World of Warcraft: The War With Metzen

[J1M]

Containment thread for complaining about WoW and organizing groups for The War Within, which we will officially understand as Metzen's personal struggle to wrest control of the franchise from freefall by coming out of retirement and hitting the brakes on the plans of Steve Danuser.



Similar to how he teed up the cinematic at BlizzCon, Metzen apologizes in this promo interview that what people are about to play was 10 months deep in development before he had a chance to reassert control. He didn't have to do that, and part of the reason I am willing to give the franchise another chance is that honesty.

Also appears to be taking no chances and is already planning 6 expansions ahead so they don't fall back into story by committee.

I will be starting with my horde demon hunter tank but there's a small chance I switch to an earthen warrior once I unlock it.

[Nooneatall]

Wow may be the most boring MMO I've ever played. What's the appeal?

[J1M]

Wow may be the most boring MMO I've ever played. What's the appeal?

The appeal of all MMOs is virtual achievement to substitute for real life stagnation.

[Vergil]

Wow may be the most boring MMO I've ever played. What's the appeal?

Nostalgia and stockholm syndrome. Most WoW players played it as a kid so they didn't know any better and now they're 30 year old men desperate to feel something again.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

"Metzen came back to a team "much more democratized" in Dragonflight than when he left"

Confirmation of what we already knew. The story is being written by committee. It will not get better.

Anyone still giving Blizzard a chance is kidding themselves. It's been 20 years. It's like a marriage. After a few years pass, saying "I am going to change! This year will be different, I promise!" for the Nth time doesn't work anymore. The honeymoon period is long over and the reality has set in. You know him/her inside and out now. You know how it has been and how it will continue to be. Blizzard is not going to pull a miracle and make a WoW expansion with a story experience comparable to FF14 or even GW2. It's going to be more of the same we already know.



My Tufts of Yak Fur from MoP remix carried over



I'm so happy

What's the appeal?

It is one of the very few high production value colorful artbook fantasy RPGs on the market right now. The only alternatives are FF14, GW2, the occasional JRPG release like Granblue Fantasy Relink or a Xenoblade game, and that's it. Beggars can't be choosers. Once you've played through the backlog of old games like the classic Final Fantasies or Xenogears, you eventually run out of stuff to play.

WoW not only still holds up aesthetically, but it has the most character customization of any game I can think of, with over a dozen different races with different animations and postures. Not just reproportioned, reskinned humans, but also hunched over inhuman beastmen. You have 20 years of armors, weapons, mounts, pets, toys, and elixir/item effects to mix and match. The netcode is very responsive. The soundtrack isn't anywhere near as fantastic as it once was during MoP and WoD but is still overall more memorable than anything else I hear coming out of Western RPGs. And the new expansions are fun to play at launch, going through the new story content and touring the high fantasy zones, and then doing the raid. WoW has among the best boss/battle designs I ever had the pleasure of doing, from jetpacking to the other gunship to assasinate the enemy commander in ICC, to clinging on to Deathwing's back as he barrel rolled trying to throw you off, to a B-team detaching from the raid to hop onto the conveyor belt to destroy the three inventions on Siegecrafter Blackfuse, to dodging the incoming trains on Operator Thogar, to chasing Sylvanas across the chains in Sanctum of Domination, to the frantic Echo of Neltharion fight where he is trying to separate the raid with the earth walls and you have to hide in the black holes, to Tindral where you have to fly and chase him, etc. And then after that you dabble in speedrunning M+ dungeons or doing 10vs10 RBGs for a couple months before calling it quits till the next expac release.

[Magick]

The "world soul" ******** was just laughable.
What's funny is WoW, Transformers and Marvel's Eternals ALL used the exact same plot point, even with the partially emerged horns of the "titan" or whatever.
Do they share the same ****** writers, or are they all just copying from eachother?

[Manny V]

Metzen cannot resurrect the corpse that is retail WoW.

[Boontaker]

The "world soul" ******** was just laughable.
What's funny is WoW, Transformers and Marvel's Eternals ALL used the exact same plot point, even with the partially emerged horns of the "titan" or whatever.
Do they share the same ****** writers, or are they all just copying from eachother?

Human zeitgeist for normies is God is dead or never was, so they come up with strikingly similar gnostic gobbledegook as a replacement. World souls, ancient creator races, metaphysical psychic goo. It's all the same satanic stuff IMO.

[Tweed]

WoW was always gay.

[LemonDemonGirl]

Oh boy I can't wait for Blizzard to **** up the Amani in Midnight! Can't wait!

► Show Spoiler

I'm being sarcastic

[Manny V]

The "world soul" ******** was just laughable.
What's funny is WoW, Transformers and Marvel's Eternals ALL used the exact same plot point, even with the partially emerged horns of the "titan" or whatever.
Do they share the same ****** writers, or are they all just copying from eachother?

Human zeitgeist for normies is God is dead or never was, so they come up with strikingly similar gnostic gobbledegook as a replacement. World souls, ancient creator races, metaphysical psychic goo. It's all the same satanic stuff IMO.

one of the things that irks me the most in Warcraft is that humans don't worship a god (or rather, THE God), it's just "The Light"

then the gay draenei retcon **** comes along and it's like 'erm akshually it's the fuckin weird space alien Naaru **** or whatever'

i like being a gigachad human paladin and sticking with the Christianity vibes, but it rubs me the wrong way knowing it just isn't quite right without an actual God.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The "world soul" ******** was just laughable.
What's funny is WoW, Transformers and Marvel's Eternals ALL used the exact same plot point, even with the partially emerged horns of the "titan" or whatever.
Do they share the same ****** writers, or are they all just copying from eachother?

Human zeitgeist for normies is God is dead or never was, so they come up with strikingly similar gnostic gobbledegook as a replacement. World souls, ancient creator races, metaphysical psychic goo. It's all the same satanic stuff IMO.

one of the things that irks me the most in Warcraft is that humans don't worship a god (or rather, THE God), it's just "The Light"

then the gay draenei retcon **** comes along and it's like 'erm akshually it's the fuckin weird space alien Naaru **** or whatever'

i like being a gigachad human paladin and sticking with the Christianity vibes, but it rubs me the wrong way knowing it just isn't quite right without an actual God.

I don't think the Draenei ever worshipped the Naaru. The Naaru were angels/prophets/emissaries of the Light. IIRC in one of those early WoW novels, Turalayon saw a vision of a Naaru. There were some good paladin storylines such as the Crusader Bridenbrad questline in Northrend where you have to go visit A'dal trying to save this dying paladin. After Wrath, however, the paladins/Church of the Light stopped being treated well by the narrative. We got an evil Pope reveal in Cata, and then the Light was entirely absent from the narrative in MoP, and only got a small glimpse in WoD. The holy Temple of Karabor was supposed to be the Alliance capital city in WoD, but instead Blizzard backed out and just made a generic Alliance military camp be the capital city (citing lack of development time). Then Warcraft Chronicle came out, and retconned the Light into just being a materialistic elemental magic with no real spiritual factors, and started pushing the "Light and Void are just two sides of the same coins, neither intrinsically good nor evil" schlock, and then we got "The Light is evil!" **** with X'era and evil Yrel at the end of Legion. Ever since then, the WoW fandom has been anticipating that we are eventually going to get an "evil Light" expansion. And now with the upcoming TWW, we have the introduction of an antagonistic overseas human empire ruled by a holy emperor that worships "the Light" and has templars, who you fight in a dungeon. Pretty clear to see what modern Blizzard is thinking here.

[LemonDemonGirl]

one of the things that irks me the most in Warcraft is that humans don't worship a god (or rather, THE God), it's just "The Light"

then the gay draenei retcon **** comes along and it's like 'erm akshually it's the fuckin weird space alien Naaru **** or whatever'

i like being a gigachad human paladin and sticking with the Christianity vibes, but it rubs me the wrong way knowing it just isn't quite right without an actual God.

Weeelll, the only "confirmed" actual God is Elune and she's pretty stupid. Seriously, how can you just **** your followers souls to Hell (the Maw) and not care? Stupid elves.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

the only "confirmed" actual God is Elune

After the 2016 Chronicle retcons, there is no actual God in Warcraft at all. The Warcraft universe happened because of a big bang from a clash of light and void elemental energies that were always there. The Titans, the Void Lords, etc, they can all be killed with sufficient force applied. Shadowlands adds another group of precursors called "The First Ones" but they're not actual gods either, they're like the Ancients from Stargate/Babylon 5 in that the created a lot of stuff in the current setting and then left to go ascend to a higher plane/the next level universe. Elune is sister to the Winter Queen who is a robot created by the First Ones and you kill her prototype in Sepulcher. Even Warcraft's ruler of hell where the souls of "bad" dead people go, the Jailer/Zovaal, turned out to be a robot who you dismantle and shut down once you beat him up enough.

[Manny V]

see that's what i dont get about you two, why give a **** about newer(post cata) lore, it's a jumbled mess with gorillions of retcons anyway, may as well just write it off as non-canon and enjoy the earlier stuff

[SoLong]

Considering the game is now one of the longest running MMOs (and one of the most profitable) they've clearly done some stuff right in the past.

The only problem I have is the sequelitis that seems to have set in. So much of the game lore is artificially stretched because they need to keep the game going. The money demands that the game can't really end so the writers have no idea where to actually take everything. Constantly introducing new "gods" or whatever didn't help either.

The one thing I do give them credit for is the area storylines they have introduced with Pandaria: Instead of random questmarkers sprinkled across the map there is now an actual main story thread in each region you can (and should) follow. I makes the world feel more alive compared to the random area jumping you did in classic.

[J1M]

The "world soul" ******** was just laughable.
What's funny is WoW, Transformers and Marvel's Eternals ALL used the exact same plot point, even with the partially emerged horns of the "titan" or whatever.
Do they share the same ****** writers, or are they all just copying from eachother?

Human zeitgeist for normies is God is dead or never was, so they come up with strikingly similar gnostic gobbledegook as a replacement. World souls, ancient creator races, metaphysical psychic goo. It's all the same satanic stuff IMO.

one of the things that irks me the most in Warcraft is that humans don't worship a god (or rather, THE God), it's just "The Light"

then the gay draenei retcon **** comes along and it's like 'erm akshually it's the fuckin weird space alien Naaru **** or whatever'

i like being a gigachad human paladin and sticking with the Christianity vibes, but it rubs me the wrong way knowing it just isn't quite right without an actual God.

You could be like that pyromancer guy and believe that Sargaras (Lucifer analog) is actually the misunderstood god of light in your RP sessions.

[J1M]

the only "confirmed" actual God is Elune

After the 2016 Chronicle retcons, there is no actual God in Warcraft at all. The Warcraft universe happened because of a big bang from a clash of light and void elemental energies that were always there. The Titans, the Void Lords, etc, they can all be killed with sufficient force applied. Shadowlands adds another group of precursors called "The First Ones" but they're not actual gods either, they're like the Ancients from Stargate/Babylon 5 in that the created a lot of stuff in the current setting and then left to go ascend to a higher plane/the next level universe. Elune is sister to the Winter Queen who is a robot created by the First Ones and you kill her prototype in Sepulcher. Even Warcraft's ruler of hell where the souls of "bad" dead people go, the Jailer/Zovaal, turned out to be a robot who you dismantle and shut down once you beat him up enough.

I think Shadowlands was meant to show that the realm of death had been conquered long ago and ordered. I don't think the natural state of the universe is that the soul realm sprang into existence full of and operated by robots.

[Xenich]

Wow may be the most boring MMO I've ever played. What's the appeal?

I enjoyed it at beta and release. It still had a lot of older MMO concepts of play such as heavily populated large dungeons that your party crawled through slowly.

AoE's were supplemental damage (ie not the main source and focus) and you used pulling and CC to split off and contain mobs while you killed them one at a time.

Fights were longer and slower paced.

Classes had large pools of skills and abilities designed for various situational use and function and were specific to a focus (ie not everyone was a rubber stamp with tanking, DPS, healing abilities).

The AH was mostly dead (ie hadn't become a massive FFest of sellers and hoarders).

Quests had to be read mostly, no tons of UI cheat bouncing ball mods where you clicked through everything and followed a pointer.

Pre-****** player base (mostly the early players were transfers from the older MMOs).

Modern wow is garbage IMO. Too dumbed down and gimmicky with massive mundane grind implementations.

[Xenich]

Considering the game is now one of the longest running MMOs (and one of the most profitable) they've clearly done some stuff right in the past.

The only problem I have is the sequelitis that seems to have set in. So much of the game lore is artificially stretched because they need to keep the game going. The money demands that the game can't really end so the writers have no idea where to actually take everything. Constantly introducing new "gods" or whatever didn't help either.

The one thing I do give them credit for is the area storylines they have introduced with Pandaria: Instead of random questmarkers sprinkled across the map there is now an actual main story thread in each region you can (and should) follow. I makes the world feel more alive compared to the random area jumping you did in classic.

At one point, yes... but mostly WoWs success is timing and market.

Early WoW pulled older MMO players because it attempted to "fix" some of the perceived "problems" of earlier MMOs (later we found that many of these fixes were detrimental over time) and this satisfied that core for a while.

The bulk of its success was market though. It pulled in a large base of non-gamers (people who did not play games much in the past) as well as the console market due to its ability to function on lower spec hardware.

I would say its biggest success was catering to those markets and due to their massive size, naturally it increased their sales to extreme levels.

While I would say that the game "did something right" as it concerns who it marketed to and what it provided, its overall progression to appeal to those markets is what I would call bad MMO design and what killed off the industry over time.

It is why every game that comes out that tries to "be" WoW tends to fall on its face and why every game that tried to implement WoW features destroyed its own base (WoW players will try another WoW-like game, but they will always go back to WoW).

I look at WoW today and I see "What not to do" if you are looking to make a "game" regardless of how many people they get to sub.

Saying WoW is an example of quality MMO design is akin to saying Taylor Swift is an example of quality music.

[rusty_shackleford]

WoW was a success because it was blizzard, blizzard used to have a fanboy army the size of nintendo that thought it could do no wrong

[Xenich]

WoW was a success because it was blizzard, blizzard used to have a fanboy army the size of nintendo that thought it could do no wrong

Maybe, but a large pool of the players were non-gamers though. I noticed this increasing base around before and after BC.

I had come from EQ leading raids and it became painful to run the raids in WoW due to the players complaints.

I went from a player base of people who understood planning, organizing, time sensitivity, loot distribution for raid progression, availability, etc... to WoW where I got a ton of people who threw tantrums about scheduling a raid time and demanded that they be given rights to loot even though they missed most of the raids and refused any key roles to which that loot would have helped the guild progress (not to mention, not understanding that wiping is a part of learning).

FFS, MC was a nightmare with some. I mean, asking people to farm for fire resist gear or not stroking their emotional egos when directing a given raid tactic (talk to people like they are an adult, say please/thank you, and tell people they are doing well instead of making mistakes!, btw I was polite, I just didn't stroke egos.). It is also where I saw a lot more women playing and a large portion of people who had zero understanding of basic game play mechanics (pulling, agro control, healing, etc...). It was like I was training someone's mom to play.

Granted, some of this may have been anecdotal, and there were some older guild transfers from EQ that I knew, but I ran into several guilds that were either console zerg kiddies that thought DPS solved everything (which in some cases they are correct) or complete no knowledge normies who claimed "I play a game for my fun, not as a job!"

Anyway, after several attempts with modern players, I gave up leading and raiding entirely.

I hated drama, and in EQ it wasn't an issue as most people knew the game, the stakes, and what was required. If I kicked someone from a raid because they were holding things up and causing drama (after several tells to let it go and move on), we moved on, but when I did that in WoW I got tantrums, offended rants and numerous log offs from their whiny friends. It was ******* romper room.

Yeah, apparently I could get up 72 people to follow directions, complex timing and tactics, numerous wipes, etc..., but in WoW... I couldn't get 40 people to pull their head out of their *** and not whine to me like little babies.

I don't miss that at all.

[rusty_shackleford]

I had come from EQ leading raids

(this poster paid to cheat btw)

[Xenich]

I had come from EQ leading raids

(this poster paid to cheat btw)

This poster did not raid much, or had no job living off mommy and daddy and thought this was a game play mechanic.

By the way, lead raids before I moved to Stormhammer as well...

Besides, we know your experience with EQ was EverQuest Online Adventures, am I right?

[Finarfin]

If any of you play retail, which addons do you use and recommend?

[Tweed]

I had come from EQ leading raids

(this poster paid to cheat btw)

This poster did not raid much, or had no job living off mommy and daddy and thought this was a game play mechanic.

By the way, lead raids before I moved to Stormhammer as well...

Besides, we know your experience with EQ was EverQuest Online Adventures, am I right?

[Shillitron]

Wow may be the most boring MMO I've ever played. What's the appeal?

Nostalgia and stockholm syndrome. Most WoW players played it as a kid so they didn't know any better and now they're 30 year old men desperate to feel something again.

I long for that Vanilla game setting (Not actually playing Vanilla though, **** that).
The thought of going to Shimmering Flats or Elwynn Forest.. things were simple, good music, fun mechanics.

Now the game is like "DIE AND GO TO HELL THEN TAKE A SPACESHIP BACK IN TIME AND FIGHT CTHULU VOID GOD DRAGON!!" with the same recycled **** of Level > Raid. It's tired, the game is tired - the story is tired and the setting is tired.

If Blizzard could still make good games and made a WoW2, I'd play it but the thought of installing WoW today and playing gives me nausea.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

If any of you play retail, which addons do you use and recommend?

Download the Curse mod manager as that is how you will install and updates almost all addons for WoW.

The ones I use the most are (I don't always have them turned on):

General:

• Chat Copy Paste. Essential, always enabled. When you mouse over your chat window, you will now have a scissors button you can press. That will then open up a new text window where you can copy text or click links.
• Speedy AutoLoot. I have this turned off when going through a new expansion story, as I like the tactile feel of clicking on things in the game world, clicking on containers or bodies and seeing an item and mousing over it and reading flavor text and then click to take it and put it into my bags. Once I am finished with the story and am just doing the tedious farms, I enable this addon and it skips the wait time and the loot window entirely, so you just click a container or a corpse and immediately loot it and move on.
• BetterFishing allows you to cast your fishing pole and loot the fish by simply pressing a single button, rather than having to press the ability to cast and then move your mouse to click on the bobber. Combine with SpeedyAutoLoot. Use it if you're going to fish a lot to get cosmetics, such as if you are doing the Angler's rep to get that cool oriental fishing pole, or if you are doing Tuskar rep to get the wooden boat or beanbag chair.
• RareScanner: gives you an alert if a rare or a treasure is detected nearby and pins it on your map. I enable this when I am not doing the story and I am trying to farm something that drops from rare mobs or treasures. If you want Shadowlands cosmetics then you have to farm a LOT of anima, and the most efficient way to farm anima is to loot the treasure chests and kill the rares in Zereth Mortis, which are daily. Dragonflight has a lot of Dragonriding mount customizations that only drop from rares in the Dragon Isles.
• Plumber: for planting seeds in the Emerald Dream zone if you want to get the cosmetics from there.
• TomTom: shows you your current coordinates on a map and allows you to pin coordinates and shows an arrow to them. On WoWhead comments you will see a lot of coordinates for quest or item or rare locations without a map and you will need TomTom to be able to input those into the game and get that arrow to where you have to go to get it.
• DBM = Deadly Boss Mods. Each WoW expansion every 2 years has 200 different boss mechanics ((8 x 4) dungeon bosses + 3 x 10 raid bosses) x 3-4 mechanics per boss). The game does not have standardized mechanic visuals or properly tutorialize the mechanics like in FF14, so often there will be an essential mechanic that has to be performed a certain way that you will have no way of knowing how to execute without prior knowledge. Reading the dungeon journal gives you a description of the ability's mechanical text, but doesn't show you what it looks like and often does not explain what you are supposed to do. And watching a 30 minute youtube video before doesn't help because you will not retain that information, and also it spoils surprises. What DBM does is that during a boss encounter, it will blare warning horns if something important is happening, give countdowns until something really important happens, and will also print text in the middle of your screen telling you what you should do. I do not have this turned on when I go through dungeons or raids for the first time as a part of the story, but if you intend to do M+ pugging then it is very useful.

Lastly, if you intend to do M+ pugging, you will want to download a program (not through Curse) called Raider.io. It's scoring feature was integrated into base WoW, but people can get antsy about "well what about your prior seasonal scores?" and Raider.io allows players to mouse over you (be it your model ingame or over your application to a key in group finder) and see what your highest score the previous season on any of your characters was, and your highest score on any of your characters ever.



For use in instanced rated PvP:

• Capping: a timer calculating ETA until one side in Arathi Basin reaches 1,500 points and wins given the current number of bases captured, etc.
• BattleGroundEnemies: gives you more information as to the specializations of the enemy RBG team and lets you click on them and target them from anywhere on the map. You can see if the enemy has a healer and click on him and then immedietely find out where in the RBG that healer is, or you can click on a rogue or a feral druid to see if he's on the other side of the map, and if you can't click on him then you know he's stealthed and you should stay alert because he might try to cap one of your bases.
• TopTarget: highlights whichever enemy player is being the most targetted by your team. It is important for your team to focus fire on a single target and eliminate them and offbalance a fight. Because an enemy target can be saved by healers or by paladin blessings, your team can switch to another target, and TopTarget will highlight that player so you know who to switch to, and you can hopefully kill that person instead before their healers/paladins save that person too.
• Community Flare: if you want to do premade epic battlegrounds (with an epic battlegrounds community like Savage Alliance Slayers (now defunct due to drama) or Stormpike Militia), you need this so all of the parties can queue sync simultaneously and hopefully get into the same epic BG.

Roleplay

• TotalRP: lets you mouse over other players and get key details such as if they are currently in character, what race/class they are actually supposed to be in lore (ie, San'layn, High Elf, Necromancer, Tauren Sunwalker, etc). Players can create fluff descriptions for their characters and share them. I don't bother writing or reading character descriptions, since to me RP is doing stuff like going out on campaign rather than sitting around talking about backstories, so I just use this to see who is RPing and what they are supposed to be. See the bottom right of this screenshot using MyRolePlay (the predecessor to TRP):
  
• Listener: used for trying to follow conversations when in a crowded RP event. Creates two more text windows. The first one will display everything spoken by whichever player you are mousing over or targetting. The second text window will only display lines mentioning your character. You can go into the options and set whether or not you want to be pinged if someone says "Val the Moofia Boss" or "Tauren" or "Sunwalker", so you won't miss if someone is talking to/about you.
  

You don't need a DPS meter like details or Skada unless you are doing mythic difficulty raids. Lack of DPS is almost never the issue when PUGing normal or heroic raids, it is almost always too many people failing mechanics (or a couple people botching essential key mechanics and getting everyone killed). WoW raids are about persevering to the end and you can win with 75% of the raid dead. You don't need DPS meters for M+ either as it is simply about not overpulling trash, rotating your defensives, kicking mobs before they get a dangerous cast off, and doing the boss mechanics. There are money addons like Enchrantrix, TradeSkillMaster or Auction here, but I don't use them as I don't do crafting or moneymaking.

I experimented with the ConsolePort addon during Shadowlands that adds a FF14 style controller hotbar setup, but it does not work well in WoW because WoW is a game where there are a lot of objects in the game world you need to click on to interact with, which means moving the mouse. Recently WoW added a new option in the settings where you can press a button and "interact" with what is right in front of you without having to click on it (like pressing F to talk to an NPC right in front of), so maybe this would work better now.



Lastly, there are a couple macros I recommend using:


This one macros a flying mount and a ground mount into one button press (keybound to a button on the side of my mouse). Whenever possible, it will summon your chosen flying mount. If not, then it will summon your chosen ground mount. (There is also room for an underwater mount). You can look up the mount ids by going to WoWhead, going to the item entry for a mount, and then clicking on the spell that the item teaches, and then the mount id will be listed there. I still have my ground mount on my hotbar so I can click that if I want to be on my ground mount in a flyable area for RP purposes.

/run local id; if IsSubmerged() then id = 1408 elseif IsFlyableArea() then id = 1408 elseif select(8, GetInstanceInfo()) == 1408 then id = 2091 else id = 506 end; C_MountJournal.SummonByID(id)

This macro will center your camera a little up above your character, pushing your character a little down from the center of the screen and having more of the screen realestate taken up by the environment. Has to be enabled every time you log in or /reload. I place this button on a second hotbar that I scroll to whenever I login, click it, and then scroll back to my main one.

/console ActionCam basic

[LemonDemonGirl]

WoW has Schrödinger's Lore. It's Canon until it is not.

[J1M]

Add-ons increase loading times.