detect-traps
Latest
Encrypted Text: Bringing fun back to the rogue class
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. The amount of fun that you can have on a rogue has been steadily declining since WoW's release. The original stunlock is gone, Swirly Ball was removed without any warning, and the Dungeon Finder effectively killed stealth boss runs. There are no more random chests for us to unlock, and our lockpicking levels up automatically. In Cataclysm, for the first time since launch, there was no epic weapon to look forward to through pickpocketing. Mists of Pandaria is bringing fun back. With just three little glyphs, I've had more fun in the past 48 hours than I've had in years. Glyph of Detection reintroduces Swirly Ball to our arsenal, after years of fervent lobbying for its return. Glyph of Decoy leaves a copy of you behind when you Vanish to distract your enemies, just like our old friend, Archmage Vargoth. Finally, Glyph of Disguise allows you to copy the appearance of any humanoid that you use Pick Pocket on. There is nothing more fun than flying around, looking for new appearances to steal. I will never forget the first person I ganked while disguised as Durn the Hungerer. %Gallery-152755%
Getting nostalgic about old player favorites
Minkyminky kicks it off on the forums: there's a lot of things that have disappeared from the game that players really loved, and it's pretty nostalgic to think about what we used to have, and have since lost. Plainsrunning was a Tauren racial ability that was in the game before Blizzard implemented Kodos. After a quest, the cows got an aura (canceled with combat, underwater, or indoors, just like a normal mount) that let them move faster and faster up to a certain speed. Swirly ball was what the Rogue's Detect traps ability used to be-- a castable 3 minute buff that showed an annoying swirly ball that could be used to detect lag or just make noise. The old Hunter's Mark (as you all should know, this one wasn't long ago) was just an arrow, not the fancy schmancy (garish, if you ask me) deal we've got now. Baron Geddon's Living Bomb debuff used to be able to hit pets. Hunters would then dismiss their pets-- and resummon them in the Auction House to create carnage. The Hakkar virus was another debuff, this one from Hakkar, that did damage to anyone standing around the player. The debuff hit everyone in an AoE based on the target for a few hundred damage every few seconds for a few minutes, and passed on the plague. So players beat Hakkar, ported back to IF, and spread the disease around the world. This one actually made it to the media, and was used as a study for how disease spreads in a virtual environment. Captain Placeholder (my personal favorite) was a placeholder who went up while the ships between the continents were bugged. Don't miss the Lament of Captain Placeholder. Trolls used to have a "keel two dwarves in the mornin'" emote that got removed from the game, either for violence or drug references, depending on who you ask. Unfortunately, as cool as all of these things are, there's not much chance we'll ever seen any of them in the game again-- most of them are graphics that got updated to something Blizzard thought was cooler, or just simply bugs or placeholders that got "fixed" for good.But the other interesting thing is that almost all of them are clear examples of emergent gameplay-- the devs didn't plan for this stuff to be popular, it just became so. If nothing else, they can learn from what happened with these, and (as with world events) bring them back in other forms. And that's a really interesting thought-- a game designed by the players themselves.
