Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Weapon Training

What purpose does weapon skill in WoW serve? Yes I know it's factored into various attack and damage calculations, and they've drifted over time. But why isn't the skill just your level * 5? Why is the system left in the game? It feels like there is no purpose to the system other than to penalize melee classes. Did you just get some sweet new magic weapon? Well you'll have to kill rats in the deep run tram for eight hours before that item is even worth using. Congratulations!

Further, why must I train weapon proficiencies? What point does gating my Dranei paladin from using the magic Axe that dropped until I can find some mage to teleport me to Ironforge so I can train axes. So why do magic axes even drop on the island? It's not like I make a choice between weapon types as part of my build, I'm just flat out denied use of certain types of weapons because I don't happen to have a guild on this particular server.

These legacy design issues have a tendency to hang around in games like an appendix. They were once useful in the days before alpha, but the system nevr got fleshed out to the extent where it was fun or made sense, but it was put into the game by someone important who has since moved on (I'm guessing) and no one wants to rip it out of the game and smoothe it over.

At any rate this is the biggest grind I object to, low level training up moot skills.

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