D&D 4E I wish WoW were like 4e

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I wish WoW were like 4e....

WoW is a lot more like 4E than its predecessors, especially the painful-to-remember EQ1. Subsequent games -- starting, apparently, with LOTRO -- will no doubt take the trend even further.

* Every class would have a defined role in a party and no amount of talent selection would change that. Every warrior and paladin would be able to effectively tank at all levels of the game, every priest, druid, or shaman would be able to effectively heal at all levels of the game.

OTOH, in an MMO, this leads to "sorry, we don't have room for you; we already have a tank." Getting the balance right between having a defined role and not being able to do anything else is a tricky one. WoW is better at this than EQ1 was -- hooray for being a class that ONLY does crowd control, or is barely able to do anything outside of a group, since they just heal/buff -- but obviously, the balance could be tweaked. (And will be, most likely, in the next expansion this winter.)

* Talent choices would add new options or mild benefits that don't have an end-result of effectively completely changing the role one has in a group.

I'm not sure what talents you're thinking of, here. Most of the ones that come to mind to me are just refinements of what was there all along, even if some folks ignored it.

* Crowd Control would be a role that one or more classes would have as a primary function.

Ugh, no. This is how EQ1 and CoX work, and it's hideous. First, it creates "required" slots in a group. Secondly, it creates an arms race with the developers, who respond by dumping ever more enemies onto a group, meaning you REALLY have to have CC just to bring things back to a manageable level again. WoW letting pretty much do some sort of CC (although it's obviously not all created equal) was a brilliant move.

So instead of needing 2-3 DPS classes with secondary CC abilities you could have DPS/utility classes not be relegated to second-class citizen status.

DPS classes are second class citizens because they outnumber everyone else more than two to one. (I say as a level 70 hunter and a level 64 mage.)

* Healers would be able to routinely do non-healbot things in a group if desired without completely sacrificing their ability to heal.

Every game that has a healer in it -- and not every MMO should *cough* CoX *cough* -- should definitely move this way. That said, if it ever becomes "optimal" to just focus on healing, there will be people who object to healers doing anything else.

* Threat and aggro would vanish and tanks would get powers that prevent enemies from moving past/away from them instead. Tanking wouldn't just be a PvE concept and would be a PvP one too.

Collision has its own set of problems, though. This isn't a quick fix by any means.

And threat in some form has to exist, otherwise NPCs just would attack randomly or whatever's closest. Have you DM have NPCs roll a die every round to see who they attack and see how unsatisfying that is for everyone.

* DPS classes wouldn't be defined by DPS but by the ability to do damage while being harder for their enemies to target and hit. This way all classes can still have enough DPS to manage life while soloing.

This is already pretty much the case. Standing still and waiting to get punched in the face as a glass cannon is a choice, not a requirement.

* Gear wouldn't be the be-all and end-all of character power. It would instead be more of an enhancement.

Heh, this is D&D. I don't really believe that gear is not going to be a major part of a high level character's effectiveness.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Honestly, if the game came out at the same time as WoW, I would probably have preferred playing it (visiting Bag End in Hobbiton is very strange but exciting).

Given how much of LOTRO was inspired by what worked (and what didn't) in WoW -- much more so than what worked and didn't in WoW's predecessors -- this would have to involve some fancy work with time travel and venture capital.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Plus, WoW could really benefit from finding an alternative to the threat/aggro mechanic which only works on NPCs to make the tank/defender role relevant in PvP. It's ridiculous that there's an entire segment of the game where a core class role simply is irrelevant.

At Blizzcon 2005, they actually addressed this. Someone asked Metzen why Onyxia wasn't smarter about aggro.

"OK, what would that be like? Your raid comes in her cavern. She one-shots your priests, then your druids, then your shamans and paladins. Then she wipes your raid. Are you having more fun yet?"

Threat, in general, serves to make NPCs "smarter" -- that guy in the back dropping the giant heals on everyone else clearly needs to be removed before the guys with the pointy sticks can be taken out -- but not too smart, because it's really, really easy for the game to beat players every time.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That's a fact! I played a warrior up through tier 4, some tier 5 content and had total lifetime PvP kills of < 100. You just CAN'T PvP effectively with Prot spec/gear. It would have been fun to get into PvP such that enemy players were forced to deal with my toon's raid buffed 16K armor and 22K health. Oh, well.

Run a flag in WSG/EoS.

 

[jdrakeh]

I wish WoW were like 4e....

No monthly fees required to play!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

No monthly fees required to play!

Because what WoW really needs is more dudes with no jobs and no lives.

 

[The Little Raven]

Because what WoW really needs is more dudes with no jobs and no lives.

And WoW wouldn't be as awesome as it is if they didn't make gobs of money to pour into it.

 

[AtomicPope]

You should just play EQ2 then. I have a max Templar and I'm a hell of a healer. I've ran groups of 5 DPS "Scout" classes with me healing and we did just fine. The trick is to have good groups that know when to "Evade" (or de-aggro) so they "Bounce" the monsters. The other trick is to have a great healer (me) who watches the monsters and the health bars and has everyone buffed with groups reactives.

Granted, TPK is much easier with no tank but so is power leveling. Monsters evaporate. It's the respawns that get ya.

 

[katahn]

You don't need collision for a tank to be able to block enemy movement without needing threat/aggro mechanics. What you need are class abilities that give tanks the ability to temporarily block enemies from being able to move past them, abilities that give them instant bonus attacks against enemies moving out of melee (in any direction), and potentially abilities that debuff enemies that ignore them in favor of non-tanks.

Not all such abilities need to be given to every tank class, they can be mixed and matched, but then they work without needing to have special rules for NPCs that result in an entire class-role being irrelevant in a large segment of play. Furthermore since these abilities wouldn't be necessarily absolute in effectiveness, having multiple tanks on a group of enemies means multiple blocking abilities have to fail before an enemy can move past the defensive line and into the controller, ranged dps, and healers. Unlike a threat/aggro mechanic, this would specifically make multiple tanks a viable tactic (especially where one or more controllers aren't present).

My comments on DPS having abilities that let them avoid being hit is a corollary to the above rule - namely that they will have to be in melee unless they are a ranged DPS class and without threat/aggro mechanics you either need to make them durable enough to withstand the same kind of hits a tank could or you have to make them difficult to hit at all. Either would really be fine (with appropriate balancing), because without the tank's ability to block enemy movement they absolutely couldn't fill a tank role. The role-defining ability of a tank should be in not letting enemies get past them, not in being super-tough.

 

[wedgeski]

You don't need collision for a tank to be able to block enemy movement without needing threat/aggro mechanics. What you need are class abilities that give tanks the ability to temporarily block enemies from being able to move past them, abilities that give them instant bonus attacks against enemies moving out of melee (in any direction), and potentially abilities that debuff enemies that ignore them in favor of non-tanks.

I agree that 4e's 'stickiness' approach to tanking would be more interesting and diverse than WoW's threat mechanic which, although it does its job grandly, is starting to seem long in the tooth (speaking as someone who has played a raiding tank for a very long time). However there comes a point in a real-time game where you're asking the player behind the character to do just too much, and the beauty of the aggro mechanic is that it is simple enough to free up the players' brains for other, exceptional tasks during more complex fights.

In a turn-based system, you can put many more demands on the player (marking, shifting, forward-looking strategy), which is what 4ed seems to do very nicely.