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Yesterday the well-known Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, the lead systems designer at Blizzard came out with a blue post about the class mechanics after realizing the amount of dissatisfied players in World of Warcraft was continuously increasing. To read the entire thing - click here Dev Watercooler -- The Role of Role - World of Warcraft.
Good ol' Ghostcrawler, mainly known for his addiction towards nerfing paladins, discussed the different routes which class design may take in WoWs future. I ain't going to quote what Greg said in his article, but more or less comment and reflect on it, and most of all talk about the biggest issue in the gaming industry nowadays - the fact that some of the gamers just don't understand the hardships of game design and aren't capable of any kind of objective thinking.
Having said that, I'm sure that most (if not all of you) have seen the amount of people complaining on every MMO forum. What I can see there is a bunch of whinney players, that simply can't handle their classes or find them too hard to play, so they thought that complaining and asking for more buffs would be the reasonable solution. Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter how many buffs your class can receive, if you're dying to boss abilities, you're standing in fire or you simply aren't focus firing where you're supposed to, you won't get invited to groups, even if you were playing a retribution paladin with a bugged seal during 4.3.2.
Now, let's talk about the future options of WoW classes as listed by Mr. Crawler:
Model One - Everyone is equal all the time. As Greg said, this is the current model of the game. Problem with it is that we're only equal on target dummies. Boss encounters are a different story. To make everyone equal "all the time", Blizzard would need to make each encounter the same, or have each encounter have the same amount of adds, burn phases and completely remove the RNG from the game, which quite frankly would just kill it and remake it into a completely new game, which I would never play. The current version of the model is made well-enough and the fact that some classes shine on certain boss fights is something I can live with, as long as they don't overdo it. It's a decent model and Blizzard does deserve a clap for the way of exercising it.
Model Two - Everyone has specialities and you match the spec to the situation. This model would definitely appeal to Hardcore Gamers or people who tend to take their game professionally, however, the drawback would be that casual guilds and players will struggle with having to gather different types of gear each carrying the respective stat for the right spec. Anyway, it's not a bad Model and brings nice diversity to the game from the way I see it, I kind of miss the days when shadow priests were mana batteries and shamans were the ultimate buffers.Model Three - You swap specs to get specific utility. Also known as the Burning Crusade model. Very similar to the 2nd one too. Having the dual-spec option it's even easier to carry two different specs and ensure you'll be playing the right one for the specific boss encounter. However, this option wouldn't appeal to any player that considers himself or herself casual.
Model Four - There is just a best spec for PvE and PvP. That was the Vanilla version, where paladins were all holy, warriors were all protection and so on. In my opinion, it was the worst class option that Blizzard has used so far. It's true that Vanilla days were great, but that was because the game was brand new and the encounters were all so original, if they had used Model Two for example Vanilla would've been ever better. This Model is boring and has absolutely no imagination in it, doesn't require any theorycraft, which for some of us is one of the things that brings even more fun to the game. Obviously - it's a NoNo.
Model Five - Don't have multiple DPS roles. Now let's talk about absurd. Who wants to see a healing hunter? Or a healing rogue? It's true that if this option comes live it would bring some really cool stuff along with it, like melee casters, which would be the exact definition of a War Mage, and I can't even describe how cool it would be to be a Melee Warlock Dual-Wielding 2 Spellswords. Then again, it would cost Blizzard to wipe out more than half of the current class sysytem and reconstruct it, which would take as much time as bringing a new expansion out. It's not worth it and the amount of daftness is bound to overweight the amount of good things it would bring.
My Model. Bring back the class diversity. Having every class bring every buff to the raid (exaggerating for a reason here) is plain muppetness. I miss the days in which you could be proud to be a shaman in a raid, since yours is the only class giving WF. Keep the specs equal on dummies, great idea, works well on boss encounters and leaves it up to the player to decide whether or not he wants to shine on a certain boss fight or bring a specific buff. And last, but not least, bring a little more diversity to the 'pure' classes. Warlocks are a great class, but frankly , they would be even greater if they had a melee spec that can compete on the damage meters, same goes for Hunters, I still remember some people experimenting with being melee hunters during Vanilla and TBC, while playing on Survival.
So, after talking about each of the models I would be delighted to hear about your opinion on Mr.Crawlers ideas or to hear what you think about mine. See you next time!
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