What I'll never understand about hunters is why they always make up arguments about "effective range" without once mentioning that their pet is effective at any range.
Rogues are indeed not a non-issue, since Hunters are able to detect stealth, eliminate stealth with a flare, and prevent stealth with a Hunter's Mark or a DoT sting. Using those tools, as well as your other range-keeping abilities, Hunters are well equipped to keep rogues out of striking distance.
Many games have gone "classless", but the fact of the matter is that when players have different roles to fulfill there will always be a friction due mostly to the "grass is greener" effect.
Dwarves being a rarity has nothing to do with their relative power. Stoneform is one of the best racial abilities in the game for a rogue (bye bye DoT's, hello Vanish!), and fear ward is awesome for dwarf priests.
And yet dwarf priests and rogues are some of the rarest race/class combos in the game.
Your idea to have Undead-affecting abilities work in game was tried in beta and found to be VASTLY overpowered. It's just such a bad idea to make a whole race vulnerable to abilities meant solely for PvE.
While a good idea in theory, taunt in pvp won't happen in WoW.
-Rogues and Druids lose their combo points when a new target is selected. -Blizzard has consistently followed a doctrine of nerfing abilities that "take control away from the player" in PvP- Polymorph, Fear, Seduce, stuns, you name it... taunt will never be added for WoW in PVP.
Warriors are excellent defenders in group PvP- they're the "rock" to rogues "scissors". As long as a caster isn't tearing chunks off a warriors HP, they last a long time and virtually insure that the leather wearers don't come anywhere near the cloth wearers.
"Group Leaders" is a disgusting fantasy that too many paladins bought into when creating their characters, and now they're realizing that they're no better off in PvP than your run of the mill warrior.
Shamans are well rounded and don't have an obvious achillies heel, but they're certainly beatable by every class in the game. There's no fictional "I win" button that Shamans have- they just have a broad range of situational tactics that aren't well understood by most of the people they fight.
No one of their attacks or heals or abilities is especially overpowered, but the fact that they have easy access to a diverse range makes them formidable opponents in PvP.
Your assertion that "Horde is more powerful because Blizz plays Horde" is without factual basis, and flies in the face of the facts that the horde population is outnumbered 2:1 on most servers and that the Alliance has more content available to them.
Paladins ability to live forever in PvP makes them the absolute best healers. They will almost always be the "last man standing", whereas Druids, Shamans, and especially Priests tend to go down early in a group battle.
Paladins may not be great at killing- but they have a very important role in PvP: keeping others alive. It's just a pity that 90% of paladins signed up to be uber hammer wielding destroyers.
Of course, WoW should give more CP to healers. There's really not enough incentive to be a healer in PvP.
And about the Shadow/Holy Priests debate. I play a priest, and I can tell you: the holy tree is overrated for healing. There are only maybe two or three talents in the whole tree that have a real effect on instance healing- and they can all fit easily into a Shadow Priest's build.
As a regular reader of the WoW official forums who plays both horde and alliance regularly, the author of this article stinks of alliance paladin bias.
Right now, the Paladin community is all in a tizzy because the ubermensch boyscout characters they thought they were creating have turned out to be an incredibly average class.
WoW is a game that has no penalty for death, and rewards fast numerous kills heavily- like many competitive video games. Paladins are realizing that their ability to survive a nuclear holocaust means very little when it takes them an eon to kill even soft targets.
Before the recent PvP additions to WoW (Battlegrounds and the Honor System), Paladins were very much considered overpowered in PvP- when the game wasn't about who "wins" but who "doesn't lose". They were (and still are) the only class capable of reliably soloing multiple elite mobs.
They were (and still are) the class that has so many built in luxuries and advantages, that they scoff at having to use trade skills and items to make up for their class deficiencies. Why should they have to use a Swiftness Potion or a Net Gun to over come their lack of range or speed? It's not as if warriors have to use healing potions and first aid to overcome their lack of healing.
I find the whining paladins humorous and pathetic. WoW is extremely well balanced. There are a few bad matchups here and there, but Paladins are far from gimped- no matter how much whining they do on the forums or in a periodical as respected as GamePro. Tch.
1. Paladins have the best survivability of any class in the game. Unfortunately for them, WoW is a game that doesn't penalize dying at all. Three months ago Paladins were widely considered the most overpowered class in the game, until a bug fix significantly impacted the reliability of their DPS. Since then they're still capable of some of the highest burst damage in the game if they get lucky and everything Procs and Crits at the same time, but that's rare.
Your little side comment about Priests is a bad comparison, because Shadow Priests are indeed a DPS class, a tradeoff being made for Priests' low survivability.
2. Warlocks can get soulshards in PvP as of last weeks patch. Blizzard has stated that they are analyzing the idea of having a shard bag or stackable shards.
3. The hunter dead zone only means they can't use their ranged abilities in melee combat. They're still capable of using their melee abilities and pet DPS and are the best equipped class for kiting and keeping other classes outside of their "dead zone". From another point of view, all melee classes have a "dead zone" outside of their melee range.
4. Stoneform, Shadowmeld and Perception are all exquisitely useful abilities, depending on the situation. Escape Artist should be instant and WoTF and Warstomp need longer cooldowns, but other than that the Horde/Alliance racial abilities are very well balanced.
5. You're obviously ignoring the huge improvements made to the Druid and Warrior classes over the past few months. Mages have gotten several lesser improvements, and hunters and warlocks are still in the process of major improvements.
There may be problems with WoW in terms of balance, but you are way off the mark on just about everything.
1) Shadow Priests are excellent in PvP, but FAR from useless in PvE. It's ignorant for you to assume that because they can nuke well that they are no longer capable healers. In fact, all "Solo PvP Specs" are quite viable in group PvE, just not min/maxed for the task. On the other hand, a character that is min/maxed for PvE is usually quite gimped in PvP.
2) The other healers in WoW are all excellent PvP classes: Druid, Shaman and Paladin. They all have strengths in both PvP and PvE.
3) As others have stated, the Fear and Seduction nerfs ONLY applied to PvP- not PvE.
WoW is extremely well balanced- both in PvP and PvE. With some small exceptions, every class has a rock>scissors>paper counter with a system that allows exceptional player skill to overcome that pecking order.
But when it comes down to it, when another company innovates or sets the bar higher, and gamers ask for it, Nintendo denies it and tries to make excuses.
As far as delving on to both sides, I lost faith as a card carrying Nintendo-fanboy about the time Super Mario Sunshine came out. I took off the rose colored glasses and realized all the bullshit we've been spoonfed from Nintendo was just propaganda.
Others are realizing it too, and thus we get rumors about Nintendo going software-only like Sega.
Relevance in America and Japan are two different things. If anything, Nintendo is showing this by avoiding High-Def where the installed base in Japan is much higher than America.
I chide them for trying different things because they're arrogant enough to think that their "innovations" are somehow more important than the real trends in gaming.
For every analog thumbstick and Mario 64, there's a Virtual Boy and a proprietary non-backwards compatible cartrige system.
Yes I mean Final Fantasy. But go ahead, name me a relevant RPG franchise on a Non-Portable Ninentdo console. That's what I thought.
And yes, they shunned online play. It's common knowledge that they opted to avoid broadband and online play in the Xbox/PS2/GC generation simply because they wanted to do it on "their own terms". The same thing is happening this generation with HD.
It's nice to see that if you criticize Nintendo on Slashdot, you'll get modded down as flamebait and then half-baked fanboy apologists can come up here and get +5 Insightful.
Why is it that Nintendo ignores obvious trends in gaming, only to come up with their own arrogant and ultimately useless "innovation"? It's like they relish in being the odd man out, even when it means doing away with features that would benefit their games.
-They consistently avoided CD-Roms and then DVD's, the Gamecube being the first optical media Nintendo has used. The result was that the console RPG has been virtually non-existant on Nintendo consoles since the SNES.
-When Sega and Sony started garnering support from 3rd party developers, Nintendo shut itself off in an Ivory Tower, giving support only to in-house and 2nd party developers. The result was that the N64 had a tiny selection of games.
-Nintendo is the king of gimmicky and irrelevant consoles, examples being the Virtual Boy and the DS. But when the PS2/GC/Xbox came around, they derided DVD playback in other consoles.
-TFA mentions Online Play and High-Definition as the two new features that Nintendo has shunned. But for what? The impression I get is that they are avoiding these features because they don't know how to implement them effectively- not because they have an alternate plan in mind for the future of console gaming.
It's like they cling to the Nintendo Power glory days, spiteful that these "upstart" companies MS and Sony are the ones holding all the cards.
What amazes me more than Nintendo's obstinance is the fact that they've managed to hang around and still be something of a factor in console games.
As far as cordless mice goes there are a few good reasons:
-A cordless optical mouse can go anywhere. If someone wants to show you something using your computer, you don't have to get out of your seat. Just hand them the mouse and they can use it on their lap. It's also very useful for when you don't have a full desk area (like with a laptop), you can have makeshift mousing surfaces out of just about anything and not have to worry if the cord will reach.
-A cordless mouse stays put when not in use. This doesn't seem like a big deal at first, but going back to mice with cords I can often notice a slight "drift" in the cursor when I take my hand off the mouse.
-Along the same lines, a cordless mouse has no directional resistance. It's a tactile preference that I've been spoiled with. Cordless mice always feel tethered.
-You don't have to unplug anything to clean it or check the laser.
Batteries really aren't a problem if you get rechargables.
I'm sure many of the same arguments can be made for wireless keyboards, but I wouldn't know because I use a laptop most of the time.
I finally got around to reading Ender's Game a few months ago, and I have to say I wasn't too impressed. This ubiquitous book had numerous spelling and grammatical errors and at least one obvious plot hole (Ender gets transferred because you can't be promoted to leader of your own team, but that rule doesn't appear to apply to another character a few pages later).
Taken as pulpy chewing gum sci-fi, it was pretty good. The characters and dialogue were unrealistic, but the descriptions of zero-g manuvering were entertaining.
Delve a little deeper, and the book gets very disturbing- mostly in the pervasiveness of underage homoeroticism and the cynical view of child manipulation.
When I found out Card was a homophobic right-winger with an agenda, I can't say I was surprised.
You have to be kidding. AC at its absolute worst did not have daily server outages for over a month. Rollbacks and server resets were almost always due to exploits, and I'll admit they were far too lenient in their punishments.
Every day in WoW there is a new server issue. At least 10 servers are chronically unplayable. The login server goes down several times per week. Scheduled maintenance causes 16 hours of downtime in the middle of the day EVERY WEEK.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'll never understand about hunters is why they always make up arguments about "effective range" without once mentioning that their pet is effective at any range.
Rogues are indeed not a non-issue, since Hunters are able to detect stealth, eliminate stealth with a flare, and prevent stealth with a Hunter's Mark or a DoT sting. Using those tools, as well as your other range-keeping abilities, Hunters are well equipped to keep rogues out of striking distance.
Many games have gone "classless", but the fact of the matter is that when players have different roles to fulfill there will always be a friction due mostly to the "grass is greener" effect.
Dwarves being a rarity has nothing to do with their relative power. Stoneform is one of the best racial abilities in the game for a rogue (bye bye DoT's, hello Vanish!), and fear ward is awesome for dwarf priests.
And yet dwarf priests and rogues are some of the rarest race/class combos in the game.
Your idea to have Undead-affecting abilities work in game was tried in beta and found to be VASTLY overpowered. It's just such a bad idea to make a whole race vulnerable to abilities meant solely for PvE.
While a good idea in theory, taunt in pvp won't happen in WoW.
-Rogues and Druids lose their combo points when a new target is selected.
-Blizzard has consistently followed a doctrine of nerfing abilities that "take control away from the player" in PvP- Polymorph, Fear, Seduce, stuns, you name it... taunt will never be added for WoW in PVP.
Warriors are excellent defenders in group PvP- they're the "rock" to rogues "scissors". As long as a caster isn't tearing chunks off a warriors HP, they last a long time and virtually insure that the leather wearers don't come anywhere near the cloth wearers.
"Group Leaders" is a disgusting fantasy that too many paladins bought into when creating their characters, and now they're realizing that they're no better off in PvP than your run of the mill warrior.
Shamans are well rounded and don't have an obvious achillies heel, but they're certainly beatable by every class in the game. There's no fictional "I win" button that Shamans have- they just have a broad range of situational tactics that aren't well understood by most of the people they fight.
No one of their attacks or heals or abilities is especially overpowered, but the fact that they have easy access to a diverse range makes them formidable opponents in PvP.
Your assertion that "Horde is more powerful because Blizz plays Horde" is without factual basis, and flies in the face of the facts that the horde population is outnumbered 2:1 on most servers and that the Alliance has more content available to them.
Paladins ability to live forever in PvP makes them the absolute best healers. They will almost always be the "last man standing", whereas Druids, Shamans, and especially Priests tend to go down early in a group battle.
Paladins may not be great at killing- but they have a very important role in PvP: keeping others alive. It's just a pity that 90% of paladins signed up to be uber hammer wielding destroyers.
Of course, WoW should give more CP to healers. There's really not enough incentive to be a healer in PvP.
And about the Shadow/Holy Priests debate. I play a priest, and I can tell you: the holy tree is overrated for healing. There are only maybe two or three talents in the whole tree that have a real effect on instance healing- and they can all fit easily into a Shadow Priest's build.
As a regular reader of the WoW official forums who plays both horde and alliance regularly, the author of this article stinks of alliance paladin bias.
Right now, the Paladin community is all in a tizzy because the ubermensch boyscout characters they thought they were creating have turned out to be an incredibly average class.
WoW is a game that has no penalty for death, and rewards fast numerous kills heavily- like many competitive video games. Paladins are realizing that their ability to survive a nuclear holocaust means very little when it takes them an eon to kill even soft targets.
Before the recent PvP additions to WoW (Battlegrounds and the Honor System), Paladins were very much considered overpowered in PvP- when the game wasn't about who "wins" but who "doesn't lose". They were (and still are) the only class capable of reliably soloing multiple elite mobs.
They were (and still are) the class that has so many built in luxuries and advantages, that they scoff at having to use trade skills and items to make up for their class deficiencies. Why should they have to use a Swiftness Potion or a Net Gun to over come their lack of range or speed? It's not as if warriors have to use healing potions and first aid to overcome their lack of healing.
I find the whining paladins humorous and pathetic. WoW is extremely well balanced. There are a few bad matchups here and there, but Paladins are far from gimped- no matter how much whining they do on the forums or in a periodical as respected as GamePro. Tch.
1. Paladins have the best survivability of any class in the game. Unfortunately for them, WoW is a game that doesn't penalize dying at all. Three months ago Paladins were widely considered the most overpowered class in the game, until a bug fix significantly impacted the reliability of their DPS. Since then they're still capable of some of the highest burst damage in the game if they get lucky and everything Procs and Crits at the same time, but that's rare.
Your little side comment about Priests is a bad comparison, because Shadow Priests are indeed a DPS class, a tradeoff being made for Priests' low survivability.
2. Warlocks can get soulshards in PvP as of last weeks patch. Blizzard has stated that they are analyzing the idea of having a shard bag or stackable shards.
3. The hunter dead zone only means they can't use their ranged abilities in melee combat. They're still capable of using their melee abilities and pet DPS and are the best equipped class for kiting and keeping other classes outside of their "dead zone". From another point of view, all melee classes have a "dead zone" outside of their melee range.
4. Stoneform, Shadowmeld and Perception are all exquisitely useful abilities, depending on the situation. Escape Artist should be instant and WoTF and Warstomp need longer cooldowns, but other than that the Horde/Alliance racial abilities are very well balanced.
5. You're obviously ignoring the huge improvements made to the Druid and Warrior classes over the past few months. Mages have gotten several lesser improvements, and hunters and warlocks are still in the process of major improvements.
There may be problems with WoW in terms of balance, but you are way off the mark on just about everything.
1) Shadow Priests are excellent in PvP, but FAR from useless in PvE. It's ignorant for you to assume that because they can nuke well that they are no longer capable healers. In fact, all "Solo PvP Specs" are quite viable in group PvE, just not min/maxed for the task. On the other hand, a character that is min/maxed for PvE is usually quite gimped in PvP.
2) The other healers in WoW are all excellent PvP classes: Druid, Shaman and Paladin. They all have strengths in both PvP and PvE.
3) As others have stated, the Fear and Seduction nerfs ONLY applied to PvP- not PvE.
WoW is extremely well balanced- both in PvP and PvE. With some small exceptions, every class has a rock>scissors>paper counter with a system that allows exceptional player skill to overcome that pecking order.
Nintendo asked developers to make Hi-Res options of their games before...
But when it comes down to it, when another company innovates or sets the bar higher, and gamers ask for it, Nintendo denies it and tries to make excuses.
As far as delving on to both sides, I lost faith as a card carrying Nintendo-fanboy about the time Super Mario Sunshine came out. I took off the rose colored glasses and realized all the bullshit we've been spoonfed from Nintendo was just propaganda.
Others are realizing it too, and thus we get rumors about Nintendo going software-only like Sega.
Relevance in America and Japan are two different things. If anything, Nintendo is showing this by avoiding High-Def where the installed base in Japan is much higher than America.
I chide them for trying different things because they're arrogant enough to think that their "innovations" are somehow more important than the real trends in gaming.
For every analog thumbstick and Mario 64, there's a Virtual Boy and a proprietary non-backwards compatible cartrige system.
Yes I mean Final Fantasy. But go ahead, name me a relevant RPG franchise on a Non-Portable Ninentdo console. That's what I thought.
And yes, they shunned online play. It's common knowledge that they opted to avoid broadband and online play in the Xbox/PS2/GC generation simply because they wanted to do it on "their own terms". The same thing is happening this generation with HD.
It's nice to see that if you criticize Nintendo on Slashdot, you'll get modded down as flamebait and then half-baked fanboy apologists can come up here and get +5 Insightful.
Honestly, I don't know. Isn't their HD market already well on it's way?
Why is it that Nintendo ignores obvious trends in gaming, only to come up with their own arrogant and ultimately useless "innovation"? It's like they relish in being the odd man out, even when it means doing away with features that would benefit their games.
-They consistently avoided CD-Roms and then DVD's, the Gamecube being the first optical media Nintendo has used. The result was that the console RPG has been virtually non-existant on Nintendo consoles since the SNES.
-When Sega and Sony started garnering support from 3rd party developers, Nintendo shut itself off in an Ivory Tower, giving support only to in-house and 2nd party developers. The result was that the N64 had a tiny selection of games.
-Nintendo is the king of gimmicky and irrelevant consoles, examples being the Virtual Boy and the DS. But when the PS2/GC/Xbox came around, they derided DVD playback in other consoles.
-TFA mentions Online Play and High-Definition as the two new features that Nintendo has shunned. But for what? The impression I get is that they are avoiding these features because they don't know how to implement them effectively- not because they have an alternate plan in mind for the future of console gaming.
It's like they cling to the Nintendo Power glory days, spiteful that these "upstart" companies MS and Sony are the ones holding all the cards.
What amazes me more than Nintendo's obstinance is the fact that they've managed to hang around and still be something of a factor in console games.
Legislation and court descisions are (supposed to be) two very different things.
As far as cordless mice goes there are a few good reasons:
-A cordless optical mouse can go anywhere. If someone wants to show you something using your computer, you don't have to get out of your seat. Just hand them the mouse and they can use it on their lap. It's also very useful for when you don't have a full desk area (like with a laptop), you can have makeshift mousing surfaces out of just about anything and not have to worry if the cord will reach.
-A cordless mouse stays put when not in use. This doesn't seem like a big deal at first, but going back to mice with cords I can often notice a slight "drift" in the cursor when I take my hand off the mouse.
-Along the same lines, a cordless mouse has no directional resistance. It's a tactile preference that I've been spoiled with. Cordless mice always feel tethered.
-You don't have to unplug anything to clean it or check the laser.
Batteries really aren't a problem if you get rechargables.
I'm sure many of the same arguments can be made for wireless keyboards, but I wouldn't know because I use a laptop most of the time.
I finally got around to reading Ender's Game a few months ago, and I have to say I wasn't too impressed. This ubiquitous book had numerous spelling and grammatical errors and at least one obvious plot hole (Ender gets transferred because you can't be promoted to leader of your own team, but that rule doesn't appear to apply to another character a few pages later).
Taken as pulpy chewing gum sci-fi, it was pretty good. The characters and dialogue were unrealistic, but the descriptions of zero-g manuvering were entertaining.
Delve a little deeper, and the book gets very disturbing- mostly in the pervasiveness of underage homoeroticism and the cynical view of child manipulation.
When I found out Card was a homophobic right-winger with an agenda, I can't say I was surprised.
What about the staged aircraft landing? That was pretty fascist.
And in doing so, they keep the logging industry from buying up all the land.
I just don't see how a +5 informative post can start with:
and end with:
Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools never fails to give me ideas for spending my money.
http://www.kk.org/cooltools/index.php
"Attack my enemies, Western Digital Raptor!"
*screee!*
You have to be kidding. AC at its absolute worst did not have daily server outages for over a month. Rollbacks and server resets were almost always due to exploits, and I'll admit they were far too lenient in their punishments.
Every day in WoW there is a new server issue. At least 10 servers are chronically unplayable. The login server goes down several times per week. Scheduled maintenance causes 16 hours of downtime in the middle of the day EVERY WEEK.