Seeing my World of Warcraft account getting hacked wasn't much fun but it does have one positive side. Since I had to pay €15 to get my deleted items back I decided to log in a few times this month and see what changed. I haven't played WoW since April this year so there's quite a bit of new content to go through. And of course I wanted to say hello again to all the friends I haven't spoken to in months.
As I logged in I was quickly greeted by some of my guild members. Time is never standing still so I wasn't surprised to see that my guild looks nothing like it did half a year ago. Roughly half of the people I enjoyed chatting and playing with had all decided to join a guild that was more to their liking. Only the officer team seems to be relatively intact. The player gap has been filled in with lots of new players but it doesn't feel like the same guild. I had a chat with the old officers and my friends from ancient times. In this short time I even got a few guild invites to restart raiding!
As I'm a min maxer one of the first things I just had to do was to look up the new top deathknight spec. As my luck would have it that spec was obsolete one week later as patch 3.3 rolled in. It seems like the deathknight class is still going through a roller coaster ride. Before patch 3.2 my unholy build was too strong. One patch and its nerf later it wasn't a viable spec anymore. The newest patch was supposed to put it back to normal but only days after releasing it did they nerf the spec again. Updating those damage spreadsheets must be one hard job. To me, the biggest change to the unholy spec is that they removed our cool unholy blight spell and changed it with a boring, passive talent. I hope they'll eventually put the spell back in some form in the expansion.
Last week my guild was planning an Onyxia run and I gave them the extra hand they needed. The run wasn't very smooth but five wipes later we had one dead dragon. Quite the difference from soloing her ten months ago... It also feels weird to see people walk around in gear my mage used to wear five years ago. Onyxia's hat is suddenly popular again and people are even wearing moonshroud robes! We must all be tied to the giant wheel of time after all.
Some things never seem to change. Blizzard reinvented the wheel again as they have done before. The equipment manager they added feels an aweful lot like the old Itemrack addon. Hover over a slot and you can finally see all the items from your bag that fit in that slot. It's just not as easy to use compared to how Itemrack implemented it. And in that addon you could also add events. There it was possible to automatically equip your carrot on a stick when you mount or equip your wedding dress when you entered a city. So as they did with their scrolling combat text implementation Blizzard took a great addon and then just gives us a dumbed down version. It makes me wonder why they don't just strike a deal with the addon creator. Creating an addon of such scale is a ton of work and just copying that addon feels like a huge waste.
As I logged in I was quickly greeted by some of my guild members. Time is never standing still so I wasn't surprised to see that my guild looks nothing like it did half a year ago. Roughly half of the people I enjoyed chatting and playing with had all decided to join a guild that was more to their liking. Only the officer team seems to be relatively intact. The player gap has been filled in with lots of new players but it doesn't feel like the same guild. I had a chat with the old officers and my friends from ancient times. In this short time I even got a few guild invites to restart raiding!
As I'm a min maxer one of the first things I just had to do was to look up the new top deathknight spec. As my luck would have it that spec was obsolete one week later as patch 3.3 rolled in. It seems like the deathknight class is still going through a roller coaster ride. Before patch 3.2 my unholy build was too strong. One patch and its nerf later it wasn't a viable spec anymore. The newest patch was supposed to put it back to normal but only days after releasing it did they nerf the spec again. Updating those damage spreadsheets must be one hard job. To me, the biggest change to the unholy spec is that they removed our cool unholy blight spell and changed it with a boring, passive talent. I hope they'll eventually put the spell back in some form in the expansion.
Last week my guild was planning an Onyxia run and I gave them the extra hand they needed. The run wasn't very smooth but five wipes later we had one dead dragon. Quite the difference from soloing her ten months ago... It also feels weird to see people walk around in gear my mage used to wear five years ago. Onyxia's hat is suddenly popular again and people are even wearing moonshroud robes! We must all be tied to the giant wheel of time after all.
Some things never seem to change. Blizzard reinvented the wheel again as they have done before. The equipment manager they added feels an aweful lot like the old Itemrack addon. Hover over a slot and you can finally see all the items from your bag that fit in that slot. It's just not as easy to use compared to how Itemrack implemented it. And in that addon you could also add events. There it was possible to automatically equip your carrot on a stick when you mount or equip your wedding dress when you entered a city. So as they did with their scrolling combat text implementation Blizzard took a great addon and then just gives us a dumbed down version. It makes me wonder why they don't just strike a deal with the addon creator. Creating an addon of such scale is a ton of work and just copying that addon feels like a huge waste.
"It makes me wonder why they don't just strike a deal with the addon creator."
ReplyDeleteFor the same reason they don't want people to submit them ideas for quests and such; it's an intellectual property issue.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete@Elnia. Well, they can buy the addon.
ReplyDeleteBut do they really have to copy it? I think it's better to just let the UI design to the mod makers.
And they should take a good look at the most popular mods and try to implement them in their next mmorpg.