We min/maxed so hard we optimized a stat on release that didn’t exist until halfway through the expansion.
coming from the guy that think re-release of a 12-year old game won’t be min-maxed to death…
maybe? maybe now that all 25 players are min-maxing, fights will be so short that arcane blast spam might be the new meta, and i doubt a warlock could beat that.
If and when they do TBC servers, I hope they simultaneously open fresh vanilla ones. Let the zoomer min-maxers waddle over to TBC and allow vanilla to be chill.
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Min-maxing in TBC isn’t as big a problem for PvP, because the pvp gear is pretty much standard. Slight differences here and there get washed out underneath how important comp and skill are in arenas. And you can’t spend-to-win as easily.
PvE is only for people that hate their lives and are trying to distract themselves until they die. Let them have their min-max.
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yes. all the fotm warrior / rogue world first players will be rerolling lock & hunter. tbc is figured out just as much as vanilla is
It will be MUCH worse
No big deal bringing a couple meme specs in a 40 man raid, plenty of room for dead weight. But bringing sub optimal players in with only 10-25 slots? In raids with actual “git gud” mechanics? Where plenty of properly itemized options for gear are available for most specs? Someones not gonna make the cut.
Without a doubt, WOTLK will to. Min/maxing plays a bigger role now than back in the day. There were then too but the games weren’t as dissected
There’s no going back to ignorance… no matter how fun that was.
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I as Enh Sham and my buddy Demo/Destro Lock will enjoy roflstomping all cookie cutter comps in 2v2 for Glad title as we did back then.
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Armor pen was on SSC/TK pieces and those were available at launch.
If it comes out, then yes: even more so.
TBC was when Blizzard started to capitalize fully on the “competitive MMO” niche that had yet to be truly explored. In a true RPG, gameplay is subservient to the in-universe themes and fantasy. Blizzard reversed this upon seeing there is a bigger audience in a more fine-tuned, polished mmo friendly to competitive playstyles.
The extreme end of this is what retail is, where the story and whatnot exists only to justify gameplay design decisions, not because it’s actually a good story. The massive retcons of chronicles regarding the rules on how the schools of magic work, for example, were done to justify things like holy light being no more or less effective against undead/demons than shadow or fel. All the story that exists now is a servant of gameplay, whereas in a true RPG, mmo or not, gameplay serves the story.
So, hypothetically, BC comes out. Be it new, empty servers or expansions to current classic ones, you will have almost everyone chewing through the new content as quick as they can to try and be first.
As soon as hitting 61, pretty much all pre-BC content is rendered irrelevant. Once end-game mats and content is devalued and a ghost town; everyone’s in outland.
Classes are refined in a way that every “spec” now has a place in the new content design(more on that later.) However, this is done according to the principle of the “tank heal dps” trinity, as opposed to the older philosophy of each class having its own unique purpose.
For example, retribution paladins do a bit more damage overall(about 20-30%, relative to how they’d perform in AQ and naxx BiS), warriors, rogues, and mages are all nerfed heavily, all out of this new ideal that every DPS spec must be within a certain margin of each other, with utilities brought considered a secondary aspect of balance. So, instead of making something like ret more in line with the original hybrid philosophy of paladins being melee support, with retribution focused on bringing damage to the group, they give retribution an on-demand melee strike, a DPS CD, and buff paladin damage abilities across the board in various ways. At the same time, utility abilities such as healing or cleansing is nerfed indirectly by talent tree revamps, and the content design.
Content design is the yin to class design yang. You cannot change one without changing the other, and just how BC fundamentally altered the approach to classes and specs, and just how they should work and their purpose in the game, content design also changed. Raids were tuned tighter, mechanics were more demanding on one’s reflexes and raid coordination. Raids were pruned down to 10 or 25 players, because it’s much easier to balance content around a set number of players, as opposed to the vanilla approach to raids where they weren’t necessarily tuned around 40 people, but simply allowed 40 people. In older RPGs, endgame bosses were little more than something to grind and farm towards, not really anything “skillful.” Content design of TBC, in contrast to vanilla, was designed around the more refined class design, with tighter DPS checks, mechanics that absolutely demanded certain specs and rendered others forbidden(such as many dual or tri spec hybrid builds), whereas you can get away with them just fine in vanilla raids.
It’s your class that matters over your role in vanilla, whereas in BC, this was changed for your role to matter over your class, and every expansion that followed doubled down on this more and more. Vanilla raids, you want paladins there for their blessings; believe it or not, their healing is secondary, and minor in their contribution compared to said blessings. BC? You’d better hope that paladin you recruited as a healer is geared, specced right, and good, otherwise it’s simply not going to work.
In short, the min-max “culture” of classic is purely placebo, and certainly overkill. In BC, it’s pretty much mandatory, as the content and class design enforces it; you don’t have a choice if you actually want to play the game.
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Min-Max was the culture of TBC from the beginning.
It will be that way again.
There will be min-max to what degree I really don’t know.
A well balanced comp that isn’t too crazy will do just fine all the way through to sunwell. Sure the mages in top guilds will get sunwelled but the rest of the guilds will do just fine and bulldoze content just as fast as we are now in classic.
People forget that just about every spec brings something to a raid so you can expect to see a heap of diff specs in average raids all pulling decent numbers and getting content done.
Well, for starters, you won’t spend two hours getting world buffs for 45 minutes of raiding, and thank gawd for THAT!
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Elitist Jerks existed back then.
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This particular concern is silly.
MMO’s in general, and multiplayer online gaming specifically has always been about min/maxing.
Always.
There are loads of people who don’t bother it. You can be one of them and suffer absolutely no consequences for it in the vast majority of cases you will encounter.
I mean this is the period when I and a lot of others really got hot and heavy with theorycrafting thanks to the existence of Role Forums, with the Tank Forum being the absolute best (for entirely objective reasons I assure you)
So yeah… I don’t even need to redo anything. I can just pull up my old spreadsheet and double check equations and call it a day.
It was on select items, but wasn’t really an easily stackable stat until Wrath. So definitely could personally drop a target’s Armor to zero with the correctly stacked stats, especially as a Warrior being able to wear every possible item for optimal min/max. Still, there are a quite a few more ArPen items than I remember existing. Tier 6 and ZA provided a lot of it.
FYI there are TBC private servers out there…and yes, they are min/maxed just as much if not more so than classic WoW.
On a certain server, they released Vashj and Kael in their pre-nerf states (Blizzard utterly nerf-batted both bosses due to them being so hard) and were still taken out rather quickly.
You could definitely reduce boss armor to 0 by the end of TBC. This is after sunders/other reducing effects of course, and probably near the end of BT/Hyjal at the earliest.
Armor pen was changed to a % reduction rather than a flat amount in WotLK to prevent TBC gear from being too strong as a result.
This is the theorycrafting I remember doing DURING tbc. So I would expect TBC to be at least that min/maxed.
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