Burdens I miss (part 1 of ?)

This started off as just a list and as I began to expand it kept getting longer and longer. So I think I’ll break this one into multiple posts.

I started playing just after Burning Crusade came out so while I haven’t seen everything, I’ve been through the vast majority of versions of World of Warcraft. In that time, there have been a lot of great (flying!) and terrible (CRZ) things added as well as the removal of great (scenarios) and terrible things (limit of 20 on crafting material stacks). There can be arguments over how the game has been made easier this way or that but what I wanted to talk about are things that were removed from the game that they were probably right to remove, but I kind of miss or even want back in the game.

Ammo

For those that didn’t start playing until Cataclysm, originally hunters had to carry the appropriate ammo  for their ranged weapon. The quality of the ammo ranged from common (white) to legendary (orange).

The good:

Realism. Okay, so take "realism" with a grain of salt when we have a game with elves and demons and magic and the like, but I appreciated that it was trying to reflect an aspect of reality. It really reminded me of D&D where you had to carry, track, and purchase arrows for your bow. Yes, it was a pain, but it also meant more thinking about the character since arrows took up space and weight. Weight isn't a problem here in WoW but space is.

Income for Engineers. Engineers could use up all of that damn Rough Stone to make Rough Blasting Powder and make basic ammo at low level and make some money. Or just save money for themselves. And they could keep making better and better quality ammo too.

The bad:

Space. While it could stack up to 1,000 shots/arrows, ammo could take up a lot of space if you didn’t want to have to find a vendor all of the time. And while engineering was great for guns, there wasn’t anything comparable for bow & arrow. That always bothered me.

Cost. A mage didn’t have to spend gold to do DPS but a hunter did. It wasn’t always a huge cost and there were of course ways of limiting it (engineering, high end ammo, etc) but in the end, a hunter had to pay to do damage.

Quality. If you wanted to be effective, you needed to have good ammo. Just like with any piece of gear, it wasn’t the end-all-be-all but it mattered. And so if you didn’t want to spend a lot of money on the top end ammo or were not an engineer or didn’t get good ammo drops, your damage could suffer because you weren’t getting the best quality ammo available to you.

Complex talent trees

I have the second edition of the World of Warcraft Master Guide  and I used to love to read it. It helped me to try to understand the world that I was just learning to explore. WoWhead (and before that Thottbot) has much better information on in game stuff, but this was my starting place. Plus you can read it offline (<--- what is that, the youngins say)

One of the things that I would do is look over the talent trees and think about what my focus for a character would be. Not in a technical playing type of focus but in the way in envisioned my character.

The good:

The freedom of choice. I really enjoyed the ability to choose what I wanted. To go deep into a tree if that theme fit or to take a little bit from everything at the sacrifice of not getting the defining talents. As you may have guessed, the theme, the RP idea for my character was typically more important than the effect on game play. To me, at the level I was playing, the talents did not usually do much. Some did help me of course, but most were not visibly impacting my game. So if I had chosen wrong, I couldn’t see it. But being able to flavor my character correctly, in my mind, really added to my quality of play.

The bad:
Wrong choices. It really did matter what talent you picked if you were part of a group (raid or dungeon). Certain skills were not just better but decidedly so. If you didn’t have X talent from this line, which is buried 15 talent points in, you weren’t going to be part of the team. Now, the issue is not necessarily with the talent in that situation but rather creating content that requires a specific set of talents. Whatever the case, the freedom to choose what you wanted created the freedom to exclude yourself from content. Not typically an issue for me, but it was for many.


Firewood

In order to make fire, you must have something to burn so you had to carry firewood. And flint and tinder too.

The good:

Realism. Yes, I actually, kind of, miss carrying firewood. And it is pretty much exactly for the reasons you might expect, “realness” and RP. There really is no other good reason for it.

The bad:

Space. Not a huge amount since it was two slots (which comparatively speaking, was a lot early on) but again, there really isn’t a “good” reason to have it other than to have a nod to reality.


There are several more that I plan to type up, but as I said, I do see why these things were removed from the game. It isn’t as simple as “dumbing it down” or making it easier for the casual (which I wouldn’t complain about anyways). It’s about reasonable game design. Most of those things, from a story/RP perspective, make a lot of sense but when contrasted with the gameplay reality, just don’t mesh well.

Still, if I could have them back for me, I probably would.