Oh, not from the "does this game interest me" perspective; after all, I still play Civ IV a lot and do get my feet wet in Baldur's Gate from time to time. What I meant was truly how ignorant I was for the first several months of playing MMOs, and how that didn't deter me from playing despite not knowing jack shit about how to play MMOs.
Okay, let me step back a second and explain a few things.
The concept of talking to people and getting quests in a computer game isn't new. After all, you see that in just about every RPG computer game, even in the old Ultima IV days. In the same vein as opening each freaking cabinet or chest in a video game might earn a player some gold (or in the case of Link smashing vases and amphorae, rupees), talking to everybody you see in a game is critically important when you're trying to figure out what to do and where to go.
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| That's the case even in Stardew Valley. |
Even in pencil and paper RPGs, talking to NPCs is frequently how you find out plotlines and adventure hooks, but in a pencil-and-paper game the GM is free to redo their adventure hooks to make it relevant to the group. Is the group going to the wrong inn, or the wrong town? Never fear! The hooks just swapped names, that's all. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a "meh" GM is one that can't adapt their campaign to accommodate players' various whims and flights of fancy.*
But I digress.
The basic cadence of questing, I understood. And after a disastrous misunderstanding that a Priest != a D&D style Cleric, I adapted to what I was presented with.
Understanding gearing and how to pick out gear, however? Well....
Let me put it this way: pencil and paper RPGs are a LOT easier to understand than MMOs as far as gear is concerned. And while Pathfinder and D&D 3.0 have all sorts of crunch for min/maxing Classes and Feats and Skills, they don't have anything on the complexity of MMOs for all that.
Probably the biggest difference between the two is that a significant portion of people who play pencil and paper RPGs probably don't care quite so much about min/maxing or making optimal choices for your character as they do in MMOs. When the goal is raiding and killing the big bad, MMOs are pretty unforgiving about numbers. In pencil-and-paper RPGs, GMs have far more flexibility to adjust things on the fly as needed. They can also read the room and make decisions because, well, the GM is the ultimate arbiter of things, and if there's a conflict with what is in game versus the rules, the GM's rule is law.
MMOs simply can't compete like that, so raids become a test of skill. And gear. And talents. And other options such as enchants, potions, glyphs, etc.
And there's that small matter of physical dexterity as well.
***
When I started playing WoW back in 2009, I was ignorant of all of that. I was ignorant of even where to go and what to do, as far as gearing goes. I knew Mail (and then Plate once it became available) for my Paladin was good (because armor), but what stats were good was a completely different thing. After all, Paladins do cast spells, and their abilities rely on mana, so Intelligence is good, right?
Well... Not really.
I mean, not even Blizzard had a good handle on things like that in Vanilla Classic, since the gear that comprises your class tier set is frequently not as good for your role as individual pieces cobbled together. And while leveling, you're likely to not even run into gear such as bonuses to Hit and Expertise. You actually have to go out of your way to find such gear, which is why such guides exist.
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| This screencap is from Wowhead's TBC Classic Ret Paladin Guide. |
Take a look at the listing above, which not only shows the BiS gear for pre-raid Ret Paladins in TBC Classic, but specifically if your raid doesn't have a Boomkin with Improved Faerie Fire. There's a lone piece of Green gear there, which I chose to highlight, that has Expertise. So without looking that up and going down that rabbit hole, the piece likely a quest reward or a random drop as part of a quest chain. That's something that unless you were clued in using a guide, you'd likely have replaced with a Blue or Purple piece at earliest opportunity.
Oh, and the goggles? Yeah, you should have chosen to level Engineering, noob.
This is what I was talking about being ignorant of.
I had no clue that anything like this existed back when I started WoW in 2009. Sure, I knew of print guides for video games, and I did have a few myself**, but websites that crunched numbers and somehow figured out the math behind the game so they could reliably tell players what they should do to min/max their characters? No, I didn't know that at all.
Not until Soul and I had a chat in-game while hanging around Org, and he pointed out a Ret Paladin nearby. He told me to inspect that person's gear --I was pretty ignorant of how to do that, even-- and said that this is the sort of gear that I should be aiming for. He then pointed me in the direction of Elitist Jerks and their guides.
This was in 2010, a month or two after I reached max level in a game that I'd already been playing for months, and I was wondering why I was still struggling to kill mobs when other Ret Paladins were just cruising through them.*** After all, I was finally running dungeons by myself and accumulating Blue gear.
When I finally opened up the guides, they were a revelation.
There it was, in one summary, what I needed to do to properly gem and enchant items for my use. What gear to focus on. What rotation to use.**** And why it was okay to ignore gem bonuses and just go all out on gemming Strength.
And almost immediately my DPS output leapt upward.
Back then, I immediately became a believer in the usefulness of these guides to make me a player better, and while I can appreciate the work behind the scenes, I'm glad I wasn't involved in creating those guides. That would have taken a lot more work --and free time-- than what I had available to me.
So, when All-Trades Jack talks about the hoops you must go through to raid in WoW in his This Game Wasn't Made For You video, and how a new player would be completely ignorant of all this unless someone points them in that direction, I get it because I've lived it.
***
In retrospect, I was lucky.
I mean, I had Soul to point me to the guides rather than being ripped on or called out in group content*****, and he was nice about it. Given that I didn't have any aspirations to raiding, I wasn't trying to do anything more than simply not embarrass myself in an instance. The Quel'Delar questline alone was worth it not simply because it was the best non-raid weapon in the game at the time, it had a fantastic story in the quest chain. Gearing for T9 and then T10 may have started with simply gaining access to better gear than found running heroic 5-person instances, but because the gear looked so damn cool it became a reward in itself.
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| I don't have the fashion sense that Kamalia does, but I do like the look of a well designed set of gear. |
Even when I quit WoW back at the end of Wrath, it had more to do with dealing with bots and whatnot in battlegrounds more than anything else. Because of those guides, I could at least hold my own compared to other people, even when I transitioned to other MMOs over the years.
But if I had nobody there to tell me where to look for guidance, it's not exactly a given that I'd ever have stumbled on those external guides at all before I gave up the game. As much as I found WoW fun and interesting, I felt that there was a level of skill and understanding that separated the end game raiders from me that I couldn't match. Even when I began to get what was supposedly "good" gear, the Blue and Purple varieties, I lagged in output. How much of that poor output being due to a lack of understanding what was important for the role I had chosen --first as a Healer and then melee DPS-- is likely pretty significant.
What was also immediately apparent once I began reading those guides was the lack of such guides on the official Blizzard website. You'd think that information such as this would be available on the website, or at least the game would have identified as such and oriented certain bonuses (such as gem bonuses) toward what was considered optimal for a player's class and spec.
Over time, some things were fixed by Blizzard, such as using Reforging to correct gear, and aligning gear stats/drops to better match classes and roles, but also due to the hiring of some of those Elitist Jerk theorycrafters on the development staff. However, the accompanying mindset that brought about those changes reinforced other aspects of WoW (raiding/PvP focus) at the expense of others (older expacs, story, the world).
***
I can't go back and relive the past, because my experiences helped shape who I am. I can't erase memories, such as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and because of that I know what the answers are likely to be.
The joy of discovery is gone, because that was a one time event. I never got to experience the Marshal Windsor storyline back in the day, so it was new and epic to me in 2019/2020. Raiding was new and fresh to me, even though it wasn't to most people I have encountered in Classic. Looking ahead to the Wrath Classic release, there will be no fumbling around, trying to figure things out, and getting frustrated when I hit a DPS/healing wall. I know where to go and what to do to discover what the meta should be.
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| From all over the internet. |
However, I will feel constrained by the chains of doing things the "right way", knowing that most people will simply accept them as the cost of doing business, without stopping to wonder what it would have been like to look upon the game with fresh eyes, with all the joys and frustrations contained therein.
Will the tolerance be there for those people, I wonder?
*I should know, since I was in a campaign with one for 20+ years. I only found out when it blew up this past Spring that we "missed all sorts of encounters" along the way. Which is pretty silly, given that we had no idea we missed that stuff.
**Such as the in-depth understanding behind the original Sid Meier's Civilization and the first Master of Orion games.
***I went hunting to try and find a post on the matter back in the day, but either I'm just looking in the wrong place or it's simply not coming up. Kind of a bummer.
****In the case of Ret Paladins in Wrath, there wasn't one. I breathed a big sigh of relief that I was actually doing it right for a change.
*****Okay, that happened too, back when I was still leveling as a Holy Paladin, which directly led to me switching to Ret.
I think most of us fell into that trap with the stats, especially if you played any P&P before, guess 1 INT isn't such a great idea even on a Fighter type class... But some of us were lucky and played Diablo before and I guess that's where I had my aha moment, many years before my first MMO - like... a Warrior can do 100% STR (maybe a bit of VIT/Stamina) and it will be fine, there are no social checks like in classic RPGs.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, the old 1e AD&D Paladin is so incredibly difficult to achieve, stats-wise, that an MMO player wouldn't understand the role a 1e Pally would play. I mean, a 17 Charisma minimum really means it's an inspiring class to play, being out front in social situations and leading the party, that modern players would have a difficult time wrapping their collective heads around that. Well, maybe saying "Imagine you're Tirion Fordring, and that's pretty much your gig, with all of the leadership capability that he has," might work.
DeleteYeah, the opacity is bad, gemming in particular. Either gear should only have what you want, or there should be benefits for having "bad" stats. Or your third solution, in-game guides on how and what to do for your character's role is. Having said that, there was a comment somewhere that someone didn't like the primary stat switching that retail does. Too bad too as it's not a terrible solution.
ReplyDeleteRight, I have played with the stat switching a bit when it came out (Mists?) and it's not bad, but it does feel like you're missing out on some stuff, stats wise, when you use it. It feels like there's a hidden cost in there somewhere, but that might have been the Mists implementation of it.
DeleteI'm all for in-game guides explaining things. I really wish that there wouldn't be such a requirement to go find third-party sites to figure this stuff out, not because I don't think that those people don't do a good job (they do) but that the implementation in the game is lazy when it's a requirement but they simply don't want to do it and essentially outsource the job to unpaid labor.
I'm pretty sure Reforging was removed, along with hit, expertise and spirit, when armor was given all primary stats back in WoD. That's probably what you felt you lost, but I understand why they got rid of Reforging too. Imagine you are in a group that loses a healer and you want to just look for a dps, but instead of carrying two sets of gear, you have to go reforge those secondary stats to make your spec change viable. That means using an addon with either standardized stats based on cookie cutter builds or tabbing out after you log off and to update your character on the armory to get your reforge profile. From a design and customer complaint perspective they must have figured it was the lesser of two evils to just remove what they did. I kinda miss reforging but understand why it's gone.
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