Friday, September 19, 2014

What If Your Class Was Removed?

After talking about blizzard removing things yesterday I started to think what wouldn't they remove.  Almost anything is fair game.  They can remove or redesign zones, remove raids, dungeons, gear, titles, achievements, mounts, pets, mobs, you name it.  They could even remove entire races if they choose to and just leave your race as the "last survivors" if they wanted to because that is what some races are to begin with.  But what about your class?

What if tomorrow you woke up and logged on to your favorite warcraft news source or random internet blog to hear about the recent hub bub going on with the game to see announcements about your class being removed?

Lets say for some reason blizzard did not like the idea of 11 classes and wanted to move backwards to a nice even number like ten and it was your class that they decided to put on the chopping block.  Outside of the clear outrage you would see on the forums, and many blogs like mine, over the removal of your favorite class with no warning, it very well might be the first time that anyone would agree rage quitting the game is actually the right answer.

While some of us have many alts and might even like to play them most people consider themselves a particular class.  I am a hunter, that is what I am.  There are no ifs, ands or buts about it.  I like the play style, I like having a pet, I like being the loner sort of class that is capable of doing many things on its own. So even if I have all classes at max level and multiples of many of them at max level I am a hunter first and foremost.  So this post, for me at least, is about the hunter class being removed from the game.  For you, make it about whatever class is your true love in the game, the one you like to play best and the one that you most closely identify yourself with.

This is a what if in all scenes of the words because when you think of things they could remove this would be as far as possible of anything that could happen because it never will.  But to continue with the what if, what if you do not rage quit.  Which would be, quite honestly, the result most people that play that class as a main would do. So no rage quitting allowed.  Now to the question posed to me, change the class to the one that best suits you for your answer.

What if the hunter class was removed?

I first started playing a hunter when I tested it out in BC mainly because it was what was highlighted on my screen.  I wish there were some sort of deeper thought put into it but it was highlighted and when I read the desorption I liked it, really that was all that was involved in choosing the play a hunter.  It was a ranged class, which if you have ever played any fantasy game ever in the history of gaming you would know is the best class to be, and it had a pet that could take the hits for you while you beat down a mob.  So hunter it was for me.  It sounded good.

As the years went by I made a lot of other classes, even had a few more classes to play around with before my hunter was max level.  Mostly support characters made with the intention of helping my hunter.  Like someone to make gear for me, someone to make bags for me, you get the idea.

So I was an alt-a-holic before I ever actually became one.  With that I learned to play with many different styles and it became clear in no time at all that hunter was the only class I ever waned to be.  So if I could not be a hunter, while I could still find some joy in the game otherwise, I really would not get that into it.  But being I am not allowed to quit in this what if now that the hunter class is being removed I have to consider other options.

For me it is not as hard as you might think.  I have always had my main, a hunter, and two additional mains, for a few expansions now.  I've worked with the three main system and I am used to it.  One main for tanking and one main for healing along with my over all main, the hunter of course.  Those other mains usually ended up being a druid for tanking and a priest for healing.  For a short time in cataclysm I was mostly healing on my shaman and mostly tanking on my warrior, but in time I went back to my druid and priest combo for my tank and healer mains as it was.

I have dabbled in the other damage dealers and all their specs.  I do not like any of the other ranged classes.  I could sink my teeth into a warlock, or one might assume, as it does have a pet to tank and it does (or very soon did) have some ability to do damage while moving but I just never felt comfortable with a lock.  I could play a mage because they can do what I love to do with my hunter better than any of the other classes I have played and that is kite.  Mages are quite good at that.  But no, they did not feel right either and always feel way to squishy.

Nearly all the damage dealers have something I like about them, but they just are not for me.  I am sure everyone that has a main can sympathize with me there.  No matter how we try, no matter what we like, an alt will always be an alt.

And that is where my problem would lie.  I am an average at absolute best healer.  Sure I am healing heroic, sure I can heal most things, but when it comes to cutting edge stuff I will never touch that with a ten foot pole.  As far as tanking goes I do that a slight bit better than I do with healing.  I am a very serviceable tank.  Given a little time playing with it to into a grove with it I believe I could meet my potential as a tank, at least a hell of a lot easier than I can as a healer.

Over all however, I am a damage dealer, that is what I like to do.  When I am on my hunter and I pug I usually just tell the raid leader.  I know the fights, just point at what you want me to kill and I will kill it.  I do not need any explanation.  And that is the truth.  It is how I play.  I study the fights and what is relevant to me first to do my job to the best of my ability.  I rarely if ever go into a fight not knowing what I want to do and how I want to do it.  I plan out my cooldowns before the first pull.  I plan out my movements before the first pull.  I take pride in being the best bringer of death that I could possibly be.  My job is the be the best killer I am capable of being and I try my best.  It is the fun of the class for me.

So that means while I would still have a main tank and a main healer neither of those would be my new main.  I would need a new damage dealer.  Not a main as a tank or not a main as a healer, my main will need to be just as my hunter is, a dealer of death.  So which damage dealer would I choose?

The obvious choice would be to choose one where I can double dip.  One I can tank and DPS on, or one I can heal and DPS on.  Or even better yet, one and I can tank, heal and DPS on like a druid, monk or a paladin.

I'll rule out the monk because although I did have a short stint as a main tank on my monk this expansion, which included tanking for some of our earliest clears of ToT I abandoned it shortly after SoO came out because I was just not feeling it any longer.  I've never tested monk healing so that would be worth a shot at some point maybe and I can say that I like monk DPS even if it is melee but not enough to main it.

Now on to the druid.  No thank you.  I am not fond of the kitty toolkit.  I played around with it once this expansion and gave it a true effort to play it and I did manage to get it working.  Even the advanced rotation.  However, while fighting I oft times found myself losing track, not because of lack of skill on my part, but because I was not enjoying it and started to zone out.  There is too much to keep track of as a cat and if I am going to get bored at doing it that quickly it will only hurt my game play because a bored player is a bad player that makes mistakes.  And I was starting to make mistakes.  Balance just never floated my boat, all 2.3 seconds I tried playing it for on the various occasions I did attempt to play one.  No thank you.  At least being a druid healer I could get into but that would not solve the issue where I need a damage dealer.

For the paladin the answer is a lot easier.  I do not like paladin healing and I do not like the peaks and valley feeling to the DPS rotation.  So paladin is not even an option I would consider.  It is tank or nothing.

Now for the ones that can heal and DPS only which would be shaman and priest.  Although I have used both as my main healer over the years and I really love both shaman and priest healing I am not keen on the damage dealer part of if.  I can not stand shadow.  Talk about boring, that one is up there.  For elemental it is better than shadow at least but still takes place in the category of lacking buttons and waiting on procs does not make for compelling game play when you only have a couple of buttons to begin with.  Enhancement is what my shaman always was.  It was not a healer to start oddly enough, it was melee DPS.  I hate melee DPS but I really like the enhancement rotation.  It has always had some issues with gaps in the rotation and that bugs me, but I could deal with it.  I would give it a try, but I do not see me considering this as my main DPS spec to start with, just something I could try.

Now for the tank and damage dealer category.  I could consider a death knight but I am not overly fond of either unholy or frost.  I have played them, I have played them okay as well.  So I am sure if I put my mind into it I could even get good with them but I do not want to.  They suffer from the number one thing I hate about damage dealers, being in melee range.  Unless you are the tank I do not believe there is any reason anyone should ever be in striking distance of the mob.  Simple as that.  Now I do understand my choices are getting quite limited.  I've already ruled out both pure ranged classes and all ranged specs from classes that can do damage and something else, so I am getting short on options here.  But DKs are not it.  I would give the enhancement another try way before even considering a DK.

Warrior, ah the warrior.  I have had a warrior as my main tank before and gladiator stance does really seem promising.    I love the idea of being a sword and board damage dealer.  Just the idea alone is enough to get me to test it out.  From all I have read, have not tried it yet, it seems like gladiator is also a very fun style of combat.  So it is quite possible I might find myself being a warrior tank and damage dealer, basically while still a tank.  That is an interesting idea.  This would most likely be the first alt I would bring up just to try it.  At least as it stands now, it is the most promising alt.

So were are we now.  There is only one class left and I saved it for last for multiple reasons.  It is the class I like the least.  It is a pure class which means it can not do anything else.  It has a history of being a great PvP class but I am not a PvPer.  And last but not least it is a melee class, which as I mentioned, I really dislike.  But when all is said and done, and I do not believe I am about to type these words, if hunters were removed from the game I would main a rogue.

Yes.  I said it.  I feel dirty now.  It is my arch nemesis the rogue.  Not only as the exact counter to hunters in PvP but many I like about hunters, rogues don't have.  However, with that said, many things I do like about hunters, rogues do have. 

They have a misdirect of sorts, they have a better stealth, they have a way to drop aggro, they have lots of control, they have more defensive cooldowns and they are kind of sucking in the self heals department just like hunters plus they can get around pretty nice with things like sprint and shadowstep.  They are a lot like hunters and a lot not like them at the same time.  As I like to joke sometimes rogues are hunters that were not smart enough to stay at ranged and got hit in the head one to many times.

When all is said and done, if I were forced to pick a new main it would end up being a rogue.  I might not be good at one now but they are one of, if not the, easiest classes in the game, so I am sure if I tried getting the most out of one it would not be too hard when compared to other classes.  I can pull around 200K-240K at a 544 item level with a lovely 502 weapon but I can not tell you if that is good or not.  But one thing I do know is that if I played it more than once every few months I would be doing better. 

Also one thing that is in the rogues favor, sort of like how gladiator is in the warriors favor, is that they changed one of things about rogues I had hated to the most, outside of the fact they are melee of course.  Combo points.  Now that they are on me and not on my target which means I will not feel as useless as I always did when there was a time I had to switch targets.  I always felt bad that I wanted to land a finisher on the target I was on before switching.  Now that I no longer need to worry about that, and with rogues excellent movement abilities, target switching should no longer be an issue that holds me back from enjoying the class. 

As an added bonus a rogue brings some decent raid utility, does fair numbers, is one of the least played classes and is a beast even for a complete noob like me to play in PvP.  So maybe I might actually enjoy PvPing when I am not running around with the free kill sign around my neck that I usually feel like I am wearing when I am on a hunter because everyone always comes after me first, even before healers.  And if someone puts that sign on me as a rogue, cloak, vanish, reset.  Yeah, I think I can really dig that.

So what if your class was removed and you were not allowed to quit, you had to pick something, what would you pick?

14 comments:

  1. I'd pick up priest or hunter. Both things’ I've mained before the mage. As far as yesterday's topic and today's about removing things I'm going to be contrary to what the rest of the people seem to post. I LIKE it when they remove things. I like it when other people that come later can't get the things I have. I like that you can't have a murky mini pet or my blizzard bear. I'm stoked that people won't be able to get the CM gear from panda. In this game there isn't a lot of ways to distinguish yourself from others. There should be things removed that give people ways to distinguish their accomplishments. The other day I ran into a paladin in an amazing transmog rocking a corrupted ashbringer and I knew that guy had been around forever and that was cool.
    Specifically on the CM gear they’ve been warning people that was going away for a LONG time now. If you didn’t get it then you didn’t try and that’s not my problem. Valor gear and valor removal fine I don’t really care. As long as the heirlooms come back I’m fine with that as well it does sound like there will still be ways to get them in game IE the fair and they intend to add a new way to get them. Removal of flying I’ll hold my judgment I’ll concede that there is an argument to be made about current content being better without it but I feel it should be added back in after 6.1 I’m “cautiously optimistic” that that will be the case.

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    1. There will always be people that want to feel as if they have something others don't. As a matter of fact I love I have things that are no longer in game. However, as I mentioned a few times in the last replies. I have no issues with someone getting the cloak 4 years after I got mine. Their achievement does not take anything away from mine so I see no reason I should deny them the chance to do it. After all it is a game, let people play it how they want to. But to each their own.

      I do know what you mean about the corrupted ashbringer. A warrior friend of mine has it, but he has not been a warrior for so many years. I think the character is still 70. He pops on one in a while just to show it off but that is about it.

      Talking about things removed. My trasnmog can not be made any longer. More than 1/2 the things in it are not in the game any longer. No, I did not do that on purpose, I just did it because that is the gear that looked the best to me.

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    2. I would be fine with them removing all legendary's at the end of an expansion remove them and let us transmog them to show them off :)

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    3. Now that I can get behind. If we were allowed to transmog them after the were removed. But under 1 condition. They need to let us know well ahead of time that they are removing them.

      Three of my characters that I could have done it on, more even, I made a choice not to do it with and save it as something to go back for later. Now I can't do it at all. They did not give fair notice. And this is coming from a person that has 11 of them. So it is not like I feel cheated or I missed out on something because I did not. I just think if they are going to remove something they need to give more than ample time to get it before they do, like they did with CMs.

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    4. I would agree I think that's a more than fair request.

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    5. See, I am not entirely unreasonable. ;)

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  2. Though I don't totally know that this is the case (I can find it tough to judge my own motives, sometimes), I feel like one of the reasons I keep playing wow is because I've put in so much time studying the hunter class, so when I start to play a new game, and realize it's going to take me years to know the ins and outs of whatever new game/class/spec, it just doesn't seem as appealing.

    I wouldn't "rage quit". But nothing lasts forever, and I would take the end of the hunter class as a fine time to bow out of the game. Just like when the party runs out of beer. Had fun at the party, but now it's time for folks to sober up and head home.

    Also, to continue some of the conversation from yesterdays post. I was thinking particularly about the legendary cloak, and the thing is, even if you did everything right when it was fresh content without over-gearing it, getting through the quests/scenarios took at most average skill. Really just that one with in the forge, for pure DPS classes, could be mildly challenging, it was a joke for hybrid classes, though. And the last one, where you fought wrathion, I guess you had to at least know the basics of the mechanics.

    But right now, in 5.4, none of it takes any skill. It takes patience. You can get everything from LFR, which takes away any skill factor. Even if you dont' raid at all, you'll have plenty of freebie gear from the celestials to waay over gear all of the scenarios. And even for non-pvpers, getting through the battle grounds is 99% luck, depending on the other people in your group, and the opposing teams group. Rarely does a random battleground actually come down to skill or competence.

    So the point I'm trying to make is that it will take just as much patience to complete it the quests in WoD as it does right now. And it will probably take slightly more skill, since there won't be chances to queue for LFR (though I think they said you'd be able to solo LFR level raids, so that might be easier than completing LFR is right now with a random queue).

    Really, I think it would be a more impressive feat to get the legendary cloak in WoD than it is now, late in 5.4.

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  3. If they took paladins out of the game... wow I'd be heartbroken. I'm not sure what I'd end up maining afterward, but it would probably either be a monk or a hunter, since they are my other two favorite classes. I love monks because they share the versatility paladins have as far as roles, though I don't like the playstyle for tanking quite as well and I honestly haven't even dipped into their dps spec.
    Hunters, well that's my other usual thing to be in a game. If I can't be a paladin I'll probably be the guy with the bow. And there are the pets and I definitely love that, so assuming I'm in the universe where paladins are getting removed instead of hunters, I might main hunter, though with a monk on the side for tanking and healing.
    That's assuming I'm not allowed to quit of course, because paladins being taken from the game might be the deal breaker for me if it actually happened. I love hunters and monks almost as much, but not quite.

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  4. If Hunter was removed, no raids would ever be defeated ever again. How can you beat a raid if you only have support classes?

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    1. They will have to step up their game if they want to try. I am sure the really skilled guilds might be able to squeeze by but most others will just have to wait until they over gear it. ;)

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  5. Wow ok no paladins and I'm not allowed to quit? Ouch. Ok well I'll run through it like you did.

    First class I rolled, first class at max level, 80 as it was then was a Mage. My friend who recruited me to the game, his main was a Mage so I figured it had to be best. However, I never really took to it and it's one of the classes that hasn't made it to 90.

    You see I discovered after rolling an alt that the game could be fun. What I wanted to do was smack the boss in the face. I wanted to tank. At the end if the day that's kinda what it comes down too.

    That reduces my options to four classes. Monk, Druid, warrior and death knight. I was tempted when I first saw the question to say I'd swap mains to kitty Druid. That was my main alt in Cata and though I shouldn't brag I actually felt like I was pretty decent on it. However I didn't like the separation of bear and kitty. It kinda ruined half the fun I used to have. Sure when I just did dps and pulled top numbers that was fun but what I loved the most was pinch hit tanking. Popping bear then enrage + frenzied regeneration. Even with no healer that sometimes did the trick. However blizz removed it and wrecked it and now even though kitty didn't change much I'm too bitter.

    I have raid tanked on everything but warrior. Warriors don't have much of a self healing mechanic and I never really took to them. My death knight was my main alt tank in Cata and my monk was my main alt tank for T14 in Mists (I only did MSV with it) and I like both classes well enough I guess. They aren't paladins, they aren't the Druid I loved in Cata but they are tanks with some self healing.

    I suppose at the end of the day if I could get over my bitterness I would choose bear Druid with an OS of kitty, how I ran it kinda in Cata. Otherwise hmm well plate makes more sense to me, I don't RP but it just makes sense to have the strongest armor. It's what initially drew me to paladins as even the healers are properly protected with plate. Anyway I don't like and suck at rune dancing but at the end of the day however much I'm tempted to say monk I think I have to go with death knight. Unless as I said I got over my bitterness in which case Druid for sure.

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    1. I could see how it would be hard for you because there are no classes like paladins. I would say, in a way, paladins are very much like hunters. Doing something unique for their role. A mana based tank and a non mana based ranged that is not a caster. We just do not fit.

      I think druid would work best for you if you wanted to do everything. And as you said, you do have experience with it which is a plus.

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  6. Geez that's so tough. With one main, I would be lost, floating around trying to figure out what to play. I have my warlock... but I don't think I was built to be a damage dealer. I still prefer the triple role that my hybrid brings so I think Paladin would be my choice. Not that I have any idea HOW to play one of those...

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    1. You are wearing plate, stand in the bosses face and stuck your tongue out at him while insulting his mother and you will be just fine. ;)

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