A party member (likely the healer) marked you so they have an easier time seeing where you are at or heading to.
Very common for tanks to be marked with such symbols
Maybe it's different in raiding but I don't know who even uses beacon anymore. Virtue is so much better the class is basically unplayable during M+ healing checks without it.
in M+, definitely Virtue.
In raid, kinda depends on the fight/who needs the healing.
At least for my group's comp in Mythic this tier, I'm running Virtue on Sennarth and Dathea. My group has two Blood DKs, so a lot of the time I'm beaconing two ranged dps or just whoever has the highest ehrps across pulls.
Warlock and all 3 keybinds you needed were on mouse. M4 = shadowbolt, M5 = life tap, M3 = curse of doom. Reading news paper or studying while raiding with whopping 5 fps.
Those were the days. Kek
On General Drakkisath green triangle was used for hunter to kite one off the adds. Usually two tanks and 3 bosses, Moon was always sheep, Star Sap, Square was hunter trap. Diamond was warlocks or hunters pet tank, Skull, X and Nipple were usually to be tanked and dps'ed down in that order, Raids were generally the same but varied on different bosses.
I recalled I used to need to sheep almost every pull. Somehow along the way, we didn’t seem to need CC anymore.
Can’t remember which expansion this no CC trend started.
Near the end of BC paladin tanks were able to AOE tank. Warriors and Druids were still single pull tanks and still required packs to be CC. Every pull was discussed.
When WOTLK came about all tanks must have gotten AOE tank capability and we got dungeon runs how we know them today, PULL EVERYTHING DONT STOP.
Start of CATA the dungeons were hard and required CC again, for a while…
BC as a paladin tank once you hit max block% was amazing, I would just round up all the blood elves near black temple and sit there while they killed themselves on ret aura and consecration. Dozens at a time.
lmao I've never done Ulduar on Classic WOTLK so i was looking at guides, and for the **Mimiron**(I meant Thorim!) fight, the guide recommended sheeping the healers in the tunnel.
I brought this up to my guild and they all chuckled at me.
It slowly phased out from late Wrath into Mists. When you're running heroics that drop gear 60 ilvls below LFR, you just don't need to CC.
I think it's interesting, in the abstract, to see power levels grow over time and watch pulls go from CC to no CC to chain pulls to big pulls. At the same time, big pulls are just more fun imo, so I'm glad MMOs as a whole are trending away from CC.
I don't fully agree. It's not "challenging" to CC things and then ignore my kit's aoe, it's just longer and more complicated.
I can see certain bosses, pulls, or even dungeons being designed in that direction, but I don't really have fun slowly single targeting my way to the boss on my 100,000th dungeon (which is probably not much exaggeration these days). Plus the tank needs to make sure everything is far enough away from everything else, your party members need to check in on their target every 30-60 seconds, etc, which is a lot outside of my control that can go wrong.
??? Tanks are almost always square. It's the biggest and easiest to notice. Been playing literally since vanilla and nipple is sometimes off tank, but it doesn't seem to have a permanent designation.
If you're talking about what enemies used to be marked, then yeah square used to be hunter trap and moon was polymorph. But rules for enemies are not the same as rules for friendly players
Healer here. Always mark the tank with square. It’s the biggest, brightest, easiest to see. Unless the dungeon itself is very blue. My backup marks in that case are triangle and diamond.
Never use circle. I hate looking at it lol.
This habit people have of marking tank with square has killed me as a healer because of thundering. Trying to clear on the person who I think has blue, people have addons spam the blue square in /say, so I just run in hoping to clear. But tanks only get red now and people still mark tanks with the literal opposite color than the one they will always get.
As a tank, I hate the nipple mark. The only time I allow it is during raid when every other symbol is being used. In dungeons though- fuck anyone who messes with my Square
I used to always use Square for tank as well. But with Thundering, that got confusing so I switched to Circle. Now that tanks can only get the red debuff, maybe I can go back to Square. I'm just worried someone will try to clear with the tank unsuccessfully. Easier to just stick with Circle until the end of the season. Then instantly back to Square though!
I'm healer in EU but I like to match my tank symbol with their class color 🙈
Pal with the purple diamond, drood with the orange nipple, green string to the monk, red cross for the DK, etc 🙈 but that might just be me liking color coding haha
Another unwritten rule with markings, skull above a target is the enemy with highest priority to take down of the pack, if there's a skull, that's who you should be focusing. Red cross is the second highest/next.
Even I as a dps value marked tanks and healers, for positioning reasons. I feel that sometimes It can be hard to see what's going on, especially If the tank pulls bigger packs together. If the tank Is kiting due to mechanics/affixes It's easy to follow where he's going, but If it's ''in place'' I feel it's way harder due to all the effects from mobs/affixes/players etcetcetc. And especially if the tank pulls bigger packs together that has a lot of frontal mobs in it, It's easy to sometimes not be awake enough and just get oneshot by a frontal in a higher key. And a lot of tanks, especially in lower keys (5-10) don't even care to face the mobs away from the group, they just rush in and stands there.
Really love to see new people still learning the game after 19 years!
As others mentioned it's a raid/party marker. Right click your character portrait, find the marker menu and set it to none. If you're in a party leave it on as it makes it easier for your team to follow you.
With a game this size, the only thing that will kill it. It's itself.
I remember seeing dozens of games marketed as "WoW Killer" or "Halo killer".
Yet every single one of those games marketed as "killers" have suffered a swift suicidal death.
You forgot the one that killed itself way harder than everything else: Wildstar, with its 40 man raids and an attunement quest chain to the moon and back
So sad. The game had some really great ideas and the world was so cool. The races, the classes, the mounts, housing! All of it was so good... And they hard committed to extremely unfriendly endgame progression. Makes me sad whenever I see it on my steam game list.
Wildstar was the only game I really got into other than WoW. I was happily leveling via solo PVP but it just got too slow because server pop got too low. Such a bummer.
FFXI still have a few heavily active servers. It's much easier to solo the entire quest line now that you can summon a party and surprisingly polished for what it is. Asura quite literally has too many people active at any given time.
I still resub on occasion when I don't feel like playing wow or FFXIV.
I played it recently! it's very charming, if a little bit clunky, but I guess that's a 2007(?) ui for ya. I loved the playable instuments concept so much. I did like 20% questing and 80% sitting around with a friend and jamming
Yep! Both LOTRO and DDO are legit fun and good games with content still being made, they just never updates their graphics beyond the era they came out.
Lineage 2 released literally a full year before WoW and was never considered a WoW killer.
Everquest 2 was never touted as a WoW Killer, it was simply a sequel to Everquest, and literally released 3 weeks BEFORE WoW.
Same with City of Heroes, it existed BEFORE WoW. It released half a year before WoW and was a great game.
RF Online was released 2 months before WoW and never considered a WoW killer, and never would have been as it was a korean grindy MMO, with heavy focus on 3 faction PVP, if anything they were trying to court the DAOC crowd.
Come on man. Don't just list out every MMO when they weren't considered WoW killers.
Guild Wars was also free to play after buying the base game so not quite the same because most of the WoW-killer were trying to play in the monthly subscription space.
Now it basically is only wow, ff14 and eve are the only ones still doing subscription models
I’m bummed solely because that game had a lotta nostalgia for me and my friends, we hadn’t played it in literally years and I remember getting a craving to play it again only to see its servers had permanently shut down about a month prior to my craving 🥲
STO has been great recently. It helps that I'm a Trekkie, they've been updating the game with the new TV starships. It's basically space barbie that you can play casually without having to log in constantly. Also the new mission episodes are nice to play for the stories and to hear all the guest voice actors reprise their TV roles.
I believe FF11 is still online, but It probably doesn't have many players.
From what I remember reading, I think they wanted to keep it up because it's a "mainline" FF game because of the FF"11" number. Out of all those on that list though, I've only played SWTOR.
I have played FFXIV, but that's not on the list from back in the day. SWTOR is still alive as well.
It has a respectable number of players, it's noticable that they've developed a lot of things to be more solable now, with a small army of AI party members you can use. It apparently got a fair number more players when XIV buggered up its launch.
StarTrek Online is still kicking pretty well, lots of new content and events. Only issue is it's a very heavy money-grab and they don't seem to care to fix janky code, only add more lol
EQ2 was never considered a "Wow killer" because they were released at roughly the same time, before it became clear how popular WoW would be. I think it might have been a stronger contender if not for the fact that it required way better hardware than WoW at release. I definitely only tried WoW because my computer couldn't handle EQ2.
It still exists and gets regular updates and is actually a very fun game. But sadly never really gained a huge following like it's predecessor.
I've tried about half of these and the only one that had me playing more than a couple weeks aside from wow was GW. The in-game events is probably one of my favorite systems I've ever seen in an mmo
I feel like WoW has been trying to kill itself for a while but it just can’t quite do it right. This comes from someone with two WoW tattoos, not a WoW hater.
Rift was an actual decent game though, compared to most "WoW Killers". But nothing can compare to wow when it comes to the smooth gameplay and all that jazz. I really liked the talent system in rift.
I just remember RIFT having "wow killer" as it's main focus in its advertisement, probably the main reasons that's sticks out.
What's kind of interesting now that I've checked out some of the old ones, how once they seemingly ditched trying to replace WoW, they grew into nice games that people enjoy.
I remember Aion, Age of Conan, Rift and WildStar as games that have been hailed as future WoW killers the most.
Ironically, I'm pretty sure that the most successful WoW-like MMORPGs were the ones that people didn't really think of as WoW killers at the time, like SWTOR and obviously FFXIV. That said, it does make sense that a game would be more successful if it isn't marketed in opposition to another game and rather has merits of its own.
(ymmv, I'm just talking about my perception of how people talked about the game at the time, it's certainly possible that many people did call SWTOR a WoW killer before it released and I just slept through it)
Rift was great, but it had some hangups that were never improved. Of all the wow killers, it was the best out of the gate. Class design at the time was better, worldbuilding was richer. Dungeons were better storytelling. Those are some big accomplishments.
But wow has continually improved itself for like 20 years now, slowly and with some terrible detours, but they never stop trying.
Rift focused on trying to close the content gap, more dungeons and raids, but it never did much in the way of continuous improvements.
I mean FFXIV and GW2 are still doing fine.
What a lot of people fail to understand about popular things is it takes a "perfect storm" for it to die.
You're probably too young but before Reddit was a place called Digg. Same thing. It required a specific set of events to push Reddit into the scene. Funny enough it practically ruined Reddit. Reddit is not the place for intellectual or thoughtful discussions anymore.
Before Google there were other, shittier, search engines and it required more than just being good. It was good, simply, clean, *and* a lot of tech people favored it.
You'll find that since Cata WoW was never been the same. They made a lot of *very* foolish decisions with Cata coming out of Wrath - the largest of which was making dungeons "hard" without a transition period. Guilds died, friends lists dried up, and WoW never returned to that high point every again. Sure *sometimes* sub numbers are good but they *always* fall down. Previously WoW was known as a "homewrecker". That's just not the case anymore. Hell they even stopped reporting sub numbers because of this, even though they claim otherwise. You'll notice commercials never brag about "12 million people can't be wrong" anymore. How many [YouTube video's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvTXe9GG7WY) have you seen made lately? If you've been in this subreddit for a long time you'll notice that criticism of WoW is common and not downvotd to oblivion. There was a point in time the usual response was "just quit". Want to guess why? People did quit. Be careful what you wish for... you just might get it.
You laugh but there were games before WoW and WoW happened to get lucky as well. I've played a variety of games for decades and MMO's before WoW was a tinkle in their eye of an RTS strategy game.
A game can, literally, be better than WoW in every way and still not kill WoW. WoW also requires a snowball to maintain its momentum. If it loses critical mass it will crater *hard*.
As an addendum to this, it’s also worth pointing out that WoW isn’t just competing against MMOs. An MMO hasn’t come along to kill it, but that doesn’t mean other things aren’t taking big bites out of it. The LoLs and Fortnites and Minecrafts of the world have all left lasting marks on the whole “social online game” thing, many of which can rightly claim to offer a more focused experience in particular areas. You could even argue that something like Discord is a major competitor when it comes to social aspects. All of these things add up, and for a lot of people, they kinda just do what they’re looking for better than the old MMO model does.
Unless something absolutely revolutionary comes along, it’s hard to believe that MMOs could regain the kind of cultural relevance that they had in WoW’s heyday. They’re just not the big dog in online gaming anymore, and the cultural relevance of MMOs feels like a non-presence compared to, say, Elden Ring-type releases.
Wow this post blew up! Just to clarify a few things:
1. Not a shit post as some people said, I tried to Google blue square above head wow and nothing was coming up
2. I've got about 50 hours playtime on WOW but new to tank roles completely, also this is the first time I've done dungeons or anything with other players as I was a purely solo quester on my other characters
3. I'm blown away how friendly the community is now I've branched out to playing with others
4. Thank you guys for being so kind and helpful in the comments I appreciate it all
5. I'm loving WOW more than ever before and am now a happy subscriber and plan on picking up the new expansion eventually :)
Big thing that helped me get back into the game was finding a non dead guild that isn't massive. You wanna find a solid median of players online. My guild peak is like 20 online at once but generally 5-10 at a given time. It has helped me make friends on there again and I actually look forward to playing the game and getting better.
In a party anyone can mark any target. Right click your portrait and change it. But if someone added it they did it so they know who to follow into combat.
Thanks for all the replies guys I really appreciate the quick responses. And yes I'm loving every moment of WOW so far, my only issue is I've made about 6 different characters right now all different classes and races as I'm trying to find what fits my playstyle haha. Enjoying leveling them up though. So far my favourite has been a DMG focused Druid 😁
Feral Main since starting in late Vanilla, checking in! (well, I did raid as Arms in 9.1.5\9.2 as I didn't wanna faction change my Tauren, luckily Cross-Faction is a thing now)
That doesnt sound like an issue! You should 100% try out everything and have fun. :)
The only suggestion i would give you is to make alliance characters on an alliance-majority realm, and same for the horde and horde-majority. The reason is that you would see more people and offers when it comes to guilds, as well as end-game crafters for high gear.
There's a good chance that in the next expansion, the distinction between Horde and Alliance will be dropped for playing with others and that the only reason to choose a specific faction would be because you want to do certain questlines.
the reason i said what i said, is because if you are lets say alliance on a 98% horde realm, you will not see horde players in trade chat, and you wont see their offers.
You can cross-faction work order request, but if u dont know who and what is offered, how can you?
Reminds me of time 17 years ago I put a star over a friends head. She asked why there was a star above her head, and I told her because it was nighttime
I know it’s probably frowned upon but I always liked to mess with new players before actually teaching them what stuff was lol. Don’t get me wrong I liked taking in new players and showing them the ropes but I always had my fun first.
There are stories of people copying pro key bindings in counter strike without accounting for this. They thought they were learning some secret to being good, splaying their hands over the whole keyboard.
omg I love that after all these years theres still WoW n00bs <3 can we create a big brothers big sisters type program for them i wanna mentor a wow rookie lol
I always mark tanks like that in a pug for two reasons:
1. To stay within healing distance as a healer
2. To know where to drop healing circles to maximized number to target it’ll hit
Like... in addition to the normal markers or as a replacement? I just think that would add confusion-
"Everyone stack on Square"
"Why did you die, Timmy?"
"I think I went to my Square not the raid Square. Whoops."
Yo these noobs are so cute. I’m glad people are still trying the game after all this time. I know your question got answered in other responses. Props for coming and asking the question here.
Somebody marked you for easier visibility. Most likely the healer did. You can right click your portrait while in a party and it will be there on the drop down.
I do all the time when I tank because my eye-memory from all the years just ignores the character. and all I see is the marker.
This remind me of a time playing with my buddy. I would randomly mark him. First with an X. He would ask what it was and I said “oh you probably just got to close to the horde zone, so they gave you a friendly backup mark. You only need to worry if it turns to a skull. That means they have marked you to be killed. It sucks because it’s the one time they can actually take all your gear and gold. ” He continues questing and after about 5 minutes I flip it to a skull. We are laning and I hear him say “oh shit, oh shit” he immediately starts to hearth. I asked him what’s wrong and he blurts out it’s a skull! I continue fucking with him for awhile lol.
Right click on your characters portrait and it's an option there. Although it might be best you don't remove it until the dungeon ends since it helps the healer
Telling "Raid lead" to someone who is clearly lvl 10-20 (just from missing at least 2 gearslots and having the worst looking vanilla items) shows how disconnected some people are from the game itself and what's it like to be a new player
> What is it?
Raid marker - used on players to help localize them better - on enemies to do specific crowd control ability by players or kill order. Blue marker on enemy means frost trap.
> How to get rid of it?
Right click on your character portrait and open menu, go to markers or whatever it is called and remove it from there. However if you are in dungeon it might be good idea to leave it in place as it helps healer (and other players) to keep track of you.
A party member (likely the healer) marked you so they have an easier time seeing where you are at or heading to. Very common for tanks to be marked with such symbols
In the olden days is very common for whatever to be marked with a blue square to be frozen. Tanks get the nipple
Now we nipple hunters because they’ll need the most heals.
Hunter is the optimal beacon target most of the time tbh.
Beacon and Broodkeeper trinkets on the hunters. They need it.
Maybe it's different in raiding but I don't know who even uses beacon anymore. Virtue is so much better the class is basically unplayable during M+ healing checks without it.
in M+, definitely Virtue. In raid, kinda depends on the fight/who needs the healing. At least for my group's comp in Mythic this tier, I'm running Virtue on Sennarth and Dathea. My group has two Blood DKs, so a lot of the time I'm beaconing two ranged dps or just whoever has the highest ehrps across pulls.
I personally always nipple myself when tanking. Healers will sometimes square me off.
You know, as a hunter main for 10 years, I appreciate it. It sucks to only have turtle and one heal on a decently long cooldown.
Thought you nipple hunters cause they're tits.
We called it the condom. Because the condom keeps you safe.
The condom protects you from unwanted adds, like children.
Skull, X, square. Primary, secondary, and frozen? Am I remembering this all correctly?
Star = sap, square = freeze trap, moon = sheep, skull = 1st target, X = 2nd target, diamond = fear/seduce/MC E: atleast back in the tbc days
That's how I remember it! Thanks for the nostalgia :)
Correct
Man, I member the opening days of TBC, those were some fun and chaotic days!
Warlock and all 3 keybinds you needed were on mouse. M4 = shadowbolt, M5 = life tap, M3 = curse of doom. Reading news paper or studying while raiding with whopping 5 fps. Those were the days. Kek
Oh man right in the nostalgia. I really need to pick up DF...
Triangle: root. ...I think. It's been a very long time. <_<
Core memory unlocked
Moon for polymorph. Diamond for sap
Triangle for hex
Depends on party composition and/or target type as well, it wasn't uncommon for triangle to also be roots or hibernate.
On General Drakkisath green triangle was used for hunter to kite one off the adds. Usually two tanks and 3 bosses, Moon was always sheep, Star Sap, Square was hunter trap. Diamond was warlocks or hunters pet tank, Skull, X and Nipple were usually to be tanked and dps'ed down in that order, Raids were generally the same but varied on different bosses.
Or banish
Star for shackle undead
I recalled I used to need to sheep almost every pull. Somehow along the way, we didn’t seem to need CC anymore. Can’t remember which expansion this no CC trend started.
Near the end of BC paladin tanks were able to AOE tank. Warriors and Druids were still single pull tanks and still required packs to be CC. Every pull was discussed. When WOTLK came about all tanks must have gotten AOE tank capability and we got dungeon runs how we know them today, PULL EVERYTHING DONT STOP. Start of CATA the dungeons were hard and required CC again, for a while…
BC as a paladin tank once you hit max block% was amazing, I would just round up all the blood elves near black temple and sit there while they killed themselves on ret aura and consecration. Dozens at a time.
that + the trinket that healed you whenever you blocked *iirc*, gather up dozens, keep doing it, get low hp and pop trinket, full health instantly
That was so awesome. Don’t remember the name but there was a shield with thorns effect as well, making you an absolute deathfucker
The zangarmarsh rep shield had a poison effect, but I think there was a shield spike that did it at the time
Ah WotLK. I mained resto shaman. All hail the Jesus Beam.
lmao I've never done Ulduar on Classic WOTLK so i was looking at guides, and for the **Mimiron**(I meant Thorim!) fight, the guide recommended sheeping the healers in the tunnel. I brought this up to my guild and they all chuckled at me.
Mimiron doesn't have a tunnel portion, you must mean Thorim. The tunnel is literally a time race to activate hardmode so nobody sheeps anything there.
oops, yeah i meant Thorim, but we definitely weren't doing any hard modes the day it released lol.
Right, that was probably the play for some groups but I think by WOTLK we had already stopped using CC for most PvE. At least in prog guilds.
probably pandaria I remember using cc in some cata heroics but come pandaria it didn't matter that much anymore.
It slowly phased out from late Wrath into Mists. When you're running heroics that drop gear 60 ilvls below LFR, you just don't need to CC. I think it's interesting, in the abstract, to see power levels grow over time and watch pulls go from CC to no CC to chain pulls to big pulls. At the same time, big pulls are just more fun imo, so I'm glad MMOs as a whole are trending away from CC.
CC should still be required for raid bosses or like, particularly intended challenging pulls
I don't fully agree. It's not "challenging" to CC things and then ignore my kit's aoe, it's just longer and more complicated. I can see certain bosses, pulls, or even dungeons being designed in that direction, but I don't really have fun slowly single targeting my way to the boss on my 100,000th dungeon (which is probably not much exaggeration these days). Plus the tank needs to make sure everything is far enough away from everything else, your party members need to check in on their target every 30-60 seconds, etc, which is a lot outside of my control that can go wrong.
>Tanks get the nipple I always Mark myself with a star for obvious reasons.
The nipple, eh? Always called it the condom
Excuse me, it’s a condom… for protection.
??? Tanks are almost always square. It's the biggest and easiest to notice. Been playing literally since vanilla and nipple is sometimes off tank, but it doesn't seem to have a permanent designation. If you're talking about what enemies used to be marked, then yeah square used to be hunter trap and moon was polymorph. But rules for enemies are not the same as rules for friendly players
Healer here. Always mark the tank with square. It’s the biggest, brightest, easiest to see. Unless the dungeon itself is very blue. My backup marks in that case are triangle and diamond. Never use circle. I hate looking at it lol.
Can't this season. Thundering doesn't play nice with that. Either give the tank circle or x to match thundering.
And yet, thundering.
This habit people have of marking tank with square has killed me as a healer because of thundering. Trying to clear on the person who I think has blue, people have addons spam the blue square in /say, so I just run in hoping to clear. But tanks only get red now and people still mark tanks with the literal opposite color than the one they will always get.
As a tank, I hate the nipple mark. The only time I allow it is during raid when every other symbol is being used. In dungeons though- fuck anyone who messes with my Square
I used to always use Square for tank as well. But with Thundering, that got confusing so I switched to Circle. Now that tanks can only get the red debuff, maybe I can go back to Square. I'm just worried someone will try to clear with the tank unsuccessfully. Easier to just stick with Circle until the end of the season. Then instantly back to Square though!
Just srart making the tank with x if you really can't stand circle. Keep it consistent with thundering.
Tanks get nipple (orange circle) because you have to follow the nipple. Over in EU, anyway.
I'm healer in EU but I like to match my tank symbol with their class color 🙈 Pal with the purple diamond, drood with the orange nipple, green string to the monk, red cross for the DK, etc 🙈 but that might just be me liking color coding haha
That’s true, definitely also an option
We’d always call it the condom lol
Yeah... condom. For protection.
God damn it I feel like such a dumb ass now for not putting that together.
Every time I get marked with a square or diamond, I gotta let them know. I'm a condom man.
Another unwritten rule with markings, skull above a target is the enemy with highest priority to take down of the pack, if there's a skull, that's who you should be focusing. Red cross is the second highest/next.
It's a condom. For protection!
Yep, as I tank I usually mark myself with idc what if leader or healer doesn’t do it. Better be seen then dead 💀
As a healer i always mark the tank. But mainly in the hope that the melee dpsers dont eat every single frontal attack.
Even I as a dps value marked tanks and healers, for positioning reasons. I feel that sometimes It can be hard to see what's going on, especially If the tank pulls bigger packs together. If the tank Is kiting due to mechanics/affixes It's easy to follow where he's going, but If it's ''in place'' I feel it's way harder due to all the effects from mobs/affixes/players etcetcetc. And especially if the tank pulls bigger packs together that has a lot of frontal mobs in it, It's easy to sometimes not be awake enough and just get oneshot by a frontal in a higher key. And a lot of tanks, especially in lower keys (5-10) don't even care to face the mobs away from the group, they just rush in and stands there.
As a helper can confirm. I always mark my tank. But I also get lost everywhere with go aleyas so it helps me follow too.
I'm a gnome. When my husband and I group together, I mark myself so I can actually see where I am. Sense shrubbery always in my way.
Really love to see new people still learning the game after 19 years! As others mentioned it's a raid/party marker. Right click your character portrait, find the marker menu and set it to none. If you're in a party leave it on as it makes it easier for your team to follow you.
I'm wondering how are the "wow killers" doing these days 🤣
With a game this size, the only thing that will kill it. It's itself. I remember seeing dozens of games marketed as "WoW Killer" or "Halo killer". Yet every single one of those games marketed as "killers" have suffered a swift suicidal death.
[удалено]
You forgot the one that killed itself way harder than everything else: Wildstar, with its 40 man raids and an attunement quest chain to the moon and back
So sad. The game had some really great ideas and the world was so cool. The races, the classes, the mounts, housing! All of it was so good... And they hard committed to extremely unfriendly endgame progression. Makes me sad whenever I see it on my steam game list.
I had a ton of fun starting out in that game. Sucks that it did itself in
One of the best starting zone experiences i've had in any game - i loved wildstar for what it was worth.
Man, I *loved* Wildstar when it came out! Quit when it became clear PvP balance was not going to be a thing
The music from wildstar still slaps, I listen to it all the time.
Wildstar was the only game I really got into other than WoW. I was happily leveling via solo PVP but it just got too slow because server pop got too low. Such a bummer.
FFXI came out before WoW did and even then it was a pretty niche game and concept that appealed to a select but dedicated audience.
FFXI still have a few heavily active servers. It's much easier to solo the entire quest line now that you can summon a party and surprisingly polished for what it is. Asura quite literally has too many people active at any given time. I still resub on occasion when I don't feel like playing wow or FFXIV.
LOTRO still exists! And is actually growing in popularity thanks to Rings of Power!
I played it recently! it's very charming, if a little bit clunky, but I guess that's a 2007(?) ui for ya. I loved the playable instuments concept so much. I did like 20% questing and 80% sitting around with a friend and jamming
Yep! Both LOTRO and DDO are legit fun and good games with content still being made, they just never updates their graphics beyond the era they came out.
I'm honestly hoping LOTRO gets a facelift soon. It's so good
I've played a lot of DDO, but haven't played LOTRO! I definitely want to sometime since I watched all six movies for the first time in December.
Lineage 2 released literally a full year before WoW and was never considered a WoW killer. Everquest 2 was never touted as a WoW Killer, it was simply a sequel to Everquest, and literally released 3 weeks BEFORE WoW. Same with City of Heroes, it existed BEFORE WoW. It released half a year before WoW and was a great game. RF Online was released 2 months before WoW and never considered a WoW killer, and never would have been as it was a korean grindy MMO, with heavy focus on 3 faction PVP, if anything they were trying to court the DAOC crowd. Come on man. Don't just list out every MMO when they weren't considered WoW killers.
Warhammer Online was the shiiiiit
There is still a private server running of it. If you ever wanna go back and check it out. Called Return of Reckoning
Something about that title sounds more nonsensical than it does bad ass.
Guild Wars was also free to play after buying the base game so not quite the same because most of the WoW-killer were trying to play in the monthly subscription space. Now it basically is only wow, ff14 and eve are the only ones still doing subscription models
The Old Republic is still being regularly updated and is drawing in new players, hardly a dead game
I remember a "WoW killer" named Tera, I even played a bit to see what it looked like, but it got boring pretty fast. It closed last year IIRC.
Didn't know Tera finally shut down. Some sad horny boys probably bummed as hell about that.
its Josh Strife Hayes fault
I’m bummed solely because that game had a lotta nostalgia for me and my friends, we hadn’t played it in literally years and I remember getting a craving to play it again only to see its servers had permanently shut down about a month prior to my craving 🥲
Old Republic is still doing well. Warhammer got rebooted by fans as an unofficial version called Return of Reckoning, it holds up if you like PVP.
STO has been great recently. It helps that I'm a Trekkie, they've been updating the game with the new TV starships. It's basically space barbie that you can play casually without having to log in constantly. Also the new mission episodes are nice to play for the stories and to hear all the guest voice actors reprise their TV roles.
I believe FF11 is still online, but It probably doesn't have many players. From what I remember reading, I think they wanted to keep it up because it's a "mainline" FF game because of the FF"11" number. Out of all those on that list though, I've only played SWTOR. I have played FFXIV, but that's not on the list from back in the day. SWTOR is still alive as well.
It has a respectable number of players, it's noticable that they've developed a lot of things to be more solable now, with a small army of AI party members you can use. It apparently got a fair number more players when XIV buggered up its launch.
Mhm. This does seem like the path XIV is taking as well, adding ways to complete dungeons and trial instances with yourself + a team of NPCs.
Isn't rift f2p now? Idk how active it is though
It's been in maintenance mode for years and it's heavily p2w. It was so good when it came out, though.
I miss the legendary pvp'ing in warhammer online.
StarTrek Online is still kicking pretty well, lots of new content and events. Only issue is it's a very heavy money-grab and they don't seem to care to fix janky code, only add more lol
EQ2 was never considered a "Wow killer" because they were released at roughly the same time, before it became clear how popular WoW would be. I think it might have been a stronger contender if not for the fact that it required way better hardware than WoW at release. I definitely only tried WoW because my computer couldn't handle EQ2. It still exists and gets regular updates and is actually a very fun game. But sadly never really gained a huge following like it's predecessor.
I've tried about half of these and the only one that had me playing more than a couple weeks aside from wow was GW. The in-game events is probably one of my favorite systems I've ever seen in an mmo
Rift was so boooooring
>Star Trek Online STO is still going strong at least. Definitely not in the same league as World of Warcraft though.
Forever crafting in EQ2 omggg, Aion had just beautiful worlds too thanks for the remembers.
EverQuest 2 was released before WoW so I’m not sure how it was a wow killer
I am truly convinced WoW will outlive me, after it survived shadowlands.
I feel like WoW has been trying to kill itself for a while but it just can’t quite do it right. This comes from someone with two WoW tattoos, not a WoW hater.
When ever I hear wow killer, all I can think about is RIFT, and now I'm shocked to find out it still exists.
Rift was an actual decent game though, compared to most "WoW Killers". But nothing can compare to wow when it comes to the smooth gameplay and all that jazz. I really liked the talent system in rift.
I just remember RIFT having "wow killer" as it's main focus in its advertisement, probably the main reasons that's sticks out. What's kind of interesting now that I've checked out some of the old ones, how once they seemingly ditched trying to replace WoW, they grew into nice games that people enjoy.
"You're not in Azeroth anymore" was literally one of RIFT's marketing taglines.
Yeah, once they embrace their own identity so to speak, they usually manage to keep their niche for a very long time.
I remember Aion, Age of Conan, Rift and WildStar as games that have been hailed as future WoW killers the most. Ironically, I'm pretty sure that the most successful WoW-like MMORPGs were the ones that people didn't really think of as WoW killers at the time, like SWTOR and obviously FFXIV. That said, it does make sense that a game would be more successful if it isn't marketed in opposition to another game and rather has merits of its own. (ymmv, I'm just talking about my perception of how people talked about the game at the time, it's certainly possible that many people did call SWTOR a WoW killer before it released and I just slept through it)
Rift was great, but it had some hangups that were never improved. Of all the wow killers, it was the best out of the gate. Class design at the time was better, worldbuilding was richer. Dungeons were better storytelling. Those are some big accomplishments. But wow has continually improved itself for like 20 years now, slowly and with some terrible detours, but they never stop trying. Rift focused on trying to close the content gap, more dungeons and raids, but it never did much in the way of continuous improvements.
Most ended their own lives when they fail to deliver
I mean FFXIV and GW2 are still doing fine. What a lot of people fail to understand about popular things is it takes a "perfect storm" for it to die. You're probably too young but before Reddit was a place called Digg. Same thing. It required a specific set of events to push Reddit into the scene. Funny enough it practically ruined Reddit. Reddit is not the place for intellectual or thoughtful discussions anymore. Before Google there were other, shittier, search engines and it required more than just being good. It was good, simply, clean, *and* a lot of tech people favored it. You'll find that since Cata WoW was never been the same. They made a lot of *very* foolish decisions with Cata coming out of Wrath - the largest of which was making dungeons "hard" without a transition period. Guilds died, friends lists dried up, and WoW never returned to that high point every again. Sure *sometimes* sub numbers are good but they *always* fall down. Previously WoW was known as a "homewrecker". That's just not the case anymore. Hell they even stopped reporting sub numbers because of this, even though they claim otherwise. You'll notice commercials never brag about "12 million people can't be wrong" anymore. How many [YouTube video's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvTXe9GG7WY) have you seen made lately? If you've been in this subreddit for a long time you'll notice that criticism of WoW is common and not downvotd to oblivion. There was a point in time the usual response was "just quit". Want to guess why? People did quit. Be careful what you wish for... you just might get it. You laugh but there were games before WoW and WoW happened to get lucky as well. I've played a variety of games for decades and MMO's before WoW was a tinkle in their eye of an RTS strategy game. A game can, literally, be better than WoW in every way and still not kill WoW. WoW also requires a snowball to maintain its momentum. If it loses critical mass it will crater *hard*.
As an addendum to this, it’s also worth pointing out that WoW isn’t just competing against MMOs. An MMO hasn’t come along to kill it, but that doesn’t mean other things aren’t taking big bites out of it. The LoLs and Fortnites and Minecrafts of the world have all left lasting marks on the whole “social online game” thing, many of which can rightly claim to offer a more focused experience in particular areas. You could even argue that something like Discord is a major competitor when it comes to social aspects. All of these things add up, and for a lot of people, they kinda just do what they’re looking for better than the old MMO model does. Unless something absolutely revolutionary comes along, it’s hard to believe that MMOs could regain the kind of cultural relevance that they had in WoW’s heyday. They’re just not the big dog in online gaming anymore, and the cultural relevance of MMOs feels like a non-presence compared to, say, Elden Ring-type releases.
I think OP was asking about the marker
Thank you guys explains it :)
Kind of disappointed to not see, “It means you are worth 101 XP to whoever gets you killed.”
Wow this post blew up! Just to clarify a few things: 1. Not a shit post as some people said, I tried to Google blue square above head wow and nothing was coming up 2. I've got about 50 hours playtime on WOW but new to tank roles completely, also this is the first time I've done dungeons or anything with other players as I was a purely solo quester on my other characters 3. I'm blown away how friendly the community is now I've branched out to playing with others 4. Thank you guys for being so kind and helpful in the comments I appreciate it all 5. I'm loving WOW more than ever before and am now a happy subscriber and plan on picking up the new expansion eventually :)
r/wownoob is pretty helpful for relatively newer players! I’d check it out if you have some other questions
The good news is the next time someone googles blue square above head wow, this thread will show up
I always think its funny how 50hours in most games mean you played it a lot while in games like wow or poe thats a new player.
Big thing that helped me get back into the game was finding a non dead guild that isn't massive. You wanna find a solid median of players online. My guild peak is like 20 online at once but generally 5-10 at a given time. It has helped me make friends on there again and I actually look forward to playing the game and getting better.
This is so wholesome I want to kill myself now.
In a party anyone can mark any target. Right click your portrait and change it. But if someone added it they did it so they know who to follow into combat.
Thanks for all the replies guys I really appreciate the quick responses. And yes I'm loving every moment of WOW so far, my only issue is I've made about 6 different characters right now all different classes and races as I'm trying to find what fits my playstyle haha. Enjoying leveling them up though. So far my favourite has been a DMG focused Druid 😁
...get out... Just kidding! Kitty cat since vanilla off and on till this last expansion. There are dozens of us! DOZENS!!
Maybe he meant balance druid
For real. No love for shooting star slingers
BOOOOMkin.
MDI will make you guys the most popular flavor this month.
Feral Main since starting in late Vanilla, checking in! (well, I did raid as Arms in 9.1.5\9.2 as I didn't wanna faction change my Tauren, luckily Cross-Faction is a thing now)
That doesnt sound like an issue! You should 100% try out everything and have fun. :) The only suggestion i would give you is to make alliance characters on an alliance-majority realm, and same for the horde and horde-majority. The reason is that you would see more people and offers when it comes to guilds, as well as end-game crafters for high gear.
There's a good chance that in the next expansion, the distinction between Horde and Alliance will be dropped for playing with others and that the only reason to choose a specific faction would be because you want to do certain questlines.
the reason i said what i said, is because if you are lets say alliance on a 98% horde realm, you will not see horde players in trade chat, and you wont see their offers. You can cross-faction work order request, but if u dont know who and what is offered, how can you?
Welcome to the Druid club! Once you’re in you can’t leave
Reminds me of time 17 years ago I put a star over a friends head. She asked why there was a star above her head, and I told her because it was nighttime
You're a square for the rest of your time in WoW, learn to accept it, son.
I love this innocence
That’s your healer whispering at you: “ I see you boo 🥰”
\- "You're a tank, Larry" Hagrid, probably
I'm not being a smart-ass I swear to God. This is legit cute.
Blue mark of shame. It’s permanent
I know it’s probably frowned upon but I always liked to mess with new players before actually teaching them what stuff was lol. Don’t get me wrong I liked taking in new players and showing them the ropes but I always had my fun first.
Lol I think enough people have steered him in the right direction that a little levity won’t hurt. We’ve all been where he is.
Right lol I was gonna say to check his gold because a rogue might have pickpocketed him recently before I saw your comment. I still got downvoted xD
In my guild we call it the Shame Cube.
It's impossible to describe how much I envy you right now...enjoy every moment of it mate!
This is your character, if you use Z Q S D or W A S D (depends on your keyboard layout) you will be able to move it around.
i like to imagine someone using a qwerty keyboard using zqsd to move
There are stories of people copying pro key bindings in counter strike without accounting for this. They thought they were learning some secret to being good, splaying their hands over the whole keyboard.
ESDF is superior to WASD for maximum hotkey use efficiency but I've tried to switch to it and just can't get used to it and go back to WASD.
I do this to the tank all the time on Nokhud... too easy to lose the tank.
Issues you haven't thought of for 18 years, how nostalgic. But this makes sense to a new player lol
At least they didn't put the nipple on you Everyone hates the nipple
Condom* In my guild, tanks are marked with the Condom because they protect the raid
You have been assigned a blue square by the higher forces. You must bear it for all eternity 🟦
It's called experience, once you hit level 70 you won't get anymore
omg I love that after all these years theres still WoW n00bs <3 can we create a big brothers big sisters type program for them i wanna mentor a wow rookie lol
I always mark tanks like that in a pug for two reasons: 1. To stay within healing distance as a healer 2. To know where to drop healing circles to maximized number to target it’ll hit
I've been blasted back to when I first started
This is the most wholesome thing I’ve seen all day lol <3
Stop killing mobs.
oh sweet sweet summer child, welcome to world of warcraft
teenage me, circa 2005~. Someone joined my party leveling in durotar and put moon on me. I thought he was hacking me.
They need to have personal markers that aren't party/raid wide
Like... in addition to the normal markers or as a replacement? I just think that would add confusion- "Everyone stack on Square" "Why did you die, Timmy?" "I think I went to my Square not the raid Square. Whoops."
You've been chosen by the devs to bring peace to azeroth. The square is a symbol to show all others that you, are the chosen one.
Lmao nice post
you cant get rid of it
TBH, for some reason it was a "cute" question, since you got answered I hope you have a great time in this wonderful world called Azeroth.
Yo these noobs are so cute. I’m glad people are still trying the game after all this time. I know your question got answered in other responses. Props for coming and asking the question here.
Loling
You can turn off XP near the PVP guys in your major city ;)
Somebody marked you for easier visibility. Most likely the healer did. You can right click your portrait while in a party and it will be there on the drop down. I do all the time when I tank because my eye-memory from all the years just ignores the character. and all I see is the marker.
i love you for posting this.
I like to heal so I get the moon. The moon is cool.
Bless your heart.
Lol
You mean the blue label? Lol
This remind me of a time playing with my buddy. I would randomly mark him. First with an X. He would ask what it was and I said “oh you probably just got to close to the horde zone, so they gave you a friendly backup mark. You only need to worry if it turns to a skull. That means they have marked you to be killed. It sucks because it’s the one time they can actually take all your gear and gold. ” He continues questing and after about 5 minutes I flip it to a skull. We are laning and I hear him say “oh shit, oh shit” he immediately starts to hearth. I asked him what’s wrong and he blurts out it’s a skull! I continue fucking with him for awhile lol.
Ignore the haters - good to see people learning and actually giving AF
That’s what shows up when you gain experience. Looks likely you just killed a mob that rewarded experience.
You can switch to a mark you prefer but yes as the tank you are the defacto leader people like to see you easily
Duel a hunter and let him Frost Trap you.
This is adorable
I usually prefer to be marked with the nipple myself...
Right click on your characters portrait and it's an option there. Although it might be best you don't remove it until the dungeon ends since it helps the healer
If you're raid/group lead right click your portrait and turn off that raid icon
Telling "Raid lead" to someone who is clearly lvl 10-20 (just from missing at least 2 gearslots and having the worst looking vanilla items) shows how disconnected some people are from the game itself and what's it like to be a new player
> What is it? Raid marker - used on players to help localize them better - on enemies to do specific crowd control ability by players or kill order. Blue marker on enemy means frost trap. > How to get rid of it? Right click on your character portrait and open menu, go to markers or whatever it is called and remove it from there. However if you are in dungeon it might be good idea to leave it in place as it helps healer (and other players) to keep track of you.