Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Audience Inconsistencies, Class Quests

Audience Inconsistencies

Sometimes I feel sorry for Blizzard. They get so many conflicting signals from the audience that it must be quite hard to figure out what the right thing to do is. For example, right now:

Players: Classic is amazing with it's difficulty and inconveniences. It's awesome when players have to be careful about what enemies they attack and avoid. Retail should be more like Classic

Blizzard: In Patch 8.2 absorbs will no longer prevent daze. You need to be more careful about avoiding enemies, and not just mounting up and running straight through them all.

Players: Why does Blizzard hate fun?!?

Class Quests

I hit level 12 in the Classic Beta yesterday. Apparently there's an entire quest around getting Resurrection that I completely forgot about!

I really enjoyed that quest. It's small, and involved a lot of running, and wasn't that difficult. But it was very paladin-specific. I also liked that it wasn't world-shaking, but first about providing linen to an orphanage for clothes, and then resurrecting someone who was investigating the Defias. It fit nicely with learning the Resurrection spell. Though that does raise questions about who you can actually resurrect or not resurrect story-wise.

10 comments:

  1. Blizz has already said that the daze thing was unintentional, but it certainly does show how tight a line they walk.

    I had totally forgotten about class quests for things, at least aside from the early hunter experience. But everything about hunters was strange and different back in vanilla.

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    1. Pity, I think the Daze mechanic shouldn't be so easy to circumvent. Sometimes I wonder if Blizzard agrees, but then backs off whenever they deem the outcry is "too much".

      Yeah, hunters have the full pet mechanics, including feeding, happiness and learning new abilities from other pets. It will be interesting to see how those mechanics are received.

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    2. I have a whole post from the "good old days" of going into LBRS solo, with invis pots, to tame the only Dog in game that had Furious Howl X (something or other) and Bite 6 (or whatever). Earning your hunter stripes back then!

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  2. I remembered the existence of that paladin class quest mostly because I vividly recall being grouped with a paladin back in the day who hadn't done it and who just gave us a blank stare when we asked him to res someone. At which point we had to explain to him that it was an ability that he should have gotten several levels ago and had to point him towards the quest giver.

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    1. Yeah, that's probably the reason it got removed in the first place. :/

      Perhaps a compromise might be that you can do the quest at level 12 and get the ability, but if you don't do the quest you get the ability automatically at level 30 or so.

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  3. It's likely that Blizzard decided to remove "absorb prevents daze" rule (these days everybody runs one Prydaz-like azerite power for that) because there will be mount equipment that prevents daze.

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    1. Yeah, that's probable. It's too easy to avoid Daze right now.

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  4. I loved the little class quests. They added such flavor to leveling. I always tried to search them out even after they didn't do much for you. Given there is a limit of content, I suspect I'll end up with a fair number of alts (over a very long period) just to see all bits again.

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    1. Yeah, it does give an incentive to make alts. Especially when you hear players of other classes discussing things you haven't seen yet.

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  5. I remember the Blood Elf equivalent quest, where you had to go out to an island and then you were jumped by another Blood Knight. You had to kill the Blood Knight and then rez him, and afterward he quipped "That sucked! Next time so-and-so asks me to do something, I'm refusing!!"

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