Diablo's 20th Anniversary

It's the 20th anniversary of the release of Diablo, and the various Blizzard games are celebrating. These are the events I've tried.

World of Warcraft

In WoW, there are Treasure Goblins which spawn in the Broken Isles, in the Dalaran Sewers, or at the end of instances. Kill them fast enough, and you can take a portal to the Cow Level, which has a lot of diabolical tauren, cows, and the Cow King. Killing the Cow King gives you a toy.

I recommend going for a Treasure Goblin in the Dalaran Sewers. You can pick up a guard from the guard captain for 5g, and that will keep you out of PvP (for 5 minutes or so). There are usually lots of players in the sewers, making it easier to kill the Goblin.

You can only loot the Cow King once, no matter how many times you kill him. However, you can loot multiple Treasure Goblins. Apparently the Cow King is a mess on PvP servers, but that's what you get for rolling PvP.

All in all, a short, fun event with some Diablo-themed loot.

Diablo 3

Diablo 3 has a small area and dungeon which mimics the original Diablo. There's a filter making all the graphics look old-school and pixelated, though all the mechanics are still Diablo 3. There's 16 levels in total, and four old bosses.

I recommend that you start with a new level 1 character in an Adventure game on Normal. You can portal right near the entrance to the new area and enter it without killing anything. Completing the dungeon on normal with that character gives you an achievement and pet. Plus it gives you the enjoyment of low level gearing and gaining levels and abilities.

One thing I wasn't sure about was if you were allowed to go back to town before finishing and still get the achievement. I ended up just dropping all the blue and yellow items that I didn't equip.

I did it with a new Crusader, and it was pretty easy. If you're thorough, you can get almost all the seasonal achievements in that one run. The only one that takes multiple runs is the achievement to kill all the unique mini-bosses.

This was a lot of fun, and the old-school graphics did a good job at invoking nostalgia. And at the same time subtly pointing out that normal D3 is a pretty good looking game.

Personal Loot and Set Pieces

I was musing about Personal Loot a bit more, and began to wonder if Personal Loot would fall out of favor with guilds when Nighthold is released.

A somewhat unique element of the raids released so far is that there have been no tier sets released. The first Legion tier set is coming in Nighthold.

At that point, though, guilds may feel that guaranteeing X set tokens for the raid each week through Master Loot is better than leaving set bonuses up to random chance. Sure, on an individual level you may have to wait, but eventually it will be your turn.

I'm also watching The Old Republic's new loot system, where all loot, including set pieces, comes in a random lootbox. It does feels like the the largest complaint against the system is the possibility of getting very unlucky and never getting your set bonuses.

Well, the SWTOR community doesn't like the system as a whole, but I think that the set pieces are the single biggest complaint. I wonder if Bioware could mitigate a lot of the complaints simply by having set tokens drop from a few raid bosses, even with leaving set pieces dropping from the lootbox as well.

It will be interesting to see if Nighthold does change the dynamic, and push organized raids back towards Master Loot.

Raiding and Time Management Issues

My guild is moving along steadily. We're currently 7/7 Heroic Emerald Nightmare (Ahead of the Curve!), but now we're running into time management issues.

It's actually kind of interesting how things have turned out. I think the guild leadership expected to be a casual Normal-mode guild for the most part, and maybe work on a few heroic bosses in the time left after the Normal raid ended. So we've ended up with a Normal raid on Friday where everyone in the guild is welcome to come. And then we have a Heroic raid on Saturday which you have to "qualify" for. 

The qualifications are really low, but it's just enough that you actually know the correct rotation for your spec and have minimal gear. But it's kind of indicative of the mindset of the guild, in that they see Heroic as "not for casuals".

The problem, however, is that even though we raid two days a week, it's sort of like we only raid one day a week, but in two different worlds. Friday we do 7/7 N EN, and there's maybe enough time to poke at Odyn. Saturday is 7/7 H EN, and again, barely enough time to poke at Trials of Valor.

If you add to that the casual inclination to farm gear before tackling something hard, and you can see how--even though we are relatively successful--we're kind of stuck at the same time, and not really progressing forward.

To me, the best solution would be to see if we can take the Friday group to Heroic EN. The vast majority of the raid is the same for both nights. (Though a lot of people now play alts on Friday.) If we can kill 3 or 4 Heroic bosses on Friday, I think that would free up enough time on Saturday to make solid attempts on Trials of Valor.

But I don't know if that squares with the way guild leadership views Heroic raiding. Ultimately, in their heart of hearts, I think they still believe we are a Normal mode guild, and the majority of people in the guild aren't really ready for Heroic raiding.

A Loot System Suite

This would be my ideal suite of built-in loot systems for an MMO. Each system is aimed and optimized for a different audience.

1. Personal Loot

• Items are handed out on an individual basis, and are independent of other people in the group.
• Items cannot be traded.
• Aimed at eliminating loot drama entirely, as you get what the system gives you.
• Is the fixed loot system for any group activity where you queue for a group.

2. Master Loot

• The group leader gets full control over who gets which items.
• Items can be traded with other people in the same group.
• Aimed at guild groups who want to use their own system, be it Loot Council, DKP, etc, to distribute loot.

3. Need/Greed with WinCount

• 3 buttons on an item popup: Main-spec, Off-spec, Greed.
• Main-spec beats Off-spec beats Greed.
• Each button has a WinCount associated with it for each player.
• WinCount starts at zero for the instance
• When you win an item, the WinCount for the button you chose is incremented by 1.
• Lower WinCount beats higher WinCount.
• If choice and WinCount are tied, random roll for winner.
• Items can be traded with other people in the same group. This does not affect WinCount.
• No Disenchant option, so mistakes with loot are always recoverable.
• Aimed at pre-made groups who want a reasonably fair loot system that distributes loot widely with minimal administrative overhead.
• Someone who rolls Main-spec all the time is expected to be dealt with by the group leaders. If people insist on gaming the system, then Personal Loot or Master Loot is a better option.
• Basically requires more trust, in exchange for more speed and less overhead.

4. Auction

• 2 button on an item popup: Bid, Pass, with a short timer.
• Bidding starts at 1000 gold.
• Bid increases the current bid by 10%.
• If the timer runs out, the item goes to the highest bidder.
• Gold is taken from winning bidder and divided evenly among other players in the group.
• Items cannot be traded.
• If no one bids, the item is given to someone at random.
• Aimed at pre-made groups which want to sell items to people, rewarding geared players who help carry the group.
• This type of system is popular in Asia, so may as well build it in for them.

There would be some other restrictions. Like when you make a group in the group finder, you have to choose a loot system, which is clearly displayed. Once you've chosen a loot system and listed your group, you cannot change it.

This is the type of loot system suite I would like. Each system is very different from the others, and has specific places in the game, or specific audiences, where it is better suited. I think that is a better way to go than four systems which only differ from each other slightly.

Personal Loot is a Corrupted System

I'm going to define a "corrupted system" as the following: The developers design a system for a specific purpose. Someone else comes along, and says, "That system is really cool, but if we make this tweak, we can also use the system for a different purpose." So the tweak is made, but the result ends up weakening the system for the original purpose.

To see what I mean, let's take Personal Loot. Blizzard introduced Personal Loot to eliminate loot drama when grouping with strangers. The game gives individuals loot, and that's that.

But then Blizzard allowed Personal Loot to be trade-able to other members of the group. That immediately cuts against the original purpose, to eliminate drama. Now we have mods like Personal Loot Helper which call out in group chat when you get an item that you can trade and someone else needs. Refusing to trade creates drama.

Blizzard should have stuck with the original plan. Completely eliminate loot drama in transient groups. If you want to share loot, use Master Loot.

Part of my annoyance at Personal Loot is that my guild likes to use it during raids. I have no idea why, as it turns loot distribution into a huge hassle of people calling out tradeable items and having to find others to trade. It's pretty much a dumber version of Master Loot.

Personal Loot has its purpose, and it is an important purpose. It should be designed to fulfill that purpose to the best possible degree. Instead Personal Loot was watered down so that it is usable in a greater variety of situations. But those other situations already had reasonable options.

Return to Karazhan

In Patch 7.1, Blizzard returned to a fan-favourite instance from The Burning Crusade: Karazhan. The new Karazhan instance is a call-back to the old one, but is designed for a 5-person group, rather than a raid.

Return to Karazhan is also part of an interesting new trend in Legion: a move away from transient content, and towards more extended content. Return to Karazhan are is the third Mythic-only dungeon, and then there are also Mythic+ dungeons. Personally, I think it's a good trend, shifting the balance back. Regular heroic versions of these dungeons are coming in a later patch.

Return to Karazhan is also a much longer dungeon than we've seen in a very long time, maybe not since Blackrock Depths in Vanilla. The first time I went into Kara with a guild group, we only managed to kill 4 bosses in 4 hours. As one guildie put it, "[Kara] isn't a 5-man dungeon, it's a 5-man raid!"

The next week we did better, of course, and managed to down all 8 bosses in 4 hours. But it's still a very long instance, and would be a good candidate for a smaller guild to do over a couple of nights.

The bosses are all very well-done. They're almost all call-backs to the original bosses and share similar themes. Old-school players will recognize most of the fights, but the mechanics are all very well designed to work with a 5-man group instead of a raid.

The first half of the instance is fairly normal, but the second half has this crazy Alice-in-Wonderland feel to it. For example, for one part, you're shrunk down to a tiny size and have to deal with trash like a single normal rat (who hits like a truck, by the way) or a single spider. The boss of this area is a single Mana Devourer, which is a weak trash mob in the rest of the instance which you usually kill multiples at a time. That whole area just makes me smile when remembering it.

About the only negative thing I can say about Return to Karazhan is that the Chess event is not very good. It's kind of boring, takes up a lot of time, and it isn't even a boss with loot. It also comes at the very end of the instance where you just want to get to the final boss. It feels like something that should have been cut, but was left in because everyone would have complained if Return to Karazhan didn't have a Chess event like old Karazhan.

But all in all, Return to Karazhan is an excellent instance.

Legendaries in Legion

I got my first (and only) Legion legendary a couple of weeks ago: [Ilterendi, Crown Jewel of Silvermoon]. So I immediately respecced to Judgement of Light.

It actually works pretty decently. Judgement into Light of Dawn into Holy Shock does a fair amount of healing. Judging more or less on cooldown contributes about 25k dps, and it doesn't seem to really drop my total healing.

It got me thinking about the general design of legendaries in Legion. In many respects, I think my experience is how Blizzard intended legendaries to be used. You get one, and you build your character around it. So each legendary gives you a slightly different playstyle.

But one issue is that you may not like that playstyle. I like Judgement of Light, but it is mechanically different from the other builds, and I can see some healers disliking having to keep an eye on the enemies. Not to mention that it generally works best with some macros to smooth things out.

Another issue is that some playstyles will strictly math out better than others. Ilterendi is consider the second-best Holy Paladin legendary, and pretty close to the best. So it's not an issue for me. But someone who gets one of the "worse" legendaries will be unhappy.

But if everyone gets to choose their legendary, or the drop rate is high enough that you eventually get them all, then everyone will pick the one considered "Best-in-slot". And that seems to negate the whole "build-around" aspect.

The other part is that the legendaries have secondary stats on them, and they might be the "wrong" stats for your class. I do think it would have been better if the legendaries only had primary stats.

Another possibility might have been to have the legendaries be more common, but they have a lower item level base. Then there could be Warforged or Titanforged versions. This way, it would be fairly easy to get access to the "build-around" component, but a player might choose to build around a Titanforged version of a weaker legendary.

Or maybe add an expensive device that allows you to transmute legendaries. A Kanai's Cube. That way if you really did not like the legendary you got, you could spend resources on getting the one you desired.

Also making it completely random was probably not the best of ideas. I think getting a random legendary from a quest to kill the last raid boss (in any difficulty) would have been a better way of handing them out.

All in all, legendaries in Legion remind me of garrisons in Warlords. The system is not quite there, but is pretty close. A few more iterations might have made it much better.

Legion Raiding as a Holy Paladin

I ended up joining a small, somewhat casual guild. We've gone 7/7 Normal Emerald Nightmare, and hopefully will end up completing Heroic mode.

Here are some initial thoughts on raiding as a Holy Paladin.

• Healing feels very much old-school, with you focusing on the tanks, and having other healers cover the raid, though helping out occasionally.

• Bestow Faith is the standard Tier 1 talent, but I don't have a good feel for it. It felt like it was always getting sniped, and it seemed to have a much higher overheal than my other spells. I did try Light's Hammer, but it never seemed to work nicely.

• I used Aura of Mercy for the most part. I think Devotion Aura has a better cooldown, but it requires you to be proactive. Aura of Mercy actually does a fair bit of healing, and it supplements your raid healing which is your weak point. I think I want to try Devotion Aura and see if that works better next time.

• Judgment of Light actually does a decent amount of healing. Of course, it's all ambient healing, and you do have to remember to judge a lot.

• I couldn't decide between Beacon of Faith or Beacon of the Lightbringer. The increase to Light of Dawn from BotL is really strong. But double-beaconing is a lot easier in fights where you need to focus both tanks.

So far, my initial impression of Holy Paladin healing is that you have to choose between strengthening your strong points of focused tank healing, or trying to shore up your weakness of raid healing.

I started with the focused build, but we were a little healer-light to start, and it felt like the dps died too easily. So I switched talents around to add more raid healing, and that felt a little better. If we had another healer though, I think the focused build would have been better.

Of course, I'm very rusty with raid healing, and we're only a Normal-mode guild at the moment, so keep that in mind.

Any other holy paladins care to share their experiences and tips?

World Quest Group Finder

Yeah, I know, I haven't posted for a while. I fell out of the habit, I guess.

I've been playing Legion a fair bit though. I'm a bit behind the curve, only ilvl 825 or so. I haven't stepped into Mythics or raids yet, though I've been looking for a guild on Lightbringer. So far everyone seems full up on Holy paladins, sadly.

In any case, I'm using a new addon, World Quest Group Finder, that's really nice.

It allows you to automatically make or join groups that are doing the same World Quest as you are. It's pretty nice, making grouping for world quests a lot easier. Now, you can do all the world quests solo, and kill credit is usually shared, but having an actual group is pleasant, and useful for sharing credit for other objectives. Especially as I am often questing as Holy, so I get to feel more useful with heals.

It's pretty smooth and pretty automatic. When you enter a World Quest area, the addon will automatically ask if you want to join a group. If you do, it's pretty much automatic from that point, searching the group finder or adding you to it. In fact, if you look at quest group finder right now, you'll probably see a few groups created by WQGF users.

It's a really nice tool for making questing a bit faster and a bit less lonely than pure soloing.

Stat Templates for Leveling Dungeons

In Patch 7.0 Blizzard introduced stat templates for PvP. In B\battlegrounds now, you don't get stats from your gear. Instead your gear stats are overridden by a stat template. All characters of a given specialization share the same template. Your gear level does increase the amount of stats given by the template, but by a much lower amount than in PvE.

These stat templates apply to low-level PvP. I've been leveling a rogue without heirlooms and dabbling in some PvP. In my mind, these stat templates are amazing. Low level PvP is actually fun again. You don't get one-shot by characters decked out in heirloom gear. In my mind, whatever the impact at max level, the stat templates have rejuvenated low level PvP.

Then I did a low level dungeon. It was pretty terrible. The other characters were decked in heirlooms, so they just zerged the entire thing. Bosses died in less than 30 seconds. There was no skill or strategy, or any sense of group play.

The problem is that leveling dungeons need to be balanced such that a group of new players in quest gear can complete them. But if one or more heirloom characters are present, that balance goes out the window.

I think stat templates for leveling dungeons would be a great idea. Everyone would be reduced down to an even playing field. Dungeons would be a proper group experience once more. I rather doubt anyone will sheep anything, but maybe it could happen.

Heirlooms are fine for solo-play. They can be overpowered in the world. But when playing with others, I think it's more important to provide a fun, balanced, and reasonably challenging experience. Heirlooms will still give the character more XP and a high ilevel, but at least with stat templates the disparity and zerg would be greatly diminished.

The Clunky New Retribution Rotation

The new Retribution paladin is getting lambasted on the forums, and rightfully so. The new rotation is extraordinarily clunky. It just feels bad and frustrating to play. I imagine that it most players will just end up using an add-on to tell them which button to press.

Here's my analysis of the new rotation, and why it just doesn't work. There are four main pieces to the rotation:

• Blade of Justice - 10.5s cooldown, +2 holy power
• Crusader Strike - 4.5s cooldown, +1 holy power, 2 charges
• Judgment - 12s cooldown, +20% damage to holy power spenders for 8s
• Templar's Verdict - costs 3 holy power

To the previous paradigm of generating and spending holy power, Legion adds this concept of a Judgment "window". You want to Judge and then squeeze as many Templar's Verdicts in those eight seconds as you can. The Ret paladin mastery emphasizes this as well, increasing the damage done by spenders in that window.

The first problem is that there are simply too many levels to Ret now. You have to track your cooldowns, your total holy power, and the Judgment window.

The second problem is that the cooldowns for Blade of Justice and Judgment are slightly off. Judgment is 8 GCDs, and Blade of Justice is 7 GCDs. So they never quite line up, and are always changing position in the rotation relative to each other. This makes it impossible to really get into a rhythm.

The third problem is that Judgment changes its traditional position in the rotation. Ever since Vanilla, paladins open the fight with Judgment. It's the only ranged ability as well. But now you want to delay judgment until 5 holy power has been generated. It's not really an issue on long fights, but it's very annoying to have to hold off on the ranged ability when going to attack something new.

Even Holy's combat rotation is better, simple as it is. There the Judgment window improves Holy Shock and Crusader Strike. So you Judge as you run towards the mob, Shock, and CS as you get into melee range. It works intuitively and smoothly. (Also, you get to use Consecrate as a regular part of the rotation, which is always fun.)

I gather Blizzard is enamored of the Judgment window, seeing as it's also the new Mastery. My suggestion would be to smooth out the cooldowns by increasing the Blade of Justice cooldown to 12s (increasing the damage done to compensate). The heart of the Retribution rotation would become Judgement - Spender - Blade of Justice. That common piece would anchor the rotation, giving it a regular rhythm that you always return to.

This simplifies the cooldown level, and allows the Ret paladin to focus on Holy Power and using spenders in the Judgment window.

The new Retribution rotation reminds me of one of the Jedi Sentinel rotations in SWTOR. It had the same concept of cooldowns, generating and spending resources, and a damage window. But it simplified the cooldown and resource levels, allowing the player to focus on the damage window.

Legion Beta Impressions

I got into the Legion Beta last Friday. I was debating trying it, because I don't really want to be spoiled. But in the end, I rolled a blood elf priest and gave it a whirl. Some thoughts:

• The level 100 boost and initial sequence is really nice. You start out in a tutorial that goes through your basic spells one by one, and you use them on enemies. Priests start as Discipline, so the tutorial went through Shadow Word: Pain, Penance, Smite, Psychic Scream, Power Word: Shield, and Plea. It's really well done.

• I do wonder if they are going to end up making new tutorials for every expansion.

• Regarding spoilers, they come fast and furious. Legion starts off with a scenario, and crazy stuff happens. It's good to see Blizzard putting the main story back into the game, and having important events happen in-game, rather than in a novel or other tie-in.

• After the scenario, the next part that happens is the Artifact Weapon questline. It's a pretty fun quest that sends you to different parts of the world and ends in a nice scenario that makes use of class abilities. For example, as a Discipline Priest, I had to kill things, heal things, use Levitate and even take control of an enemy with Dominate Mind.

• After you get your weapon, you're introduced to the Class Hall. It's really nice to see a space with just other people of your same class. It feels like an exclusive club, and much better than an empty garrison. It's also nice to see all these NPCs of your class.

• After that starts Legion questing proper. You get a choice of 4 zones to start with. I guess this is their new scaling technology so that it doesn't matter what level you are. I started one, but then decided I didn't want to spoil the experience any more, and so stopped.

• It feels like Blizzard put in a lot of work to avoid bottle-necks at Legion launch. You start off in an instanced scenario. Then the Artifact Weapon quest scatters specializations to different parts of the world. Finally, four starting zones scatter everyone further. I guess we'll see if it works.

• I did also try the Demon Hunter initial experience. It's quite good. It puts a different spin on what happens when players did the Black Temple back in TBC. The demon hunter class feels pretty good. With a dash, double jump, and a glide ability, it also feels very mobile.

I think I'm actually going to uninstall the beta and wait for Legion to launch. Initial impressions are very good, though.

AoE Damage is Hurting Trinity MMOs

I have a sinking feeling that dungeon gameplay in FFXIV is making the same mistakes that WoW did. There is increasing pressure for the tank to just run and grab everything, and the DPS proceeds to AoE everything down in the name of efficiency.

A random picture of AoE from Google Images

WoW has gone super crazy with this, especially with leveling dungeons. There's no strategy, no interesting gameplay. Just spam AoE.  But FFXIV is trending in the same direction, especially in the higher levels.

I've had dps and healers run ahead and pull packs back to me. It's really annoying, but the growing community consensus is that the tank should be getting as many packs as they can.

I think the major problem is that AoE is too good relative to single-target damage. AoE is generally better at 3 or more mobs, and that's the size of an average pack. So simply pulling two packs at a time is a complete win.

AoE also obsoletes tactics like Crowd Control. No point in sheeping something, it's going to get broken in the first few seconds. As well, tank AoE threat has to keep up to match DPS, and that in turn has made tanking very easy, and has removed a lot of the tank gameplay that Vanilla WoW or older MMO structures.

AoE should be significantly reduced in effectiveness, such that it only becomes viable at the 8-10 creature mark. Single-target gameplay should be the norm, except in situations which specifically call for AoE. Single-target trinity gameplay is far more interesting and fun than AoE gameplay, and so AoE damage should be kept under strict control.

Low Level Notes from the PTR

I took a poke around the public test realm this weekend. Trying to avoid spoilers, I didn't do anything major. I made a few low-level characters and took them through the first few levels. Here are some observations:

• Classes now start with a specialization. Paladins start as Retribution, Druids start as Feral (and start the game in Cat form, no less), Hunters start as Beastmaster, etc. I think the other specializations unlock at level 10. Overall, I think this is a good idea. There's no forgetting to specialize, and no "generic" abilities which are only used in first 10 levels. You also don't get two abilities that don't synergize, because they are meant for different specializations.

• Judgment has a new animation. You throw a golden hammer at the enemy, and the hammer returns to you. It also sometimes chains to a nearby enemy, but I can't tell if that's intentional or a bug.

• I think the Hammer of Justice animation changed. A giant hammer drops from the sky on the enemy's head. I don't really like it. I miss the simplicity of the current spinning rising uppercut animation.

• The default nameplates have changed. They're cleaner, and enemy health is represented as a thin red line, instead of a fatter bar. There's also small health/mana/resource bars in the center of your screen under your character. These bars only appear in combat, and fade out otherwise. I really like these new nameplates.

• The quest helper minimap graphic has changed. It's now this transparent outline instead of a shaded area.

• There's a nice animated flair on the XP bar when you get a large amount of XP. It's snazzy.

• The initial class quests that send you to your trainer are gone. I guess it makes sense since the abilities have all changed. Still, it makes me a little sad. I liked that little nod to your class right at the start, with the notes expounding the philosophy of the class.

• Armor starts as the max armor type. Paladins get plate, hunters get mail, etc. The item still looks the same as previous, like mail or leather. This is a bit weird with mail armor that looks like leather (those night elf shorts you always get), but plate that looks like mail looks decent enough.

• Otherwise quests appear to be all the same as live. For low levels, it looks like only mechanics changes.

I didn't poke around a great deal, but these are some smaller impressions of what you can expect in Legion at low levels.

Which Players Should Be Mentors?

It's nice that FFXIV decided to mark all the jackasses in Duty Finder. They're the ones with a crown beside the name.

For those of you who don't play FFXIV, the crown denotes a "Mentor", a high-level player who is supposed to help new players. However, in my experience, people marked as Mentors are equally likely to be the people who are unpleasant in groups.

There's no denying that the Mentors are qualified players. FFXIV has quite high requirements. You need to have at least three classes at max level, a tank, healer and a damage dealer. You also have to have done a thousand dungeons, which is a crazy amount. As a result, Mentors are the top slice of people in the game.

However, I'm not sure if they are the best players to advise new players. Being edge players, they have a tendency to use and expect edge strategies. Giving too specific and complex advice instead of ensuring mastery of the basics.

Also, and this may be a skewed perspective, they also seem to be most impatient, especially on older content which is trivial for them.

In some respects, I think the people below the edge tier would make better mentors for new players. They would still be decent at the game, but would be closer to the new player experience, and better able to give advice from that perspective.

To put it into a WoW perspective, currently you need to be a Mythic raider to be a Mentor. It might be better if the Heroic raiders were Mentors, and Mythic raiders expressly prohibited from being Mentors to new players.

It's kind of like a university, where professors give high level lectures, but graduate students are the teaching assistants and help students with problems. A lot of time a professor is too far away from the student experience to really see the issue.

Legendary Ring and Draenor Flying

Yesterday, in an unexpected coincidence, I managed to finish both my goals for Warlords of Draenor. I got my legendary ring, [Etheralus, the Eternal Reward]. I also finished [Draenor Pathfinder], unlocking flying mounts in Draenor.

I was a little surprised at the getting the ring. I was 31/33 for the tomes, but only had two bosses left for the week. But somehow Lady Luck decided in my favor, and a tome dropped for both bosses. I fully expected to be left with 32/33 and have to wait for next week.

As for the Pathfinder achievement, it was mostly a matter of finishing rep with the Order of the Awakened and finding enough rare monsters for the quest items. I still don't like the "blue bar" areas in WoD, but they're tolerable if you make or join a group in the LFG section.

There's still a lot of weird behavior in those posted groups that I don't understand. For example, I'd make a group. People would join and leave ten seconds later. For every person who joined and stuck around to work on the area, at least three people would join and leave. I don't know what they were looking for, as I was pretty explicit about what the group was for.

Now I'm not sure what to do with WoW. There are a couple quests to clean up, but I'm pretty much done until the pre-expansion stuff starts happening. I am leveling a mage, who's up to 45, so maybe I'll focus on that.

The Two Million Gold Mount

In Legion, Blizzard is introducing a spider mount that costs two million gold. This naturally has the forums up in arms. To give an idea of the scale, the maximum amount of gold I've ever had at one time is about 50k.



Is this mount a good idea?

It's pretty clearly a reward for "goblin" players. Players who like money-making and playing the Auction House. That's a playstyle that a significant number of players enjoy.

But just because a significant number of players enjoy a playstyle, that does not necessarily make it one that should be encouraged or rewarded. After all, a significant number of players enjoy ganking lowbies. If Blizzard introduced a mount that you got for getting 1000 kills of players half your level or lower, that would be a horrific mistake.

So first, do goblins benefit the game? In general, they do. Goblins generally "smooth" out the market. The vast majority of them make money by buying cheap items and relisting them at the market equilibrium price. The presence of goblins means that normal players probably won't be able to find bargains on the AH, but there will always be a supply of items available for purchase. It's fairly unlikely that the AH will be sold out of anything entirely.

As well, it means that normal players can guarantee sales simply by listing the item at a discount from the market price. A goblin will pick it up and relist it. Sometimes it is more important to have liquid cash than wait for the best price.

Second, does the goblin playstyle require skill or dedication, some characteristic worth rewarding? I suppose it does. The factors that give me pause is that the risk is much lower than other playstyles. I mean at least in a game like Eve you can get shot down while transporting something. The other issue is that it is a playstyle which is heavily automated. There are mods which can do amazing things for you. Of course, you have to be fairly savvy to get the most out of those mods.

Third, can the requirements be gamed? The big element here is gold-sellers and gold buying. Legitimately, you can buy 10 WoW tokens a week. If we say it's 50k gold per token, that's 4 weeks and $1200 USD. I'm really not sure that introducing a mount that can be legitimately purchased for $1200 is a good idea.

There's also the illegal gold sellers. But in a way, because the amount needed is so high, the mount can act as bait. There should be relatively few sold, so examining each account that buys the mount for gold-buying can be viable.

Fourth, will the game be hurt by incentivizing this playstyle? Ironically, adding more goblins probably makes it harder on all of them, There are more people hunting the bargains, competition becomes fiercer, and profit margins become thinner. So overall, the AH experience for normal players should be even better.

Finally, is the playstyle already rewarded enough? In general, there isn't really a great advantage to having huge amounts of gold. The one exception is the Black Market Auction House. It is a bit unfair that the other playstyle rewards can be purchased for large amounts of gold, while the spider mount remains exclusive. But then again, I've never liked the BMAH. Honestly, I think Blizzard should take the opportunity of these new rewards to drop the BMAH entirely.

All in all, the two million gold spider will probably work out fine. Though Blizzard should increase the price to eight million, one million for each leg. That's a far more aesthetically pleasing price, and also increases the time required for purchase via WoW tokens and real money to four months.

Ashran

I gave Ashran a try last week. Ashran is Blizzard's "world PvP" style zone for WoD. It's been through a couple different iterations and fixes. The current version is pretty fun, and does feel a lot more like World PvP used to.

The basic structure of Ashran is that there is one "road" connecting two bases. To get to the enemy commander you have to push your way up the road, capturing each node in sequence. Then there are 5 "off-road" events that take place in the other parts of the map. The main Ashran quest requires to win 4 events and kill the enemy commander once.

So the basic cycle of play is to skirmish at the current border in the road until an event pops, then both sides rush off to the event and contest it. Eventually one faction will win four events. That faction then makes a concerted push to get to and kill the enemy commander.

By and large, it's pretty fun. The different events give a feel of having several different battles within the larger battle. There's also mechanics like giving each class a new Ashran-only ability. The paladin ability allows you to judge people and send them to a jail in your base, which is greatly amusing. There's also items you can turn in to summon NPCs to aid your side.

There's really only two problems with Ashran. First, it desperately needs a catchup mechanic. If the other team is more organized or stronger, the weaker team simply loses event after event. As well, part of your honor gain comes from artifact fragments that you loot and turn in. But if you die, you lose half the fragments you've collected. And the weaker team dies a lot more.

My fix would be to give the side that loses an event a stacking buff that boosts them by 10% or so. If they win an event, their buff count drops by one. That should be enough to even out the sides.

The second problem with Ashran is that there is no point in defending your leader. If the other side is making a concerted push to kill the leader, the best thing to do is get out of their way and get a jump on the next event.

This problem is probably much harder to solve. I think any attempt at a real solution would just see the two sides explicitly collude and take turns killing the other leader.

It's ironic, but very often the best strategy in long-running PvP games is cooperation between the two enemy sides to maximize resource gain.

Legion Dev Update

Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas did a Dev Liveblog today on Twitch, where he touched upon several of the topics we've been discussing recently. Wowhead has a nice summary. He also announced that Alpha is ending, and Beta starting shortly.

Every day when you log in, there is an emissary that asks you to do specific sets of world quests to aid a faction (eg all Dreamweaver faction quests in Val'sharah). Do four quests for the emissary and get an awesome chest. These emissary quests kind of work like Hearthstone dailies - they pile up for a few days, so you can catch up on ones you missed.

Legion will still have dailies, though these "world quests" seem more similar to Diablo 3 bounties. But they're adding a bit of a buffer, allowing you to save quests for a few days.

The leveling-up experience in classic zones is pretty broken right now and not well tuned. It's way too easy and it was neglected for a bit. Due to ability changes over the years, you basically feel invincible (even before heirlooms). You're running around more vs actually fighting. The pacing of the game isn't what it should be. They've been looking to fix this (even via hotfixes now).

As I remarked a few weeks ago, leveling is excessively easy with a very fast Time-to-kill. It's good to know that it's on Blizzard's list of things to fix.

As an aside, it's not all classes which are broken. I've been leveling a human Fire Mage, and that specialization feels surprisingly right while leveling. Admittedly, I'm only in quest rewards with no dungeon gear or heirlooms. Perhaps that spec is just under-tuned. It might be a function of not having enough critical strike, as Fire seems to want more critical strike rating to get off instant Pyroblasts. But I actually took First Aid to make bandages to keep my health up. Given my experience leveling a druid, that was completely unexpected.

In any case, there's a decent amount of interesting information on the major system changes coming in Legion. So far, it all sounds pretty good.

Alternatives to Daily Quests

There's a very good discussion in the comments of the last post. Shandren comments:

The problem with dailies is that they are... daily. You have to set time aside to do them every day or you will fall behind (yes i know it is not a lot, and likely doesn't actually matter, but the problem is how it feels to miss them, not what the actual outcome is). If you skip you dailies today,you will not be able to just do them twice tomorrow and catch up. Ergo you are "forced" to do them every day.

This is true to a degree, and I sympathize with this perspective. But the alternative to dailies isn't a game where you log in whenever you feel like it and complete tasks on your own schedule.

The alternative is a game where you grind like crazy the first couple of weeks, and then spend the next few months complaining that there is nothing to do. If you don't do the hardcore grind, you "fall behind", just as much as if you miss a day of dailies. This is especially true if the rewards are half-decent. It's only the grinds with trivial rewards which players feel free to work on at their own pace.

Of these two extremes, I prefer the dailies.

There's certainly room for improvement though. For example, suppose you could do 5 dailies per day. But you could "bank" up to 25 dailies. This would allow you to skip a day here and there, and make it up the next day.

FFXIV does something similar with its levequest allowance, though that is mostly used for leveling classes. In fact, FFXIV offers two types of leves: one type gives you, say, 100 XP per quest and costs 1 leve allowance. The other type gives you 500 XP per quest, but costs 10 leve allowances. So one is better XP per time, and the other is better XP per allowance.[1]

But overall, I think dailies were an improvement over very long grinds, especially those grinds with meaningful rewards.

1. To be honest, this is probably more complexity than is warranted. I think it also ended up confusing most players.