Comments on: And the Warlocks Wept

By: Nubulicious

Nubulicious — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:53:55 +0000

waaa. lern2playbetternoob

By: Rog

Rog — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:06:59 +0000

I dunno, Everquest didn’t peak in subscriptions until after 4 years.

By: Fraxx

Fraxx — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:59:03 +0000

I have to agree with Vykromond on this one. Where were the other games after 3 years? You probably weren’t playing them still. Now I know that WoW raised the bar for all MMO’s, but I think we might be holding them to unfair standards as a consequence of their own success. The God of the Industry itself is just showing it might not be so immortal after all. I also think it’s too soon to count them on their way out yet.

By: Vykromond

Vykromond — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:27:29 +0000

Honestly I don’t understand all the fuss about WoW being in decline or whatever. Of course it is, 3 years is ancient history in computer games and that’s how old Warcraft is getting to be. It’ll still be a terrific revenue stream if it hangs onto as much as 10% of its peak subscriber base, and would be profitable and worth maintaining at far less (just look at, you know, any other fantasy/sci-fi MMORPG).

By: Elbows

Elbows — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 13:28:55 +0000

At 400 reslience, DOT damage is reduced by 10%. If anyone actually think that this is going to really put a dent in warlock effectivness they’re smoking crack. Shadow priests I feel a little sorry for though. Also, look at it this way, in the current 2v2 tournament that’s going on the Schmity from Death & Taxes and his team are currently destroying any warlock team that they come up against because they have access to the epic shadow resist gear form PVE. All they have to do at the beginning of the fight is swap gear according to the team that they’re going up against. If I was a lock this would bother me much more than a lousy 5 – 10 % reduction in my dot damage. After the patch this won’t be possible anymore, so try and look on the bright side.

As for WoW, all I do is PVP and I could queue for arenas all day every day. I think it’s a blast. I haven’t been inside an instance since february.

By: Val

Val — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 21:26:40 +0000

I play a warlock, I don’t PVP, but I was actually discussing with my paladin friend just about a week ago about how we could do wonders as 2v2. This since I had noticed that Arena2-gear didn’t have any resistance at all. And that would mean if I got myself some 40ish penetration my dots would be quite unstoppable, with the UA and the ‘dont dispel my dots’-talent above it.

So yeah, this swing of the nerf bat is totally valid. DoT or OP all over. Easy to use, alot of damage, good scaling with gear.

By: Rog

Rog — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 21:26:30 +0000

Note: Blizzard’s subscription numbers are only listed as “base”, which in MMO terms means “Every subscriber that has ever played since release”. It’s a number that ALWAYS goes upwards, it cannot go down. This is why their subscription numbers do not reflect active population.

As for hard evidence, it’s been posted all over the place, but of course many fans choose to ignore / discount it. Take your pick: there’s the graphs at Warcraftrealms, there’s the postings of servers with screenshots of ~30 players total online during primetime (search the forums for “dying server”, Tortheldrin is one example), there’s the merging of Battlegroups, there’s been no new servers in months.

The most telling to me however, is that Blizzard stopped updating their max “subscriber base”, which by the way is still higher than sales of TBC. I’m sure they’ll get around to updating it eventually, those numbers are designed to only go upwards, but they haven’t mentioned them since March.

BUT! Does it matter? Financially, believe it or not, Blizzard makes most of its money off of box sales, at least according to Viacom’s revenue reports. Blizzard’s operating income is far, far lower than its sales.

By: steven

steven — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 21:02:30 +0000

Let’s all face it Locks did have an advantage over a lot of other classes. Getting hit with 4 damaging abilities in 2 seconds that eat through 8000 hit points in seconds does not sound like a balanced PVP abilities.
I won’t even comment on life tap tanking!

This change was going to happen sooner or later. Also, on the good side the dots damage will only be mitigated by resilience rating. And not all players have 350-400 rating.

Hell, my hunter has a rating of 90 =)

By: Gheist

Gheist — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:59:34 +0000

Pretty much why I quit WoW. To be ubbber in PvP you need to PvE for weeks in big guilds, which needs good equipment and … yeah and etc. Too much hassle to get a quick fix

Funny I did the opposite, I had absolute crap drops on weapons as a rogue in kara/ssc so ended up doing arena just to get merciless weapons :/

Personally I think WoW has about 8-12 months dominace left in it, Warhammer online will take the PVP’ers and Age of conan probably a large chunk as well, and those bored of hi-fantasy will swap to something like tabula rassa (aka me ) for a complete change of pace. Notice I didn’t say it was dying, I said dominance. I heard the sale rate of Burning crusade was 2/3 of the subscriptions that they claimed to have in the normal game (8 million) and said they sold 1.5 million in the first two weeks.

Look at me talking about millions of customers and saying it’s like a flagging business, im sure vanguard would be happy with a 100k let alone a million, wonder what the numbers are like now in Lotro (the only other comparable competitor to WoW at present).

By: nordee

nordee — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:33:26 +0000

Can anyone point to hard evidence that subscription is slipping? Yes, I see the same anecdotal evidence that you all see (fewer friends online, fewer priests healing, fewer night elf hunters ninja-ing loot), but maybe we are living in a bubble.