wow Three Features WoW Should Steal From Diablo

[Odinn 95]

 

With separate development teams working on each of their franchises, Blizzard will often share clever ideas or riff on the work of their teammates - but some of the implementation varies. There are (at least) three features that World of Warcraft should emulate from Diablo.

 

1. Transmogrification

 

When Transmogrification was announced for WoW, it breathed a huge amount of new life into old game content and made all of the gear collections that were otherwise exclusively for use standing on bridges in Ironforge suddenly valuable and relevant once again. It may be one of the best-received features ever introduced into WoW.

 

The reality of the technical implementation, however, is not as impressive as it is in Diablo. On the Prime Evil side of the equation, players unlock transmogrification options within a UI upon acquiring an eligible item - having the physical item is not required whatsoever. There are also far fewer exceptions or exclusions on transmog in Diablo - weapon type is among the only significant remaining rules.

 

With the extensive logging required for tools like WoW's Item Restoration service, it is apparent that the required information - items ever owned/received by a character/account - is already being stored. Making this modification would obviate the need for Void Storage (which, for many transmog enthusiasts, is woefully insufficient space anyway!), and drastically improve the feature overall.

 

2. Skills (Talents/Glyphs)

 

Given the changes over time to WoW's talent and glyph system, the requirements of the talent/glyph change system seem archaic. Requiring a reagent, stopping to swap specs, having to visit trainers to change between specializations - all of this is, to all appearances, a combination of slow feature creep and a strange attachment to old NPCs/features. Much like how players now instantly unlock new spells, rather than needing to visit trainers, though, it seems like it's time to improve upon it.

 

Blizzard could bring a more Diablo-esque system in to WoW, whereby players could simply swap between specs/talents/glyphs at will (out of combat, presumably) - maybe even have macros set up to make those tweaks happen between pulls? The game is already facilitating this in a roundabout, convoluted way, but with a lot of provisos (you need Tomes of the Clear Mind, which you can buy off of vendors from your mounts/repair bots, which stack nearly infinitely, etc., etc.). A simple, easy solution that puts gameplay over throwbacks to old RPG rationale seems like the natural conclusion of the changes that have continued to develop in this system over the years.

 

3. Shared Stash (Bank/Reagents)

 

All Diablo characters on a single account share a unified Stash, which allows the player to quickly move unbound items between their characters with ease. WoW still relies on things like the mail system, which is out of place alongside the new Collections pane.

 

Given how many (most) items in WoW are soulbound, however, a good compromise might be to create an account-wide shared Reagent Bank, perhaps with some further options to place consumables/other items that have no ability to become character bound in it. Many players get around this with personal guilds and guild banks, which is an insane workaround in the current state of the game.

 

Would you like to see these - or other - features from Diablo cross over into WoW?

[Archimage 98]

Since the removal of profession bonuses, I would like to see Profession NPCs like the ones in your garrison, but instead of only 3 (small building limit) npcs, there should be a profession npc for every profession. 

 

You would level them individually like the artisans in D3 via gold or training manual, and find the recipes and materials for the items. You can also salvage items you find, for example salvaging a green armor item will give you some scrap, and maybe some enchanting dust. The scrap can then be handed to the mining NPC to smelt it back into some bars, that can then be used to craft some item.

 

Gathering professions would work like the Lumber mill, except you can only have 1-2 of these Gathering NPCs active. The materials gathered will then automatically be deposited into your Reagent bank.

[SkuulzonVelen 2]

The reagent bank would be total win for me, and the ability not to have to have the item in my current inventory?  Yes please.  I was stoked to see the personal bank received the upgrade.  With the current set up, farming mats and selling on the bank is out and I have 5 accts/professions running at the same time.  It would be great to just have one bank to share between all toons and still have the guild bank to share other mats.  Especially for those soulbound mats that I'm never going to use but one of my other toons desperately needs.

 

Otherwise, yes the mail system is terribly outdated and forces you to log out/log in just to transfer items.

[Storm 426]

I heard about a year ago that the WoW team was working on a transmog system for WoW like the one in D3. It came from a friend that made a lot of other correct predictions that came from a few dev's he talked to, so I wouldn't be surprised if we do see this at some point.

 

Skills definitely need to be changed. playing all 3 specs is a lot easier now since gear goes between any/all specs much more easily. rather than implementing tri-specing they should just allow us to change specs out of combat whenever we want to.

 

The shared bank is a good idea, but I feel like players are a lot more inclined to have a lot more junk in WoW than in diablo. and also what about cross server and cross faction? those would present a different set of issues depending on if it were or were not implemented in such a way. and BoP items would be strange, since you obviously can't allow a bop item to be traded between characters, so an alt could potentially have a shared bank that's half full of items they can't withdraw anyways. It's a good idea, but would have a very strange implementation in WoW. having the reagent tab be account+server bound, and adding another tab or two to reagents would be an excellent addition though.

 

One additional thing I would like to see done is adding a commodity auction house. On a populated realm like Stormrage there are sometimes so many herbs listed 1 at a time that you have to click through 10-20 pages to find stacks larger than 1. Sometimes I can't even use Auctionator to more easily buy herbs in bulk because the addon takes 2-3 minutes to rescan in between purchases to see what is still available because of the shear volume on the AH. a commodity system like what D3 uses for gems would make trading mats a lot easier. I want 1000 herbs, I'm willing to pay up to 2g each for them, now go fill my order.

[Archimage 98]

Just as the raid system changed from LFR, Flex, Normal and Heroic -> LFR, Normal, Heroic and Mythic, so can the storage system change.

 

Each character could have Void ("Soul") Storage for their Soulbound items, and then have a shared stash of items for all their characters, as well as the reagent bank. The storage system should however not be an account wide system, but bound to a single realm (to avoid cross-realm economy breakdown).

 

The GUI breakdown would look like the Guild Bank/D3 Stash:

First tab would be your Void Storage.

The 2nd to n-th tab would be the shared stash.

The last tab will simply be a "very large" reagent tab.

 

If Blizzard implemented the D3 Transmogrification system, the amount of personal storage space needed will be reduced since most people only store their transmorg items and reagents. 

[Adhemar 3]

Would like to see guild storage and cooperation improved. I do not use the reagent bank because it interferes with my ability to send mats to alts (it's a huge PITA to travel to my bank to get four sorcerous fire to mail to my enchanter so that he can then mail a scroll back to my main character (travel time to bank, loading screen to switch to enchanter, loading screen to switch back to main, travel time back to whatever I was doing, etc.). I'd like to be able to dump materials into a guild reagent tab and craft directly from there (as well as use those materials to post work orders for my garrisons).

I consume tons of bag space with various materials (including the new BoP daily CD limited materials) and managing all of it is a huge pain. The whole thing needs to be reworked.

[Adhemar 3]

One additional thing I would like to see done is adding a commodity auction house. On a populated realm like Stormrage there are sometimes so many herbs listed 1 at a time that you have to click through 10-20 pages to find stacks larger than 1. Sometimes I can't even use Auctionator to more easily buy herbs in bulk because the addon takes 2-3 minutes to rescan in between purchases to see what is still available because of the shear volume on the AH. a commodity system like what D3 uses for gems would make trading mats a lot easier. I want 1000 herbs, I'm willing to pay up to 2g each for them, now go fill my order.

Dear god, no. This was terrible in WildStar and it should die with that awful game. They just need to improve the AH interface and make it less cumbersome to retrieve the data (part of the problem you see is actually Auctionator, which runs some very intense loops through all of the AH results).

[Itherael 0]

I think Blizzard stole idea about Transmogrification from SW:TOR.

[Entenei 1]

a Third Spec (or even a 4th). Its annoying having a tank/dps, then changing to tank/healer, and or tank/ pvp and so on. every time needing to go back to the trainer (and I'm a monk so I just push a button and appear by one) and have to redo all my bars.. its unnecessarily painful.