So I remember a point where guides talked about things like crowd control and how hunters could use their pets to assist the tank. Mages were wanted in every group because of food/water and sheep. People focused the same target and you had an off tank (often a Palladin) that everyone used to get the main target (reason for the existence of the ‘F’ target-of-target function). (This was before ‘F’ meant ‘pay respects’)
Nobody cared about DPS. We cared about whether you spanked the sheep. Rogues got yelled at for doing too much DPS and pulling aggro off the tank. The game was fun. It was peak Classic.
Somehow things changed and we got all sweaty with damage meters, gearscore and everything was GO GO GO, AOE AOE AOE LOOK AT MAH NUMBURZ!!! PULL MOAR! Everyone wanted to finish the instance so they could do the next instance so they could finish that and get to end game where they could complain on the forums about how the game was crap and there was nothing to do. And then we ended up with retail.
I’d really love for DPS to get relegated back to just something everyone kinda did and contributed to and the focus was really on your other class abilities.
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Uhhh, like wotlk-cata is when everything became aoe fests with threat basically being removed from the game. Just because this is a pretty different game doesn’t dispel people’s attitude they picked up.
Also, more dps = boss dies faster = we can go again sooner cause LMAO my item didn’t drop.
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Yeah I think it was when they added Hunter Volley and suddenly EVERY class had AoE. I seem to remember a Culling of Stratholme run where I was just pounding one key and when I asked if we were doing CC I got yelled at. I think that’s where it started.
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Doesn’t matter what time period, level cap, or expansion. As soon as people can viably do this type of strat they will.
Happened when Classic rereleased, mages were in high demand as were other AoE classes for blasting through dungeons. etc.
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About halfway through Wrath, the game formula changed and it became more about compartmentalizing content into chunks that can be played by casuals and can be completed in 30 minutes or less.
This is where the game was colloquially named World of Queuecraft. Because now you just sit in town and queue all day, and faceroll aoe your way through the dungeon, then on to the next queue.
It was no longer the time sink that it used to be. People were getting divorced, quitting school, and losing their jobs over this game. But wrath changed that by becoming more casual friendly.
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I only started in TBC myself but I remember this being the case too, at least if you could get a paladin tank in the group.
Sure, food/water and sheeps were important, but ultimately everything came down to efficiency, and damage output is probably the biggest contributor to that. As soon as threat and survivability allowed for it, I found people not wanting me to sheep stuff anymore because it got in the way of quicker kills.
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Right… so I was thinking. For a classic+ or really for us to just not end up with Retail 2.0, the game design needs to shift. We’re going to need MORE DPS nerfs. Mobs doing more damage to lower armored toons and tanks causing less threat.
The whole thing was that a tank could sit there and take damage all day and needed a few heals to top them off, but the real challenge was losing aggro. If DPS pulled aggro, most bosses would 1 or 2 shot them.
Regular dungeon mobs would 3-4 shot you and if the healer tried to compensate for your inability to manage threat, THEY would pull aggro and then it got bad. Which is why you used CC. The tank’s mitigation and the healer’s mana pool was the throttle on DPS.
Man, those are the dungeons I would really love to have back.
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That would require a world-wide lobotomy to undo all the collective meta knowledge the player base has. Why waste time CCing something when it can be Tanked and exploded along with the rest of the pack? Why care about boring fundamentals when they are in fact, boring and fundamental and you’re bad if you can’t do them while DPSing?
You might as well demand everyone playing League of Legends to go back to methods of pre-Season 1, where no one knew wave mechanics, or how to rotate, how to build, etc.
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okay but what happens when I don’t gear check and then a female gnome warlock does 2% overall dmg in the raid and our group can’t clear kelris? after 2 initial scuffed groups I’m never not gear checking again for BFD
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Or they could shift stats to have tanks hold less threat and mobs in dungeons do more damage to non-tanks. Make the dungeon rewards relatively useless to people who overgeared them.
And sure you call them boring fundamentals, but that was the game and that’s what was fun. How is mashing AOEs and or the same rotation over and over again fun?
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When did DPS become everything?
When we figured out the game.
No one wants to crawl through Deadmines marking every trash pack.
Well, you might.
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The solution for you is to play hardcore. It’s played far more similar to how we played vanilla due to the inherent risks in the game mode.
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Cant. Classic players are too bad. No, seriously, people think WC or BFD are hard. Bless their souls, you need to be terrible to think that. But awful players are still players and deserve being able to clear content in their own, awful, terrible pace.
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Tank survival is purely a matter of stat-checking, not skill, especially in Vanilla where we don’t have really any expressive ability to maintain survivability outside of Blade Dance maintenance. That means that tweaks to mob damage and Tank threat just sets the bar higher for who will be preferred. Tweak this too far and some Tank classes drop out of preference entirely because they’re too squishy and/or too low of threat while surviving.
Blizzard has zero track record making threat a meaningful mechanic. Players will literally stack the most efficient Healers with only the highest TPS Tanks using full buffs if it means everyone gets to slam DPS buttons all day and finish 5min faster.
As for fun? Fun is highly subjective but people tend to, on average, have more fun trying to push out bigger numbers than dutifully babysitting a sheep.
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Awfully specific example.
You can get a good enough idea of someone’s gear by just inspecting it. You can tell when the group isn’t doing enough damage without gearscore or DPS meters. Those are just for Epeen.
If the healer runs out of mana and nobody else is dead, either the healer doesn’t know how to conserve mana, doesn’t have enough mana or the tank is taking too much damage. Easy enough to figure out which of those is happening by looking at combat logs.
I’m not sure where we are disagreeing? I never even mentioned gearscore I mentioned checking gear before raid. Dps and healing meters simply let me know who is not pulling their weight. You can replace one or two people max in a 4/7 bfd raid but any more group is dead
The problem is the way dungeons are setup, its a very old gameplay loop and hasn’t aged well. For example, dungeons don’t feel “alive” as mobs are static and extremely predictable. There is no life. So, take away dopamine from doing damage, you get a slow paced, lifeless, play through. The first run may be fun, but it would be like watching a suspense movie more than 1x. If dungeons were not static and more alive, then a cc oriented setup would be much more reactive and engaging. With the way dungeons are, I believe focusing on dps/aoe mechanics is the lesser of 2 evils.
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That’s a really freaking great point. CC was a big deal for adds. Of course you eventually knew what adds to expect and it kinda became rote.
If dungeons were more dynamic that whole gameplay loop would probably be a lot more fun. Of course then you’d have to still deal with players either figuring out the ‘optimal’ configuration to no-brain their way through or complaining bitterly that it’s just “too hard”.
A good group will realize you are doing your job instead of just looking at meters.
For example I was the only warrior in my BFD raid yesterday, and went as DPS. It was my job being the only warrior to ensure that every boss had 5 stacks of sunder, thunderclapped, and demo shouted.
While spending rage on these skills lowered my personal dps, it increased the raid as a whole and made for a better run.
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When Blizzard nerf everything into the ground.
Seriously, the Classic and casual Retail players combine to play on SoD so they can do no work and win. That’s the bottom feeders the MMORPG world right there. Actually any game for that matter.