it isn’t mine - it’s Kevin Jordan’s lol - maybe try actually learning and LISTEN to what he has to say in his interview
i mean it’s not like he designed every single class talent/spell/ability in Vanilla WoW or anything…
It’s raining former Blizzard staff as Countdown To Classic brings you the first of three straight fantastic interviews with the people that helped make the game that we’ve all come to know and love.
Listen in as Josh chats with Kevin Jordan, one of three original game designers who was brought on early to World of Warcraft, and who helped design many of the abilities that we’ll be using again soon when Classic drops.
After that, Josh finishes with a Memory Lane segment, and then a quick comment on the big news that J. Allen Brack would be replacing Mike Morhaime as President at Blizzard.
Highlights Below:
In Depth Interview – 3:10
All About Kevin – 4:10
Working With Blizz Personalities – 8:00
State of WoW/Blizz When Kevin Arrived – 11:45
Designing/Balancing Abilities – 14:30
Designing Talents + Talent Trees – 17:40
Cookie Cutter Builds – 21:20
Spec Failures/Ret Paladins – 25:10
Elemental Mages – 29:20
Things That Hit The Cutting Room Floor – 31:25
Class Design Pride/Warriors – 36:05
Warriors Being OP – 37:35
Hunter Late Design – 40:20
Technical Limitations Cutting Content – 42:30
Broken Rotations – 46:30
Would You Change Anything With Hybrids – 49:10
Demon Hunters In Vanilla – 53:50
Spell/Ability Design Process – 58:10
Grim Batol – 1:02:45
Cooldowns – 1:07:20
Warlock Design – 1:12:05
Runemaster Class – 1:14:25
Necromancer Class – 1:15:30
Bard Class – 1:16:50
Other MMO Inspirations/Concepts Kevin Liked – 1:19:25
Kevin Helps Bring PvP To WoW – 1:27:50
Fun Blizz Personalities – 1:33:30
Having Items Named After You In Game – 1:35:40
Classic WoW Demo – 1:37:25
Changes or No Changes Coming To Classic – 1:40:40
Thoughts On Post Vanilla WoW – 1:46:05
Blizzard Love For Vanilla? – 1:50:20
Thoughts On Classic Leaks – 1:54:30
Will Classic Succeed? – 1:58:45
Farewell – 2:00:30
Memory Lane – 2:05:00
Morhaime/Brack Blizz President News – 2:14:45
Show News & Shout Outs – 2:18:100: https://countdowntoclassic.com/2018/10/04/episode-73-ex-wow-designer-kevin-jordan-on-classes-abilities-classic/
No matter how good you are at designing code, there will be bugs that slip through that you never intended. And as I said earlier, any programmer worth his salt is going to ask people to find bugs. That’s the whole point of beta testing.
Sometimes those bugs aren’t game breaking enough to worry about people exploiting them.
that isn’t the point - Seal Twisting was known by EVERYONE - it wasn’t hidden
it was a known variable by every player and every Dev including Kevin Jordan - if he wanted to drop the ban hammer he would have - but he didn’t - or simply write a Stickied post telling people NOT to use Seal Twisting
And again, just because people weren’t banned for it doesn’t mean it wasn’t exploiting. It’s a fallacious argument to say that it wasn’t an exploit because it didn’t meet your definition of something that is bannable over.
Im gonna take Kevin Jordan’s definition of exploit and what is a bannable action over yours any day of the week friend - now please do yourself a favour and LISTEN to his interview.
The mechanics in game did not come with a set of rules that say YOU MUST DO A,B AND C.
Instead the mechanics were awesome because it was open to your interpretation of how to play.
There were a few hunters back in the day that were stacking +spell damage cloth and PVP’n that way… And it worked out for them, IMO more power too em for doing something interesting.
That’s the best part about Classic WoW, the ability to do things that may not have been intended, but are indeed possible and not actually considered even remotely an exploit.
A fine example is Century totem, jump off a certain fall too your death and century totem stops your fall. Good awesome stuff!
FD+ trapping a rogue’s opener; epic!
Rogue vanishing CC, also totally awesome and never designed but it’s a point of skill that gives the game 10X more depth and customization that it would otherwise just not have.
This is why the modern game is so garbage; it has NONE of this kind of customization, and people see that its trash and so leave the game.
You keep bringing them up as some kind of evidence that they were intended to work that way in the first place which is not the case. You’ve posted the patch note links twice about crit abilities and talk about them as if they were specifically designed to work that way when that’s not the case.
Just because people seal twisted doesn’t mean that it was designed to work that way. Just because you could sit spam to get reck charges doesn’t mean it was intended to work that way.
It didn’t work that way if you had decent latency though. And no one has to want classic to be like that. That may be what you want but not everyone has to want all the latency bugs that only worked half the time when spamming macros.
It’s no mystery that the original concept of many classes in early vanilla changed over time.
If memory serves me well, I recall paladin going from a more mele oriented class into a more or less hybrid melee spell damage monster.
That late model paladin was truly dangerous, and the risk of dueling them and getting no joke 2 shot was real. Half that damage came from and correct me if I am wrong was hammer of justice + judgement seal of command.
Thing is the lack of formal scripted play is why Classic WoW was so darn good. This is why a lot of people really want it back, including me.
Not sure how you can call it an exploit when it’s more of an unintended thing that just became normalized.
I mean, look at TBC, it was developed further in that direction because of what the paladins were doing in game.
and once again for like the 10th time, if the devs did not want anyone to use latency to their advantage for either Reck charges or Seal/Totem Twisting, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN A HUGE STICKIED POST TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO DO IT
Back when you could “raid” dungeons, yes, Deadmines all the way through UBRS, we found a bug in the code during Scholomance. Our Warlocks would log in and out and then zone in and out, then summon people 1 by 1, and as people were summoned, they were so close to the instance entrance, they were automatically zoned in. Picture for a minute zoning into Scholomance and seeing 40 people there. We then had everyone leave their groups and reform into 5-mans while inside, and did Scholomance with 40 people.
We were bragging about it and laughing, absolutely stomping a mud hole in this thing’s rear end, when a GM appeared. Someone had snitched on us. The GM legitimately said, “I have no idea how, but please report this bug.” We continued and got to finish, and everyone got their Mirah’s Song. When we logged out, we were disconnected. We were all given a temporary 72-hour in-game ban.
But the truly great part was the response to our tickets; “incredible resourcefulness and clever use of game mechanics, and enjoy your vacation.”
We were punished for exploiting server-side latency and the raid system, and I love that. I legitimately think we were one of a handful of guilds that forced your Hearthstone when you left a group in a dungeon, or as people tend to call it, “ghetto hearth”.
Point being to my ridiculous diatribe; a great many things were intended and had to be remedied, and weren’t outright exploits, but oversight. This is the beauty of Vanilla. It wasn’t muddied up, it was just the perfect amount of flawed.
“Seems like NF near-meaningless in best case that maximizes it, and meaningless in basically anything less.” - Arkadian
Nope…
Further extrapolation can be seen here in analyzing Coalition’s Patchwerk kill from a month ago for real world DPS numbers from the top raiding guild on Anathema before they folded a few weeks ago IF I WERE IN THE RAID SWINGING NIGHTFALL FOR THEM: