Time Management Article

Ciderhelm posted a superb article on the TankSpot forums: Time Management for Raiding Guilds.

For most people, thinking of the top tier of raiding guilds conjures thoughts of people who do nothing but play a computer game in a dark room somewhere. In fact, this is often not the case -- time for career, family, and friends are still very much a part of their lives.

The key is in time management.

It's very well written, and is very insightful. It also has tips on how a lower tier guild can take advantage of some of the time management techniques to improve their own progress.

Money Quote:

What players do not understand is how real a factor time is on the guild welfare as well as their own. Spending time gearing up for new content is almost never as well spent as time actually working on that content. This is especially true in the Burning Crusade, where stat differences and gear progression between Karazhan and Black Temple is relatively small; keep in mind that Nihilum cleared through Black Temple just 3 months after raiding began. Gear is good, but it is not key. [Emphasis mine]

Mages and AoE

If mages are supposed to be the kings of AoE damage, why do we always use warlocks in fights which require AoE?

Take Illhoof, for example. The standard strategy is to have a warlock spamming Seed of Corruption on Illhoof to take out the imps. But why not use a mage? Does it just come down to the fact that the warlock will be a lot easier to heal?

It seems a bit odd. If mages are supposed to be the best at AoE, they should be the first choice for fights which require AoE.

More Healing Macros

I made and tested a couple of new macros tonight. I find that I am not very good about using short-cooldown trinkets and spells, and so I decided to try and come up with macros to use these automatically.

Holy Light Macro

#showtooltip Holy Light
/cast Divine Favor
/stopcasting
/cast Divine Illumination
/stopcasting
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Holy Light

This macro attempts to cast Holy Light(Rank 11) with both Divine Favor and Divine Illumination. I'm a Flash of Light spammer, so when I need to pull out HL11, it's usually worthwhile to pop both these cooldowns.

Flash of Light Macro

#showtooltip Flash of Light
/use 13
/use 14
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/castsequence reset=10 Holy Light(Rank 5), Flash of Light, Flash of Light, Flash of Light, Flash of Light, Flash of Light

This macro attempts to pop both my trinkets whenever I cast my Flash of Light. This ensures that I get maximum usage out of my trinkets. The castsequence is so that HL5 keeps Light's Grace up fairly often.

You can adapt this macro so it works with any spell you spam (Fireball, Sinister Strike, etc.):

#showtooltip spell
/use 13
/use 14
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast spell

If you use these macros, you should go into Sound Options and uncheck Enable Error Speech. Otherwise it will drive you mad. Note that text error messages are cleared before you cast the actual spell. This is so you can see "Out of Range" or other useful errors.

Hit Rating Revisited

There have been some interesting developments in hit rating theorycraft since I posted my list of caps. According to this Elitist Jerks thread, miss rates are actually slightly higher than previously believed. The ranged/2H/specials miss rate is now thought to be 9% against raid bosses, and the dual-wield miss rate is 28%.

Weapon skill is believed to work differently as well. The first 5 points of weapon skill reduce your miss rate by 3%, and every 5 points after reduce it by 0.5%. (5 skill = -3%, 10 skill = -3.5%, 15 skill = -4%, etc.)

I'm inclined to believe these new numbers. Besides the evidence from experiments, this setup seems a little cleaner and more logical than the previous setup. I'll have to revise my list of caps slightly.

Ideal Raid Makeup

I think my ideal 25-man raid make-up would look like:

Tanks (3)
Prot Warrior x2
Feral Druid

Healers (7)
Holy Paladin x2
Holy Priest
Resto Druid x2
Resto Shaman x2

Melee DPS (3)
Arms/Fury Warrior
Rogue x2

Ranged DPS (9)
Hunter x3
Mage x2
Shadow Priest x2
Warlock x2

Flexible Slots (3)
Enhancement or Elemental Shaman
Mage or Warlock
Protection or Retribution Paladin

Hmm. I'm not really sure about the Protection Paladin. The DPS warrior could act as a 4th tank, but I'd want the third Blessing. Maybe use a Retribution paladin. That would give higher DPS on fights that require less than 4 tanks, but lower DPS on 4-tank fights.

What would be your ideal raid?

Paladin as Add Tanks

A couple of A'lar attempts last week got me thinking about paladin tanks again. Basically, if I were specced Protection, I would be a much better add tank than a warrior or a druid.

Ironically, this is because I can control the adds from range. Rather than chasing them down and then moving them into position, I could use Righteous Defense and Avenger's Shield to bring them to me. This is an amusing power, considering that paladins are the most melee-centric of all the classes.

The paladin's high, front-loaded threat also allows DPS to burn down adds faster. I don't think most adds deal crushing blows, so you could gear for spelldamage and stamina. Not to mention that we are hands-down the best AoE tank.

However, a paladin tank would still be much worse than a warrior/druid for tanking the main boss, or even building threat as an off-tank. Is being the best add tank enough? Is it worth bringing one paladin tank over a warrior or druid tank?

Void Reaver Down!

Even though everyone says he's easy, keeping the melee DPS up with paladins was hard. My kingdom for a resto shaman or holy priest on that fight.

I wore my Arcane Resist set, and ran into melee, keeping Judgement of Light up and tossing Flash of Lights. It was very stressful, especially because all the melee are taking damage at the same time. Judgement of Light + Improved Leader of the Pack helped a great deal.

Cosmetic vs Impact decisions

When looking at decisions a player makes in the game, there are two types: cosmetic decisions and impact decisions. Impact decisions actually have a numerical effect on your character, while cosmetic decisions don't really change anything.

It's interesting to see what a game chooses as a cosmetic or impact decision. An example of a cosmetic decision is character gender. I've played games where your gender changed your attributes (usually along the lines of males getting a bonus to strength, and females getting a bonus to intellect, or sometimes stamina). Yet in WoW, gender is a purely cosmetic decision.

In fact, almost every decision you make at the very start of the game is cosmetic. The only truely impact decision you make is your choice of class. Even race is mostly cosmetic. Sure each race has slightly different starting attributes and small abilities, but in the great scheme of things, race is mostly a cosmetic choice.[1]

Indeed, the few places where race shifts from a cosmetic choice to an impact choice are the points of big debates and much forum angst. The classic examples are Dwarf priests (Fear Ward) and Tauren tanks (+5% health). Here's a point where an expected cosmetic decision actually turned out to be an impact decision, and that causes players to become unhappy.

Making almost all initial choices cosmetic has the big advantage that it's really easy to jump right in and start playing. You don't need to worry about every little thing.

Yet, I find that for a lot of RPG game designers, there is a tendency to want to model everything. If your character is fat, that should have a game effect. If your character used to be sailor, that should have a game effect. I actually like Blizzard's decision to make most decisions cosmetic, and only have a few significant impact decisions.

Another difference between other MMOs and WoW is character appearance when wearing armor. Other games often have things like dyes, which allow you to change the look of your character. This makes your character's look a cosmetic decision, for the most part. In WoW, by contrast, the look of your character is an impact decision. You usually chose armor by stats, and if your character looks like a clown, so be it.

This decision is an interesting one. I'm not entirely sure if it is a good one. On one hand, how you look is kind of the epitome of a cosmetic decision. On the other hand, it means that your appearance is constantly changing as you change gear. And for a MMO which you play for a long time, variety in the character model which is on your screen 99% of the time is a good thing, and can help retain interest.

It also provides a talking point for people. You can't really admire someone's hat, or commiserate with them about its looks, if you can easily change things. If you read the forums, when Blizzard releases images of new armour, especially Tier sets, there's huge buzz and discussion. Would we really have that discussion and interest if we could change the look of our armour?

Not to mention that there's actually a PvP purpose to it. Fixed armour looks provide a signal to your opponent about the quality or type of gear, and a skilled team knows how to take advantage of that.

So making a decision a cosmetic or an impact one is not always obvious. Generally though, if you set an expection that a decision is one type, people will be unhappy if it turns out to be the other type.

[1] A common question on the forums is "Human or Dwarf paladin?" The humans will point out superior racials such as Diplomacy. The dwarves will point out that the humans are pansies who can't hold their liquor. Both sides will walk away thinking they've won the argument.

Light's Grace Macro

I was playing around with a macro to keep Light's Grace up on me today. In general, Flash of Light is a superior spell to downranked Holy Lights. If you compare a downranked Holy Light to a Flash of Light with equivalent mana consumption (for example, HL4 vs FoL6), you'll see that the Flash of Light has a higher base heal-per-second and--more importantly--a higher coefficient-per-second.[1]

(Coefficient-per-second refers to the amount of +healing from your gear that is applied per second. If a spell has a higher coefficient, it means that there is always a point where it will heal for more than a spell with a lower coefficient.)

However, a downranked Holy Light does have the advantage that it will give you the Light's Grace buff, which can be invaluable when you need to throw a big heal quickly. A two second HL11 can be the difference between a dead tank and a boss kill.

So I decided to try out a macro that casts Flash of Light most of the time, but casts a downranked Holy Light just enough to keep Light's Grace up:

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=10 Holy Light(Rank 5), Flash of Light, Flash of Light, Flash of Light, Flash of Light, Flash of Light

What this does is cast HL5, 5xFoL7, and then repeat. You can play with the number of FoLs and the reset timer to ensure that Light's Grace never drops off. I personally don't constantly spam, so I have the HL5 coming a bit earlier than necessary. You could add a couple of FoLs to squeeze out the maximum effect.

I tried out on Gruul, and it seemed to work reasonably well. It felt a little bit easier to nail the OT with a 2s HL11 right after coming out of a Silence. The majority of our healers are paladins, so the Hateful Strike, Silence, Hateful Strike sequence is a killer near the end of the fight.

[1] Technically, if you bring Blessing of Light into the picture, FoL6 has a lower base heal-per-second than HL4. But FoL6 becomes strictly better at about +900 healing, which is relatively trivial for a raid healer to achieve.

Tank Shortage?

In comments to the last post, people are saying that the real problem is that there is a tank shortage. I think the tank shortage could be attributed to raiding requiring extra healers as well.

It seems to be a lot harder to find a tank now than it was for the first few months after TBC. The tanking classes are warriors, druids, and paladins. Maybe raiding requiring more healers is pushing would-be paladin/druid tanks to switch to healing specs, thus reducing the total number of tanks out there.

I'm a case in point. I was Protection for all my TBC levelling and a month or two later. Now I'm Holy. +1 healer for raiding, -1 tank for 5-mans. And I think that this may be a fairly common experience for paladins. How common do you think it would be for people to go the opposite route, from healing to tanking?

Why are so Many Healers Required in TBC Raids?

Way back in 2005, in my third post ever written, I predicted that a 10-man would need 2 tanks, 5 dps, and 3 healers. And lo and behold, this prediction came true in TBC. The standard Karazhan make-up is 2 tanks/5 dps/3 healers.

However, my prediction should not have come true! It was based on the assumption that an WoW 1.0 ideal 5-man group was 1 tank/2 dps/1 healer/1 "fifth man" (paladin/shaman), and extrapolated that assumption out to 10-mans. In contrast, a TBC 5-man is 1 tank/3 dps/1 healer.

If we extrapolate that out, a 10-man should be 2/6/2, and a 25-man should be 5/15/5. Immediately we can see that those healer numbers are simply too low. When learning Karazhan you really need 3 healers. It's at the edge of possible with 2, but 3 is ideal. For 25-mans, you need 7-8 healers. My guild tried Gruul with 5 healers last week, and we just couldn't keep the tanks up. A shadow priest respecced and we got him down.

Where are these extra healers supposed to come from? Looking at recruiting posts, everyone is looking for healers.

The 5-man game assumes 20% of the playerbase are healers. The raiding game assumes 30% of the playerbase are healers. Right away we see a problem.

I think the raid game needs to be balanced for raids with fewer healers. It makes no sense to require proportionally more healers than the previous phase of the game needed. A raid that required 5/15/5 would be far easier to put together, and could be created from five 5-man groups.

The Nature of a Paladin

Without resorting to game terms, or specific mechanics, each class can be summed up in an easy-to-understand sentence, which contains the basic nature of the class.

The hunter has a pet animal, and shoots enemies with a bow or gun. The rogue sneaks around, and stabs enemies in the back. The mage blasts enemies with raw elemental or magical power. The warlock summons demons, curses enemies, steals souls, and generally trafficks in all manner of darkness.

When elements of this basic essence of the class disappear from the playstyle, it leads to unhappiness. For example, I believe that hunters are happier now that they can use their pets in instances.

What is the basic nature of the paladin?

The paladin heals her allies, and smites her enemies with a giant hammer.

Both elements are necessary. Just healing is not enough, and just smiting is not enough. A paladin is both shield AND hammer.

In raid content, Holy fails this test, but Retribution fails just as badly. Respeccing to a warrior-lite is not enough, but neither is speccing to be a priest-lite. I enjoyed playing a paladin while levelling. Now that I am raiding, I would like to play a paladin as a paladin once again.

That's all. I don't want to top the DPS charts. I don't want to top the healing healing charts. All I want is to do is heal my allies and smite my enemies with a giant hammer, without being a liability to my raid.

And for those of you saying reroll, I chose the paladin for a reason. If I had wanted to only do damage, I would have rolled a warrior or rogue. If I had wanted to only heal, I would rolled a priest or druid.

Question to Ask at Blizzcon

"In Blizzard's view, where should paladins be in raids: in the melee zone with the rogues and warriors; or in the back with the priests and mages?"

Just give us a straight answer, once and for all.

More on Attunements

Why have attunements?

Attunements are useful when the answer to "Are we ready for X?" is not obvious. For example, you are ready for Gruul when you've beaten High King Maulgar. You're ready for Magtheridon when you've beaten Gruul. You're ready for Scarlet Monastery when you hit level 35. If you can ask the question, and get a one-sentence answer from someone, attunement is not necessary.

However, the question of "Are we ready for Karazhan?" is a lot more complex, and generally involves discussing relative gear levels. That's why the attunement process works. If your raid can do the attunement chain together, especially Black Morass, your raid is ready to try Kara. They may not blow through it in a single night, but you won't be out of your league either.

Similarly, "Are we ready for heroics?" is another good question. Reputation is a decent stand-in for gear level and familiarity with instancing. Heroic attunement isn't quite as good as Karazhan, because it's easy to do an unequal amount of instances, and end up with Exalted rep with one faction, while not having Revered with another. I did this with Sha'tar and Lower City reputations. Reputation is a reasonable proxy for readiness, but it is not perfect.

But outside of those two situations, it is very easy to state readiness in terms of other bosses or character level. And so formal attunements in-game are not necessary. There are already de facto attunements.

One thing I've always found--which is not intuitive from the outside--is that the raiding playerbase is very conservative. They are far more likely to err on the safe side when it comes to trying new content, or content which they think may be beyond their current gear level. Half the time, you don't need to slow them down, they will slow themselves down.

Does Blizzard need to slow down access to content?

Jehu, in a comment to the previous post, says that:

Blizzard is in business to make money, so they have to find a way to keep emptying people's pockets on a monthly basis. They know that players that want to experience and see limited access content will do what it takes to get there. Hence, beyond the challenge of the actual content therein, there also has to be a way to slow down access to that content so it is not experienced too quickly, thereby extending the amount of time a player stays "hooked" on the game and keeps paying a monthly fee.

I disagree with this statement. How many of us finished WoW 1.0 content? I didn't, and I'll venture that 99% of the playerbase didn't either. And how much of that was because of attunements? Given that attunements in WoW 1.0 were trivial, I don't think they had any effect on the inability of players to complete content.

Blizzard doesn't need to slow access down to content. Indeed, they need to increase access to existing content. Blizzard doesn't lose people because of lack of content, they lose people because the content is not accessible. Putting up unnecessary barriers just hurts this situation even more.

Attunements

Attunements are an interesting topic of discussion. They are obvious "gates" to content. The benefit of attunements is that they provide a pathway to content. You do Karazhan and Gruul before Serpentshrine Cavern, you do Magtheridon before Tempest Keep.

For most of WoW, the pathway is provided by level. At level 35-40, you do Scarlet Monastery, 40-45 Uldaman, etc. But at endgame, Blizzard resorts to attunements to provide the same pathway.

There are actually several types of attunements in WoW. First are the keys, where only one person in the group needs the key in order to :

1. Upper Blackrock Spire
2. Shattered Halls
3. Shadow Labyrinth
4. Arcatraz

Second are the initial raid attunments, where you need complete a non-raid instance to attune to a raid instance.

1. Molten Core
2. Blackwing Lair
3. Karazhan

Third are the heroic instances, where you need to run a fair amount of non-heroic instances before being allowed to run heroics.

Finally, there are attunements which require you to complete raid instances.

1. Serpentshire Cavern (Removed)
2. Tempest Keep (Removed)
3. Mount Hyjal
4. Black Temple

But how many of these attunements are really necessary? The thing is that players are pretty good at figuring out what the pathways are. AQ40 had no attunement, but everyone knew you had to beat Blackwing Lair before moving on.

Would anything really change if the keys for the first set of instances didn't exist? I don't think anything would really be different, save that it would have been a lot easier to make groups for UBRS back in the day.

To be honest, out of all the attunements listed above, the only one I think is actually necessary is the Karazhan attunement. Insisting that you have successfully done several of the regular instances before moving on to Karazhan is probably a good idea, especially for guilds and players who have never raided before. Attuning for BWL is unnecessary, as most people know that MC comes first, and Razorgore will ensure that you understand this.

As well, I think the implementation of the fourth class of attunements is not done well. It's not enough to be able to attune your current raid, you need to be able to attune your entire raiding force. For example, let's say your guild successfully defeats Kael'thalas. The next day, all excited, you head for Mount Hyjal. What are the odds that you will be able to field a full raid? For most guilds, the odds are low, because you need the exact same 25 people as the previous night. But you won't get the exact same people. A couple will not be able to log on for real life reasons, and you'll need to swap other people in. Only because of the attunement, you can't. And that's just messy and saps your momentum.

In general, artificial barriers to content are not really necessary. There are already enough real barriers in terms of level, difficulty, and required gear. Keys and attunements are not going to significantly slow down the hardcore, and they just make life more annoying for the more casual players. I think that WoW would not be hurt by removing most of the attunements and keys in the game.

Picture

For some reason, Blogger is not saving the picture when I use it in the sidebar only. Hopefully adding a post with it will make it more permanent.

As an aside, why do random Kara epics look exactly like Dungeon 3 pieces? I don't mind reusing model skins, but you should never replace one item with an item that looks exactly like it. As well, collecting the entire Dungeon 3 set is an accomplishment. A player who has spent the time to get the entire set shouldn't look the same as someone who picked up a couple Kara epics.

The green-brown lawbringer looked pretty bad, but it was better than the current skins for the non-set Kara pieces.

PvP-only or PvE-only spells

Perhaps it is time that some spells and abilities got tagged as PvP-only or PvE-only. It seems a bit artificial, but it would make balancing a bit easier.

This thought is prompted by the upcoming change to Blessing of Sacrifice in patch 2.2:

Blessing of Sacrifice now has a 1-minute cooldown.

It's pretty much aimed at PvP, where Sacrifice is constantly used to break Crowd Control for paladins. However, this change makes Sacrifice useless for both PvP and PvE purposes.

Admittedly, Sacrifice doesn't get used an awful lot in PvE. But there are times when it is useful. I use it on AoE packs to keep multiple mages up. I have fond memories of almost killing myself with it in the BWL Suppression Room. (It turns out that putting Sacrifice on 8 mages/warlocks adds up to a lot of damage.) It's also useful for controlling Greater Blessings, allowing you to put Greater Blessing of Salvation on DPS warriors and "clean" it off the tanks. There are a few fights where you can use it to break Crowd Control (for example, Maiden of Virtue, or Moroes for a paladin tank). I've even used it on the tank, to mitigate damage, if I am on Salvation duty.

It's a neat little spell with a lot of uses. It's not a spell you use all the time, but comes in handy on occasion. However, this cooldown pretty much makes the spell useless for my purposes.

The annoying part is that yes, Sacrifice is probably overpowered in PvP. Virtual immunity to crowd control is overpowered, even if you can purge/dispel it. But adding the cooldown removes it from both PvP and PvE.

Maybe it would be better if Sacrifice was tagged "PvE-only" and you could not use it in Arenas. There are already several spells that are effectively PvE-only: Lay on Hands, Righteous Defense, Taunt, Blessing of Salvation, etc.

There are probably several other spells that could benefit from the same treatment. And maybe Blizzard could introduce PvP-only spells, which could only be used in arenas.

PvP and PvE are very different creatures. Is it really ideal to attempt to balance for both simultaneously?

Gruul Dead!

We finally killed Gruul the Dragon-Slayer. For some reason, Gruul has stymied us for longer than any other boss so far. Tonight everyone stepped up and we got him down in 13 growths.

The best thing about this is that we can finally start on the full 25-man content, and not worry about 10-man raids.

+Hit Caps for Bosses

Note: This page used to have all the hit caps for level 70. Because it was still getting linked and visitors, I have deleted all the data from the page, as it is now obsolete.

DoTs, Resilience, and Cleanse

One of the upcoming changes in the new patch is that Damage-Over-Time spells will now have their damage reduced by resilience. Some DoT classes see this as unfair, because resilience is a stat targeting critical hits, and DoTs cannot crit.

I think the reason DoTs need to be reined in a bit is that their normal counters are much less effective these days. Traditionally, the downside to DoTs is that they can be Cleansed or Dispelled. But Cleanse is no longer as powerful as it once was, due to three new factors in TBC.

First, Unstable Affliction punishes you for Cleansing. It does a significant amount of damage, and the Silence effect is a killer. It is a superb guard for the other DoTs.

Second, there are several new talents which increase the chance of resisting the Cleanse.

Finally, many classes are able to apply 2 magic debuffs per global cooldown(GCD). While Cleanse only removes 1 magic debuff per GCD. Shadow priests in particular are insanely annoying for this, as all their spells add an extra Shadow Weaving debuff. This means the Cleanser is always falling behind. Affliction Warlocks use Shadow Embrace to accomplish the same thing.

As well, Cleanse is an entirely defensive action, and that means that the attacker has tempo, or is controlling the fight while the defender is Cleansing. While you Cleanse you can't use special attacks or heal. In general, because of tempo, defense needs to be more powerful than offense to be a viable tactic.

These three factors have conspired to significantly reduce the power of Cleanse. Thus DoTs need to be reigned in using another method, which is Resilience in this case.