i’m not “obsessed”. i’m participating in a conversation, the topic of which is WoW combat and wether /duel is a faithful representation thereof. if you want to stop participating in it for whatever reason then feel free.
you wonder that for the same reason you call into question my attitude towards RP in general, and the reason you accused me of being “obsessed” earlier - it’s cynicism trying to masquerade as a valid argument.
this low-grade ad hom crap is my cue to stop responding to you, i think. gimme a shout if you’re interested in getting back on topic.
Thinking that duel is a faithfull representation of fights as they happen in the lore is like comparing Call of Duty or even Squad to real warfare. Yes, you shoot people, however, that’s largely where the similiarities end. Same goes for /duel when compared to the fights we see in lore.
I don’t recall my player character tiring after 5 minutes of non-stop sword-swinging, while even Varian Wrynn seemed to get tired out by the end of his fighting on the Broken Shore.
I’ve used /duel before, but usually just between friends when we both know we’re somewhat evenly geared and that the match up could go either way.
Otherwise I tend to whisper the other guy and we each agree to lay out our strengths and weaknesses. No “Well if he does X then my guy will do Y!” back and forth. Just listing objectives capabilities in summary within the span of maybe a minute. Then we just try to figure out, with minimal arguing, who would be most likely to win, agree on X number of emotes (So it doesn’t drag out forever) and agree to focus on putting on a good show for observers.
Sometimes it’s agreed that my character would wipe the floor with the other guy, sometimes I acknowledge that my character is at a disadvantage. Agreeing on X number of emotes also means that we can keep the fight looking even for a while, then towards the end either character can make a SINGLE mistake (While rolls might have you try to come up with mistake after mistake after-) which is then exploited to secure a win.
If we really can’t agree then we fall back to rolls, usually with a short rule of “Each time you fail in a row get +1, +2, etc until you succeed” to minimise frustration and make the fight not look horribly one-sided and unfun.
My focus is and always will be to make a fight entertaining to participate in and to observe. Winning is fun, losing can be frustrating. That will always be the case, but I feel having a pre-agreed outcome can mitigate the frustration, while /roll can amplify it. How do you explain a Demon Hunter rolling a 1 over and over again? Do they just fall over and impale themselves on their own weapons or what? At least with a pre-determined outcome, on the second to last emote the DH may make a single fumble or error that leads to their defeat, rather than a comical trainwreck start to finish. Even if it would be an even match, it just looks off if a heroic character is constantly on the backfoot and never gets a single hit in.
We have Blizzard’s tweets and Chris Metzen himself saying that game mechanics are not representative of the in-game world.
Saying otherwise is close to breaking lore.
You may /duel and use it as an abstract way to depict emotes but let’s be honest, you’re doing so only because it’s convenient for you. I personally RP-PvP with my own faction as a last resort; especially if there is gear/class imbalance.
No, the topic is RP combat (look at the title - it says RP, not ‘wow combat’). Which is why the single-minded focus on /duel alone is weird.
I mean you are free to think that /duel is the only right way to do it but that won’t change it being a go-to for only a minority.
No one in the thread but you really cares about the definition of ‘wow combat’, and honestly this is the first time I see anyone spend a long argument regarding its definition - especially in RP, where it isn’t actually relevant.
Yet we have other instances where Blizzard have outright said they take the rule of cool over lore, and that continuity is there to enhance, not restrict them.
I’ll do /emote fighting with people I know who aren’t going to take it to the nth-degree of absurdity, otherwise I’ll settle it via duel or rp-pvp, the former tends to make uppity players with inflated egos shut up more than put up so it puts a stopper on that.
Also getting into fights in major hubs like cities is a whole other level of immersion breaking, considering how many guardsmen npcs are around.
Simply put though, duelling is representative of combat because it -literally- is combat. Arguing over the minutiae is pointless since there will always be a certain category of player who will mythologise emote combat as the be-all-end-all of how to rp “correctly” and won’t be swayed either way.
There is such thing as positive elitism and negative elitism in roleplay after all.
some dude says /duel isn’t a faithful representation of WoW combat. i reply that it is WoW combat. pretty uncontentious, considering duelling is WoW combat.
you then come along with…
… and we descend down your personal rabbit hole where you’re the one who defines what’s combat and what’s merely “game mechanics”, with the former constituted by “whatever gives me the most satisfying represntation of my character’s fighting abilities”.
you’ve now moved on from that and are flinging out ad homs left and right, calling me “obsessive” and “weird” and whatnot.
i’ve never once said that, and have repeatedly said the opposite in fact.
you did. cared enough to argue with me up until the point you realised you were wrong, at which point you transposed into name-calling and trying to wriggle out of being wrong by dragging the discussion off on tangents.
given your inability to remain civil - or even do me the courtesy of reading what i’m writing for comprehension - i’m going to draw a line under this exchange.
PS: it’s possible to roleplay in a duel, or indeed in any WoW combat situation. you might need to go out of the way to do it so it’s not always appropriate for resolving IC conflicts, but you can do it provided you’re not a hyper-competetive jank who thinks WoW combat must be played to win at all costs.
Yeah, on explicit cases like Ashenvale not being changed to reflect it’s current status during MoP, Dalaran location and alike, including I believe one tweet about the scale of Azeroth (?), but nothing has ever been explicitly said about classes, how they perform and function.
I’ver argued this topic to the death with people at this point, so all I’m just going to say that guess what, i was 100% correct about the ice block thing back in the day (despite a fierce opposition) as per the audio novel with Khadgar & Maiev and Gul’dan.
But now again Jaina will utilize Ice block in the raid, and it can not be removed with mass dispel, so it’d seem that while regular ice blocks can indeed be removed by spells like it, it seems that some can’t. So I guess I was right all along. Narrative is the answer (AKA what sort of action/theme fits what situation), rather than arbitrarily analyzing 1/10 of the warcraft universe and deciding that “ok this is how we should do things”.
Personally I believe there’s room for anything from rolling to emote battling to templates to dueling. All of them have their upsides and downsides, and while the combat system is the default one that comes with the game, you as a roleplayer can choose what kind of medium you want to choose.
Like Brigante has said in the past, one of the big flaws with dueling is that you can’t represent mounted combat at all with it, which is a fair point. Class imbalance is also a thing, as well as other concerns.
But equally /roll and emote battles are flawed, and only really shine under very specific situations. Templates are on paper (duh) very good idea, but since we do not have (nor ever will) an universally agreed upon template system, they do not tend to work outside of guilds or tightly knit groups.
I mean yeah, it is a faithful representation of the combat system in the WoW game, but that is a tautology. I am not sure why you would spend so much energy arguing that.
We RPers are more concerned with lore, and judging from cinematics and other depictions of how fighting works in the Warcraft setting’s lore (depictions that are unconstrained by game balance, engine limitations and so on), /duel is extremely inaccurate.
That’s another problem with /duel, isn’t it? Not once in my years on AD have I seen anyone intentionally put on worse gear to represent their character not being at the top tier - it flat out does not happen. If you have an advantage in the form of high raiding and PvP gear, you always use it. In that sense, /duel isn’t really RP at all, because the main deciding factor is entirely based on OOC gameplay.
The gameplay of WoW unironically holds huge, vast sources of lore from which people adapt to their RP- Be it from the original RTS games, questing, ingredients for professions, major storylines pushed in the game itself, factions and their reputation systems, areas and their actually design and outlooks, and so on.
Many of which are never, ever touched upon on lore books, chronicles, official artwork and so on.
That is where common sense comes in, doesn’t it? It’s lore in the sense that users of arcane magic can remove various curses for example, because of the relevant mage spell (even though I can’t think of any book or cinematic where this is used). You won’t find anyone contesting that. The problem is that /duel enforces all kinds of gamey properties, ranging from basic things like GCD-based actions and arbitrary cooldowns, to more complex matters like certain armour/weapon combinations being completely unviable. You can make that list very long.
My earlier example of spear and shield warriors is a good one, I think. It’s obviously very popular on Azeroth, being used by various races, but in duels the only way to use it is to go fury… Except that with a shield you lock yourself out of most of your abilities, so you face a gauranteed loss against basically everything. Which does not seem too lore-friendly.
I just remembered another thing about using WoW duels for RP, which makes the whole idea not all that great in my opinion. Let’s assume someone has been RPing a character for quite a few years (even over a course of few expansions, but could be since the very start of the game!), been in RP combat with it and resolved it through duels, being under the impression that it’s the best way to express the nature of the combat. But, as the years have passed… pruning has happened! How’d one even explain that? “Oooh, by character has been in military for quite a few years by now… but they suddenly forgot how to make quite a few effective moves! Those were pretty much the game-changers, but my character has had amnestia and doesn’t remember how to use them.” Is that how it’s supposed to work? What with character progression, them becoming… better as they go on with training. Are we throwing that all to the bin out of a sudden?
Though I think that cooldowns per-say play a good role to show us that you can’t just perform some abilities over and over again due to how draining/difficult to perform they are (See: You can’t charge or heroic leap 24/7 due to how hard they are to perform), and that you can’t just fart out spells without incurring some stops between them, which I feel is completely fair.
The rest of your comment is true though. Our classes and the way the combat works does place great many constraints, which is unfortunate, and in such cases alternative options might give you a better result. However, by far and large for specs & classes that do confine within the limits, the system works well.
Like I said, it’s by far not a flawless system, I’m just saying that it’s certainly got it’s upsides as well, and great many of them actually.
Short answer, yeah. Retcons happen. It’s just not the pruning you see, it’s everything else as well.
Take how demonology warlocks were able to use metamorphosis before legion. Then they suddenly forgot about it. That’s gotten retconned out due to class fantasy- Since the most current lore overwrites the previous.
Or look at how raise dead works. Originally you needed a reagent, and it rose people back as ghouls. Then it didn’t require a reagent, and it functioned as a battle rezz.
That’s how it is, then. I can’t say it leaves a good taste in my mouth, but I go along with it anyway, if somebody would use it in that literal fashion.
What about Vol’jin using a blend of Hunter, Monk and other class related stuff in his own novel?
I don’t think the classes are as strict as people make them out to be to be honest. It all entirely comes down to preference, I don’t think /duel works but each to their own.
Even disregarding all we have said, the cookie cutter problem is my main problem with /duel. One of WoW’s strengths is the extreme variety in available character concepts, and the creativity it therefore allows.
PvP makes everyone just about exactly the same, which is its shortfall.
To illustrate, consider if RP existed in a vacuum. No game mechanics whatsoever - no RP-PvP, no /duel, etc.; none of it a concern on anyone’s minds. In this situation, everyone would still be able to design their IC characters to match the (in this case non-existent) playable class archetypes perfectly, but how many would?
Almost nobody, I suspect.
Now this is obviously not the situation at hand. What I see happen is that people design their characters to fit inside the box presented by their OOC spec, which to me is a great shame - there is so much more creativity and variety to have.
To get back to what I said earlier, I am not opposed to /duel when it does not come at the cost of any accuracy to the IC characters involved. I am opposed to it when it comes at that cost, however, which is why I don’t really end up using it anymore - just about all my characters fight differently in some meaningful way.
This was kind of the thing with the very OLD talent trees, as there weren’t really per-say specs. Theoretically, you could be a bit of a fire mage but also have skill in frost magics, and whatnot. Of course, even the old specs had their cookie cutters like the current talent system does, but I feel that the old talent system, if ever reintroduced and properly made, would be a great “RPG” element for the game.
Say, fury talent tree would give you access to wielding 2h weapons as 1h weapons. Protection would give you access to protection skills, and then there’d be extra “hybrid slots” you unlock after reaching certain talents in each tree, allowing you to choose a talent out of the hybrid selection, which in this case could be some sort of a buff when using a 2h weapon with a shield, and so on.
Now, this has nothing to do with the topic but I digress. The game has limitations in place that are “necessary” for the game to be somewhat balanced and playable, but it does come at the cost of people having less choices than they’d like to have.
This on the other hand I absolute disagree with. By seeing the skill a character shows in a duel (Maul, anyone?), roleplayer characters rise to become almost legends, ushered by other characters in IC- hell, you don’t even need to duel, but if you do well in battles, you become famous! Just look at Buckles (Fearless), Skreel and Pascoe, who were all infamous in the game back in the day and still are, thanks to their way of playing the game. Would they ever have become as (in)famous if not for their exploits in these said circumstances? Maybe. Maybe not. All I know that it’s very cool.
I absolutely adore dropping the duel flag on the boosted leveling green warlords who try to push you around with their authority and mass invited, faceless numbers. Nothing puts them better in their place.
Those limitations are not relevant for RP, though, and actually works against it.
For sure, PvP can be fun to watch, a good spectacle and so on, but it’s not really what I RP for. If I like to watch people PvPing Blizzard streams arena tournaments etc., there is no need to for me to bring that into my RP.
Speaking of your example - wasn’t Dire Maul that tournament that was completely rolled by a destrolock who was able to just outheal any attempts by other classes to hurt him? I could see why that might be problematic for RP - imagine if a second destrolock had joined the tournament…