Why I love...druids?

[Mniaron]

As guild members should already know, this is my first time through WoW. I'm familiar with basic D&D prior and had usually played triple-multiclass in other games, so I thought a druid would be a good idea.

Definitely a more difficult class to master, I think, because I have to learn four play styles at once, but I love that variety--offensive spells, healing, bear, and kitty. (kitty!) Not ideal for my idea of hybrids due to form limitations, however, but I'll stick with it for now. Still learning, of course.

I'm leveling slowly. Since every encounter is new to me, I try to sit back and consider strategies when possible since death is never a success to me even if I kill the target. (Random trivia: I'm pretty sure it was Warcraft II:ToD that I've played before, but I didn't consider a campaign successful unless NO ONE died on my side. In the last chapter, that meant I won...once, barely. XD)

It's extremely satisfying to me when I survive five simultaneous mobs slightly lower level than me or three the same level or one five levels higher or one elite the "same level," but I'm sure the more experienced in other classes would have no problem anyway. Nothing is a cakewalk to me except in retrospect and with sheer luck. (Bah, everyone will gain five levels per each I manage to gain. XD) I wish I had an AoE stun or something, though. >_>; And bash needs to land more. :<

So far, I'm satisfied with what I can do as a druid as long as it doesn't diverge too far from my ideal as a hybrid (I think Blizzard's original description did use that term though it doesn't now). I'm considering trying out a shaman on Horde side as well.

And come ON... chubkitty (in Elindrae's terms) is too damn cute. <takes graceful leap off tower>

[Alt-Girl]

Agreed on the bash thing. *feels silly for last post* Mea culpa.

[Mniaron]

icelus said:

Agreed on the bash thing. *feels silly for last post* Mea culpa.

Neh. I have nothing against other classes (except when people with pets start bragging about soloing--then I laugh). I get to kidnap you to open lockboxes or drown you in cloth! XD But really, I have to continually assess my attachment to this game to justify even the piddly monthly cost--money isn't an issue. Time is. Right now I'm pretty satisfied with my druid because everything is an adventure, and I'm playing with nice people. ^_^ At my own pace, of course. I don't remember when this particular subscription expires, and I didn't put a renewable card number in, so I'll have to reassess in another couple months or so.

At the same time, I'm not so attached that I feel any remote need to buy the expansion. We'll see.

OH, and to the druids who might be reading this (esp. Elindrae)--
I've been trying to study up on bear threat and aggro, as you know. If you haven't been following the undocumented patch notes, apparently both maul and swipe have had their aggro generation reduced to a flat rate. Swipe's threat modifier seems to have been completely removed in favor of increased damage(?). Maul crit threat has also been reduced, supposedly, but I don't know by how much. The general consensus is that you must be a 41-point feral build to hold aggro more easily, but I don't know what this means in various situations. Hopefully this is critical only to raiders, since I don't intend to be one. <_<; >_>;

[Alt-Girl]

Well damn. I uber-modified my entire post of unabashed horn-tooting for nothing. Curse me and my paranoid insecurities.

Oh well. Guess I'll need to do more spiffy things to brag about then.

[Cognite]

*Sigh*

Well I love druids too, but upon some slight investigation, nobody else other than druids do. So the company has changed alot, and now we're in tough straights now, and headed for worse times likely. I tried to tank for Lower Blackrock Spire the other night, and had a signifigantly more difficult time than ususal. If it wasen't for growl, I would barely have any control. Very depressing.

And it would have been easier if I actually had mangle, but since a blizard patch screwed things up so now you can't use mangle unless you had it before, well....

[Mniaron]

(A warning on directionless rambling. Avert your eyes and turn back before it's too late. TURN BACK!)

And so I am holding a trial disc of Dark Age of Camelot in my paws... (which I obviously can't install until tech support fixes my computer, which may take two more FRAKKING WEEKS T_T but I digress).

As I've said, I'm always assessing how well my playstyle meshes with Warcraft, and I've 99% decided that I won't be renewing my subscription come May (unless certain other friends also join me, or something), nor will I be getting the expansion. I only play hybrids, and I've come to the conclusion that Warcraft isn't hybrid-friendly the way I want it to be and the game mechanics aren't what I really enjoy...

Everything is so binary; I can't think about quests outside of combat because everything is accept/decline and fail/succeed. The stories aren't interesting because I'm not required to invest anything with the NPCs. The whole setup encourages players to look at the rewards, skip the quest description, and just hit accept/decline for later. Compared to my old favorite, Baldur's Gate, Warcraft really has nothing in the way of quests that make me think. There are no dialog trees nor decisions outside of what quest reward you want, no RP-type consequences. And grinding for things (leather/rep/etc.) gets boring so quickly. I mean, "Myst" was a great old thinking game, and solving that in two days without cheats and with plenty of sleep was a real accomplishment to me. "Accomplishments" in Warcraft are levels and stuffs; that's fine, just not really my thing.

Looking at talent trees, the common conception I see is that nothing under the "top tier" talents are worthwhile, so hybridization is discouraged; this seems especially true for druids, who "must" carry multiple sets of gear prior to (and after) the 2.x patches to fulfill "multiple roles"--feels completely illogical to me, anyway. A term I caught on the forums while looking for advice is "min/max." Is this a raiding term? Maybe, but the druids I know from my other server and the druids I've met on this server all carry sets of gear to help them with a specific "role" in any party--that's my problem. That feels so unrealistic and nonhybrid. I couldn't even imagine RPing that. "Hey, this next pull that we've done eight times before is going to have four hard-hitters, so put on your healing gear because we need you to heal." Eh? That line has never been explicitly said to me, but comments about my spec and gear choices have been mentioned. It's disheartening, but not necessarily reflective on the other player for being a prick--it reflects the overall game mechanics.

Everything is so gear dependent, so the real purpose of Warcraft is to accrue stuff; you level to use and get more stuff, and with new stuff you can get even more stuff. >_> Then you show off said stuff.

Originally I was optimistic and thought about getting BC later with the intent to go 33/14/14 (seriously XD) for a mana spec that was a mite similar to AD&D mage/cleric/thief. Well, maybe not. Right now I'm going to respec again to a version of cleric/rogue, so that's okay, but still... Tree structures tend to box me in, and I hate being boxed in. Feats don't really work like this. The original Warcraft druid description was so attractive to me: hybrid. I thought it would be like multiclassing, but it's much harder to apply that idea to Warcraft druids with all the form and gear limitations.

So what about shamans? That's the only other hybrid class I would consider, but there's the issue of game mechanics again, and I'm not so in love with Warcraft that I'm willing to buy BC for Draenei shaman. I could try Horde, yes... and I will do that more, but it still comes down to game mechanics. Warcraft is a DPS game. There's nothing wrong with that; that's just how it is. All DPS specs have a much easier time (soloing, certainly, though parties require a variety of classes). Playing a hybrid as a hybrid here is certainly much harder than pure DPS classes, and this is evidenced with the class census and the fact that the leveling contest from the last Warcraft con-thing had pretty much all rogues (hm, well, I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere in a Blizzard-type newsletter thing). I have the option of speccing all points into feral, but to be honest, that's just the same as being a rogue with minor spell abilities that I can't use in feral forms anyway, and it feels like a copout--i.e., every class being told to spec DPS from 1-59 to level. I don't like leveling for the sake of leveling and stuffs. The CRPGs I've enjoyed didn't have this sort of emphasis.

And RP? That's great that Blizzard has a handful of loosely termed servers for this purpose... even though the game is advertised as a "role-playing" game to begin with, which is amusing now that I think about it. But outside of noted RP events and exclusive, larger RP guilds, a newcomer would be hard-pressed to find a wholly role-playing-friendly environment. Though if I'm not fully enjoying the game mechanics either, is it worth it to pay $$/month for just RP? My old characters on my other server are there only for chat purposes now, but why pay $$/month for chat?

Now, obviously, I have only myself to blame for not giving most random strangers a chance. The only value a MMORPG has is with the social networking... But I've also come to accept that the average age and maturity level of the Warcraft crowd is--yes--below my own. And then we get into the various types of elitism, myself included, and then people get boxed off even more. Well, that's just no fun. <_<

I like my poor druid. She's going to live and die a hybrid all the way. But I'll also be trying out DAoC and buying IWD (oldie, but good 3ed).

I think we should RP more. ;D I'm not good at it at all, and sometimes my heart isn't in it, but without the social aspect, this MMORPG really means nothing to me. On the other hand, group-questing is always fun, so that ups my enjoyment, but our guild is fairly small. There are two points in this: I think EK should prepare to try to get more people into its ranks or prepare to disband later. I saw the attrition problem early on. The middle ground (stagnation) is honestly too depressing. I'm not saying I'm important to EK at all, but looking at pure population and activity, once I leave, I hope EK and you wonderful people will still be around... or you've moved on to bigger and better things. (Oh, I got off track there, huh.)

Hm. Come give Mniadruidkitty a hugz and [Ice Cold Milk]! <also kittysmacks computer>

[Doskious Steele]

Mnia, I've been having the same issues as you have mentioned with MMOs ever since I started, and you're rignt, it's all the social aspect. IMO we all could be as well served by somehow getting into a Single/Multi Player networked private game like BG/BG2. Maybe not that, inasmuch as it's less group-RP friendly and tends to focus on 1st player a lot. NWN / NWN2 might provide for a better experience.

THere might be other games too, should be looked into. Or something.

I do intend to keep reading the forums here tho, even if my frequency in WoW declines. And IM works too ^_^ Good ol' D&D via IM is something I've always wondered about... Seems it would be easier to keep focus and sens secret messages to people and stuff.

Anyway.

Good luck with the Computer >_>


~Doskious Steele

[Daeliria]

@dosk: "dreading" the forums? I think you mean "reading". XD

Something I felt compelled to point out, on a third reading:

It's really hard to make hybrid situations in WoW. D&D is intended to be played only in groups, where you need people to do different things and some people to do all-sort-of-things. But any game (online or not) that can easily be played mostly solo, has to give all classes an equal chance to get through content quickly. This, yes, usually means ramping up DPS, because good players will hardly ever be in a situation where they're wishing for more healing or more damage reduction on a regular basis.

If WoW was designed instead so that you couldn't get through the game except in parties of three or four or more, there'd be plenty of room for free-floating fifth members. (I should add at this point that my preferred D&D class is a bard - originally only for the RP aspect of it, but I ended up playing three or four years' worth of bards and never learning how to make an attack roll until I made a ranger.) But as it is, players in instance groups don't need hybrids. They aren't struggling for their lives with every group, so they don't need reinforcements on every front. And so the class that can do everything is recruited for certain specific things and never gets to do everything. And Blizzard has responded to that by basically saying, well, if you guys don't need hybrids to be hybrids, we'll give you ways to not really be hybrids.

I hope that the Eilon runs, at least, gave you opportunities to do all sorts of things without putting you in a definite role. (On second thought, you were probably main healer most of the time. Sorry. >.>)

*kittypats*

[Mniaron]

I think the WoW druid class is a special case of awkward non-hybridity compared to shaman or paladin, though; those two classes can behave like the multiclass that I originally envisioned, though I've gotten used to shapeshifting in the middle of combat. Ironically, I hadn't played any druid class until now because I've always been turned off by the 2ed true neutral requirement, regardless of 3ed changes. And I never played paladin for the same reason. Hee. But yes, I've gotten to caster/bear/kitty in guild runs before, so that's nice. I don't mind healing--after all, my favored D&D multiclass is cleric/rogue/*.

(On second thought, it's extremely unlikely for me to pick up another MMORPG in the next year or so if it has a monthly fee; money isn't a problem, but it does create a certain "obligation" of play time for me. If it's free or a one-time fee, that might be different. I'll wait and see.)