Ability Pruning Will Not Be Reverted

#1 - March 30, 2016, 2:24 p.m.

In a recent stream by Towelliee, Lore was quoted saying a lot of pruned abilities would be very difficult to reimplement.

http://i.imgur.com/JdeVyIE.png

What does this mean?

In addition to expansion pushback, the same argument for here applied to Vanilla servers: the technology is different, thus the change will not be reverted.

Where do we go from here?

It's time to accept the changes. We most likely will not have those abilities back. Now that we know any outcry is futile, it is time to understand Blizzard's thinking.

A lot of their reasoning stems behind "class identity/fantasy." Classes have become way too homogenized. Every class having some sort of teleport/charge/stun/hide/whatever makes no class unique. It's pretty obvious they want to return to a Vanilla-style of play, where classes were genuinely unique, and players rolled classes for those specific abilities.

I'd like to have a discussion around this. What frustrates you with the recent change? Aside from reverting, what is another solution to fix some angst?

Lore

Community Manager

#45 - March 30, 2016, 6:45 p.m.

03/30/2016 10:55 AMPosted by Aerist
Thank you to those who set the record straight for millennials.

While there is no exact year range, it's generally accepted that millennials were born between the 1980s and around 2000. That means, majority of millennials have hit adulthood and are probably a good chunk of loyal WOW players. I grew up playing MMOs (not WOW necessarily, but others like Ragnarok Online, MapleStory, Runescape, etc).

I'm quoting this post because it's just as relevant to the topic of ability pruning as an out-of-context quote from a Twitch chatroom.

In the quote from the OP, I was specifically asked about a list of hundreds of abilities that have been removed or reworked since 2004. Yes, I imagine it would take a lot of work to re-add (or un-change) hundreds of abilities, not to mention sorting out the massive balance issues that would result from such a thing. No, that doesn't mean we're ignoring feedback about pruning or that we won't make any changes based on that feedback. It just means I think it would be a lot of work to add hundreds of abilities to the game, which I think is a fairly reasonable assumption.

We've been specifically asking for feedback about what abilities you feel are missing and why, and that's because we want to hear it. Often times, our design process involves pulling a bunch of stuff out so that we can directly see what's missing; we do this because, occasionally, there is a better way to provide that same gameplay, it's just hard to see it while the old stuff is still in the way.

At any rate, please do continue to provide that feedback, because we're actively discussing it. There's certainly been no mandate that "ability pruning will not be reverted," and even if there had been, we wouldn't be announcing it in a Twitch chatroom.

Lore

Community Manager

#51 - March 30, 2016, 6:52 p.m.

03/30/2016 11:50 AMPosted by Exorrt
03/30/2016 11:45 AMPosted by Lore
we wouldn't be announcing it in a Twitch chatroom.

Yeah.

It would be on Twitter, right?

Snapchat.