Friday, September 6, 2019

My First Add-On

I've been playing Warcraft Classic for a few days now when I have time, and I've finally sought out an add-on, a mana bar that shows when my druid is shape-shifted. I'm pretty sure this was also the first add-on I installed when I first started playing Warcraft. If I was asked what my first add-on was prior to Warcraft Classic I don't think I would have been able to answer. Such a silly little thing that eventually got baked into the standard UI and the add-on forgotten, but at the same time such important information to have.

Now I've only gone so far as to find and download the add-on so far, DruidBarClassic. I still need to install it and make sure it works next time I play, but I'm pretty optimistic.

We'll see if this leads to another cascade of ever increasing numbers of add-ons, or if my current minimalist outlook on add-ons will prevail.  A lot of that may be up to add-on developers since the availability of add-ons is pretty limited as compared to when I started playing near the beginning of the Burning Crusade.

Friday, February 8, 2019

Level Scaling Caps are a Mixed Blessing

In the past few months, or I support over the past year is more accurate, I've been working towards loremaster achievements with alts.  Particularly with the new allied races and the "new" level scaling changes.

I've run into a couple of annoyances: group quests for old content than cannot be soloed, and outleveling zone before finishing the content.  Both can be worked around, but both also sort of defeat the purpose of level scaling.  I can wait and come back when I outlevel the content in the case of group quests, and I can just keep completing gray quests and killing green mobs when I want to stick it out and finish a zone.

Ideally the group quests would be nerfed and/or made to be single player, and the level scaling scale to a higher level, just another 1-2 levels would be fine.

If they really wanted to get fancy they should dynamically change the level scaling cap based on what content you've played.  You could level up to the point of the current content (the character boost level) in whatever old content you wanted, but killing mobs or completing quests in the next content tier would snap the scaling for the previous content tier down.  For example you could quest to level 83 in vanilla content, but as soon as you started questing in Outland or Northrend the level camp for vanilla content would snap back to 60.

The whole point of the level scaling is to be able to quest along happily in whatever content you are working on without feeling you need to leave for greener pastures to actually progress, and right now that is broken along the boundaries between content tiers.

Some sort of compromise could be an NPC in Stormwind to toggle level scaling caps on or off.  That seems to be the go to solution for similar things.

Friday, February 1, 2019

Clang!

I really like the paladin sound effects, and the visuals are pretty good too.  I'm not sure when they changed, but it was sometime after I abandoned my paladin in Cataclysm, and before I picked it back up in Legion just to see the class hall.

Maybe I've just been playing a druid so long that the growls and roars don't do it for me anymore.  I noticed they changed, but they don't excite me in the way the paladin sounds do.

I've been devoting pretty much all my unscheduled play time (aka non raid time) to leveling up a new Dark Iron paladin.  Something about the race/class fantasy of cleansing holy fire does it for me.  So far I've made it up to level 80 and I am really excited to get into Warlord of Draenor content to make use of some Blackrock style transmog gear, Blackhand's hammer in particular.