Why greater drums? just add tinnitus

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
882

The problem is that people don’t know, or rather don’t care how all of this works as a company. So really, there are 3 very general silos. Tech, Business, and Product who is the liaison between Tech and Business. Every year, Tech needs to ask the Business for money to fund projects. Tech is actually all red marks on the expense sheet. Product is the middleman between the two - managing expectations, funding, timeline, etc.

Kavaix from what I can gather probably is somewhere in the Product silo, but has no more pull than a junior developer on the tech side. Now, by the time Kavaix gets the go ahead to post something on the forums, it will already have been groomed and watered down with Blizzards PR polish and OK. What he’s writing to us is essentially is translated down not just from multiple levels of the corporate chain, but multiple silos as well.

Let’s take drums. The business knows that they want TBC and that it needs to have some old school appeal. So they go to Product and tell them this - and usually it’s a very general idea. Product goes to tech and tech makes suggestions, and comes up with timelines etc. Product then goes back to the Business and says “OK”. Business puts it on their “road map” of products and project milstones - TBC, Hearthstone, SC2, WC3, etc.

Then, by looking at drums again, Tech finds out it’ll take additional work because well, drums data doesn’t quite fit into Retail and that the old school experience will take an addition month to deliver. Product goes to the Business in which case the Business tells Product to tell Tech to piss off and deliver something because by pushing time and project back, the Business is losing money. So tech needs to figure out what a “hack” solution.

Product then needs to figure out how to issue a statement about drums and why. It tricks down from upper management to the legal team, to audit, etc. And at the end you have poor Kavaix posting it.

It’s like “layering” from Classic. As soon as Blizzard sold it as a “special technology just for Classic”, i knew it for what it was - Sharding under the covers. Tech just sold the idea to Product who then convinced the Business.

I’ve been in the software engineering business for 25+ years lol for fortune 500 companies and startups a like. Kavaix is just a messenger. What is lost on people is that the Tech team are slaves to the business. Always. Even if the tech team understand what we want, it doesn’t matter if they can’t sell it for business buy in.

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883

“Brian Birmingham thinks it is very likely that they will be making adjustments to the drums of war by leatherworkers. The drums should remain an important advantage for leather workers, but the job shouldn’t be a duty for every raid enthusiast.”

All I can say is they sold me on the above and I hope they are still going in that direction.

884

Ah I see, you think you’re going to be a fury warrior in Sunwell. Well you might just be. But as you say, you could have glaives, thus BS is not giving an advantage over raid drops.

885

There’s going to be a void created when/if drums get changed to only require 4 LW or none at all. There’s a few things that will fill it that might be problematic.

  1. Only 4 LW’ers are required for haste drums. This means you can have the following instead for an even larger raid bonus:

4 Haste drum users
4 Attack Power / Spell Damage drum users
8 Restoration Drum users (200 health and mana every 5 seconds)
Optionally 4 more 15% move speed drum users

This leaves you back to square one with once again, 20 drum users in the raid.

  1. Engineering becomes the new LW’ing with everyone being told to get Battle Chickens for the 5% attack speed bonus that stacks and last 4min on a 20min CD
886

Yeah sure there’s many factors at play of what the bis professions would be if xyz was true at the given time.

887

if they make all the drums not need LW to use, then 1 isnt an issue except for the people who dont like to use drums at all and are not just concerned about needing LW to use them.

2 is pretty pog but does it work for casters?

888

Chicken buff is melee haste only, 5% per chicken stacking 5 times. Doesn’t effect casters or hunters except their pets.

889

still sounds pretty good since most hunters are BM and it stacks.

890

Um, you add a debuff so you can only have 1 drum buff active on a player at a time.

This really isnt that hard.

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891

the only debuff they have to add is “coward” for those asking LW Drums to be nerfed.

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892

I like the idea of raid wide drums, but then as some people have pointed out, does that then mean the meta becomes every other type of drum gets used too (unless they share the one buff slot :man_shrugging:)?

893

Or another prof takes the place like engi

894

What exactly in Engineering is desirable in TBC?

895

And here I thought they had wised up that no changes was the wrong approach and the loudmouth #nochanges crowd should be summarily ignored. These people are the same ones parroting world buff and warrior stacking and all the other garbage “meta or bust” things that came from retail.

This is 100% a social/player issue, I agree. but the player base has shown that they are unwilling and incapable of fixing the problem themselves. You see this time and time again that players will constantly choose the selfish option rather than what’s good for the community because they are too focused on minmaxing and feel you always need to be doing everything you can to maximize your effort or you are holding people back. Players can never be trusted to do what’s right,only what benefits them in the endless quest to show you’re better than your peers by any means necessary.

Since the players will not fix the problem socially with the tools available, the only recourse is to FORCE them to by changing what they are allowed to do. Otherwise, it has been proven that given the chance drums meta will absolutely infect and corrupt the game. It is a player issue, but since they won’t solve it blizzard has to.

896

I’m sure as a community manager you’re forced to stay robotic with your responses but does anyone at blizzard even look at the game or do you just put a bunch of suggestions in an RNG generator and do whichever is picked?

897

You are aware that this does not “fix” the Drums meta?
So are you going to address that or no?

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898

My two cents. Why not just make it so anyone can use drums, so you don’t need to be a LW to use them, just to make them? That way you don’t need to change the effect which would hopefully mean no balancing issues for Sunwell. I guess this would mean people would have access to another profession which would be more beneficial personally in a lot of cases, but ultimately people don’t want to be forced into using LW for drums.

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899

Before Blizzcon we all expected to be required to be LW to play TBC at a high level. Your dev’s got our hopes up by saying “We don’t want everyone to feel forced to be LW’ing”

Now that we see the “fix” it’s disappointing because it doesn’t actually address what you guys said you were trying to fix. Saying you want an “authentic experience” is disingenuous because you are already making several changes, like Pally seals and Boosts. Hiding behind that phrase comes off as intellectually dishonest. As a long time Blizz customer I know it’s pointless to try and get you to revert what you’ve promised with Boosts, so I’ll focus on drums.

If your “fix” stays, you’ve just postponed LW’ing being mandatory until Sunwell at best, which goes against your stated goal at Blizzcon. I would argue it will be necessary before that, as we’ve seen any form of buff to the raid exploited to the max in the current WoW Classic culture of parsing.

Based on what you’ve said in this thread, it sounds like a solution that would better reach your stated goals is to have a more expensive version of the drums that non LW’s can use. This would keep LW’ing as a valuable profession across the expansion, but not making it mandatory for every single raider. It would also prevent you from needing to rebalance the content.

900

You’ve been awarded one Yike by the Council of Yikes!

Why is that such a bad thing? We’ve already seen that a lack of changes to the original game has led to the World Buff meta in Classic, which has resulted in an INSANELY differently experience from actual Vanilla. And for the absolute worse, as almost anyone would agree. It not only added a painstaking and unfun mechanic to the game, but it’s made all of the content so much easier. Drums won’t have as big of an impact as world buffs, but it’s very clear that giving us an authentic experience means that things should be tuned from time to time. Besides, I don’t see how raid being slightly more difficult is a bad thing when this change wouldn’t actually be that impactful and most of these fights are probably going to be solved very early on anyway.

Please spare us the speech about authenticity. Activision may have forced the devs’ hands, but please, don’t talk to us about authenticity when you guys are implementing a cash grab that will allow people to buy a level 58 character. And even further bastardizing Classic if that datamined mount ends up being in the game. The ‘authenticity’ thing is just a sad joke at this point. It’s very clear that, at least where money can be made, this game’s authenticity isn’t a high priority for the dev team, so now that that’s already behind us, why not implement a change that pretty much everyone is asking for?

Who actually wants these awful drums in the game in their current state?

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901

Daily reminder that you’re wrong and you need to make appropriate change to leather worker or nearly everyone will be required be leatherworkers.

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