The Recruit-A-Friend Program

You've probably seen the buzz on Blizzard's new Recruit-A-Friend system. If you recruit a friend, you get:

1. An exclusive in-game zhevra mount.
2. A free month of play-time.

While the zhevra is interesting, these incentives are pretty standard for referring someone. The really thought-provoking part is that both accounts (veteran and new player) are linked, and there are some in-game benefits:

1. Characters on both accounts can summon each other once per hour.
2. While adventuring with your linked friend/family member, you will each gain triple experience.
3. For every two levels the new player earns, the new player can grant one free level-up to a lower-level character played by the veteran player

Some posters I've seen have spun this as Blizzard catering to multi-boxers, or rushing new people through old content so they can hit the level cap. While this may be true on some level, I think Blizzard is aiming for something different. I think this is their effort to solve the Paradox of Levels, as immortalized in this comic from Penny Arcade.

This is especially problematic in this situation as the veteran player is very likely to have a main high-level character. Basically, Blizzard is trying to encourage the new player and veteran to team up as much as possible and level up together. The veteran is unlikely to jump ahead, as she will probably revert to playing her main character when the new player is not online. And if the new player jumps ahead, she can boost the veteran's low level character up with the free levels.

Playing together with a friend is probably the strongest incentive that will cause a new player to stick with the game. This system encourages the veteran and new player to play together until close to the endgame, at which point the new player has caught up to the veteran's main character, and levels have ceased to matter.

I wonder if this is a potential forerunner of more formal "levelling pacts", or mechanisms which encourage groups of friends to stick together near the same level, and keep people from being left behind.

Revamping Paladins by Upgrading Abilities

In a previous post I mentioned how much I like having 3 offensive abilities with 6-10s cooldowns, like the current WotLK Retribution and Protection trees have. I've been thinking about it, and my fondness for that structure and pacing has only increased. I think it would be really nice if the baseline paladin played like that.

We are a long way from the days of 15s Judgements, but still, levelling a paladin is much less interactive than any other class. I do like how paladins have a more moderate pace than rogues and warriors, but only using Judgements until level 40 is a bit too boring.

However, one of the problems with giving the baseline paladin new abilities is that when the paladin gets new abilities in the talent trees, she gets new buttons to press during combat. This leads past the sweet spot of 3 abilities, and into more warrior/rogue button-mashing territory.

Then the solution hit me. Instead of giving the paladin entirely new abilities in the talent trees, the new abilities should be upgrades and replace the baseline abilities in the paladin's rotation.

WoW doesn't use a lot of upgraded abilities. New abilities and spells are usually additive, meaning you often use them in addition to your current abilities, as opposed to instead of your current abilities. There are some replacement abilities, however. Devastate replaces Sunder Armor, Mangle replaces Claw. And there are a few when levelling. Cleanse replaces Purify.

So what I was thinking for the paladin class is that the baseline paladin gets three active combat abilities before level 12 or so:

1. Judgement. Has a 10s cooldown and is like the WotLK version.
2. A weak Strike (Holy Strike?) with a 6s cooldown.
3. A weak Cleave/melee-AoE style ability with a 10s cooldown.

This base paladin would play very similarly to the WotLK Retribution or Protection paladins, at least in terms of buttons pushed during combat.

Then as you go down the trees, you get new abilities that replace the second two baseline abilities. These abilities are tailored to the specific talent tree. Each ability would share their cooldown with the baseline ability, ensuring that the paladin would switch to the upgraded ability without changing the pacing of the class.

For example, in Retribution, the paladin would upgrade Holy Strike to Crusader Strike at level 40. At level 50, Divine Storm replaces the baseline Cleave. In some ways, each ability performs the same function as the previous ability, only tailored to the spec.

In Protection, Holy Shield replaces the Cleave, and Hammer of the Righteous would replace the Holy Strike.

In Holy, Holy Shock would replace the Strike. It's a 6s ranged strike, with a healing component. We'd need a new ability to replace the Cleave, but it would be something that hit multiple enemies and yet had a healing or ranged component to it.

The basic idea is that all the Strikes share a cooldown, and all the Cleaves share a cooldown. This way the pacing of paladin combat is maintained, the baseline gameplay isn't so boring, but each spec gets upgrades and a unique playstyle, and ends up in more or less the same position as current design.

Ask Coriel: Defeating a Warlock

Paul writes in:

During PvP, what do I do when encountering a Warlock face to face? Fight or flee. My past experiences have taught me that they whoop my ass. How can we best them?

I'm not really that good at PvP, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Warlocks are kind of paladin kryptonite. It's pretty hard to beat a good warlock, especially if they have a felhunter out. Try to kill or fear the pet first. Remember you can use Turn Evil and Exorcism on warlock pets.

Other than that, you just have to wear them down. Heal early and often, with Flash of Light to save mana. Save your divine shield for when you are loaded down with DoTs, as it will remove all of them. If the warlock doesn't have Shadow Embrace or Unstable Affliction, Cleanse off the DoTs, otherwise just heal through the damage. Get the PvP trinket so you can break a Fear. Remember that you can Cleanse Drain Life and Drain Mana.

All in all, it's a pretty hard fight, especially if the warlock is good.

Any other tips for Paul, especially from people who PvP regularly?

WotLK Beta - Seal of Vengeance trick

In Wrath, special attacks like Crusader Strike will proc Seals. If the attack hits multiple people, the Seal will proc for each person (or have a chance to proc for those Seals which aren't a guaranteed proc).

This is pretty amusing with Seal of Vengeance and Hammer of the Righteous. HotR hits 3 targets every 6 seconds. If you are running SoV, you can actually build full SoV stacks on all three targets, refreshing them every 6 seconds.

WotLK Beta - Soloing with Holy

Holy doesn't look like a solo-friendly spec. My Holy gear is roughly one Tier higher than my Ret or Prot gear, but Holy seemed a lot slower than the other two.

Part of it is that there is a limited number of abilities to use while soloing.

Holy (2): Judgement, Holy Shock
Protection (3): Judgement, Hammer of the Righteous, Holy Shield
Retribution (3): Judgement, Crusader Strike, Diving Storm

While the 6s cooldown on Holy Shock is a lot better than the current cooldown, combat as Holy is still pretty boring. Judge, Shock, wait 6s seconds, Shock again. I suppose I could have worked in Consecration, but it seemed like a waste.

At 75, paladins get a new ability, Shield of Righteousness (slams the target for 200% of Block Value as holy damage). I suppose that can help out Holy, though it will hit for much less as Holy has no Strength or Block Value.

In my opinion, I really like the way the paladin plays when she has 3 decent offensive abilities with 6-10s cooldowns, as with the current WotLK Retribution and Protection. It's not as frantic as a rogue or warrior. It's measured, but it's not boring. You're always planning your next move, but you're not waiting for long cooldowns.

It's sort of sad that you have to wait for level 40 (Holy, Prot) or 50 (Ret) before you get your second low-cooldown offensive ability, and level 60 (Prot,Ret) before you can get your third.

Again, though, this is just soloing. I haven't tried Holy in groups yet.

WotLK Beta - Soloing with Protection

Protection is a lot of fun for solo questing. It's not as fast as Ret, but it's pretty good. I used Judgement, Hammer of the Righteous and Holy Shield, and easily went through 1-3 mobs at a time. I didn't feel it was worth using Consecrate for so few mobs. Prot is a little mana-hungry, but I went JoL + SoW, and still killed fairly fast while keeping my health and mana pretty high.

The caveat to this is that I did not use Prot gear. I used my Ret gear + a green 1H hammer from one of the first WotLK quests (~84 dps) + an Illidari Runeshield. When I tried with my epic Prot tanking gear, it just felt terrible. I think you really need a decent amount of strength to make the new Protection work. I'd probably get the new Cobalt blacksmithing gear as soon as possible, and replace all my precious epics.

I think I'm probably going to level as Protection in WotLK. It's solid for soloing, and I can tank instances on the way up.

WotLK Beta - Random Notes

Quick bullet points:

• As predicted, Art of War was changed. Overall, Ret is still awesome, but no more 20K crits.



• Seal of Righteousness is really strong at the moment. It's scaling a bit too well with AP. In full Ret gear, with a Ret spec, SoR is looking like my highest DPS seal. Unfortunately, it's our levelling seal for 1-60, where we don't have any SP, so Blizzard will have to be very careful with it. The only solution I can think of is to have a breakpoint in the AP scaling. I.e. the first 1000 AP gets 10% scaling, but all AP after that only gets 5%.



• Divine Storm's graphic is awesome! It's pretty much the single best spell effect in the game. It's like a storm of hammers swirls around you.



• Seals now last for 2 minutes. However, Judgments now invoke a global cooldown, as they should.



• Pets and mounts are sort of spells now. At least, right-clicking the pet or mount causes you to "learn" the pet/mount and puts it in a pane on your character sheet. This is pretty neat, and frees up a ton of bag space. Plus, it's really easy to review your collection. The pane has a display so you can see what each pet looks like.



• There's a built-in calendar now. You can schedule raids, and do sign-ups. It's somewhat bare-bones, but it covers all the basics. In my view, this is a huge step forward for new guilds. In many ways, this simple change has the potential to be the best change for endgame that Blizzard has introduced.



• Potions grant a debuff now that prevents you from drinking another potion until the end of combat. This puts an end to chain-potting, and returns potions to an emergency-use item.
  
  One interesting thing about this change I found is that a lot of casual commenters are predicting that the hardcore would be unhappy with this change, as it makes the endgame more accessible to casuals (no more farming for pots). Meanwhile, at EJ, pretty much everyone is cheering the change. The point is that a lot of the things that the casuals don't like about endgame, the hardcore also do not like. However, the difference is that the hardcore is willing to put up with these negatives, to do whatever they deem necessary to be successful.
  
  On the one hand, that's good, as they're willing to work hard for a goal. If killing a boss requires chain-potting, they will chain-pot. On the other hand, they do lack a sense of proportion about things, and things end up balanced around the extremes, rather than closer to the center. Raid encounters end up balanced assuming that everyone is chaining potions.



• Back to paladins, apparently Consecration and Exorcism now scale with AP as well as SP. The biggest problem with current prot gear is that there is very little strength on it, and that makes it hard to judge how good the the Protection tree is. I'm strongly considering junking all my Prot epics and trying the new Cobalt blacksmithing armor (+Str, +Sta, +def). I also need to find a good DPS 1H weapon. Maybe I'll try Ret Gear + 1H/Shield, and see how that works for general soloing.

WotLK Beta - Retribution

I feel sorry for Retribution paladins. Every beta, Blizzard overpowers Retribution, and ends up scaling it back for live, thus disappointing all the paladins who are watching eagerly.

WotLK appears to be continuing that trend. Retribution is sick right now. I'm testing on Quel'Danas, and level 70 mobs die instantly. Judgement, Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, dead mob. I'm not even in that amazing gear. I'm in T4 with a Gorehowl. I'd hate to see what the T6/Sunwell people are capable of.

So far, Ret is extremely good for soloing. Judgements of the Wise returns a fair bit of mana to the paladin. Basically, right now there is close to zero downtime with Retribution.

The biggest Retribution news out of beta are the massive 15K - 20K Judgement of Command crits Retribution is capable of. This is not an exaggeration. My best crit so far was 12.5K, and that was without trying. In better gear, pop Avenging Wrath and trinkets, and I can easily see coming close to 20K.

What's really weird about these crits is that they are somewhat controllable. The Art of War is procced off a Crusader Strike. So you wait for Art of War to proc, then stun and Judge Seal of Command. And since Fanaticism gives you +25% crit chance, that puts the chance for Command to crit at over 50%. Between the Art of War proc and Fanaticism, this burst is oddly reliable.

All in all, I think Retribution is headed for a nerf. And there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Paladin forums.

The First Thing You Should Do In WotLK

The very first thing you should do in WotLK is roll a Death Knight and do the Death Knight starting questline.

The DK starting questline is like a prologue or introduction to the expansion. It sets up a couple of very interesting storylines to be revealed in the expansion. After you finish the questline, you can switch back to your main character or continue with the Deathknight as you please.

I'm not really impressed with the Deathknight class itself (I'll probably expand on this in a later post), but I strongly suggest you do the DK quests first before heading to Northrend.

Crafting, Gold, and Balance

Right now, there's a trend--especially at the high end of raiding and PvP--of characters taking two crafting professions. They do this in order to get the "perks" from each profession slot, maximizing their character's potential.

This has some interesting economic ramifications. There are now fewer gatherers, and more crafters, so the raw materials have become scarcer, and prices have increased significantly. To combat this, Blizzard is introducing perks for the gathering professions in WotLK. For example, Mining gets a +Stamina bonus.

However, some people aren't happy with this, because levelling crafting professions is an expense, while levelling gathering professions gains you money. They feel that because they put in the greater expense, they should get a greater reward.

The problem with this is that money or gold is really irrelevant when it comes to character balance. If Leatherworking gives more of a boost to your characters stats than Mining, Mining will be dropped by the serious players, regardless of how much money it brings in.

It's like there are two mutually exclusive choices. A crafting profession can either be useful to your character (I.e. it has benefits that cannot be provided by another crafter), or it can be profitable. If it is useful, everyone will take it, increasing the supply, increasing the costs, and reducing the profits. If it is not useful, then fewer people will take it, increasing scarcity and making it more likely you can make money with it.

For example, if Blizzard really wanted players to be able to sell crafted goods for profit, they should increase the perks for the gathering professions until they are noticeably better than the perks from crafting. This means that most serious players will drop crafting professions and go double gatherer. This means that there will be plentiful supply of raw materials. Then Blizzard should have crafted BoE recipes of good quality available. Plenty of raw materials + fewer crafters = lots of income.

But would you take that trade? More gold in exchange for lower character prowess? I think that most people won't. That it will just lead to complaining by everyone. So Blizzard will try and balance perks between the crafting and gathering professions.

Unless the cost is extremely exorbitant, gold costs never hold players back. Respec costs haven't, costs to level professions haven't, repair costs haven't, alchemy costs back in WoW 1.0 didn't. You cannot count on gold costs to balance character prowess. All significant gold costs really do is cause players to spend more time farming, complaining, and cause players to drop out of the game when they can't keep up.

Edit: This post is really the confluence of two somewhat-related ideas: gold costs do not affect game balance; and crafting can be useful or profitable, but not both. I probably should have tried to separate them out a bit better.

WotLK Beta - Protection

I got fed up with trying to figure out Judgement of Command, so I specced Protection to try out some new talents. Some thoughts in no particular order:

• Wow, there are a lot of talents in the Prot tree. I spent all 61 points, and I still wanted to spend 10 more. Prot really needs a couple of talents in the high end collapsed, and maybe a couple PvP-dedicated talents in their place.



• I'm running out of space to put all my icons. 3 Judgements, Hammer of the Righteous, Seal of the Martyr, and at 75 we get Shield of Righteousness. It's all putting a squeeze on the available bar space I have.



• Hammer of the Righteous is broken at the moment. Admittedly, I'm using a caster weapon, but my character sheet says 116-213 damage, and I'm seeing white hits of 76-132. I run up to a mob, smack HotR, and it does a whopping 35 damage!
  
  HotR does anywhere from 35-120 damage, so I think it's bugged at the moment. As well, I haven't yet seen it crit. Admittedly, I have a pretty low crit rate in Prot gear, but I did test it a fair bit.



• The new cast time on Avenger's Shield is very nice. The dazed duration has increased to 10s, which is nice because it slows down the pull in a group. On the other hand, it takes forever for the mob to actually get to you.



• Protection plays pretty much like always does. Gather mobs, Consecrate, Holy Shield, and lots of numbers appear on your screen. For solo play, I think it might be a bit mana-hungry.



• The really interesting question will be Spell Power versus Attack Power gear. To a large extent this depends on how HotR works. Touched by the Light gives a fair bit of spell power to keep your SP-based spells from falling behind.

So that was my quick look at Protection. Some interesting things going on with it, but so far it seems very similar to TBC Protection.

WotLK Beta - Judgements II

Here's a quick way to sum up the new Judgement system:

Debuff comes from the Judgement; Damage comes from the Seal.

I actually really like the new system. It's really intuitive once you start playing with it. It makes Seals and Judgements more central to the paladin experience.

You get the benefit of JoL/W without having to sacrifice extra damage. You get an initial burst of Holy damage at the start of the fight. You can switch the debuff you have on the target quite easily.

Pretty much everything scales with both Attack Power and Spell Power. (I think Seal of Blood is the only thing that does not--it is AP-only.) It's great to see your Judgement debuffs become more powerful as your gear improves.

Heh, the only problem is that I keep forgetting to cast a new Seal after 30s. I'm so used to casting immediately after the Judgement, or macro'ing the Seal to the Judgement.

I've been doing a bit of work determining the new coefficients for the Seals and Judgements. They're buried in the thread on EJ, if anyone is interested. I just have to figure out how Command and Blood work, and I'll post a summary.

WotLK Beta - Judgements

WotLK is revamping the Seal and Judgement system. Here's an overview of Judgements.

There are three Judgement spells: Judgement of Light, Judgement of Wisdom and Judgment of Justice.

Casting a Judgement
- costs 5% of base mana (your mana without any gear)
- does not invoke a Global Cooldown
- requires an active Seal
- does not consume the active Seal!

Casting a Judgement has 2 effects:

1. Puts a debuff on the target. The exact debuff depends on which Judgement you cast. Casting Judgement of Light puts the Light debuff, JoW puts the Wisdom debuff, and JoJ puts the Justice debuff. Judgements last for 20s, but can be refreshed with your melee hits, or any Paladin's Crusader Strike.

2. Unleashes the active Seal for some Holy damage. The amount of damage depends on the active Seal. All Seals, including Seal of Light/Wisdom/Justice, do damage when unleashed. This effect does double damage on a critical strike for all active Seals. This effect does not consume the active Seal!

The Judgement of Justice debuff prevents NPCs from fleeing and prevents the target from increasing her speed beyond 100%.

The Judgement of Light and Wisdom debuffs have a chance to return health and mana, respectively, when an attacker strikes the target. The amount of health or mana returned depends on the paladin's Attack Power and Spell Power.

JoL: Health gained per proc = 18% * AP + 18% * SP

JoW: Mana gained per proc = 9% * AP + 9% * SP

In a group, the amount of health or mana gained depends on the stats of the Paladin who cast the Judgement.

Still to be determined:
- How refreshing debuffs with Crusader Strike interacts with health/mana values from JoL/JoW
- How changing stats in the middle of a fight (from temporary buffs or debuffs) affects JoL/JoW

WotLK Beta - Requests?

Thanks to a friend, I'm now have a WotLK Beta Key!

I'm currently near the SSO, with zero talent points, trying to nail down how the new Seals and Judgements work. (Seal and Judgment of Justice are bugged like crazy, which isn't helping.)

Anyways, if you guys have any requests about what I should look at or report on, feel free to ask in this thread. I only have my paladin transferred over at the moment, though.

Also, I haven't gone to Northrend or seen any of the new content yet. I'd like to play with some of the talent and mechanic changes first.

WotLK Beta - Burst Damage

Sometimes I really don't understand Blizzard. Back in March, they said they were worried about Paladin burst damage. Fast forward to the WotLK Beta, and we see the following two talents:

Righteous Vengeance (5/5)
Requires 45 Points in Retribution
Increases critical damage bonus of all attacks by 15%.

The Art of War (3/3)
Requires 40 Points in Retribution
Your damaging Crusader Strikes have a 15% chance to cause your next Judgement spell to cause double damage.

Let's say you have a 30% critical strike chance. Your attack possibilities (ignoring misses, parries, etc.) are:

59.5% - Normal damage
10.5% - 2x damage
25.5% - 2.15x damage
4.5% - 4.3x damage

Yes, that's correct. In the current Beta, Retribution paladins have better than Quad Damage!

I think The Art of War is going to be nerfed, and nerfed hard.

WotLK Beta - Holy Builds

Here's some thoughts on likely LK builds for Holy paladins. Again, it's still in beta, so things may change drastically.

48/0/23 - Sheathbot

This looks to be the best single-target healing build you can make. It has the most spell power, the most crit, and a massive 2.4x crit multiplier. (For reference, a normal paladin has a 1.5x multiplier.)You also provide Imp Might and 3% crit for the raid.

I think this will be the standard 25-man raiding build, at least for the first Holy paladin in the raid. You are giving up any chance of an AoE heal, but the druids, priests and shamans can cover that while you concentrate on keeping the main tank up.

51/0/15+5 - Beacon of Light + Ret

This build trades-off the extra spellpower and crit multiplier from the previous build in exchange for an AoE heal in Beacon of Light. Basically you trade raw single-target healing in exchange for flexibility. You also provide Imp Might and 3% crit for the raid.

I think this build will be very popular for 5 and 10-man instances. Since you have fewer other healers (or none) to cover your weaknesses, flexibility becomes more important.

51/20/0 - Beacon of Light + Prot

Trade the goodies in Retribution for Blessing of Kings, Imp Devo Aura, and Divine Guardian. Also get Beacon of Light for some AoE healing.

Essentially, this is the "We don't have a Prot Paladin and people are whining for Kings" build. It should be pretty good for the second Holy paladin in a 25-man raid.

Edit: On EJ, Cathela posted an interesting way of looking at 25-man raid composition for paladins. Positing two default slots per class (fair, considering there are now 10 classes), Cathela proposes that it will break down as follows:

Slot 1: Sheathbot or DPS Ret Paladin
Slot 2: Beacon of Light + Prot or Tank Prot Paladin

Two Pressing Beta Questions

1. What is going on with Judgments? It looks like there are new Judgement spells which automatically Judge Light/Wisdom/Justice in addition to your running damage Seal. But Seal of Light/Wisdom/Justice still exists, as does the regular Judgment spell. This seems very cluttered and inelegant.

2. Take a look at the new 51-pt Holy talent:

Beacon of Light
1.5 sec cast, 780 Mana, 40 yd range
The target becomes a Beacon of Light, healing all party or raid members within 10 yards for 990 over 15 sec.

Pretty neat, and a very welcome addition to the paladin healing arsenal. But the real question is: does this spell have a graphical effect causing the target to shine with light? Because if it does, all we need is a feral druid tank, and we end up with a giant, glowing bear!

Salvation's End

Beta patch notes are out, including a whole whack of changes for paladins.

The stand-out change:

Blessing of Salvation renamed Hand of Salvation, now reduces total threat on the target by 2% per second for 10 seconds while also reducing all damage and healing done by 10%. Only one Hand spell can be on the target per paladin at any one time. Now costs 6% of base mana.

At long last, Blessing of Salvation is gone. This one spell has warped our class so much, and I am *thrilled* to see it tossed out.

There's a bunch of other changes, and I'm especially pleased to see that Blizzard has decided to prune away a lot of the deadwood. Notable spells that have been removed are Blessing of Salvation, Blessing of Light, Seal of the Crusader, and Sanctity Aura. A lot of the worst excesses of the 1.9 change--pushing the good Holy talents deeper into the tree--have been reversed. Holy Wrath is on steroids now for some reason.

It's amusing to see how many changes from this old 2006 post of mine have been implemented.

It still appears that Blizzard is sticking with the specialist paladin, rather than the hybrid ideal. But other than that, the changes are actually quite good so far. There's still a lot of work to be done, but this is a great clean-up pass.

Just one note to Blizzard: Seal of Corruption is a terrible name for a paladin ability. Corruption is a warlock word. Please don't try to be "edgy" with the whole "Arthas falling from grace" thing. Just play it straight and give us an ability with a proper paladin name.

Libram Swapping Nerf

Yesterday's patch nerfed the practice of libram-swapping. Basically, you could macro a command to switch librams to the command to cast a spell, and get the full benefit of the libram. So you would bind a Holy Light libram to Holy Light, and a Flash of Light libram to Flash of Light, and you would get the full benefit of your libram slot for whichever spell you cast.

My response to the nerf is: Good! Libram-swapping was a lame hack.

Librams are designed to be powerful but specific. You get a bigger bonus than normal, but only for a portion of the total time. This makes gameplay interesting, as you try and shift your gameplay to maximize the use of your Libram. Rely more on HL if you have a HL libram. Tank heal if you have the BoL libram.

If you wish Librams to be more general, they're going to be weaker overall. That's just the way balance works. Swapping Librams with spellcasts allowed paladins to get all the bonuses of a libram with none of the drawbacks. This was not intended, and would have just led Blizzard to make weak, general Librams.

To see what I mean, compare [Libram of Souls Redeemed] to [Blue Diamond Witchwand]. They both drop from the Opera event in Karazhan.

The wand gives:

+13 Int
+11 Spi
+29 Healing

The libram gives a Holy paladin:

+125-150 Healing but only on targets with Blessing of Light

The libram healing bonus is significantly higher than the wand healing bonus. The drawback is that it really only works when healing the tanks. Given that the tanks are the ones taking the big hits, I would much rather have the specific libram than the general stats wand.

Specific librams are more *interesting* than general librams. They give us something to discuss, to theorycraft about, to make decisions about. Making decisions is what makes games interesting. Going from a +10 healing libram to a +20 healing libram is not an interesting decision. It's an obvious one.

Most of the other equipment slots are general, boring, and obvious. (Trinkets are a notable exception.) One slot dedicated to a new model of itemization is not too much to ask.

The Initial Hand in Card Games

How a game unfolds in a card game is very dependant on the initial hand. Essentially, the initial draw gives you a random subset of your total abilities to work with. That means your game plan changes with your draw. A lot of the work in deck construction for CCGs goes towards making that initial hand has good options for playing.

The big advantage of this is that each game is slightly different. Sometimes you'll have lots of small effects to harass your opponent. Other times you'll have to stall until you can play a big effect.

Contrast this to WoW. In WoW, you always have access to the full set of your abilities. That means that most non-raid boss fights tend to progress in the same manner. First you play ability A, then you play ability B, and so on. There's some reaction abilities like Kick or stuns, but by and large, once you have worked out a rotation, you stick with it.

(I suppose this doesn't apply to healing in a 5-man, as that is very reactive, and thus different each time.)

Imagine what gameplay would be like if a random 2/3rds of your abilities were locked out when the fight started. I think it might be pretty neat. Every fight would be slightly different. No Fireball this fight, use Frostbolt!

However, it's pretty hard to come up with a reason to justify only having access to a random subset of your abilities in non-card games. In a card game, it's just obviously the way a deck of cards works. Once you accept the metaphor that your powers are cards in the deck, you don't bat an eye at not having access to all powers at all times.

I can't really think of a way to justify not having all your abilities available for a non-card game. Why shouldn't a Warrior be able to use Mortal Strike when he has enough rage? Yet, the initial draw is a very interesting mechanic that goes a long way towards countering the repetitiveness of individual fights.

Life Tap and Scaling

Why does Life Tap scale with spell damage?

The simple answer is that spell damage improves your spells, Life Tap is a spell, and thus spell damage should improve Life Tap. However, I think that this logic is flawed, and a scaling Life Tap actually causes some issues with warlocks.

Power Stats like spell damage and attack power work in a linear fashion for individual spells. They follow the general equation Total Damage = Base Damage + Coefficient * Power Stat. Pretty much all classes use this model to determine how the Power Stat affects the damage done by spells or abilities. Even warlock spells use this equation.

However, unique to warlocks, spell damage also changes the ratio of spells being cast. Consider a warlock who just casts Shadow Bolts and Life Taps. At zero spell damage, the warlock can cast 1.3 Shadow Bolts for every Life Tap. For about every 500 extra spell damage, the warlock can cast another Shadow Bolt before needing to Life Tap. 500 spell damage = 2.3 Shadow Bolts. 1000 spell damage = 3.3 Shadow Bolts. 1500 spell damage = 4.3 Shadow Bolts.

What this means that as a warlock accumulates spell damage, the percentage of time she spends on DPS increases. This is in addition to the fact that the individual spell's damage increases as well. So spell damage essentially has a double effect--a non-linear effect--on a warlock's DPS. It increases the damage of Shadow Bolt and, through Life Tap, increases the percentage of time Shadow Bolt is cast.

This shows that warlocks scale in a different manner than the spells of most other classes, and this probably makes them hard to balance accurately for all tiers of endgame.[1]

On the other hand, if Life Tap didn't scale, you can replicate much of the same effect by downranking Shadow Bolt. A downranked Shadow Bolt has a lower cost, meaning it can be cast for a greater percentage of the time, and potentially doing more total damage than the higher ranked spell at some point.

So now I'm not really sure what we can conclude from this exercise, other than once again we show that being able to downrank spells causes problems in WoW. In many ways, costs are most important part of game balance. Being able to change costs without repercussion has caused a lot of balance problems in WoW. One of these days, I hope Blizzard takes this to heart, and removes the ability to cast downranked spells.

[1]DPS warriors also have some of the same double effect, in that AP allows them to hit harder, therefore they generate more rage, which allows them to use specials more often. However, DPS warriors tend to hit the point where they have always have enough rage for their ability cycles relatively early in their progression, so it ends up not mattering as much.

No Room For Johnny

In Magic:the Gathering design, people often speak of three player archetypes: Timmy, Johnny, and Spike.

Rosewater writes that "Timmy likes to win big. He doesn’t want to eke out a last minute victory. Timmy wants to smash his opponents. He likes his cards to be impressive, and he enjoys playing big creatures and big spells." In WoW terms, we'd probably ascribe the "casual" label to Timmy.

"Spike is the competitive player. Spike plays to win. Spike enjoys winning. To accomplish this, Spike will play whatever the best deck is. Spike will copy decks off the Internet. Spike will borrow other players’ decks. To Spike, the thrill of Magic is the adrenalin rush of competition. Spike enjoys the stimulation of outplaying the opponent and the glory of victory." We'd definitely tag Spike with the "hardcore" label.

But there's a third archetype in Magic, one that may be missing from WoW: Johnny. "Johnny likes a challenge. Johnny enjoys winning with cards that no one else wants to use. He likes making decks that win in innovative ways. What sets Johnny apart from the other profiles is that Johnny enjoys deckbuilding as much as (or more than) he enjoys playing. Johnny loves the cool interactions of the cards. He loves combo decks. Johnny is happiest when he’s exploring uncharted territory."

I know that Johnny exists in WoW. He's the guy who is constantly tinkering with off-the-wall builds; who derides "cookie-cutter" builds on the forums; who attempts to challenge a paladin raider who declares (rightly) that you should use spell crit gems instead of +heal/+int gems. (This last one is from recent threads on the paladin forums. Osc is arguing with Aus and an whole lot of paladin raiders on this issue. Osc is wrong, but I understand why he is arguing.)

Yet Johnny occupies a very different place in the Magic hierarchy than in the WoW hierarchy. In Magic, Johnny is respected because occasionally his creations are tournament-level, and often end up being the most powerful decks and/or breaking the format. In WoW though, Johnny's creations are almost never as good as the cookie-cutter builds and options. Johnny is considered misguided at best, a bad player at worst, and generally to be wasting his time. The hardcore guilds are rarely tolerant of Johnny.

So why does this difference exist? I think it exists because the math behind WoW is a lot simpler than the math behind Magic. In particular, the costs in WoW (mana, rage, energy, time) are a heck of a lot simpler than the costs in Magic (tempo, card-advantage, mana-curve). The value of an ability rarely changes in a fight. Thus the best abilities and sequences are quickly calculated. There is no real room for Johnny to experiment.

I think that when designing a game, it's important to try and ensure a place for Johnny, to look at what you can do to prevent cookie-cutter builds/gear/rotations from dominating and stifling that segment of your playerbase.

Blizzard's Lack of Vision For Paladins

The various paladin forums have been discussing a few posts by Blizzard on the Alpha forums. Joanadark has a good rundown at Tankspot.

I do not have confidence that Blizzard will be able to fix the paladin class. So far, they have demonstrated an utter lack of a vision for what the paladin class should be. And they show no sign of coming up with a plan anytime soon.

The old vision of the paladin class shattered upon the rocks of raiding. Ever since then, Blizzard has been frantically running around slapping band-aid fixes on each of the paladin specs, hoping to get them--and for the majority of the game, only one of them--at least somewhat raid-viable.

The only saving grace for the paladin class, the only reason we are consistently taken to raids, is because our Blessings are overpowered. Salvation > All.

Think about this:

Even with the upcoming changes to spell and melee statistics, there is not a single statistic which is desired by all three Paladin specs.

Strength - Holy and Prot don't want
Intellect - Prot and Ret don't want
Stamina - Holy and Ret don't want
Crit - Prot doesn't want
Hit - Holy doesn't want
Spell Power - Ret doesn't want
Attack Power - Holy and Prot don't want
Defensive Stats - Holy and Ret don't want

Maybe it's just me, but that seems crazy to me. There should be at least one stat in common to all three specs.

Take a look at the base 0/0/0 paladin. What can she do? She's missing the essential tools for melee dps (SoC, CS). She's missing the defining talent for healing in Illumination. She's missing Holy Shield, the vital talent for tanking.

I think Blizzard needs to start from scratch. Stop with the band-aid fixes. Stop swapping talents around madly. Wipe the slate clean. Come up with a vision for the base paladin and then expand on that vision with the talent trees.

I don't think this will happen in Wrath. I think, just as in TBC, we will get more and more slap-dash patches until one or two individual specs finally become viable, eternally relying on the crutch that is our Blessings.

What is a paladin? I don't know anymore. And so far, Blizzard has shown that they do not know either.

Keeping Secrets From Players

One game that has been a huge influence on my thinking about games and game design is Magic: The Gathering, made by Wizards of the Coast, and specifically the writings of Mark Rosewater. His archive is very long, but it's worth reading. You probably need to know how to play Magic to get most of it, but a lot of the basic concepts transfer to many different games.

I love the way Magic does the Design/Development columns every week, especially the way they are actually willing to discuss changes and decisions in detail. I would love for Blizzard to do something similar, to publish a weekly column from a designer that actually has some detail in it.

Of course, maybe Blizzard is scared of the reactions from the forums, but watching the M:tG forums, most people seem to take things in stride. In fact, I would say that the columns have actually made the Internet audience more attuned and accepting of Wizard's process and decision trade-offs. Right now, any change to WoW comes down the pike, the WoW forums immediately make claims about how it's because designers play class X. And quite frankly, some of the occasional claims by CMs make no sense. Mages do insane damage, are the kings of AoE? That was met with disbelief by most theorycrafters, because--as has been proven--it was not true at all.

In the absence of real information, game players will believe the worst. If you can look at the M:tG columns, the designers will post their reasonings after bannings, or post about mistakes or things that didn't work out. And most of the commentary on the forums is sensible. If anything, disclosure has made the M:tG forums a better place.

In many ways, the computer game industry seems very unwilling to share details about process. Sure, they'll publish technical algorithms now and again, but you'll rarely see people discuss how they design, develop, or test. And of course, they end up reinventing the wheel a lot, making the same mistakes over and over.

If you look at the comments on this post on Patcher Surveys on We Can Fix That With Data, Sarah Jensen Schubert (who is an actual MMO designer) asks if someone from Pirates of the Burning Sea can tell her what percentage of people filled out that survey. Joe Ludwig responds, "Not on The Internet, no. :) Ask me at AGDC."

Honestly, why not say the percentage in public? What harm would that do? But the first instinct of game developers seems to be to keep information secret from the players, and only pass it on through back channels. In my opinion, this behaviour, this tendency towards secrecy, hurts the game industry far more than it helps.

PvP Servers

I really want to like PvP servers. For some reason, the *idea* of being at war with the opposite faction, with danger around every corner, and engaging in battle with unpredictable human foes is very appealing.

However, the *reality* of a PvP server is my level 39 Paladin getting jumped by a level 70 Rival Warlock in 3/5 Vengeful Gladiator.

There's probably an interesting thought somewhere in here, but I'm too disgruntled to try and find it.

Edit: Just for reference, I have been on a PvP server before. My first character was a warrior on a PvP server (made it to level 48), and my warlock levelled to 60 pre-TBC on a PvP server.

So I have experience with PvP servers. It's just odd that I keep coming back to them, even though I really should know better by now.

Is Questing Anti-Social?

Tobold has an interesting post, Making Quests Less Anti-Social, where he argues that people do not group up for quests because quests "*must* be done alone if the players want to maximize rewards".

I agree that most people don't group up with strangers when doing solo quests. However, I've always found grouping to be more efficient, especially for reducing downtime. Additionally, grouping with people is usually more fun than going it alone.

Second, if players were going solo to maximize reward, I would think that if you asked someone to group, they would turn you down. Yet my experience is that if you encounter someone doing the same quest as you, and you ask if you can join their group, 90% of the time they will send you an invite. To me, that behaviour implies that maximizing reward is not the reason that people don't group.

I think people don't group because they are ambivalent about approaching strangers. Maybe it's fear of rejection, a desire not to impose on someone else, or feeling bad about asking for help. But my experience is that a lot of people are perfectly willing to group up, they just don't want to be the one to ask. And because you can solo most quests, they don't ask unless they have to.

In some ways, I think this behaviour is at the heart of the whole 'clique' issue in a lot of guilds. You join a guild, and your guildmates become something more than strangers, but less than friends (at least at the start). It's still hard to approach them and ask if you can join them, because they are sort-of strangers. Yet it still stings when they leave you out, because they are sort-of friends, and you expect your friends to ask you to do stuff.

So I don't know how to solve this. Maybe Public Quests in Warhammer Online will solve this problem, by implicitly grouping people in the same area on the same quest, without making one party formally ask and risk rejection. In WoW, though, if you are willing to take the first step, and ask for help on the General channel, or whisper someone you see working on the same quest, you may be surprised at how easy it is to group up with a perfect stranger.

Funny/weird grouping story: A couple of nights ago, I grouped with a mage to do another Arathi Highlands quest. This mage didn't like buffs. He didn't run Arcane Intellect, didn't cast a mage Armor. He even asked me to turn off my Aura (I was on a paladin alt--yeah, I'm not really sure why, either). I wasn't able to figure out why he had an aversion to buffs, but he was a nice guy in all other respects and we finished that quest easily.

Video Games, Art, and Social Status

Lume the Mad has an interesting post discussing whether video games are art. It's a good entry in the "Yes, Video games are art" side of the debate. This debate has raged all over the place, so I thought I may as well toss in my two cents.

My take: I don't really see why it matters if video games are Art or not.

To be honest, most of the arguments on either side boil down to how you define Art. I can construct definitions of Art such that video games fit. For example, video games can convey messages; they often use many of the same techniques of writing, dialog, etc.; they engage our aesthetic senses.

I can also construct definitions of Art such that video games do not fit. For example, Art requires an audience, video games require participants or players. As well, often the best game does not match the most artistic game, and that is incongruous for an Art. Tetris may very well be the best video game ever made, but is it the most artistic?

The more I listen and read the debates about video games and Art, the more I become convinced that this debate isn't about Art at all, it is about social status.

It's pretty clear that game developers and game players in our culture have low social status, especially in comparison to artists. This whole debate is gamers are trying to say that video games are like films and novels, so the culture should treat game developers like filmmakers and novelists, and game players like film buffs or literati.

Honestly, that's not going to happen anytime soon. The gatekeepers of culture don't care about your reasoned arguments. Social status doesn't really have anything to do who or what deserves that status. If anything, it's a function of how the wealthy and the intelligentsia differentiate themselves from the rest of masses. Oprah is not going to have a Video Game of the Month Club. She's not going to treat Will Wright and Shigeru Miyamoto like Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou. Roger Ebert won't treat them like Robert Altman or Martin Scorsese.

For one thing, video games are popular. In particular, the "good" games are often the same as the most popular games. The upper classes can't give games the high status of Art, as that would implicitly give high social status to the plebes, defeating the point of having social status in the first place.

To me, this entire debate smacks of the divide between cool kids and the unpopular kids in high school, only brought forward into the adult world. The unpopular kids are busy constructing arguments that the cool kids should consider them "cool", not realizing that none of these arguments actually matter. This was pretty pointless in high school, and it's even more pointless now.

Games are games. If they are not Art, that does not make them lesser than they are. If they are Art, that does not make them greater. And in the end, social status does not obey reasoned arguments.

Being on the Path, Part II

In a comment to Being on the Path, Messallina/Agrippina of Perenolde, writes:

I've only seen one other poster here who identified themselves as a gladiator level pvp'er, so even though this post is already filled with comments I still feel I can offer a distinct take on things. Also, as an additional disclaimer I will add that for entirely selfish reasons I am emotionally biased towards rating requirements for gear. Goddamnit getting gladiator skills took a long time and I want more tangible rewards besides just obtaining gear faster and a sweet title/mount!

Looking over Coriel's post, I see a couple of basic points that I would like to lay out before I respond to them:

Premise 1: Hope for achievement drives players (duh).

Premise 2: Hope is more important de jure than de facto. In other words, theoretically possible hopes motivate players more than practically possible hopes.

Conclusion: Rating requirements are inherently discouraging, even to those who won't get enough non-rating-required gear to the point where the only gear remaining has rating requirements.

Premise 2 is the weak one I feel, for the following reasons.

First off, I don't see any evidence for your de jure progression theory. You make an effective analogy with raiding, but there's no evidence offered that that is the case with raiding. It's like you cited something faulty in a scientific paper without checking the source. Back when I raided casual at 60 with a guild that was lucky to kill Nefarian before BC came out I doubt I would've cared two shits if Naxxramas had had some kind of blocking requirement for entry. I was worried about the present instance, along with the rest of my guild. Your claim was that de jure impediments demoralize people even if they have no plausible tangible harm, but I don't see any reason for that, and I don't buy that even pvp'ers who will never find themselves in a situation where their access to gear is limited only by personal rating will still be significantly demoralized by the rating requirements on gear. After all, the lower your personal rating, the slower you earn gear, which I know you understand: "In reality, of course, a casual PvPer is not likely to earn all the pieces of S4 before WotLK. But again, what is likely is not as important as what is possible."

Second off, I dont think it was accidental that rating requirements reached their apex for BC in the final season. For each day that elapses in this final arena season of BC players will care less and less about season 4 gear as lich king draws nearer.

Also, since I'm all about the empirical evidence, it's worth noting that more teams participated in 3v3 in my battlegroup in season 3 than season 2. Almost 40% more, in fact ( Arena Junkies; WoW Armory: Cyclone Battlegroup)

It doesn't seem that the 1850/2000 rating requirements significantly lowered (in one casual pvp'ers words) the "popularity" of arena from S2 to S3. After all, players have been "blocked" in arena from the start, given the stern title requirements since Season 1. Obviously, gear>titles for most people, but it's worth pointing out.

I should have introduced the concept of "Being on the Path" earlier, rather than attempting to force that one article to do double duty. I actually came up with it a long time ago, back in the pre-TBC days, just never really blogged about it. If you look at Casual vs Raider, Part VI, written in Jan 2007, you'll see the same idea echoed.

Essentially, I was looking at the introduction of Naxxramas, and the great flamewars on the forums between the casuals and the hardcore. One thing that struck me was the lower raid guilds, the ones in MC and BWL, sided with the high-end guilds, instead of the casual players who wanted Blizzard to spend more time on regular 5-man and lower content. This seemed odd to me, as the MC/BWL guilds had practically no chance of seeing very much of Naxx, and would have benefited much more from new 5-man dungeons instead of a new raid instance.

From the practical standpoint of who would actually experience the content, the split should have occurred between the AQ40 top-end guilds vs the MC/BWL/non-raiders. Yet the actual split was between those who could raid, and who could not raid; those who were on the path, and those who were not.

I can't really cite scientific proof of any of this. I don't have access to any real data. All I can offer is my observations and my experiences, and my theories and explanations. This is punditry, not science.

But the concept of Being on the Path is why I've usually concentrated my suggestions on ways to get more guilds raiding. To me, making it easier for guilds to raid is a much better use of resources than making additional 5-mans or even additional raid instances. That transition from normal guild to raiding guild is the most crucial transition in the game, and something which could use a lot more attention.

---

Premise 2: Hope is more important de jure than de facto. In other words, theoretically possible hopes motivate players more than practically possible hopes.

Premise 2 is not exactly how I would word it. I would invert it. Hopelessness (or the impossibility of doing something) de jure is worse than hopelessness de facto. Knowing that something is guaranteed to be impossible for you is a lot more demoralizing than knowing that something is most likely not possible.

Now, I don't know if this will really result in less people playing season 4. S3 was different in that most of the armor could be obtained. Yeah a couple pieces were out of reach, but you could still get most of S3. I felt it still came doing on the de facto side. As well, coming later means that more people hit 70 and started PvPing for gear. Not to mention that S3 pushed PvP into T6 territory, ahead of the vast majority of raiders, who were still stuck in T5 content (Vashj/Kael). All that combines into more people playing S3 than S2.

S4 is different. All the pieces have requirements on them, all of which are higher than the average. That immediately guarantees that at least 50% of the audience will not be able to get any of S4. However, PvP doesn't really require a lot of time or organization. It's pretty easy to just do your 10 games and go. So even if people aren't happy about the S4 requirements, they may still put in their 10 games. Some improvement is better than none, especially if the time cost is minimal.

If PvP actually required a significant time cost--like raiding does--I would expect participation to diminish sharply. However, because the time cost is so low, I'm not sure what will happen. I do think the rating requirements will diminish enthusiasm for PvP, and satisfaction with the game. But that is hard to measure and hard to see, and whether that translate into diminished participation or subscriptions is an open question.

New Security Dongle

According to Broken Toys (aka Scott Jennings/Lum the Mad), it looks like Blizzard is introducing a keychain security dongle called the Blizzard Authenticator.

It looks like an interesting option for anyone really worried about the security of the account, as it enables proper two-factor authentication. You will be able to purchase it from the Blizzard store for $6.50, which is a pretty reasonable price, in my opinion.

The only issue is that this is optional, and some of the people who would get the most use out of this will not hear about it or pick it up.

It will be interesting to see the effect of this Blizzard Authenticator on the game. For example, account sharing is rampant among the high end. But the people at the high end also have the most to lose to a hacked account, and are the mostly likely to purchase and use the Authenticator. And that may cut down on tactics like getting someone else to play your character in Arenas.

It might also have an effect on guilds. A lot of guilds are very concerned about security for the Guild Bank. I can see a guild requiring that all its members, or at least all the officers, purchase and use the Authenticator.

It's good to see that Blizzard has been taking security more seriously lately. They took my advice on disabling hyperlinks on the official forums, and are now introducing a good two-factor authentication system. However, I still think that the default game experience needs to be a little more secure.

Ask Coriel: Magic-Immune Mobs

Jupis asks:

Well,recently,I encountered a problem. I was MTing Karazhan,and we reached the room after Curator(Before Aran,where the Journal of Medivh quest is).I was terrified of the fact that the mobs there are magic immune,since as a Paladin tank,I can't generate threat with just physical power. Luckily enough,my druid Off Tank picked them up for me,and got the whole deal done,while I was standing aside,shamed that I could not have helped the group.

This leads to my question:

A) Are immunities same as resistances for mobs? Would spell penetration of any kind would help?

B)Although they don't hit hard,they still do hit.If I can't control agro,it means damage on DPS and healers,but all of our mages and warlocks couldn't do a think in that situation,for the very same reason.

How is this situation solved without a full physical team,or a non magic using tank?

A) Immunities are different than resistances. Spell penetration will not help against immunities.

B) In general, don't worry about it. These mobs don't hit hard enough to make it an issue. Your hunters, warriors, rogues, shamans can help tank these things. Just get everyone (including the mages/warlocks) in there whacking away with their weapons.

As well, you should use Seal of the Crusader when attacking the mobs. You still get threat from white damage, though not a whole lot. SotC will increase your white damage. Tab-target to hit different mobs. It should be enough threat to keep them off the healers.

Basically, no one should stand aside on these mobs. Just attack them with your physical attacks, focus fire, and they'll go down quickly.

Bosses, Tokens, Recipes, Crafting

There are many people who feel that the current model of loot distribution (primarily random drops) in raiding is flawed. They feel that players are at the mercy of random numbers, and that it is very easy to be unlucky and miss out on a specific piece of loot (Dragonspine Trophy, for example). The proposed solution is that we should move to a more tokenized model of loot, like how Tier gear is distributed.

There are also other people who feel that crafting is not utilized enough in the endgame. They feel that crafting is pointless, as you inevitably replace crafted gear with raid loot.

This raises an interesting idea (which to be honest, has probably been proposed before): What if all endgame loot was crafted?

The way I envision it working is that each tier would have 5 or so epic materials. Bosses would drop a couple recipes and about 3 different bind-on-pickup mats. Every player that killed the boss would get these materials. The recipes in each tier would only use the tier materials to create items. The last boss in each instance might drop a special material that was only used in a few really good recipes. Essentially, crafting materials become the tokens/Badges, and player crafters become the gear vendors.

This solves a few problems. It gets crafters more involved in the endgame. All your gear will get that <Made By X> tag, which I find neat. Crafters get to forge every piece of loot. It makes getting gear more fluid, as different bosses could drop the same components. You still need to progress, as certain materials might only be available on certain bosses. There's still an element of randomness in the recipe drops, but because you only need the first drop, the effect of that randomness is muted. Worst comes to worst, you can go outside the guild to find a crafter.

You'd have to play with the numbers necessary for each recipe to get a good rate at which people could gear up, but I'm sure it could be done.

Now there are some problems with this model. Immediate gratification is not present. You kill a boss, and you don't get loot immediately. You do get some new recipes, which might serve the immediate "oooh, that's neat" aspect of loot. Players would need to do a little more research into what's available when gearing up. You can't equip new gear right away, you have to obtain it out of raid. Though with gemming and enchanting requirements, this is pretty much standard unless it is a massive upgrade.

The bigger problem is that if the materials or the crafted gear is Bind-on-Equip, then that will drag raid drops into the economy. One of the big things about WoW is that the top end stuff is not buyable (most of the time), and generally has to be earned by the player participating in activities. If it was all Bind-on-Equip, then that might have negative effects on the game, with increased gold farming, buying, and selling. It would make your farming prowess a very large factor in how well you are geared. I don't think that is a good idea, and I'm pretty sure all the tanks and healers will concur.

In reality, item crafting in WoW is missing an action. Currently, you can:

1. Make a Bind-on-Pickup item for yourself.
2. Make a Bind-on-Equip item for anyone.

It would be really useful if there was a third option:

3. Make a Bind-on-Pickup item for someone else.

If you think about it, this is essentially what a NPC token vendor does. You give them a Bind-on-Pickup material component, and they give you a Bind-on-Pickup item. For this idea to work well, you really need to be able to replicate that same transaction with a player crafter.

Perhaps the solution is a crafting window, like the trade window. The buyer puts her materials (and fee/tip!) on her side, the crafter chooses the recipe on his side, hits the craft button, and the item is deposited in the buyer's inventory.

I think craftable raid gear is an interesting solution to the problem of unlucky raid drop distribution. We get the excitement of random drops in the recipes, while mitigating randomness because only the first recipe drop is important. We get the consistency of badges and tokens in the material drops. We get the variety of loot in that certain recipes or materials only drop from certain bosses. We make crafting an integral part of endgame without overpowering it. Pretty much get to kill two birds with one stone, as I see it.

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

Wow. I just finished Dreamfall, and I am in shock.

I regret buying this game. I regret the 10 dollars I spent on this game. I regret the hours I spent playing this game. I regret posting that it was "superb". I regret playing the first Longest Journey--even though I loved that game--because it caused me to purchase this one.

The ending was the biggest, most nihilistic, "F*ck You" to the player that I have ever seen. This was not tragedy, or cleverness, or an ending that was fated to be. It was the designer making the last few hours of the game one giant railroad. He took all the characters the player liked, and just stomped them into the ground. Kind of honestly, I am in awe at how far he went.

The Longest Journey had a bittersweet ending that was almost perfect. This was beyond bittersweet, beyond tragedy. The only word I can use to describe Dreamfall's ending is nihilistic.

Man, between Dreamfall and The Time Traveler's Wife, it's been a very depressing weekend.

Weapon Speeds

One of the weird things about WoW melee combat is that you almost always want a slow weapon. There's only a few situations where a faster weapon is better. This is because a lot of abilities depend on "weapon damage" and slower weapons have a higher damage range than faster weapons with the same DPS. So given two weapons, you almost always want the slower weapon.

This seems odd to me. It seems like there should be some advantage to using a faster weapon, some trade-off that would make faster weapons better in some situations. You'd think that effects that have a chance of occurring on a hit--also called procs--would be lend themselves to fast weapons, but because Blizzard uses a Proc-Per-Minute system for most of these effects, there's no advantage to a fast weapon.

(A quick explanation of Proc-Per-Minute (PPM): The probability of proc happening is independent of the weapon speed. For example, Seal of Command will proc an average of 7 times a minute, regardless of how fast or slow your weapon is.)

The few times a fast weapon is desired usually occurs when one of these two trends is broken. For example, combat rogues desire fast off-hands because none of their regular abilities rely on off-hand weapon damage, and because Combat Potency returns energy on every swing (a non-PPM system).

I think it would be better if fast weapons had some innate advantage, to balance the extra damage that slow weapons give to your abilities. Right now, I think weapon speed makes a bit too much of a difference in the quality of weapons, and that makes several drops less desireable than they should be.

Note: Slam Warriors and Hunters don't adhere to the slow weapon rule. Because of the way their abilities interact with the weapon swing/shot timer, there's usually a specific "best" speed for them. The weapons still suffer from the same problem, in that a weapon can be much better or worse than others of the same DPS, just because it happens to have a specific speed.

Network Traffic

A couple days ago, Tobold wrote a post on tiered pricing for Internet access, caused by the rise in BitTorrent traffic. Essential, he took the position that heavy users of the Internet, who transferred more data, should pay more than light users. The resulting firestorm caused him to delete the post and all the attached comments. It's sort of a pity he had to do that, as it is an interesting topic. It's not directly related to WoW, but as we play WoW over the Internet, how the Internet is structured is important to us. (Plus, I haven't written anything in a while, so here's some content.)

For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that all file-transfer or BitTorrent traffic is legal and does not infringe copyright. This isn't true, but I feel that moral arguments about copyright infringement are a distraction, and obscure the real issues at the heart of this problem.

A lot of people say that if a company says you have X amount of bandwidth, say 512 Kbs up/down, the company should allocate that amount for each customer, and not punish you for using the full amount. The problem with this view is that it is supremely wasteful. It's like you and your neighbour each having a private road from home to work. The vast majority of the time, both roads will be empty and just taking up space. A much better solution is a common road that everyone shares.

Network traffic is like cars on that road. The important part here is that an individual doesn't really care who else is on the road, so long as he can get from point A to point B in a fast and efficient manner. As more and more cars appear, the road becomes more congested, and it becomes harder to use the road to full effect. In the past, whenever this happened, ISPs would add more bandwidth to the system, essentially adding an extra lane to the road, spacing out the cars once again. (Unlike real roads, extra bandwidth is often the cheapest solution.)

So why don't ISPs just continue adding bandwidth? The answer lies in the nature of BitTorrent, which is the major protocol used to transfer files these days.

BitTorrent

BitTorrent is a very aggressive protocol. It basically uses all available bandwidth, saturating your connection. This is one of the reasons that downloading with BitTorrent is so fast. To go back to the road analogy, it's like the road was suddenly packed full of trucks, taking all the available space. If you're in your car, trying to get on the road to go to work, this is very frustrating. Adding bandwidth doesn't help in this case, because the BitTorrent trucks will immediately fill up the new lane.

Anyone who's tried to play WoW at the same time that several torrents are running understands this. WoW takes very little bandwidth. It's playable on a 56K modem. But add several torrents downloading in the background, and your WoW connection craters. God help you if you want to run Ventrilo as well.

There are essentially two solutions to this problem: a technical solution, and an economic solution. Like all solutions, neither one is perfect.

Technical Solution - Quality of Service

The technical solution is something called Quality of Service. Basically, each type of traffic has a priority, and higher priority traffic gets transmitted first, while lower priority traffic gets delayed until the network is free.

Using the road analogy, it's like the road is full of trucks, but as soon as you pull up to the entrance, a space automatically opens up for your car, and you get shifted into the fast lane immediately. It doesn't really matter that the rest of the road is filled with trucks, you get to your destination quickly.

My personal priority system would look something like this, from highest to lowest priority:

1. Game traffic (low size, needs high responsiveness)
2. Streaming audio/video (moderate size, needs high responsiveness)
3. General web (low size, moderate responsiveness)
4. Email (low size, low responsiveness)
5. File transfers (high size, low responsiveness)

People who want to transfer files via BitTorrent can still do so, but without interfering with other people's web experience. Quite honestly, there will be a large amount of bandwidth still usable for file transfers, especially at off-peak hours.

There are several issues with Quality of Service. It is a bit expensive to implement across the entire Internet. There needs to be common agreement on the priority scheme. The network neutrality fanatics will be upset. Some bright MBA will probably think it's a good idea to prioritize by source or destination, and charge for increasing your priority.

As well, this method will decrease the average speed of file transfers. I think the increased responsiveness of all the other types of traffic more than makes up for it. However, someone else will disagree, and make a file transfer client that pretends to be the highest priority. That will lead to an arms wars between ISPs and file-transferrers as the ISPs develop new methods (Deep Packet Inspection, etc.) to classify traffic, and file-transferrers try to fool those methods.

Economic Solution - Metered Pricing

The other solution is to charge people according to the bandwidth they use. This essentially causes people to decide what uses of the Internet are important to them, and implement their own priority. I suspect that most people will cut down on file transferring, and spend their money on web surfing and email.

This is a good solution because it's fairly easy to implement, very hard to evade, and will almost certainly work. It also maps to what people think is "fair": people who use the service the most pay the most, and people who use it least pay the least.

The problem with the economic solution is that there are a lot of interesting ideas or applications that rely on people having access to extra bandwidth at negligible cost. For example, if metered pricing had been the norm, I don't think things like podcasts or YouTube would exist. Similarly, digital distribution of games or movies would have very little chance of taking off. Downloading patches for games and software becomes expensive.

There are also a lot of implications for open source. To a large extent, open source software relies on being able to easily transmit changes and updates across the Internet. Metered access puts a significant cost on using and creating open source software, which would be a shame.

As well, metered pricing can provide a disincentive for the ISPs to improve their service and increase the bandwidth available. To a certain extent, this depends on the competition available, but many ISPs in the United States seem to operate in a quasi-monopoly fashion.

Conclusion

Network congestion caused by BitTorrent and other distributed file-transfer systems is a real problem. Trying to ignore it, or getting into unrelated arguments about copyright infringement, will not work.

My personal preference would be for the ISPs to implement a decent Quality of Service system (with WoW and other games at the top, naturally). However, I lack faith that the ISPs will remain source/destination neutral, and only prioritize on traffic type. I also lack faith in file-transferrers, and I am pretty sure that instead of accepting slightly-reduced file-transfer performance for better overall performance, they will trigger an arms war by attempting to fool the Quality of Service systems.

The Quality of Service solution essentially requires a degree of cooperation between all parties, and I don't think that's likely. So we will probably end up with some form of metered pricing.

L70ETC Music Video Contest

Blizzard's latest Music Video contest is over, and the winners can be seen here.

I sort of wish that Blizzard had used the same format as the 2007 Music Video contest (with the Ataris). I like L70 Elite Tauren Chieftain, and I'm not really a fan of the Ataris, but the 2007 contest produced much more interesting videos.

In particular, the song chosen in 2008 was a WoW-specific song about rogues, and the L70ETC models exist in the game. So we basically ended up with clips of L70ETC interspersed with Rogues doing roguey stuff. All the videos were very similar in content.

In contrast the Ataris' songs were much more abstract, not related to WoW at all, which required the filmmakers to do some interpretation. This lead to a wide variety of videos, which were much more interesting to watch.

Choice in Deus Ex: Invisible War

I mentioned Deus Ex: Invisible War in my last post. Invisible War is an interesting game. A lot of reviews panned it as being worse than the first Deus Ex, but I thought it was actually a superior game.

The thing is that where the first Deus Ex made choices obvious--usually through RPG elements like skills--Invisible War stripped out all extraneous choices, and built them into the gameplay itself. You could handle almost every situation multiple ways. But you never really saw all the different possibilities, because your first plan, your chosen playstyle, would usually work, and you never had to consider playing the game differently. If you approach every problem from the stealth perspective, you see the stealth solution first, and don't even consider the "guns blazing" option.

From a game design point-of-view this is very clean work, to build multiple solutions for every problem with such elegance. But the player ends up only seeing one facet of the game. RPG elements make the different paths obvious. If I can assign points to certain skills, I am chosing to *not* assign points to other skills. If the player never even thinks of using a rocket launcher, does the rocket launcher exist?

I suspect that Deus Ex: Invisible War would have gotten a lot higher ratings if two different reviewers had sat down and compared their experiences, and realized that they may have approached the game in two completely different styles and yet each style worked perfectly and seamlessly.

The lesson that Deus Ex: Invisible War taught me is that if you want people to appreciate their choice, you have to make obvious the fact that that there was a choice. People need to not only see what they are choosing, but also what they giving up.

Old and New Graphics

As I've said before, I wasn't all that impressed with the graphics in Age of Conan. Therefore, I was relatively surprised that I really, really like the look of Dreamfall, which is an older adventure game made by Funcom.[1]

Of course, Dreamfall has a number of advantages over Age of Conan. It's a single-player game with few models on screen and smaller locations. It also uses bright colours, and has that vibrant look that I enjoy.

However, I think a bigger factor may be that Dreamfall is an older game, published a couple years ago. My system is fairly new, and so I can crank all the video settings to maximum. In Age of Conan, I can't push the settings all the way up, and have to settle for medium quality.

It begs the question: is 100% of older graphics better than 50% of newer graphics? Maybe one reason I preferred WoW's graphics is that I can run the older graphics at near-maximum, and that provides a better experience than newer graphics at medium.

I had a similar reaction a while ago, when I played Deus Ex: Invisible War. I played it a couple of years after it was published, and on newer hardware. Again, I was able to crank the graphics to maximum, and I thought it was a really good looking game.

Maybe it's harder to get all the different elements of a graphics system working together perfectly at the mushy middle quality. Maybe the contrast between quality of different elements is a factor. I mentioned that I was very impressed with Conan's water. Did the quality of water diminish how I viewed the avatar graphics? Would it have been better if the water quality was intentionally degraded to match the other graphics settings? Would that have provided a better overall experience?

I'm not sure, and I'm not really into computer graphics. I just found the difference in my visual reaction to two Funcom games to be interesting.

[1] As an aside, Dreamfall and its predecessor The Longest Journey are superb adventure games. I'm still working on Dreamfall, so please don't post any spoilers.

Heroes, not Tourists

I generally like Mount Hyjal. The setup is very different from a normal raid instance, with the trash waves, NPC allies, and bosses that come to you instead of you finding them.

However, one big negative for Mount Hyjal is that there is no purpose to the heroes being there. Unlike the previous Caverns of Time instances, where the Infinite Dragonflight is trying to alter history, pretty much everything seems to happen as it is supposed to. The raid isn't a band of heroes, they're a group of tourists.

I don't demand much from the lore in this game, but there's usually a mission behind our ventures into the various raid instances. Mount Hyjal seems to lack any purpose. It feels like Blizzard thought, "You know what was a cool mission/event in Warcraft III? Mount Hyjal! Let's allow players to revisit it." Playing tourist, rather than doing something heroic.

The Infinite Dragonflight are also superb villains. Mysterious dragons, with that awesome reverb effect for their voices. Epoch Hunter's reveal in Durnholde was an epic moment. Aoenus in the Black Morass made a really good argument for preventing Medivh from opening the Dark Portal. In many ways, the Infinite Dragonflight are the best villains in The Burning Crusade, and it was a real disappointment that they did not appear in Mount Hyjal.

The reason I'm writing about this now is that Blizzard is talking about the new Caverns of Time instance coming in Wrath of the Lich King, the Culling of Stratholme. And the manner in which they are talking about it seems to be emphasising the tourist aspect heavily, "The Culling of Stratholme was a cool mission in WC3. Let's have the players go play tourist with Arthas."

New CoT instances are a great idea. They're fun and often unique. But they need to be along the lines of Durholde and Black Morass, giving the players a heroic purpose, rather than Mount Hyjal, where the raid is just a gaggle of tourists.

Also, bring back the Infinite Dragonflight please.

Being On The Path

Note: Sadly, because this post deals with the Season 4 PvP Ratings Requirement, I have the feeling that the comments will devolve into PvP vs PvE and miss my larger point.

The majority of Season 4 PvP gear will require the purchaser to have a personal rating of 1550 or higher. Even some of the gear obtainable through Battlegrounds will require Arena ratings. Many people, who thought PvP gear was too easily obtained for its quality, are happy about this, and many casual PvPers are unhappy.

It may surprise some of you--because I am in the camp which felt PvP gear was too easily obtained--but I believe that Rating Requirements are a bad idea.

The key is the concept of "Being On The Path" for endgame content. In nutshell, the number of people who reach the highest point of endgame is less important than the number of people who are working towards--and feel that they one day could achieve--that point.

For example, in PvE, the number of guilds in Sunwell does not matter. What really matters is the number of guilds who make it to Gruul and Magtheridon. Once a guild reaches Gruul and Magtheridon, they are "on the path" to Sunwell. Most of these guilds probably won't reach Sunwell before WotLK, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that they are steadily working on content, and feel that they could reach Sunwell eventually.

As long as a player is "on the path", everything is fine. The real crisis point are when people are unable to get on the path, or their progress on the path becomes completely blocked. I think it is less important to cater to the raiding guilds, and more important to help the guilds who are trying to become raiding guilds. To help the people who cannot get on the path at all.

This is why I feel Rating Requirements for Season 4 are a bad idea. If you are a casual PvPer, one who tries, but isn't really all that good, you've basically fallen off the path. And that is demoralizing.

In reality, of course, a casual PvPer is not likely to earn all the pieces of S4 before WotLK. But again, what is likely is not as important as what is possible. As long as you are on the path towards the end, that is the critical element.

If you look back at the last time I posted about PvP rewards, notice that I never outright denied a reward to a player. My suggestions made the process longer, but so long as a player kept at it, they would stay on the path towards Season 4.

The number of players who achieve the end is less important than the number of players who are on the path to the end. The number of players in Sunwell is less important than the number of players on the path to Sunwell. The number of players in Season 4 gear is less important than the number of players working towards Season 4 gear. With the advent of extensive Rating Requirements, the number of players on the path to Season 4 gear will drop drastically, and that is an unhealthy state for the PvP endgame.

Thoughts on Raid Schedules

I've noticed that there are very few 25-man raiding guilds that only raid for one or two days. There's probably a significant portion of the audience that would be happy in this type of guild, and it seems a little bit unusual that these guilds are so rare. I think that there are two reasons for the lack of 1 or 2-day raiding guilds: the nature of guild leaders; and the pressure to do more.

Guild leaders, by their very nature, tend to be a little more hardcore than normal. After all, starting and running a guild is a great deal of work and effort. As well, they tend to play a fair bit. People who are only online one or two evenings generally feel that they aren't able to devote enough time to the guild.

Because guild leaders play so much, they tend to shape the guild so that it matches their schedules. If they want to raid four days a week, that's what the guild works toward.

The other reason is that there is a constant pressure on a guild to do more. Every extra day you can add to the schedule makes you better off. An extra day of farming, or an extra day of boss attempts, sounds enormously appealing. A lot of times I've seen a guild start with small raid schedule, and then realize that, hey, if we add another raid day, we could farm Kara for badges, or have two days for boss attempts, and their raid schedule balloons.

Lately, I'm coming to the opinion that a non-hardcore raiding guild should ideally raid one less day than it is fully capable of. For example, if your guild absolutely cannot raid for five days, but you can for four, I think you should raid three days of the week. Having that extra slack can go a long ways towards combating fatigue and burnout.

I think the next major innovation in MMO game design will be an pressure or force that compels you to do less, and is one which is willing accepted by the player base. For example, you could always brute-force it, and say that you can only ever be saved to one raid instance at a time, but the player base would howl. I have no idea what this force could be, but I believe it will be key to the success of the MMO that dethrones WoW.

Fun and Raiding Video

Theoretically, this is still a WoW blog, so I may as well make a WoW post.

Apropos of our discussion on raiding and fun, comes this video of a Kil'jaeden attempt by <V A N Q U I S H>:



I like this video, because often raiding is a "quiet" sort of fun (except when a boss dies and Vent breaks out in cheers). You need to keep quiet in order to make sure that the raid leader can be heard. The surprise and outright delight in this raider's voice at the end is something that we all feel, but often don't give voice to, and thus is not really communicated to non-raiders.

It's sort of appropriate that this comes from a very hardcore guild, on the last encounter of the last raid in the game. It is heartening to see that even at that level, raiders still have fun.

Age of Conan: Odds and Ends

Tharok has challenged me to note some things that Age of Conan does better than WoW. I'm going to try to do so.

*crickets*

Umm, the water is really, really pretty. Seriously, the reflection, refraction, and diffraction is superb. Simply putting my toon in the water ups the graphics quality by an order of magnitude.

The use of positional effects such as knockbacks is very nice. My Priest of Mitra got this spell Repulse, which flings all enemies close to you backwards, and does a fair bit of damage. It's a lot of fun to use, and is a great spell for a priest type character.

The melee combat is more reactive than WoW's combat. Where WoW tends to fall into set routine, AoC combat tends to make you push buttons in a unique order each time.

Quests are a lot easier to do as quest objectives are marked on your map, so you can just follow the arrows.

I think the LFG system is better, but I haven't actually used it yet.

Well, that's done, and I can go back to pointing silly design design decisions. This is just going to be a quick list of stuff, not really in any significant detail.

Melee Combat. I personally find melee combat to be awkward, and not really that deep. Hit the guy on the side with no shields is not the height of strategy. Maybe it will get better if you can start identifying when a combo has been started and what moves are coming up.

Death Penalties. When you die, you essentially "respawn" at a graveyard. You have a penalty to your stats, which will go away if you reach the spot where you died (or after 30 minutes). Of course, if you die far away from a respawn point you have to run all the way back to your body, and there are normally respawned mobs in the way. So you have to kill these mobs all over again, only this time it's harder because of the penalty.

Quest tracking. As far as I can tell, you can only track one quest at a time. However, if you pick up a new quest, the tracking automatically switches to the new quest. So what ends up happening is that I'm following the arrow to a quest item and I see someone who has a new quest. I pick up the quest, look at the mini-map to find my bearings, and realize that I have to open the quest log and re-select the old quest I was working on. This behaviour is supremely annoying.

Chat Window. Here's the general rule of chat windows: Chat windows are for communicating with other players, the rest of the interface is for communicating with the game. 9 times out of 10, the player does not need to see an actual message from the game if the UI has been designed properly. AoC shows too many messages. As well, by default you can only see 3 or so lines in the window. The worst is when you sell loot after adventuring, and every transaction is posted. I'm not really sure it's even possible to carry on a conversation while doing something using the default chat.

Instancing. AoC doesn't really feel like a world. It feels like a collection of instances strung together. The instancing tech to balance loads and over-crowding is quite clever, but I'm not sure it was a good idea. I quite clearly remember my first griffon flight in WoW, and realizing that I could see other people and they could see me, that I was still part of the world. That was amazingly cool. In fact, I think Blizzard's decision to instance off the Blood Elf and Draenai starting areas was a mistake, and AoC is making that same mistake on a far larger scale.

Balanced areas. I was doing a green (low-level) quest that involved killing level 5 monsters at about level 8. However, to get to the correct area I had to get past a level 11 monster that killed me every time. I finally waited for a higher level to come by and kill it, and followed him through.

Graphics. I don't really like the graphics. Technically, they may be better than WoW (more polygons, more insert-CG-buzzword-here, etc.), but I find that Blizzard makes much better use of colours, contrast, and shapes. But I'm not really a fan of "realistic" graphics. I find that games that go for realism are not as "vibrant" as real life, and that more cartoony games are more likely to achieve that vibrancy. Your personal taste may differ.

Inability to switch characters. If you want to switch to a different character, you get to exit from the game and log back in again. I cannot fathom how Funcom decided this was a good idea.

Company logos. Yes, Funcom, when I start your game, I really want to see all 100 logos of every single company that had a hand in the game, including the pizza shop down the street, as well as the opening movie. Seriously, every time you launch the game, you get to sit through all the opening movies (or more accurately, hit Esc a whole bunch of times). Please, for the love of all that is holy, gaming companies need to stop doing this! Play all the movies whenever you make a new character, or the first time the game launches, but after that let us get to the actual game ASAP!

This isn't a negative for Funcom, but something that would have been really cool is if they had provided a set of "WoW default keybindings". Basically press L to bring up the Journal, B to bring up the inventory, C to bring up the character screen, P to bring up the Abilities/Skills and N to bring up the Feat trees. Just to make it slightly easier to steal WoW players. Similar to what Excel did to capture Lotus 1-2-3 users, by implementing all the Lotus "slash" commands.

All in all, AoC hasn't really grabbed me yet. There hasn't been anything that has really made me excited to play, and there are enough annoyances to make me not want to play. Admittedly, I haven't levelled very far yet, my highest character is my Priest of Mitra at about level 11. However, I have put in several hours on a bunch of different characters trying to find one that I liked. I predict that I will probably try to get my Priest through the starting area over the weekend, just to get my money's worth out of the game, and then probably stop playing it.

Age of Conan: Melee Combat

Melee combat is the big selling point of Age of Conan. I find it fun and visceral in some ways, but also rather awkward.

Basically, there is no auto-attack. Combat is more like a console game, where you have three basic attacks (left, middle, right). Your enemy has three shields which they shift around. So basically, you try and hit them where they've left openings in their defenses.

This system is all well and good. Combat is bloody and fluid, and pretty fun with just the three basic attacks.

My problem comes with special abilities, called combos. To start a special attack, you press the hotkey for that attack, and then a specific sequence of basic attacks. That executes the attack.

For some reason, I find this really awkward on a keyboard. My basic attacks are bound to 1, 2, 3. I can use special attacks bound to 4 and 5 fairly easily. However, hitting specials bound to the other number keys causes me trouble. I generally have to take my fingers off the basic attacks in order to reach the specials, and that makes it hard for me to complete the specials, as I have to get my little, ring, and middle fingers back in place. I've been experimenting with using my other hand or the mouse to trigger specials, but then I can't use that hand to control movement. WTB one more hand!

Essentially, the basic attacks take up too much of "key space" accessible to one hand, at least with the default keybindings. I might be able to do something by remapping those keys to the middle of the keyboard. But right now I find that I'm skipping most of the combos and just hitting the basic attack buttons.

A very annoying note is that if you play an archer, your bound specials bar doesn't change when you switch weapons. If switching to a bow automatically swapped the specials available, it would be much easier. It's not so bad on a WoW hunter, as you can put range on one side, and melee on the other. The problem in AoC is that you use 1-3 in both situations. So it's like 1-6 for range, and 1-3 + 7-9 for melee.

It strikes me that this system would work superbly on a console controller or gamepad. You'd use your thumb to hit the basic attack buttons, and you could queue up specials using the right shoulder pad buttons.

Though to be honest, if I had designed this system I would have designed it differently. I would have allowed the player to replace the basic attacks with new attacks, but still keep the whole directional combat with the shields. For example, if you got a Poisoned Strike, you could replace your Middle Basic attack an Middle Poisoned Strike. Then whenever you made an middle attack, you would make a poisoned strike. (You could bind the same Strike to multiple directions.)

If you combined this with abilities that had cooldowns, it would get pretty interesting. If you have a Haymaker with a 10s cooldown on your Right attack, you'd make attacks to draw shields away from the right side, then Haymaker the opponent for a ton of damage. But now you can't use your Right attack for 10s, and a smart opponent can balance shields to protect the Middle and Left sides.

It would keep the twitch and visceral nature of combat. You could still have combos, but now the components of the combo could change. (I'd also remove having to start the combo by hitting a new button.) If Left, Left, Right triggers a Sweep, you could set it up so that Left and Right had abilities of your choice. It would be a little more strategic, and would be a lot easier to hit keys with one hand.