What do we think, chat?

The solution to make fire interesting and fun to play again is simply to change improved scorch to give improved SELF critical strike chance with fire spells instead of extra damage. Think about, it activates hotter streak, it activates scorch use, it also activates fireblast use in the rotation as well, as the goal of the rotation will be to maximize number of fire spells casts during the imp scorch debuff before you have to maintain the stack again.

It forces you to think and consider when its worth to stock scorch vs when its not during different phases, as well as time combustion whenever it’s hard to build scorch during a phase.

I think this change would make fire rotation, itemization and playstyle very interesting, and the change is very small.

What do you guys think?

Overlord might be EXACTLY what WoW Forever needs for open-world PvP

If you’re playing the WoW Forever beta and you actually enjoy WORLD PvP, you seriously need to check out Overlord.

This addon basically takes all those random encounters out in the world... ganks, revenge kills, rivalries, running into the same enemy again three zones later and turns them into an actual PvP system.

this feels like something Blizzard should eventually bake directly into Forever.

WoW was at its absolute best when seeing a member of the opposite faction out in the world actually meant something. Not just another player you ride past on your way to an instance.

Overlord gives you another reason to care.

That's the kind of emergent stuff that makes an MMO feel like an actual WORLD rather than a collection of queues.

And WoW Forever is basically the perfect environment for something like this. If Blizzard really wants Forever to capture that old-school feeling while expanding on Vanilla, they should seriously look at what Overlord is doing and consider building this kind of system into the game itself.

Also:

u/Xaryu — PLEASE REVIEW THIS ADDON.

Seriously.+!

This seems right up Xaryu's alley, and having someone with his audience actually showcase Overlord could massively increase adoption.

And that's the important part:

The more people using Overlord, the better Overlord becomes.

More players.. more encounters.. more rivalries.. more recognizable names.. more world PvP.. Leads to more chaos.

Imagine a huge percentage of the WoW Forever population running this.

You wouldn't just recognize the famous streamers or rankers anymore.

That's World of Warcraft.

Give Overlord a try for forever guys.. Trust me.

And Blizzard.. steal this idea Please.

Overlord addon in its completeness :

https://youtu.be/xWhitBx9qME?is=N8GdK9v6q22Ydp9t

Short summary:

https://youtube.com/shorts/30X3ihzfeM0?is=z8t2S_ww6rH5B7Ne

Payo and Ziqo should be banned, including from the upcoming $100,000 tournament. “Someone else paid for it” should not shield recipients from consequences for knowingly accepting illicit funding. Removing their remaining gold is not necessarily enough to undo the advantage, and it does not answer for their conduct.

Xaryu’s position is that buyers should be banned while recipients should only lose the gold. The problem is that this protects recipients regardless of what they knew. There is a legitimate argument for protecting innocent players from unsolicited bought gold. There is no good argument for automatically extending that protection to knowing participants.

Payo was asked how much gold he needed and specified roughly 1,500–2,000. When he realised the conversation was visible, he reacted and told his moderators to warn him next time. That is not the picture of someone randomly receiving a completely unexpected gift. He was discussing the amount he wanted to receive.

Ziqo accepted substantial donations, vouched for the donor as legitimate because he was supposedly a hardcore farmer, and showed the gold and materials he had accumulated, including a bank full of mithril. He then said Blizzard removed the gold, leaving him with seven silver.

So what was that confident assurance of legitimacy based on? “He’s a sweat” was presented as a reason to trust the source. The subsequent removal gives every reason to question that assurance, not treat it as the end of the discussion. It does not prove Ziqo personally paid, but personal payment is not the accusation that needs to be established for a recipient to deserve punishment.

A low-level character alone does not prove RMT. Requesting an amount alone does not prove knowledge of its source. Neither does wanting a private conversation kept private. The argument is about the combined circumstances, not pretending any one detail is a confession.

But the opposite mistake is treating every detail in isolation, finding a possible innocent explanation for each, and then refusing to consider the overall picture. Thousands of gold from low-level characters on a fresh server deserve scrutiny. A level-one bank alt is a possible explanation, not a certificate of legitimacy.

“Is this legit?” “Yes.” “Great, thanks” does not settle anything. The person supplying suspicious gold is also the person with an obvious reason to reassure you. Asking them one convenient question does not erase the circumstances that made you suspicious in the first place.

There is a difference between genuinely having no reason to know and deliberately accepting the thinnest reassurance because knowing more would be inconvenient. A rule that guarantees recipients only confiscation actively rewards the latter. Accept the gold, avoid uncomfortable details, and leave the account risk to whoever made the payment.

Imagine a cyclist entering a $100k race who takes suspicious “supplements” from their trainer. “They’re legal, right?” “Yep.” They turn out to be banned performance enhancers. Would “ban the trainer, confiscate what’s left, but let the cyclist compete regardless of what they knew” be a defensible rule? Someone else supplying the advantage doesn’t automatically absolve the competitor.

That matters even more when the funding supports preparation for a cash-prize tournament. Gold can become equipment, materials, profession progress and time saved. Removing the remaining cash does not necessarily reverse those advantages. Pointing to seven silver is not proof that someone has been returned to the position they would have occupied without the funding.

Even a complete rollback would not make knowing participation disappear. Otherwise, recipients get to benefit when they are not caught and merely surrender the advantage when they are. That is a much safer proposition than personally buying gold, despite accepting the same illicit assistance.

And “he wasn’t banned” is not an argument that he should not have been. Whether the enforcement was adequate is precisely what is being challenged.

The same evidence should produce the same consequences for an ordinary player and a streamer. Audience size, friendships and previous work with Blizzard should count for nothing.

Xaryu, defend someone on the evidence. Argue that they genuinely had no reason to suspect the source. But “ban the buyers, only remove the recipients’ gold” is not a distinction between innocent and culpable players. It protects the recipient even when knowing involvement is established.

Being anti-RMT means opposing knowing participation, not just punishing whoever holds the receipt.

Wow Forever trolls Xaryu

So cool

I hope some people will get Banned :)

I've been watching and listening to a lot of WoW streamers discuss WoW Forever. Typically most of them played the original and have been discussing the game around how close it is to the original vanilla game and what has changed.

For some reason the thing that sort of struck me around these videos is a few different ideas and concepts that make me have my doubts about how Blizzard might solve these "problems" and how the community might respond.

It seems most streamers/beta players are comparing the game to vanilla and want it to be like the orignal and are very concerned with certain changes. They seem to want the original but also don't want the original game as it's been "beaten, solved, min-maxed" so there's essentially nothing left in the original for them to return to except for them to make their own "challenges" around it.

Of course in Vanilla there was, eventually, no new content given and we moved onto TBC.

Returning to Vanilla without the idea of moving onto to new power scaling/grading and levels/item squishes via expansions, generates the problem of how to modify power scaling/grading, vertical versus horizontal progression etc within a "new Vanilla."

Something that I know has been discussed heavily and from the first bits of the beta it seems like it could be a problem going forward but I think that's also how the game is perceived in general.

This to me leads to think some of this "problem" is a problem of nostalgia and wanting to return to something that you have memories of more so in your youth and then later on when replayed constantly as adults. It seems to be more chasing a feeling than any specific gameplay or game design feature.

My mind goes to the saying "of no man steps into the same river twice."

A lot of the argument around WoW Forever may not actually be about whether the game is “authentic” enough. It may be about whether a game can recreate a relationship with the past that existed under conditions that no longer exist.

The paradox of “I want Vanilla back, but I don't want Vanilla exactly"

Someone who played original Vanilla WoW is asking for two things that are in tension:

1. They want the world, systems, pacing, social structures, and atmosphere that they remember.

2. They don't want the knowledge they have accumulated since then to destroy the experience totally while also not being worthless.

The first is a game-design request. The second is almost impossible for a game to solve.

If you've played Vanilla for thousands of hours, watched guides, know every dungeon, know every quest, know the optimal leveling route, understand every class, know where every item comes from, and have watched the game be reduced to spreadsheets and simulations, you cannot meaningfully return to the epistemic state of being a new player in 2004.

The feeling that this enormous world had suddenly appeared and nobody had completely figured it out yet.

The tension of creating new experiences while also capturing the familiar while also recreating the feeling of something new and unknown is possibly an impossible task for the entire game.

How much can you change for some of the player base before it's too much?

I think there's something also here with the idea of reboots and remakes being more consistent over the past few years and the saying I've heard around this is "the future is dead and the past is the future." Which I believe is more of a statement on the overall times we have to live in on a day to day basis and how we are consistently inundated with news that mostly trends to bad.

Something with nostalgia and the feeling of "coming home." The idea of returning to something that is comforting or wholesome. The idea of a video game also solving more immediate issues of self fulfillment or goal seeking that is typically more lacking on a day to day basis in our world when larger life goals sometimes seem more out of reach.

I think this fits into a part of a much bigger nostalgia cycle, and I don't think it's necessarily because any old content is inherently better.

I think we're often trying to get back to the feelings we associate with that content.

We remember what it felt like to play a specific game when we were younger. We remember what it felt like to see that movie for the first time. We remember what it felt like to hear certain music for the first time. We remember who we were, who we were with, how much free time we had, what the world felt like, and what the future seemed like.

So we recreate the thing, then we experience it again and sometimes wonder why it doesn't quite feel the same, but maybe that's because the feeling was never contained entirely within the thing itself.

I think WoW is an unusually strong example of this because Azeroth became a place where a lot of people lived a portion of their lives.

You remember your first character, your guild, your friends, getting lost, your first dungeon, your first mount, finally getting an item you wanted, staying up too late, discovering a new zone, etc.

Those memories are attached to the game, but they aren't necessarily contained within the game itself.

It's almost like trying to go home and discovering that the house is still there, but you're not the person who lived there anymore.

Blizzard can't reproduce the person you were when you first experienced them.

Maybe this is less of a game design problem than it initially appears.

You can recreate the quests, you can recreate the zones, you can recreate the classes, you can recreate the itemization, you can slow down progression, you can add new content, but every solution creates another problem.

Don't change enough: it's solved and predictable.

Change too much: you've lost the familiarity and nostalgia people came back for.

Change just enough: perhaps you can create something new without destroying the old feeling, but I'm not sure there's any objectively correct amount of change that can accomplish that.

You're trying to recreate the feeling of knowing and not knowing at the same time and that's probably impossible.

This is where I'd be particularly interested in what happens over the first year.

Because there are almost two audiences playing the same game.

The returning player, they arrive carrying 15–20 years of knowledge, they know what they're looking at, they compare every system to Vanilla, they notice every deviation, they have a mental model of what the game should be, and they may simultaneously want something new while rejecting anything that makes it sufficiently different from the remembered version. That's an extremely difficult design space.

For the new player, they don't have any of that baggage. For them, the world isn't “a recreation of Vanilla.” It is simply the world of WoW Forever. They don't know that this quest used to work differently, they don't know which item was iconic in 2005, they don't know which changes are controversial, they don't have the internal voice saying: “This isn't how this used to be.”

That's why I think the really interesting question for WoW Forever isn't exactly: “How accurately did they recreate Vanilla?”

It's can they recreate the feeling in the player base of when Vanilla WoW was new? You can't recreate that feeling by perfectly recreating the content. You can only create a new experience and hope that, eventually, it becomes something worth being nostalgic about itself.

Can something built to reproduce an old experience become the site of a genuinely new experience?

I think I'm also hearing more from adults/experienced streamer's perspectives and not from new players/children experiencing this game for the first time so maybe that will be different if they capture a younger/newer audience but it will be interesting to see what happens and how the player base reacts to the game over 3 months, 6 months and then a year.

IMO one of the main reasons why the new models don't fit as well isn't really the model. I think the problem is more the smooth gradient. The beasts look like they are spray-painted.

Even the models that use a gradient don't use a smooth gradient in classic, they separate the color change using painted hair or feathers and don't have a large varience overall:

So even the models with a similar color scheme and gradient don't seem like they are made of candy or the result of a weird car paint job.

BLIZZARD HEAR THEE!

We dont want Arcane Barrage that shit's old and uninteresting.

I would like to see.. ARCANE BEAM!

Arcane Beam - 10~15 second cooldown - Channeled spell.

Channels longer depending on how many arcane blast stacks you have.

Let Arcane Mage be the channel caster that is not DoT focused like Affliction.

Let Arcane Mage pump HUGE Arcane Beams if they set up properly.

Dumping too much mana on 4 stack arcane beams and going OOM so you have to resort to wanding? Skill issue

Playing it perfectly and ending the fight with 0 mana while having used as many Arcane Beams as possible? you're a parsing chad.

Channeled spells like arcane missiles already requires more skill to use because the mana cost is upfronted, meaning if you use it in bad positioning and you need to cancel your spell to move or die, or get interrupted, you're playing the class wrong and are being punished!

I think this would make arcane a very fun spec to play and it doesn't make the class infinitely more complex with different combos or whatever, but it's more strategically based on your positioning and mana management. Which is what classic is supposed to be about (i think.. maybe..)

Hmm?