I’ve been mulling this over here and there, preschool and school is closed today, gas leaks, so – day off from work.
There’s been a lot of back and forth in the game about dom gems and the noise (critical review) online has been awful. It’s too bad this thing got put in the game right when all the bad news was dropping like a bomb. Keeping track of or following streamers is just not in my sphere. I don’t do it. Though, I’m peripherally aware they exist and sometimes get breadcrumbed to them when seeking information.
Anyway — when the bad news dropped I did go and seek information and apparently some of these guys were making big dramatic “exits” from the game and nailing up their martin luther lists left and right. Dom gems were pretty high on those lists. One of them made a special stink about it saying that not having tier set bonuses was … man, you could just see his contempt and disgust. They are certainly dramatic. But the fact is that in any given tier set the half of the powers just stink or only one spec actually works. Sometimes all specs stink for a given class. Tier set bonuses are always a gamble and sometimes enforce a certain style of gameplay to leverage them. In general, players are not giant fans of that.
Awful business, cosbygate, all the way around. I hope one of the lessons taken from all this is that you guys need to more appropriately make use of these 3rd parties. You’ve relied too much on them. Sure they present themselves as loving the game as real enthusiasts and are good communicators … but at the end of the day their primary drive is to draw attention to themselves. They are not in service to you, they are in it for themselves. And they will dish and sling trash without compunction to meet their goals, everything else be damned.
I’m not saying don’t leverage or partner with them, they are good communicators. It’s just, you guys need to stop dropping the ball on your own messaging to the players. I can think of a couple examples of this but I don’t want to digress even further. I know it’s hard, crazy hard, engaging with … like a quivering mass of conflicting player emotions, wants, and needs. But you need to do it more, more adult voices. Some of the longtime presences on the forums have had some pretty epic self control, focus, and adult voices. Take inspiration from that.
So, dom gems. The reason I brought up all that streamer stuff is that they have been soundly trashed in manny channels. And make no mistake, there’s some stuff not-right. But ingame, in actual practice they’ve been a truly inspired and incredibly useful thing. They aren’t overpowered, they are consequential (you can tell), and on top of that they are configurable to meet a huge variety of situations. IMO, some char schemes and designs aren’t so great with lots of little flaws here and there. I know some fo that is intended to work with borrowed power, which sucks … but that is what it is. But the configurability of the gems work well with that. And for new classes in particular they patch holes like nothing I’ve ever seen. I actually developed 3 chars so I could play all the covenants and got them into LFR asap for the gems and sockets. Massively useful.
In primary raid, the players like them as well. Especially the configurability of them. Taking cues from our better raiders, they change a couple every fight depending on what’s needed. Being able to do that is … fun, the best kind.
Dom gems should be carried forward. Both increasing the existing ones and new ones.
Ok, real flaws.
That stupid little item you need to buy in order to take them out? No good. The gems should be drag and drop and if you drop a gem on top of another one, they should swap without problem.
You guys, seriously, not everything needs a block or inconveniencing mechanic. Rein that impulse in. It’s crap. You need to refocus on player accessibility and good functional design that flows. An essential question is “How does this feel in practice?”.
Also - the usefulness of the dom gems has really highlighted little rough spots in certain classes. The gems go a good distance to helping remove clunk. You guys did a good job getting the gems to drop like mad. But the sockets, no good. I actually made a post about LFR socket drop and loot drop in general saying that it should be upped. But — not sure that’s it. I think the sockets should have been straight purchasable, cheap too. Or craft-able ilvl 200 dom socket pieces. That way people could get them going asap for good clunk-removal. And if they decided that they wanted higher ilvl then they can go for that.
ok, done, cheers.