The Queue: It's the final countdown

I've been rewatching Arrested Development lately with the wife, and I'm just struck at how amazing the Buster / Gob relationship is. Especially the scenes when they're doing a magic trick together. It's just priceless entertainment, and it gets funnier every time I watch it.

This is my third viewing of the series, and I realized all the reference to Buster getting his hand cut off early on in the series. Such brilliant writing, so far ahead of its time.

Jabbok asked:

How big of an effect did Dungeons and Dragons have on WoW? Obviously it was some, but did the coders reject D&D and want something else?

I agree that Dungeons and Dragons had a huge effect on WoW, and I don't really think the coders rejected many parts of the core design. Infact, the base of WoW is really a modified copy of the AD&D ruleset (in many ways). We saw a lot of the same (overly?) complicated systems of AD&D appear in one form or another in Classic WoW's designs. WoW never had anything as bad as THAC0, but it got pretty damn close.

What the designers (who control the gameplay, not the coders) did reject was many of the now awful things out of EQ1. They were good back in the day, but folks like Pardo and Tigole went on gigantic and well-known rants against the poor design of EQ. In many ways EQ was an even truer copy of AD&D, and it didn't really work out well. Standing around against hundreds of other players trying to tag and kill an outdoor boss that was 100% the end game? Yeah... that was less than fun compared to the instanced dungeons of WoW.

At the end of the day though it's important to realized the historical progression of the MMO as well, and not to get held up in the minutia of what WoW was and wasn't compared to other games. It has been part of a long line of RPG development, and fortunately has continued its development throughout its lifetime thus far. And despite the endless "WoW is dying" commentary, there's no sign of the game's progression slowing down.

ladyrhees asked:

Hubby was in a dungeon leveling his lock and the hunter in his group popped Stampede. It occurred to me, "What if warlocks had a demon version of Stampede? Discuss.

As Jeff pointed out in the comments, locks have the Wild Imps spell, which gives us a bunch of little annoying imps which like to run around like fools tossing their fireballs at anything around them. It's not the same as the hunter's stampede, but it's close.

I don't think that they should do this, however. It's my opinion that the classes have gotten too homogeneous lately, and I'd like to see more separation and uniqueness amongst them and their abilities. I kinda liked having to stack the raid with shamans and druids, so maybe I'm a masochist at heart.

JS asked:

Blizzard states that they do not have the time to make new heroic dungeons because of the time it takes to make the art, they have also stated that they do not want to make Ragefire Chasm a heroic. So my question is, why not make Ragefire Chasm a few chains of heroics using the same art that they already have, since most of it makes sense and they have the bosses. They could add another wing or so, then at least there would be heroics.

That's a valid criticism. However, Blizzard has been reluctant to go back and just slap a heroic label on old content. If they go back and hit up an old dungeon for a heroic version, it gets a redesign, and when that happens they redo the art. Why? Because Blizzard doesn't, ever, deliver a half-arsed product. Or at least they try not to (I'm looking at you Diablo 3 PvP).

I'm not really sure what to expect about heroic dungeons... something in the back of my mind tells me that even though many designers have said that they're not getting rid of heroic 5-mans, I think the super positive response to scenarios might be quickly stabbing the poison knife in 5-man's back.

[SPOILER REFERENCE REDACTED BY GRRM]

Matt Rossi said:

I don't like the 4e ruleset.

I agree with you when you compare it to the 2nd Edition. I could play the old editions, even 3.5, forever.

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