Remembering Divine Intervention

I rather miss Divine Intervention.

For those who don't know, Divine Intervention was a spell that killed the casting paladin, but removed another player from combat and encased him in a unbreakable bubble for up to three minutes. It was generally used to save someone when wiping, or possibly to grief the tank.

Divine Intervention definitely was a clunky spell, mechanics-wise, but I always felt that it spoke to the heart of the paladin class. The paladin sacrificing herself to save a comrade.

I had the thought that--if it was still in the game--Divine Intervention would actually work really nicely with Mass Resurrection. Wipe is called, you DI anyone else still alive, and they Mass Res the raid.

Transmogrification and Cosmetic Gear

Well, it looks like I'm the only one, but I don't think cosmetic gear is a good idea.

I talked a bit about this in 2007. Your character model is on screen for 99% of the time. It's the one constant in your WoW experience. I think the game is better served by having that model gradually change over time. I wore T4, and then upgraded to T5, then so forth.

As seasons change, your character changes in a natural fashion. You look forward to new sets, commiserate with others when sets are weird (honestly, pally T3 and T5?), rejoice with them when they are good. Your character changes as you do things, and your gear reflects your accomplishments.


Gear is tied to a time period, and gear from that time period evokes memories of that time.

Cosmetic gear throws away all that. You find some set of gear that you think looks "cool", and you wear that. Or more accurately, all the teenagers will find the gear that looks the sluttiest and wear that. Yay for raiding with people wearing [Black Mageweave Leggings].

I guarantee that the vast majority of paladins will be wearing T2 Judgement from now until the end of time. Judgement is awesome, I have collected 7/8 T2 and an Ashkandi recently. I consider that to be the high water mark of paladin fashion, and wear it in town on occasion. But its time has come and gone. New tier sets will just not be as exciting as before when everyone wears the best of the old ones.

There are issues with gear art at the moment. There are too many recolors, diminishing the uniqueness of the art. Tier art is reused for off-spec pieces, so everyone looks the same, instead of having Tier sets being instantly recognizable.

But I think those issues could have been solved without cosmetic gear. I think cosmetic gear will prove to be a mistake in the long run. We play these games for a long time, and fashion needs to cycle, to refresh itself with new ideas. Allowing time to stand still, to grow stagnant and ossify, will only hurt WoW.

Tank Changes

Ghostcrawler has written a post on upcoming tank changes in WoW. The changes can basically be broken down into two items:

1. Tank threat is being significantly boosted, to the point where tanks can maintain threat leads with minimum effort. This is coming in a hotfix soon.


2. The tanking classes will have some of their survivability changed from passive to active. Basically, moving towards the Death Knight model where the tank uses Death Strikes at appropriate times to stay alive. This will be implemented with the 4.3 patch.

In the past, tanks have had responsibility for both threat and survival. And yet, survival has always been the most important. I don't think that--in the history of the game--there has ever been a time where tanks sacrificed survival for more threat.¹

So this change is basically Blizzard throwing in the towel after 5 years and saying, "Well, you tanks don't care about Threat at all, so we're going to stop trying to force you to care." Instead, tanks will have to take a more active role in their survival. They will still gear and optimize for survival. But if, for example, Shield Slam has to hit the enemy to boost your armor, then stats like Hit and Expertise become survival stats instead of threat stats, and will be valued higher as a result.

Additionally, this will make it easier for under-geared tanks to group with geared DPS, which should help out Dungeon Finder groups a little.

The truth is that tanks never really had to care about threat, save at the edges of progression content. If a DPS pulls threat, most people consider it the fault of the DPS player. This change is merely reflecting that reality.

1. Possibly Horde-side Vaelastraz back in Vanilla, as the Horde didn't have Blessing of Salvation then. But I don't know for sure. I do know that Horde tanks were pretty sick threat machines compared to Alliance tanks in my experiences back then.

Creator-centric Games

There's been a fair amount of chatter recently about Namaste's upcoming game/system, Storybricks. The tech they are talking about looks very cool.

But here's the problem I have with these types of games:

Where is the audience?

Creators need an audience for their work. A writer needs readers. A director needs movie-goers. A machinima maker needs YouTube viewers. And a game designer needs players.

So what is the hook that will get people that will play the stories that others make with Storybricks?

When I think of the most robust add-on/amateur communities, they tend to be for games which stand on their own, which throw in mod-tools as more of an extra than anything else. Quake, Civ mods, the WoW mod community.

And I don't think this is coincidence. I think that the audience, that group of non-creators, is essential to the growth of a creator community. It provides the feedback loop and the sense that people are using your creation because it is useful or provides enjoyment.

This is the part where the creator-centric or building games always seem to stumble for me. I just don't see what will draw the audience. And without the audience, I don't think a creator-centric game can thrive.

Some Thoughts on World PvP

WoWInsider posted an article on world PvP. MMO Melting Pot posted an editorial decrying that post, calling it "a guide to griefing". I meant to comment on this kerfuffle at the time, but got distracted. Jinxed Thoughts posted some thoughts and reminded me about the issue.

For reference, I play on a PvP server, though I'm really a PvE player at heart. But my guild prefers PvP servers, so that's where I am.

In my experience, there are two "mindsets" when it comes to player-against-player combat. One mindset is that of chivalrous combat:

The orc warrior steps into the clearing, and sees the human knight. The knight draws his sword and salutes the orc warily. The orc unlimbers her axe and grunts, acknowledging her enemy's bravery. A charge, and there is blood in the snow. A single tear rolls down the face of the victor.

This mindset is old, invoking Arthurian legends, and codes of single combat and dueling. Combat here is consensual for both parties, and they are driven to it by their honor.

The second mindset is that of total war. Here victory means everything, and victory is the goal. Ambush, poisoned knives, the destruction of supply lines, outnumbering your opponents. All of these are acceptable practices. There is no honorable combat, only death and victory. Under this mindset, the entire idea of consensual combat does not even apply.

In my experience, the players who tend towards the first mindset usually prefer PvE servers, while players who tend towards the second mindset prefer PvP servers. But then the chivalrous mindset people see what happens under total war mindset and object to those tactics. And the other side doesn't see why they are objecting. In essence, they are playing different games, and talking past each other.

The thing is that world PvP is not consensual on a PvP server. Or rather, the act of existing is implicit consent.

If you cannot handle that, or you think that is dishonorable or griefing, then you should not roll on a PvP server. It will just lead to frustration. Stay on a PvE server and formally flag when attacking the enemy or do battlegrounds. The act of flagging counts as giving consent on a PvE server, but there is no equivalent action on a PvP server.

For PvP though, the entire mindset is different, and you just have to accept that PvP servers play by "total war" rules. You have to keep your guard up, be alert. It is a tiring playstyle sometimes. (Also, I miss bubble-hearth.)

So why play on a PvP server? Because you get random stories that never happen on a PvE server. The other night I got jumped by a Horde rogue and shaman healer. They killed me pretty quickly. When I got back to my body, the rogue had attacked a druid. But that druid had a friend who the Horde hadn't seen. So I ressed, and jumped into the fight. We killed the shaman, and the rogue vanished and that was the end of the fight.

A short vignette that interrupted my questing, true. But it is something that doesn't really happen on PvE servers.

Finally, from a fairness perspective, the Molten Front is the best place to engage in world PvP. All parties are guaranteed to be level 85. As well, there are usually many people questing, so you can call for help from others of your own faction in the area.

Molten Front Daily Quests

Warning: Contains spoilers for the first part of the Molten Front.

I'm way behind on my Molten Front dailies. I generally like the quests, but I haven't been doing them diligently. I've unlocked the Shadow Wardens and the Druids of the Talon, but haven't unlocked any of the next three.

I really like the Leyara storyline so far. When she killed Hamuul Runetotem, it was a genuine shock, and Leyara jumped quite rapidly to the top of the villain list. Even though my guild is Alliance, there were outcries in guild chat as people hit that part. As I posted back in Wrath, villains need victories. In some ways, it's sort of unfortunate that Blizzard copped out and let Hamuul survive, though badly wounded.

For the quests themselves, they're quite good for the most part. I like how a lot of the group quests share tagging. The Mylune quests are awesome.

I also really like the quest that gives you a small group with a named character to help out. It's really nice to see old favorites like Mankrik, Chromie, etc. The one thing I would like for this is if these friendly NPCs would show up on your group bars. It would make it a lot easier for a healer character.

However, in one respect the Molten Front dailies feel weird to me. The zone really feels like it was designed to "progressively phase". It really feels like when you first unlock the Shadow Wardens/Druids of the Talon that the first area is supposed to permanently phase to a "finished" state. And then you only do the tearing down of the tower and walking through the flames once. Instead of going through the entire process every day.

One point of evidence is that there are no Achievements for those first quests in the Molten Front, though there are Achievements for every other section.

I think this would have lead to slightly fewer daily quests, and not so many bottlenecks in questing progress. You would unlock entire sections of the Molten Front once, and they would stay unlocked from that point on.

What I think happened is that Blizzard originally designed the Molten Front to work like this. But a lot of people complained that extensive phasing made it hard for grouping, so Blizzard cut back on the phasing that actually affected questing, leaving in the cosmetic phasing like the tree, and then "resetting" the phasing of the zone every day, so you always start fresh.

In some respects, I think that was a mistake, and a progressive phasing design for the entire zone would have been better and smoother. But it would definitely have caused issues for people at different stages of progression trying to group together.

Mists of Pandaria?

MMO-Champion is reporting that Blizzard has trademarked the phrase "Mists of Pandaria". Apparently the timing and technical details of the trademark are leading people to speculate that this will be the title of the next WoW expansion.

It could be true. A mysterious continent, maybe magically hidden until the Cataclysm revealed it, would be an interesting setting for an expansion.

I don't think Pandaren will be a playable race, though. Which faction would they belong to? What race would the other faction get? If anything, I thing Blizzard should go with making them a neutral race, maybe one that both the Alliance and the Horde are courting for favor.

Another argument against a Pandaren expansion is that it would not be "epic" enough. The last two expansions have been the Lich King and Deathwing. Pandaren are simply not in that league.

While this is a good point, I wouldn't mind a quieter expansion. A little less world-destroying threats, and a narrower, more detailed focus.

So is Mists of Pandaria the next expansion? I have no idea, but Blizzcon this year should be very interesting.

Diablo III Cash AH

Eliminating the middleman is never as simple as it sounds. ‘Bout 50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated.
-Malcolm Reynolds (Firefly)

So the big news is that Diablo III will feature a real currency Auction House.

Personally, I don't think it's that bad an idea. Diablo being more a single-player game than a persistent world, it seems very optional.

Things I like about this plan:

• It uses real currencies like dollars. There's no messing around with "fake" transition currencies like Turbine Points, etc.


• It's obvious how Blizzard is going to make their money. They get the listing fee on every posting and the transaction fee on a sale. There's no games or trickery. Their cut is obvious, straightforward, and reasonably fair.


• It's symmetrical. You can buy or you can sell. But there's also no subscription fees so that certain segments of the audience end up going infinite and playing for free at the expense of others.


• It's completely ignorable. You can use the regular gold AH or even not use any AH at all.


• Arbitrage between the two auction houses might be interesting. Maybe people will buy items off the gold AH to put up for sale on the cash AH.


• Hardcore mode is cordoned off into its own section. You play Hardcore, and all you have to rely on is in-game resources. That is respectable.

Stuff I'm unsure about:

• It kind of legitimizes farming. The "illegal" and dangerous part of farming has always been the transfer from gold to dollars. This gives a reasonable way for people to take advantage of this. Further, farmers will decrease prices on the cash AH, because of increased supply of items. But they should actually increase prices on the gold AH, because the farmers will use the gold they farm to buy items on that AH to sell on the cash AH.
  
  Keeping the dollar price low seems better, even if it frustrates would-be sellers. It sort of separates the professional sellers from the people would sell in the course of playing the game. The gamer sellers would probably be better off with the gold AH, at least in my initial eyeballing of it.


• As someone on another message board pointed out, this is the precise strategy offered by many people to deal with illegal drugs. Legalize it and tax it. Let's see how that works out.
  
  Most gamers tend to the liberal/libertarian side of things, so it's amusing to see how many of them complain about this strategy when it affects what they deem important.

Things I don't like:

• It raises the stakes enormously for account theft. Let's say you have $100 attached to your Diablo 3 account. Now if your account is stolen, the immediate strategy is to buy overpriced items from a specific seller in order to transfer your money to a different account.
  
  I don't really know how Blizzard plans to deal with this. Perhaps access to the cash AH will require an Authenticator. Perhaps there will be a significant delay on the actual cash transfer in order for Blizzard to identify and reverse false transactions. You could give the item to the player right away, but just delay the payment for 48 hours.

So those are my thoughts. Overall, I think it's a good fit for a random item-driven game like Diablo. I especially approve that Blizzard makes it obvious how they are going to make money. In my view, when you can't tell how the company providing a service will get their money, that is cause to be nervous.

Eliminating Reforging, Hit Rating, and Expertise

I hate reforging. It's just so inelegant. It's complex and time-consuming. You basically have to use an external application to figure out how to reforge properly. All in all, it just seems so unnecessary.

So how can we get rid of reforging?

The primary reason that reforging exists is because of Hit Rating and Expertise Rating. In particular, Hit Rating has a very steep value curve that looks like a step function. When you are below the Hit cap, Hit Rating is usually the most valuable stat. Then past the Hit cap, Hit rating is a complete waste. Expertise displays a similar value curve.

So the best path to eliminating reforging would be to eliminate Hit Rating and Expertise Rating. If those two stats were gone, reforging would not be needed. It still might be nice to have, but the extra complexity would outweigh the value it adds to the game.

The easiest way to get rid of Hit and Expertise would be to say that special attacks and spells cannot miss, or be dodged or parried. White melee auto-attacks could still be affected by those stats.

If this was done, the game would not change greatly. Once you hit raiding, pretty much everyone has enough hit to make this the default state anyways. Indeed, Blizzard has started moving towards this state in small steps. First, taunts were changed to always succeed. Then interrupts were changed to always succeed. A lot of threat dumps used to miss, but now always succeed. Extending this to all specials just removes a little randomness.

Then Blizzard just needs to introduce a new stat for melee dps and ranged dps. Perhaps something like changing Expertise to increase autoattack damage. Maybe casters could get a stat like "Spell Charge" which increases damage done by spells with cast or channel times. Then each role would have a unique secondary stat. Healers would have Spirit, tanks have Dodge and Parry, melee DPS would have Expertise, and caster DPS would have Spell Charge.

But none of the remaining secondary stats would display the steep step change of value. They wouldn't go from amazing to useless at a single point. There would still be breakpoints where the value changes slightly, and that would keep the theorycrafters happy. But adding more of stat would always improve your character.

The need for reforging would disappear. Blizzard could eliminate reforging from the game. Mylune would save all the wee forest animals in Hyjal. And we would all live happily ever after.

Dev Interaction with the Community

Blizzard recently ended their "Ask the Devs" series of community interaction. In Ask the Devs, the community posted questions and the questions were voted on. The 10 or so questions with the top ratings for each topic were resented to the devs and the devs gave answers.

It was an interesting exercise in community management. However, Ask the Devs is generally regarded as unsucessful by both the Blizzard CMs and the community.

Let's take a look at why Ask the Devs failed. It was a worthwhile experiment, but I think that there are two major reasons why it failed.

First, the vast majority of questions were thinly-veiled versions of, "My class sucks. When will you buff my class?"

That was not conducive to interesting answers.

The second reason is that asking good questions is just plain hard. A lot of the time, it is difficult to ask a good question unless you already know the answer.

For example, let's take a question like, "Is Blizzard planning to change the paladin healing model?" If the answer is No, this was a very pointless question. But if the answer is Yes (as in pre-4.0), all of a sudden the question is extremely interesting.

But the playerbase doesn't really have enough information to know which are the interesting questions and which are the boring questions.

This was the biggest strength of the previous interaction between Ghostcrawler and the forums. Because Ghostcrawler knew the answers, he also knew which questions were worth answering.

Of course, that model was not sustainable, and Ghostcrawler's presence on the forums tended to warp them, as everyone started trolling for blue responses.

The new form of Dev interaction, the development blog posts, also have weaknesses. In particular, they have a tendency to be at "too high a level". Ten thousand foot overviews are generally not interesting. Specifics are interesting. The best Dev blog was probably Ghostcrawler's line-by-line explanation of the patch notes, which was about as specific as you can get. Even the ten thousand foot overviews can be greatly improved with concrete examples.

But dev blogs are probably an art, and something that needs to be learned. The gold standard of gaming dev blogs, in my opinion, is Mark Rosewater's columns for Magic: the Gathering. A dev looking to communicate with her game's community would probably be well served by studying how Rosewater did things.

Valor Point Capping

Over the last couple of weeks, when I've sat down to game on the computer, here's a list of activities that I wanted to do:

1. Raid Firelands
2. Work on the new Molten Front daily quests and achievements.
3. Play Mass Effect

Notice what's not on the list? Running Troll Heroics for Valor Points.

I liked the troll heroics. I don't mind doing them occasionally. But honestly, being "forced" to do them when there's all this cool new content to explore is very annoying.

What's especially aggravating is that I know that in a couple of weeks the novelty of new content will have started wearing off, and it will be enjoyable to mix in a few heroics. But by then my guild will be 6/7 or 7/7 and we'll be capping out Valor Points just from raiding.

Of course, "forced" is a bit of a misnomer. But right now, capping valor points is the most effective use of non-raid time to help your team defeat bosses. And the worse your guild is, the more pressure there is to do more heroics. Someone in a 4/7 guild only has to do 3 heroics, while someone who is 1/7 needs to do 6.

Please note that the single most effective use of time overall is to put in more attempts on the boss. If your guild is thinking of raiding less and instead doing heroics for valor point gear, reconsider! Down that path lies failure, madness, and a shattered raid team!

I am really not fond of mechanics that keep me doing things that I may not be interested in. If I just want to raid, why not just let me raid? Why make the optimal path include a lot of other stuff?

Mastery/Crit Build In Practice

I decided to give the Mastery/Crit build a try last night in raid. We were going after Baleroc, and it was mentioned that this build was particularly good for Baleroc since the fight is mostly single-target heals.

The Mastery/Crit build uses the following stat priority: Intellect > Mastery > Crit > Haste > Spirit. The idea is to rely more on Holy Light and less on Divine Light. It was a little nerve-wracking to reforge away so much Spirit.

Performance-wise, the build is solid, I think. The numbers were definitely comparable to the other paladins. Additionally, the single highest source of healing done is actually from mastery shields, Illuminated Healing (something like 27% for me, followed by Beacon at 25%), and damage prevented is always better than damage healed. As well, overheals are not a complete waste, as they still give shields.

For playstyle, initially the build feels very sluggish. High haste means that all your spells are very fast, and it feels easier to react. But you get used to it after a while, and you still have Holy Shock and Word of Glory for speed.

Surprisingly, mana is not really an issue. The thing about Spirit/Haste builds is that even though you regen mana faster, you also spend mana faster. This build seems a lot less "swingy" when it comes to mana. You spend mana at a steadier rate. You still have to Judge on cooldown and use Divine Plea, like normal.

Personally, I rather like this build. It feels very solid and complements the other healers in the raid well. I'd like to see how it performs across more fights, but I think it's the build I will try for the next few weeks.

Holy Paladin Builds

Blizzard's class dev team is probably estatic at how their changes have worked out for Holy Paladins. Holy Paladin theorycraft is all over the map at the moment. As I can see it, there are currently three different stat weights being discussed.

1. Intellect > Spirit > Haste > Crit > Mastery

The standard build from 4.1. It's still the best build if you have to raid heal, and is also the most versatile build.

2. Mastery > Intellect > Spirit > Haste > Crit

The ultimate single-tank healing build. Insanely large mastery shields buffer the tank's health. Probably only viable in 25-man raiding with good raid healers to cover for you.

3. Intellect > Mastery > Crit > Haste > Spirit

Eloderung of Eternal Reign is touting this build. He says that it is a very strong two-tank Beacon healing build. It relies a bit more on Holy Light, and takes advantage of all three new mechanics: 100% HL transfer through Beacon, 200% crits, and a stronger mastery. Unlike build 2, this is likely a viable build for 10-mans.

This is probably the most interesting time to be a Holy Paladin in a long while. Excellent work, Blizzard!

Zaroua on Holy Paladin Mastery

Zaroua of Premonition made a really interesting post on the official forums discussing Holy Paladin Mastery today:

I'm creating this thread hoping to greatly reduce the influx of PMs and tells I get regarding our mastery. Keep in mind that is pretty much only for 25 man raids; I see some potential uses for this in 10 man, but for the most part it probably won't be as useful in a 10 man scenario.

The Firelands fights come in two categories: sustained AoE damage stages and no AoE damage/AoE damage that Holy Radiance isn't suited to heal. Beth'tilac, Lord Ryolith, Domo and the ground phase of Alysrazor are all mostly based around AoE healing for sustained amounts of time while while Alysrazor air phase, Shannox, Baleroc and Ragnaros are fights where Holy Radiance isn't even worth casting.

For the AoE fights, all we really have going for us is Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn, while all of the other healers are able to pump out AoE heals nearly non-stop. Now the way I look at it is that someone still needs to heal the tank and that since Paladins are pretty horrible at sustained AoE healing, a 25 man raid may as well put one or two Holy Paladins on full time tank healing and just have them Holy Radiance on cooldown.

For the non AoE healing fights, Paladins have the choice to choose between tank healing or... tank healing. Casting Holy Lights and Lights of Dawn on the raid simply doesn't compare to Chain Heal/Wild Growth/Circle of Healing/Prayer of Healing.

My guild's healing team is flexible enough to allow for a Paladin to have a weaker Holy Radiance in order to have more powerful tank healing. This translates in the AoE healers having to spend less time on the tank and more time doing what they're good at.


How does this relate to mastery? The golden rule of tanking and healing is that when it comes to handling damage, the best to worst order to do it in is this: completely avoiding the damage, mitigating the damage, healing the damage with a very large amount of fast heals, healing the damage with slow and large heals. Mastery helps mitigate damage and in some cases, completely avoid it. The reason why mitigating damage is so good is because it leads to reduced frequency of spikes in the tank's health and when spikes do occur, it makes them less pronounced, which in turn means that other healers don't panic and waste cooldowns or inefficient heals on the tank. Before the 4.2 change to make Mastery shield stack, the stat was mostly useless because such a huge portion of the shield was wasted on any given heal that gearing for Haste for faster reaction times was something pretty much every Holy Paladin agreed to being the better choice. But now we're in a position where Mastery is finally viable for a Paladin who wants to focus on tank healing.

The most important thing to note about healing with a Mastery set is that you sacrifice throughput in order to become a more effective tank healer. [Emphasis mine.] Your Holy Radiance (and mana regen) will be weaker than a Paladin who is going for a more balanced approach to gearing or a Paladin going for Haste. But in turn, you'll be putting a downright overpowered shield on the tank every time you heal him directly. And don't kid yourselves: if you're able to reduce the average hit the tank takes by 10k because of the Mastery shield, what you're doing is very nearly game breaking. The shield simply is that good for keeping tanks alive. What a full set of mastery comes down to is your guild's capacity to support one of its healers focus less on raid healing and more on tank healing.

Even if your guild can't (or won't) support a Paladin will a full mastery set, every Paladin should try to get off pieces with mastery on them so they can use them for Shannox, Baleroc and Ragnaros at the very least.

If you look at his gearset, he's gemming and reforging according to the following priorities:

Mastery > Intellect > Spirit > Haste > Crit

This has a lot of drawbacks. It's hyper-specialized for tank healing, and possibly even single-tank healing (no off-Beacon healing).

Now, you probably shouldn't run out and switch to this right away. But any time someone from a top Royalty guild like Premonition or Paragon says something that contradicts common wisdom, it's worth taking a good long look at the situation.

Melee vs Ranged

It's pretty common to hear that a fight favors ranged over melee. Relatively few fights favor melee over ranged. So let's take a look at why this happens.

In my experience, most fights don't punish you for taking melee, they punish you for taking more melee than normal. Put another way, it's easier to take extra ranged DPS than it is to take extra melee DPS.

So what are the advantages that ranged has over melee?

1. Any effect that hits one melee usually hits all the melee.

Usually if there's an effect that melee needs to avoid, all melee have to avoid it at the same time. However, you very rarely see an effect target all the ranged simultaneously. Usually the ranged can spread out, so that only a portion is hit at any one time.

This also shows up in effects that "chain" from one target to another. It's easier to organize ranged such that chain lightning hits a minimum number of people. It's much harder to do the same for melee.

2. Ranged can go to melee, but melee cannot go to ranged.

If a fight does favor melee, ranged can often avoid it by running into melee range. Take Magmaw, for example. A common strategy is to have most of the ranged DPS stand with melee, with minimal people standing out at range to be targeted by the specials.

If ranged could not do this, it's arguable that Magmaw would be considered a melee-friendly fight, instead of a draw.

Not saying it would be a completely good idea, but if ranged had a 10 yard minimum on their spells, the balance between melee and ranged would be very different.

3. Any effect that affects the ranged will also affect healers.

The healers are usually at range, so any environmental effects will often affect them as well. That means that there is a maximum to what can be done to ranged without making it impossible to heal.

Conclusions

As you can see, it's not so much that individual melee classes are weak, but more that melee and ranged are affected by mechanics differently. Add to that the ranged can "pretend" to be melee characters, and pretty much every advantage ends up falling to the ranged.

Fixing this might be pretty complicated. Large fixes, like a minimum range for ranged, are not really feasible at this point.

The best way to go is probably identify the ranged classes and have effects target those characters. For example, when Magmaw does flame pillar, rather than targetting "a character at range", he instead targets "a ranged DPS spec" even if that character is standing in melee. That would allow melee specs to avoid some mechanics, while preventing the ranged specs from running into melee range.

Age of Conan Goes F2P

Age of Conan goes Free-2-Play today or tomorrow.

It's odd, because the truth is that I ragged a lot on this game when it came out, but AoC has somehow become my favorite non-WoW MMO. I'm not 100% sure why, but here's a list of reasons that you should try out AoC.

1. Sensibility

It has a very different feel than a lot of other MMOs. The setting feels older and rawer. A lot of MMOs feel quasi-Medieval-Renaissance, but AoC is Bronze or Iron Age.

2. Similar, yet different.

AoC is similar enough to WoW that it's easy to adjust to. But it's also significantly different, and at a deeper level than you'd expect. For example, AoC is a tank-healer-dps trinity game. But the default group is 2 tanks, 2 healers, and 2 dps, and that makes the actual experience very unique.

It often seems to me that AoC tries new things at a deeper level than the other game companies. Sometimes they fail, but I give credit for the attempt.

3. Music

The music in Cimmeria is amazing.

Conclusions

Give Age of Conan a shot. You might be pleasantly surprised.

One piece of advice, you really need a good set of keybinds in this game. It makes a huge difference. I use the numpad on my keyboard, and have 4,5,6 bound to the direction attacks and 1-3 and 7-9 bound to specials.

Fandral Staghelm

I have always liked Fandral Staghelm.

To me, Fandral was the only character who treated your new character the way she should have been treated. All other friendly NPCs fawn over your character, giving them praise that they haven't really earned yet. Fandral, on the other hand, was all "Why is this level 10 noob bothering me? Here, go take a message to Darkshore."

The thing is that Fandral (as originally presented) wasn't a nice character, but he was a good character. That distinction is not often made. Far too often, nice is synonymous with good. Bad characters are mean to you, good characters are nice to you.

I also like that he wasn't a passive character, like Tyrande. He tried to fix things, even if the solutions were not perfect. He didn't get help from the Dragon Aspects (the majority of which had disappeared or gone rogue), but he kept on going anyways. He was arrogant and ambitious, but seemed genuinely concerned with his people.

In the Ahn'Quiraj patch, I really enjoyed the way Blizzard fleshed out Fandral's back story. The loss of his son at the moment of victory made him sympathetic, and understandable.

But with Cataclysm, Blizzard has made Fandral into a villain. Apparently the simplistic case is correct. If an NPC is mean, he is a bad guy.

Even the Morrowgrain storyline backs this up. Some no-name druid tells you Fandral is using Morrowgrain for evil purposes, and instead of telling you to stop collecting Morrowgrain, tells you to bring it to him instead. Yeah, that's not the least bit suspicious. But since Quentis Jonespyre was nice to you, and Fandral was mean, clearly Quentis is the good guy.

And all the challenges Fandral struggled with? Mary-Sue-Furion comes back, and then everyone else (like the Dragon Aspects) fall over themselves to help him resolve all the problems easily.

Fandral was intriguing friendly NPC. In my view, having him "go evil" was a waste of a unique character, and merely reinforces a cartoonish "mean equals bad" way of looking at the world.

Blocked Player Advancement

Let's say that a player with a max-level character cannot raid for whatever reason. How then should she advance her character as the game progresses?

Options

There are three options.

1. She can't advance.

Also known as Vanilla WoW. The players only option is to quit or reroll a new character. This is a potentially viable solution, but the viability depends on how many people end up quitting. This option also probably has the highest "conversion rate" of raiders. If the only way the player can advance is raiding, than a lot of people will give raiding a try.

In all honesty, I think that this option might actually work better now than it did in Vanilla. Because of the 10/25 split, and the normal/hard mode split, it might actually be a lot easier to get into raid groups, or convert smaller guilds into raid guilds.

2. Advance through new content at her level

Blizzard makes new 5-man content. But new content costs resources to create, and there is a finite amount. As well, each "tier" of 5-man content fragments the player pool further, and makes it harder to assemble groups.

3. Advance by repeating existing content

Essentially running the current instances and either upgrading the gear that drops, or giving points to purchase better and better gear.

Analysis

Obviously, Blizzard has chosen a mix of options 2 and 3. New 5-mans are released every so often, and as the raid tiers are added, you can get better gear from Valor Points.

There is one further point to consider. Does advancing her character mean that the player must earn the best gear, or is it enough that the player only earns better gear than what she currently has?

Consider the idea that Valor Points don't exist. A non-raider would have gone up to i346 gear with some i359s from reputation. When the troll 5-man instances came out, she would upgrade all her i346s to i353s. When Firelands comes out, she upgrades those i353s to i359s, which are now available for Justice Points (which reset when the new raid comes out).

Would that be enough advancement to satisfy the non-raider?

Personally, I think it's good enough. And it has the side effect of removing Valor Points from the game. Let raid loot drop from raid bosses. If you want the best loot in the game, you get to deal with the random dungeon generator, as in Vanilla. I would change the Tier tokens to a single token for each armor type, and that would be enough. When Firelands comes out, those tokens can go on the Justice Point vendor.

This would be cleaner and simpler, and remove the need for over-geared people to run heroics. Heroics would remain the province of those people who needed to run them. People wouldn't expect everything to be AoE'd down. It would also have the side-effect of encouraging more people to try to step up to raiding, rather than just grinding heroics. But heroics also offer loot one step below the current raid tier, keeping a heroic geared character a viable recruit for all but the very edge guilds.

The Root Problem

Before you read this post, go read Shintar's excellent An Annotated History of the Badge System. As you read over the history, it becomes quite obvious that the current Valor Point system we have evolved over time, and now serves several different purposes than it used to.

So let's take a step back. What is the root problem that Blizzard is trying to solve?

In my view, the original design of PvE went something like this: First, a player would do quests mostly solo. After a while, she would transition into small 5-man group content. After that, she would move onto larger group content, or raiding. Each step up would be more difficult, and would reward better gear.

The problem, though, was that not everyone was able to transition from stage to stage. In particular, the transition from small group content to large group content was particularly harsh in Vanilla. Players effectively became "blocked" from moving up.

So then the problem becomes two linked--but subtly different--questions: What does a blocked player do with her time? and How does a blocked player improve her character?

That's the primary function of Valor Points. They allow a player who is in the second stage to still advance her character, by engaging in second stage activities.

Valor/Justice Points also have a secondary function. They mitigate the randomness of loot drops. Enough points guarantee you loot.¹

Finally, Valor/Justice Points serve a third function. They give players a small reward even if the player doesn't need loot off a specific boss.

But is the current design of Valor Points the best way to accomplish these functions? Are some of these functions even necessary? When looking at randomness, consider that the amount of loot per player has greatly increased since Vanilla. Combine that with a more generic token system for tier pieces, and smoothing out of loot distribution is pretty much unnecessary in Cataclysm.

And the small reward is also unnecessary. Indeed, the current daily heroic cuts against this idea. Since only the end boss of a heroic gives VP, there is great incentive to skip other bosses, even though they give JP.

That really only leaves the first and greatest purpose of VP, giving a path of character advancement for non-raiders. I will look at that issue in a future post.

1. Unlike, say, Cho'gall and paladin bracers.

Remove the Daily Heroic

Kleps had a post a while back on segregating the playbase. Basically, the idea is that groups are happiest when all the group members share the same goals and are roughly the same skill level.

I think there is some sense to that when you look at LFD groups. Levelling instances are pretty much on the same page, as are normal 85 instances. It's really only Heroics where a lot of the negativity and conflicts come into play.

This is because there are three separate groups running Heroics: people gearing up; non-raiders collecting Valor; and raiders supplementing the Valor gained from raiding. Yet the goals, methods, and standards of these three groups often conflict. People start complaining when the tank is new, or refuse to use CC, or skip bosses trying to get to the end as fast as possible.

But suppose that Heroic 5-mans never gave out Valor? That the only way you could get Valor is from raiding. What would happen?

Well, immediately, Heroics would become the province of those people who needed Justice points and Heroic blue gear. People who had "outgrown" heroics would not run them. Heroic groups would share the same purpose. People would not skip bosses. Tanks learning the ropes, or being less-geared, would be more understandable. CC would still be used, as it would be less likely that everyone would out-gear the instance.

A lot of other people have said that having Heroics give badges (the old equivalent of Valor), was the worst mistake made in the endgame. There is some truth to that. But it was done for a reason. It was done because people who did not raid 25-mans had no way of advancing their character. But in the current game, there are 10-man raids, 25-man raids, as well as normal and heroic versions. Pick-up groups are a lot more common.

Additionally, even with just Justice points a non-raider would still be able to advance her character. When new tier of raid gear comes out, the old tier rolls over to Justice points. Admittedly, the non-raider is behind the raider, but she can still advance and make her character more powerful as time passes. It isn't like Vanilla, where if you couldn't raid, that was it for you.

There are advantages for the raiders as well. They are freed of the necessity to run instances long after they have outgrown them.

The big question is if this will increase queue times. After all, forcing raiders into the Heroic LFD pool makes the pool larger, and more likely that groups will form. Now increased queue times are certainly possible. But consider that leveling groups and normal 85 groups still form with reasonable queue times. Those pools are not artificially inflated, and yet you can still get groups for those dungeons.

Badges of Justice dropping in Heroics was a necessary solution back in TBC. But in Cataclysm the options for endgame, and for advancing your character, are much wider. Valor points in Heroics are no longer necessary. The Heroic experience will be much better without them, when all participants are on the same page and share the same goals.

Holy Paladins in 4.2

Patch 4.2 appears to coming out pretty soon, and there actually a decent number of changes for PvE Holy Paladins. Here's the list of pertinent changes:

• All healing critical strikes now heal for 2 times a normal heal (+100%), up from 1.5 times a normal heal (+50%).
• Divine Light mana cost has been increased to 35% of base mana, up from 30%.
• Flash of Light mana cost has been increased to 31% of base mana, up from 27%.
• Holy Light mana cost has been increased to 12% of base mana, up from 10%.
• Beacon of Light can no longer be dispelled. In addition, it now transfers 100% of the heal from Holy Light, but still 50% of the heal from other spells.
• Holy Shock mana cost has been decreased to 7% of base mana, down from 8%.
• Illuminated Healing (Mastery) has been adjusted slightly so that if a paladin refreshes an existing copy of his or her own Illuminated Healing on a target, the new absorption amount will be added into the old absorption amount and the duration will be reset. The total absorption created can never exceed 1/3 of the casting paladin's health.
• Speed of Light now increases movement speed when Holy Radiance or Divine Protection are cast. In addition, this talent now reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 13/26/40 seconds, up from 10/20/30.
• Walk in the Light now improves Word of Glory healing by 30%, in addition to its current effects.

None of the changes are particularly drastic. Cumulatively, a Holy paladin should cast Divine Light less, and Holy Light more. Mastery smooths out, and critical strike rating becomes more valuable. You can use Holy Radiance more often, or have it available faster if you make a mistake with it. Word of Glory becomes much more powerful once again.

I'm actually planning to go back to the Word of Glory talents in 4.2.

For stat weights, mastery and critical strike rating both get a boost. The two stats also work well with each other. I'm not sure if either is better than haste, though.

One thing I'm considering is treating mastery, haste and crit as more or less equal, and only reforging to spirit. I'm not sure if this is a good idea, though. Haste is pretty hard to math out.

Holy Mastery Update

This may not go live, but on the 4.2 PTR, Holy Paladin Mastery shields are now stacking up to a maximum of 1/3 of the Holy Paladin's maximum health.

This is a pretty good change, in my view, and will probably be enough to bring Mastery up to a viable level.

Of course, there are still some concerns, specifically with Beacon of Light. BoL heals don't create shields, so your BoL target does not benefit from your mastery. It's perfectly fine for 2-tank situations, but Mastery does become a little weaker in 1-tank situations or if you prefer to heal your Beacon target for Tower of Radiance power gains.

And of course, it does encourage paladins to heal a tank who is already at full health, to build the shield higher. But on the whole, this should be a good change.

Healer UI

I was reading a thread on the WoW forums about what to look for in a healer app. The thread devolved into arguments about what is acceptable in a healer's User Interface.

Personally, I think that as long as you are comfortable with your UI and are effective with it, then all is good. I personally use Grid and the default UI. Mostly because I find that too many add-ons cause performance issues and unforseen bugs, and make patch days miserable.

However, here are my three criteria for evaluating healer UIs:

1. Can the healer see the health bars of the entire raid?

It seems pretty obvious, but back in the day there were a fair number of healers who only healed their group. Less common now that there is a decent default raid UI.

2. Can the healer see all relevant buffs and debuffs?

You must be able to see all the important buffs and debuffs in a fight. Ideally, your UI would allow you to filter the debuffs, so that you don't see the unimportant debuffs.

This is one of the major reasons I like Grid, because I really like its debuff filtering capabilities. Being able to get identify at a glance the people with Chimeron's Low Health debuff or Explosive Cinders on Heroic Nef makes healing those fights a lot easier.

3. Can the healer see the fight?

It's really easy as a healer to "tunnel vision" on your health bars. Sometimes your UI makes it even easier, and makes it harder to view the fight. But you have to be able to keep an eye on what's going around. A good healer UI, somewhat paradoxically, needs to emphasize the fight rather than the health bars.

The nature of healing drives the healer to focus on the health bars, and in some ways the UI should pull them in the other direction.

So those are my three criteria for judging healer UIs. But again, comfort and effectiveness are key.

However, I believe that all healers should be able to use the default UI if necessary. Your favorite addon could break, or stop being maintained, or cause you to crash on a specific fight. You should be able to at least be somewhat effective if you had to heal without third-party addons.

Basic Ability Conventions

I was running random Stockades on a low-level warrior, when I encountered a mage who was pretty obviously a new player. He wasn't a "bad" player, at least he did not pull mobs and roll need on everything. But his DPS was abysmal for that level.

Obviously, he had no heirlooms, so that made a difference. But more important was his spell mix.

He had Pyroblast, so he was a Fire mage. Except he never cast Fireball! He cast every single other spell in his repertoire instead. Frostbolts, Fireblasts, Frost Novas, Arcane Explosions, etc.

Clearly, this was the wrong thing to do. But when you think about it, there is a certain logic to his actions. First, he obviously saw Pyroblast as a "upgraded" Fireball. After all, why have two spells which hurl giant balls of fire at your enemies? And to be fair, there are specialization abilities which work like this. For example, Mangle replaces Claw for Feral druids.

As for the other spells, why have all these spells if you're not expect to use them? If you think about it, it does seem odd to drop half or more spells from your spellbook.

He is wrong, but he's not stupid. His reasoning makes some sense. And in the absence of easy to understand feedback, it's hard to tell that he's gone wrong.

Whenever people say that the levelling game is too easy, I think of players like this. We experienced players are used to the conventions of the genre, which extends to the abilities used. Ideas like "your best spell should be spammed" are a bit alien at first.

Even if you don't have the best reflexes, understanding those basic conventions can put you head and shoulders above new players who don't understand how abilities in the genre are supposed to work. We've internalized the math and advice that tells us to refresh DoTs when they expire and not before, to spam Fireball, to save instant spells for movement, to divide damage by cast time when evaluating effectiveness.

When you think about it, it is amazing how much knowledge we MMO players consider basic.

Archeology versus Artifacts

As RIFT and Cataclysm were released very close to each other, it's interesting to compare similar systems from both games. One such comparable mini-game is Archeology in WoW and collecting Artifacts in RIFT. In a lot of ways, Archeology reflects current WoW design, while Artifacts reflect RIFT and perhaps Vanilla WoW design.

Description

First a quick description of the two systems. For Archeology, you have four dig sites marked on your world map. You fly to a digsite, and start surveying. Surveying is essentially a Hot Cold game. Your survey tool tells you when you get closer and provides a rough direction. When you find an archeology node, you collect fragments. There are three nodes per dig site. Collect enough fragments and you assemble an artifact. Most WoW artifacts are sold for gold, but there are a lot of pets and non-combat items.

Artifacts in RIFT are more like resource nodes. They're bright, sparkling white balls that are stuck all over the map, often in hidden or out of the way locations. When you click on an RIFT artifact node, you get a random artifact for the zone you are in. Each artifact belongs to a set. When you collect an entire set, you can turn it in to an NPC for tokens. You can then exchange these tokens for various non-combat rewards. The best analogy to this is collecting baseball cards or collecting CCGs like Magic: the Gathering.

Comparison

What I've found is that Archeology in WoW is very grindy. Fly to digsite, survey, survey, survey, fly to next digsite, repeat. But it also offers guaranteed results. If you put in the time, you will complete the artifact that you are working on. The only randomness is where the digsites appear, and what artifact you are currently working on.

In contrast, Artifacts in RIFT are extremely random. Nodes spawn in random places, so you can go hunting and not find any. Every node is a random artifact. You can get lots of duplicates, while not finding the ones you need to complete your set. You can, however, sell or trade your duplicates. On the other hand, the final reward is not random. You just have to collect X sets to get the specific reward you want, while in WoW you have to wait for the correct Archeology project to pop for you.

It should be noted that in my time playing RIFT, I only ever managed to complete 1 Artifact set. I had like 20 or so partially finished, but only one complete set.

Archeology in WoW is very interface-driven. The dig sites are marked on your world map, and aren't shown in game at all. When I'm flying to a dig site, I have to have the map open so I can tell if I'm in the right spot. And surveying is entirely done using an interface button.

Collecting Artifacts in RIFT, on the other hand, are in the game world. Picking one up often requires maneuvering your character out on a ledge, or doing fancy jumping to just the right spot. The only interface action is actually putting the artifact into a collection.

Archeology in WoW is entirely independent of other players. You don't share nodes or dig sites with other people. There's no real competition or cooperation with them.

While in RIFT, other people can beat you to the Artifact node. It's like herbing or mining. You're busy clearing out the enemy mobs, and they sneak in and grab the artifact.

Archeology in WoW is also aimed at endgame, and is also not really something that you can do in between quests. It's pretty much impossible to level archeology without a flying mount. In some respects, it feels like Archeology was designed as something to do while waiting for a dungeon queue to pop.

Whereas it's perfectly possible in RIFT to see and collect an artifact while out questing. Even low levels will collect many artifacts.

Conclusions

In a lot of respects, I like RIFT Artifacts better than WoW Archeology. I love the fact that Artifacts are in the game world, scattered in obscure corners. I like trying to figure out how to get that artifact which is stuck in the tree. In WoW, I really dislike flying from dig site to dig site with my map open, trying to tell if I am flying in the correct direction.

I like the whole rush of opening the Artifact node and seeing what you get. It reminds me a lot of my days of playing Magic, and opening packs to see what rare I'd pull. While a dig site in WoW is terribly boring. Survey, survey, survey, but I know I'm getting 3 nodes of 3-5 fragments each. The only moment of excitement is finishing a project and seeing what the next project is.

In some respects, it sort of feels like the WoW devs spent too much time trying to simulate the profession of Archeology, rather than coming up with a mini-game which was actually fun.

But then again, I don't like the randomness of RIFT Artifacts. As I mentioned above, I only ever completed one set. And the more sets you finish, the harder it becomes to finish the remaining sets. Like Magic, getting the last few cards you needed to finish your collection can be a killer. On the other hand, if you removed the randomness, it might lose its luster and become a straight grind.

It's entirely possible that because I treated RIFT Artifacts as a side-game--only collecting them as I came across them in the course of questing--that I never saw the real flaws and frustrations. I imagine that trying to complete the Achievements for collecting all the sets would be mind-numbing, and you'd eventually resort to the Auction House to purchase the few artifacts you are missing. To me, the idea that a mini-game would force you to do that is something of an admission of failure on its part.

Revamp of the Old World

There is a contradiction at the heart of the old world revamp in Cataclysm. On one hand, the mechanics are more newbie-friendly, to the point where even a lot of experienced casual players are saying that it is too easy.

But on the other hand, the stories being told are not particularly newbie-friendly.

Take Westfall for example. The new Westfall is a tour de force. It is gorgeously done, and a joy to play through. And yet, would it work at all if you hadn't played the old Westfall? If you didn't really know who Edwin Van Cleef and the Defias are?

There's lots of zones like this. The reclamation of Western Plaguelands is also a great storyline. But can it work if you didn't see the original Western Plaguelands?

Darkshore is heart-breaking for an older player. But again, not experiencing the original Darkshore causes that zone to lose a ton of impact.

The same thing is going to happen with a lot of NPCs. Their "origin story" disappears, but the NPC is still in the world. For example, take Chromie and Tirion Fordring. Fan favorites, both of them. But the original quests which introduced you to them have been removed.

To me, the level 1-60 zones in Cataclysm now feel like Book IV in a series. But Book I is no longer available to read. And Books II and III now come after Book IV, for some reason.

But then again, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe new players won't be hampered by this fact. Or maybe it will feel to them like the world has history. I mean, I never played Warcraft III, and I never felt that I greatly missed anything.

(Except for Illidan. I never really understood what the fuss about Illidan was all about.)

Of course, one significant difference is that Warcraft III is still available for play, while the original zones are gone for good.

I am not sure that--if I was in charge of an MMO--I would ever green-light a revamp like Cataclysm. I actually agree with pretty much all the mechanical changes, and even the easier difficulty. But I would balk at rewriting the original stories of the game. Even though the new stories are extremely good, I think the loss of the old stories was a greater harm.

Of course, going through the older stories and tightening them up is another matter. In some respects, my ideal change is something like what happened to the quest [Princess Must Die]. The pig, Princess, used to be on the other side of the map, in the Brackwell Pumpkin patch. It was moved to the Stonefield farm. This made it easier to complete the quest, and strengthened the original story. Before, you were sent to assassinate a pig on a different farm, which was somewhat questionable. Was the pig really causing damage, or was Ma Stonefield using you to hurt an innocent competitor?

While now the pig is clearly causing damage to the Stonefield farm. The story is tightened up, and mechanically life is easier as you don't have to run to one end of the map and back.

In a lot of respects, I think Blizzard should have kept changes to the original zones to that level. Edit Book I rigorously, but not replace it entirely with Book IV.

4.2 Raid Nerfs

Yesterday Blizzard revealed that with patch 4.2, Tier 11 normal raid content will be nerfed into puggability.

(Yes, I just made up that word right now. But I think it's a fair description of what the difficulty of T11 content will look like after 4.2 hits.)

In any case, there's a lot of angst running around the blogosphere and forums. But the thing is that the raid paradigm has changed, and there's not a lot of use in holding on to the old paradigm. We've discussed this before, but raiding has switched from a "progression" paradigm to a "focus on the current tier" mentality.

This nerf fits right in with that idea. Come 4.2, the current tier will be Firelands, and all guilds will jump into that. T11 will become the province of pickup groups and individuals gearing up for Firelands.

And T11 does need a nerf in that case. Right now, it is not forgiving enough for most pickup groups to complete successfully.

It is also silly to expect that gear from T12 will make pugging T11 easier, as I've seen proposed. The people who will need to pug T11 are the people who need to gear up so they can join their groups in T12, not the other way around.

In my view, the "progression" paradigm is dead and gone. It's not worthwhile to protest changes from the point of view of "progression across tiers" raiding anymore. In the new world of raiding, only the current tier really matters.

Trends

A reader asks:

As a back drop let me tell you that I played wow from vanilla to wraith..quit..then came back for cata then quit again. But putting in those five or so years has left a mark on me (for better or worse I haven't figured out yet). I doubt I will ever return for numerous reasons not the least of which is not knowing anyone from the early days that are still playing...but none of this either here nor there. I active/ casually follow a handful of blogs concerning WoW (and other games) and have started to notice a disturbing trend of people not posting anymore. Whether because they quit the game, moved on, or just got tired of blogging who knows but here is my question.

Is the phenomenon of WoW starting to wear off? Is the community of gamers shrinking, moving on to other games, or other forms of entertainment? Or is it just the blogs I follow are shutting down?

To some extent it's probably a combination of the two. WoW has been out for six years now. That's a long time to be a phenomenon.

But a lot more is probably due just to the blogs you read. People stop blogging and new ones start all the time. (I wonder if any of my readers remember Psyae.) When you're an avid player, there's a lot more incentive to search out new blogs. But searching out new blogs is a lot of work, and after a while it becomes easier and more comfortable to stick with the blogs you know.

I've always found that it's really hard to generalize the whole game from your personal perspective. Sometimes it becomes really easy to think of your situation and the people around you as "normal". Theres a lot of self-selection bias.

I really noticed this when I was following Elitist Jerks. A lot of the people who hang out there think of their experience as the normal one, when we all know that it isn't. But all their friends have the same experience, as do the people they hang out online, so they don't see everyone else.

As well, we're moving into summer, and there's always summer lulls.

So I don't really know if there's a general trend. That would require access to better data than I have. If I took my experience as normal, then there wouldn't be a decrease at all. For some reason, a lot of older players who quit have been coming back to us. But, as I said above, personal experience is often misleading.

Too Much Mana Regen?

I haven't really commented about the upcoming mana cost increases for Holy paladins in 4.2. I'm still waiting to see how things pan out. Though naturally the forums are up in arms over the changes.

But I'm coming to the conclusion that there is too much mana regen running around these days. In a lot of respects, it feels like my mana bar is swinging around wildly during fights these days.

We were doing Heroic Maloriak the other night. On the first attempt, the phases at the end of the fight went Blue->Red->Green->P2. I entered the Green phase with about 40% mana, which in retrospect was a bit too low.

On the second attempt, which was a kill, the phases went Red->Blue->Green->P2. This time I entered the Green phase with 90% mana. This is because the healing needed in Blue phase is pretty light, making it a total regen phase. Pop Divine Plea, cast Holy Lights instead of Divine Lights, etc.

Sadly, a lot of my mana went to waste because WoW crashed on me in P2. It was quite infuriating. Why didn't it crash the previous attempt when I was bone dry?

But this "swinginess" of mana seems too much to me. Bouncing around from 40% to 90% and back down is really weird. If a fight has a regen phase, you can gain a ton of mana back, probably too much.

Personally, I'd rather Blizzard nerf mana regen rather than increase costs. It seems like it would make healing mana more stable and predictable.

Premium Cross-Realm Dungeon Feature

A Blizzard CM, Zarhym, posts:

With the continued popularity of the Dungeon Finder, many players have been asking for a way to group up with real-life friends who play on other realms to take on instances together. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about a new feature currently in development that will allow players to invite Real ID friends of the same faction to a party regardless of the realm they play on, and then queue up for a 5-player regular or Heroic dungeon.

As this is a fairly complex service to develop, we don’t have a release date to share quite yet. It’s important to note that as with some of the other convenience- and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service. We'll have more details to share with you as development progresses -- in the meantime, you may begin to see elements of the feature appear on the World of Warcraft PTR.

First off, I think mentioning the Dungeon Finder was a bit misleading. As I read it, this doesn't have a lot to do with the Dungeon Finder. It sounds like you can invite RealId friends to your group, and then queue up for an instance.

Honestly, I don't really see the point to this feature. There's already a workaround if you want to play with real-life friends regularly. You just roll new characters on the same server. You can save your old characters for times when your group isn't online. And if you're always playing together, then maybe server transfers are a better option.

I don't really see how the economics of this idea will work. This feature sounds like something you pay for ahead of time, that you plan on using multiple times, but not too often. And only one person in the group needs to pay for it.

I don't think that the number of players that would use this service is very high. And the people who would actually need to pay for it is a fraction of that number. So basically, I don't think the amount of money you'd get from this is worth the complaints from the community that "Blizzard is making us pay extra if we want to play with friends".

It also doesn't fit in with previous premium services. Server transfers, et al, are all one-time things. Having a price tag attached to them just serves to keep demand down, and ensures that people only use those services when they really need to. If server transfers were free, people would be jumping around like crazy.

I don't really see the point of decreasing demand for this service. Maybe it serves to ensure that people don't RealId strangers just to group with them again. That you only put "real" friends on your RealId list. This is one thing that could convince me that charging for this feature is a good idea. If there is a significant potential negative effect to this service, depressing demand via pricing is wise.

However, I don't think Blizzard charging for this service is "wrong". Personally, I'll never use it. So for me, having it be optional is better than bundling it in the base package and increasing the price of that.

Complete speculation, but from a software dev perspective, it kind of feels like one faction of Blizzard management didn't really want to spend the development time and effort on this feature. That they thought it would affect too few people to be worth spending money on, and would end up like the barbershop¹. But another faction really wanted to work on this feature. Maybe because it would set the stage for future cross-server coordination. So the two factions compromised with the idea that it would be a premium service and so "pay for itself".

Of course, the above paragraph is pure speculation. But to me, the other premium services, and even the pets and mounts, make sense to me as premium services. I may prefer that Blizzard didn't charge for them, but they make economic sense to me. But I just don't see the point of charging for this idea when only one person out of the group of friends would actually end up paying for it. It's ticky-tacky, nickel-and-dime stuff that seems out of character for Blizzard (though maybe not Activision).

1. You can really tell from a lot of Blizzard's comments that they feel that the Barbershop probably wasn't the best use of resources, given the number of people that actually use the feature semi-regularly.

Levelling Speed in Cataclysm

There's a lot of concern that levelling is too fast in Cataclysm. I am not sure if it is too fast or not, but lately I've been making a bunch of low level alts. Here is one thing I've noticed about levelling speed.

If you do nothing but quest, the XP curve seems to match the quests very well. But if you do anything else like a dungeon, or some PvP, or even herbing/mining, it feels like the XP from those activities starts making you outstrip your quests.

It seems like Blizzard wanted to make running instances, running battlegrounds, or herbing/mining viable methods of leveling. So that questing wasn't the only path. But to me it feels that if you dip into multiple areas, it hurts questing because you get pushed past the optimum level for the quests you currently have.

In Vanilla, questing was the sole means of levelling. Dungeons formed too infrequently to really affect you. Battlegrounds didn't grant XP. And herbing/mining certainly didn't help you level.

(As an aside, I don't really understand why herbing and mining started granting XP. That seems so unnecessary to me.)

I don't know how one would fix this issue. If Blizzard expects someone to do multiple activities, and adjusts XP accordingly, then someone who just quested would find themselves under-level for the quests they were getting.

So that's my observation on the state of the early game and leveling speed. I'm not sure how extensive the problem is. I have a low-level rogue, who has quested, done each available dungeon two to three times, and is a herbalist. That rogue has definitely out-leveled her quests. On the other hand, I have a low-level shaman that has done nothing but quests, with no professions. That shaman matches his quests correctly.

Tower of Radiance

I've been thinking about the talent Tower of Radiance. Common wisdom is that healing off-beacon is the way to go, rather than healing on-beacon and generating extra Holy Power. But how close are the two options?

Spell	Amount Healed
Divine Light	11733 + 1.15306p
Beacon - Divine Light	5866 + 0.57653p
Light of Dawn (Glyphed, 3pt)	11512 + 2.376p
Beacon - Light of Dawn	5756 + 1.188p

(Values taken from Elitist Jerks.)

For the on-beacon scenario, healing done = 3 DL + 1 LoD + 1 Beacon_LoD.

For the off-beacon scenario, the extra GCD contributes about 60% of a Divine Light. Healing done = 3 DL + 3 Beacon_DL + 60% * DL + 60% * Beacon_DL

If we remove the common 3 Divine Lights from both scenarios, we end up with the following:

On-beacon healing: 17268 + 3.564p
Off-beacon healing: 28159 + 2.767p

Note that on-beacon healing actually has a higher coefficient. What that means is that there is a point of spellpower such that on-beacon healing will surpass off-beacon healing. That point is around 13700 spell power.

So off-beacon healing still does more healing. But there is a cost. That 60% of a Divine Light costs a fair bit of mana, while the Light of Dawn was free. And on-beacon healing will do more if the last heal in the off-beacon scenario was a Holy Light instead of a Divine Light.

So, unless my math is greatly wrong, on-beacon healing is surprising close to off-beacon healing. It may even supersede it if the off-beacon healer casts Holy Lights sometime during the fight, as the mana saved during the on-beacon rotation can allow you to replace some of the Holy Lights with a Divine Light.

Of course, this doesn't count the practicalities of healing specific fights. Sometimes two tanks are taking the brunt of the damage, weighting towards off-beacon healing. Sometimes only one tank is taking damage, weighting towards on-beacon healing. In a 10-man, Light of Dawn is less likely to hit all 6 targets (though it does hit pets as well).

Building a Better Community, Part II

I forgot one other strategy for building a better community when I was writing the last post.

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D. Reduce Anonymity

According to John Gabriel's Greater Internet F****** Theory, the combination of anonymity and an audience causes normal people to feel free to act badly. So maybe reducing anonymity is a valid strategy to build a better community.

6. Tie all characters to a single id

Remove the idea of anonymous alts. All alts can be identified as belonging to the same player/account.

7. Tie all accounts to real word name or identity

This takes the previous idea a step further. Your online identity is linked to your real name.

In addition to reducing the anonymity of the would-be bad actor, this also might have the additional effect of "humanizing" the other players. Sometimes when you're playing with a bunch of avatars, it's easy to dehumanize them and treat them as effective NPCs. Perhaps using real names will remind people that they are playing with real people.

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I also want to respond to a couple of specific comments made.

Community Based Policing

SaiyanMan states:

Isn't the central problem: "The Internet is a horrible place to have a community"? The only working solution on a fairly large scale tends to be a strong, user community based policing.

I am not as sure of this as you are. Community based policing enforces the current norms of the community. So if the community is bad, the norms it enforces will be bad as well.

For example, if you picked 5 random WoW players and presented them with one player, Sue, who used the word "gay" as a pejorative, and other player, Jane, who does 2K dps in heroics, who do you think the community is more likely to censure?

(If you say Sue, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that you might be interested in.)

In my experience, community based policing only really works when the power is not given to the community at large, but to a subset of users who have a vision of what the community should be. Often older or original members of the community.

As well, community based policing is vulnerable to hijack by organized "mafias". A small group working together can often intentionally push the community moderation in an unintended direction. Just imagine if Goonswarm gets to be the police in your MMO community.

Moderated Servers and the Best Guilds

Winterpine suggests:

Create specific servers where there is little to no moderation or banning and see where people choose to roll their mains. Five bucks says that many who try out the "freedom of speech" servers will realize society without laws isn't as peachy as they thought, and that a little (self) moderation goes a long way in improving play experience. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see the best guilds thrive on the moderated servers.

This might or might not be a good idea. But personally, I would be shocked if the best guilds were on moderated servers.

The best players tend to come from the young, male, hyper-competitive gaming culture.¹ Killer-Achievers, basically. They are not particularly attracted to moderated servers. The culture is often crass, and contains a lot of bravado. They're not bad, per se. If the lines are laid down, they will stay more or less within them, pushing the edges where they can.

But that culture would see it as a point of pride to be top dogs on the non-moderated servers. A sort of "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" attitude.

1. I'm not saying that they're all male, or all young, but the core of most high end guilds tend to be males in their 20s.

Building a Better Community

Tongue firmly in cheek, Tobold asks what game companies could do to build a better community.

I'll take the question seriously and give several possibilities. But I'd also like to take a step back, and consider the greater strategy behind each idea. As well, remember that all things have a price, but some prices are worth paying.

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A. Improve the environment

The idea behind the Broken Windows Theory is that "humans constantly monitor other people and their environment in order to determine what the correct norms for the given situation are." An environment in disrepair encourages people to be more anti-social, while a maintained environment prevents further vandalism.

Basically, the theory states that paying attention to small violations of social norms helps prevent larger violations. Accordingly, here are a couple of suggestions following this theory:

1. Have a strict naming policy

Normally, naming rules are very relaxed, save on Role-Playing servers. Enforcing stricter naming rules for characters, guilds, and PvP names would send a signal about what is acceptable and not acceptable. We've all seen the terrible, scatological, rude, and quite frankly stupid names that abound in WoW.

They're kind of like graffiti and petty vandalism. Making sure that names are decent (and also don't use special characters) might improve the general environment.

2. Stricter forum moderation

Hyper-aggressive forum moderation would set a the standard for what is acceptable behavior. Forum bans should also result in in-game bans, further linking the idea that how one behaves on a forum should match how you behave in-game.

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B. Filter your audience

There's an old saying that "one rotten apple spoils the bunch." Here, the idea is that a single malicious player can destroy the community for numerous other players. That player might also influence other players to behave badly as well. Identifying and getting rid of that player might have the greatest impact on the quality of your community.

3. Be more willing to ban players

If it looks like a player is a bad influence, ban them. Even if it is debatable, maybe it is better to lose a good player than keep a bad player.

4. No PvP

If you follow the Bartle archetypes of Killer, Achiever, Socializer, and Explorer, Killers are the ones who enjoy harming the game experience of others. Killers are also greatly attracted to PvP. Getting rid of PvP gets rid of a major attraction for those players and makes it less likely that they will join your game.

There's some circumstantial evidence for this. First, battlegrounds have always been much worse than dungeons. Heck, I've been in BGs that featured vicious insults and trash talk when we were winning!

Second, of the MMOs I've played, the Lord of the Rings Online community (at least prior to going F2P) always had a very good community. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's the one game that featured the least PvP.

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C. Remove sources of conflict

Maybe to improve the community, the best thing to do would be to remove the things players fight over.

5. Make the game easy.

In my experience, players are pretty easy-going as long as they are successful. It's really only when failure happens that the knives come out. If the game was much easier than it is, maybe players would have less to fight about.

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Anyways, those are some ideas to improve the community of an MMO. Remember that they all have drawbacks, which I really haven't discussed at all.

Crowd Control Changes

Big Bear Butt has a good post talking about the changes coming for Crowd Control in 4.2.

Basically, sheeping a mob in a pack will no longer pull the rest of the pack.

I completely agree with BBB that this is a good change. It makes CC much more user-friendly, as it separates the CC phase from the actual pull. Rather than painstakingly marking the entire pack, we will be able to CC first, see that it was done correctly, and then pull the remaining mobs.

The DPS can even CC ahead of time, confident that they won't be pulling before the tank is ready.

As well, it will make tanking easier. The CC'd mobs will stay where they started, while the remaining mobs will be pulled to the tank. This makes it a lot easier for the tank to use AoE abilities without breaking Crowd Control. Essentially, we get some of the Wrath-style AoE capability, while still using Crowd Control.

All in all, this will be a good change for the game.

Optimizing and Fun

Several commenters advance the notion that looking up talent and gear optimizations is not fun.

And there's a lot of truth in that statement. Coming up with your own specs and strategies is a great deal of fun. Personally, if I'm looking at something new, I like to make up what I think the optimal spec will be and then go to Elitist Jerks and see how my spec differs from theirs and why.

But you know what isn't fun? Wiping.

It isn't fun to wipe to bosses you know that you could beat if only that hunter over there went to EJ, looked up a decent spec and rotation and tried it out. It isn't fun to watch your guild die because you stalled out at a boss that you know your team had the skill to beat, and optimal specs, gemming, and rotations would have been enough to push you over the hump.

I've been there and done that. To be honest, I've probably contributed to the problem in past guilds.

I'm in a guild now that takes it for granted that players will use the Internet to help determine optimum specs, rotation, reforging, and gear. That every player will come to raids pretty close to the accepted optimum for all those elements. If you app to us, and you differ from the optimum, you will face extra scrutiny.

And you know what? This is enormously freeing.

It takes so much of the "busywork" off the table. We still struggle with fights, but we're struggling with execution, and mastering the mechanics of the fight, not basic elements of how to play the class.

Talents, gear, and rotation are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to playing. They're the basics. Using community resources like EJ allows you to "shortcut" past those basics and work on more advanced techniques¹ and fight-specific mechanics.

Ironically, taking optimization for granted allows you to focus on playing the game, and not playing the spreadsheet. Someone else has made the spreadsheet for you, has done the math. Leverage their efforts, steal their results, and you get to focus on making the right gameplay decisions for the fight at hand.

1. For some examples of more advanced techniques, see Kripparian's video.

More Thoughts on Optimality

Choices and Futures

Several commenters took exception to my statement that "for a decision to be meaningful, there must be a right choice and a wrong choice."

Kring states:

I couldn't disagree more. You only have a real choice if all choices are valid.

It's like democracy. Just because you're allowed to vote doesn't mean you also have a choice. You only have a choice if there are multiple good and relevant parties.

I don't really think we're that far apart. Perhaps I'll rephrase and extend my thoughts.

For a choice to be real, it must lead to different futures. If you vote Conservative or NDP, it's a choice because the future with a Conservative government is different than the future with an NDP government. However, the desirability of each future matters.

When voting, neither future is obviously desirable. Some people would prefer the Conservative government, others the NDP. Thus neither choice is right or wrong.

However, this is not the case with optimizing. In one future, the boss dies. The other future, the boss doesn't die. The future where the boss dies is 100% more desirable. Thus, barring any side-effects, the choices that shift the probabilities towards first future are "right", and the other choices are "wrong".

For another example, take a Civ-like game. Both going for military victory or cultural victory are valid choices. But if you're pursuing a cultural victory, randomly producing tanks for no real reason when you could have made a cathedral instead is the "wrong" choice.

Now if it's a single player game, then no one else other than you pays the price for your wrong decision. But in a team game, wrong decisions hurt your team's chances of victory.

Shintar phrases this in a different manner:

Situations where there is a clearly right and a clearly wrong solution are calculations, not choices.

Sure, if that's the semantics you want to use. But it is incumbent on you to pick the best calculation in a team game. And the best calculation is determined by the optimizers.

Good Players and Sub-Optimal Choices

Masterlooter states:

If you have the "optimal" setup, and I have a "sub-optimal" one, but I do more damage than you (with equal gear), then I am more valuable to the raid. But since my setup is considered to be "inferior", I may not even get an invite to the group in the first place.

In my view, this is a bit of a strawman. The truth is that this very rarely happens.

High-skill players almost always use the optimal spec or strategy. There are a few exceptions, but they are very rare. The vast majority of the time, someone with a non-optimal spec turns out to be a low-skill player.

Encouraging medium or low skill players to feel that they are a "special snowflake" and don't need to use more optimal builds dooms them and their group to mediocrity and failure. You have enough trouble with lack of skill, why further handicap yourself with a sub-optimal build?

And even the high-skill player with the sub-optimal spec does her group a disservice. If the high-skill player switched to the optimal spec, odds are she would play at an even higher level.

DPS Meters

There's also a lot of antipathy for DPS meters among the non-optimizing crowd. This is probably uncharitable of me, but sometimes it seems like DPS just want the freedom to play badly and not get called out for it.

They'd rather no one be able to tell how terrible they really are. That might mean they have to take the "effort" to improve. Just let the tanks and healers carry the group and do the work, while they sit back and collect the loot.

After all, it's pretty obvious when the tanks and healers are failing. What's so wrong with having an element that makes it just as obvious that the DPS are failing?

Good players don't worry about DPS meters. You know why? Because they post respectable results. They're an asset to the group instead of dead weight.

Optimality

Nils and Tobold are talking about inefficiency and the fear of being sub-optimal. Both of them seem to feel that the drive to optimize is negative.

I disagree.

For a decision to be meaningful, there must be a right choice and a wrong choice. Taking the right choice makes it easier to be successful. Taking the wrong choice makes it harder.

Players optimize because there is a chance of failure, and no one wants to be the guy who is deliberately handicapping the rest of the team. The game is already hard enough. Why make it harder on the rest of your group?

Trying to stop optimization is futile. Removing the ability to inspect or dps meters just means that you don't get any feedback and can't see what's going wrong.

You can remove the decisions entirely. Remove talent points and different stats on armor. No more optimization. But that makes the game less interesting.

You can make the game easier. If there's no chance of failure, there's no point in optimizing.

You could make content less predictable. But this is no guarantee of optimizing. PvP still has optimal builds and, more egregiously, optimal group compositions. It just changes the focus on optimizing to be the most damage for the most situations.

And I don't think that PvE players like unpredictable content as you think they would. Faction Champs in ToC and Prince Malchezzar in Karazhan had unpredictable elements, and there was a lot of grumbling about those.

As well, unpredictable content can still be optimized. Think of Blackjack or Poker. It's unpredictable. Yet there are still strategies and optimizations for those games. Only now you have to take probability into account, which makes the optimizations far harder to execute.

You could rotate content such that the "optimal" build in Fight 1 becomes sub-optimal in Fight 2. Which is promptly followed by the playerbase replacing the players from Fight 1 with different players for Fight 2.

In reality, I think that most people who are against optimizing aren't really against optimizing per se. Rather, they are against other people optimizing for them. If they were the ones to come up with the "optimal" build and reveal it to the world, then they would be happy.

But it just doesn't work that way. My rule of thumb is to assume that there are people who are ten times better at this game than I am. And there are people who are ten times worse. The better people are going to come up with optimizations faster than I will. The worse people will not see what I see, and just perform at a much lower level, making grouping with them destined to failure.

For any meaningful decision in a game, someone will determine the "right" answer sooner or later. The good players in the game will figure it out pretty quickly. The bad players will never figure it out.

The best an MMO company can do is make sure that each "playstyle" is close enough to the optimal so that it is viable. But otherwise, it is impossible to have meaningful decisions in group play, and yet not have optimizations.

Paladin Tier 12

Blizzard recently unveiled the Paladin Tier 12 armor:


I think it looks rather decent. A lot of people deride the "dress" surcoat/cassock, but I rather like them. It makes paladin armor recognizably different than warrior or deathknight armor. It also plays up the "cleric" aspect of the paladin.

The helm is clearly inspired by T2, Judgement armor. In fact, where T2 was Paladin as Dark Inquistor, this set is Paladin as Fiery Inquisitor. Which is a pretty neat interpretation.

What's most interesting to me is that Blizzard did not show off any recolors of the set. And because the T12 theme is fiery armor, I don't see how they can actually do recolors this time around without wrecking the theme. So it will be interesting to see how, or even if, they differentiate the heroic version from the normal version.

My final verdict is that T12 is not in the absolute top Paladin sets (reserved for T2 and T6), but it is certainly above average.

Star Wars: The Old Republic Preview

Ouch. These guys probably aren't going to get any more previews or material from EA. Oddly courageous for the gaming media:

Our opinion of The Old Republic, formed over two solid days of playing, is that it’s one of the most boring titles we’ve ever had to endure. It’s plain and staid and deathly dull.

I don't know how absolutely accurate this will turn out to be, but I admire Bitgamer for being so willing to bite the hand that feeds them.