You literally get “Speed” as a tertiary stat on armor, and you’re going to claim it’s not a power increase?
If you die, your dps output goes down (generally to zero). Being alive is a power increase.
Moving faster increases the chance of getting out of a thing that would kill you.
Moving faster is a power increase in that it improves your chances of remaining alive.
QED
Mounted combat in general sounds really cool, but once you start to think about specifics, it starts to sound annoying.
So, while I like the concept of mounted combat, I think Blizzard’s BC/WotLK team probably got it right when they decided not to do it large scale. An expanded version of the Argent Tournament could be cool though.
Yes.
Speed is not the same kind of stat as Strength or Attack Power. Indestructible is also a tertiary stat on armor and that’s not a power increase either.
Leech and Avoidance are, though.
I’m not particularly married to Mounted Combat. Other games have ‘engagement’ abilities that just launch you into battle in a cool way. It’s not mounted combat, but it still incorporates your mount.
I’d like to see other systems, like active/passive abilities, specialization, etc. It never had to be just combat.
Yes it is.
No longer having to be concerned by the negative effects of deteriorated armor is a power increase.
Just because something doesn’t directly increase the number your hammer smashes for doesn’t mean it isn’t a power increase.
You are mind-bogglingly wrong about everything you think and say.
We have different ideas about power increase and that’s fine.
Yes. Yours is provably wrong and mine isn’t.
Why do you think Leech is a power increase? It doesn’t increase the damage you do. It just heals you for a portion of the damage you deal. If your answer is “because the healing keeps you alive”, then SO DOES MOVING OUT OF THE FIRE.
Why do you think Avoidance is a power increase? It doesn’t increase the damage you do. It just reduces the damage you take. If the answer is “because reducing the damage you take keeps you alive”, then MOVING OUT OF THE FIRE FASTER REDUCES THE DAMAGE YOU TAKE.
Therefore, movement speed is a power increase.
Your argument seems to be that “A number happens” is what constitutes a power increase.
-50 damage taken is a power increase.
+100 healing done is a power increase.
How about this? Go fight Maut in Ny’alotha. You know he has the ability where you have to run into the void zone or you die?
If you run faster, you can spend more time dpsing the boss before you move away. If you run faster, you get back to the boss sooner and can begin dpsing him.
Running faster gave you +1 second of dps time.
A number happened. Power increase.
Fair enough, I’ll play along here.
You’re saying movement is a power increase because it lets you navigate hazards. That’s fair. That’s fine.
The hazards are still there. You still have to input the choice to move. You still have to be quick about it. Even if simply walking out is generally the worst option to get out of fire (because which classes don’t just have a movement ability that is on a negligible cooldown).
Avoidance and Leech have an active interaction between the relationship the character has with damage sources, which is what this game is when you boil it down to its barest gameplay. You hit things until they die before they hit you until you die, an exchange of damage sources and HP until someone dies. Healing, passive or otherwise, and missed hits, factor into that.
So, sure. If you’re involved in content where positioning is that important, and reactionary movement is critical to staying engaged in that activity, improving speed is improving power, if it’s the most passive way to do it.
Does that mean movement is gameplay? Only in some places. Does that mean movement speed is player power? Only in some places.
Mounts are not player power. They’re not gameplay. They are only conveniences and deserve more depth and gameplay.
Warlocks.
Paladins only have it on a 45 second cooldown. Most bosses do a thing more often than once every 45 seconds.
I’m not going to sit here and type out the movement abilities of every class, because frankly, it’s irrelevant. You need to press move extremely often in raids, and certainly far more often than any class would always have some speed increasing cooldown available.
So does speed. Not every damage source works like a stick of dynamite where you are either in or you aren’t when it goes off.
Many damage sources work like fire—the longer you stand in the fire, the more damage you take. Fire is especially famous for working like fire. Lots of bosses do fire.
Let’s say you have absolutely perfect reaction time and click your speed cooldown. It still takes your character a non-zero number of seconds to move out of the fire. If you are faster, you will take fewer ticks of this damage before you reach a safe area.
And as I’ve already stated, sometimes enemies force you to move away or they move away. Wrathion likes to go to the other end of the room. If you run faster, you can get back to him sooner. Getting back sooner means you might get an extra swing or two in. Speed has interacted with your damage output by creating a sword swing that otherwise would not have occurred.
If you move faster in the world, you can do more quests.
+5 quests per hour.
A number happened. Power increase.
Even with your extraordinarily narrow understanding of power, that is provably not true. Your obsession with hard power is silly.
Beyond what I’ve already demonstrated, there are softer power aspects to moving faster.
Let’s say you play with war mode on. If you are flying by on a 60% speed mount, you cannot outrange the net gun before you get shot down. You die because of this.
But if you have 310%, the enemy player will have a hard time getting the net gun to fire in time. Even if they do, you are likely to land so far away that you can mount before they can engage you in combat, and you’ll be outside of net gun range next time.
Even if you don’t play with war mode on, let’s say you’re heading toward a rare spawn being killed. It’s got 10% health left. You definitely can’t make it on foot. Good thing you’re flying through the air at 430 yards/second instead of the measly 100 yards/second that running would give you.
Speed is a clear power increase in any situation where you are moving.
Disregarding time is just plain wrong. When you really think about it, what is the point of the most obvious aspect of your power, DPS? It’s to kill something faster.
TL;DR: Even DPS is just a way to decrease the time it takes to perform the action of murdering. Anything that decreases your time spent achieving the goal is a power increase. Moving faster easily falls under that category.
One of the most memorable moments in any Final Fantasy game = unlocking Airship that lets you travel quickly and safely around the world.
Flying is always an awesome boon in any RPG that has it.
Trying to remove or severely limit it after over a decade of allowing it is a recipe for disaster, see WoD for proof.
The wheel is rolling along just fine, stop trying to reinvent it with terrible ideas. Blizzard comes up with enough bad ones already.
Or until you switch it out for another piece of mount equipment.
Provided mount equipment continues to exist in the next expansion.
Exactly.
I don’t consider the rate of completion to be gameplay. I consider it to be a convenience. This happens a lot in mobile games, and Raid: Shadow Legends famously has a ‘speed up’ button. Is that power gain? Is that game play? I’m not willing to say that it is.
You’re the one asserting that a number means power. I’m not. The compromise I made that when movement and positioning are necessary to remain engaged in an activity, improving movement capability can be considered a power gain.
The simple act of moving your character in any direction in the world is not gameplay. Movement becomes gameplay when the game has imposed a reason to move, but simple locomotion is not. There’s a reason why certain narrative-heavy games are called ‘walking simulators’.
Never said anything about limiting it. I mentioned that it would be cool if there were flight hazards, but that was it.
I don’t understand this mindset. If the concession is that Blizzard is incompetent and implements bad systems, or at the very least is not capable of implementing a good one, why would anyone continue to invest time in their game?
I think Blizzard could pull this off. They did so with Battle Pets, they can do so with mounts.
The capability of doing it faster is caused by a power increase, the same way that if you increase the power of a car’s engine, it can go faster.
Again, a DPS increase, which you surely agree is power gain, will increase the speed at which you murder something. In the context of a gameplay loop, doing things faster (shortening the loop), is a power increase. Traversing terrain is part of the gameplay loop, whether it be to reach an objective, to close distance on an enemy, or to avoid unfriendly effects.
You implied that a number occurring means power by your argument that avoidance and leech, things which do not increase your damage output, are power increases. At no point did you ever explain why Leech and Avoidance are power increases in a way that is not directly applicable to Speed.
That’s what happens when you decide on a position and then twist your logic around it instead of using actual logic and arriving at a position: Your argument is a mess. You don’t even understand what gameplay is and you’re not going to let little things like “the meaning of words” or “common usage of phrases” dissuade you from backing the position you arbitrarily decided on.
Your problem at this point is you’re embarrassed. It’s obvious from your “compromise”. You realize you’re wrong, but you’re almost 300 replies into this thread and you’re not going to abandon your original post.
Their track record with Azerite, Essences, Corruption, Mount Equipment, Legiondaries at launch and WoD would say otherwise.
The game has a lot of flaws, and many recent changes and decisions have been questionable in my opinion, but I still enjoy aspects of the game and would rather see the flaws fixed before another half-baked system is forced into the game.
I think the reason these systems are flawed or superficial is because they’re not meant to stay around.
Garrisons did not stick around. Order Halls and Artifact Weapons did not stick around. The Heart of Azeroth will not stick around. We’re still waiting to see if Anima is another AP grind.
But Battle Pets did. They were introduced in MOP and never left. They have continued support even now with new pets and Pet Battle content like dungeons added all the time.
Blizzard would be wise to ditch these systems that are only meant to survive the life of the expansion and focus on things that will have lasting power throughout the game’s coming years. Mounts have always been part of the game, and a system that integrates them into actual gameplay is going to have to stick around.
I still think Blizzard could pull it off. If the alternative is to have no faith in what Blizzard can do, I can’t rationalize why anyone would support them.
I don’t think convenience or game play are good metrics to use. Game play is literally anything we do in the game. We could increase “game play” by forcing everyone to RP walk everywhere. But it wouldn’t be much fun.
A better thing to focus on is meaningful game play. That (unfortunately) differs from person to person. We should be trying to get people to spend more of their time playing the parts of the game that they enjoy. So, I’m generally going to be in favor of things that move away from pointless actions and to more meaningful interaction. Mounts of all types help with that.
While a lot of people absolutely adore battle pets, the best thing about them is that they’re completely optional. If you don’t want to do pet battles, you don’t have to. If you change how mounts work, that affects everybody, every day. There’s going to be someone that doesn’t want to deal with that hassle and with a player base in the millions, it’s probably going to be a lot more than just one person. And people will get tired of the feature after a while as well.
I somehow overwrote this while replying in a completely different thread. I don’t know how that happened.
Then maybe a faster ground speed is in order. Like by 200% and make it purchasable via gold.
I dunno-- outta ideas here.
Gamer, not consumer.