Havelock
11-25-2005, 07:56 PM
At Fanguard I met the McCanns, who play on Whisperwind, so to stay in touch with them and kill time in the beta queue I rolled up a paladin on that server and have been playing around with him every now and again. Patch 1.9 is bringing with it a pretty major revamp of the paladin talent trees. I've been keeping an eye out for details, and now that they've arrived, people are screaming holy bloody murder at the top of their lungs and apparently canceling their accounts over the changes.
First, let me say that from my perspective the changes aren't bad. I wanted to play a healadin, and the holy tree gets what looks like some decent buffs - old talents have been consolidated so you can get the same bang for fewer talent point bucks, and there is an outstanding new talent that ups your % to crit on holy spells, which is exactly what I've been looking for.
Second, the drama, wailing, gnashing of teeth, etc., of the players is just mind-boggling. Passion about classes can be a good thing, but I fear that speculation at launch that every twelve year old wanted to be a pally may have been true. There are a lot of measured responses, too, but my cursory impression is that the outrage is even bigger than the anger warriors had back when we were the red-headed stepchild class in WoW, and I think warriors were far more justifiably irked.
Third, I have ot shake my head at yet another big class revamp. It's inevitable that classes will change over time to some extent, but Blizzard seems to be very much against the idea of small, incremental changes and far more in favor of reinventing a class on a fairly regular basis. SOE did the same thing in SWG, and I gather in EQ too after LDoN. While I may gripe about specific changes, I don't mind classes changing, but keeping a game coherent is an end at odds with drastically changing classes on the fly. This is one area where I hope Vanguard's long beta really helps (though WoW had a long beta and made a bunch of really irksome changes right at the end of open beta and around launch, defeating the purpose of a lot of the later-stage testing). A player who plays a particular class at release, leaves for a year or two, and comes back should recognize the class and have a good grasp of the utility of particular abilities. Some things will change, no doubt, but he should not find all the old truths obliterated. Classes should develop through organic growth, not revolutions.
First, let me say that from my perspective the changes aren't bad. I wanted to play a healadin, and the holy tree gets what looks like some decent buffs - old talents have been consolidated so you can get the same bang for fewer talent point bucks, and there is an outstanding new talent that ups your % to crit on holy spells, which is exactly what I've been looking for.
Second, the drama, wailing, gnashing of teeth, etc., of the players is just mind-boggling. Passion about classes can be a good thing, but I fear that speculation at launch that every twelve year old wanted to be a pally may have been true. There are a lot of measured responses, too, but my cursory impression is that the outrage is even bigger than the anger warriors had back when we were the red-headed stepchild class in WoW, and I think warriors were far more justifiably irked.
Third, I have ot shake my head at yet another big class revamp. It's inevitable that classes will change over time to some extent, but Blizzard seems to be very much against the idea of small, incremental changes and far more in favor of reinventing a class on a fairly regular basis. SOE did the same thing in SWG, and I gather in EQ too after LDoN. While I may gripe about specific changes, I don't mind classes changing, but keeping a game coherent is an end at odds with drastically changing classes on the fly. This is one area where I hope Vanguard's long beta really helps (though WoW had a long beta and made a bunch of really irksome changes right at the end of open beta and around launch, defeating the purpose of a lot of the later-stage testing). A player who plays a particular class at release, leaves for a year or two, and comes back should recognize the class and have a good grasp of the utility of particular abilities. Some things will change, no doubt, but he should not find all the old truths obliterated. Classes should develop through organic growth, not revolutions.