Recently, during a break from WoW, I got really into FFXIV. For those who haven’t tried it, in the game, like in Rift and many other MMOs, you have all your classes on one account. Changing between them is just a matter of equipping a weapon for that class and/or having an item set, and you immediately would go from (the equivalent in WoW) hunter to mage etc. in a flash.
I believe Warcraft would need retooling to do this, but implementing such a change as part of a major patch or expansion would breath a lot of life into the game and fix many issues. These include:
Making it much more seamless and fun to level an alt
Eliminating the “starting over” issue of reps, achievements other inter-character stuff
Easier preservation of money and items across one toon (you would offer more bag space to an individual toon in bank slots to combat the loss of alt space by combining classes)
Easier switching between toons when people want to run different content - in FFXIV people adjust on the fly to play dps/heals/tank - you could even go a step further and allow people to queue as all three, which would provide a much bigger pool and reduce times
I just don’t see the reason not to do this. Yes, there are game adjustments necessary to align the game to having all classes on one toon (and you would have to level each one independently, like in FFXIV), but not having this seems really old fashioned and, frankly, after FFXIV I just can’t go back to starting over
As much as I would love it, I think blizzard has made their stance on it unfortunately clear with how many times they’ve turned down account-wide rep. Ultimately it would lead to us having less to do, we would play less and therefore unsub faster.
I got you. Well, you could at least be able to play all the classes for your race. You would still start each class at level 1 so I don’t really get the point of not knowing how to play it. People could buy boosts but that could happen on a new toon anyway.
I think the race/class point is valid, but the point about people not knowing how to play doesn’t make any sense - this wouldn’t be better or worse than the current system because people still have to level toons from nothing or get a boost in either case
It’s already too easy to level and gear alts, let’s have some of the decisions we make in our game have actual lasting meaning like an R-P-G should. This is not a sandbox game. Go play guild wars 2 or Minecraft
The only issue I have with this is the way questing is done for the 2nd or 3rd class and beyond… it is boring: you complete most of the zone quests and main story on your main class which means that when you switch over, the only things you can do are to spam the dailies that require a currency. It gets really bad.
I understand the appeal for allowing everyone to play whatever class they please. But the main issue here is that the core of World of Warcraft was built on having your Class be your characters Main Identity, this was prevalent in vanilla and even back in legion this was a major theme as well.
While yes, they have been trying to streamline armor so they won’t have to design armor that appeals to X class fantasy and yes, they’ve been trying to bunch everyone together as one big “faction” in BFA (which it’s kinda failing at due to the terrible lore reasons for classes like Druids still remaining in the Horde) then trying to make everyone go down the same “hero” path without much divergence on the journey in BFA regardless of what the character is nor what the characters background is.
All of that can essentially be ignored as you can just easily change X thing as say “Oh well, I changed it” and the players can’t do anything to revert it unless they stopped playing which I doubt many here will.
You see though, the main thing which is preventing this is how the game is designed and built. Your Characters Class plays a major part in how the engine reads you and if you allowed a person to casually switch a Class out with another, like going from Warrior to Mage as you can in Final Fantasy XIV then it can break ALOT of things in the game due to just how important such information is for the engine because the game was built with the logic that you cannot change such a thing and in order to incorporate such a ‘feature’ in this old engine they’ll have to re-write alot of the games code even more so then how much work they had to do for allow Demon Hunters to Double Jump, which was alot.
So, yes while this would be a good thing to have in the game. Realistically it won’t work due to how old this games engine was built.
Unfortunately, I can think of at least one reason why WoW shouldn’t take this route: WoW doesn’t have the gameplay infrastructure to support it.
I honestly don’t think this is a feature that can be “patched in” to WoW, and there’s also the byproducts of the optimization-obsessed community suddenly forcing everyone to level multiple classes (possibly ALL classes) just for that “edge”.
There’s also the matter of HOW to level alt classes, at least after the 2nd or 3rd and the quests dry up. FFXIV has multiple options for leveling classes outside of questing and endlessly running dungeons. Levequests, FATEs, multiple roulettes (daily random queue bonuses), Palace of the Dead, Heaven-on-High, and other stuff.
This would have to be addressed in SOME capacity before considering being able to level up multiple classes on one character in WoW.
FFXIV actually requires you to level each class/job individually, and combined with quite a bit of reasonably challenging mandatory story content (including some solo scenarios you have to do)… well, this players not knowing what to do is rather rare in FFXIV.
… if anything, they’d be scarily competent in WoW.
Not to mention VERY adept at avoiding boss attacks.
It’s only half as weird as seeing Godbert wearing pants.
… and that probably makes no sense without the appropriate context.
… and even less sense in context.
That would be too game changing. I love FFXIV too, but I would like WoW to remain WoW.
Blizzard chose to have single class characters, but to compensate they made their classes flexible (talents, specializations, etc.) to support multiple roles and playstyles. I would like them to stay within the confines of that design so that WoW stays true to itself.
There are a lot of things they could do to alleviate the issues of alts without completely eliminating the need for alts. Personally, I would like them to let me select my “main” character and give me the option to display my main’s name next to my current character name, to redirect whispers to my main to my active alt, etc.
Which is my main gripe with FF14’s class system. Multi-classing isn’t an option. It’s a requirement. Even if you’re a healer and you have no intention of ever playing ranged DPS, you have to level up in Thaumaturge because it gives an ability (the name and specific function of which escapes me right now) that is considered mandatory for the healer classes to function properly.
Leveling teaches you nothing about your class. Killing hundreds of thousands of identical mobs with zero instruction about what your spells are for and why you would choose one rather than another does not count as “instruction”.
And apparently skills are getting worse, not only due to boosts, but to the elimination of reasons to do dungeons while leveling.
I would put actual tutorials into the game that anyone can do. What would you do to change this downward spiral of skills, since apparently things are getting worse.
And I don’t mean giving tests to block players from content instead of helping people learn.
If I personally were to change the method of level boosting then I would instead do what they did with the Hero Classes, have the character start off in a zone and learn abilities and lore about their class as they play through the zone. Aka something like the Mardum starting experience for Demon Hunters. It would be a tutorial without being so upfront about it like the Class Trials are and it would also entice the players to play and try out the class before they make the final decision of using the boost on said toon and only making the boost permanent when they are finally leaving that class specified zone
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