But we will get into that in a moment.
Tuesday was a little
rough. One of our regular tanks couldn't make it so Lag, myself ended up
hanging up his two handed axe for the good old sword and board. Of course
I was a little rusty and it took us all night to kill Gruul, but kill him we
did. And much happiness followed.
Wednesday we ended up
being a little short and I ended up hitting the raid finder feature to get our
last person. We managed to snag a hunter and hopped in starting about
half an hour late. We went to work on Hanz and Franz and got them down
after a couple of attempts. (Partially because I wasn't tanking. If
I was it might have taken a bit longer...) We then went on to Oregorger
and promptly got destroyed a bit. By the end of the night we were making
progress, but he has a bit of work to go yet.
Now, Blizzards April
fools jokes actually got me a little this year. In particular the
T.I.N.D.R. add. I had forgotten what day it was, and after adding the selfie to
the game, I didn't find this to be much of a stretch as an area for Blizzard to
Foray into. The thought of playing a love match game with your followers
seemed like what one might have for a legitimate idea to get one more attached
to those characters.
But it got me to
thinking about their past April fools jokes. My favorite to this day was
the addition of the Bard class. They had taken some screenshots and
married them with the interface from guitar hero to make it look like an
interactive music type of class. It was well done and since bard was a
fun class to play elsewhere, as well as a common fantasy archetype. It was obviously fake but a fun idea. Since then I will not lie, I've kind of
wanted to see a bard class in Wow.
However, I don't believe it will ever happen.
Traditionally bards
are support classes. This means that
they enhance the abilities of those around them, rather than dealing damage or
healing themselves. That isn't to say
they can't fight, or couldn't heal if Blizzard had the notion but their
strength is in helping the group over themselves.
This does appeal to
me. I see a class that has three sets of
spells to move to through the fight. One
set that makes the group deal more damage during light healing phases, one set
to enhance healing when needed, and one to diminish the damage coming in from
the enemies. It could be fun to figure
out when the best time to balance during a fight when the bard should focus on
which of these three areas to focus. Think
of it this way, you're the bard and the tank pulls. For the first few moments of the fight you enhance
the damage going out. Then, the boss
does an ability that puts out a lot of damage so you swap to damage reduction
rotation. Then after the boss deals that
damage you swap again to help the healers top of the life bars and then back
and forth as needed during the encounter.
Alas, this will never
happen because of one thing. The trinity
of Tank, Heals, and DPS is completely ingrained in the player base.
If a Bard where part
of a group where he increased the damage going out by 100k overall, there would
still be someone who called him out for not topping DPS in his personal
numbers. Same with heals. People would not understand that this
character could help everyone else at the expense of personal statistics. To many people would turn into rage machines
that would ruin the experience for all.
Even if this was a minority of people it would poison the pool of those
who wanted to play such a class. Let's
be honest too, as Monks have shown us, being introduced this late in the game
doesn't bode well for player numbers.
Because while Monks are versatile and fun to play, they still are one of
the lowest played classes in the game, if not the lowest.
But how do you feel?
Would you play a Bard? Or a similar class?
Is this a complete pipe dream or do you think Blizzard would consider
something like this? Or do the classes buff
and support each other enough to make this a moot point? If they were to do this what class would you
like to play?
Lag/Lazyeye
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