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Ask Questions of the World of Warcraft Team
You may have already heard of Blizzard's most recent title. World of Warcraft was released in November of last year to high critical praise and a favourable player reaction. While technical issues were a problem for the first few months of retail service, prompt patching and additional world servers have left the game in excellent shape. World of Warcraft has since gone on to become not only the largest MMORPG in the United States, but also the world, with 3.5 million subscribers as of July 21st. Given all this, the likelihood that Slashdot readers would be interested in asking the development team some questions seemed pretty high. The team has kindly offered to take some time out of their extremely busy schedules to answer questions. So, feel free to ask whatever question is burning in your heart. Please stick to World of Warcraft related topics, and only ask one question per comment. We'll take the best of the lot and pass them on to the Team. Their answers will be posted when we've gotten them back.
I've been trying to get the answers to these questions for awhile now. I've changed the format of the posts, I've posted it in the general and warlock boards, nothing has worked. I've called blizzard and they told me the only option I had was to continue to repost and hope to get an answer, so here goes. I won't post the link to the other thread as we're not supposed to, so I'll just copy+paste in a new thread as I was told to by the csr I talked to. Thanks for the answers in advance. I hope things are well there at blizzard. "I know this post is long, and for that I appologize, but there is alot that needed to be said. First off, I want to let you know that I'm a warlock, on a pvp server. I have played my main pretty exclusively now since the very first day of launch. I love my character. I have asked some of these questions in previous threads, and other warlocks have asked the others, so I figured I would compile them here so that a cm can have a quick and easy place to answer them. In addition to posting here I've called Blizzard several times and was told that the only way that I can get the answers to these questions was to post on the boards...again, so here I am asking for a blue to respond and answer even some of these questions and issues that warlocks have been asking for quite some time now. I know much of this has been asked before. I ask that people keep the flames and /bumps without comments other than /bump to a minimum. I know that many people are tired of hearing the same thing from warlocks day in and day out, but that is because we simply haven't been told the answer by blizzard. I would appreciate it if someone up the chain of command would even acknowledge that they know these issues exist even on the most basic of levels. The problems that our class faces pale in comparison to the problem that we have with getting information from those who are in the know.
Anyways, onto the questions.
1. Why is it that the developers require that level 60 warlocks on pvp servers (and pve/rp to a much lesser extent) farm for hours to gather shards which do nothing more than put us on equal footing with other classes? The cookie-cutter response has so far been "balance", but when you look closely at the facts, shards are the single most unbalanced variable in any of the warlocks repetior. Also nobody has ever explained what shards are balancing that the long cooldowns, high mana costs, lower damage and talent point costs don't already.
Allow me to explain;
There are several spells in the Warlocks arsenal which require shard usage. All of our low level pets, (except the imp) all of our high level pets, all of our stones, summon players, shadowburn, and soul fire. Now on one level this doesn't seem too bad until you realize that a warlock without shards is not on equal footing with other classes who can simply log in and play as "balance" would dictate. If anything we are severely handicapped as we cannot use most of the spells that define us as a class.
Many of these spells, shadowburn as a premier example, have long cooldowns, higher mana costs than comparable spells from other classes, do less damage than those same spells, require talent points even to be able to cast, then get hit with the additional burden of requiring a non-buyable reagent that can only be farmed from mobs (or players, but more on that in a moment) of level 48+. Now if this was really a balance issue, the cooldowns, mana costs, damage and talent points would be right on par with all the other classes, but once you realize that you then have the additional burden of wasting time farming those shards THAT is when the imbalance occurs.
Many players claim that without the shard requirements on spells such as shadowburn that the spell would be overpowered. This is wrong for several reasons;
First, any warlock who has this spell will go out to farm as many shards as they can possibly fit in their bags with the intention of using them all as rapidly as possible given the situation. If a warlock is faced