Buff Spells and Abilities

A couple weeks ago, a Blizzard CM posted the following in response to a forum thread:

Why do you feel blessings and auras are fun? I can understand that it feels "nice" to help other players with buff spells, but, in general, they were just niche spells that actually didn't contribute much to meaningful game play (Seals are a different story, I guess). I never thought to myself on my Pally that turning on Retribution or Devotion Aura was going to result in an exciting change besides some passive armor or thorns-like-damage reflect.

Buff spells are fun, but articulating exactly why is a bit of a challenge. They're not difficult decisions, which leads to the claim of "not meaningful gameplay." But not everything needs to be a difficult decision. The mere presence of a buff spell means that before the group even starts playing, people in the group are better off. Buff spells enhance the idea that the characters are stronger together.

It's also part of the ritual before starting something. Food, flask, buff up and then pull. When all decisions and actions occur in combat, I think something is lost. These actions in preparing for combat are important too.

I think buff spells might be most important to healer players. They're a concrete manifestation of your support. You buff your allies, you buff random people. I liked joining a group with a druid and seeing Mark of the Wild go up. I liked having Blessings and Auras.

Now, buff spells do have a lot of problems. The presence of buff spells mean that you want specific classes, rather than letting people play what they want. If the class was balanced around the buff spell, then the best plan was to only take one person of that class, and not multiples.

(Though, it seems that without buff spells, play what you want basically becomes "take the top parsing specs", so I'm not sure that we've truly gained anything.)

Blizzard tried to get around that in previous expansions by handing buffs out to every class. But that kind of watered down the whole concept. So in Legion, they've pretty much removed buff spells, or made them "interesting". Of course, it turned out that the new Blessing of Might was too interesting for Retribution paladins to handle, and so it had to be removed.

A Design for Class Buffs

Here's what I would do to reintroduce buffs:

• Three buff types - 5% damage increase, 5% damage reduction, 5% healing taken/output (numbers are subject to tuning)
• One cast buffs the raid. 
• Buffs of the same type don't stack.
• Healing specs get the buffs
• Holy/Disc Priest - Prayer of Fortitude (healing)
• Resto Druid - Mark of the Wild (tanking)
• Mistweaver Monk - White Tiger statue (damage)
• Holy Paladin - Blessing of Might (damage), Wisdom (healing), Kings (tanking). Only one blessing at a time.
• Resto Shaman - Totems: Windfury (damage), Strength of Earth (tanking), Mana Tide (healing). Only one totem at a time.

Basically, your healer brings a buff to the group, an iconic spell for most of the classes (I'm not entirely sure what monks had). Paladins and shamans, being the traditional buff classes, have versatility. A full raid heal team with several classes will bring all 3 buffs. The specs and classes who I think most enjoy buffing get them back, without overloading everyone with complexity, or needing a spreadsheet to fill out a raid.

Updates

Since I don't seem to be doing well at actually writing posts, here's a round-up of what I've been doing gaming-wise.

World of Warcraft

My paladin has gotten the 35th point in The Silver Hand, and I'm at 34 in The Ashbringer. I've done all the Suramar quests, and am pretty much ready for 7.2.

I have a Horde warrior at 110, and have finished the class order campaign. However, I haven't done much else with it.  I also levelled a Demon Hunter to 110, but that character hasn't even finished the class order campaign.

FFXIV

This is pretty much dormant, waiting for the next patch. The interesting thing here is that I haven't done the second 24-man raid, or the 2nd and 3rd 8-man raid. I play a tank, and I seem to have concluded that those pieces of content are too complicated for me, for some reason.

Diablo 3

I started a Demon Hunter in Season 9. Really, I did this because my 70 Crusader has the same name as my current 70 Demon Hunter, and I want a Demon Hunter with a different name. I'm not sure if this character will make it to 70, though.

Pillars of Eternity

I made it to Act 3, and I just can't seem to push myself further. Maybe I'll spin this out into a full post.

The basic problem I'm having is that I don't like anyone in this world, so I have no real impulse to keep going. It's kind of like my attitude to Game of Thrones: if you kill all the characters I care about, I'm left with a book full of characters I don't care about, and that rapidly becomes a book I stop reading.

Diablo's 20th Anniversary

It's the 20th anniversary of the release of Diablo, and the various Blizzard games are celebrating. These are the events I've tried.

World of Warcraft

In WoW, there are Treasure Goblins which spawn in the Broken Isles, in the Dalaran Sewers, or at the end of instances. Kill them fast enough, and you can take a portal to the Cow Level, which has a lot of diabolical tauren, cows, and the Cow King. Killing the Cow King gives you a toy.

I recommend going for a Treasure Goblin in the Dalaran Sewers. You can pick up a guard from the guard captain for 5g, and that will keep you out of PvP (for 5 minutes or so). There are usually lots of players in the sewers, making it easier to kill the Goblin.

You can only loot the Cow King once, no matter how many times you kill him. However, you can loot multiple Treasure Goblins. Apparently the Cow King is a mess on PvP servers, but that's what you get for rolling PvP.

All in all, a short, fun event with some Diablo-themed loot.

Diablo 3

Diablo 3 has a small area and dungeon which mimics the original Diablo. There's a filter making all the graphics look old-school and pixelated, though all the mechanics are still Diablo 3. There's 16 levels in total, and four old bosses.

I recommend that you start with a new level 1 character in an Adventure game on Normal. You can portal right near the entrance to the new area and enter it without killing anything. Completing the dungeon on normal with that character gives you an achievement and pet. Plus it gives you the enjoyment of low level gearing and gaining levels and abilities.

One thing I wasn't sure about was if you were allowed to go back to town before finishing and still get the achievement. I ended up just dropping all the blue and yellow items that I didn't equip.

I did it with a new Crusader, and it was pretty easy. If you're thorough, you can get almost all the seasonal achievements in that one run. The only one that takes multiple runs is the achievement to kill all the unique mini-bosses.

This was a lot of fun, and the old-school graphics did a good job at invoking nostalgia. And at the same time subtly pointing out that normal D3 is a pretty good looking game.

Rogue One

This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: Rogue One.

I saw Rogue One yesterday, and I am not quite sure how to word my feelings. It wasn't a bad movie, but it wasn't a very good one either. Decent enough, I guess.

The truth is that Rogue One commits the same sin as most modern action movies: there is too much action.

As a result, you can't really tell much about the characters, as they spent 95% of their time being shot at, shooting people, or running away from stuff. The characters certainly seemed serviceable enough, though I don't really remember their names or much about them.

The action set pieces all seemed fine and well done. I do wonder if the movie would have been better as a pure infiltration/heist piece, rather than the warzone of the last third.

I did like the bureaucratic in-fighting in the Empire, with both Tarkin and Krennic struggling to make sure they got credit for the Death Star. That felt very true to life.

Tarkin was CGI, and I thought that was pretty decent. I hope it doesn't start a trend of making movies with dead actors, though.

Vader's cameos were pretty good, especially at the end of the movie.

I don't really know what else I can say about Rogue One. A bunch of disjointed observations for a movie which really was a bunch of disjointed scenes strung together. Each individual scene was pretty good, but it never really became a whole, complete thing.

SWTOR's Command XP System

In their latest expansion, The Old Republic introduced a unified item reward system for endgame. Basically, all activities give some amount of "command" XP. Once you gain enough CXP, you gain a command level and get a lootbox. The lootbox has a random item in it. The quality of item you get depends on your current command level.

The community reaction to this is very negative. Personally, I don't think it's that bad a system. Its one great advantage is that you can do whatever activity you like, and you'll earn gear. You aren't "forced" to do raids or PvP.

But perhaps people like being able to "optimize" their gear hunt. To go after specific pieces in specific different activities. I complained once about grinding blue bars in WoW, specifically because you could not optimize your gameplay, and thus it was less interesting. In a way, this CXP system is very similar.

Or perhaps it's because the optimization is really obvious. Find the activity with the best ratio of CXP to time spent and spam it. Perhaps if Bioware made the CXP system artificially more complex, like having diminishing returns on activities, players would find it more "fun".

Another group of players complain because the system is entirely random. What if CXP had been a straight currency system, where you spend CXP at a vendor to purchase items? The grind is still there, but at least there is no random factor in obtaining loot. But then the random system gives you more gear because it expects you to end up wasting a large amount of it. A true purchase system would have very high prices to compensate.

Another possibility might be to "seed" the game with set tokens. Certain bosses or activities can reward specific set tokens, maybe with a cap on how many tokens you can earn in a week. So people can target those activities if they need that exact piece. The Command XP system would still exist, but would be more supplemental.

I don't know. I'm rather sympathetic to Bioware here. People always complain about "needing" to do activity X, which they dislike, to get gear. Bioware makes a decent system aimed squarely at letting you play whatever you want. And they end up with a huge community outcry.

Personal Loot and Set Pieces

I was musing about Personal Loot a bit more, and began to wonder if Personal Loot would fall out of favor with guilds when Nighthold is released.

A somewhat unique element of the raids released so far is that there have been no tier sets released. The first Legion tier set is coming in Nighthold.

At that point, though, guilds may feel that guaranteeing X set tokens for the raid each week through Master Loot is better than leaving set bonuses up to random chance. Sure, on an individual level you may have to wait, but eventually it will be your turn.

I'm also watching The Old Republic's new loot system, where all loot, including set pieces, comes in a random lootbox. It does feels like the the largest complaint against the system is the possibility of getting very unlucky and never getting your set bonuses.

Well, the SWTOR community doesn't like the system as a whole, but I think that the set pieces are the single biggest complaint. I wonder if Bioware could mitigate a lot of the complaints simply by having set tokens drop from a few raid bosses, even with leaving set pieces dropping from the lootbox as well.

It will be interesting to see if Nighthold does change the dynamic, and push organized raids back towards Master Loot.

Raiding and Time Management Issues

My guild is moving along steadily. We're currently 7/7 Heroic Emerald Nightmare (Ahead of the Curve!), but now we're running into time management issues.

It's actually kind of interesting how things have turned out. I think the guild leadership expected to be a casual Normal-mode guild for the most part, and maybe work on a few heroic bosses in the time left after the Normal raid ended. So we've ended up with a Normal raid on Friday where everyone in the guild is welcome to come. And then we have a Heroic raid on Saturday which you have to "qualify" for. 

The qualifications are really low, but it's just enough that you actually know the correct rotation for your spec and have minimal gear. But it's kind of indicative of the mindset of the guild, in that they see Heroic as "not for casuals".

The problem, however, is that even though we raid two days a week, it's sort of like we only raid one day a week, but in two different worlds. Friday we do 7/7 N EN, and there's maybe enough time to poke at Odyn. Saturday is 7/7 H EN, and again, barely enough time to poke at Trials of Valor.

If you add to that the casual inclination to farm gear before tackling something hard, and you can see how--even though we are relatively successful--we're kind of stuck at the same time, and not really progressing forward.

To me, the best solution would be to see if we can take the Friday group to Heroic EN. The vast majority of the raid is the same for both nights. (Though a lot of people now play alts on Friday.) If we can kill 3 or 4 Heroic bosses on Friday, I think that would free up enough time on Saturday to make solid attempts on Trials of Valor.

But I don't know if that squares with the way guild leadership views Heroic raiding. Ultimately, in their heart of hearts, I think they still believe we are a Normal mode guild, and the majority of people in the guild aren't really ready for Heroic raiding.

An Interesting Twist on Faction Warfare

The Old Republic is launching its latest expansion, Knights of the Eternal Throne, tomorrow. One of their new elements caught my eye. In the expansion, you declare if you are Light Side or Dark Side. Then doing stuff generates points for your side. Whichever side gets to LS/DS 5 first "wins", and that side gets gear faster. But for the other side:

During the “Victory State”, that side’s influence can be seen and felt throughout the galaxy. Powerful bosses loyal the victor’s side will appear on Tattooine, Alderaan, Hoth, and Dromund Kaas or Coruscant. On each of those worlds, there are 8-10 possible places the bosses may appear, and a 25% chance in each spawn area that the boss will stay and face battle. If the losing side can defeat these bosses they will earn bonus Command Experience as well as a chance to earn Dark or Light Tokens. For example, if the light side wins, light side bosses will randomly appear on some worlds. If dark-aligned players defeat these enemies, they have a chance to earn Dark Tokens. These tokens can be used at the special cosmetic item vendor mentioned above.

The losing side gets extra bosses to fight, as well as a boost in the next war. This is a pretty neat consolation for losing, as extra bosses/content is always fun. It's also very flavorful, as the new bosses represent the winning side oppressing the losing side or flaunting their power. I think this is a pretty decent attempt at making a mechanic which encourages the sides to switch winning and losing, and keep everyone from defecting to the winning side.

The only issue I see is that it would have been ever more flavorful as Republic versus Empire, rather than Light vs Dark. But I guess SWTOR has moved away from that faction division.

RPGs, Stats, and Conversations

I decided to try and finish some of the unfinished games that I have hanging around. I'm currently working on Pillars of Eternity. The first time I played Pillars, I was very enthusiastic at the start, but lost interest somewhere in Defiance Bay. This time through, though, I think I've put a finger on what caused me to stop playing.

I created a paladin, as normal. In Pillars, the paladin's main stat is Resolve. But many of the early Resolve conversation options are, well, not quite paladin-like.

The early Resolve conversation options are very aggressive, almost intimidating the opposition through sheer force of will. As an example, take Rorschach's famous line from Watchmen: "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me." That's the kind of high-Resolve conversation options the early part of Pillars contains. I suppose it is high-Resolve, but it's not exactly paladin-like.

(Though perhaps Rorschach is a paladin, after a fashion. He certainly was the only one who stayed true to his beliefs, unflinching in the face of overwhelming opposition.)

A Paladin?

In any case, I think last time I was regretting making a character with high Resolve, and wishing I had spent my points in Perception or Intelligence. I think that's what caused me to drop away from the game the first time.

This time, though, I realized the issue, and simply ignored Resolve lines that I disliked. I'm also not really trying for "perfect" results, but just taking the outcomes as they happen. So I'm making more progress, and more fitting Resolve options are coming up later.

I thought it was an interesting conflict between stats and personality in the more old-school RPGs.

A Loot System Suite

This would be my ideal suite of built-in loot systems for an MMO. Each system is aimed and optimized for a different audience.

1. Personal Loot

• Items are handed out on an individual basis, and are independent of other people in the group.
• Items cannot be traded.
• Aimed at eliminating loot drama entirely, as you get what the system gives you.
• Is the fixed loot system for any group activity where you queue for a group.

2. Master Loot

• The group leader gets full control over who gets which items.
• Items can be traded with other people in the same group.
• Aimed at guild groups who want to use their own system, be it Loot Council, DKP, etc, to distribute loot.

3. Need/Greed with WinCount

• 3 buttons on an item popup: Main-spec, Off-spec, Greed.
• Main-spec beats Off-spec beats Greed.
• Each button has a WinCount associated with it for each player.
• WinCount starts at zero for the instance
• When you win an item, the WinCount for the button you chose is incremented by 1.
• Lower WinCount beats higher WinCount.
• If choice and WinCount are tied, random roll for winner.
• Items can be traded with other people in the same group. This does not affect WinCount.
• No Disenchant option, so mistakes with loot are always recoverable.
• Aimed at pre-made groups who want a reasonably fair loot system that distributes loot widely with minimal administrative overhead.
• Someone who rolls Main-spec all the time is expected to be dealt with by the group leaders. If people insist on gaming the system, then Personal Loot or Master Loot is a better option.
• Basically requires more trust, in exchange for more speed and less overhead.

4. Auction

• 2 button on an item popup: Bid, Pass, with a short timer.
• Bidding starts at 1000 gold.
• Bid increases the current bid by 10%.
• If the timer runs out, the item goes to the highest bidder.
• Gold is taken from winning bidder and divided evenly among other players in the group.
• Items cannot be traded.
• If no one bids, the item is given to someone at random.
• Aimed at pre-made groups which want to sell items to people, rewarding geared players who help carry the group.
• This type of system is popular in Asia, so may as well build it in for them.

There would be some other restrictions. Like when you make a group in the group finder, you have to choose a loot system, which is clearly displayed. Once you've chosen a loot system and listed your group, you cannot change it.

This is the type of loot system suite I would like. Each system is very different from the others, and has specific places in the game, or specific audiences, where it is better suited. I think that is a better way to go than four systems which only differ from each other slightly.

Personal Loot is a Corrupted System

I'm going to define a "corrupted system" as the following: The developers design a system for a specific purpose. Someone else comes along, and says, "That system is really cool, but if we make this tweak, we can also use the system for a different purpose." So the tweak is made, but the result ends up weakening the system for the original purpose.

To see what I mean, let's take Personal Loot. Blizzard introduced Personal Loot to eliminate loot drama when grouping with strangers. The game gives individuals loot, and that's that.

But then Blizzard allowed Personal Loot to be trade-able to other members of the group. That immediately cuts against the original purpose, to eliminate drama. Now we have mods like Personal Loot Helper which call out in group chat when you get an item that you can trade and someone else needs. Refusing to trade creates drama.

Blizzard should have stuck with the original plan. Completely eliminate loot drama in transient groups. If you want to share loot, use Master Loot.

Part of my annoyance at Personal Loot is that my guild likes to use it during raids. I have no idea why, as it turns loot distribution into a huge hassle of people calling out tradeable items and having to find others to trade. It's pretty much a dumber version of Master Loot.

Personal Loot has its purpose, and it is an important purpose. It should be designed to fulfill that purpose to the best possible degree. Instead Personal Loot was watered down so that it is usable in a greater variety of situations. But those other situations already had reasonable options.

Did Eve Online Go F2P?

Syncaine is adamant that Eve Online did not go F2P with its new alpha accounts. I think he's mostly right, but its interesting to see exactly why. After all, a pretty literal reading of "Free-To-Play" gives you the fact that people can play a hugely significant amount of Eve for free.

The difference lies in the nature of subscriptions. A subscription is a barrier to entry. If you don't want to pay $15/month, you can't play the game.

But a subscription is also a "cap" on revenue. If a dedicated player would be happy to pay $40/month, she can't. (Well, unless we get into multi-boxing, etc.)

What the F2P games currently do is that they remove both facets of the subscription. They remove the barrier to entry, and they also remove the cap on revenue. If a dedicated player wants to drop $40/month, they'll happily sell her lockboxes or whatever.

The F2P marketing emphasizes the first facet, because it sounds very generous and is good marketing. But I think they actually make their money from the second facet, from dedicated players spending above the subscription cap.

Eve Online's program is fairly unique in that it dropped the barrier to entry side of subscriptions, but kept the cap on revenue. Aside from buying a few ship skins, most transactions are a constant amount per month of play-time.

So Eve Online is not F2P as we commonly think of it. But it is half-way there. If CCP unveils a much expanded in-game store, then at that point we can say that Eve Online has truly gone F2P.

Return to Karazhan

In Patch 7.1, Blizzard returned to a fan-favourite instance from The Burning Crusade: Karazhan. The new Karazhan instance is a call-back to the old one, but is designed for a 5-person group, rather than a raid.

Return to Karazhan is also part of an interesting new trend in Legion: a move away from transient content, and towards more extended content. Return to Karazhan are is the third Mythic-only dungeon, and then there are also Mythic+ dungeons. Personally, I think it's a good trend, shifting the balance back. Regular heroic versions of these dungeons are coming in a later patch.

Return to Karazhan is also a much longer dungeon than we've seen in a very long time, maybe not since Blackrock Depths in Vanilla. The first time I went into Kara with a guild group, we only managed to kill 4 bosses in 4 hours. As one guildie put it, "[Kara] isn't a 5-man dungeon, it's a 5-man raid!"

The next week we did better, of course, and managed to down all 8 bosses in 4 hours. But it's still a very long instance, and would be a good candidate for a smaller guild to do over a couple of nights.

The bosses are all very well-done. They're almost all call-backs to the original bosses and share similar themes. Old-school players will recognize most of the fights, but the mechanics are all very well designed to work with a 5-man group instead of a raid.

The first half of the instance is fairly normal, but the second half has this crazy Alice-in-Wonderland feel to it. For example, for one part, you're shrunk down to a tiny size and have to deal with trash like a single normal rat (who hits like a truck, by the way) or a single spider. The boss of this area is a single Mana Devourer, which is a weak trash mob in the rest of the instance which you usually kill multiples at a time. That whole area just makes me smile when remembering it.

About the only negative thing I can say about Return to Karazhan is that the Chess event is not very good. It's kind of boring, takes up a lot of time, and it isn't even a boss with loot. It also comes at the very end of the instance where you just want to get to the final boss. It feels like something that should have been cut, but was left in because everyone would have complained if Return to Karazhan didn't have a Chess event like old Karazhan.

But all in all, Return to Karazhan is an excellent instance.

Legendaries in Legion

I got my first (and only) Legion legendary a couple of weeks ago: [Ilterendi, Crown Jewel of Silvermoon]. So I immediately respecced to Judgement of Light.

It actually works pretty decently. Judgement into Light of Dawn into Holy Shock does a fair amount of healing. Judging more or less on cooldown contributes about 25k dps, and it doesn't seem to really drop my total healing.

It got me thinking about the general design of legendaries in Legion. In many respects, I think my experience is how Blizzard intended legendaries to be used. You get one, and you build your character around it. So each legendary gives you a slightly different playstyle.

But one issue is that you may not like that playstyle. I like Judgement of Light, but it is mechanically different from the other builds, and I can see some healers disliking having to keep an eye on the enemies. Not to mention that it generally works best with some macros to smooth things out.

Another issue is that some playstyles will strictly math out better than others. Ilterendi is consider the second-best Holy Paladin legendary, and pretty close to the best. So it's not an issue for me. But someone who gets one of the "worse" legendaries will be unhappy.

But if everyone gets to choose their legendary, or the drop rate is high enough that you eventually get them all, then everyone will pick the one considered "Best-in-slot". And that seems to negate the whole "build-around" aspect.

The other part is that the legendaries have secondary stats on them, and they might be the "wrong" stats for your class. I do think it would have been better if the legendaries only had primary stats.

Another possibility might have been to have the legendaries be more common, but they have a lower item level base. Then there could be Warforged or Titanforged versions. This way, it would be fairly easy to get access to the "build-around" component, but a player might choose to build around a Titanforged version of a weaker legendary.

Or maybe add an expensive device that allows you to transmute legendaries. A Kanai's Cube. That way if you really did not like the legendary you got, you could spend resources on getting the one you desired.

Also making it completely random was probably not the best of ideas. I think getting a random legendary from a quest to kill the last raid boss (in any difficulty) would have been a better way of handing them out.

All in all, legendaries in Legion remind me of garrisons in Warlords. The system is not quite there, but is pretty close. A few more iterations might have made it much better.

FFXIV's Haunted House

As part of the All Saint's Wake (Halloween) event this year, FFXIV added an interesting small piece of content: a haunted house.

It's essentially a non-combat dungeon for four people join of any class or level. (Well, I think you need to be level 15 to participate in the event.) SE reused one of the spookier dungeons, Haukke Manor. But instead of the normal mobs, they have patrolling monsters. You have to sneak behind them. The party has a combined sanity meter. If a patrol spots you, they turn you into a pumpkin and reduce the group's sanity by a bit.

The group has to complete 3 challenges before time runs out (30 minutes) or they lose all their sanity. The challenges are random, and selected from a pool. They are fairly simple, and mostly an excuse to send the players searching around the manor. One challenge is that four rooms in the manor have magical circles, and each player has to stand in a circle. Another challenge requires you to collect 15 cookies from the different rooms. A third challenge has chests in all the rooms, with most chests trapped. But there are clues which point you to the correct room, and the party has to work together to call out clues and cover the floors.

It's a relatively simple piece of content, but it's fun. It's a nice change of pace from a combat dungeon. It's also an interesting feature to have the group split up to cover different areas of the manor. Reusing Haukke Manor is clever, as it's a nice callback to a "spooky" dungeon, and very thematically appropriate.

The only loot is the event currency, and if you run the haunted house three times, you'll get enough to buy all the new items. The pacing of the dungeon is also very well done. Ten minutes per challenge, and 100 sanity is enough to make the end a bit tense, especially with new people, but isn't excessively challenging. Though one of my runs finished with 6/100 sanity, and that was a little nerve-racking.

All in all, I think the Haunted House in FFXIV is an excellent and innovative piece of content. I think the community reaction has been quite positive as well. It will be interesting to see in what direction the dev team takes these ideas.

SWTOR's New Endgame Loot System

The Old Republic is introducing an interesting new endgame loot system in their next expansion:

First, here are the details on how gearing will work at level 70:

• Once you hit level 70, the source of end-game gear will be Command Crates from Galactic Command.

• Most activities in the game will earn Command Experience Points (CXP), which will earn you Command Ranks. Each time your Command Rank increases, you earn a Command Crate.

• The higher your Command Rank, the better gear that will drop from your Command Crates.

• The highest difficulty Operations and Uprisings, along with Ranked Warzones are intended to be the fastest ways to earn CXP. This means they are the fastest way to get the best gear.

• Both PvP and PvE gear will come from Command Crates. Their gear is now shared as Expertise is being removed (head to this thread to discuss PvP/PvE itemization specifically).

• Gear will no longer drop from bosses as all gear will come from Command Crates. All cosmetic/unique drops will still remain on those bosses (Stronghold Decorations, Wings of the Architect, etc.).

• Players will be able to craft comparable item level gear without set bonuses.

This system reminds me of the loot system in Overwatch. All activities give CXP, and every level you get a loot box. Gear that comes from the loot box is based on your endgame level.

It essentially converts gear into a straight currency system, albeit one with a some randomness in reward. It heavily simplifies the endgame gear system, and unifies it. Now you can do whatever you like, and you'll still earn experience. It prevents content from becoming entirely obsolete once you've out-geared it.

The downside is that some "easy" activity will become optimum for grinding and gaining levels, and then people will insist on doing that non-stop to earn levels. The advantage of harder content giving better gear is that eventually you have to challenge yourself if you want to improve. This system makes it easy to keep from challenging yourself, and contenting yourself with content that you know you can succeed with.

The normal PvE mindset is that quality of reward is intrinsically tied to difficulty of content. I wrote a bit about this a long time ago, though more in the context of PvP versus PvE. (See Raider Perspective on Rewards, and Why Does the Reward System Matter?) I am not certain that breaking this link will be healthy for the game.

The other problem is that reward is now greatly tied to time spent in game. If you play twice as much as someone, you should have twice as many levels, and thus twice the gear and further into the higher level gear. But maybe making this explicit is more fair than current games. And I suppose you can tweak the XP gained to mitigate this. For example, the first time you do a piece of content each week, you get a big bonus to XP, etc.

Still, it looks like an interesting experiment, and it will be interesting to see what sort of effect it has on the game and the players.

Legion Raiding as a Holy Paladin

I ended up joining a small, somewhat casual guild. We've gone 7/7 Normal Emerald Nightmare, and hopefully will end up completing Heroic mode.

Here are some initial thoughts on raiding as a Holy Paladin.

• Healing feels very much old-school, with you focusing on the tanks, and having other healers cover the raid, though helping out occasionally.

• Bestow Faith is the standard Tier 1 talent, but I don't have a good feel for it. It felt like it was always getting sniped, and it seemed to have a much higher overheal than my other spells. I did try Light's Hammer, but it never seemed to work nicely.

• I used Aura of Mercy for the most part. I think Devotion Aura has a better cooldown, but it requires you to be proactive. Aura of Mercy actually does a fair bit of healing, and it supplements your raid healing which is your weak point. I think I want to try Devotion Aura and see if that works better next time.

• Judgment of Light actually does a decent amount of healing. Of course, it's all ambient healing, and you do have to remember to judge a lot.

• I couldn't decide between Beacon of Faith or Beacon of the Lightbringer. The increase to Light of Dawn from BotL is really strong. But double-beaconing is a lot easier in fights where you need to focus both tanks.

So far, my initial impression of Holy Paladin healing is that you have to choose between strengthening your strong points of focused tank healing, or trying to shore up your weakness of raid healing.

I started with the focused build, but we were a little healer-light to start, and it felt like the dps died too easily. So I switched talents around to add more raid healing, and that felt a little better. If we had another healer though, I think the focused build would have been better.

Of course, I'm very rusty with raid healing, and we're only a Normal-mode guild at the moment, so keep that in mind.

Any other holy paladins care to share their experiences and tips?

FFXIV Patch 3.4 Main Story Quest

FFXIV's latest patch, 3.4, came out this week. I spent the afternoon going through the main story quest.

It was really good. It tied up a lot of loose ends, and set the stage for the next expansion. There were a lot of good moments, especially in the middle. It did get a little complicated near the end. Final Fantasy "theology" has always been a little mind-bending.

One interesting element in the main story was that they sent you back to do an old primal from 2.0. Not a new version of the primal, but literally the old fight. Now, FFXIV does include mechanical reasons to do old fights. They're part of the random duty finder roulettes which give out endgame currency. But this is the first time they've given a story reason to do the old fight.

What was most interesting was that it was the old fight, but if you're on the main story, they changed the dialogue of the primal during the fight to reflect the new situation. It was a really interesting idea, and worked really well. I'm not sure if it's something SE could pull off again, but it worked beautifully in this story.

All in all, the 3.x story was a great one, and I'm looking forward to the next expansion.

World Quest Group Finder

Yeah, I know, I haven't posted for a while. I fell out of the habit, I guess.

I've been playing Legion a fair bit though. I'm a bit behind the curve, only ilvl 825 or so. I haven't stepped into Mythics or raids yet, though I've been looking for a guild on Lightbringer. So far everyone seems full up on Holy paladins, sadly.

In any case, I'm using a new addon, World Quest Group Finder, that's really nice.

It allows you to automatically make or join groups that are doing the same World Quest as you are. It's pretty nice, making grouping for world quests a lot easier. Now, you can do all the world quests solo, and kill credit is usually shared, but having an actual group is pleasant, and useful for sharing credit for other objectives. Especially as I am often questing as Holy, so I get to feel more useful with heals.

It's pretty smooth and pretty automatic. When you enter a World Quest area, the addon will automatically ask if you want to join a group. If you do, it's pretty much automatic from that point, searching the group finder or adding you to it. In fact, if you look at quest group finder right now, you'll probably see a few groups created by WQGF users.

It's a really nice tool for making questing a bit faster and a bit less lonely than pure soloing.

Eve Online F2P or Unlimited Trial

Eve Online announced a F2P or unlimited trial variant. Basically, you can make a character with a restricted number of skillpoints and skills and play for free. To get a full character, you have to be a subscriber.

It's an interesting choice for Eve. The biggest advantage is that it gives the new player a long time to truly come to grips with the game. Eve is infamous for its learning curve, and now there's no time pressure on learning how to play.

The interesting side will be seeing how the current Eve players abuse this mechanic. At certain levels, Eve is often a numbers game, and now each side can field arbitrarily large numbers. For example, instead of scouting multiple systems in a patrol with a single ship, you could instead station one character per system, and log onto each character in turn.

If I remember correctly, Eve did crack down on multi-boxing, so maybe that will mitigate the effect.

Another concern is that Eve often boasts that a new player can become "useful", even to the major powers, within a few days. But if that new player is useful, surely a couple hundred alpha accounts is even more useful. But if you nerf the usefulness of the alpha accounts, are you not also nerfing the usefulness of the new player?

WoW has an unlimited trial, where you're limited to level 20. But no one cares about level 20s. They're pretty much useless in the greater scheme of things. So there's no need to worry about players (other than gold-sellers) making tons of level 20s.

Will low level characters in Eve become more useless, thus diminishing that selling point?

Edit: Here's another way of putting the issue. I think there are two options:

1. Infinite low level characters
2. Useful low level characters.

I think that these need to be mutually exclusive to be balanced. If you have infinite amounts of useful low level characters, the game is going to break. That means I expect Eve Online to eventually choose Option #1 over Option #2.