Actions and Consequences

In a comment to the previous post, Kring asks:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archival Saves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Do Top DPS Video

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



Direct Link

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

Lowbie Tank Tales: Floating Rage, Hand of Reckoning

Floating Rage

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

The Best Laid Plans of Blizzard Designers...

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

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

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

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

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

Low Level Warrior Tanking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elegant Design: Glyph of Life Tap (WoW)

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

First up, [Glyph of Life Tap].

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

So the following scenario unfolded in dungeon after dungeon:

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

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

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

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

Disenchanting Option

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PuG Tales

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Icecrown Citadel: Lower Spire

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

Lord Marrowgar

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

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

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

Lady Deathwhisper

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

Icecrown Gunship Battle

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

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

Simply a great, great fight.

Deathbringer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

Patch 3.3 First Impressions

Dungeon Finder

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

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

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

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

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

New 5-mans

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

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

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

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

Other Impressions

The new map and quest guide are pretty slick.

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

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

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

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

Paladins and Patch 3.3

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

Divine Intervention

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

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

Flash of Light

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

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

Lay on Hands

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

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

Aura Mastery

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

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

Repentance

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

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

Divine Sacrifice

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

Going in Blind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dragon Age: First Impressions

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

Origin Stories

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

World Building

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

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

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

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

Plot

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

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

Graphics

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

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

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

Blood

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

Gameplay

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

Random Comment about Ret Fixes

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

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

Made me laugh, in any case.

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

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

That's a good compromise.

Ad Infinitum Recruiting

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

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

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

Website: ai-lethon.com

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

Micro-Transactions

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

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

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

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

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

Dragon Age Review

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

On Sep 21, I received the following email:

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

On Nov 2, I received:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Avoidance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valithria Dreamwalker

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Icecrown Citadel.

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

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

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

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

Torchlight Review

Torchlight is Diablo. With a dog.

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

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

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

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

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