Do you think the Fresh life cycle of HC will be longer due to how much slower progression needs to be in order to avoid deaths?
I think the world might actually end up being a lot more ‘alive’ and lived in with people online outside raid time just because prep outside raid time is such a huge deal for the team’s success.
Like for example; on softcore lots of progression guilds comp stack doing MC and have an army of warriors and Frost mages who they (pretty much) stack with as much raw DPS gear as possible and then whip at Ragnaros’s face with as many Greater Fire Protection Pots as possible. Everybody knows Rag strat so I. Softcore…you just come with a bunch of consumes and keep doing attempts until he falls over. You can do 3-5 pulls if you need to in order to get him down and if people die…it’s NBD in progression.
I think we’ll still see comp stacking obviously, but the idea that you can just brute force your way to Rag by stacking DPS gear and crutching on Greater Fire Protection potions likely won’t hold up. I just forsee so many dead Warriors and Rogues due to how limited their mitigation tools are against magic damage.
I think back to what Kevin Jordan (an OG Vanilla WoW Dev) said when somebody asked him during a Twitch stream about what the thought process was about Hunter Damage in Vanilla. This was either during the leadup to Classic’a re-release…or during it.
Basically somebody was like:
‘Why would you ever take Hunters over mage, warrior, rogue, damage? Aside from the gear rot/waste…all those classes just do more potential damage and often times easier than Hunter.’. (Whether that statement is correct and when in the games life cycle it becomes true/more accurate based on gear scaling is a other matter).
Kevin Jordan was basically tells the person posing the question:
'Well, Hunters are constrained by their mana bar…and their damage potential is less in certain situations…but they have tools like ranged damage and feign death.
Hunter DPS is desirable because it’s SAFER DPS’.
When he said that…it really resonated with me because back when I originally played Vanilla 20+ years ago and was complete garbage at the game…his statement rang more true to the game as I experienced it 20 years ago.
Hunter DPS is generally safer/solid DPS that tended to die less frequently. That was of more value when fights were longer and when people were less familiar with fight mechanics / had less knowledge because people were bad at the game and killed the bosses slower and died a lot more during progression.
When the DPS in the raid is bad and you kill the boss slower because the DPS don’t know fight mechanics…or are on dial-up internet and die…or aren’t good at pushing the buttons…all of a sudden that Hunter in the back who doesn’t die early or towards the middle of the fight and keeps DPSing becomes more valuable.
If there is supposed to be a relationship between risk of death and DPS potential…I’d say it’s probably felt most in HC.
Obviously, Mages break that idea because Jeff Kaplan played Mage (not kidding).
HC really highlights certain elements of game design dating back 20+ years that…kinda got dumpster’d by the current meta/player knowledge.
Who needs ‘safe’ Hunter Damage when you can just class stack and play more aggressively?
The answer is…raid teams that can’t afford to watch loot rot…or who suffer real consequence when their riskier DPS that’d traditionally carry die and are gone forever until they level a fresh toon back to 60 (if they ever do).
I think it’s going to be really interesting.