Ensidiagate

So Ensidia claimed the world-first kill of Arthas, but were then hit with a 72-hour ban and had their kill and titles revoked.

I admit that, like Tobold and Larisa, when I first heard the story I was a bit sympathetic to Ensidia. Their story was that a rogue using Saronite Bombs as part of his regular rotation happened to make part of the encounter easier.

However, now I think it's likely that the ban was completely deserved. Apparently, what happened was something like:

1. The Lich King destroys part of the platform during the fight.
2. Valkyrs come and snatch raid members. They have to be DPSed down before they reach the edge or they drop the person to their doom.
3. Saronite Bombs are bugged and apparently rebuilt part of the platform.
4. Ensidia apparently sent the Saronite rogue to deliberately rebuild the outer edges of the platform where the val'kyrs drop people.
5. Ensidia ignored the val'kyrs when they appeared, focusing DPS on the Lich King.
6. The val'kyrs dropped the people, but they landed on the rebuilt platform safely, and rejoined the fight.

That's textbook "exploiting a bug to avoid part of the fight". Thus, Ensidia fully deserves their ban.

Star Trek Online: Ground Combat, Skill Points

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skill Points

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

Offering Advice

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

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

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

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

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

Dreamwalker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Trek Online: Space Combat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Offline For A While

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top Video List (so far):

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

Measuring Absorbs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gevlon Is Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kicking Underperforming Players

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on FoL vs HL Builds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exponential Soft Enrages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AoE and Crowd Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Top Video List (so far):

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

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

Difficulty and WoW

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

Here's a some cold, hard truths:

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

2. Fifty percent of all people are below average.

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

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

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

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

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

Will You Play Star Trek Online?

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

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

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

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

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

Beacon of Light and Range Tip

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

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

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

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

Unifying Paladin Mana Mechanics

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

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

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

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

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

Crowd Control and Tank Threat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crowd Control

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

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

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

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

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

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