07 August, 2005

Undead... and the troubles they cause

There's a lot of talk circling around the fact that in the beta we used to be able to use Exorcism and Turn Undead on Undead players. Then the developers changed it because they felt it was unfair to those who wanted to play the Forsaken. Thus they became Humanoids instead, rendering our Undead spells obsolete in PVP. One of the community managers said the reason why this was the case was due to the fact (paraphrasing here) "that the Forsaken were not Undead, they were the Forsaken."

That made total sense? Keep in mind that this is the game where Orcs and Dark Elves are good. Chris Metzen likes to spin things around. You can always question whether they adapted the lore around the gameplay or the gameplay around the lore, but that's for another time.

In fact, this very issue got me in to a brawl on a community website centered around the city where I live. I just wanted to casually start talk World of Warcraft so I started to talk about this Undead-issue on how they're undead but not undead. It ended with one guy (who I've met before thought was a good guy) said I was wrong (though by using harsher words) and that he was going to rape/murder my mother and father. It sounds crazy, but I'm totally serious about this. Later on I heard from a friend of mine that he now seemed to absolutely detest me. All I could think was "Jeez, that came out of nowhere".

So there hasn't been much talk about the lore for this for quite a while, because that was several months ago... until recently! Addressed by Caydiem in a thread a couple of days ago she opened up the subject again:
The Forsaken are not bound to the will of the Lich King as are the Scourge, Lorber [guy who's asking the question]. A beast and a humanoid are made, physically, of the same material, and operate in the same capacity, but the minds are different -- what works on a beast (say, sleep) may not affect a humanoid due to that difference. The same holds true for Forsaken vs. Undead. The spells do not affect the Forsaken.
That makes sense, sort-of. The Forsaken aren't bound by the Lich King's mind spell and have more of a free will, thus any form of exorcism don't bite on them. It's the same reason why Druids can't use their Sleep or Mind Sooth spells on other creatures except Beasts and Dragons.

And remember the "stealth nerf" that was brought upon the Tarren Mill guards in patch 1.50? Many complained you couldn't use Exorcism, Turn Undead or Holy Wrath on them anymore... But keep in mind: It wasn't a nerf, it was a lore fix!

Oh, and that guy that hates me... Well, since he hasn't raped or murdered my mother and father yet I can only guess he realized I was right all along.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

i personally have no problem with undead spells not working on the forsaken, after all the beta was there too test classes to make sure none of them had overwhelmingly powerful abilities that made them impossible for another class (or in this case race). If you will remember this was a great problem for undead, and the moment they saw a paly all they could do was run away or die very quickly.
tbh this subject is pretty dead and complaining about it is pretty pointless, there are more useful paly subjects to be adressed like reshuffling the talent tree for one, so it makes more sense.

3:11 AM  

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