Racial changes

Community General Discussion
1

Cross posting from arena forums because I’m curious how the general public feels about this idea.

Why I think racials are good:

  1. They provide extra customization that benefits pve and pvp.
  2. They provide a sense of uniqueness for race.

Why I think racials are bad:

  1. They lock you into a specific race to min/max, even though you might not like the race, which impacts pve and pvp.

I don’t propose completely removing racials because some people who like the race might also like the identity that comes with it. For instance, worgen being able to run fast unmounted or Tauren picking up herbs better.

I suggest keeping some of the fun, flavor racials (or making new ones) and pull existing combat related racials into another category by themselves. You can call it something like Battle Prowess. Slap some rp on each battle prowess, for instance stun reduction might be battle hardened, where your past experiences have taught you to shrug off stuns in a fraction of the time.

Allow players to choose their battle prowess at character creation and change them somewhere in game. Put a long timer on it like a month or something so people can’t swap often.

The benefits of this are:

  1. Players can choose the race they truly like based on lore, looks, and flavor/racials.
  2. Balancing racials (battle prowess) becomes easier.
  3. You can create new battle prowesses without impacting existing people too much because they can switch.
  4. You don’t have to worry about balancing racials and creating an issue because people need to switch races, during balance tuning you could reset the battle prowess reset timer and allow players to switch if they feel it’s necessary.
  5. Battle prowesses could be chosen to benefit the class/main spec and not be so generic.
  6. Faction balance (in pvp) may be improved since orc isn’t the clearly best race choice.

Thanks for reading!

2 Likes
2

So you want to be able to pick you race’s racials therefore invalidating the idea behind them and homogenizing them.

No.

This is a MMORPG. They have removed enough of the RP stuff, they don’t need to remove any more.

4 Likes
3

I actually like this idea and if implemented properly could add additionally role playing aspects of the game.

My ideal version of implementation would be that you create your character’s origin story by the combination of the racial options you pick.

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4

But did you read the thread though?

5

Or just remove them. No reason to keep them really. WOuld just be an extra factor that everyone picks the same because Min Max

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Yeah I dont think you read they said keep all the flavorful racials like goblin rockets worgen running vulpera bag ext but things that are vastly overpowered compared to everyone else like the human and orc pvp racials make those selectable or change them.

7

This is an interesting idea, in pvp scenarios it does feel very limited on what you can play. If you really want to be competitive you have to go with the race that has the best racials and sacrifice what you really want to play as. For instance, I like playing on horde and being a Druid but the night elf racial is the best by a long shot. I would have to give up my faction, preference, etc just to be able to access it.

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8

Well, this is… Interesting.

On one hand, it would restore the balance between the two faction racials.

On the other hand, it would mean that my decision to make a Mechagnome Death Knight would be obsolete.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

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9

I think that’s the point though it’s not really good in an mmo to feel like you have to pick a certain race to be optimal. That’s exactly why the op made the suggestion

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10

Racials make up a ridiculously small amount of performance to the point it’s very unlikely they’ll actually effect if you win or lose outside of maybe pvp, and even that I kind of have doubts about.

They’re fine as is.

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I want racials to stay as they are.

If you want to min/max, then you go ahead and min/max. I don’t want .01% of the player base’s desires affecting 99.99% of the player base negatively.

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12

I actually think racials should matter a lot more than they do but it probably can’t be balanced. We have too many races. So it’s probably best that they stay how they are.

1 Like
13

pvp is the whole point though and they do kind of matter even in pve on the extreme levels

14

It seems like you are the one interested in limiting RP by locking characters into racial abilities that significantly impact their gameplay experience. Interesting roleplaying is when someone goes against the grain. How is it compelling that every Orc is hardy, and no other race ever is? Even D&D has finally figured this out that no one actually likes being soft-locked out of class race combos because their racials don’t line up with their class. It’s about time Blizzard figures it out.

It’s amazing to me that everyone was angry with the covenant system for the same reasons they should be mad at some of these racial abilities, yet they aren’t.