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kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2021
@ZMOT I think we liked Wrath's casual game for different reasons. I thought it was great how 10 man raiding was its own lock out and loot table. It gave expansion-long progression mirroring the 'real' end game, allowing a friends and family/pug community to grow around it. Then they sabotaged it because it made heroic 25 man raiders uncomfortable that players were being removed from the recruitment pool by the seductive lure of casual raiding and loot.
M+ is what we got, because putting people on a conveyer belt to mythic raiding creates the environment in which that kind of high skill, high pressure group content can even exist. Buying flex ilvl loot with tokens doesn't push you into that pool of players that can be pulled on to replace the ones who burn out. And those raids are WoW's centerpiece. It really is the case that you should be playing ESO, FF14, GW2, anything not WoW if that's not an end game that appeals to you. Certainly you shouldn't bother with buying expansions until they go on sale.
They don't want you to do veteran raids with special rewards from scaled content, let alone being rewarded for it in any way. That takes you out of the keystone master and ahead of the curve/cutting edge pools where they need you to be. Unless that becomes the new esport, but timewalking raids didn't seem to catch fire, so into the cutting edge meat grinder with you!
On the topic of out of place wokery:
Original
It's kind of neat to see pushback, and see it based on how it breaks with the setting and the (fictional) realities of how and where these characters live. I'm also an idiot who thinks if they wanted to do matriarchal societies, gnolls are right there (along with Night Elves and Nightborne, possibly dragons too).
Yes, I am on coffee #6, why do you ask?
M+ is what we got, because putting people on a conveyer belt to mythic raiding creates the environment in which that kind of high skill, high pressure group content can even exist. Buying flex ilvl loot with tokens doesn't push you into that pool of players that can be pulled on to replace the ones who burn out. And those raids are WoW's centerpiece. It really is the case that you should be playing ESO, FF14, GW2, anything not WoW if that's not an end game that appeals to you. Certainly you shouldn't bother with buying expansions until they go on sale.
They don't want you to do veteran raids with special rewards from scaled content, let alone being rewarded for it in any way. That takes you out of the keystone master and ahead of the curve/cutting edge pools where they need you to be. Unless that becomes the new esport, but timewalking raids didn't seem to catch fire, so into the cutting edge meat grinder with you!
That's why I was so confused about Lorthemar and Thalryssa. Interspecies relationships in WoW only seem to be OK when it's male human and female high elf.
tl;dr, instead of easy initial quests giving relatively high ilvl gear rewards to ease players over the gear hump or just adding vendors in the start of the zone, they rescaled all the things. This fucks up players who skipped out on Shadowlands, fucks up old raids/dungeons, makes leveling gear fucky in ways that will only get weirder if they do it again.
So if you guys noticed, during SL heirlooms at level 50 were ilvl 58, and items out of the Chromie time bag were ilvl 57. At level 50 Timewalking vendor gear was ilvl 76, but the dungeon drops were all over the place- ilvl 45ish to 60ish. Benthic tokens were ilvl 85, and if you did Timewalking before SL, the drops and vendor stuff was about the same depending on the patch.
But shit got weird in stage two of the prepatch. Heirloom scaling at 50 rose to ilvl 143, and items that dropped from Chromie Time bags scales to 155. Gear dropped in Chromie Time dungeons is similarly boosted (I'm assuming that these and the bag items are tagged internally as Chromie Time items with the level of the character at the time they were created).
But say you had gear that wasn't heirloom or Chromie Time? Those stayed unchanged. What's more, now old dungeons and raids are also scaled up with newly beefed up bosses dropping ilvl inflated gear. Your ilvl 76 Timewalking vendor items are now way weaker than they were before prepatch.. and drops from Legion Raid Finder are a substantial upgrade (ilvl 145 from Emerald Nightmare LFR, though randomly some items are something like ilvl 75).
OK, if you aren't passing up expansions that's just a blip of weirdness. On new character island you get gear ilvl 3-9ish, with your heirlooms following around the same. But by level 20 heirlooms are ilvl 54 and dungeon drops are ilvl 61. At level 17 I got a quest reward that procced to epic with an ilvl 82. As a side note: the ilvl of crafted gear isn't boosted, so by the time your alts can equip something nice, dungeon drops and heirlooms have far outstripped them. Emerald Lion Ring, requiring thorium and huge emeralds, is ilvl 28 and requires a level of 22.
It seems like they scaled everything up to avoid the gear hump, at the same time leaving crafted and previously acquired gear in the dust. Between that, the scaled up bosses, and the diminished or missing legacy raid buffs, the result is your characters are weaker when it comes to farming old ass instances and now have to level up and farm mythic raids once more to get back to where they were. It was certainly an ugly log in day for people who raided in BFA coming back for DF, but took SL off. If you have bad luck while leveling, things will get weird fast. Honestly? Feels a bit of an asshole way to solve the expansion gear hump problem. It'll be really fucky for leveling if they do the same thing in 11.0.
So if you guys noticed, during SL heirlooms at level 50 were ilvl 58, and items out of the Chromie time bag were ilvl 57. At level 50 Timewalking vendor gear was ilvl 76, but the dungeon drops were all over the place- ilvl 45ish to 60ish. Benthic tokens were ilvl 85, and if you did Timewalking before SL, the drops and vendor stuff was about the same depending on the patch.
But shit got weird in stage two of the prepatch. Heirloom scaling at 50 rose to ilvl 143, and items that dropped from Chromie Time bags scales to 155. Gear dropped in Chromie Time dungeons is similarly boosted (I'm assuming that these and the bag items are tagged internally as Chromie Time items with the level of the character at the time they were created).
But say you had gear that wasn't heirloom or Chromie Time? Those stayed unchanged. What's more, now old dungeons and raids are also scaled up with newly beefed up bosses dropping ilvl inflated gear. Your ilvl 76 Timewalking vendor items are now way weaker than they were before prepatch.. and drops from Legion Raid Finder are a substantial upgrade (ilvl 145 from Emerald Nightmare LFR, though randomly some items are something like ilvl 75).
OK, if you aren't passing up expansions that's just a blip of weirdness. On new character island you get gear ilvl 3-9ish, with your heirlooms following around the same. But by level 20 heirlooms are ilvl 54 and dungeon drops are ilvl 61. At level 17 I got a quest reward that procced to epic with an ilvl 82. As a side note: the ilvl of crafted gear isn't boosted, so by the time your alts can equip something nice, dungeon drops and heirlooms have far outstripped them. Emerald Lion Ring, requiring thorium and huge emeralds, is ilvl 28 and requires a level of 22.
It seems like they scaled everything up to avoid the gear hump, at the same time leaving crafted and previously acquired gear in the dust. Between that, the scaled up bosses, and the diminished or missing legacy raid buffs, the result is your characters are weaker when it comes to farming old ass instances and now have to level up and farm mythic raids once more to get back to where they were. It was certainly an ugly log in day for people who raided in BFA coming back for DF, but took SL off. If you have bad luck while leveling, things will get weird fast. Honestly? Feels a bit of an asshole way to solve the expansion gear hump problem. It'll be really fucky for leveling if they do the same thing in 11.0.
On the topic of out of place wokery:
Original
Questing for the Maruuk Centaur, I just couldn’t help but feel like something was off in a bad way about how they’re portrayed in this expansion, with a lot of aspects of their society seeming to not make much sense.
Look at some of their catch phrases when you interact with them:
“May your prey fly low and run slow.”
Why? Wouldn’t it make more sense if the phrase was “May your prey be mighty and fierce”? You know, to emphasize the glory and prestige that comes with a successful hunt? You can’t say that they don’t care about glory and just want to feed their tribe, there are numerous quests where you’re asked to hunt ridiculously dangerous creatures for no reason other than the ‘glory of the hunt’. It’s something they emphasize in their culture -constantly-. I thought in this sort of barbarian-ish culture, they would celebrate a good hunt, not a weak and pathetic one.
“Be respectful”
This just doesn’t sound like something a tribe of primitive warriors would say, unless you add a comma and then a “-or I will crush you” or something of the like afterwards. Something like “Mind your tongue” would be more appropriate in this context. The whole ‘be respectful’ just seems really out of place.
They’re also extremely tolerant of same-sex relationships (Hunter Narman and Windsage Dawa) and even supportive of it even though it means their bloodline will end (Bloodlines are valued significantly in the cultures these centaur are based on). Additionally, they’re very loving, cuddling, and caring with their animals (One of them even giggles as their pet wolf/lion prances around them in circles). I can see them caring affectionately for their beast companions, but it doesn’t feel right seeing them be so silly and playful with them. The hunter-beast relationship should feel more like a respectful bond rather than a cute and cuddly one.
Something just feels…off about a tribe of primitive warriors who decorate their encampments with bones and spikes, yet are really silly/goofy/humorous and welcoming to outsiders. IMO It would feel a lot better if you were captured and/or disliked by them at first and had to earn their respect overtime instead of just being welcomed immediately.
They’re also very racially diverse, which normally I have no problem with, but in this particular setting, I can’t help but wonder how a tribe of numeral insignificance that has lived in total isolation from the rest of the world for thousands of years can be racially diverse? Wouldn’t their ancestors have long ago bred the tribe into an ethnically homogenous group with almost no distinguishing racial features?
One last thing that doesn’t make much sense to me is that they’re apparently a matriarchal society, which is totally fine for races where the Females are the more physically dominate sex (Gnolls, Quillboar, Magnataur) but with how the centaur are portrayed in this expansion, the males, like Balakar Khan, are shown to tower over the other female Khans, enough that he dwarves the lot of them in size. If the males are shown to get much bigger and stronger than the females, how is it possible that any Female Khans are in power? In a society where physical strength and might determines who is the most capable to lead, why would any centaur be okay with a smaller Khan of lesser strength leading them?
At the end of the day you can just say “It’s a video game, bro”, but for me, it’s really hard to get invested in their story when very little about their culture makes sense. Which is a real shame too since I feel like they did an amazing job fleshing out the Tuskarr and Drakonids.
Look at some of their catch phrases when you interact with them:
“May your prey fly low and run slow.”
Why? Wouldn’t it make more sense if the phrase was “May your prey be mighty and fierce”? You know, to emphasize the glory and prestige that comes with a successful hunt? You can’t say that they don’t care about glory and just want to feed their tribe, there are numerous quests where you’re asked to hunt ridiculously dangerous creatures for no reason other than the ‘glory of the hunt’. It’s something they emphasize in their culture -constantly-. I thought in this sort of barbarian-ish culture, they would celebrate a good hunt, not a weak and pathetic one.
“Be respectful”
This just doesn’t sound like something a tribe of primitive warriors would say, unless you add a comma and then a “-or I will crush you” or something of the like afterwards. Something like “Mind your tongue” would be more appropriate in this context. The whole ‘be respectful’ just seems really out of place.
They’re also extremely tolerant of same-sex relationships (Hunter Narman and Windsage Dawa) and even supportive of it even though it means their bloodline will end (Bloodlines are valued significantly in the cultures these centaur are based on). Additionally, they’re very loving, cuddling, and caring with their animals (One of them even giggles as their pet wolf/lion prances around them in circles). I can see them caring affectionately for their beast companions, but it doesn’t feel right seeing them be so silly and playful with them. The hunter-beast relationship should feel more like a respectful bond rather than a cute and cuddly one.
Something just feels…off about a tribe of primitive warriors who decorate their encampments with bones and spikes, yet are really silly/goofy/humorous and welcoming to outsiders. IMO It would feel a lot better if you were captured and/or disliked by them at first and had to earn their respect overtime instead of just being welcomed immediately.
They’re also very racially diverse, which normally I have no problem with, but in this particular setting, I can’t help but wonder how a tribe of numeral insignificance that has lived in total isolation from the rest of the world for thousands of years can be racially diverse? Wouldn’t their ancestors have long ago bred the tribe into an ethnically homogenous group with almost no distinguishing racial features?
One last thing that doesn’t make much sense to me is that they’re apparently a matriarchal society, which is totally fine for races where the Females are the more physically dominate sex (Gnolls, Quillboar, Magnataur) but with how the centaur are portrayed in this expansion, the males, like Balakar Khan, are shown to tower over the other female Khans, enough that he dwarves the lot of them in size. If the males are shown to get much bigger and stronger than the females, how is it possible that any Female Khans are in power? In a society where physical strength and might determines who is the most capable to lead, why would any centaur be okay with a smaller Khan of lesser strength leading them?
At the end of the day you can just say “It’s a video game, bro”, but for me, it’s really hard to get invested in their story when very little about their culture makes sense. Which is a real shame too since I feel like they did an amazing job fleshing out the Tuskarr and Drakonids.
The animation has just been amateur hour for years. There's no sense of weight, thought, emotion, personality, or timing to it. When they want to add oomph, they just double the speed.. which does nothing except run the bland animation faster. It's possible that they just don't have (and/or never had) the senior art and animation director staff that would have helped the animators do better than a mediocre job.
But to be less kind, for all I know they're hiring people with one year certificates or associate's degrees from liberal arts schools or community college, who never once in their lives did they really look at old animation to understand how and why it felt alive, let alone looked at really old bad animation and understood why it didn't. They've never done storyboards, keys, timing, or sound reading. They watch hyper-paced crack baby animation for kids who haven't the attention span to sit for 15 minutes and focus. So everything is weightless and goofy, made all the worse by the living plastic aesthetic.
But to be less kind, for all I know they're hiring people with one year certificates or associate's degrees from liberal arts schools or community college, who never once in their lives did they really look at old animation to understand how and why it felt alive, let alone looked at really old bad animation and understood why it didn't. They've never done storyboards, keys, timing, or sound reading. They watch hyper-paced crack baby animation for kids who haven't the attention span to sit for 15 minutes and focus. So everything is weightless and goofy, made all the worse by the living plastic aesthetic.
Yes, I am on coffee #6, why do you ask?
