Diablo III Cash AH

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

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

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

Things I like about this plan:

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


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


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


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


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


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

Stuff I'm unsure about:

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


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

Things I don't like:

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

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

Eliminating Reforging, Hit Rating, and Expertise

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

So how can we get rid of reforging?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dev Interaction with the Community

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

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

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

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

That was not conducive to interesting answers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valor Point Capping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mastery/Crit Build In Practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy Paladin Builds

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

1. Intellect > Spirit > Haste > Crit > Mastery

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

2. Mastery > Intellect > Spirit > Haste > Crit

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

3. Intellect > Mastery > Crit > Haste > Spirit

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

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

Zaroua on Holy Paladin Mastery

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Mastery > Intellect > Spirit > Haste > Crit

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

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

Melee vs Ranged

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

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

So what are the advantages that ranged has over melee?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

Age of Conan Goes F2P

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

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

1. Sensibility

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

2. Similar, yet different.

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

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

3. Music

The music in Cimmeria is amazing.

Conclusions

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

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

Fandral Staghelm

I have always liked Fandral Staghelm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blocked Player Advancement

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

Options

There are three options.

1. She can't advance.

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

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

2. Advance through new content at her level

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

3. Advance by repeating existing content

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

Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Root Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remove the Daily Heroic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy Paladins in 4.2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy Mastery Update

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

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

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

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

Healer UI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Can the healer see the fight?

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

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

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

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

Basic Ability Conventions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Archeology versus Artifacts

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

Description

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

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

Comparison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

Revamp of the Old World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.2 Raid Nerfs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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