Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Vanilla Servers and Paladins

Vanilla Servers

I gather there was a little tempest over one of the Vanilla WoW pirate servers. So much so that people are calling for Blizzard to officially support Vanilla servers. Personally, I think the demand for Vanilla servers is overrated. I think that if Blizzard opened one, a lot of people would join, and then the vast majority would quit within three months.

Not to mention that it would be a pretty expensive undertaking. Unlike pirate hobby servers, Blizzard has to pay the people working on their Vanilla servers. People are expensive.

Maybe I'm a little cynical about gamers, but if there is this pent-up demand for a Vanilla-like experience, why don't people go and play one of the current MMOs that offer a similar experience? Games like RIFT or EQ2 or FFXIV? I'm sure the potential audience will always  have a reason why the option you have to pay for is not good enough.

The Vanilla Paladin

Azuriel has declared that a lot of the Vanilla and TBC design was garbage. That may be so, but he has singled out the paladin class as an example. Thus I am forced to defend it.

The vanilla Paladin was not badly designed. Rather, it was designed for a game that soon became obsolete. The paladin was designed for 5-man groups, where the make up was [tank, healer,  2x dps, paladin]. The paladin would back up the tank and healer at the same time.

That's why the vanilla Paladin appears to be so passive. Its combat is very passive. But that's so you could run up to a mob, Judge, Seal and then focus on your group. You'd throw out heals, cleanses, and Blessings as appropriate. The UI was designed for this, so that you could throw spells on groupmates without losing your main target, even without mouseovers. You could tank one mob, or small adds, when the warrior took the rest of the group.

Shamans were the opposite. Shaman support was passive, through totems mainly, but their damage was active. Paladins had active support, but passive damage.

The thing is that this system does not scale into raids. [3x tanks, 3x healers] is stronger than [2x tanks, 2x healers, 2x paladins]. And obviously solo play is fairly boring. Though honestly, I kind of liked it. It was very steady and relentless.

But the Vanilla paladin in 5-man groups is still my favorite MMO playstyle, across all the MMOs I've tried.

16 comments:

  1. The same was true for druids. They could also trot along in cat form but shift to either heal or catch/stun an add.

    Druids, too, lost their in-combat hybridness.

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    1. Somewhat. Druids hybrid style was a little different. It was more sequential, switch forms into the different roles as needed. Paladin/Shaman was more "do both at the same time".

      But yeah, specialization won over hybrids.

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  2. I agree with your opinion about vanilla paladins. I enjoyed playing as dps/support/heal hybrid as I felt useful even without crowd control in dungeons (of course, TBC heroics threw that concept out of the window). I understand that this kind of gameplay is anachronistic in today's WoW, and the "jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none" thing probably appeals to very few people. I personally liked it and therefore I'm guilty as charged. Which leads to ...

    Legacy servers: I agree that the market is probably very small (I think the fashionista word for this is "niche".) But I would totally pay Blizzard monthly sub to be able to play on a progressive classic or TBC quality server using old ruleset and without modern crap like tokens, LFD etc. The thing could be built on open-source platform like MangOS and outsourced to a good group of enthusiasts for all I care, as long as I get quality service and support. (By the way, hosting cost for two Nostalrius servers was 280 + 120 EUR montly, so only 33 subs per 13 EUR would be necessary to pay the bills. Prices include VAT.)

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    1. Hosting and server costs are miniscule. The cost of people dwarfs it. If they have the equivalent of one person devoted to the server, that's probably 60K per year in salary, and another 60k in overhead.

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  3. This hybridness was great and should have been preserved in raids by opening "rooms" for 2-3 players in a bossfight where they have to kill an add and then rejoin the main fight. Great place for a hybrid.

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    1. Maybe. I think it would have been too difficult to work well, and would have warped raid fights in trying to accommodate it.

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  4. I loved the capacity to jump in and cover for the tank/healer should they die. This was possible up until MoP when they decided to destroy the whole Hybrid thing.
    I would however not want to go back to playing a retribution paladin as they were in Vanilla/TBC as they were awful and I remember all to well the usual response when looking for a dungeon group of 'sorry we need dps with crowd control'

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    1. Yeah, it was great for hybrids who embraced the role, but those paladins who did want to specialize had a really hard time.

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  5. Neither RIFT nor EQ2 nor FFXIV have the quality of classic WoW...

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    1. I disagree, especialy about FFXIV. I think those games are close enough to the Vanilla WoW experience that they are a viable option for those people wanting a Vanilla experience.

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  6. Honsetly the recent letter by Jagex (they run Runescape) regarding legacy servers was very informative. They mentioned that when they opened the Old School servers for Runescape, they employed only 3 people to run it, expecting the project to end shortly after, when the nostalgia fades.

    They got 2,5 mil. new subs instead.

    So as you can see, the potential profits can outweigh the costs by many orders of magnitude. And in the end, even if the operation is a loss for Blizzard, the good PR they would garner from their fanbase would mean that they would get increased revenue in their other franchises. And frankly, a cost of even 200k per year is nothing for a company the size of Blizzard.

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    1. Well, maybe Runescape is a point in favor of vanilla servers. Nostalgia is a powerful force.

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  7. Heh i just read you (newer) post about a legacy server and thought you had completely misunderstood the point of vanilla. Then i read this and find that you explain the paladin role in vanilla better than I have ever seen it done before... you confuse me Rohan :-)

    Still a nice read as always, even if I might disaggree sometimes :-)

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    1. Perhaps I should have done a better job explaining. I understand the point of vanilla. I just think it's infeasible from Blizzard's point-of-view. So I suggested the "next best thing" as an alternative.

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  8. I'm not saying everything was broken, but EZ-Thro Dynamite for ranged pulling...

    As someone who quit his paladin in the low 20s because levelling was unbearable.. I don't miss that experience at all.

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    1. Personally, I liked that aspect. Because paladins had no ranged tools, you had to body pull, to learn tricks, to play in a fundamentally different way than other classes.

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