Project Lore

Blue Stew is a new semi-daily column bringing you a delicious concoction of developer news, thoughts, and opinions straight from the boiling pot that is the official World of Warcraft forums. The highlights of each day include additional commentary by Project Lore staff. PvPvPvE Would you look at this pair of winners... In one thread, Paladin extraordinaire, Feanorion, wonders:

"why are PvE concerns being trumped by the concerns of such a miniscule portion of the subscriber population? "

And in another, posted the same day, Fireweed puts on her frowny-face:

"Since the Illidan kill in TBC I swore I would not touch PvE ever, ever again. It's mind numbing, forces you to deal with people you never want to deal with on your free time, it requires way too much dedication in the scene/too many people and to stay in a guild that is capable to handle it and so forth... What I really enjoy about this game is arena, even some random battlegrounds here and there with a small group."

This, friends, is a microcosm of all that is wrong with the average complainer's mentality towards the game : "I don't like it, so it shouldn't be there!" I've said time and time again that I'm not particularly in favor of PvP, at least not to its extremes, but that's the way I prefer to play. I'm not going to outright deny the ways in which other people might have fun. But the fact of the matter is that if any decisions to change the underlying structure of Warcraft, it would be based on an entirely different group altogether, as Ghostcrawler so handily points out:

"If you expect us to balance around the most popular way to play the game, then you'd see most of our changes aimed at low level alts and very few end-game raiding tanking changes. "

I think we all get so caught up in the endgame, that we forget most people who subscribe to WoW simply enjoy tooling around, by themselves, or with a couple of close friends, in the lower levels of the game. These are the people that like to level up over a week, not a couple of hours. And these are the people that enjoy picking herbs just because they enjoy picking herbs, not because they need to make flasks for the next raid. And that's why I think Cataclysm is going to be such a big hit with the community. It refocuses the game on these types of players without entirely forgetting those at the level cap. You see, WoW is a lot like this scrum-diddly-umptious cake... (image courtesy of http://www.mmmmbrains.com/blogg/) But even ignoring this group of players, can't we just all accept that PvP and PvE are integral parts of the game? I used to be a nay-sayer, too, but I've long since learned that both styles are like two delicious flavors coming together to make World of Warcraft just as enjoyable as a tasty little peanut butter cup! Ghostcrawler explains in a seperate thread why you will never see them split:

"Internal consistency for belief in the game world is part of it. Just keeping complexity down is another part of it. We don't want to see every spell or talent have two tooltips and players having to keep all of that straight. It just feels like two games with one art set at that point, which isn't what we're going for."

Please Explain Argent Tournament Reset Seems like the Faction Change service includes everything but the kitchen sink. Or, in this case, Argent Tournament progress. Kisirani gives a simple enough answer:

"I'm responding to this thread because it's written in a calm and concise manner, so thank you for that. Simply put, while it was not a decision we enjoyed making, due to the way the Argent Tournament functions it was not feasible on a technical level to properly switch progress between factions. I am sorry we were unable to offer a better solution."

I wish he would've expanded a bit more on that, but then again, that's due to my own curiosity. I'm always intrigued to know how the game is built, how its underlying systems are structured to allow certain things and not others. While I have no way of being specific myself, I imagine it's the case of simply coding, or constructing, the Argent Tournament in a certain way at a time before the requirements for the Faction Change service were fully laid out, leaving the two aspects of the game incompatible with each other. So for those of you still considering a Faction Change, please keep this in mind. You'll have to do the Argent Tournament all over again (though, presumably, the earned reputation with each home city will remain intact, even if the quest progress doesn't). And for those of you who already did, without realizing this caveat, I'm sorry! That's potentially months worth of daily work down the drain! Earthen Power Nerf: Overkill Oh, it's the weekend. I'll throw you guys one more bone to look over! This one's for the Enhancement Shamans out there, in response to the most recent PTR patch update, which makes changes to the way in which Earthen Power works, potentially affecting their performance in Arena teams:

"The 3.2.2 PTR change to earthen power will be crippling to Enhancement Shaman, I am not saying that this talent isn't a bit too powerful, but granting the shaman short term immunity to movement impairing effects is not the issue, the issue is it granting the shamans team mates the immunity. Removing the immunity from the shaman themselves will do nothing but cripple a spec that has just recently regained viability, without showing any form of dominance, except as a part of a counter RMP team in one tournament, a tournament which doesn't well reflect the state of play on live (nothing over item level 213)... I would propose that if you feel earthen power is overly powerful, you remove the snare immunity from allied targets, but leave it on the shaman, else we will see a return enhancement shaman being unable to stick to a target. We already suffer greatly from a lack of controllable damage, reliance on long cooldowns (bloodlust/heroism, spirit wolves), and inability to kill healers. Returning Enhancement Shaman an easy to kite class will severely undermine everything you have done to give us arena viability."

Ghostcrawler explains that they favored Ghost Wolf as a reducer of movement-impairing effects instead:

"We think Earthen Power and the Ghost Wolf change were trying to solve the same problem. Together they felt like overkill to us, and we thought the Ghost Wolf change was more interesting so we kept that one. Your mileage may vary and I would be surprised if many shaman agreed since they were the target of the nerf."

Alright, folks! Have a fantastic weekend, but don't forget to respond and let us know what you think about all of these different subjects before you do!

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