[WoW] I Was a Teenage Alpha Tester

I looked at the WoW FAQ on pulling and got my first uneasy feeling about the game for awhile. "Pullers are generally tanks such as a Warrior or Paladin". Is WoW going to get stuck in the same mindset as EQ of having certain classes with the truly "prime" ("essential") abilities and other classes which offer "utility" ("nice to have, by no means necessary") abilities. This gets to the heart of my current question about WoW and the direction it will take - if I'm on with 3 of my friends, is it pretty much necessary that we are the "right" combination of classes to get things done?

Qey, there been noted earlier in the thread about how a 5 rogue group was successfull. The idea that the puller is the one tanking sounds rather common sense to me, he get a edge in aggro on incoming. Also noted that clerics can solo by tanking with rune and huge aggro spell, and they are cloth, I don't really see how there is a essential ability lock down. Now if the puller is a Warrior, paladin, pet or cleric, does it really matter?

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Originally Posted by Goladus

You mean like, a job and a wife?

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Bwahaha, for some reason Goladus I found that ownage seriously funny.

More questions:

1. Does it feel cheesy that gnomes don't get their own city?

2. How do languages work right now?

3. Can you form "raids" like in EQ to do larger targets?

4. Do nameds for quests spawn fast enough that you do not have to kill for hours?

5. Can you talk a little bit more about how quests work with instanced dungeons?

6. Is there any kind of tool to help you find people looking to group?

ok more later....

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Originally Posted by Dangrim

Qey, there been noted earlier in the thread about how a 5 rogue group was successfull. The idea that the puller is the one tanking sounds rather common sense to me, he get a edge in aggro on incoming. Also noted that clerics can solo by tanking with rune and huge aggro spell, and they are cloth, I don't really see how there is a essential ability lock down. Now if the puller is a Warrior, paladin, pet or cleric, does it really matter?

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Dangrim, thanks for the mention of the all-rogue group (my bad for not reading the entire thread). I'm not debating the sense of having the person pulling doing the tanking, I was just wondering whether certain classes would have such an advantage doing certain essential tasks that a group is crippled without that class. I'm just having flashbacks of having to form up the "perfect group" in EQ (slower, healer, tank, puller, CC, snarer) instead of my friends and I just selecting what classes we enjoy the most, getting together and having some fun and still being a competent group in most situations. What I've read about WoW thus far seems to indicate it will be different that EQ in this regard, which is what I'm looking for.

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Originally Posted by Blind

I was wondering if anyone could tell me about how ranged weapons work with non Ranger classes and how throwing weapons compare to bows and guns.

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Warriors and rogues can train in ranged weapons at level 20, and their choices are determined by race. Gnomes, dwarves, humans, undead and I think Tauren (which seems odd to me) can train in guns.

Someone else is going to have to answer on how they compare. Pedi's rogue actually can use guns and has been throwing knives for many levels.

Rogues get throwing around level 5, and hunters get ranged weapons at level 1.

If you're interested in ranged fighting, though, no warrior will ever be as good as a hunter, who gets a special firing interface, we're told, and the ability to do more damage the longer they aim.

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Originally Posted by Axxl 01

As for WoW, just how difficult will game play become in PvE? While I do not know the playing style of the four people discussing alpha gaming, I get the feeling the game might be too easy to advance. If people could power-level themselves to level 30 within a weekend, level 60 within a week or two almost seems possible.

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Lots of people accused the 30-in-a-weekend folk of exploiting. I personally just think it was roommates taking shifts.

XP noticeably slows down after 20, and we all expect it to get still harder.

60 within a week is unlikely for the first year of the game or so (when you've got four level 60s PLing you later on, sure), but Blizzard has enough power-gamers on their staff to know the risk. It's hard to say "trust them!" about a MMORPG dev team, but this experience has really been positive with the team making all the rational adjustments during the process.

But we'll see -- if people can finish a faction in a month or so, and do so in large numbers, that'd be a problem. I honestly don't think most people will be blowing through the content at high speed, though. The point of WoW is actually doing the quests themselves. Levelling up past them doesn't seem like a winner to anyone I've encountered. Indeed, I know a lot of people who go back and do "gray" (much lower level, negligible rewards for the level) quests of other races, just because they're fun.

7. How about down time while soloing and down time while grouping? If they have eliminated downtime does this feel like it is going to effect the social atmosphere of the game (no time to chat)?

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Originally Posted by QeynosRose

I looked at the WoW FAQ on pulling and got my first uneasy feeling about the game for awhile. "Pullers are generally tanks such as a Warrior or Paladin". Is WoW going to get stuck in the same mindset as EQ of having certain classes with the truly "prime" ("essential") abilities and other classes which offer "utility" ("nice to have, by no means necessary") abilities. This gets to the heart of my current question about WoW and the direction it will take - if I'm on with 3 of my friends, is it pretty much necessary that we are the "right" combination of classes to get things done?

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No. That guide was written by Frazier, who's a nice guy, but who is a little conservative in some aspects of how he plays MMORPGs. The guides were added to by alpha players who are, again, sort of conservative players.

Pedi and I reached level 30 and cleared out every quest we gave a damn about with two characters, a mage and a paladin. And if you've looked at the official boards, you've seen the over-hyped problems the mage has (I don't think they're perfect, but the people rending their clothes and pulling their hair are making way more of the problem than it deserves, especially since they know Blizzard is actively working on the class and doesn't need that sort of histrionics to focus on mages). I can only think of one quest in Duskwood where we ended up needing help, and that includes us completing a number of elite quests just as a duo, which shouldn't have been possible according to the conventional wisdom.

WoW is a game where playing smart isn't punished, and is in fact rewarded. Sneak through the environment where possible instead of plowing, pull by shooting in through an open porthole, do the Scooby Doo technique of "I aggro and pull them all, you pull out the guy we need and I'll circle back after I've lost the rest of them." We've done all of them and gotten far.

In one case, where we were able to avoid almost all the content by cutting over the landscape, that particular area has been made impossible to pass through (due to natural geography) because, honestly, it was silly easy.

But for the most part, it's still very possible -- I lead both Vashanti and Pedi's rogue through the Redridge Canyon, sneaking past gnoll guards and patrols until we were able to get to the camp of their leader, avoiding a lot of pain in our assassination mission, for instance. Redridge is one of the most popular areas in the game, and it's something that's almost certainly been done by dozens of people (most just don't think to not plow), and the dev team hasn't touched it.

Thinking outside the box in WoW works just fine, although many testers (like any MMORPG community) are most comfortable in the box with a "right" way to play. But there's no penalty without it.

Now, I do think that it's nice to have someone around who can rez. But in WoW, for the Alliance, that means priests, paladins, warlocks and maybe druids (we don't know yet) can fill that role. The odds of a group having one of four of the eight classes available to the Alliance are pretty good. But it's not a catastrophe even if you don't. Pedi and I, in our presumed final duo set up, of dwarf hunter and rogue, won't have a rezzer, and neither of us are concerned really.

Some of the players may have the mindset you're worried about, but just don't group with them. They'll figure it out soon enough.

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Originally Posted by Dmitry the Wizzy

1. Does it feel cheesy that gnomes don't get their own city?

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They do get their own city. It's going to be a huge (city-sized, in fact) dungeon and I THINK have a large instanced portion, where gnomes and dwarves battle to retake it from leper gnomes and troggs.

Gnomes also have their own section of Ironforge, which is going to have a SPECTACULAR thing running through it when it's done, and gnome settlements are found in almost as many parts of the world as goblin settlements.

Gnomes don't seem very deprived to me, and I had the same concern you did. It's worth noting that even before the fall of Gnomeregan, gnomes and dwarves had overlapping, even merged, communities. Now the smaller of the two sister cities is in enemy hands, but even at level 10 or so, you start the fight to get it back. (The gnome quest screenshots linked earlier.)

Between the battle for Gnomeregan and their rivalry with the goblins, gnomes have a lot to do and feel very connected to the world, certainly more than any EQ race does.

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2. How do languages work right now?

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Right now, you just see what language is being used, but each language has its own particular gobbledy gook version if you're not a speaker of it. (You can tell Darnassian from Gnomish from Troll at a glance.) Learning languages hasn't been added yet, but it's likely to be something you pick up with skill points. Horde folks learning Common and Alliance folks learning Orcish will probably be semi-common, and I certainly intend to do that, as well as picking up Gnomish on my dwarf.

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3. Can you form "raids" like in EQ to do larger targets?

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The technology isn't in yet, but they said it was coming since the beginning of alpha, and Frazier and others have run defacto raids on instanced dungeons with multiple groups even without it. The game will both definitely support raiding (although with a size cap significantly below PoP) and, at the high end, encourage it. There's an instanced dungeon coming designed for a whole guild to participate in that they figure will take roughly a week to clear end to end ...

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4. Do nameds for quests spawn fast enough that you do not have to kill for hours?

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Nameds, once you're in the right area, spawn fairly often, sometimes even instantly.

There are a few quests where drops take a while, but they've been toning those down with each push. There was one quest in the Barrens where you had to get 20 Barrens Stalker paws. Now, the stalkers are lions with rogue skills -- in this case, they can turn invisible and hide in the grass to ambush people running by. Since initially, none of us were smart enough to buy the Perceptive talent to give us a better chance of seeing through their stealth mode (playable rogues weren't in yet, so the talent simply wasn't on most of our radars), it was a really, really painful process finding the lions.

In addition to making them slightly lower level rogues, so everyone had a better chance of spotting them once in a while, they changed the drops needed to 7 in this last push.

The "Digging Through the Ooze" quest in the Wetlands -- find the slimy bag an ooze swallowed by killing lots of oozes in a graveyard -- is the only one that really compares to an EQ-style painful quest for a drop, but people are hollering about it as more folks get to that point in the dwarf quests (Pedi and I were two of the few to attempt it back on dwarf push in November) and it seems likely it'll be fixed in a patch or two.

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5. Can you talk a little bit more about how quests work with instanced dungeons?

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Well, they're like any quests. They can be "kill all four of these guys so the ritual spell binding NPC X is broken" or "collect suchandsuch, which only grows in Dungeon Y" or whatever. In fact, it's likely that you'll have a number of quests for each dungeon, so once you're in the instance and your group is on their own, there's a lot to do.

In the Wailing Caverns, there are six total quests I know of, and five of them either require going into the instance or extend into it if people are going there.

And Wailing Caverns may not be the Tower of Frozen Shadows, but it's very close to the best dungeon I've ever explored in a CRPG.

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6. Is there any kind of tool to help you find people looking to group?

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The social menu has the Who window on one tab, and you can mark yourself as LFG there. Not a lot of people are using it currently, though.

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7. How about down time while soloing and down time while grouping? If they have eliminated downtime does this feel like it is going to effect the social atmosphere of the game (no time to chat)?

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Depending on what you're fighting and your group size and level, you have downtime after every fight or after every few fights. And unless you buy the most expensive food and drink the moment they become available (at which point they are VERY expensive to you), you don't instantly jump up again after eating and drinking. So there's definitely downtime there, and there's also downtime while miners, herbalists and skinners do their thing, and almost everyone takes up some tradeskill in WoW, at least so far.

WoW is VERY social, to the point that a lot of us shut off our non-group/guild chat channels, just so we're not overwhelmed by it all. Social gamers are very happy with it so far, although a few people wish they could auction from one end of the world to the other. I think it's impractical -- someone in Thousand Needles saying they're going to buy my item in Southshore is going to take at least 40 minutes to get to me -- but you do hear people kvetching about it. Custom chat channels are buggy at the moment, but once that's resolved, those folks will have their Worldtrade channel back and running again, however much good it might do them.

My...God... This thread has given me twice as much information than all the other previews together! And most of all, it has got opinions..
Just wanted to ask a couple of questions for my friends, and you others of course..

Which race's females have the "Facial Hair" customizable? Could you tell which have what, and maybe post screenshots?

About the guild system.. Is guild banking in the game?

Could you post screenshots that have Guild thingies in them?
Or Night Elf pics? Those hotties.. :)
What about the inventory and the thing in which you can see what armor you are wearing.
And finally.. When you die, the ghost you become, and how the world looks from their eyes.
Hope I'm not asking too much.. :)

You have been busy, Whiz!

The instanced dungeons sound even better than I had imagined... and I expect they're probably saving some real kickers for release.

Regarding groups, I had a similar discussion with my friend. Somewhere it says that most quests will require about five people to complete... we expect that between the two of us and perhaps a third friend who might play, we should be able to handle any quest five ordinary players might handle. It's all about how you use it, at least in Blizzard games.

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Originally Posted by Hilldweller

Which race's females have the "Facial Hair" customizable? Could you tell which have what, and maybe post screenshots?

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As far as I can recall, trolls, humans and orc females have facial customizations beyond just face choices at the moment. Pedi would know better.

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About the guild system.. Is guild banking in the game?

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The guild system is at a fairly early stage still -- still using /slash commands for everything, omg! -- so even if this is planned, it's not in yet. I think guild banking will have to wait on player/guild housing, which they're saying is coming shortly after release.

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Could you post screenshots that have Guild thingies in them?

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The purple shirt piece Vashanti's wearing in his screenshots is the guild tabard for our alpha guild, <Alpha Bits>, although it's tucked in since he's wearing a robe. We saved up 10 gold as a guild, and designed our tabard (about 25 logos, 20 background colors, etc.) and then everyone dropped another gold to get their tabard.

WoW is pretty good about sucking your money out of your pocket every other level as you get new spells/abilities to purchase, and having a surplus gold piece, much less 10 of them, isn't something that happens quickly. Most guilds don't start getting their tabards until all their members are over level 20.

I'm hoping for more logos for the tabards, but so far, other than every other guild going black with gold logo/trim, people haven't gotten repetitive yet.

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Hope I'm not asking too much.. :)

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I'm running out the door right now, so I'm going to leave screenshots up to someone else.

Whizbang, any chance of you listing some hard skill tree info for paladins? Just so I can see what kind of skills they will be able to buy? I'm rather interested and it seems no beta tester have thought of doing that anywhere I've seen.

Cheers :)

I find myself fascinated by the depth of the lore Whizbang is weaving into his explanations. Where can an aspiring WoW historian learn more about WoW lore?

I've played 1-3 etc and whiz knows a lot more than i have seen.

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Originally Posted by Goladus

You mean like, a job and a wife?

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I have one of each, and she can't wait to play either! ;)

Thanks for all the great info so far! Couple questions:

1) How much incentive is there to group? I've played a number of other MMORPGs which went with the idea that "anyone can solo," and they just ended up with EVERYONE soloing and no reason to group. While I want people to have the opportunity to solo when desired, I really like having strong group incentives to "force" people to interact and meet each other

2) I'm a little confused about the dungeons. Is the entire dungeon instanced, or just part of it? I thought I remembered reading some stuff previously where they said that it would only be instanced once you got deep into the dungeon, or something like that. Also, you talk about taking hours or days to clear the dungeons. Does that mean the mobs inside the instance don't respawn? Can you re-do the dungeon after you beat it? I love dungeons, doing 1-2 group crawls through dungeons was by far my favorite thing in EQ, so I'm curious what WoW's take on them will be

3) I know this was discussed earlier in the thread, but I wasn't quite clear on the answer. What kind of dropped loot is there? Are there named mobs that spawn in a certain location and drop specific loots, like EQ? Or do named mobs spawn randomly more like LDoN? Or are loots just dropped randomly from regular mobs. I like killing a specific mob to get specific loots, but it sounds like the anti-camping mentality wouldn't make this possible

4) Has there been any indication of whether they intend to do some sort of global trade system? I for one don't really like the effect the bazaar (and easy travel) has had in EQ of killing local trade in specific areas. Player vendors are a definite Good Thing (tm) though, if they can be set up in more than just one spot

5) This is a big one... You've now leveled 1-30 several times. What is the replayability like? Since you said that most of the time you are doing quests, does it get boring to do the same series of quests again on a different character? What about when you hit the top end and run out of quests? All the quests sound like something that would be a lot of fun for a while, but then might cause people to lose interest when they run out of hand-crafted content


Thanks again for all the info. You're making me insanely jealous that I haven't gotten in to the beta yet :p

My two main questions are, is Northrend in the game, and what about the Lich King?

How does 1 gold in WoW compare to currency in EQ? Cause i see people posting about how you need 10 gold to do this and that.

How do skills and spells work? Is it like in WC3 and D2 where you gain skill points and just level up a skill/spell, or more like EQ where you train it, then it goes up?

About the quests, say a quest asks you to kill qwerty, are you going to have to compete against other people to kill him? Can other people not doing the quest gank him from you?