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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsBreakfast Topic: If you could redo features in Wrath, what would they be?
by Zach Yonzon 
Mar 3rd 2010 at 8:00AM
Another area that the developers felt lacked a little more polish was the emblem system, which they described as "clunky". Of course, they admit that in hindsight there happens to be quite a number of things that they'd like to redo, pointing out that they are their own worst critics. I'm sure we've got our own ideas about what could have gone better, so let's have at it. Personally, I'm quite happy about their plans to improve Battlegrounds play in Cataclysm, so I guess I'll kick it off with that. What about you guys? If you could ask a favor of Chromie and her Bronze Dragonflight cohorts, what things would you have done differently about Wrath?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Wrath of the Lich King
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 10)
Tokhand Mar 3rd 2010 8:10AM
Azjol-Nerub. Two and a half little bits (2 5-mans plus the area in the Dragonblight and Anub'arak again) does not seem like enough for an empire whose twin to the far far south have their own zone, 2 raids, and pop up all throughout the leveling areas even as early as the Barrens.
Mr. Crow Mar 3rd 2010 8:21AM
I'll tip my hat regarding Azjol-Nerub as well.
While the rise of 10-man raiding has been great, I think I would have found a way to make it on-par with 25-man rewards rather than being secondary. 10-man is more challenging because each player is worth so much more of the raid's output, whereas 25-man is more challenging because it takes more logisitics to organize 25 people's time. (Lose a healer in 25-man and the 4-5 other healers can likely pick up the slack. Lose a healer in 10-man and you're down to only 2 or maybe even 1 healer who's got to keep the whole raid up. THAT'S a challenge.)
If there were a way to make 10-man and 25-man raiding give the same rewards, it would be worth it. Of course, they'd need to share a lockout, but at least 10-man raiders wouldn't feel like second-rate players.
kvanje Mar 3rd 2010 8:13AM
Made the hard choice and axed the Nerubians entirely, when it became clear that the zone wasn't going to happen. Then spent more time on content for the places that were developed. I'd have liked a Grizzly Hills instance with an outside feel a lot more than Ahn'Kahet and Azjol-Nerub. Or something -- anything -- in Crystalsong.
Ozzard Mar 3rd 2010 8:18AM
The Argent Tournament was slated to be in Crystalsong, until experiments showed that the server load would be too high from that plus Dalaran.
Adoisin Mar 3rd 2010 8:57AM
Grizzlemaw should have been an instance. A lot more could have been done over in that area.
StoNe Mar 3rd 2010 9:36AM
I just think the zones in WotLK don't feel as usefull as the ones in Outlands.
Grizzly Hills and Zul Drak are the main two culprits. They're leveling zones and that's it, with little to no interest to return at level 80.
At least with Nagrand they still had PvP, and Blades Edge and Terrokar Forest had lvl 70 flying zones.
All of Outlands was utalised, Northrend was not.
emsee Mar 3rd 2010 8:16AM
The recent changes to speed up instances, skip over introductions (CoS, etc) were very welcome changes indeed. I hope that developers will consider this sort of thing up front while designing new content so that they don't have to make such adjustments in the future.
Ozzard Mar 3rd 2010 8:17AM
1) Give arenas a decent burial and allow people to get on with larger-group PvP that didn't need to be so tightly balanced. The continuing balance problems are not *all* the fault of the arena, but a significant number are.
2) Allow landscape and mobs to load without textures, then fill in the textures as time allows, so that it's possible to land then navigate around Lagaran and interact with mobs and players on a machine with less than 4G RAM and a 1G graphics card. Sure, this breaks immersion - but not as badly as being unable to see anything except shadows.
3) I wholeheartedly second the comment above about dual monitors.
Actually, these apply to Cataclysm as well!
Varedis Mar 3rd 2010 10:44AM
For your second comment, all you would see is a white silhouette for things, as the lighting info for all static elements is baked into the texture.
chipersoft Mar 3rd 2010 11:35AM
Plus, textures are only half of the equation. Player gear models take just as long to load as the textures do. Ultimately having the characters load bits at a time would simply look awful.
When Halo 2 came out one of the features they put into the game to improve level loading times was having all character and scenery models first load with just low-res textures, and then the higher detailed textures were loaded asynchronously while the player went through the level. This did reduce load times to almost nothing, but the result was that every time you entered a level there would be a moment where everything would look like shit.
Players hated it!
When the Xbox 360 came out the system was fast enough that the loading was almost instant, but one of the largest complaints for the game during the original XBox livespan was that buffered texture loading.
Ozzard Mar 3rd 2010 11:52AM
@Varedis: In reality, that doesn't happen; the specular lighting is *not* baked in. That's not from theory, the no-texture display glitches happen pretty regularly on my box as I fly. I get an environment that's perfectly possible to interpret, it just looks like it's all made from white paper.
@Chipersoft: Interesting data point about Halo 2 - thanks. I'd *still* like this for me, or even just to mark each character with a white sphere and not load any gear at all. But I guess I'm more willing to live with artificial interfaces than most :-). I'm an old-timer - wrote my first program on punched card!
sephirah Mar 3rd 2010 8:17AM
No more vehicles!
jrizutko Mar 3rd 2010 11:18AM
This!
I stopped playing for 4 months over the summer because I was so disinterested with all the Jousting and vehicle combat stuff they were shoehorning into the game.
Dressel Mar 3rd 2010 8:18AM
No jousting.
vinniedcleaner Mar 3rd 2010 8:57AM
Totally agree. Even after I built a new system, I still get lag in the ability CDs.
heath Mar 3rd 2010 9:04AM
No more jousting?? how about BETTER mounted combat? the idea was great, the execution just sucked imo. i mean, guys wearing plate mail on horses usually kinda go with lances ya know? who can't shoot an arrow on a horse? I for one have no doubt I could cast deathcoil while galloping along....
jousting was a feeble attempt imo...just better mounted combat.
Turlagh Mar 3rd 2010 9:04AM
Yeah Fix Jousting. The double cool down sweep is just frustrating.
Vahan Mar 3rd 2010 8:20AM
I would like to see a few things, although they are not necessarily things I think should have been there from the beginning.
A raid/heroic weekly that sends people back to the older instances and raids, that has rewards along the lines that the current ones do (perhaps less).
Karazhan brought up to a level 80 raid. This instance is by far my favorite in the game. It is well laid out, aesthetically pleasing and challenging.
Retool all the WoTK raids to have 10 heroic/normal and 25 heroic/normal modes.
Neirin Mar 3rd 2010 12:59PM
I still believe that you can learn 90% of everything you need to know about raiding by running Kara. As fun as it was, though, I don't want my nostalgia messed up by having it updated.
However, I definitely think blizz should make some sort of PvE arena thing where you can go to have people experience those now outdated fights. No loot or anything, just pure fun. Maybe then more people would be able to appreciate the flame wreath chant.
nieboh Mar 3rd 2010 3:25PM
Ever since the day I went exploring the crypt behind Karazhan, I've been chomping at the bit to get back there. Every patch in every expansion I think "maybe this will be the one". The fact that it wasn't brought out in Lich King was one of my biggest disappointments. And sure, all the action is taking place up north in this expansion, so coming back to Deadwind would be a little odd...but no more so than when everything was happening in the Outlands and we had to trudge back to Deadwind.