The Queue: Rifts and scenarios

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Return of the RIFT character header images! Run away!

MikeLinton said:

I have to seriously question the "super positive response" that you are seeing to scenarios. I only see my small slice of the WoW community, of course, but what I'm seeing tells me the opposite. The only people I knew that ran regular scenarios were for either daily valor or guild gold, and they didn't like doing it. Heroic scenarios are a little better because Blizzard made the rewards awesome and forced people to go in with a full group. If Heroic 5-mans were the same way, then they would be far more enjoyable to heroic scenarios.

I know this isn't a question, but I feel a need to respond to it. What I tend to see personally is that people who play only healers or only tanks dislike scenarios for the most part. People who primarily play DPS (like myself) enjoy them quite a bit. As a DPS player, queues for dungeons and raids are (were?) so absurdly long that I stopped bothering. Scenarios didn't have that problem, plus they give me much more freedom in how I played. Scenarios had me digging tools out of my belt that were never relevant in the tank/healer/DPS tinity, but made a big difference in scenario performance. Not being locked into the trinity is refreshing.

I can totally understand why tanks and healers wouldn't enjoy scenarios as much. For me, as someone who isn't a tank or a healer, I grew to feel the same way about dungeons and raids. It doesn't feel like those two realms of play hold much value for me these days. Scenarios, however, have a great deal of value.

Am I saying dungeons or raids should no longer be produced in favor of scenarios? Absolutely not. That's crazy talk. What I'm saying is that scenarios do serve a purpose, and many players do find them enjoyable.

ISO1600 asked:

Anyone going to try out Rift when it goes 100% free to play later this month? I love WoW and plan on playing til the servers go dark, but I am interested to see how Rift feels hands-on.

I played it at launch, will almost certainly check it out again. It's a fun game!

Benno asked:

If a new voice chat is added to the new battle.net stuff, could that allow for LFD/LFR style content to become a little more difficult?

They say the content is designed for a random grp with no coordination, but if they provide another communication tool like a good voice chat inherently in the system, that could facilitate better random groups.

The developers specifically don't want LFR to be difficult. Plus, if I had to be shoved into voice chat with 24 random people every time I jumped into LFR, I would become violent.

Snichy76 asked:

I recently started levelling a Mage after playing as Shadow Priest for years. I have to say I REALLY like the fact that when I cast a spell, you can see it travelling to the target. I never thought it would make much of a difference but after playing a class that has no visual representation of a spell (other than Mind Flay), I LOVE seeing my spells.

My question is: do other people feels as strongly, and if Blizzard were to introduce a similar "shadow bolt" type animation to the class (which I would love by the way), would this travel time reduce the DPS as most of the SP spells have zero travel time to target...?!

Actually, yeah, I do share the feeling. Way back when my priest was my main, shadow always felt a little dull because the lack of projectiles. Standing behind a blue beam of light constantly didn't feel very impressive. In general, I'm big on the feel of gameplay moreso than just numbers. I stopped playing a retribution paladin entirely because the dull animations coupled with holy power made it not feel good anymore.

As for whether or not travel time of projectiles would impact DPS... maybe? I don't honestly know. I would imagine it would just delay your ramp-up time marginally longer than usual and then not be an issue after that. Maybe one of our readers will be able to break down some numbers for you in the comments.

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