OK, so CoH was the first MMO I ever played that wasn’t text-based, and I enjoyed it for quite a while, mostly due to the city environments and teaming. It eventually became a grind with little payoff, due to
No loot.
Annoying travel time.
Repetitive tasks.
From what I’ve been reading, WoW seems to be the cat’s meow. Here are my questions:
All the spells/abilities/whatevers, do they work roughly like CoH, with recharge times, etc? No clunky interface to fight with, just hit a button and start casting?
What does loot do for you, besides increase stats? Does it have any cool effects like Diablo (PBAOE burn, or frost weapons, or other coolio stuff?)
Can anyone explain the item degradation penalty a bit more? How big of a pain is this?
I played HL2 on my work laptop, with a Radeon 9000, and it ran fairly well. Can I expect the same from WoW?
re #3: Items degrade as you use them. You can get them repaired for pretty cheap so its no big deal - it’s probably just something they stuck in as a money sink to keep the economy from getting out of hand.
When you die and choose to respawn immediately your items suffer an immeidate 25% degradation, which I guess could get expensive if you have nice stuff.
“All the spells/abilities/whatevers, do they work roughly like CoH, with recharge times, etc? No clunky interface to fight with, just hit a button and start casting?”
Pretty much the same. Most abilities have cooldown timers that prevent you from spamming them. I’d say that all abilities have some kind of governing device that prevents them from being spammed. With rogues, for example, some attacks have a cooldown and some attacks don’t but all attacks use up energy, so you can’t just spam attacks regardless.
“What does loot do for you, besides increase stats? Does it have any cool effects like Diablo (PBAOE burn, or frost weapons, or other coolio stuff?)”
A lot of weapons have procs. There’s some armor and jewelry that have procs too. For example there’s a trinket you can equip that has a chance to proc a holy shield around your character. Weapon enchants can add a glowing effect too.
“Can anyone explain the item degradation penalty a bit more? How big of a pain is this?”
It’s a minor nuisance. I hardly notice it. Your items will never break, and they will remain 100% effective until they reach 0% durability.
“I played HL2 on my work laptop, with a Radeon 9000, and it ran fairly well. Can I expect the same from WoW?”
My guess would be yes since WoW is less demanding than HL2.
I’ve been stubbornly ignoring MMORPGs for a while now, but all of this WoW talk is starting to wear away at my resistance. So my question is, how is playing WoW different from playing Diablo with a larger world and many more people (and no end to the game)? My knowledge of MMORPG mechanics is minimal, so it’s hard for me to imagine why I would want to play one given that it costs extra money per month. But you guys can’t all be wrong. :)
Sorry if this is a thread hijack, but there are so many WoW threads already and my question is at least vaguely related to the original poster’s question.
It’s similar to Diablo in a superficial way: you get quests, whack monsters, grab their loot, and dress up your character with it. Of course, that describes pretty much every RPG out there. There are three main differences, though. First, everything is on a much grander, more complex scale. You have more character options (because you pick race as well as class), the world is much bigger, you have tradeskills to round out your character, etc. Second, the combat is much more complex. You have several tactical options easily accessible during combat, in contrast to having two options (unless you were fiddling with hotkeys a lot) in the Diablo series. Third, the game is in full 3D, which makes a big difference in terms of what they can do with the art, architecture, and immersiveness. And lastly, of course, you’re part of a giant community. That’s huge. You can play with a bunch of folks from Qt3, or a bunch of your friends, or meet a bunch of your friends’ friends or even a bunch of strangers that you enjoy playing with. You buy from, sell to, help, are helped by, and fight with and against dozens of other players every week.
That’s actually four things, because I added the 3D world as I thought of it. I’m going to stop typing before I come up with another way that WoW is different from (and better than) Diablo, like the way you can re-do your character for a cost if you’ve put together a bad build. Whoops.
When you die and choose to respawn immediately your items suffer an immeidate 25% degradation, which I guess could get expensive if you have nice stuff.
On the other hand, you can just run back to your corpse for a loss of 5%, which is pretty minor, even when you have stuff much better than normal.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned, travel time is worse in WoW than CoH. Once you travel somewhere you can open up a wind rider path, similar to CoH’s subway system, but you do have to travel there initially on foot, and most classes don’t get any kind of travel boost until level 40. Shaman get a 40% travel buff at 20, Hunters get a 30% travel buff at 30, all other have to wait until level 40 with a TON of money to get a horse. Even then, the horse is 70% movement speed buff at most, which is less than even Fly from CoH.
I have a Gateway Laptop with a Mobility 9000 processor. WoW will not run, because I can’t find drivers that are DX9.0c compatible. (I can install the latest omega drivers from ATI, but for whatever reason these don’t enable hardware acceleration in DX9.0c mode.)
So you have the hardware requirements, but laptop drivers can be a far different beast than desktop drivers. You might want to check around (and perhaps go so far as to borrow a friend’s copy and install it first or see if Fileplanet still has the beta download if you have the bandwidth to see if it craps out on trying to run as mine did).
Rywill: Thanks for the response. Yeah, I gathered that it wasn’t just like Diablo, but I couldn’t think of any other game to compare with. At any rate, your description intrigued me enough to look for the game last night. The store had a notice posted saying they were out of stock and Blizzard wouldn’t be sending them any new copies until they added more servers. So I’ve dodged the bullet for the moment. :)
Last I’d heard, places like Best Buy have plenty of copies (at least, 'round here they do – one of my friends said there were three Collector’s Editions at our local Best Buy. When I told him they were going for $120+ on eBay, he got that “Eureka!” look in his eye)
Yep, I love the way they implemented the city-to-city travel. You can walk, but if both cities have a critter hanger (and you’ve visited the destination city before), you can pay a small fee and fly there. It’s not instantaneous, you actually ride a flying beast from one city to another.
No joke! My human mage ran into a Tauren in an allied zone. He was probably very high level (it just said ?? where his level should be) and he was decked out in this armor that looked like a cross between samarai armor and the totum poles of the North West, and he was Enormous. It was really cool just walking up to him and staring at him (since it was an allied zone he couldn’t hurt me).
Yep, I love the way they implemented the city-to-city travel. You can walk, but if both cities have a critter hanger (and you’ve visited the destination city before), you can pay a small fee and fly there. It’s not instantaneous, you actually ride a flying beast from one city to another.
Taurens are so huge they look almost comical riding these things. The other races look a lot more convincing.[/quote]
It’s nice compared to EQ/etc, but it pales in comparison to CoH’s subway system, where you can go anywhere at any time without unlocking it first, a nd the trip itself is close to instant. WoW’s system forces you to see more of the game world, which is a ton prettier than CoH’s in my opinion, but it’s still far more tedious.
It also costs money for each way on the fliers, ranging from half a silver to almost 10 silver depending on where you are and where you’re going. For the most part it scales well, but it’s still a pretty big cost.
I like it, overall. I think it’s kind of cool that you have to actually find a destination before you can just fly there. The cost is fine; it’s just another example of WoW’s many small money-sinks that are intended to keep the economy in line without hitting you with giant whopping charges for stuff (similar to the item decay system). Whether it will actually work as intended, who knows, but I don’t mind it. I do find it somewhat annoying that you can’t skip the actual trip, though. Sitting there watching my guy’s ass and a griffon’s ass for 90 seconds is not particularly fun. The first couple of times you make a trip it’s usually pretty cool; after that, it’s just some time to grab a soda or reread your quest log.
WoW definitely has a LOT of travelling. Way more than City of Heroes. One thing I would really like to see is a vastly reduced cooldown time on the hearthstone, or somethign to buy at a higher level with a vastly reduced cooldown time. One quest had me running around for about an hour straight, just talking to people and filling up vials and whatnot.
Loot is something WoW has done so amazingly well. You can reasonably expect to get an upgrade of some kind every 4 hours or so. Things come so incrementally that you aren’t really stuck if you don’t get everything you roll for. It’s also nice to see progression with choice. I have had 3 staves thrown my way, all equally good but in different ways. I had to choose function over fashion. Then a jerk in my group rolled for a staff, won it, then sold it for a few silvers. He didn’t even realize I was a staff user.
Seriously: I see MMORPGs like WoW as uber-dungeon hacks, like Rogue on steroids - it’s all about the grind. You take quests and fight monsters to gain XP and loot to make yourself stronger so you can take harder quests and fight tougher monster to gain even more XP and better loot so…well, you get the idea. Welcome to the treadmill.
Don’t get me wrong: WoW’s really good for what it is and it’s a lot of fun if you like that sort of thing. It’s got a huge, detailed world; a ton of different quests and monsters; colorful, vibrant graphics; varied, distinct classes you can play; engaging combat; lots of items to buy / loot / craft; and good playability both solo and in groups. The nicest thing I can say about it is it took the basic EQ formula and made it much less tedious so it’s more like fun. 8)
That said, though, it’s still an inherently repetitive experience - in some ways better, in some ways worse than its competitors. That huge world can take a loooong time to traverse; if you’re not into sight-seeing, you may find all that travel boring. [I found travel in CoH less tedious and time-consuming overall, because of the instantaneous subway system and the fact you can get a travel-boosting power like speed or teleport at a fairly low level.] And while there’s a lot of different monsters in the game, you tend to spend a lot of time fighting the same half-dozen or so monsters in any given area before you move onto the next one. And while the tougher fights do require some skill, you spend a lot of time on mindless lesser fights. Crafting is much less cumbersome than in EQ, but it’s still largely a number-crunching task, not a test of your skill.
Seriously: I see MMORPGs like WoW as uber-dungeon hacks, like Rogue on steroids - it’s all about the grind. You take quests and fight monsters to gain XP and loot to make yourself stronger so you can take harder quests and fight tougher monster to gain even more XP and better loot so…well, you get the idea. Welcome to the treadmill.
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Speaking of which, I got a set item last night. I had no idea there were set items in the game. The text color is gold, the exact same gold of Diablo’s Uniques. I wonder what the set items do in tandem. (It tells you how many items there are in the set; my set has 5 items, and I have the gloves. I can’t decide if I should wear them or sell them for rediculous amounts of money. I guess it depends on whether there’s a chance I’ll see another one.)
