#71

So, it seems Darren over at common sense gamer is no longer a gamer and no longer applying his common sense... Darren, you're a near scientific sounding chap at times.... science has to stay 250 yards from religion at all times... what are you thinking man?

(He's branched out into a new blog about philosophy and the meaning of life... the answer is 42 mate, thanks for all the fish, etc etc).  Go check that out at his new site Ethos Incarnate.

But Darren is the reason I'm back here to post again, I have his SUWT recordings lying around and have listened to them, but for some reason I missed part of the listeners mail section in #71.  This is the follow up cast to the one featuring myself and Mr Richard from over at GeekRageQuit.  And I had to laugh at what I heard...

Darren explains that the second writer to him... "Tevaco" or "Teveco" I can't be sure with the accent :) wrote to Darren and complained he found my comment strange, that really WoW isn't and MMO, but yet I then went on to explain a core concept of an MMO, i.e. I described my explaining to a friend about the character classes...

I think poor old "Teveco" missed my point... the point was... I sat here, exactly where I am sitting now, with World Of Warcraft on my screen, I'm sat in my Mage and I'm in the middle of the Ring of Trials... and my friend leans over...

F: "Hey Xel, who's that?"

X: "That's me, I'm a mage, see the fireballs, whoohooo glass cannon"

F: "Oh, right, and who's that?"

X: "That's a druid."

F: "That looks cool, he's a tree and a person at times, what's he doing?"

X: "Well, Druids can heal, like when he's in the tree form, and they can do damage as a caster or cat form, or they can be the tank to soak up damage."

F: "Oh cool, three things."

X: "Oh a lot more than that, they're like the original swiss army character, they even have a form to get stones out of horses shoes."

F: "Right, so who's he there then?"

X: "Oh that's the newer class, the Death Knight"

F: "What can he do?"

X: "He can do a damage, or tank and heal himself a bit".

F: "So what can your mage do?"

X: "I do damage high damage per second, I nuke stuff"

F: "Can you heal?"

X: "No, not at all."

F:  "Oh. What's that guy there do?"

X: "Oh that's a rogue, he just does damage too, he can't  heal"

F: "Hang on, so him and him can do many things, you can only do damage, doesn't it get boring?"

X: "A bit repetative yes."

F: "Doesn't seem very fair to me.  So what's that last guy over there do?"

X: "That's a paladin."

F: "Let me guess, he does everything?"

X: "Yup".

And that's the moral of the story, not about the character class, its funny how my friend saw the unfairness of one person being limited to one thing and others being let hog wild.

We went on to discuss the situation, and I had an attack of the memory lanes, when in vanilla wow up to level 60, right up to BWL and ZG really, each person had a role to fill, and each class was seen only one or two ways.  It's only with the esculation of gear and skills and talents and enchants and gems and scrolls that really some glasses have homogenised into the same sort of role in groups, while others have ben further specialised to just a couple of tasks.

I mean, there's no doubt early on in the history of WoW a Druid who was specced for levelling was a poor healer in instances, and so healing fell much more often to Priests and Paladins at that stage, but soon with multi speccing, bigger mana pools from multiple high level, easily obtainable, gear Druids could choose to be a jack of all trades much more easily... In fact on the servers I played on, but PVP and PVE, for a long while Druids were the choice healer for their heal over time abilities....

So, to Teveco, I hope; where ever you are out there; you read this and chuckle along with me...

And to Darren, the first listener mail in show #71... what did he mean "new blood, but not really"? Me and Rich were virgins, you took our podcast cherries, if I recall correctly.... :)