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  1. #38
    Player
    Taranok's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2015
    Posts
    777
    Character
    Arilaya Syldove
    World
    Brynhildr
    Main Class
    Black Mage Lv 100
    Quote Originally Posted by Kabooa View Post
    It'll be interesting to watch the lifespan of WoW Classic.

    I expect it to have a few good months and then it dies down once people realize Vanilla wasn't actually that great.
    It was great, for its time. And some people literally play WoW as the only game they play, period, so having a nostalgiagasm or seeing what they missed will be refreshing to them. But I am expecting it to be lackluster....eventually. Classic had a ridiculous ton of issues that plagued it, and it shouldn't take long for players to realize that it's not quite all it's cracked up to be. That said, I expect it to be hilariously popular anyways, since it still represents Blizzard's original and perhaps truest vision for WoW, a vision that has been massively eroded as the greedy aspect of RNG design worked its way deeper and deeper into it. But I digress.

    This game has 2 major, legitimately concerning aspects of homogenization in it. Homogenization of how tanks mitigate damage, and homogenization of how healers actually heal. People will split hairs over how NIN or RDM is underpowered/terrible, but a NIN and RDM play vastly different than each other, and play vastly differently from every DPS you could hope to compare it to. And that texture difference between them works wonders towards helping prevent a homogenized feeling. But when classes all accomplish their role the same way down to button execution, it starts to massively undermine the variety and become a serious problem.

    WoW actually has this issue, because the overwhelming majority of classes are all variations of the same style, which is a priority-based rotation with a hefty sprinkling of procs or other RNG elements thrown in. Very few of them aren't this, so they tend to blur together pretty quickly. But WoW doesn't have this issue, ironically, on tank or healer design for accomplishing the feel of being a tank or healer, because they focus on a different style of encounter design that allows them to express those classes in wildly different ways. So while their DPS start to blur together, their tanks and healers actually are more divergent than FFXIV tanks and healers because of it, and the truest example of this is looking at Brewmaster and comparing how it tanks (not DPS, tanks) to literally any other tank in any other game and then scratching your head as you realize it's such a bizarre style of tanking that it sits in a category all to its own.

    There will always be a meta, some classes will always be mathematically better than others. Having raid utility or not is whatever, but what really should be emphasized is what makes the classes feel different even when they might perform the same. That is what legitimately will help break up the meta more than anything, because if someone seriously wants to play a class because that's stylistically what they prefer, it doesn't matter how off-meta it actually is, they will play that class. The rest is a matter of breaking the player expectations of what is or is not viable.
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    Last edited by Taranok; 08-29-2019 at 05:02 PM.