Star Trek Online: Ground Combat, Skill Points

The other half of Star Trek Online is ground combat. In true Star Trek fashion, anytime you need to beam down into a hostile situation, rather than sending Marines, you send the bridge crew.

You beam down with your officers, creating a party of 5. If you are with other players, you have less NPCs and more real players. The NPCs are pretty good. Kind of honestly, they seem to do a better job than I do, so I let them do their thing. I'm still not sure what the Science Officer is doing with tachyons in the middle of the fight, but I'll assume it's something useful.

Combat is pretty much MMO-standard with 3rd person-view and hitting buttons corresponding to abilities. The one twist is the Expose/Exploit system. About half the weapons have a special ability that has a chance of putting an enemy into an "exposed" state. The other weapons have a special Exploit ability. If you hit an Exposed target with an Exploit, the target takes massive damage, and is usually vaporized thus far.

This adds some nice coordination between characters. My Engineering officer sets people up with an Expose, and I vaporise them with an Exploit. There's a real sense of teamwork there.

An added concern is that Exploit abilities do large amounts of damage on their own, but they have a long cooldown. The cooldown is long enough that you often miss an Exposed window. So you have to decide if it's worth saving the Exploit ability for an Expose (which is not guaranteed) or if you should use it whenever it comes off cooldown.

Ground combat is okay. I don't think it's as fun as space combat, but it's interesting enough in short doses. However, I think there is a issue with skill points.

Skill Points

Star Trek Online gives you skill points as you play which you can invest in skills. However, Space skills are separate from Ground skills, but both use the same pool of points. Because I like space combat, I've been dumping all my skills into Space skills. This has the side effect of lowering my effectiveness in the ground game, which makes the ground game harder and less fun.

You have to make the same choice between Space and Ground skills for your officers as well. My officers have been maxing out their Space abilities, but still have poor ground abilities, which really isn't helping.

I can't help but think that it might have been better if there had been separate point pools for Space and Ground. Or if each skill had both a ground effect and a space effect. That way you don't end up gimping yourself for one half of the game.

Not to mention that there are no respecs yet, and if Cryptic follows the Champions Online pattern, skill respecs will end up being sold in the RMT store for real cash.

Conclusions

Well, that's an overview of Ground Combat and the Skill system. I think that they are both interesting yet flawed elements of the game.

Offering Advice

Apropos of our discussion last week, here's a question. Let's say you see another player make a mistake. When should you offer them unsolicited advice?

1. They're playing solo and you come across them randomly.
2. They're part of your Random Dungeon group.
3. They're part of your PuG Raid Group.
4. They're a member of your guild.
5. They're a member of guild's steady raid team.
6. They're a long-time "in-game" friend.
7. They're a "real-life" friend.
8. They're a family member.
9. Never. Only offer advice if someone asks for it.

I think most of us are more willing to offer advice as you go down the list. The more tenuous the social connection, the less likely we are willing to offer unsolicited advice.

Where I disagree with a lot of readers, it seems, is that I think it is perfectly appropriate to offer advice to pretty much everyone. Why not? Are you afraid of looking elitist?

Obviously you should be tactful, but if you're a skilled player, I don't think it's a good thing to just keep your head down and collect badges.

Dreamwalker

So Valithria Dreamwalker is now active in Icecrown Citadel. It's an interesting boss, where the healers have to heal the dragon up to full health, while the rest of the raid deals with adds trying to prevent this.

It's a pretty good fight, but there's one aspect of the fight that I do not like.

Every so often, Dreamwalker will create portals to a dream world. In the dream world are little orbs that you can touch and it will give you a stacking buff that increases your healing by 10% per stack.

It's possible to carry your stack from portal to portal, but the timing is exceptionally tight. If you are capable of carrying stacks, your healing gets massively magnified. If you're not, or have high latency, your healing is greatly hurt.

The timing is way too tight for the potential gain. If healers are meant to carry the stack from portal to portal, the timing should be slightly longer. Alternatively the penalty could be less severe, maybe losing a stack per second instead of all of them at once. If healers are not meant to carry stacks, the timer should be lower, so the stacks drop off before you enter the portal.

Basically, if Patricia is a little bit better than Daisy, Patricia should do a little more damage or healing than Daisy. You shouldn't have a situation where Patricia can all of a sudden do twice as much damage or healing as Daisy. Small differences in skill should not translate into very large differences in effectiveness.

Star Trek Online: Space Combat

Space Combat is Star Trek Online's killer feature. It's relatively novel, interesting, and fun.

Combat is quasi-2D. There is a Z-axis, but movement along it is restricted. It's 3D-enough that you can do cinemactic passes underneath or above an enemy ship, but the combat itself is effectively 2D. No Immelmanns for you.

Combat is not really frantic, it has a measured pace that works extremely well. Also, there are explosions, which always improves everything.

Your ship has four shields: fore, aft, left, and right. Weapons are all about firing arcs. The starter ship has forward phasers and photon torpedos, and aft phasers. Photon torpedos have a narrow firing arc, so you can only fire them when your target is directly ahead. They also have a longer cooldown. Phasers, on the other hand, have a very wide firing arc. If the enemy is to the side of you, you can fire both phaser banks at them.

So much of the early game is using phaser broadsides to weaken shields, trying to keep a strong shield between you and the enemy, and getting a photon torpedo to strike through a hole in the enemy shields.

(Tip: if you right-click your weapons, you can set them to auto-fire. I think you still have to fire them once before auto-fire kicks in.)

However, new weapons can completely change how you fight. On my first ship, I got a Disruptor Cannon, which did a lot of damage but had an extremely narrow firing arc, and a Disruptor Turret, which did low damage, but had a 360 degree firing arc. So now, if I faced the enemy straight on, I did a huge amount of damage because the Cannon, Turret, and Photon Torpedos were firing. However, as soon as I had to turn, damage dropped off greatly.

As well, if you keep one side facing the enemy always, that's the shields which are going to be pounded, so there's a nice tension where you have to keep rotating which weapons are firing and which shields are taking hits.

You can also adjust power for your various weapons. You can send more power to the shields, or the weapons as you need.

Long-term cooldowns are special abilities given by your bridge officers. For example, my Engineering officer can greatly boosts the shields every few minutes. (I envision "Scotty, I need more power to the shields!" "She cannae take much more of this, Cap'n!" when I click that button.) The Science officer does something with Tachyons which damages the enemy's shields. It's a very neat way of handling cooldowns, and very much works with the IP.

I am not very far in yet, so I don't know how the rest of the game will pan out. However, I think Star Trek Online is worth trying for the space combat alone.

Offline For A While

My cable company was working on my building last night, and they managed to knock me offline. The next tech can only come out Friday, so I guess I am taking an enforced vacation from the Internet and WoW.

Still my cable company is pretty competent, and this is the only issue I've had in three or four years, so maybe a vacation will be good for me.

I've managed to make a post a day for the month of January, and didn't want to see that streak get broken on the very last day.

For the record, you can really see the difference in traffic that a regular posting schedule makes.

See ya in a week (or maybe sooner if I'm lucky).

Top WoW Videos - #3 - Tales of the Past III

The #3 video on my countdown is Martin Falch's magnum opus, Tales of the Past III.

Note that there's no Youtube link. In a world where most machinima are shorts, rarely exceeding the 10 minute mark, Martin Falch made a full-length, one-and-a-half hours-long, movie. The movie is 2.3 GB in size, so I recommend using the torrent option to download it.

The movie is pretty epic. It features many of the big names in Warcraft, including Thrall, Jaina, Arthas and the Ashbringer. Also, there's a paladin in full Judgment, which automatically makes every movie better. Tales of the Past III is over the top, but gloriously so.

It is not a perfect movie. In a lot of technical aspects, it is weaker than the other movies lower on the list. But I admire boldness and daring. Martin Falch dreamed a greater dream, one that most other machinima creators would hesitate to raise their eyes to. And he had the fortitude to see his vision to completion.

Top Video List (so far):

3. Tales of the Past III
4. The Craft of War: BLIND
5. Big Blue Dress

Measuring Absorbs

Ah, Discipline Priests. According to some meters, they are the worst healers. According to other meters, they are the best healers because their shields prevent so much damage. What's the truth? Who really knows? Probably somewhere in the middle, would be my guess.

All of this is because the combat log does not report absorbs correctly.

The lesson here is, again, one of feedback. You need to feedback to be able to correctly evaluate abilities.

How does Sacred Shield compare to the other abilities? Is it weak or strong? I have no idea. I take it on faith that it's doing good, so I keep it up on the tanks always. But I really don't know.

That could actually be another point in favor of the FoL paladin healing style. Focusing on Spellpower gives you a really strong Sacred Shield. Maybe that's the element which makes the build truly viable. We don't know, though. We can theorycraft, but theorycraft really needs data to confirm the math.

If you have a game with a combat log, all effects need to reported and properly attributable. Blizzard really needs to get a proper reporting system for absorbs up and running.

Gevlon Is Right

I may disagree with his methods, but at his heart, Gevlon is right. Most people do not play anywhere near their full potential.

Why then is it verboten to point this out? Maybe all the people who advise you not to make a fuss are just cowards. They're afraid of being called "mean" or "elitist". Who cares about about other people, so long as you get your badges. Much easier to take the safe route and avoid confrontation; to laugh about a poor player in guild chat behind her back.

Surely the better path, the harder path, is not to turn a blind eye to poor players, but to help them become better ones.

The difference between Gevlon and I is what we believe are the motives. To Gevlon, bad players are "morons and slackers", who are bad players because they choose to be bad. In my view most people want to be decent players, but a lot of them don't really know how to be good. They don't see the path from what they are to what they could be. Or worse, they ascribe the difference entirely to gear, which is pretty much the worst mistake you can make if you want to be a better player.¹

Pointing out that a player has poor DPS is not mean. It's a fact. If you can shame or push them into seeking out external information at Elitist Jerks or the WoW Forums, that's pretty much the only thing which will make them better players.

Of course, though, it's all about style. Calling them terrible and trying to vote-kick them from PuGs unless they do better isn't going to work. It would work if they were actively slacking, but not if they don't know how to do better.

1. See the Why Are DPS So Bad? articles on the sidebar for more on this.

Kicking Underperforming Players

Gevlon is turning into a real social type of player these days, on a crusade to improve the level of play in instances. Whatever happened to goblinish profit-above-all motives?

Still, I can't help but think his methods are backfiring. Attempting to kick the lowest DPS resulted in the group kicking him instead. To be honest, that exchange was probably the funniest thing I've seen all week.

People generally aren't going to kick someone for underperforming, so long as the performance does not affect success. If success is a bit slower than it could be, that's okay for most people. However, causing the group to wipe--as Gevlon did--will get you kicked.

In my experience, people are very lenient about trying. As long as the player is not just /afk leaching, people are tolerant of performance, regardless of how good they are actually doing. It's only when wipes happen, where the lower performance results in actual failure, that the tolerance disappears.

I think the carrot might be a better weapon than the stick, at least in random PuGs. Post the meters, say that X could do better, and then point her to Elitist Jerks. That probably will have a better success rate than attempting to play power games, even if you are the healer or the tank.

Thoughts on FoL vs HL Builds

There are are currently two styles of paladin healing builds at endgame: one focusing on Flash of Light, and one focusing on Holy Light.

The Holy Light build is the pretty standard gem-everything-with-Intellect build that we all know and love. It relies on massive amounts of Intellect so that mana regeneration from Replenishment and Divine Plea is maximized.

The Flash of Light build focuses on Spellpower, and relies on the fact that FoL is very efficient to handle mana concerns. The idea is to get enough Haste so that your FoLs cast in 1.0 seconds (about 650 Haste rating), resulting in steady stream of very fast, moderately strong heals. It's sort of being like a living HoT. You generally need T9-level gear before this style becomes viable.

One thing to note is that neither build uses one spell exclusively. HL builds can use Flash of Light when damage is low to save mana, while FoL builds can still drop Holy Light when the going gets rough.

Holy Light's advantage is that it has huge raw throughput. Flash of Light's advantage is that it is "good enough" most of the time, is very steady healing, and you don't have to worry about using Divine Plea or the -50% healing Divine Plea entails.

My personal preference is Holy Light, because the Holy Light build is a bit more "forgiving" than FoL. Massive amounts of healing makes up for a lot of mistakes. If you use HL when you could have used FoL, oh well, you just wasted some mana. On the other hand, if you use FoL (even a strong FoL) when you should have used HL, someone might die.

Exponential Soft Enrages

One new element in Icecrown Citadel are exponential soft enrages. These are mechanics which start out slow and "speed up" as time goes on. There are currently three fights that use exponential soft enrages: Deathbringer Saurfang; Professor Putricide; and Blood Queen Lana'thel.

In the Deathbringer encounter, Saurfang gains Blood Points when he deals damage to someone. When he reaches 100 Blood Points, he puts a Mark on someone and deals damage to them whenever he hits the tank. That means he generates the next Mark faster, and so on. If a person with a Mark dies, Saurfang heals for 5%.

In Putricide Phase 3, the tank gets a debuff which causes raidwide damage. Each stack increases the raidwide damage by a factor of 3. If the debuff expires for any reason, including tank death, Putricide is healed for a large amount (10% maybe, but P3 starts at 35%, so it's effectively a third or more of his remaining health.)

In Blood Queen Lana'thel, one person is turned into a vampire allowing them to do more damage. After a short time, they have to bite someone else and turn them into a vampire as well. After another interval, two new vampires have to be created, and so on. If you aren't able to bite someone, you get Mind Controlled.

One of the most interesting things about these setups is how vulnerable they are to "fiddling" in the early part of the sequence.

For example, in Deathbringer Saurfang, you can let the first Mark die. Saurfang heals for 5% and you lose a DPS, but you effectively reset the soft enrage timer. Let's say the first Mark comes at 2 min with the second Mark coming at 3 min. Letting the first Mark die means that the first active Mark comes at 4 min, with the second mark at 5 min. You gain a huge amount of time because you were able to reset the sequence, and the fight becomes trivial. The penalty of 5% health and a DPS is not enough to prevent the tactic from working.

In Putricide, the penalty is very high. It's high enough to make resetting the stack non-viable. However, you can buy a bit of extra time by inserting more tanks into the tank rotation. Each extra tank would give you an extra 40s in P3 while keeping the raidwide damage low. It's possible that a guild which is having trouble with P3 could drop a healer and put in an extra tank.

For Blood Queen Lana'thel, originally the sequence of 1-2-4-8-16 was less than the hard enrage timer. So people started doing a sequence like 1-2-(4-3)-6-12-24. When you hit four vampires, one vamp would deliberately die to shift the sequence slightly. A small change early in the sequence netted more time, enough that the hard enrage became the limiter. Again, there was no penalty for fiddling with the sequence. Blizzard eventually increased the timer, so the normal sequence would hit the hard enrage timer as well.

So exponential soft enrage timers are a very interesting mechanic introduced in Icecrown. However, they need strong penalties to avoid people tampering with them. An early reset or delay can push back the soft enrage by a large amount. In two of the three fights that use it so far, the penalty wasn't strong enough.

AoE and Crowd Control

Often the debate on Crowd Control sounds like it is a choice between AoE or Crowd Control. If tanks don't have good AoE threat, then obviously you can't cast AoE spells, but you might use Crowd Control more.

Are we doomed to have choose between Blizzard and Polymorph? If you could only cast one of those spells in instances, which would you pick?

Perhaps the solution doesn't lie in player abilities, but in how mobs are created. For example, you can't really AoE in Faction Champs because the mobs have a -75% AoE buff.

What if we extended that buff to all elite creatures? The major difference between Elite and normal creatures would be that elites would be very resistant to AoE and normals are not. At the same time, rather than only having elites in an instance, Blizzard could put in more normal creatures, or convert some elites in a pack to normals, with higher health and and attacks.

Right now, pretty much every mob in an instance is elite, which has made that designation lose a lot of its meaning.

So now you get a choice, depending on what mobs you face. If you face elites, you might have to use Crowd Control. If you face normals, you can use AoE. Fights that currently use Crowd Control can have the adds tagged as normal, but with the same stats as now.

It might even allow Blizzard to make more interesting trash packs. Imagine a pack with 5 elites and 10 normals. You might have to separate out the elites so that they can be controlled while the normals are AoE'd down.

The big advantage of this solution is that you don't have to nerf tanks. They still have good AoE threat for when it is necessary, or when AoE would make a fight better. But they can't rely solely on AoE threat, and they have to single-target at appropriate times. In a multi-type fight, a warrior would use Thunderclap to pick up the normals, and Shield Slam to hold the elite.

In many ways, I think this solution, creating a difference between elites and normals regarding AoE, could give us the best of both worlds.

Top WoW Videos - #4 - The Craft of War: BLIND

The #4 video on my countdown is The Craft of War: BLIND, by Percula.



Like 90% of WoW's population, this video inspired me to make a rogue.

Though most of elements such as style, music, plot, and pacing are well done, the real strength here is the animation. Percula used the WoW models and scenery, but did his own animation. He did a superb job. Everyone, from the soldiers to the rogues to the trumpeter, is extremely well done.

In particular, I love how he used the animation to convey the essence of his main characters. The rogues are all style and flair, with lots of movement. On the other hand, Lady Prestor, who is the dragon Onyxia masquerading as a human noble, is very contained, with minimal motions. It is a beautiful contrast.

One thing I enjoy in movies is a good introduction of a villain.¹ The first impression you get of the villain is often the most important one. Percula's presentation of Onyxia in this video is awesome. He spends the video building up the blood elf rogue, from the tavern fight, to the two rogues fight, to the group of guards before Lady Prestor. Then the rogue, which Percula has taken such pains to establish as exceptionally competent, gets to Lady Prestor. And Lady Prestor just beats down the rogue without breaking a sweat; then has the audacity to mock the rogue about Lady Prestor's secret identity, thus using the rogue's own Blind against herself. It is a superb introduction that utterly establishes Onyxia's credentials as a genuine bad-ass.

There are also a lot of small touches in this video. For example, the scratches in the Blood Elf's sword at the end, and the way the guard flinches when Onyxia deflects the dagger at him. All these small touches add to the finished product, making The Craft of War: BLIND a great, great video.

Top Video List (so far):

4. The Craft of War: BLIND
5. Big Blue Dress

1. My favorite villain introduction is in the movie The Illusionist. That introduction is just sublime in its efficiency.

Difficulty and WoW

Various people are once again discussing the difficulty (or lack thereof) of WoW. I don't really understand the fascination with this topic.

Here's a some cold, hard truths:

1. If an activity is hard, most people who attempt it will be never be successful.

2. Fifty percent of all people are below average.

So what does this mean? Let's say you made questing in an MMO to be of average difficulty, whatever that may be. Congratulations, you just eliminated half of your potential customer base! I'm sure your shareholders are thrilled with the purity of your Vision™.

The basic activity in your game must be fairly easy. Questing should be easy enough that 90% of all potential players can do it. (And judging by the fact that people seem to need addons like Questhelper, it isn't there yet.)

After that, you can scale difficulties upwards. 75% of players can do regular dungeons, 50% of players can do heroics, 30% of players can do normal raids, 10% of players can do hard modes, and 0.1% can do the single hardest fight in the game.

To my mind WoW has done a very good job of providing content of appropriate difficulty for everyone. There is something for people of every skill level including those people who are not that skilled. Providing basic gameplay that low-skilled players can do is just good business sense.

If you think WoW is too easy, maybe you should step up to the next level of challenge.

Will You Play Star Trek Online?

I'm not in the Beta for Star Trek Online. The shenanigans to get a beta key seemed like more work than I was willing to put in. But I've been watching a lot of the news and reactions to the game.

I'm really on the fence about this game. The ship combat looks kind of neat, but I'm not sure about the rest of the game.

I've been watching the EJ thread on Star Trek (amusingly entitled "Elitist Kirks"), and one thing that strikes me is that the game seems to get very complicated very fast. And I'm not sure I'm up for a very complicated MMO.

I'm also not sure about the IP. I like Star Trek, but it's always struck me as something I watch. To see a story unfold. I never really thought of it as something active, something you play. I think I've only ever played one Star Trek game (Star Trek:25th Anniversary on the NES, if I recall correctly). I don't actually remember too much about it, but Star Trek has always been firmly in the "not-game" category in my mind.

I guess we'll see how bored I am when STO actually launches.

Beacon of Light and Range Tip

One fact that's often overlooked is the fact that Beacon of Light has *60* yard range, even though paladin heals have a 40 yard range.

So if you're assigned to heal a target that occasionally goes out of range, keep Beacon up on them, and heal people closer to you. This gives you a little more leeway in moving. You don't have to move right away to keep pace with your target, you can move a bit later. Or sometimes you don't have to move at all, if they will come back in range.

This is a particularly useful tactic for fights where someone has to go pickup adds and bring them back to the group, as they'll often only be out of range for a few seconds. Beacon of Light can even be cast when the target is up to 60 yards away, so you don't even need to refresh Beacon early.

This is a small tip if you are having range issues as a paladin healer. Choose your Beacon target wisely. Sometimes the main tank is not the best choice.

Unifying Paladin Mana Mechanics

Each paladin spec has it's own mechanic to regenerate mana. Holy pops Divine Plea once a minute to get 25% of total mana back. Protection has Guarded by the Light to get 100% of total mana back per minute. Retribution has Judgements of the Wise which returns roughly 190% of base mana back per minute.

The interesting thing is that the amount of mana returned is not that far apart. If we say Holy has a total mana pool about 5 times base mana, then Holy gets 125% base mana back per minute. Ret is a bit of an outlier, but not that much higher.

Rather than having three separate mechanics, maybe it would be better to have one mechanic that all three specs use. I think the best mechanic out of these three is Retribution's JotW. Judgments are an iconic part of the paladin class. Plus, Judging is fun. A giant golden hammer drops out of the air and smacks your enemy in the head. Never gets old. Hitting Divine Plea once a minute is not particularly fun. As well, most tankadins seem less than enamored with the way Guarded by the Light works.

Suppose JotW's functionality was built into the base Judgement spell, so that each Judgement returned a net of 15% base mana. JotW could increase the mana returned by another 5% or 10%, to keep Ret the same.

That way, each spec would be encouraged to Judge a lot, and Judgement would be the primary method of regaining mana. We could then remove Divine Plea from the game.

Crowd Control and Tank Threat

In a comment to the last post, Jeremy offers another suggestion for promoting Crowd Control:

Another alternative is to make it difficult or impossible for a single tank to hold threat on all mobs simultaneously.

Back in the good (bad?) old days of vanilla WoW, when warriors were basically the only tanks and had very few AoE threat-generating abilities, you *had* to CC because the tank simply couldn't hold all of those mobs at once.

In BC, when tankadins became viable, their AoE tanking abilities became the gold standard: groups forgot about CC, and other tanks suffered because groups expected them to just tank everything. (As a warrior tank at the end of BC, I routinely felt like I just didn't have the tools to tank effectively.) In WotLK, this imbalance was fixed by giving *every* tank reasonable AoE capabilities, which made CC irrelevant.

Thus the "quick" fix for the lack of CC is to nerf every tank's AoE threat generation abilities to the point where they can't reasonably expect to hold more than three active mobs at once.

I don't agree with this idea. The thing is that there is an alternate strategy to Crowd Control if the tank's AoE threat is poor. The DPS simply focuses on a single target, and nukes them down one by one.

Now, admittedly, many DPS seem to find the concept of "focus fire" and "assisting" to be advanced techniques, but there's nothing really preventing them from learning. Kind of honestly, they seemed to have the same problem with "not breaking sheep".

A tank just has to generate enough AoE threat to get past the healers. Strictly speaking, good AoE threat is not absolutely necessary, it's just necessary if people want to use AoE spells.

Tankadins really came into prominence in TBC because it was "easier" for a paladin to gather everything and the raid AoE things down. I remember seeing Hyjal tanked by Warriors, and they were fine, you just had to be a little more careful.

You could have such weak AoE threat that the healers would pull off a tank, and that would make Crowd Control much more useful. But it would also make running dungeons a bit more dicey. Sheep breaks, and the mob runs straight to the healer. That's pretty much a recipe for a wipe.

Tanking is already an unpopular role. Making it harder for tanks probably isn't the best of ideas.

In a way, that may have been the bargain: Crowd Control was sacrificed to make tanking easier, making more people willing to try tanking. Overall, I'd say it was probably a good bargain. I would rather have more tanks than more use of Crowd Control.

Crowd Control

A lot of people feel that Crowd Control should be more prominent. You should have to Polymorph more, or Banish, or even Sap. I am not entirely sure I agree with this. I'm not sure I disagree with it either. I remember the days of Sapping or Sheeping, and they were kind of cool.

However, when I think of Crowd Control, I think of those demons in Tempest Keep. The ones with the Buzzsaws of Doom. You may remember them. If you failed to CC them, they started launching buzzsaws at the raid, doing massive damage before you could get them locked down again. Even the gap between Banishes was dangerous. Kind of honestly, I would rather not see trash like that again.

The thing about Crowd Control is that, in order for it to be used, the mob must be too dangerous to leave active while other mobs are alive. That means if you make a slight mistake, it often leads to a wipe. If the mob is any less dangerous, then it will just be tanked down.

Another problem is that mob must eventually be tanked and killed. You can't really make an untankable mob and expect people to control that. So the controlled mob exists in this zone between "can be tanked" and "cannot be tanked". And the better the gear you get, the more the mobs move to the "can be tanked" category.

I suppose if you really wanted to enforce Crowd Control, you have to create dependencies between mobs in the same pack. For example, Mob A applies a debuff to the tank increasing Fire Damage taken by 500%. Mob B does Fire damage. The optimal solution here is to fight the two mobs seperately, either by using two tanks or crowd controlling one until the other is dead.

I think that would be a fine mechanic to use once or twice. But if every trash pack started having these dependencies, just to force people to use Crowd Control, it would soon seem contrived.

Top WoW Videos - #5 - Big Blue Dress

Since Saturday is a pretty slow day, I thought I'd take a look at what I think the best WoW machinima videos are over the next few weeks, and in true Blessing of Kings style, over-analyze them to death.

We'll start with #5, Big Blue Dress, by Cranius.



Now, I'm not precisely sure that Big Blue Dress is the fifth-best WoW video, but I couldn't think of anything else I would put above it. Plus, Cranius does have a very good track record with his other videos as well.

Big Blue Dress is also nominally a PvP video. PoM-Pyro has always been a classic PvP mage tactic, and it's amusing to see a video devoted to it.

Finally, the kicker is the absolutely hilarious gnome chorus, which just fits the video perfectly.

Limited Attempts on Putricide

I really like the limited attempts model on Professor Putricide. For those who are unaware, Putricide is the last boss in the Plague Wing of Icecrown Citadel. You get 10 attempts on Putricide each week, after which you cannot engage him in combat any more.

I like the 10-attempt limit. It's a good number, large enough so that it gives you room to maneuver, but small enough that it really restricts you and causes a good stratification among the guilds. The 50-attempt limit in Trial of the Grand Crusader was way too many. Many weeks, we never even used up all 50. In contrast, only 10 attempts makes it feel like you need to make each attempt count, while still giving you time to talk things over.

(We haven't beaten Putricide yet. We've pushed into Phase 3 a couple times, and have 5 attempts left for our next raid day.)

I'm not sure how the rest of ICC's raid model will work. From what I understand, the attempt limit will increase, but each end boss will share attempt counts. I.e. Maybe next week you will get 15 attempts to defeat both Putricide and Blood Queen Lana'thel. The number of attempts will keep increasing. As well, eventually the faction leaders will provide a raid buff to help guilds complete ICC.

Personally, I think that seems a little bit complicated. I think a better model would be to have attempts on the bosses be independent of each other. Then, the number of attempts should remain at 10 always. For example, you get 10 attempts at Putricide, and then 10 attempts at Blood Queen Lana'thel. Only the faction leader buff will "nerf" the instance as time progresses.

I think this model would be easier to understand, and easier to make decisions about. You don't need to juggle number of attempts and bosses. Additionally, the 10 attempts provides a real limit for all guilds, and will produce the nice stratification that the Putricide limit has created.

Lowbie Tank Tales: Authority

One of the interesting things about tanking is how the rest of the group automatically defers to you.

I've ran Gnomeregan a fair bit, and now know the easiest way to get to the boss with a minimum of fuss.¹ When I'm on my tank, the group falls in behind me and we move through the instance smoothly.

On the other hand, when I'm on my rogue, generally people don't know which way to go, and the group stops for discussion. I can tell them the way to go, but they never seem to listen to me. Half the time we go in a crazy direction, and the group never makes it to the end boss. This happens even I am the nominal Party Leader.

Generally, my tank is perceived to have much more authority than my rogue, even though there's not a lot of difference between the two characters. It's like WoW players are trained to defer to the tanks.

Maybe it's just that the tank goes in first. Maybe being the first person in the battle confers an aura of leadership, in the style of ancient generals and kings.

I find the automatic mantle of authority to be a very interesting part of tanking, even if I'm not completely sure why the tank is assumed to be in charge.

---

1. Generally, always go left, and don't jump down. Jumping down with an inexperienced group inevitably causes more problems than it's worth.

Trauma and Paladins

I got a new mace from ICC tonight: [Trauma]. It replaced my mace from Ulduar.

It's rather underwhelming so far. The proc does like 0.6% of my healing.

According to Ghostcrawler:

Estimates of Bryntroll at 8 to 10% of dps seem exaggerated to us. Something at the 3 to 3.5% seems more typical. It should be eminently possible for healers to get 3 to 3.5% healing out of Trauma.

I'm not sure what data Ghostcrawler is seeing, but I get nothing close to this. And I'm usually healing tanks, so it should be hitting the melee DPS as well.

The worst part is that [Trauma] is pretty much the only upgrade for a healing paladin in ICC-25. The only other alternative is a sword with hit rating.

I hope Blizzard takes a look at this weapon and upgrades the proc effect for paladins.

As well, they really need to drop an alternative weapon type that paladins can use. The other healing classes get daggers and staves in addition to maces. Paladins can use caster swords, but Blizzard always seems to put hit rating on the swords, restricting the swords to the DPS casters.

Edit: I forgot to mention that in addition to being a lackluster proc, effect-wise, it also lacks flash, which is a very common complaint for healing effects. In comparison, [Nibelung] spawns Val'kyrs to smite your enemies for you! Why does healing never get the cool stylish effects?

More on Tanking and Healing

Gordon responds to the previous post:

Secondly, I'd like defined "harder" in this context. I think leveling a healer or a tank (with that spec) is tougher and more time consuming than leveling a DPS class. Yes, tanks could level as a DPS spec but then would suffer the consequences in their grouping ability and/or be forced to pay the 1,000g to allow for dual speccing. DPS classes don't face this obstacole.

I disagree with this. First, you could always tank and heal normal instances regardless of what spec you have. The base class always includes the necessary tools to heal and tank. Back in 2008, I wrote a post about Retribution Tanking for WotLK normal dungeons. It's really only when you hit end-game heroics and raids that you need to spec for your role.

Second, the new Dungeon Finder makes leveling as a tank or healer significantly easier than it used to be. I've taken a warrior from 15 to 32, and it's been blazingly fast. I would rank it as faster than questing. Not to mention that character has much superior gear for her level. She's almost all blues, without really trying.

With the Dungeon Finder, it is quite possible that tank and healer leveling has become easier than leveling as DPS.

Also, I think there's a fair argument to suggest that both tanking and healing are more stressful roles than DPSing because you are really carrying the weight of your group or raid on your shoulders. I know people will vehemently disagree with me on that point but so be it.

In my opinion as a long-time healer, the idea that "you are really carrying the weight of your group or raid on your shoulders" is an illusion. It is an illusion born of unfamiliarity with the role and the fact that you are an obvious point of failure.

It's true that if the tank or healer makes a major mistake, the group wipes. If you're new to healing, this idea can seem intimidating. This is especially true when you're faced with a new role. DPS is familiar, it's what you did all through your leveling experience.

So when faced with an unfamiliar role, where failure is obvious, it's not really unexpected that the roles of tanking and healing would be invested with more weight than they deserve.

However, once you tank or heal for a while, the unfamiliarity goes away. Once you get as comfortable with healing as you were with killing mobs, it doesn't seem harder or easier, just different.

The first time I tanked on my warrior at 15, I was very nervous. Now, at 30, I'm jaded. I know my role, I know my purpose, and I can take care of my end. That's how fast the acclimation process goes.

You don't have the weight of the raid on your shoulders. It just seems like you do at first. And practice cures you of that illusion.

Should Tanks and Healers Get the Biggest Rewards?

Gordon, from We Fly Spitfires, recently wrote a controversial guest post on World of Matticus, Tanks and Healers Should Get The Biggest Rewards.

I think a lot of the controversy comes there are several issues entangled together in this piece. If we unravel the issues, I think a clearer picture emerges.

Gordon says:

Tanks and healers are the most important classes for any group...These are the two most important classes that exist in any MMORPG. But the DPS? They’re just meat in the room.

This statement is true for certain levels of play, but completely and utterly false at different levels. At the lowest levels of skill--for example, normal dungeons, easy heroics, Naxxramas--yes, the tanks and healers are the most important. A solid tank and healer can carry the DPS to victory. A bad tank or healer will probably wipe the raid.

But at the higher levels of play, the DPS takes on more and more importance. Good DPS becomes supremely valuable, much more so than tanks and healers. Excellent DPS can carry decent tanks and healers on difficult content, while the reverse cannot happen. In my view, the single greatest difference between Royalty guilds and the rest of us is that their DPS players are significantly better than most of the DPS in lower tier guilds.

I mean, it’s in our culture to reward those that do the most and work the hardest, right?

This line goes to the heart of the issue. Gordon assumes that tanks and healers do the most and work the hardest. But he never actually proves that they do.

In my experience, good DPS works just as hard as tanks and healers do. They theorycraft, get the best gear, and hone their rotations on the target dummies. Kind of honestly, the DPS in my guild do more work than I do.

I think a lot of the problem here is that Gordon is conflating "scarcity" with "moral value". Specifically, it is undeniable that tanks and healers are less popular roles than DPS. But that does not mean that DPS players players choose DPS because they are lazy. Or that tanks choose tanking because they are noble souls devoted to the betterment of humanity.

There are many other reasons. DPS is more active. You are actively killing the enemy, not just holding the line the way the tanks and healers do. The DPS archetypes are often more popular and may resonate in the imagination to a greater degree. Hunters, mages, and rogues in particular are very iconic archetypes. Retribution is much closer to the archetypal paladin image than Holy is.

So I don't think that tanks and healers "deserve" the biggest rewards. "Deserve" implies connotations about moral value that I do not agree with, especially given how important superb DPS is in the harder levels of the game.

However, it might still be a good idea to give tanks and healers higher rewards. A higher reward might nudge more people into trying tanking or healing. It's like the new rewards for Oculus. If you complete Oculus, you don't "deserve" better rewards. It simply isn't that hard, especially after it was nerfed. But the rewards do encourage people to stick with Oculus, leading to a better game experience.

Similarly, a higher reward might convince some DPS to switch to tanking or healing. More tanks and healers mean faster dungeon queues for everyone, making everyone a winner. Extra badges would be a bad idea, because that would gear tanks and healers up faster, encouraging them to stop earlier. However, extra gold might be an interesting incentive.

But to reiterate, extra incentives to play a certain role does not mean that role is morally superior to the others.

Resource Theory

There are a few main types of resources that drive class abilities in most MMOs. This is a categorization of the ones I've seen.

1. Net-Loss Resource

This is a resource which, at the end of the encounter, is lower than it starts. The classic example of this is mana. Classes with mana start at full, and spend it as the fight progresses.

One of the advantages and disadvantages of mana is that all abilities are available right at the start. As well, there is no innate restriction to using any sequence of abilities, until the entire resource is exhausted. This can cause burst damage in PvP, but it does grant the character maximum flexibility to deal with whatever situation may arise.

The major problem with net-loss resources is that they are very dependent on encounter length. If the encounter is longer than the resource can sustain, the character cannot do anything. If the encounter is shorter, the resource does not constrain the character in any significant way.

Net-Loss resources work best when their rate of consumption depends on something in addition to time.

In my view, Net-Loss is the best resource type for healing, because healing depends on damage done. Additionally, having the most flexibility to deal with unusual situations is very valuable when healing.

2. Cyclical Resource

Cyclical resource are used up and renewed multiple times in an encounter. The cycle length is much smaller than encounter length.

The main advantage here is that total time does not really constrain the class. The class is constrained by ability costs and the rate at which the resource regenerates.

There are two main subtypes here: resources which start at full, and resources which start at empty. There are also systems which use a resource that starts somewhere in between, but those system tend to act like whichever extreme is closer.

Full-phase resources (such as Rogue Energy in WoW) allow characters to take immediate actions when an encounter starts. This gives the player something to do as the fight starts, but offers the possibility of burst damage in PvP.

Zero-phase resources (such as Warrior Rage in WoW) require characters to wait before they can take actions. This usually guarantees that the other side has a chance to do something, but is often not as much fun as taking actions right off the bat.

In my view, zero-phase has the potential to be more strategic, but it depends on how fast the resource is acquired, and how important the trade-off between building or expending the resource is. One example of a strategic zero-phase resource is power points in Wizard 101.

One interesting pattern often used is Two Linked Opposite-Phase Cyclical Resources. One resource starts at full, and as it is used, it generates the other resource which powers different actions. Examples of this in WoW are Rogues, where Energy generates Combo Points, and Death Knights, where Runes generate Runic Power. This patter is used because it is relatively simple, but deep enough to be interesting, and provides gameplay where several abilities are used at different times.

I think that cyclical resources are the best for both tanks and DPS characters. Generally, threat and damage depend more on time than anything else, and the other resource systems tend to be too good, or not good enough, depending on encounter length.

3. Net-Gain Resource

This, I suppose, is more a theoretical resource than anything. I'm including it mostly for completeness purposes. This is a resource which increases over time.

The only resource I can think of that does this is Land (potential mana available for that turn) in Magic: the Gathering. On turn 1, you have access to 1 mana. On turn 2, you have access to 2 mana, and so on.

This resource depends heavily on encounter length. If the encounter is long, the resource ceases to constrain the player at all.

This might actually be an interesting resource type for a PvP game. It would make the early stages of the game very strategic, while the final stages would end in a flurry, ensuring the game does not drag out.

Pally DPS Song

Courtesy of TheGreyFoo, this one is for all the old-school Classic paladins.



His Spacebar Clown is also very good.

Actions and Consequences

In a comment to the previous post, Kring asks:

If the game is designed to have non-revertible changes, isn't it kind of cheating if you return to an old save game to change a non-revertible event?

Isn't it a failed design if you revert to cheating because the game isn't fun if played in the way it was designed to be played?

Well, I don't really know. On the one hand, if you only ever follow one decision path, you'll miss a lot of content. There's a lot of dialog options which you might want to choose just to see what happens. Generally, the snarky options are great examples here. I might want to lip off to the king just to see what the writers did, but I don't want it to be permanent. The thing about non-reversible changes is that they often make you play very conservatively, instead of taking chances.

The freedom to go back and revisit old decisions is also the freedom to see all of the game's content. Depending on how "wide" the game's decision tree is, if you never revisit decisions, you may only see a small fraction of the total content. And that seems like a waste of the creator's hard work.

On the other hand, consequences don't really mean anything if you can wipe them out easily. And then you get into the question of is it worth getting a consequence if you don't like the actions you took to get there. If you feel the actions you took were right and just, should you not then accept the consequences of those actions?

Sometimes though, it's hard to tell what the consequence of your action will be. This is especially true in games, where the information given to you can be limited. There's an example of in Dragon Age in the Dwarven section. You're supposed to pick between two potential leaders. The problem is that you really can't tell what the significant difference between the leaders is. I started helping one leader, then accidentally did something for the other leader that got me stuck with him. And quite frankly, they were both pretty much the same, so I didn't really care and just went with it.

If a game makes some consequences seem arbitrary, shouldn't the player have the freedom to revisit those actions?

So I'm not really sure which way it goes. Personally, I think you should give extensive saves, and let the player decide for themselves. If someone wants to keep to the narrow path, they can easily do so themselves.

Finally, I'll conclude with a quote I've always liked from Lois McMaster Bujold from one of her Vorkosigan books:

His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
- Lois McMaster Bujold, "Memory", 1996

Archival Saves

I have to confess that I haven't actually beaten Dragon Age yet. I am really close to the ending. However, I made a choice much earlier that will mean I will not get the ending I want. In addition, I have a problem in that I did some quest that required me to turn in 20 health potions, and now I don't have enough potions remaining to beat the fight currently blocking me.

My first thought was to go back to an earlier saved game, but I realized that I hadn't made a backup save in the timeframe I wanted. I'd have to redo a large section of the game.

It occurred to me that Saved Game systems are rather primitive. Most games have a couple of autosaves, a quicksave, and some manual saves. I think saving progress could be done much better.

For example, you could take a cue from various archival schemes. Consider a scheme where you saved the last 5 quicksaves, then retained every fifth quicksave after that. That would give you a solid history of saved games, while not wasting that much space.

Or since the "important events" tend to be known in a game, you could make a save after each section of the game is completed. This would make it much easier to go back to an earlier point and continue on.

I think saving games could be more automated. Relying on the player to keep correct saves is brittle. A game developer should look at saves more like the creation of a history of that playthrough. Of course, the difficulty part would be accounting for forks in that history.

Perhaps representing the saved game timeline as a tree would be interesting. A player could move through the tree to pick the point she wants to start a new branch. Older, or stubby, branches which did not go anywhere could be pruned away to save space.

Or perhaps just use a linear time model, with dense amount of saves closer to the present, and a sparser amount of saves in past. After all, there's only one instance of an individual playthrough running at any one point in time.

Whichever way, I think save game schemes could be better than the current standards.

How To Do Top DPS Video

Here's a very nice video about how to improve DPS after you have the basics (gear, gemming, rotation) down. It's by a hunter, Kripparrian, from the guild Exodus:



Direct Link

I think the best point is to think 2 or 3 abilities ahead. So you aren't reacting, but executing a plan.

Lowbie Tank Tales: Floating Rage, Hand of Reckoning

Floating Rage

Thanks to the people who suggested floating Rage from encounter to encounter. That makes a huge difference. At these levels, a Sunder and Revenge are enough to hold a mob until it dies, leaving lots of Rage for the next encounter. I only needed to use Bloodrage when the healer needed to drink.

The Best Laid Plans of Blizzard Designers...

I was in this one Wailing Caverns run with a 18 Ret Paladin, who seemed to be a newish player, or at least new to paladins. He was a pretty good guy, but he seemed to be putting out a ton of threat. I'd Sunder and Revenge, and then move on the next mob. But then I'd notice that the mob was attacking the paladin. I checked for Righteous Fury, but he didn't have it on.

This kept happening until I had a suspicion and checked Recount. The paladin was using Hand of Reckoning as part of his DPS rotation!

When I asked him about it, he responded that it did damage to the mobs, which I couldn't refute.

In a way, I can't really blame him for that (at least, not that much). All the poor guy has for DPS abilities is Judgement every 8s. When he got HoR at level 16, he must have been excited that he got another button to press. And HoR does pretty good damage for Ret and Prot specs.

I couldn't really get him to stop doing that, so I just let him take some hits, and Sundered to grab the mob back. Still, it is an amusing side-effect of having a damaging Taunt.

Low Level Warrior Tanking

With the new Dungeon Finder, I've found that I really enjoy running the old, low-level instances. There's something pure about a group of lowbie characters facing old-school challenges like Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep in greens and blues. Before talents really make a major difference, where people use the old meat-and-potatoes abilities instead of the fancy-shmancy expansion abilities. Where drops are actual upgrades instead of pure disenchant fodder. Where you enter Wailing Caverns, get lost, and finally finish several hours later, defending a tauren healing a night elf from a giant murloc.

After a couple of runs with dual-wielding or two-handed tanks, I decided to make a warrior and level and gear strictly through the Dungeon Finder. A warrior that, further more, would tank properly with: 1) a shield; and 2) Defensive Stance. The DPS warrior tanks did a lot of damage and didn't really die, but they couldn't hold aggro at all. My rogue kept pulling off them and she doesn't even have any heirloom gear.

So far, my warrior has made it level 19, and I've tanked Ragefire Chasm, Wailing Caverns, and Deadmines.

The thing I've found with low level warrior tanks is that they are really dependent on getting hit once at the start of the fight. Once I get enough Rage to Sunder or Revenge even just one time, the mob is stuck to me, and no one can touch me in threat for the rest of the fight.

However, many DPS like to hit the mob before it hits the tank. That makes it much harder for the warrior to recover and you have to start burning taunts. So far, the main culprits have been paladins. I think it's because Judgement has a slight range on it, and because they have mail armor so they're not scared of the mobs. It's terribly enraging to see a mob running towards me, my finger hovering over the Sunder button, and then see a golden hammer hit the mob's head and "Changed Target" flash on my screen right before the mob reaches me.

Now I truly understand the fuss warriors made over Rage and priest shields. It must have been extremely annoying to them to be shielded right before the start of the fight and not be able to get any Rage at all.

I wonder if the warrior experience would have been slightly better if the "rest level" of Rage had been twenty instead of zero. (It seems appropriate that Warriors get to be slightly angry all the time.) If out of combat, Rage rose or fell to 20 rage. This would give warriors enough rage to use one or two moves at the very start of combat and make them not so dependent on getting hit right off the bat.

That's one of the advantages of Paladins and Death Knights when tanking. Their resource starts at full, so they aren't dependent on getting that initial hit.

Elegant Design: Glyph of Life Tap (WoW)

Since a lot of the time I focus on things that I dislike in games, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some small elements that I consider examples of elegant design.

First up, [Glyph of Life Tap].

In the beginning, there was Life Tap. And the warlocks looked at it and saw that it was good.

So the following scenario unfolded in dungeon after dungeon:

1. Warlock pew-pews until she runs dry.
2. Warlock Life Taps all the way back to full mana.
3. Healer has a heart attack when they see that someone just dropped to 10% health unexpectedly.

Efforts to get the warlocks to Life Tap more often met with failure. It's not that they meant to make life excessively exciting for the healers, it's just that you don't really think about mana until you run low.

But Glyph of Life Tap changes that. It encourages the warlock to Tap every 30 to 40s, keeping their damage buff up (which is what the warlock really cares about) while simultaneously keeping the warlock's mana levels up and keeping the health hit manageable for the healer.

I like Glyph of Life Tap because it nudges the warlock to play in a group-friendly manner, while still preserving the full use of Life Tap. A more heavy-handed solution might have been to impose a 20 second cooldown on Life Tap. But this would make Life Tap more rigid and less versatile. Because Life Tap affects your health, there are many situations where you need to postpone using Life Tap--or use it early--and make up for it later by Tapping multiple times.

Disenchanting Option

The new disenchanting option in the default loot systems is interesting. Coriel is an enchanter, so it's always available whenever I do a random heroic.

In general, I like the option when doing random heroics. It's very convenient, and it saves me the trouble of handing out shards at the end. I'm somewhat sympathetic to those enchanters who feel it has taken away the profitability of enchanting, as they're probably correct. But I don't really look at professions as a means to make money, so more convenience for me is more important.

It's an interesting change, as it was a game system change that was driven by a social behavior. Enchanters were gathering unwanted items and handing out shards at the end of runs. Blizzard didn't really make this change for gameplay reasons, but to preserve a emergent social behavior that the playerbase had agreed to. This seems like a rare move for them, and I wonder if there are any other examples of social behavior that was later codified into game law.

However, I don't think the DE option is perfect. In fact, I think that the Disenchant Option should be disabled in the Group Loot system.

The DE Option is perfect for random heroics because of the forced loot system and transitory nature of the groups. You can't really trust the enchanter to stick around and hand out shards. As well, since you can't trade permanent items cross-server, the downside to accidentally DE'ing an item is low. After all, you can just run more heroics.

However, in other situations, I think the chance of making an irreversible mistake with the DE button is too high. Let's say you're in a raid that wants to use Group Loot with a "Need for main-spec, Greed for Off-spec, pass otherwise" rule. Right away you can see that someone accidentally hitting DE is going to cause problems.

It's especially annoying because Blizzard allowed Bind-on-Pickup items to be temporarily trade-able to other people in the raid. That made loot distribution a lot easier, because you could recover from mistakes. Did Deborah the Death Knight accidentally roll need on a caster staff? No problem, just trade it to the right person.

But the DE button cuts against that. It allows people to make unrecoverable mistakes with loot, which leads to drama and GM tickets. Simply disabling the DE button in Group Loot would eliminate all those problems. After all, you can still disenchant items manually if necessary.

To sum up, the Disenchanting Option is a good fit for the Need Before Greed system used in Random Dungeons, but it is not a good fit for the Group Loot system used elsewhere in the game.

PuG Tales

Actually, I don't really have a whole lot to say about grouping through the Dungeon Finder. It's pretty much been, in the words of Scott Jennings, "Bam! Loot! Dog!"


In any case, I'm sort of surprised at seeing some of the negative stories about Dungeon Finder groups going around. Pretty much all of mine--knock on wood--have been successful. No comments about low DPS, no snarkiness or elitism, just clean and competent groups.

This includes heroics run on Coriel and Valarin, as well as low level dungeons run on a couple alts. Maybe they've been somewhat quiet, but everyone says "Hi" at the start and "Thank you" at the end, and really, what more can you ask for?

There have really only been two negative happenings. In one Culling of Stratholme, two DPS ran ahead and died, so the tank ditched us in the middle of the waves. I ressed them, the DK switched to tanking gear, and we carried on until we got a new tank from the Dungeon Finder. We even made the Drake Timer (albeit just barely, with literally seconds to spare).

The only other place that regularly has problems is Gnomeregan. And that's mostly because it's Gnomeregan. Low-level, long, a confusing layout, with somewhat rapid respawns: it's a recipe for unsuccessful runs.

Even Oculus isn't that bad. Speaking of Oculus, I've never found it difficult, but I do find it a bit annoying. It's very start-and-stop. You get on drake, fly a few feet, and get off the drake. Rinse and repeat again and again. I wonder if it would have been a better instance if it had been more like Malygos. If you spent the first half running around, and then the last half entirely on dragonback, rather than switching all the time.

Still though, the Dungeon Finder has been very successful and a lot of fun for me so far.

Icecrown Citadel: Lower Spire

I got drafted into a 10-man, so I got a chance to see what all the new bosses are like.

Lord Marrowgar

Lord Marrowgar seems...off to me, somehow. The coldfire and bone spikes are fine, but I just don't like the whirlwind phase. Which is kind of odd, because I really liked Leotheras, which featured the same switching between whirlwind and normal.

Perhaps it's because Marrowgar is so large. Leotheras was much smaller, so when he whirlwinded, it felt like you could avoid him if you were clever. For Marrowgar, I just head for the hills. As well, because of his size, everyone goes out of range for healing.

That's actually one of my pet peeves about certain raid fights. I dislike fights where people go in and out of range seemingly at random.

Lady Deathwhisper

Lady Deathwhisper is an okay fight, but nothing really special, at least on 10-man. I think this will be more interesting in 25-mans, as the extra mobs will add more complexity to the fight. Actually, looking at WoWWiki, Mind Control alone will make life interesting.

Icecrown Gunship Battle

The Gunship Battle is simply awesome! Airships, cannons, repelling boarding parties, boarding the opposing ship in turn, jet packs, Muradin Bronzebeard, High Overlord Saurfang! This fight has so many different elements, and yet they all combine beautifully to form an insanely fun fight.

I particularly like the way Saurfang is used as a phase-enrage timer, with his self-stacking buff. It gives the players a chance to engage him in combat, makes it imperative to board the enemy ship, kill the targets, and get out quickly, but also retains Saurfang's essential badass-ness.

Simply a great, great fight.

Deathbringer

(Not sure if Deathbringer's identity is considered a spoiler, but I will err on the side of caution. Note that the link to fight reveals his identity.)

Deathbringer is an interesting fight. It's a good fight, with interesting and challenging mechanics.

However, I wonder if Deathbringer will be disproportionately harder for Gentry guilds than it will be for Aristocracy and Royalty guilds.

Basically, Deathbringer stacks Blood Points whenever he deals damage. When he reaches 100 Blood Points, he puts Mark of the Champion on a random raid member, and they take damage whenever Deathbringer deals damage. So the Marks act as a soft enrage for the fight.

The thing is that some of the abilities which grant Deathbringer Blood Points are avoidable. So Gentry guilds will be hit with a double penalty. First, Gentry DPS is lower than Royalty/Aristocracy DPS, so more Marks will be handed out. Second, Gentry are more likely to make small mistakes when it comes to the avoidable Blood Points. People won't be far enough apart for Blood Boil, or they'll get hit by Blood Beasts. So not only will the Gentry get more Marks because their fight will be longer, they will accumulate those Marks at a faster rate.

I think that combination, that double penalty, might make the fight harder than expected for lower level guilds. If any of the available fights gets nerfed in Icecrown, I expect this one to be the first. And the vast majority of Aristocracy and Royalty guilds won't understand why.

Conclusions

So far, the first few bosses are pretty good. I loved Gunship Battle and Deathbringer, and enjoyed Lady Deathwhisper. Only Marrowgar didn't seem that fun to me.

Patch 3.3 First Impressions

Dungeon Finder

Awesome! Fast, reasonably balanced groups. A good variety of instances. I've even used it for low-level groups with alts (did Shadowfang Keep, Blackfathom Depths, Scarlet Monastery Graveyard, and Regular Old Kingdom) and everything worked pretty well.

Regular heroics are nice, but the low level dungeons are what interest me the most. I've always liked doing those dungeons with a level appropriate group, but it used to be so hard to form a group. Now hopefully, it will be much easier.

You know, in a few months there are going to be some sick skilled tanks available. Imagine levelling to max purely by running dungeons with PuGs. Those tanks who come out of that are going to be really good.

Finally, it's an interesting observation how much more fun you can make the game by taking control away from the players. There's no formal Gearscore, no Achievement-linking, no looking for a specific class, no choosing the instance ahead of time. You just get told, "Here's your instance, and here's your group. Go to it." And everything works out nicely.

A lot of times I think we make things more difficult for ourselves than they need to be.

New 5-mans

Forge of Souls is okay. Personally, I think it may have been a little extreme to take the James "Godfather of Soul" Brown homage to that level. But it's still an decent instance, if somewhat short. I'm not really sure what was happening on that last boss.

I adore Pit of Saron. I like the layout, the fact that it's not on rails like so many other instances. Ick and Krick are great, as is that giant boss. The ice tunnel is superb fun, and is possibly the best reuse of a raid mechanic ever. The final boss is pretty good too.

Actually, the ice tunnel deserves more discussion. It's the perfect combination of challenge and set-piece in a long while. The mechanics are relatively simple, but they really drive home exactly what Blizzard wants you to feel. They could have made the rockfall just do random damage, but avoiding the ice circles keeps you constantly moving, making the entire experience feel more urgent.

Halls of Reflection is pretty good. I suspect my feelings on HoR are colored by the fact that it bugged out on me the first three times I attempted it. But I finally completed it in the end. It is fairly hard for a heroic, especially the first fight. Lots of lore fun in the instance as well. The final fight has the greatest enrage timer in the history of WoW.

Other Impressions

The new map and quest guide are pretty slick.

I like the tag on gear that tells you what equipment set an item is in.

Some of the new interface options are interesting. However, there seem to be some automatic changes which you may not like. For example, auto-self-cast got turned on.

The new "@" syntax for macros is very nice. You can replace "target=" with "@". It shortens the macro, and makes it more understandable. For example, "target=mouseover" becomes "@mouseover".

I haven't gotten a chance to see the new raid instances yet. Hopefully I'll get a peek on the weekend.

Paladins and Patch 3.3

Patch 3.3 is almost upon us. Here's a look at the changes for paladins.

Divine Intervention

Divine Intervention: This ability now also removes Exhaustion or Sated from a target if the recipient is out of combat when the effect ends. In addition, the cooldown on this ability has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

With the decreased cooldown and removal of Exhaustion, this ability can now be used without fear. Good for wipe recovery and reducing repair bills.

Flash of Light

Flash of Light: This spell no longer causes a heal-over-time effect unless the player has the Infusion of Light talent.
Infusion of Light: This talent now causes the paladin's Flash of Light spells to heal the target for 50/100% of the Flash of Light healing amount over 12 seconds [if Sacred Shield is on the target].

Though the patch notes (so far) haven't explicitly stated it, this refers to the FoL+Sacred Shield HoT. You will still need Sacred Shield to be on the target. Pretty much nothing changes for Holy paladins, but Ret and Prot paladins lose that HoT. A PvP change more than anything.

Lay on Hands

Lay on Hands: This ability will place Forbearance on the paladin if used on his or herself. It will not place Forbearance on others.

A slight nerf to Protection paladins in PvE, and to all paladins in PvP. Blizzard is trying to cut down on the number of "extra lives" a paladin can use in a row.

Aura Mastery

Aura Mastery: This effect of this talent has been reduced in duration to 6 seconds.

A PvP nerf. The main effect this will have in PvE is that it will make timing this ability more unforgiving. Usually you use AM during a boss special attack. 10 seconds did give some margin for error, so you might hit AM a couple of seconds too soon and still cover the duration of the attack.

Repentance

Repentance: This crowd control effect will no longer break early from the damage done by Righteous Vengeance.

Small boost to make Repentance more usable on a target you've already attacked.

Divine Sacrifice

Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.
Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin's health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases. Finally, damage which reduces the paladin's health below 20% now cancels the effect early.

Okay, DS is now party-only, so it becomes much less valuable than it used to be. However, hopefully the new design allows the paladin to survive using DS without the bubble. If that is so, you get to use DS much more frequently.

The raid damage reduction gets moved to the next tier and cut in half to -20% for 6 seconds. As with Aura Mastery, the timing becomes less forgiving. However, you will get to use it without the bubble (hopefully). A less powerful effect usable more often.

I suspect that most Holy paladins will still take DS+DG, and may even end up using it more. However, I think most Ret paladins will drop the talent, and use the points in Retribution, probably making Vindication standard.

Conclusions

On the whole, not a lot has changed for paladins. Minor nerfs to a couple of situational abilities, but Divine Intervention becomes usable again. Divine Sacrifice becomes weaker, but might be usable more often. It really depends on how likely a paladin using Divine Sacrifice is to gib herself. Personally, I hope that DS and the bubble become fully de-linked. The bubble can go back to being an individual emergency defense, rather than being saved for Divine Sacrifice all the time.

Going in Blind

Last week, my guild did something that we very rarely do: we went into a fight blind, without knowing the strategy ahead of time.

It wasn't really a major fight, or a planned event. We were going through Ulduar, and we got to Auriaya, someone suggested that we do the Achievement [Crazy Cat Lady]. We shrugged and went to try it, not expecting that it would be very hard.

We started with 2 tanks, each tanking 2 adds. And then we started wiping. After a few wipes, we realized that our add tanks were constantly dying at around the same time. Looking up the death meter on Recount showed that they died from a Bleed debuff that was ticking for 20k. At this point, we realized that the Bleed was a stacking debuff. So we tried using 4 tanks, each having one add. This worked a little better, but the tanks still died to the bleed, just a little later in the fight.

So we switched to tank swapping. Two tanks took 2 adds each. At 7 stacks, a clean tank taunted the adds. This strategy seemed more successful, and on the next try the tanks opted to see if they could survive up to 10 stacks, to minimize swaps. However, this made it harder to heal, as both old and new tanks were taking heavy damage. We went down to 4 stacks, and swapped as often as possible. That attempt was very clean and led to a nice kill.

I had a lot of fun that fight. I greatly enjoy working on strats and tweaking them until you get something right. This is the one aspect of Royalty guilds that I really envy. They get to go in blind and form their own strategies for most content.

The immediate question is why not seek out a guild that tries to play blind? My guild explicitly looks up strategies and videos before the raid. This seems opposite to what I like.

The trade-off though is time. If we went in blind, we'd probably be a lot further back than we are now, progression-wise. That [Crazy Cat Lady] attempt was a great deal of fun, but we spent over two hours on that fight. If we had looked it up ahead of time, we would have one- or two-shot it.

Second, you can't guarantee that no one will "cheat". If you have a raid group of 25 people--especially people who are enthusiastic about WoW--odds are someone will follow discussions about bosses. They'll surf forums, or read EJ, or watch videos. Then what do you if the "cheater" contributes to the strategy discussion? Ignoring what she says, just because of the source, seems counter-productive.

Third, it's already hard enough to find a decent Aristocracy-level guild that matches my schedule and general inclinations. Adding the "doesn't look up strategies" requirement might eliminate all possible guilds. Especially as such a guild is likely to lose better players to further advanced guilds. Very few people are willing to deliberately wipe when they could avoid failure by looking up the answers online.

Finally, we still haven't beaten all the content, even knowing the strategies ahead of time. Formulating our own strategy from scratch seems like a luxury when we still need to work on our execution.

Still, fights like this [Crazy Cat Lady] and Al'ar back in TBC, where I got to strategize rather than just follow a recipe, remain treasured moments.

Dragon Age: First Impressions

In the end Rocket XL did send me a copy of Dragon Age: Origins, which I received last Thursday. I've played a little bit, but I haven't got very far, so this is more first impressions than an overall review. For reference, the farthest I've gotten is just past Lothering, before the main game opens up.

Origin Stories

I've done the City Elf , Mage, and Human Noble origin stories so far. The Mage and City Elf stories were really good. The Human Noble story was decent, but extremely predictable.

World Building

I love the world Bioware has created. They've done an outstanding job.

I love the way elven and human societies interact. It is superb. Mad props to the Bioware writer who coined the word "Alienage" to describe the city quarter where the elves live. Melding the word "alien" with the connotations of "orphanage" was a stroke of brilliance. It sums up the entire relationship in a single word.

I really like the Chantry, the prophet Andraste and the Chant of Light. It is an extremely well done medieval religion, and really adds an extra dimension to the game. There is a scene in Lothering where the Reverend Mother gives you a blessing that was just beautiful.

The relationship between the Templars, the Magi, the Tranquil and the Fade is also extremely interesting. It is to Bioware's credit that they avoided the whole "church persecuting mages" storyline. The idea that the Templars are both protectors and jailors of the mages is elegant.

Plot

I'm not very far in. So far, the plot has been decent but rather predictable. The mage story pulled the same twist twice. I'm not entirely sure if that was deliberate for emphasis or just poor plotting. In the other strands, the bad guys look like bad guys, and so betrayals do not exactly come as surprises.

Of course, this is just the early part of the game. The main plot still has a long way to go.

Graphics

First, I really like the way Dragon Age uses the game engine to render cutscenes. Having the character you made in her current armor be present in the scene makes the game much more immersive.

The graphics in this game are a bit odd. If you play with the over-the-shoulder view, the graphics are superb. On the other hand, if you zoom out to the overhead tactical view, the character graphics are pretty bad. They're blurry and smeared, instead of being crisp.

Part of the reason I'm playing on Easy is so I can stay in the over-the-shoulder view, instead of having to resort to the tactical view.

Blood

The blood spatter was a mistake. It injects a childish note into an otherwise adult game. Luckily you can turn it off.

Gameplay

Gameplay is decent. You can pause and issue orders for your entire party. Or you can set up "Tactics", which are short "Condition:Action" statements that the AI will follow. For example, Alistair is my tank, and I set up a tactic so he drinks a health potion if his health drops below 25%.

I'm playing it on Easy to minimize the amount of fiddling I have to do with my companions in battle. Oddly, my first character (elf rogue) still died a lot. I think I messed up her abilities, and ended up starting a new character (human 2H warrior). I think I underestimated how important Willpower (which controls your available stamina) is important to a melee character.

Mechanics-wise, it's a standard mana resource game. You have mana (mages) or stamina (warriors/rogues) which starts at full, and is used up as you use abilities.

The only interesting note is the fact that continuing effects have "upkeeps" which reduce the max mana/stamina you have available. For example, if I have 100 stamina, and activate a Brutal Strikes mode with an upkeep of 40 stamina, my max stamina effectively drops to 60, and won't regen higher. It's an intriguing method of keeping long-term buffs in check.

Conclusions

So far, Dragon Age: Origins is a pretty good game in the Bioware/Black Isle tradition. I am looking forward to working my way through it, and will probably end up commenting more on the game later.

Random Comment about Ret Fixes

Courtesy of Icechicken of <Forgotten Crusaders>, Korialstrasz, in a discussion about new change to Deadly poison to stop Rogues from using weapon switching mods:

Ret gets neat fixes all the time, it's just that all those fixes are nerfs so you don't think they are very creative at all.

Made me laugh, in any case.

Really disappointed to see the DI change reverted. Currently, DI is a liability on any serious content, because Bloodlust/Heroism is so important.

Edit: DI changed to "This ability now also removes Exhaustion or Sated from a target if the recipient is out of combat when the effect ends."

That's a good compromise.

Ad Infinitum Recruiting

My guild is recruiting again. We could use a few more good people. We're on the North America Lethon server, which is a medium-sized PvP server.

We raid (25-mans) 3 days a week: Wednesday, Sunday, Monday from 7-11pm Pacific Standard Time.

We have 4/5 Grand Crusader, and 5/9 Ulduar Hard Modes. We use DKP, with regular Auction-style bidding. We're reasonably competent, and expect people come prepared and use food and flasks.

Website: ai-lethon.com

Anyways, this sounds like a guild you'd be interested in, please check out our website. Or feel free to ask questions in comments to this thread.

Micro-Transactions

Blizzard has officially launched a micro-transaction shop for WoW, directly selling non-combat pets for real money. I am rather disappointed in them.

I don't really like micro-transactions. Maybe it's naive, but I prefer to have a very simple relationship with game companies. They make a good game, I give them money for that game, and they use that money to make more good games. They don't try to play tricks, to nickel-and-dime their costumers, to expend effort on "capturing consumer surplus". I'd rather they spend their time and effort on making better games.

I suppose this attitude is somewhat inconsistent with the other forms of quasi-RMT, like pets from the CCG or Collector's Editions. But incentives to purchase another product seem different, and more reasonable, in a way that directly selling the virtual item is not. And the cost for paid services like Server Transfers and Race/Faction/Gender changes always seemed like a means to decrease demand for desired meta-services, rather than acting as a money maker.

In a lot of ways, this feels like the moment where Blizzard "jumps the shark", when they go from being "Blizzard Entertainment" to just another of Activision's studios. For me, the two games of Blizzard that impressed me the most were Starcraft:Ghost and Warcraft Adventures. Two games that were never released; that were canceled because they weren't up to standards. Both those games were quite anticipated, and would have made a ton of money, probably far more than this microtransaction shop will bring in. Canceling them was a bold move, showing a willingness to prize long-term quality over short-term profit.

With this microtransaction store, Blizzard is making the opposite choice: choosing small profits over making a better game. They're still a good studio, and I don't doubt that Cataclysm, Starcraft 2, and Diablo 3 will be decent games. But I think Blizzard has lost something which made it special, and has been brought down to being "just another game company."

Dragon Age Review

This isn't actually a review of Dragon Age. But I do have a decent Google ranking, so it would amuse me if this ranked high up in the search results.

On Sep 21, I received the following email:

I’m working alongside Electronic Arts on the release of Dragon Age: Origins across multiple platforms, including Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, and PC. We thought you might be interested in receiving game related assets and a review copy.
...
It would be great if you could share your initial impressions of the game with your readers prior to the release date on 11/3. If you’d be interested in receiving a review copy, please send over your address and console preference.

On Nov 2, I received:

Also - I should hear back from EA later this week about whether I'm able to secure a review copy for your site. I'll keep you posted.

It looks like EA hired a firm called Rocket XL to do some publicity work for Dragon Age. This firm decided to approach a bunch of gaming bloggers and promise them review copies of the game, hoping to get some extra publicity via "new media" or whatever.

As you can see, it looks like they were unable to follow through on their promise. I wonder if they had any review copies to give out, or if they figured that by the time the game came out they would have gotten a bunch of free publicity without ever needing to actually send copies to people.

Poor form, Rocket XL. And bad judgement on your part, EA/Bioware.

And I guess a lesson for me as well. Never trust anything from PR people until they actually pony up.

Edit: For the record, I did end up receiving a copy of the game on Nov 12.

Thoughts on Avoidance

The big news in the tanking community is that Blizzard is re-introducing Sunwell Radiance for Patch 3.3. Chill of the Throne will reduce Dodge by 20% everywhere in Icecrown Citadel. I thought I'd take this opportunity to put down a few general thoughts on Avoidance.

In my view, when Avoidance hits 50%+, healing gets weird. Basically, the next attack is more likely to miss than actually connect. So it becomes very hard to predict how damage will be dealt, which is the essence of good healing. You start healing very generally, aiming at the worst case scenarios. The tank's actual health doesn't really matter anymore.

And for harder content, the damage per hit is very high to actually threaten the tank. So you end up with the scenario where the next attack is probably going to miss, but if it does hit, it will do over 50% of the tank's health.

Healing is much more fun when tank Avoidance is much lower. When you can accurately predict the pattern of damage and adjust your healing to match.

But tanks in WoW have very high Avoidance rates. That 50% magic number, where an attack connecting flips from being likely to being unlikely, occurred in Naxxramas. The very first tier of raid content.

In my opinion, WoW would benefit from a much more radical solution: don't put Avoidance on gear. Tanks would have their base 10-15% avoidance, plus another 10% or so from talents. That would give a tank-specced character about 25% avoidance, which is a pretty good number. Attacks would be likely to connect, but a miss streak here and there makes things interesting.

However, tanks would need more stats dedicated to them. They would only have Stamina, Expertise, and DPS stats. Perhaps something like bonus healing done to them, or a resilience variant, or bonus threat. I'm sure there are many possibilities.

But Avoidance has to be reigned in, and I think the optimal Avoidance value for fun gameplay is about 25%, which--after base and talents--doesn't leave any room for avoidance on gear.

Edit: Honor's Code goes hardcore and proposes eliminating tank gear altogether!

Valithria Dreamwalker

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Icecrown Citadel.

Blizzard did PTR testing for Valithria Dreamwalker today. It looks like a hilariously awesome fight. Here is MMO-Champion's post discussing her.

Valithria is a friendly green dragon captured by the Scourge. She starts at 50% and must be healed to 100%. Meanwhile, waves of Scourge are attacking, and must be held off by the rest of the raid.

This sounds like quite an interesting fight, and I am greatly looking forward to it.

It will be interesting to see what classes evolve to be the chosen healers for it. The easy assumption is to say Paladins, but there is a Druid build which can pump out more single-target HPS (single-target only, Beacon doesn't work with Valithria). Even Priests and Shamans can do large amounts of single-target HPS if they put their minds to it.

Torchlight Review

Torchlight is Diablo. With a dog.

Now, Diablo was a great game, so there's nothing wrong with that. And the dog is pretty crazy. He can carry loot back to town and sell it for you, making him more useful than 99% of all videogame AI henchmen.

I'm not really sure what else to say. Torchlight is fun and polished, with nice cartoon-ish graphics. There are three classes, and each class has three trees, allowing each class to be played in a different manner. For example, the Inquisitor can be ranged weapons, assassin-style melee, or traps. The trees aren't formal trees, as you don't have to put points in lower tiers to get higher talents. You just need to be the correct level and you can cherry-pick talents as you wish.

There are some nice updates, like a stash you can share between characters. Recovering from death is interesting, as you can either: pay xp/fame and respawn at point of death; pay 10% of your gold and respawn at the start of the level; or pay nothing and respawn back in town. Finally, there's a second track other than experience. Defeating named enemies earns you Fame. As your Fame level rises you get additional talent points. That is a nice addition.

Also note that Torchlight is single-player only, no multiplayer.

But it's pretty much Diablo with some tweaks. If you liked Diablo, you'll like Torchlight. If you didn't like Diablo, you probably won't like Torchlight.

Sacred Shield Nerf

The latest patch notes have the following:

- Sacred Shield: The damage absorption effect from this ability now triggers only once every 30 seconds.
- Infusion of Light: This talent now also reduces the cooldown on the effect of Sacred Shield by 12/24 seconds.

This is Blizzard saying that Sacred Shield really should have been a deep Holy talent, not something available to all paladins. However, they probably don't want to mess with the structure of the trees when Cataclysm is going to change them anyways. So the change effectively makes Sacred Shield a Holy-only spell.

I think the real, underlying strain on paladin design is Touched By the Light and Sheath of Light. I confess that I really liked these talents, as they were an attempt to retain some of the fluid hybrid nature of the original paladin.

But perhaps that goal just isn't worth the problems it causes. If Touched by the Light and Sheath of Light did not exist, maybe paladin design would be stronger. Prot and Holy would still have access to heals and Sacred Shield, but they would be much weaker, only using the base values for those spells. Blizzard wouldn't have to be doing these shenanigans to keep these hybrid specs in check.

If those two talents were gone, AP and SP coefficients would also be de-linked, and could be tweaked independently of each other, so Holy could be strengthened or weakened independently. Of course, it's too much to do now for 3.3 as you'd have to tweak almost all AP coefficients.

Perhaps the best way to retain "hybridity" for paladins would be to be specific, rather than general. For example, supposed Art of War gave you an instant Holy Light instead of Flash of Light. Sounds overpowered, but without Sheath of Light a Ret paladin would have zero spellpower, so that HL would only hit for the base heal.

This way the hybrid nature can be carefully controlled, and specific instances can be changed. A general solution only seems to result in general nerfs.