Fun or Formula?
Everywhere you look on the web – if you’re looking at WoW stuff anyway – you find these little gems of gospel. The forums, how-to guides, and even in game chat is full of perceived wisdom. If you are planning to play a hunter you must have THIS talent build, or you will be a noob, a loser. I found this particularly to be the case as I was playing my rogue, now level 65. If you didn’t level ‘combat spec’ed’ you were just plain stupid. And you definitely needed to level with swords, or you were a moron. (As an aside for my non-WoW playing readers, each class of player has three talent trees to choose points from … there are lots of different talents to choose from for each class). This went against everything I loved about playing a rogue. To me, a rogue is someone who stabs people in the back – with DAGGERS … not someone who charges in wielding massive swords … so I defied convention, and GASP! Levelled with daggers and a subtlety build … amazingly, I did just fine like this … I actually levelled really quickly, and hardly ever died – and I had FUN. It was a joy to find this page – The Way of the Rogue – that finally confirmed my belief that daggers was a superior choice for a rogue. I always love finding support for my own beliefs, who doesn’t?
Then, recently, when I started leveling my orc warrior, I started reading the Warrior forums, where I found someone asking about whether they should use swords or axes as their main choice of weapon. There were of course tons of responses, ranging from the inane (“don’t be such a noob, everyone knows that …”) type responses, to lengthy mathematical explanations as to why one choice was better than the other.
That’s when I ran into this post which summed up what I feel so well:
Obviously, Bulek is being sarcastic … the whole point of playing WoW is having fun, isn’t it? And Blizzard provides us with three different talent trees, choices in weapon proficiency, etc. in order to let us have more fun. Or no! wait! Blizzard gives us these choices to sort the noobs from the ubers. Silly me. Well, I guess in that case I’ll just forever be a noob and make my own choices … A noob that has a lot of fun anyway!