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Notorius Reputations
The mystery of where Ghostcrawler’s next opportunity has led him has been revealed: Lead Game Designer at… Riot Games. As in, Lead Game Designer for League of Legends. Needless to say, some corners of the internet flipped their shit. A response from Riot Games illuminated some of the reasons he got hired on:
A lot of the things we want to focus on with game health this year (and preseason is a kick-off to this effort) is primarily around fixing a lot of the old problems. After finishing up support (IE the gold item particulars + Annie problem), we want to focus on adding choice and depth by taking a HARD look at “ball of stats” stuff so we can actually introduce interesting stuff with trade-offs.
I have never actually played League of Legends, so I cannot speak to any of the complexities of the game. But while the jokes about Ghostcrawler balancing things write themselves, it’s worth a slight reflection on how, pretty indisputably, WoW is more balanced class and spec-wise than it has ever been. My prediction is that he’s going to tank LoL all right… in the aggro sense. It sorta sucks how his reputation automatically makes him an undeserved (IMO) target of scorn. But hey, if you’re good at something, I guess getting paid (more?) to do exactly that thing isn’t so bad.
Maybe Not So Dynamic After All?
Remember how excited I was over dynamic armor (as Grumpy Elf calls it)? Well, right now things are looking a bit more dicey.
- Tanking gear will have Armor as a tanking stat after Dodge and Parry are gone.
How I am interpreting that quote is that there will still be tanking gear in WoD, as there wouldn’t be a point in mentioning +Armor as a replacement stat for Parry/Dodge on gear. This then further calls into question my earlier assumption that a paladin wearing DPS plate will get +Spirit when he/she switches to Holy. So… will there be no Intellect plate but still Spirit plate? It makes no sense, but then neither does DPS gear turning into healer gear but not tanking gear.
Maybe +Armor will still be a tanking stat, but relegated to non-armor slots like rings and trinkets. In that case, it sort of makes sense for the +Spirit dilemma to behave likewise. Some dynamic gearing is better than none, but I can’t help but feel that the end result is a bit too half-assed than it has any reason to be. On the other hand, even with full dynamic gearing you will likely run into a scenario where +Crit is better for DPS than +Haste or whatever, and thus end up with what amounts to two (or more) different suits anyway.
I suppose as long as the delta between the hypothetical +Crit vs +Haste pieces is reasonable enough for normal raiding, it shouldn’t really matter. And even if it’s ridiculous, having only one tier set for each class is pretty huge by itself. Hmm. Something to keep an eye on in the months ahead.
In An Age 