One of the things that I like to do, in both this column and elsewhere, is push back against myths that have grown up around World of Warcraft while they just are not and were not ever true. For example, you did not actually know everyone on the server, ever, regardless of how you formed dungeon groups. The game was not actually harder back in the day, and in fact at the time it was seen as babytown frolics compared to the rest of the genre. And from that, you might assume I’m about to say that there was never a time when crowd control mattered or people took dungeons slower or whatever.
But I am not about to say that because that would be a lie.
The part that makes it worth a column, though, is that it would be a lie of exaggeration rather than a complete and utter lie. No, you are not remembering a fictitious past if you remember a time when tools like Polymorph were a big deal; that did indeed happen, and active crowd control did used to matter a lot to dungeon runs. But the reason doesn’t just come down to dungeon and ability design. It does come down to that, but not just that.
Let’s take a trip back to the classic days of the game, a trip that is not difficult because… well, you know, WoW Classic is right there. If you are the sort of person who looks at player abilities during your free time, first, welcome to this prestigious club. Second, you’ll notice that AoE was actually a lot less common back in the day in WoW. It’s not as if classes were incapable of handling groups of enemies, but they were a lot less capable of doing so with any means beyond “kill these guys one at a time.” And that was equally true for tanks as it was for DPS.
You’ll also note that back in the day, gear rewards were both itemized weirdly (like how much gear had Spirit on it despite Spirit being kinda garbage for most classes) and not in any way, shape, or form consistent. A leveling tank was way more likely to be in older green items, and until the middle levels, you probably might have some white items on just to fill out the set.
Indeed, if you were around back during The Burning Crusade, odds were almost absolute that you felt stronger after five minutes on Hellfire Penninsula because your quest rewards… actually had decent stats on them. It was insane.
So why am I talking about all of this when it has nothing to do whatsoever with dungeon mechanics? Well… because it kinda does. And you know that because WoW Classic at this point in the modern era has a tradition of burn parties taking in characters who can just speed-nuke things in packs down to nothing and clear the dungeon that way. That is the most efficient way to do things, just as it is in the current Retail game. Screw crowd control and slow pulls; AoE and raw damage wins!
Does that mean the classic game changed? No! It just meant that in the classic game, a lot of classes and specs could not do that. When the odds are low that you will even have that many people available to do this in the first place, your community does not build its practices upon assuming this is a thing.
If you’re not confident you can mass-nuke enemies efficiently and your tank is much more fragile than the average tank, you start building your plans based around those commonalities. Pulling one or two enemies is just way safer when a worse-geared tank has DPS that can’t break enemies any faster than one at a time anyway. You emphasize survival in these instances because death is a heavier time cost than creeping around and using Sap or Polymorph or Freezing Trap or whatever.
That’s not to say that dungeon design hasn’t changed since the older times. Dungeons are definitely much more focused than they used to be, but they’re still less focused than they are in some other games. The reality is that if you had people who were given similar restrictions to the original game in terms of gearing and player abilities and you removed institutional knowledge, the same sort of slower approach would play out in lieu of anything pushing players to move faster.
But you can’t actually remove the institutional knowledge from players, and the reason AoE got stronger isn’t an accident. The fact of the matter is that if you have only one AoE ability, players are going to just be smashing that during any larger group encounter, and that is genuinely a stronger way to play. Eventually players are going to just eschew any class or spec that can’t keep up in terms of AoE capability, the same way Retribution Paladin in the original game was not strictly speaking incapable of DPS but definitely was not as good as other options.
Players started getting access to better gear more consistently because, well, it’s more fun. We don’t want to be weaker; we want to be stronger. Everything converges to the same point not because anyone has decided that, say, Polymorph is stupid; it’s just because it turns out when you put the right incentives together the spell goes from a vital tool to control enemies to being kind of superfluous.
And the trouble is that you probably don’t want to go back.
I don’t mean that you don’t genuinely miss the days when you could, in fact, slowly pace out parts of the dungeon and had to decide which enemy was going to be the most dangerous and should sit out most of the fight. You probably do genuinely miss it because I do. It was fun! But if you ask me, if I would choose to take that over just being able to AoE my way past things, the answer is honestly no. The first time it’s novel; the hundredth time it’s an irritating chore.
One of the things I talked about in my last column was the slow move toward efficiency in the game as a whole, and the fact of the matter is that the move is one that is naturally going to happen in any game as people start to understand it and the designers start recognizing the game they have actually made. Magic: the Gathering did not go from considering Serra Angel overpowered to being a mid-tier critter at best by accident. People learned how to play and got a better sense of what mattered and what didn’t. And it is fun to look back at that old, weird, wilder world!
But you don’t actually want to sift through the garbage all the time, just as you don’t actually want every single dungeon run to take an hour (what, you thought that dungeons involving slowly killing one-by-one were as fast as they are today, no Timmy). And the fact is that the tactical style was never really about basic design so much as peripheral elements that made it more desirable. So sadly, you can probably keep Hex off of your bars.
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with almost two decades of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre and Justin Olivetti for new installments of WoW Factor as they examine the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
