So... WOTC is shutting down it's forums?

[RelentlessImp]

It's that last part that makes me think that letting the community handle its own communities is a long term mistake.

I don't know, I don't think dumpshock was much of a long-term mistake. Catalyst coming in to wave their dicks around on it most definitely was a mistake during 4E, especially when they started trying to bitch people out for daring to have negative opinions and defending their terrible work.

[Username17]

Minor tangent, Frank, but how was the nerfing of Haste, Harm, and Hold Person bad for the game? Genuinely curious, because I never got to play with the 3.0 versions of those spells, 3.5 was my first D&D edition.

Haste is the most complex, so I'll do it first. What Haste does in 3e is to give you an extra action and a significant bonus to AC. This means that when you cast it, it does not cost an action, just a spell slot. And it lets you cast two spells of consequence next turn. Now 3e Wizards don't have a lot of spell slots. So the ability to dump out 3 level appropriate spells in a combat in the time it would normally take you to cast 2 at the cost of four spell slots is very big and very expensive. You get the spell at 5th level, but you sure as fuck aren't going to be casting it at fifth level because you only have three 3rd level spell slots for the entire day.

Indeed, if you are looking at going into three or four encounters in a day, you aren't going to want to cast haste at level 7 or 8 either. It becomes a pretty dominant thing around 9th or 10th level (where your go-to battle spells are 4th and 5th level, so the extra spell slot for haste is almost trivial), but from 11th level on you never cast haste because you get Mass Haste instead, and that affects all your allies.

But there was a funny thing about being 9th and 10th level: everyone who wasn't a Wizard could wear armor. And armor could come with a Haste effect out of Defenders of the Faith and at those levels you could afford it. So if everyone had their stick on the ball, people got Haste actions online at about the same time. And it provided a huge benefit for player characters (who were twinking out in haste all the time) over team monster (who weren't doing that. And that made the game a lot less deadly in the higher levels where it would otherwise be very deadly indeed because of how much damage things do and shit. And basically melee people couldn't matter unless they had a means to move and get a full attack, and Haste was the easiest way to do that.

Harm really doesn't matter one way or the other. The 3e version did a d4 hit points less than enough damage to knock someone out - no save. So if you had a minor combo of some kind you could reliably take out enemies that you could touch, use a 6th level spell, perform a combo on, and beat the SR of. Which caused people to freak the fuck out, but wasn't actually very good and never really came up. The new Harm is also crap in a slightly different way and no one cares about it. The thing that was bad was the idea that you should get rid of edge case weird effects and replace them with boring hit point damage. It went from a pointless but interesting intellectual exercise to something that was simply pointless.

And Hold Person is very simple indeed. The 3e version takes you out of the fight on a failed save. That means that you sit out the next few rounds and if the rest of the party is captured or killed then so are you. And if your party wins, then your character becomes un-paralyzed in a few rounds. The 3.5 version could end every round, which means that the enemy is incentivized to coup de grace you immediately, which they do and then you have to make a new character. It makes the spell less good in that one of your allies has to spend an action to hammer it in, but while it has no real effect on team monster it makes the spell about a bajillion percent more lethal to player characters. Less functional, more game distrupting. Hold Person is the second worst change in 3.5 (after the complete hash Andy Collins made of the charge/overrun rules).

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Hold Person is the second worst change in 3.5 (after the complete hash Andy Collins made of the charge/overrun rules).

-Username17

Are you sure it isn't third after Sorcerer Quicken?

[Eikre]

Okay in the run up to this I'm getting a little nervous because I'm finding that there's actually a lot of documentation up on those forums that I'd really like to access again in the future. Has anybody affirmed that they've made an archived copy somewhere? Should I be setting up a desperate crawler to try and mirror as much information as I can over the next week?

Does anyone else get a sickening feeling when this happens? The internet adds such a dimension of immediacy to imperfections in human record-keeping. It's like we're sitting in the Library of Alexandria while it's burning and just putting new books on the shelves faster than the flames can spread to engulf them.

[Antariuk]

Both ENWorld and GiantitP have lots of archivation going on right now, I think most of the interesting content should be saved this way. But depending on what you think of save-worthy content a personal backup via HTTrack might not be a bad idea. Be aware though that most of the older links and threads don't work properly anymore and need some cross-referencing to the WayBackMachine and sometimes even that doesn't work because WotC really fucked up the last two or three messagebord migrations.

It's like we're sitting in the Library of Alexandria while it's burning and just putting new books on the shelves faster than the flames can spread to engulf them.

[Sacrificial Lamb]

The WoTC forums are closed. I don't know why, but this almost feels like a bizarre form of corporate suicide. 5e will slowly wither away, but at least M:tG should still survive...

[RedstoneOrc]

I stopped going to the the wotc website totally like six years ago cause their prices were too high on their own site and their forums were full of optimizing retards/they didn't have any good play advice. But this is really bad news. They might make their way to places i do frequent.

[Krusk]

I stopped going to the the wotc website totally like six years ago cause their prices were too high on their own site and their forums were full of optimizing retards/they didn't have any good play advice. But this is really bad news. They might make their way to places i do frequent.

What prices were high? the forums have were free for my 10 years there, and as long as I remember they stupidly didn't sell physical books or PDFs on their site. Do you mean insider?

[RedstoneOrc]

I guess it's been too Damn long since I've been there I thought they sold their books on their own website.

[Krusk]

Nope, that would not be moronic. And wotc is committed to doing the internet wrong.

[RobbyPants]

But this is really bad news. They might make their way to places i do frequent.

At least at several of those other places, you're allowed to tell people when they're being stupid without getting banned.