Continuing the discussion from Druid WW and WB Attack Speed Changes:
Wow, it’s hard to think about all of the time that I spent on this game playing purely as a Werewolf or a Werebear. I have been playing since the original release; I discovered the druid during the Lord of Destruction expansion’s initial release and became immediately glued, like many people did, I’m sure.
Fast forward to now; we have a game that has been “revitalized” after years of neglect from developers aside from minor tweaks. I have continued to play Lord of Destruction up through this past year, and after jumping with blind faith into D2:R and all of its problems, I have to say that this last change hits the hardest.
Werebears and Werewolves were uniquely fashioned with the “quirks” that they call them so that they could be viable in both PVM and PVP content. Being a Werebear in nearly every circumstance is already playing the underdog; closing the distance to ranged classes without stepping out of Werebear into Human Form to Teleport can take a very long time, require impeccable timing and a lot of luck, hoping that the caster will make a mistake and allow you to get close. Against a formidable player of more than one particular class, this can prove nearly impossible already, even with attack speed the way it has been for years; as it currently stands, once you touch your opponent they generally have a hard time escaping from taking repeated hits in sequence. With the planned changes, that tiny window of possible victory is totally eliminated, allowing (in many cases, unresistable) magic or physical damage to be taken in fast enough succession to die before you can make your killing blow, based on the opponent’s character statistics and resistances.
How do we approach a max-block caster as a Werebear, now? It takes many swings to achieve the final blow against a class built at 75% block before you can even come close to winning a duel (without luck involved). What about if we are surrounded in PVM? Having a zeal-like attack speed made it much easier to approach certain groups of monsters in which Human Form attack speed alone would not allow survivability.
When you say that the attack speed calculation was a poor player experience for those not in the know, what exactly do you mean by that? This game has been out for over twenty years; if you are not in the know by now as to game mechanics, you never will be, even if the game servers stayed up until you were an elderly person. When it comes to the new player experience, there’s so much content out there to read regarding all of this; that’s part of the player’s experience in this game as well as in any game, the in-depth creation and the amount of unique abilities available make the replay valuable indefinitely. Now that venue of creativity is being heavily narrowed down by administrative “developers” who have no interest in playing this game themselves, and who are standing on the creative shoulders of a team long before them to make changes that they don’t understand the impact of.
In addition to the IAS changes, the other disappointing change that I have seen is the reduction in Fire Claws synergies; I’m sure that not just myself, but many others use those synergies as a Fire Claws druid to help in situations that they might need a ranged ability in, and now those choices are incredibly limited. I understand the gain of extra skill points to use with the lack of synergies, but that’s really the only gain that I see, and it is averaged down by the choice of synergies themselves; Molten Boulder’s new state still doesn’t feel useful, and the damage still feels very low for such a minor speed increase. If Molten Boulder casted much faster than the current projected changes, sure I can see that being a viable missile class in some form, but I don’t seeing it being as successful without more speed. Now for the other synergy, Firestorm: I feel that Fissure and Volcano would have been much better synergy choices since they are much more widely used by people who currently use Fire Skills on Druids. Fissure is so useful that I’m still planning on using my extra points gained from the “synergy reduction” in the changes here in order to keep the same build that I normally run.
So why are these drastic changes being made instead of the obvious fixes that are needed? One example would be Assassins’ Kicks being unblockable, but maybe that’s a redundant question because in the back of my mind I tell myself that I know why and that I’ve always known why; as mentioned before, it’s because those responsible for development don’t actually play or understand this game, themselves.
Another reason for these odd mistakes that we continue to see in the game’s remastering, but that never get repaired is because those responsible for these developmental choices of the game in its current state are just fulfilling a job. On paper, a lot of the changes we are seeing in the coming patch can make a lot of sense to someone who has not actually played this game before; if you were looking to please your boss, wouldn’t you want to make it look as if you were over-performing on paper? There is no heart or soul in these choices, in fact they are robbing that heart and soul from the game that has already existed and brought joy to many players for these past two decades.
I ask myself often why I still play this game, especially considering that the original Blizzard North will never be attached to it again; for the first time in my own two decades of time and energy poured into this game, my favorite hobby, I wonder how long I will continue to play for since I won’t be able to experience my favorite character build in the same fashion it’s always been as these changes are made current. I think that I’ll at least dabble a bit until Microsoft takes over; they couldn’t do worse than Activision/Blizzard.
