Everything Changes… and No, This Isn’t About Pokémon

Alright the above title does share the name of a song that is used in Pokémon.  No I’m not going to go into details about the song, other then to say sharing the name is not the same thing as a post being about the item.  The name is merely a good explanation about this post.

As most people who play World of Warcraft (WoW for short) know that as of the date of writing this, WoW has a new expansion set to be released later this year entitled “Cataclysm” (Cat for short).   Information on this expansion can be found on WoW’s Cat site and information is coming out on their main page in the forums.  Most of this information admittedly is pre-beta testing, so it is very early to judge, however it does show just where Blizzard (the company that produces WoW) is heading with the game.

I play WoW, and have a level 80 character, a few level 70s, I have played every class up to level 10 multiple times, and have participated in every profession in the game.  I have played both horde side, and alliance side, and started with the game back at 1.0, (Cat being the 4.0 expansion).  In short I have some experience with the game, and while there are many people who know more then I do, I can’t help but feel a certain wrongness associated with the new expansion.  Let me explain.

You see to begin with Death Knights (DK) are becoming more “Warrior like”, when I say this I mean that they are gaining specific specialization (i.e. spec) talent trees.  They are at their most “Warrior like” currently in the Blood spec., save their abilities let them heal themselves.  Now however they are going to become tanks, already their Ice spec makes them like a furry warrior, but soon the Blood spec will function much like a tank.  However unlike a Warrior’s tanking (being damage absorption for hard hitting enemies), Blood specs will still be able to heal themselves, in short they will be a super tank.

Where I find this largely disheartening is that DK are a “Hero Class” unlike Warriors who are a normal class for WoW.  Blizzard denies that this means they are supposed to be better then a typical class, however the name certainly implies that they are better, and certainly Blizzard has admitted that “DK were designed to have an out for nearly every situation”.  Where does this leave Warriors?  Already the game has higher DPS (Damage Per Second) classes, specifically Rogues, Shaman are gaining some tanking ability, and as mentioned DK’s are becoming tanks.

My immediate impression is that Warriors (whom my level 80 is one of), will becomes an obsolete class.  Unless Blizzard manages to handle things very well, we have an immediate problem for Warriors.  Of their 3 talent trees, 1 (arms) has no clear cut use, 1 (protection) is for tanking, and the final (fury) is DPS.  This in my mind clearly indicates the possibility for warriors to become a obsolete class since there will be other classes that can do the same, have more “outs” (ways to get out of bad situations), and more functionality.  After all, if a battle lasts a few minuets longer, BUT you have a class that can better handle pulls, heal themselves, and have more group attacks, which would you prefer?  Me?  I’ll take the class that can do it all.

In saying this I would like to note that Blizzard has surprised me before.  I can remember having a level 20 character in vanilla Wow (ver. 1.xx) that that had never seen a gold coin.  Even in Burning Crusade (2.0) I had low levels that had never seen gold, however they have worked hard to improve upon this and make leveling and the experience for low levels much smoother, much better.  There are still issues for the mid ranges (30 – 60) places where the game drags some, or you have long “cross the zone” quests, however there is VAST POTENTAL to remedy this in the Cat expansion.

Additionally as previously mentioned the information is early.  What has been released at this point is merely what Blizzard plans and intends.  We don’t know how everything will work, how everything will function, and how it will all fit together.  We don’t know what tweaks and changes will have to be made, or what the Beta* will bring (my assumption being that the expansion is currently in Alpha, or very closed Beta testing).  I however am leery, and fully expect to see my most cherished character become the binary equivalent of garbage.  Warm up the keyboard, its time to power level a new toon (character).

* I put this explanation down below because unlike my common acronyms which I can simply explain there are stages to testing games which can’t be done in a few words.  To start with most games have 4 phases that they run though, some 5.

The first is the “Data” stage which can be broken down more, but for the most generic purposes this is the part of the game where things are planned, developed and the game begins to be built.  I generally won’t break down this stage any more the needed.

Next is the Alpha testing stage also known as the “Internal” phase, though this is name is something of a misnomer.  This phase is usually done by employees, though often times close friends or family may participate.  The goal of this phase is testing of systems, verification of functionality, and testing bug testing.

Stage 3 the Beta phase is perhaps the most interesting because it comes in two parts, in my mind making it actually stages 3 and 4.  “Closed Beta” is when the developers are doing additional testing; getting data from the players about how the mechanics are working, checking for functionality on a larger scale, and making changes as required.  This phase is something of a large scale bug test, and place for systems to be redesigned as needed.  Here the game is (mostly) complete and they are looking for errors, to adjust systems, difficulty, etc.

Open Beta is the 4^th phase of testing, and is commonly called the “Stress Test” when referring to large scale internet games.  The goal of this phase is to have as large numbers of people playing the game, pushing the systems as far as possible (for the number of people), finding out what works, what doesn’t, and generally generating a great deal of stress for the developers, and for the servers.  Usually at this stage the game is complete, testing is looking at real world effects of game play, how the systems handle large numbers of players, and if there are unintended bugs from changes in earlier play.

The final phase which always occurs, but is only in Internet style (and increasingly other style) games considered to be a testing phase, is the “Release Candidate” stage, or Omega stage testing.  This stage of testing is the product that customers will purchase on store shelves, or download as the “final” product (until patches come out).  In other words, this is what players who have “early access” to a game play, and, unless a patch is released on or before launch day, what you get when you pick up the game.  Often times due to the nature of suddenly having tens if not hundreds of thousands of people flocking to the servers, this can result in changes having to be made, and so is sometimes qualified as a part of the testing cycle.  As my Computer Science professors used to say “You can never find all the bugs in your system, no matter how well you test them.  Give it to the public, and you’ll find holes you never dreamt of.”