it’s stupid.
We should be able to pay dollars to get whichever racial we want.
some racials are better than others. it’s stupid design or just remove racials all together.
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No, I and everyone else likes the tradeoff it will be a personal investment of the big pvp players which race they think will be the best for arena. Essentially calculating what you want you think will do well against all others.
Gotta say I enjoy the trade off and find the racials fun. Nothing is BiS for every facet of the game and many racials have unique advantages in certain situations that creates interesting dynamics and gameplay.
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This is the kind of logic that turned warcraft into retail. Speaking of which, you should just go play that instead.
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nah I like racials, adds flavor. I’ll take variety over equality in this case.
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It’s an RPG. That means there may be some RPG elements.
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add it to the list of changes for dragonlands
leave classic alone
Yep.
Why isn’t my orc as nimble as a night elf?
umm…orc. the answer is orc. They got garona to spice it up but yeah…orc.
Night elf sneaky.
Orc is more stand up tall, square them shoulders and say I am here, come at me bro!
1 Like
Retail also has racials and they are just as impactful as racials are on Classic.
The topic of racials being problematic has existed since original vanilla, it’s a discussion worth having for Classic.
There is still a question to be had regarding racials in term of balance.
Racial abilities such as an increase to a certain trade profession or something with a rather low impact on combat such as Wisp Form (Night Elf) or Find Treasures (Dwarf) adds flavor without impacting balance.
Racials such as Will of the Forsaken (Undead) and Perception (Human) however can make races a choice based not on aesthetics or flavor but based on how strong the racials are.
When looking at the race distribution in PvP for example (See link), you can see that Undead and Human players are massively overrepresented. Many chose these races specifically for the racials and that in itself is worth taking a look into or at the very least having a meaningful discussion about.
My personal opinion on the matter is that I would rather racials not have an impact on instanced combat (Arenas, Battlegrounds, Raids, etc.) as they hold back people for choosing a race based on aesthetics.
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Either
a) Remove them completely.
b) Disable them in instanced combat
c) Make them a choice independent of race. Like choosing a profession, you can gain any of them.
That last one would prove without a doubt that the racials are unbalanced, because everyone would take Will of the Forsaken or Will to Survive (assuming they’re faction limited).
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After a 3 and a half year break, I’ve been playing Retail for the past 5 weeks, and I think you are absolutely correct.
If that’s genuinely the case, then why not just separate the two; unlock racials from race, and instead have sets of bonus skills (or whatever you’d like to call them) that can be chosen during character creation, like skin tone, hair style and color, etc?
I think any suggestion is worth considering, but need to remember the technical limitations as well.
It is a rather complex endeavor to make racials a bonus skill/ability to be picked at character creation (and to also make it possible for players to choose it for the characters they already made).
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9.2.5 ain’t too bad. who would have thought all the feed back beta gave would be be nice to play lol. well besides the players asking for this since week 1.
If only they would have did some of this at say…9.0. Why I only give them half credit here. yes it improved. but only because feedback was ignored in beta to come out in a bad state in some regards.
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Sure, there’d be some work, and not having access to the codebase, one can only guess at how the current design is implemented. Racials may already be separate from races, or maybe not. It could be a matter of adding non nullable data field, and setting it to the base racial skill set for the race, if none has already been set.
It does not appear to be particularly complex, but again… who knows what coding decisions have been made, which ultimately would dictate the complexity of making changes.
I mean, yeah… I wonder how much was just flat out ignored and how much was too much to change given the time constraints.
I suspect there was an amount of, “But we’ve worked so hard implementing these systems, just try them out… and like them, please!”
It would also require a change to the character creation UI, testing, removing the code that provides the racials to their respective races, removing any racials from already existing characters and providing already existing characters with an interface to select their racials on character selection screen.
Versus disabling an ability in an instance. Arenas already have all the existing code to disable certain items or abilities in arenas, the Classic team has even already made a change that does just that (Mind Quickening Gem and Skull of Impending Doom).
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That’s a whole lot of text to say, “Aesthetics are more important than game mechanics.”
If that’s your takeaway from my post, perhaps I didn’t express myself properly.
I believe game mechanics are more important than aesthetics in general.
But it doesn’t mean aesthetics should be ignored.
They are both components of the game.
On a game design perspective, racials having such a major impact on gameplay is arguably a poor design decision as it impacts the aesthetic component of the game too heavily. There are other ways to provide players with engaging gameplay mechanics that doesn’t involve hurting other aspects of the game.
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I still disagree with changing them on so many different fronts.
Yes, human and undead racials are the majority because they are most commonly the most useful in arena. But remember that even the top 100 teams is only so much as a speck of the total player base. Many of these players do not NEED these racials to be that high on the ladder. In addition, these players are often sacrificing their PvE performance to obtain these racials to give them an edge in the content they enjoy the most, which is totally fine and RPG-esque so long as the relative power levels of the racials are kept in check (which in my opinion, they are).
When comparing the raiding community to the PvP community, the PvP community is but a tiny fraction when compared to the raiding community. So if they are balancing racials should they not make balancing changes for the thousands if not 10s of thousands of raiders as opposed to the top 100-200 pvpers?
And if we are enforcing these changes to support a competitive PvP scene, should we not be focusing on the issues with the system itself (i.e. low participation). The competitive scene for the most part is already dead with the absence of tournaments and rampant win trading and boosting (especially in our cursed OCE PvP ladder which has so few players). In my opinion, removing them is just removing fun for the sake of a hand full to “pretend” to compete on a ladder that doesn’t particularly mean anything.
And then you have the question of is this not a classic project? People are already up in arms over LFD being removed and now they would be stripping another major feature on the game purely based on speculation and not based on how the current community feels?
Part of what people enjoyed in the older expansions is there being big rammifications behind the player choice when making their character. Aesthetics taking priority over RPG elements is one of the reasons people liked the earlier iterations of WoW.
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Oh yeah, I see what you mean.
The easier choice isn’t always the best choice though, but idk. I don’t actually think racials are broken, but rather they add flavor, imo.
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That’s what you, and other people with similar outlooks, seem to not understand. Racial abilities aren’t the problem, people who want the game tailored to them are. Racial abilities have been around from the jump and people who are good at the game simply adapt rather than cry. Blizzard should try adding things that don’t negatively affect or take away from classic aspects of the game rather than give a juice box to whoever whines the loudest… Seems like everybody wants Classic until they get Classic these days.
1 Like