Since we had to play World of Warcraft for class this week, I thought it would be fitting that I did this week's blog post on my opinions of the game.
Many years ago I tried WoW before. And I played for an entire month before quitting, as I could not find it within myself to justify paying the monthly fee for the game (the first month came free with the battlechest). That being said, I rather enjoyed my time that I spent on the game. I just did not like it enough to justify the continual spend of money on it.
Flash-forward to present day when we had to play it for class these past 2 weeks. My verdict on the game is now as follows: it is an abomination. I honestly have not a clue how I ever stomached this game before. It is infinitely worse than what I remembered from years ago.
Since playing WoW I have played Ragnarok Online for 3 months (was not a terribly big fan of it either, thus why I did not stick with it for long) and Tera for over a year now, which I still play currently. Playing these, in my opinion, superior MMOs, has obviously made me realize that WoW is even worse than I originally thought. In all honesty, I find that remarkable.
The combat is not actually all that terrible (though I have been spoiled by Tera's Real Action Combat System). In fact, I was rather floored with how unique some of the bosses were when we played this week. A fair amount of them had more than just the hack and slash element to them. That being said, most of them died rather quickly, which was terribly disappointing. Going along with combat, I thought it was not very user friendly either. The bosses tended to move around quite a bit. This means that so was your party. This made it rather complicated to track where all of your members were.
Particularly on the one boss my group faced (some goblin bomber, he was the second boss of one of the dungeons), who hopped on your party members' faces while other goblins came in and started attacking. You had to either be really focused and attentive as a group and stick together and make sure to keep on top of him, or you ended up running around like a bunch of headless chickens because it was not exactly intuitive what you had to do. Naturally, my group did the latter because we did not expect it. It felt so clunky and terrible and I thought it was highly stupid despite the rather unique mechanic used by the boss that I thought was interesting and enjoyed somewhat strictly because of its uniqueness.
All this being said, the reason I find this method of combat to be clunky and not user friendly is because of how much bosses moved. As a tank, having to move to the boss constantly instead of maintaining aggro is a burden, not to mention that if you lose aggro he could run across the entire room after one of your members, and you have to run the entire way over there. As a dps, having to re-position yourself constantly instead of focusing on dps is a burden. As a healer, this is a nightmare. With all your members constantly moving, not to mention on top of one another constantly, it becomes nigh impossible to get your job done right. It becomes hard to tell who needs healing and who is fine, not to mention it becomes hard to actually heal them with everyone moving around on top of one another, making clicking them nigh impossible to provide the necessary healing. Essentially, I think the combat is a tad too fast-moving.
Another gripe about the combat, I hate how when you are trying to level and you accidentally aggro two enemies, you better start running immediately or else you are going to die. You are leveling a battle-hardened warrior who is going to try and save the world, and yet you cannot take on two merfolk fish people at the same time? I am sorry, but what the fuck. That is retarded. It was infuriating the first time, and it was infuriating the 100th time. Especially considering it is nigh impossible to 100% avoid it.
One other thing that was really frustrating was that icons only function on your mini-map, and nothing is displayed on your world map besides area names and quest markers. It becomes much harder to find NPCs, such as equipment repair NPCs, and other tools affiliated with the icon system.
Not so much a gripe, but I found the death system to be very weird. Why do I have to run all the way back to my dead body? Why do I not just resurrect like in every other MMO forever? Granted, it allows you to easily get back to where you were, without penalty, to continue questing That is why this is not a gripe. I just did not get it. And even though it was for your convenience, I found it annoying every time. Why? Because you were required to. If you did not, you were not doing anything because you did not have an actual body anymore. Making your users have to do something that they are not naturally willing to do: bad.
Anyway, that is what I have to say about WoW. Needless to say, I will never be playing this game again. I am going to continue to enjoy Tera and the FFXIV:ARR Beta.
I think your bad experience with the game is because you weren't entirely aware/taking advantage of some of the mechanics of it. Your whole complaint about the movement speed of all the enemies and characters is actually one of the main reasons why you're supposed to use tab targeting. It's a seemingly lazy mechanic that's actually required to be effective in the game. On top of that, when it comes to healing, when I was playing with my party I selected members by clicking on their portraits instead of the character models. This was a whole lot easier and saved me a lot of time when it came to managing my party. In the end, in both when I played with the class as well as with other random players, it was honestly when kept my party from dying.
ReplyDeleteAs for the whole running back after you die, it's not supposed to be a mechanic you enjoy. It ties in with the lore, but it's also designed to be the punishment you get for dying. Dying is bad, and you should feel bad for dying, that's just how it is. Also, I'd rather have to run back to my body than lose 1/2 my exp and all my loot. If you have a good healer on your party they can revive you with a spell. If you are a healer and you died, and you're playing properly as in you're not attacking, you're staying far away from the enemy and healing your party from a distance, then you have the right to complain to your party about how they all sucked and didn't tank enough.
I will agree with you that single-target lock-on is a stupid mechanic. It's something that I've always hated in a lot of mmo's like this. Personally I'd like the gameplay style but would prefer that while you're locked on, if your weapon or spell explodes within the radius of the not locked on target, it should still hurt. Games like TERA, or PSO2, or Dragon's Nest attempt to fix this problem, but taking down multiple enemies that surround you in any game is going to be a difficult task to get through.
As for your complaints about the Map, I had issues with it for quite some time. However, WoW recognizes that its design isn't perfect for everyone, so it actually has a good Add-on API with a huge community providing add ons. I recently got a map add-on that allowed me to see where my quests are as well as set waypoints for me to go to.
More than likely I won't be playing this again just because of the subscription, but there's no way I'm going to call this a bad game, even after all the other crapton of MMOs that I've played.