Ok, this is a valid feeling, but do note that you’re talking about subjective qualifiers here. What you find fun, others may not, and vice versa. Clearly you do not find that mechanism fun, but that doesn’t mean it is a bad mechanism, either from an objective game design perspective, or from the perspective of what appeals to a significant enough chunk of the player base to justify it existing.
Ya, pulling this back to Fodder, the biggest issue is that Havoc isn’t a ranged spec. Fire can stand anywhere within a 40y radius around the boss. Given the size of most boss hitboxes (~10-15y radius, sometimes much larger), you’re talking about ~9500 sq yards of valid DPS area. A melee class, by comparison, only has ~1300, and half of that is parry/breath attack sadtown. Rune-like mechanics do not work for melee classes, period.
So my arguments about Rune are largely inapplicable to the design of Fodder. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a completely dead ability in its current form.
Ok, this is a valid feeling, but do note that you’re talking about subjective qualifiers here. What you find fun, others may not, and vice versa. Clearly you do not find that mechanism fun, but that doesn’t mean it is a bad mechanism, either from an objective game design perspective, or from the perspective of what appeals to a significant enough chunk of the player base to justify it existing.
Absolutely right. But I never did say it was objectively bad game design. I personally don’t like it or find it fun though. Although I will say while it’s not bad design in a vacuum I do think the whole picture is more complicated. From encounter design (1 person messes up and it wipes the whole raid, usually movement related) to player behavior prioritizing parses…I do think it becomes nearly toxic when taken to the extreme. But again that’s my opinion. I won’t go as far to say it’s objectively bad but I do think other factors can cause it to become that.
And I do agree rune-like mechanics have no place in melee. This ability is dead on arrival not only due to the rune mechanic but the furthermore the global (or potential global) it’ll cost to summon the demon and then whatever globals we’d have to use to actually kill it…I don’t know what their thinking honestly.
I appreciate their effort, but this iteration of Fodder to the Flame is so bad I would rather take something that’s purely cosmetic. I would choose something that turned my left thumb pale green over a pool to stand in for a buff.
Was watching final boss on YT… Fel Mastery and momentum might become the meta if the current alpha themes remain as is (ae caps\reductions on eye beam/death sweep).
That playstyle kinda makes this ability the outright wrong choice for the class doesn’t it?
This seems like a gimmicky ability with over-complicated mechanics that will effectively Wall off an entire covenant from consideration, and that’s too bad. Blizzard, please try anything else.
I really, really, really, really hope this is not the case. I don’t think I can take another raid tier of Momentum dominating the level 100 talent row anymore. It is so gimmicky and clunky to execute in Mythic Raids and high level M+ that I just wish the devs would see it and replace it already.
I think deciding to give up mobility for damage is a very good choice to get players to make, depending on the tuning.
For example, to put up with the Gimmicks of momentum/fel mastery by having to skill check your charges and about doing 10-15% more damage than a turret class (arms/beast master/fury or demonic/blindfury is an interesting trade off).
If you give up your fel rush/vt mobility but get nothing in return and do just as much damage as every other dps… its not worth it.
That said I think the choice is maintain “true AE” by fel rush, and 5 target\severely diminished AE with blade dance\eyebeam. At least thats what fat boss was showing in testing.
Ya, the problem is, that’s not how it’s tuned. They don’t tune it so that if you do it well, you’re the best DPS in the game, that tune it so that if you don’t do it well, or take something else, you’re garbage-tier DPS, and you have to take it, and use it well, simply to be competitive. And they basically have to tune it that way, too, else the world-first race will be a full rack of HDHs, because world first guilds can and do have the best of the best.
With the amount of mechanics and positional requirements as well… I’m sorry momentum in it’s current form just doesnt make sense.
Depending on fight I’d be sitting lolretreatdash hunters without a second thought. It’s cool and different idea, but in reality it’s terrible and causes wipes
You say that like Vanilla was a gold star of balance. You realize that each faction had precisely 9 viable raid specs, right? If your class could heal, your only viable raid spec was healing, because the “hybrid tax” back then was closer to 30-50%. Neither paladins or bears could become uncrittable, since they lacked Shield Block to push crits off the attack table, and both had issues with durability and threat output to boot.
For pure DPS classes, one of the specs was specifically designed and balanced to be a “PvP spec” and was next to useless in PvE. Balance between the remaining two was so extreme that literally only one of the two was even remotely viable in most cases.
Damage rotations were a joke. Frost mages literally just spammed Frostbolt nonstop. Hunters used Arcane until their mana ran out, then basically just autoshot. Warlocks couldn’t use most of their DoTs because of the debuff limit.
Oh, and Fire, despite being the stronger (and more interesting) spec, was completely useless for the first two tiers simply because everything was immune to fire damage, for “flavor”. Yay.
Literally the only class in the game with more than one viable raid spec was warriors, because they were Blizzard’s darling child back then. They were both the only tank option, and one of the strongest melee DPS in the game as Fury.
So ya, definitely better balance than what we have now, right?
It was a long day, about 12am my time… I was really tired. I have let wow down, I have let the wow forums down and I apologise.
No it was specifically a pondering on the effort and benefit in making a game for everyone vs making a game for the top tier gamer (best in the world) and catering to how it will affect them, then everyone else as an after thought.
Do you design for the top 1%, then assume the other 99% will mimic that (as happens quite often, it also gives people something to aspire to) or do you make a game that the 99% will enjoy and the 1% will break?
Push crush or crit off the table? My memory is fuzzy but I thought shield block pushed crush off and defence alone (of which druids didn’t have much access to) pushed crit off.
I could also correct the rest of what you got wrong but it would serve no point, I am not looking to start an argument. The main idea I was looking to discuss was should the game be built/designed/balanced for what 90% will enjoy or what the top 1,5,10% will enjoy?
Hmm, you may be right, my memory of vanilla is also a bit fuzzy. I just remember bears being thrilled when they could hit 102.6% (I think that was the number) dodge in Black Temple and were finally be able to tank Illidan due to pushing his Shear off the table (in addition to being flat out invulnerable to physical attacks as a whole, at least dodgeable ones).
Either way, whether it was crushes or crits, it was bad new bears for bears and protadins. I do feel like defense gear wasn’t really something bears could find in vanilla, though, so maybe it was both for them.
A larger percentage of the playerbase in WoW participates in endgame instanced content (where balance is a lot more important) now than did so in Vanilla. Actual disparities now are a small fraction of what we see in Classic, and yet their effects are outsized on perceptions.
Would fire even be a consideration without leveraging their combustion’s inside a RoP ?
Or put another way, every spell’s damage is constrained for fire and arcane because they can abuse their cool downs in a RoP window. Frost simply gets no leverage from RoP.
Further the reason Fire is dominating atm is not because of their core kit, it’s because Azerite trait stacking, mastery corruption stacking, hyperthread bracers, lucid dreams and font. All of which are gone in SL.
RoP hurts the class for majority of each expansion until the rental powers of that expansion combine to allow obscene abuse inside a RoP
I mean, I feel like you have the causation backwards. You seem to be arguing that all of Fire is being held back because of the potential power of Rune + Combustion (and similarly for Arcane). I don’t think that’s really the case. I think it is, in fact, the other way around. RoP is as strong as it is for those two specs because of how much of their damage is invested in their burst windows. RoP being pretty bad for Frost in most circumstances shows that, if anything, Rune is what is being held back by the potential power of stacking it with CDs.
Don’t get me wrong, my argument had nothing to do with viability, or even gameplay flow. My argument was purely about the merits of Rune as an ability. That exists without respect to Azerite traits, Essences, or any other rental power system. Rune is reasonable design, given how flexible they’ve made it.
But again, only for ranged DPS. Completely unacceptable for a melee.
