I feel at some point that wow should have expounded on weapon types. I for one love the “flail”… or perhaps even the “halberd”. New animations and weapon skills would have been cool and immersed players into something new.
Even shields like you could specialize in bucklers and small shield types rather than the huge kite shields you see today.
A ball and chain.
A rapier.
A sling.
Warhammer instead of mace.
The possibilities are there.
A new type of magic perhaps. blood/dream/illusion/time/wild/dream… just some thoughts here what do you guys think?
I always felt spears/polearms were underdeveloped as a weapon type. Arms has a weapons talent for it, but it’s basically the same as axes but there’s fewer good ones. It would be cool if they gave you a slightly longer melee range.
I think they actually had intentions of having more weapon differention, but they decided to scale it back. I remember hearing stuff about rogues being able to use bucklers at some point, which is why there are so many bucklers in vanilla.
With schools of magic, I think the cosmology in vanilla feels about right. A couple of expansions ago in Retail they revamped the color wheel, and it feels like there are too many elements or schools now.
Classic is funny because you can still see all the attempts to incorporate magic resistance, which they really move away from later on.
yes i understand that but a buckler is simply still just a shield even though the name is different. A halberd still an axe… a rapier the same as sword. Flail = mace = morningstar = ball and chain.
Rather than having unique movements, weapon skills, animations and talents they’ve homogenized the weapons ya know but classic rpgs have even separated “small sword, long sword, bastard sword, katana” “pike, halberd, spear”, it’s just something that could have be expandable and something the player base would have been excited about and participated in.
But just like the guy said earlier "there have been attempts to introduce magic resistance but “QOL is much easier and efficient”… so therefore here we are.
Wow has sooooooooo much potential even with the existing classes, simply tweaking a few minor things like adding in more animations, weapon types, specializations for those weapons per the classes who use them, etc.
annoyingly instead of getting the minor yet game chaning stuff we needed, we for SoD and the insanity that was..
I think the true “issue” is these items are not treated as anything other than a sub class to the main over all skill, they all have the same attack animations. While a war hammer would not change the way you would attack compared to a club, but a rapier has a specialized fighting style in the real world compared to an arming sword.
The spear/stave/poleaxe animations are all the same are seem to be based on quarter staves, swinging a spear like this would be nearly ineffectual (of you watch all animations for 2H long on wowhead) and would work against why you would use that weapon type (long range poke stick) the same with a Halberd they are designed to both be pokey pokey and choppy choppy.
over all its more a complaint on animations more than it is the unavailability.
You just kind of called out the elephant in the room and based off of retail animations that is a scary thought for them to start dabbling in animations for weapon skills.
Animation for like a spear in a sense should be simple - thrust, pull back. Then i guess each race’s animations would look different.
It seems like something like weapon skills were originally introduced with the idea that more would be added later. I think over time blizz had to simplify things (professions, talent trees, items, weapon skills, class trainers, arena vendors) in order to focus on what they needed to focus on while players were hoping additional depth would have been added. And the funny thing is the more they went away from these things the more players got angry.
Players have said “there’s no rpg elements in the game anymore”. I’ve said it myself plenty of times - retail is more of a hacker/slasher now.