WoW and 4e - where's the beef?

[EroGaki]

I have never played WoW but i have played several other games like it online. I played 4e for awhile to see how it would play.

To me it is more the style 4e pushes forward the most. Some other posters covered some aspects. yes previous editions to a point had some of the same stuff but 4e has pushed them more forward.

And for me the game play with the power system reminded me of online games. No it wasn't the same or even mostly the same, but it did have a slightly greater feel for that than previous editions did.

But what you are asking is for peoples opinions and thats all they are. What makes something feel one way or another or why someone likes something or other. Is often a matter of perception.

This thread isn't going to get to the bottom of anything I doubt, nor is it likely to change anyones mind and it just might start up a flame war.

The bottom line is 4e is what it is and either you like it or you don't. It reminds you of what ever it reminds you of or not, due to ones own personal experiences.

Ok done rambling hopefully this makes since but it might not, it is well after 4am locally. Still dealing with insomnia as I have been all week and I am getting a bit slap happy from lack of sleep.

True enough. It all comes down to opinions, and I've learned that most people are not willing to change theirs. Like it or don't.

By the way, I hope you get over your insomnia; having dealt with it myself on a number of occasions, I understand how much it sucks.

 

[Belphanior]

I have played WoW and don't think 4e is like it. If anything it compares most closely to Dofus/Wakfu, but even that is rather tenuous.

I do think that WotC took a good look at a wide variety of successful games to analyze what made them so strong, including WoW. From this they took lessons which were springboards for their own inventions.

In some ways it is interesting to see how 4e explicitly avoids being like WoW, which can be most easily seen in buffing and healing. In WoW, spells and abilities that improve yourself and others typically last a long time and are already pre-cast before the fight begins. Healing is done by a dedicated member who is absolutely rubbish at doing anything else. In 4e, buffing tends to be much more short term. Healing is done quickly, as a minor action, giving the character the ability to provide some very real assistance in other ways at the same time.

Tanking is another such example. In WoW a tank is mandatory, because a single hit from a boss will most likely destroy any of the other PCs. Thus the boss needs to be tanked all the time for things to go well. In 4e the monsters don't need to be glued to the defender at all times. In fact, when they ignore him the defender still does his job.

I think WoW may have inspired 4e by showing some problem areas, but ultimately 4e solved those problems very differently. And that is why I can't take any "4e is like WoW" comment seriously.

 

[EroGaki]

I have played WoW and don't think 4e is like it. If anything it compares most closely to Dofus/Wakfu, but even that is rather tenuous.

I do think that WotC took a good look at a wide variety of successful games to analyze what made them so strong, including WoW. From this they took lessons which were springboards for their own inventions.

In some ways it is interesting to see how 4e explicitly avoids being like WoW, which can be most easily seen in buffing and healing. In WoW, spells and abilities that improve yourself and others typically last a long time and are already pre-cast before the fight begins. Healing is done by a dedicated member who is absolutely rubbish at doing anything else. In 4e, buffing tends to be much more short term. Healing is done quickly, as a minor action, giving the character the ability to provide some very real assistance in other ways at the same time.

Tanking is another such example. In WoW a tank is mandatory, because a single hit from a boss will most likely destroy any of the other PCs. Thus the boss needs to be tanked all the time for things to go well. In 4e the monsters don't need to be glued to the defender at all times. In fact, when they ignore him the defender still does his job.

I think WoW may have inspired 4e by showing some problem areas, but ultimately 4e solved those problems very differently. And that is why I can't take any "4e is like WoW" comment seriously.

"Healing is done by a dedicated member who is absolutely rubbish at doing anything else." Really? My Shadow Priest begs to differ. Most of the dedicated healers in WoW are pretty good at other things. Priests melt faces. Restoration Druids are still a force to be reckoned with.

 

[Belphanior]

"Healing is done by a dedicated member who is absolutely rubbish at doing anything else." Really? My Shadow Priest begs to differ. Most of the dedicated healers in WoW are pretty good at other things. Priests melt faces. Restoration Druids are still a force to be reckoned with.

How often does your shadow priest heal in Naxxramas? When I talk of a "dedicated member" I refer to an individual, not a class. Priests can be either healer or (admittedly very good) dps, but I've never seen one that can be both at once.

 

[ppaladin123]

I don't really see it. I see plenty of places where WoW borrowed liberally from D&D but I don't see much connection between 4e and WoW. Now if they come out with 4.5e and replace marking with aggro management I'll reconsider the comparisons.

 

[Rechan]

In some ways it is interesting to see how 4e explicitly avoids being like WoW, which can be most easily seen in buffing and healing. In WoW, spells and abilities that improve yourself and others typically last a long time and are already pre-cast before the fight begins. Healing is done by a dedicated member who is absolutely rubbish at doing anything else. In 4e, buffing tends to be much more short term. Healing is done quickly, as a minor action, giving the character the ability to provide some very real assistance in other ways at the same time.

Tanking is another such example. In WoW a tank is mandatory, because a single hit from a boss will most likely destroy any of the other PCs. Thus the boss needs to be tanked all the time for things to go well. In 4e the monsters don't need to be glued to the defender at all times. In fact, when they ignore him the defender still does his job.

Primarily I believe they didn't copy those aspects:

Buffs are a pain in the ass to calculate and continue. If they are always on, then you might as well just call your +1/2 level bonus a buff and be done with it.

Dedicated Healers: This was what the Cleric was in 1e/2e. In 3e a healer was necessary (or a wand of cure lights), but clerics were made powerful to compensate. Simply put, before CoDzilla, no one wanted to play a class that did nothing but heal. That's boring. Players want to be saving the day, not saving the guy saving the day. In order to make the Cleric less of a necessary suckfest for one person at the table, they made healing quicker and spread around more.

Same with tanking; one thing the designers wanted to avoid in the first place was 'one hit kills' or 'save or die' effects. PCs were supposed to take a beating. That's counter-productive to 'We need a Tank, because any hit from anything significant will kill us'.

What I'm surprised WotC didn't take from WoW is the class designs. They didn't turn Rangers into Hunters. They didn't use the Shaman's totem effects. Those would have been easy to translate into the system, but they chose to move away from that.

Ultimately, what I think they took from MMOs was to show, up front, how the classes/roles work together in terms of teamwork, rather than just give you the tools and see if you figure it out. MMOs make obvious the purpose of each archetype on the battlefield. It's like a football team, with its defensive linemen, its runners, etc. MMOs showed how those roles work together, and WotC took notes.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Hmm. I don't get the WOW vibe from the 4e mechanics, I get it from selected scattered bits of flavor.

Tieflings, tieflings in their 4e imagery are palette/alignment swapped Draenai.

Rangers/Hunters "The Hunter's Mark is generally used just prior to pulling a mob. Use of this ability provides both a +damage modifier and makes the target very visible for some distance (the pink arrow that is the trademark of the Hunter's Mark can be seen for several game-meters). (Taken from Wowwiki)" This is directly analogous to the Hunter's Quarry striker ability.

Revenants strike me as a deliberate attempt to provide an analogue for the forsaken.

There are some noticeablly deliberate anti-WoW fluff choices too, like de-tinkering of gnomes.

 

[wayne62682]

From what I've seen, I think that 3.5 was a lot more like WoW than 4e is - just like in WoW in 3.5 you really had to have "system mastery" and spend time number crunching (while there's no concept of "farming" in D&D, the notion behind it was evident) in order to be effective with your character. As we all remember, this lead to the power-builds of 3.5 where casual gamers were usually a lot weaker than someone who took the time to read through various splatbooks.

I have a friend who's a WoW junkie, and I keep trying to convince her to play 4e as an experiment to test whether or not 4e is like WoW

 

[Nymrohd]

I don't think that 4E is just like WoW and I play both a lot, but they do have similarities. Art direction is the big one for me. 4E has the same cartoony feel that WoW has and in some cases I wonder who stole that art concept from whom (4E Archons are identical to WoW revenants, especially water which are damn indistinguishable).

 

[Leatherhead]

Spoiler

I apologize in advance to any English majors who's eyes bleed from reading this post.

Here is some interesting anecdotal evidence, I play in two separate groups: The majority of one group actively plays WoW, the majority of the other actively plays EverQuest (but has never gotten into WoW).

The WoW group looked at the 4E books, praised them for how much they resemble WoW, but does not play 4E (presumably because of all the campaigns that have not been finished).
The EQ group dosn't know anything about WoW, but would say that 4E is very different from EQ. However they are having quite a bit of fun playing 4E at the moment.

For the sake of clarity, WoW borrows from EQ and the Warcraft RTS series. EQ was based loosely off of, or at least borrowed allot from, older editions of D&D. Warcraft is rumored to be what happened to a Warhammer game that Blizzard lost the license on.

The interesting part is that the EQ to WoW transition mirrors allot of the 3E to 4E changes: melee classes going from mostly auto-attacking (full attack) to having numerous abilities with limited effects; classes going from one generic way to play to having multiple different sub-builds; monsters being designated as single person(normal/minion), elite(elite ), or Boss(solo); tanking going from passive roll (being in melee range with special weapons while doing what you would do anyway) to an active roll (using special "defenderesque" powers and abilities); even the non-combat parts of the game were designed a bit more user friendly. One of the "original" WoW ideas was to slightly mix-up the tank-healer-dps (or CC, depending on whom you asked) "holy trinity" by allowing classes to do more than one thing (this seems to have fallen more or less to the wayside, but that is a rant for a different message board).

But for the point of all this trivia: It's not enough to note the similarities, you have to understand why they are there, and figure out if that is a good thing.