Curious about what others think about the druid thing...Follow

I just started reading it. OMG they're gonna eat him alive.

And he realizes how stupid he sounded. He edited it...but the quotes do not lie.

You act like you're surprised that he's such an idiot.

This is Drysc, you know.

The CM in question, Drysc, is pretty much solely blamed on the US servers for the lack of love for the Rogue Class (I don't know a single Rogue on the forums who has anything remotely nice to say about him) and the "botching up" of the Rogue Review.

I'm glad for the Druid shape changing timer since when I get hamstringed I just have to suck it up and deal with it. Druids on the other hand can just hit Two buttons and they are off at full speed again.

Then again I always wondered where in the HELL that flag hole was at on a Druid in Cat/Bear form.

/meh everyone will learn how to deal with it like they have before

At the cost of mana they can't afford to spend on that. Changing costs mana.

The EU CM Vaneras made this thread on each class forum. Made quite an uproar.

Edited, Nov 18th 2006 at 8:57am PST by Mazra

I think I'll have to agree with Quor here... It's not a question of Buffs/Nerfs, but rather an issue of communication between the devs and the players...

It's obvious that someone put in alot of time and effort for druids to make procs/pots available in forms, given the animations and tooltips created... To have them activated for a week before any offical remark is made to even acknowlage that they exist, much less give any statment on whether it's intentional or not is simply inexcusable. Such behavior in my line of work is valid reason for termination.

I am no stranger to how fast things can change in beta testing, but it is counter-productive to not inform your testers on what changes you are making. If there isn't the communication there to inform your testers on what is a bug and what is intentional, then there is no way for testers to even do their jobs properly. It would be excusable if it was small and difficult to reproduce glitch, but that is certainly not the case here.

From a buisness standpoint, I would veture a guess that this fiasco has cost blizzard at least $70,000 starting with wasted resources spent to develop this "bug" to the time and money lost from the backlash in terms of public relations and server crashes... This doesn't even factor in the long term losses from the result of lost goodwill with it's customers, which could easily amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars...

This is quite the costly mistake for blizzard and the worst part is that it's something that could have easily been avoided with just a little communication.

Ya the switching to avoid snares needs to be nerfed.

I think it should be a one second cooldown.

Because If you have lag that forces your change forms to delay for more than that you are going to die anyway.

That and give it a chance to break snare, not a guarantee.

Druids need to be able to switch fast for reasons other than snare breaking, especially in group PvP.

Caster Ranged Dmg-> Cat Mage or Warr.-> Caster Heal -> Bear Rogue attack -> Blah Blah Blah.

A Cooldown is hurting the main ability of the class.

Give them a talent with a max chance to break snare of 25% (Druid shifting out then in is a good chance to break still without a huge help in BG).

I would be happy as a Druid or as their opponent.

But these should not be implemented unless complimented with the fixes they need first.

Please.

It was not a bug. There were animations and sound effects added for the different types of items for forms. They changed item tags to reflect those items being able to be used in forms. Proc animations and sounds were done too.

Do you really expect us to believe that they just "accidentaly" coded in everything needed to make this workable?

I'll buy that it might have been overpowered and needed to be changed. But they flat out lied to us by trying to call it a bug.

Quor and CrimsonNeko:

I agree that Blizzard has issues with communication. It isn't a unique one (it seems most MMOGs suffer in this regard), but it still sucks. They need some significant work in this department, especially in terms of the individual communities.

I don't know that the individual customer reps are as much to blame as whoever is in charge of the forums. Some answers seem to come out pretty quick, while others are ignored for months. I think most people would agree that they would like to at least see a "we're working on it" or "we are investigating it" just so the public knows it isn't being ignored. Coming from the rogue side of things, I can feel your pain.

We still have outstanding issues that players have "proven" to be bugged, but for the most part those issues get ignored. The most notable right now seems to be how a rogue is not always "put into combat" when they should be.

****

But the original post was focused on the most recent issue, and there I see (from reading a lot of the threads) not so much a complaint about communication but as a "we've been lied to" kind of thing. Maybe you have been lied to (I accept that as a possibility, but I also accept there could be other explanations). I don't pretend to know the truth there.

I just read an awful lot more complaints about the features that were taken away, than general complaints about communication. If the complaints were solely about poor communication, I am sure that a large percentage of board-goers would empathize with you. Heck, I do.

yeah, a lot of people are ******* and moanin about the loss of stuff we dont have. those people need to get over it. with the exception of procs, druids have been told time and again that part of the weakness of feral forms is that they disallow certain item uses. some exceptions have been made (such as the pvp trinkets for instance) but the "no bag consumables" line has been said time and time again. so i personally dont feel a huge loss with that, even if many others feel that blizzard has "slighted" them.

but proc thing, and the general lack of....respect i guess....i do take issue with that. its no better than when tseric had his famous "popping enrage" line on the warrior forums. this highlights a glaring disconnect that seems to exist between blizzard and the player base.

about the procs; you mentioned that some simple things can be changed, some flags altered and what not, and that could lead to more changes than people realize. thats all well and good, but forever (since before retail) blizz has said druids dont get procs because its too hard to code. well, we had procs for a good week there on test, so either blizz put the work in to make procs work for druids, or its as easy as you say it is, and blizz has been lying to us all this time about procs being "too hard to code". more than that, there were animations and effects that looked like they were being applied in a druid-specific fashion that led many to believe that some conscious work had been done and considerable thought had been put into all this.

but then to come out and say its a bug? ********* pun intended.

im willing to give blizzard a lot of leeway on a lot of stuff, and i fully understand that a lot of the noob druids (aka those that hopped on the bandwagon after the 1.8 review, not to be confused with those that got the game and made their first druid after 1.8) complain like theres no tomorrow. i, and any other druid worth a damn, dont give a **** about those druids or what they think. we deserve something here, just on the basis of maintaining a good customer/business relationship, and i believe that goes for all classes, not just druids.

What's sad is that the EU moderaters are actually much more informative than the US ones. New information and straight responses are almost _always_ posted to the EU forums and then cross-linked by watchful players to the US boards. New information is almost never present on the US threads.