Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred

Diablo IV's first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, launched a couple of weeks ago. Some thoughts:

Blizzard made the same...mistake is not quite the word I want...with the story of Vessel of Hatred as Square Enix did with Dawntrail. They both assume or take it for granted that the player likes the main NPC, Neyrelle in VoH and Wuk Lamat in Dawntrail, to much greater degree than is warranted. If the player doesn't like the NPC, then the story is actively annoying. At the end of the main campaign in base D4, Neyrelle does something quite stupid, and a lot of player base is out of charity with her because of that. So VoH insisting that the player is deeply concerned with Neyrelle rubs you the wrong way.

Also, in general, I think RPGs should refrain from forcing emotions on the player character. Gamers are notoriously contrary, and insisting that "No, your character feels X" is a surefire way to get their hackles up.

Otherwise, though, the story is quite good. It delves into Nahantu and Akarat, and I really liked the fleshing out of the Akarat mythology.

Gameplay-wise, I kind of wish the new Season hadn't started right away. I wanted to do the new campaign on my original Rogue which did the main campaign. But that character is an eternal character, and I wouldn't have made any seasonal progress. In the end, I basically made a carbon-copy of my Rogue and did the story in Seasonal. D3's rebirth feature would have been a nice compromise.

Apparently the new class, Spiritborn, is completely broken. One of the community sites rates builds in tiers, using S-A-B-C. They introduced a new "S+" tier, just for Spiritborn.

I'm playing a Flurry Rogue, and it's going pretty well. Blizzard has spread out the rewards nicely. Bouncing around and doing a bit of different content every play session works very nicely.

The way the new difficult tiers have settled with Torment levels is very nice as well. It's good that almost all content scales together. The only exception is the Pit, which is all about pushing higher difficulties.

All in all, Vessel of Hatred is a good expansion. The story is pretty good, and the rest of the game is in a good position. The only glaring issue is the power level of Spiritborn, and hopefully Blizzard will bring them back in line for the next season.

Thoughts on the Gilded Brutosaur

Last week, Blizzard added a new Auction House mount, the Gilded Brutosaur, to the Blizzard store for $90 USD. Naturally, it became a focal point of discussion in the WoW and MMO community.

First, some context. Back in Battle for Azeroth, you could buy the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur for 5 million gold. It was the only way to access the Auction House outside a major city. The mount was only available during the expansion, and was removed when the next expansion launched. The only way to currently obtain it is when it very rarely appears on the Black Market Auction House, where it regular sells for the "gold cap", or the maximum possible bid.

So this is the first time Blizzard is making an AH vendor available in several years.

I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. The problem is that you cannot talk about expensive items, whether in in-game gold or real-world currency, without bringing in the WoW token. And the WoW token greatly muddies the issue.

As you may recall, the WoW token essentially allows you to to trade real-world currency for in-game gold. Let's say the exchange rate is 400,000 gold to $15 USD. At that rate, the new Brutosaur costs 2.4 million gold. And the old Brutosaur cost $187.50. Does that mean the new Brutosaur is actually half the cost of the old one?

A second important point is that the WoW token exchange rate is not fixed, but floating. 

Amusing graph of the WoW Token exchange rate when the new mount was released. From Reddit.

The floating rate means that only one price is fixed, the other is variable. Which currency is better to fix? If you fix the gold value, that means the USD side might range from, say, $60 to $120, depending on when the player tries to buy tokens. To me, that seems worse than letting in-game gold vary.

Building on the floating exchange point, the side which is fixed changes the exchange rate. If the gold side is fixed, that means the supply of tokens increases as players without gold buy tokens. The rate then falls, requiring players to buy even more tokens to purchase the item.

On the other hand, if the USD side is fixed, the demand for tokens increases, and the rate goes up. This means that players who do supply tokens get a better deal in terms of in-game gold.

If you look at the issue strictly from this point of view, I think it's clearly better for expensive items to be priced in USD. It's better for the USD price to be predictable. Once you're past a certain point, there's not a lot of use for in-game currency, so it matters less if it is variable. As well, the effect on the exchange rate is healthier for the game, and a better experience for those buying WoW tokens for real-world currency.

For those reasons, I think that we're not going to seen any more items which cost a million or more in-game gold. It's awkward, and looks unfortunate on social media, but super-expensive items just work better when they're on the store, priced in real-world currency.

The Trading Post

The one element of modern WoW which I don't understand is the Trading Post. I stopped playing before it was introduced in Dragonflight, so I've only interacted with it in the last two months.

The Trading Post basically seems to be a MTX in-game shop, only without the MTX. For the F2P games, an in-game shop is a necessity. But it's almost like Blizzard feels an in-game shop is an actual attraction, in and of itself. Which is madness.

Part of my confusion is that I've always seen art as the bottleneck in modern game creation. There's got to be a better use of artists than turning out models for the in-game shop for in-game currency. Like even add the art as rewards for a simple quest chain, or extra rewards in the regular content.

Some people might say that the Trading Post art doesn't "fit" the current content, and that's true. But generally artists in corporations don't choose what to work on. They can pitch various ideas, but the business picks what it feels should be made. If the business wants art that fits the current content, that's what will be made.

I also don't see the Trading Post as a driver of engagement. At least for me, I tend to hit the Trading Post goals as a byproduct of engaging with the regular content. The Great Vault drives engagement, not the Trading Post. This is unlike a system like Galactic Seasons in SWTOR, where you would look to see what the season goals were, and that would inform what content you did.

The other thing that annoys me is the incessant in-game advertising for the Trading Post. Again, this is a necessary evil for F2P games, but it does make those games worse. As far as I can tell, WoW is deliberately inflicting this advertising on the players for no positive reason, just pure "enshittification".

I guess maybe the Trading Post is a hedge against the day WoW goes F2P, either overall or in a specific reason. But it feels like a terrible waste to me with the current game. The resources put into the Trading Post could be redirected to making the actual game better.

Raiding Plans, Ner'ubar Palace

I've been enjoying The War Within so far. There's a nice mix of weekly activities in each of the different zones.

I've also joined a potential raid group from another guild we raid with. My guild is basically in a three-guild community with one main raid, and now a second raid. I've joined the second raid, who are pretty casual, but we did the time walking Black Temple. It was pretty fun. I also got [Ashes of Al'ar] from the quest reward! The second night we did Mythic dungeons. We did a couple of +2s, missing the timer by a little bit on each. Next week we're supposed to start raiding Ner'ubar Palace.

I actually went on a Normal Ner'ubar Palace alt raid with guild community. It's a pretty interesting dungeon with some good fights. The council fight is a little difficult, possible a little too much damage for our item level. One interesting thing is that it has a couple mechanics which I associate with FFXIV, mainly the zone getting divided up and having to move into a section where the mechanic just happened.

Queen Ansurek was a very interesting fight, with an emphasis on involuntary movement that I don't recall seeing before. There's a bomb, and the raid stands next to it. Ansurek sends out a circular wave of poison from her location. As the wave approaches the raid, someone triggers the bomb, and the blast knocks the raid over the wave and safely next to the boss. There's a couple other similar mechanics in the fight.

All in all, it was a good raid. It will be interesting to see on Heroic. I also got a Warbound Tier piece, which looks to be of Raid Finder item level. A pretty interesting drop, though it would have been more exciting if I actually had alts, let alone of the correct classes.

The only other interesting note from this past week is that you can do the dungeon weekly in a Follower dungeon. This makes it a very chill experience.

The War Within: Last Zone, Delves, Endgame

The last zone of the War Within is Azj-Kahet, the spider/Nerubian zone. This zone suffers a little bit from being unfinished story-wise, as the zone's story continues on over the expansion. I don't think it really grabbed me, either. It's good, maybe I was just a little tired at that point.

Otherwise, I've done most of the other content. I've ran the dungeons on Heroic. They're all pretty good. The Dawnbreaker one is interesting as Blizzard tried to incorporate flying mounts and an aboveground layout as the dungeon. Not sure it was entirely successful, but it was interesting. Personally, I disliked not being able to tell where the tank was going to decide to land in the second part. Also, I didn't really know what was going on and died chasing the last boss.

The follower dungeons are also quite good. I did a couple of The War Within to finish some quests, and also tried a levelling one from Dragonflight. The interesting thing is that the NPC tank moves at a pretty good clip, but also stops if you stop. Ironically if you don't know that, you chase the tank, the tank keeps going, which really feels like you're stuck in the modern "go, go, go" environment. But once I realized the tank would only run X meters ahead, and then would wait, it got a lot smoother.

The other major new content is Delves, which have been on a roller-coaster of bug-fixing and difficulty adjustments. I think Blizzard will sort everything out. I do feel like the community seems to take it for granted that they should be able to do Tier 8 even while under-geared. It's not the end of the world if people gear up in lower tiers.

The other thing which would be nice is if Brann had a tank spec. I wish they had used the Chromie tank mechanic from Legion. For reference, the tank loses 2% health every second until 50%, but damage scales significantly with health above 50%. I really enjoyed healing in those Chromie scenarios, and I think Delves would have been the perfect place to bring it back.

I also did the first wing on Raid Finder and even won a healer sword, which was nice. I might look into seeing if I can raid this expansion, though the main guild raid seems full for now.

The War With has quite a nice variety of endgame activities. Having all the activities give caches, but limiting rewards to the first 2 or first 4, is an excellent way to allow the player to pick and choose what they want to do.

Hero Talents in Future Expansions

Kaylriene has some thoughts on the future of Hero Talents:

The pros are that Hero Talents add fun customization that is a decent flavor without requiring relearning a spec and that they are powerful – the stated design intent is that they can and should be near 33% of your overall throughput, which is a very-potent 10 points to spend. The cons are that they just aren’t flavorful enough, they’re largely passive bonuses that take agency out of your hands, and oh yeah – it’s WoW and mathematically you have a top pick for every spec and every mode of play that’s already mathed out and written up on Wowhead guides, Icy Veins, and the class Discords. My longer-term wait-and-see con for them is that they also feel like a trap that is going to be designed around in just one expansion – by using this solution, Blizzard has functionally trapped themselves to either expanding the Hero Talent trees for a couple of expansions until they’re as big as the class and spec trees or pruning them down and making the big marquee rollout of them a bit of a waste, and neither of these is a particularly good outcome. I hope there’s a secret third option and that Blizzard has already identified this as a priority.

I was thinking about the future of Hero Talents in new expansions, and I do think there's a third path. Blizzard could completely replace the 3 current Hero archetypes with 3 new ones. So in The War Within, you're a Templar Retribution paladin. In the next expansion, you can be a Crusader Retribution paladin that focuses on an entirely new mechanic.

Then in a couple of expansions, maybe they can bring back popular and successful archetypes, mixed in with new ones.

That way it becomes an evergreen system, but bounded at the same time. Each spec only has access to two Hero archetypes, but the archetypes change from expansion to expansion. Each archetype focuses on a specific ability, the way they do now, but remains at 10 points, and you get 1 point per level in the new expansion. 

The core class and specialization remain consistent with the standard tweaks and tuning, while the changing Hero archetypes would provide the radical changes which people like to see.

The War Within: Hallowfall

This post may contain spoilers for The War Within.

Hallowfall may very well be the best zone ever created in World of Warcraft.

Now, I'm probably a little biased as a paladin player, but everything about the zone is just perfect. The Arathi are excellent. It's so nice to have a zone of basically Lawful Good people and have it be played straight, with none of "the good guys are really the bad guys" twists that have infected modern media. (Well, there is the Priory, but even that is more a case of the good guys getting desperate.)

The motif of fires and flames holding back the darkness, and Lamplighters who go into the darkness, works perfectly in this expansion. It also has surprising parallels with the kobolds and their use of candles to hold back the darkness. I'm waiting for the inevitable meeting of the kobolds and the Arathi, where the kobolds decide that the Sacred Flame is the biggest candle of them all, and become Lamplighters.

The questing plate armour is superb, perhaps the first armor that has surpassed Judgment in the eyes of the community. At least until the Judgement remaster was announced.

There are two very memorable side-quests. First, Alyza Bowblaze, who is quite likely to lead a crusade when she grows up. The second is The Last Mage, which is worth avoiding spoilers even in a spoiler-marked post.

Hallowfall is a superb zone, one of Warcraft's best. It manages to be a standout even in a very strong expansion.