What I hope to see in patch notes pt.1

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what I want from WoW lately. Not so much about the content specifically, but more along the lines of features and systems that I feel would improve my overall experience and enjoyment in WoW. Some turned out to be simple quality of life improvements, some ended up being drastic changes to existing systems, some ended up being entirely new features. The end result was a notebook full of doodles and scribbles that I decided I wanted to write about.

This is going to be far, far too much for a single post, so I’m going to post my thoughts here over the next couple of weeks. Currently I have about 8 primary topics to touch on, but as I write I tend to have more things pop up, so who knows how long I’ll be ridding this train.

To get us started, I’ll include topic number one with this post.

Topic 1: Quality of life in Azeroth:

This topic alone could probably fill a whole blog. From big complex systems like making mounts BOA, down to super fine details like where to place your items in your bags, this topic alone is massive. With that in mind, I’m just going to cover a few topics that I think could have fairly significant impacts to my experiences as a wow player.

1) Effects Dampening / Filters

When I stepped foot into my first Molten Core, I remember being in awe at the sight of 40 people nuking the crap out of a molten giant. I’d never seen anything on a 40 person scale before and it truly made me feel like I was part of something much bigger than myself. Going from 5 and 10 player instances to 40 felt like a huge leap and the visual experience of it was intensely rewarded.

As wonderful as that was, the game has significantly changed since those days. There are so many HUGE effects that fill our screens and the world now, that it feels excessive at times. I can’t tell you how many times I've heard people in raids blame failing a mechanic on the inability to see the mechanic, or heard healers yell at people to get in the healing rain only to have a dps respond with “WHERE?!”.

As a raider, it feels pretty awful to fail a mechanic simply due to visual clutter. There is just far too much useless visual noise in modern wow raiding. I would kill to see an interface option to disable or dampen abilities from other players. This would free up my visual bandwidth to focus on the ever-important boss mechanics, as well as to focus on what I’m doing at any given time. Of course, this would take quite a bit of exemption to ensure that important effects weren't disabled, but I believe a majority of raiders I've met wouldn't mind having those arcane explosions, pets, totems, and chain lightning’s purged off the screen.

2) Too much junk in my trunk!

On the topic of clutter, let’s talk about bags. We've all seen the devs making efforts to help keep our bag space tangible. I have to give them a lot of credit in slowing down the bag race that we've seen in previous expansions. Let’s be honest, bag space in general is already getting pretty ridiculous. With 28 slot bags (36 if we count professions), and 4 bags equipped at a time, plus a backpack, it’s entirely normal for people to be walking around with hundreds of items in their inventory. While I’m all for giving people a reason to return to town now and then, it’s gotten to the point where I feel it’s unmanageable without some type of addon. And when any part of the game feels like it requires an addon, I believe that’s something that could be improved on.

I think wow is already on the right path with this one. Specifically with the efforts they've made to help here already. We've seen mounts and pets taken from our inventories, as well as word about ‘toys’ and transmog being taken out as well. But the biggest areas where I've personally struggled with bag space is in the area of of gear and professions. The gear manager already does a great job at allowing us to manage gear sets in game, why can’t the gear manager also house the physical items? This would have the added bonus of effectively equalizing the bag space across all classes. No longer would a druid or paladin being punished for playing their classes to its full extent. If I could house 1 set for each spec my class is capable of, I’d be a happy camper. Moving to professions, I really loved the idea of profession specific bags that we saw introduced a few expansions ago. I feel like this was only half of the solution though. Why can’t we have a profession tab that stores 200 of every herb in a single tab? If you want to farm your heart out, you may need to make some trips back and forth to town just like now, but if you want to carry enough mats on you to be able to craft an item for your healer in a moment of need, I think you should be able to do that without sacrificing half your bag space in the name of preparedness.

3) The Macro System

I feel that the core purpose of macros is to help make the life of the player easier. They can automate some of the more mundane tasks that we players need, save us that oh so valuable hotbar space, or even help us to figure out complex math calculations or specific encounter mechanics. Macros are extremely useful and wonderful. If you know how to use them. Which brings us to the problem, they aren't approachable at all.

The macro system feels old and clunky. We've seen so many systems reworked and updated over the years, yet macros stay stale and unapproachable. The simple cause of this is that macros are complex. It’s basically programming in tweet format. You've not only got to know how they are structured, but the syntax as well. Think about trying to explain a macro to a new player. You’d probably have better luck providing tech support over Morse code.

I’d love to see this system updated. First, add in macro sharing (similar to how weak auras allows aura sharing). This could allow a guild to have a single macro-savvy member share their macros out quickly and efficiently. Yes, this is theoretically possible already through external tools, but if you've ever had to stop a raid so everyone could go to the forums and get the macro, you know that being able to do this quickly and efficiently in game sounds fantastic. You could also implement a visual macro building interface, and an in-game dictionary for keywords, commands, and functions. I've seen a lot of “visual scripting” systems online lately and adding a similar system into the macros would definitely make them more approachable and player friendly. Though, honestly, that does sound extremely expensive from a development standpoint, versus simply allowing players to link them and letting the small number of already fluent players do all the work.

OK. So I cheated.

I used a single topic to cover 3 specific features that I've been bouncing around in my head. Sue me. Or better yet, leave a comment. What do you think? What are your quality of life gripes from WoW? With such a broad topic to a game with such a massive audience, there has to people out there who have opinions on this. Or just leave a comment and tell me you disagree and that makes you angry.

Either way, stay tuned, I should have another topic coming in the very near future. ^_^