I think there is still plenty of passion from Brack and Ion’s team. It’s ok to not like their decisions but in the end they are doing the best they can within what’s allowed from activision.
You put your distaste toward Ion and team and I put mine toward activision’s influence on Ion and his team.
Ion was a great raid dev. ICC and Firelands were awesome. I think Ion probably has amazing ideas for wow but they are limited to the scope of what activision will allow and Ion and Brack have to explain how their decisions fulfill activision’s requirements on a routine basis.
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/9498-Chris-Metzen-Starts-New-Company-Warchief-Gaming-Dave-Kosak-Leaves-Blizzard https://youtu.be/VUKE-pR1b3I
The passion, the historical knowledge of gaming.
That’s a separate issue as far as I’m concerned. I do indeed have things I dislike about how the game has been designed last couple xpacs and I would wager heavily that those decisions are heavily influenced by acti wanting certain goals met in terms of player engagement etc.
There’s only so much stuff I don’t want to do but am willing to do in order to do the things I want to do. Yes, that’s 4 "do"s in one sentence. Hopefully no one got lost in them. Anyway it’s been 2 xpacs in a row where they crossed that line for me and I won’t do it a third time. So I’m going to see how it plays out first but I’m not hopeful.
But that has nothing to do with the delay and why I think that’s a bad sign as I’ve felt the way I just described for months now. I think there is a problem there that has to be fixed and it’s obviously not something that players testing in the ptr would notice. Some big picture issue I would guess. No idea what though.
The catchup gear in the next part of prepatch will help a lot of my “issues” with the game right now. I’m pigeonholed into only playing my geared characters instead of trying out other ones. I’m wanting to give ele/rsham a fair shot but not in 70 item level crap lol.
I’m not about to do m+ 15s or horrific visions or cloak stuff or uldum/vale weekly assaults. I’m just going to wait til the normal raid iL gear catch up stuff comes out.
After actually being able to watch the adjustments roll out in real time on PTR. (Done from home?)
From the creative ideas going from A to B, has really allowed me to see how the tiers of development is unfolded.
Items were indeed ilvl 100, then ilvl 87, it seems a heavy handed actidjustment came into play last minute - ilvl 68. One well known issue/example.
Sadly, I think this was them seeing there was going to be several weeks before the 2nd phase of prepatch with the catchup gear was going to go in and this was them wanting people to experience the bfa systems. Bad decision imo. People skipped bfa for a reason.
Eh they both get my ire. Activision for the infinite grind mechanisms they feel they need to introduce. Big daddy ion for his pve elitism and making pve gear king in PvP.
Nothing wrong with that. I don’t like several of his decisions either. I think activision gets more of my blame than ion because I still find pve in this game relatively fun when you get a fun group together.
His decision to continue doing borrowed power systems instead of adding onto previous expansions class ideals indirectly destroys casual pvp. It pigeonholes players to where they have to do x amount of pve to progress their borrowed power system.
And that’s exactly why I can’t go for SL right now. If I watch and see it turns out to be not nearly as bad as the past two xpacs then I will gleefully jump in and catch up.
Who knows, maybe the delay issues require fixes that will do exactly that
I won’t go back to my shadow priest right away tho. Don’t care how powerful it is, it’s still voidform
I’ve watched some vids of it and yeah it has changed for the better. Liking DP being back, but it’s playstyle still does not align well with mine. I tried really hard since it was my namesake toon here to get into it and gear it last two xpacs I just never liked it. And the main reason is still part of the design.
Not a fan of build up classes for later burst. Didn’t like monk for much the same reason if I remember that class correctly. I haven’t looked at hunter enough, which is my other favorite class so don’t know if it would suit me. I’m sure I’d find one that suited me, that’s just not my major issue overall.
Also, it’s not like Blizzard announced a release date and then the pandemic hit.
They announced the October release date at the end of August. At that point, they had already been dealing with the pandemic for months. They should have been able to gauge their work from home progress.
I don’t mind the delay because I prefer a polished game. I don’t want them hotfixing/patching major systems on live because they released the expansion before it was ready.
Considering the consternation of beta testers over the current state of beta, that seems reasonable.
to say they should’ve been able to gauge their work form home with the release date is stupid.
cyberpunk got delayed again today, clearly no one can gauge things.
BTW blizz employees are living in the fire area right now so thank God sl didn’t come out.
they wouldn’t know how efficient working from home was so they gave a date, which was probably given buy acti themselves which forced crunch. they couldn’t meet it, so they delayed.
as for the speculations on some bigger reason for a delay that’s also stupid. they delayed it because it was not ready, quite simple. it was riddled with bugs with the main systems, like physically not working properly. they couldn’t fix things as fast from home, if shadowlands stuck to the date it would’ve been released in a very poor state.
as for the prepatch being the way it is now it’s because they released it earlier just for the people. it’s going to be a 8 week prepatch with the content roll starting on the 4th or even 5th week, we’re 3/8 right now.
If you watch “videos” or skim some posts without trying shadowpriest because of voidform essentially a combustion cool down, then that’s just silly.
There is die hard shadow mains thinking it’s the best iteration of the spec and I think it’s pretty high up there too. SP do damage without ramping up, that’s not how it runs. when they pop their cds their damage is insane, and without void they still do amazing damage.
virtually i wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between wod sp and current sp if I had cascade & feather.
lastly, legion had some of the best pve content the game has seen and if you decided to not touch it and call legion bad cause pvp then
That’s literally a bigger reason. Not polishing. Fixing an unplayable game. If it was buggy yet semi-playable, I bet acti would have put it out. And that is just one possibility here. There is no release date I could find as of yet so the 8 week speculation is just that, speculation.
Well that is REALLY good to hear! If I try SL, I might end up liking the spec if that is the case when it’s all said and done. It’s not all said and done yet though, we don’t know what they are doing, changing or planning.
It was bad for me, I didn’t like it. What I don’t like and don’t want to do anymore is to reach max level and then find a list of chores for me to do. And they are chores to me. Max level should be when the fun begins but I found it harder and harder to have fun once I did.
I don’t want to have to spend time farming a power source when I could be working on an alt. I love alts. Most of mine I entered Legion with got left behind for good. Just sitting there forgotten. It’s even worse with BfA, not a single horde toon leveled. I don’t want to spend another xpac like that and I won’t. Great class/spec design won’t change that for me.
