How I learned to play WoW:
- Helped by friends and guildmates
- Watched YouTube
- Read up on Thottbot, WoWHead, and IcyVeins
- Twitch Streamers, and other video style events
The game can show you the basics, but you still have to teach yourself.
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I don’t understand the whole anti-outside-information thing GD has going on.
There’s a vast amount of information available to us via means outside the game, ignoring it is ignorant.
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Exactly, if you want to progress into higher end game you pretty much have to use outside sources.
We need to specifically define what we are referring to when we state “proper way to play”. That is too vague.
Not calling you out, only showing why this can be overly vague. Because are we implying the proper way to play WoW is playing higher end game content? Which means if you are not playing higher end game content, you are not properly playing WoW?
I doubt you feel this way. I know I dont. But it is why I feel we need to be a bit more specific on what we are really asking/discussing.
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It’s definitely not teaching you anything beyond the tutorial, but it gives you all the informatjon needed to figure out how to play for yourself.
For example it doesn’t tell you that you can use a stun to temporary interrupt an enemy’s cast, but it does tell you that stunning an enemy will prevent it from taking any actions for X time.
Same with rotations for single target or aoe. The information is there for you to learn on your own by reading and analyzing, but wow isn’t teaching you anything in the sense that it shoves information down your throat.
Probably not. It could only teach you really basic stuff. It’s too bloated and poorly designed.
An updated, less intense version of the Proving Grounds should be part of the tutorial island. Teach new players things like interrupting spells, CC-ing enemies, and so on.
No. There’s no going back to when people were honorable and acted with integrity without having to be told how to act with other people or being told how to vote or think about environmental issues. Real life maturity is a serious problem, and it is bled into the game in every single aspect.
Absolutely not, nor should it. Rotations are a creation of the playerbase and often times do not align with the designed intent of a spec at all. Numerous times throughout WoW’s lifetime there have been “optimal rotations” that involved taking feats that you can’t even gain the full benefit of with the prescribed rotation simply because of a minor aspect of it that out performed the other alternatives at the time.
What the game needs to teach is how to use different skill types, the importance of Interrupts, CC, defensives, offensives, and utilities… players need to know how to use these types of skills and when they should use them, as well as WHY they should use them. I have lost track of how many times I’ve run across DPS who think that it is a waste of time and effort to use and interrupt, CC, or defensive… or how many tanks think the healer should just be able to heal them through everything and that if they have to use a defensive or self heal then the healer isn’t doing their job… or other healers who think the only thing they should ever be doing is healing the tank…
While I understand the desire for WoW to have interactive ways of teaching you things, the best way to learn your class is by reading lots and lots and lots of tooltips, then applying what you’ve learned to your hotbar setup and finally, testing it out on mobs or dummies.
However, after watching far too many YouTubers and Streamers struggling to play any of a wide variety of games with any degree of competence, I’ve come to the conclusion that the average gamer is adverse to reading, deathly allergic to tooltops, has the attention span of a gnat, and the memory of a goldfish. This makes current WoW literally unteachable to the average gamer. Sadly.
the game is as much about learning and progression as it is a gear and level grind.
the more you play the more you learn and the better you get.
some of us choose to rely on our own intuitions and skills and knowledge and play like that while others choose to let addons and 3rd party websites do all of the learning and skill progression for them.
some people work on their talent trees as they see fit based on their game play style and how they want to play,
others let a website and addon do that for them.
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Good thing YouTube and a million different streamers out there exist. Blizzard doesn’t need to teach you to be good at your class. You could just read the abilities and figure it out. If that’s too much work use one of the thousands of resources at your disposal to learn.
Yes, it can.
Because “proper way to play the game” means absolutely nothing. Being optimized isn’t the same thing as “playing the game properly.” So categorically, yes - you are taught by playing the game how to play the game properly. Just not optimally.
But those two are worlds apart from each other what they mean.
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Blizzard could make changes to force people to learn or fail. But they wont. Many would just quit.
For a PVP perspective the game does an ATROCIOUS job in explaining the bare basics. Stepping into a newcomer’s shoes, I’d think:
- Zero explanation on battlegrounds, objectives, bonus features like the collectible buffs. No explanation whatsoever as of how some BGs are different in Blitz (eg. EotS). Very shallow explanation on how Brawls are different;
- Nothing explains beforehand what Dampening is, nor it has a more visible place, given the importance of the mechanic;
- You don’t have a very basic briefing on why PVP ilvl is important nor why really juicy stuff like the Cyrce’s Circlet is NOT a good choice for PVP.
- Related to above, it’s absurd that the game does not provide built-in PVP tooltips with the actual values of your abilities.
Just some glaring issues among other many. Basically you learn the basics of PVP by outsourcing information (which is problematic when most resources are not always updated) or failing on practice and being yelled at.
They do have trainers, so they could give them scenarios to allow players to learn about CC as well as Tanking, Healing and DPS combat.
However, it’d be a fair bit of work to do it for all Specs, and it’d probably add a lot more work should they want to change a Spec’s talents somewhere down the line.
By “proper” do you mean max dps or heals or agro?. It is a game so the proper way to play it is to have fun.
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They tried this, it was called Silver Proving Grounds and it was reviled
Mentor system. Assign a mentor to them and then put them into a dungeon or something, the mentor gives tips and then peaces out.
But honestly I think you need to do a 100% overhaul pass on all the NPC casts in the game and they need to draw a line in the sand. Either make every single cast threatening or don’t make any of them threatening.
Right now it’s difficult to teach interrupting because you have no idea what actually needs to be interrupted without external sources. Right now there is literally a database site that calculates how hard an ability will hit you in a dungeon because there is just no realistic way to know.
You also have this problem where there are just too many things being casted. We have a random nuke being cast, a buff that can be cast, an AOE explosion, a tank buster, literally anything can be a cast right now, it’s dumb and needs to be overhauled.
You shouldn’t have to guess between 50 things what you’re actually interrupting.
I remember some of the questing mobs in pandaland doing raid mechanics from the first tier of raid, and they would kill you if you messed them up. Those Klaxxi with that forward slash thing you have to run out of come to mind.