I came across an excellent site for analyzing your performance: WoW Analyzer.
It's super easy to use and really slick. You just link a Warcraft Logs parse, and it gives you a genuine breakdown of things you can improve upon.
For example, apparently I double Holy Shock a lot when Divine Purpose procs, causing me to waste Infusion of Light procs. I really should go Holy Shock - Flash of Light - Holy Shock. That was genuinely useful information, provided in an excellent format.
Suggestions for one of my Desolate Host wipes
Seriously, this site is an amazing example of web app design!
The only problem is that not all specs are supported. It's mainly healer specs right now. Hopefully it will be able to attract more contributors and support more specs.
The latest seasonal event, Moonfire Faire, has started. It was short and sweet, and really just an excuse for everyone to congregate on a beach in swimwear.
I figured out how to hide my weapons so I could make a cosmetic gear set. I've been playing for years, and never realized the button next to Hide Hat hid your weapons! For some reason, I thought it was just sheath/unsheath weapons.
Otherwise, my Red Mage is up to level 67. The end is almost in sight. One interesting aspect of playing DPS is that commendations are treasured because they're rare. Especially if you manage to get multiple commendations in a single instance.
World of Warcraft
We got our second kill on H-Mistress, and then got our first kill on H-Sisters. Then we wiped a fair bit on H-Desolate Host. We don't have the transition to the last phase quite right yet.
Hopefully we will get it this week. However, I think the summer vacation bug will hit in August, and we'll be treading water until September. That's normal though, and hopefully we won't regress.
Pyre
Still chugging along. The difficulty is beginning to ramp up. I've won all my matches up to this point, but I think my first loss will come soon. Apparently the game continues on even if you lose a match, just like a regular sports game. It will be interesting to see how that is handled.
Overwatch's latest event, the Summer Games, started today. I don't play Overwatch a lot, but I logged in today while eating dinner to open the free lootbox. (Sadly, I didn't get anything interesting.) After that, I started clicking around to see the new skins and other elements.
I accidentally clicked on Competitive Lucioball in the Arcade, and Overwatch managed to sign me for a match within seconds! Normally matchmaking takes up to a minute, so I'm not sure if Blizz has made major improvements with the matchmaker or if I was just lucky (unlucky?).
I hurriedly tried to figure out how to play Lucio, praying that I at least would not score any own goals. Luckily my teammates were able to carry me, and we actually won!
I'm kind of surprised Blizzard made a competitive version of Lucioball. It is kind of fun, and it is a level playing field. At the very least, no one can complain about your choice of character. Still, it's pretty unusual to get a competitive ladder for an event side-game which won't be around for very long.
I've started Supergiant's latest game, Pyre. So far, it's really good.
It's sort of a text-based RPG combined with ritual battle system called the Rites. As you go through the story, you recruit different teammates and make simple choices that determines how you progress.
One interesting thing is that it's not fully voice-acted, but each character makes some sounds in a made-up language whenever they speak. It's a really neat way of adding a voice and tone, without having to actually record every line.
The Rites system is a mix of sport and combat. It's a little bit like a fantasy variant of basketball. There are 3 players on a team, but only one player can be active at a time, though you can quickly switch from player to player. There is a an orb on the playfield, and the objective is to take the orb to the enemies pyre. Each player has an aura around them which they use for defense, or to cast at an enemy player. The player with the orb has no aura.
Characters have different characteristics. Some are slow, some are fast. Some have large auras, some score more points when they capture the orb.
The battlefield is also on the mental plane, so character's have stats like Hope. All in all, it's quite a neat system.
I'm not sure how far in I am, but the story is very good so far. All in all, I recommend Pyre.
Sounds a lot like the way it's been in WoW for years (or at least it was still that way last time I played). Or do you think this is different?
First, I really don't remember exactly what WoW meta was when anymore, so I'm just going to compare FFXIV to the current meta.
In WoW, speed runs usually aim to skip trash, rather than engage. When you're skipping packs, you generally don't drag mobs along, because you don't want to accidentally engage. In FFXIV, trash is unskippable, for the most part.
WoW also has more trash than FFXIV. But the WoW trash generally has less health but hits harder. Also a WoW group has 3 dps instead of 2. Basically instead of a few large pulls, WoW tends toward many smaller pulls.
As well, packs in FFXIV have a lot of space between them, which I think makes the stop-and-start nature of gameplay more obvious. I think this lends itself to a good WoW group going through the dungeon at a steady pace. Not quite pulling multiple packs, but chaining from pack to pack quicker.
Another possibility is that WoW seems to be segregating the player base by ability this expansion. More geared and advanced players are funneled into more difficult content like Mythic+, while people generally only run the lower dungeons when they're undergeared, or just want an easy run.
FFXIV takes opposite tack, and often encourages better players to go back and play with newer players. A lot of the time this is good, but it does mean that "edge" tactics come to dominate, and start being applied in places they shouldn't be.
Now, that I think about it, this last possibility is probably the same as as older WoW expansions, when experienced players ran heroics for badges. That was a "go go go" meta as well. So ultimately, maybe encouraging veterans to play with new players is a bad idea.
I finished Chapter IV of the Seasonal journey with my Necromancer in Diablo 3 today, and got the complete Rathma set for her. This is the point I stop in D3. I don't really care for farming perfect items and Greater Rifts. I really like Seasons because they give a directed path that you can follow, and several points where you can stop and still feel satisfied with what you've completed.
The Necromancer is an interesting class. It has three possible resources: essence, corpses, and health, which you can combine in different ways. For example, I use Devour to gain essence from corpses, and took a passive that generates health globes when corpses are used. I then use a Legendary that gives me Essence from consuming health globes. I got another Legendary which causes my golem to drop a corpse every second, further feeding that loop. Add a Siphon Blood rune which automatically pulls in all health globes when you attack. Finally, all that essence gets channeled into summoning Mage Skeletons.
Some ability runes also change some costs from Essence to a percentage of Health, which you then supplement with abilities to get health back. More than most characters, the Necromancer feels like it's designed for you to set up these Rube Goldberg-esque chains converting one resource into another, feeding your damage.
It was pretty enjoyable, and I think the D3 team did a good job in setting up several possible play styles.
I'm not sure what the future of Diablo 3 is like, but these packs which introduce a new class are an interesting way to go. For example, adding a Druid shape-shifting class would be great.
Basically, many players expect the tank to pull "wall-to-wall". Basically run through all the mobs from the start to a gate, where they are all then AoE'd down. It's the most efficient method of clearing a dungeon, but it also requires the players in the group to be geared and on point. Essentially it's the most fragile method.
As an aside, I've noticed the North American players in almost all games will gravitate towards the most efficient and most fragile method, which require the highest level of personal performance. Even in WoW raids. Apparently, Japanese gamers don't do this, and tend towards more fool-proof strategies even if they take more work.
There's a lot of tanks and healers in that thread who are unhappy about the meta. Perhaps a backlash will develop, and it will become okay to pull single-packs at a time. But I doubt it. Doing that would add 5 to 10 minutes to the clear time, and that is clearly a deal-breaker to impatient players.
Personally, I've just given up on tanking, and am leveling a Red Mage damage dealer. This way it doesn't really matter to me. If the tank pulls "wall-to-wall", I'll use AoE. If she pulls a single pack at a time, then I'll use a regular rotation.
There are several libertarian-ish economists on the internet who argue against focusing on inequality. One common argument I've seen is that it is better to be a poor person (in America) in 2017, than to be the richest man a century or two ago. That poor people today have a better life than oil barons like J.D. Rockefeller. Thus rather than focus on relative inequality, we should pursue rising standards for everybody, even if it increases inequality.
As far as arguments go, it's not a bad one, especially if we focus on non-status, or more material elements. But that's not what I want to discuss today. Let's just take that argument as a given, and put ourselves in the same mindset as these economists.
So then we have the following sequence of logic:
The richest person in 1870 had a worse standard of living than a poor person in 2017.
The richest person in 2017 has a better standard of living than a poor person in 2017.
Therefore, in some year between 1870 and 2017, the richest person in the world had a standard of living roughly equal to a poor person in 2017.
What year do you think that was? What's the point in time where you would choose to be the richest man in the world rather than a poor person in 2017? What is the missing invention or innovation which makes all the difference?
I think the best candidate is 1955, when Jonas Salk invents the polio vaccine. I think that removes the last major scourge of childhood illnesses (which strike rich and poor alike). After that point, I think the richest person in the world can approximate most innovations that a poor person in 2017 has access to, or can live without those innovations. As awesome as computer games are, I don't think they make up for millions of dollars.
Last month, FFXIV released its latest expansion, Stormblood. Early access and the first week or so had several problems, with blocked instance servers and massive queues that kept people from progressing. But eventually everything calmed down.
The main story in Stormblood is about the attempt to liberate Ala Mhigo and Doma from the Garlean Empire. It's quite a good story with lots of interesting turns and new characters. The sidequests are particularly good this time around, particularly in the Azim Steppes, filling out the new cultures introduced.
The main villain, Zenos, is a little boring. He's the bored, overpowered type who's just looking for a challenge. He serves his purpose, but the two sub-villains, Yotsuyu and Fordola, are much more interesting characters.
On the whole, I think the Heavensward story was slightly better, but I'm a fan of high fantasy stories about knights and dragons. Stormblood is a bit more political war fantasy with two human sides fighting each other.
Stormblood also introduced some simple new quest types, including one where you play a merchant at a stall helping customers. It was an interesting and unusual quest.
The dungeons are pretty standard fare, though quite well done. There's even one boss fight which doesn't have any combat at all.
Stormblood also added swimming and underwater areas. Unlike other implementations, underwater areas are entirely non-combat. Personally, I like this implementation, as I find fighting underwater to be a huge hassle in most games, especially as melee.
Finally, Stormblood adds the Red Mage and Samurai classes. They're both interesting. Red Mage wields a rapier. She alternates between Black magic and White magic, then jumps into melee, executes a combo, and flips back out. It's very stylish. Samurai, meanwhile, is pretty much what you'd expect. It's an understated melee swordsman, executing combos and building up to a very powerful strike.
General mechanics-wise, there was some streamlining, mostly in how cross-class skills are handled. Each role now has a pool of common skills available to all classes in that role. You no longer need to level up a second class to unlock your job. If you're looking for significant changes to FFXIV's mechanics, you'll be disappointed.
All in all, Stormblood is a great expansion for FFXIV. It doesn't do anything radical, but focuses on FFXIV's main strength, the story. It also adds two interesting new classes and some polish to other areas of the game.
One of the more interesting experiments Blizzard is conducting in Legion are pieces of repeatable stateful solo content. Repeatable stateful content is interesting because previous runs impact future runs. The best examples are boardgames like Risk Legacy.
So far, Blizzard has included two such pieces of content: the Withered Training scenario in Suramar, and the Deaths of Chromie scenario.
In the Withered Training scenario, you start off with some Withered elves and explore a dungeon. You come across chests, and have to "spend" some of your Withered to retrieve them. However, these chests unlock new types of Withered in your next run. Chests can only be retrieved once, and then don't appear in future runs. So fully completing the Withered Training requires several plays. Each run you may go to a different area and collect the chests there.
In Deaths of Chromie, the limiting factor is time. But after you complete areas, you unlock shortcuts that allow you to make your next run faster. There's also reputation, making the scenario as you do more and more of it.
I think these are really interesting pieces of content. Repeatable content is always good, but the stateful part makes it more interesting. The hard part, I think, would be coming up with a reason the content is repeatable and stateful. The Withered scenario is an artificial training scenario, and Chromie involves time travel. Time loops like Groundhog Day are classic repeatable content.
Perhaps a large dungeon with many floors might work. You could do things like unlock shortcuts, or perhaps killing a boss gnoll causes all the gnolls to flee and be replaced by spiders.
I wonder if you could do something with repeatable stateful group content. The problem here is reconciling state. If someone who's done the scenario 100 times groups with someone who's done it 5 times, who's history is used? You could do like raids, I suppose, and simply default to the group leader.
In any case, these scenarios have been a neat part of Legion, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Blizzard expands on them in the next expansion.
Posting has been almost non-existent over the last couple of months. I'm not 100% sure why. I've been playing several games, I've have several ideas for posts. But I can't seem to bring myself to write anything. Oh well, maybe next month will go better.
I'm currently playing WoW, Diablo, and FFXIV. On deck are Pyre and Foxhole.
World of Warcraft
Just chugging along in Tomb of Sargeras. We're on Heroic Mistress Sassz'ine, and are having lots of trouble with her. We've beaten her once, but the fight just isn't clicking for us. I think we aren't doing Hydra Shot well, so when it's Hydra Shot + other mechanic, we fall to pieces and lose people. I really should look up some videos.
Diablo 3
I made a Necromancer for Season 11, who is currently level 68. For most of levelling I went with a Bone Armor + Death Nova build which waded into melee. For the last few levels, I've been trying a more caster-style build with Skeletal Mages + Blood Siphon.
Final Fantasy XIV
I got the expansion and finished the main story quest. It was quite good, and hopefully I will make a full post about it soon. I've grown disenchanted with tanking in FFXIV, though. I really don't like mass pulls, but if I don't do mass pulls, the DPS pulls for me and the run becomes a mess. So I've decided to level up a Red Mage, which is quite fun. Of course, as DPS, there are queues, so I'm leveling Miner alongside it.
Pyre
Pyre is the latest from Supergiant Games, who made Bastion and Transistor. I pretty much bought it sight unseen, on the strength of the previous two games. I have no real idea of what it is actually about.
Foxhole
Foxhole is an interesting game. It's in Early Access, but is fairly polished. It's kind of like a WWII Real-Time Strategy game, only you control a single soldier.
As well, there's a full economic chain to do anything. For example, scrap has to be mined, taken to refinery and converted into building materials, then taken to a factory to make bullets, and then the bullets have to be taken to the front line. When a soldier dies, they respawn with nothing, so everyone is reliant on logistics to get anywhere. You can build buildings and vehicles including tanks.
Games are quite long (multiple days), but it isn't totally persistent as there is an eventual winner. Then a new game starts.
In some ways it reminds of Eve Online, only there are defined teams. There also is no money involved, so the logistics chain is a bit different.
I haven't played very much, but I strongly recommend trying Foxhole if you're looking for something new and different.
In the new Chromie scenario, you have the option to make your companion Chromie a tank or a healer. The tank mechanic is particularly neat, and should be stolen by every game which uses a companion.
As a tank, Chromie loses 2% of her health every second, until she hits 50% health. But when her health is above 50%, she gains a significant scaling damage bonus. At 100% health, she dishes out crazy damage.
As a healer, this mechanic is quite fun. Normally in games with companions, you spend most of your time acting as a poor man's dps, occasionally throwing a heal on your companion. And it generally has to be this way. If normal mobs hit the companion hard enough to require significant healing, dps characters would not be able to cope.
But with Chromie, a healer can spend most of her time healing, and this is optimal gameplay for her, as the loss of the player's dps is more than made up for by the boosted companion dps.
If you're dps, you get a tank, but one which starts with half health, pushing you to kill things faster. Though I imagine dps players would still prefer to use a healing companion or another dps companion.
I think this mechanic would be an excellent match for a game like The Old Republic in particular, where companions are an essential part of solo gameplay.
This post contains spoilers for Mass Effect: Andromeda.
A good ending forgives a lot of sins. Mass Effect: Andromeda has a solid ending. It also has a lot of sins.
I finally finished Andromeda last night. I think it might be easiest to review it in bullet-point form: Good
The ending of Andromeda is quite good. It feels like someone listed everything which was wrong with ME3's ending, and systematically went about writing the opposite. As a result, the ending is very fulfilling. All the allies you made appear and help, validating all your choices in the game. Though you still have your 2 squadmates, all your other squad members show up to help in the final fight. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the ending, and Andromeda goes out on a high note.
Andromeda has one really good decision to make. On Kadara, there are two rival criminal organisations seeking control of the planet. You have to side with one of them. The two groups are very different, and it's not obvious which is the better choice. I've seen some interesting debates as to which choice is better. Additionally, Andromeda used the "quick-time event" to make the choice, forcing you to make the choice with time pressure. Ordinarily, I'm not a big fan of the quick time events, but here it worked perfectly.
The combat is fun and works well. There are lots of different builds and play styles.
If you like Krogan, there's lots of interactions with them. Drack, a squadmate, is pretty awesome. The krogan colony is pretty funny, and provides a much needed dose of humour. (Apparently, some krogans LARP, playing Krantt: the Ragening. There's also a new father support group, where they have sing-alongs and demolition explosion demonstrations.)
The six companion loyalty missions are very well designed, and actually fairly interesting, with a wide variety of styles.
Mixed
The story and writing is decent. It's not particularly good, but it's not particularly bad either. In fact, in some ways it's unfortunate this is a Mass Effect game. If it had been an entirely new franchise, I would have said it was a promising start, and hopefully would get better in the sequel.
The open world and driving around in the Nomad is reasonably fun.
Bad
Your crew, aside from Drack, are not very interesting. Honestly, they're kind of annoying. After thinking about it for a bit, I've come to the conclusion that this is because they're teenagers. Oh, they're theoretically adults, with adult histories. But they act like teenagers in a television show. Everything is overly dramatic and histrionic. I wanted to space half of them by the end.
The game has a set of quest objectives called Tasks, which are an utter waste of time, and really just serve as filler. Collect 10 rocks, etc. Some tasks have objectives which randomly appear in enemy camps. I strongly recommend that you simply ignore all the tasks you get, and just focus on the main quests.
The software quality is not quite there. The animations and cutscenes have mostly been patched up to reasonable quality by now, but quests can still be fragile and buggy.
The game lacks the "grace notes" of the original trilogy. Elements like the elcor, hanar, and volus, which weren't really part of the story, but enhanced the world.
The new races introduced, the Angara and Kett, are uninteresting.
The entire scanner mechanic is overused, and really slows the game down.
Conclusions
Looking at these notes, I don't think I've touched my main issue with the game. It feels like the new studio was given the Mass Effect franchise, and they felt like they had to do "more" to live up to the name. Add more open-world content and bring back driving a vehicle. Add a scanner. Add all these tasks. Add NPC strike teams. But in the end, they spread themselves too thin. Pretty much every element of the game, save maybe combat, is a step below the original trilogy.
In a lot of respects, I think they would have done better to cut all these extra features and focus on polishing the main story and animations. If the player does everything, tries to 100% the game, it's too long. It would be better as a shorter and more focused game.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is not a bad game. It's just not a great one. And Andromeda has the misfortune to be a sequel to a set of truly great games.
I'm generally happy with Legendaries this expansion. I only have 3, but they're good enough. I also don't play at a level where they really matter, so having or not having the Best-in-Slot ones isn't super important to me.
However, I think for a lot of people who are more hardcore, the Legendary system didn't really work. In particular, I don't think the concept of tailoring your build to match your Legendaries really took off.
Perhaps the problem was that the Legendaries weren't strong enough. For example, if you look at Diablo 3, set bonuses are pretty insane. If you're wearing a set which buffs an ability, that buff is on the order of a 1000% or more. I don't think such a system--where getting a Legendary forced you to build your character around it--would really fly in WoW.
I think a system that fits WoW better would be something with a little bit of randomness, but also add in control and effort.
I would suggest a scheme where the Legendary drop rate was about one per week, but the item level started at 800 or so. The player could use Obliterum to upgrade the Legendary to the item level cap.
This scheme would get the dedicated player all Legendaries reasonably quickly, but they would have to devote time or money into upgrading the Legendaries they want to use. Using Obliterum as the upgrade material would also help out crafters, giving them incentive and a market for their wares.
I've always liked Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero. This variant is quite well done. The video is by Kruithne. The main vocalist is Sharm, and the chorus is Letomi.
And the subject matter is certainly very appropriate. ;)
Lately, my guild has taken up a tactic which I find distasteful, but is leading to success. So far it's been used sparingly, but because it is successful, the leadership's aversion to the tactic is eroding. I fear we'll start resorting to it earlier and earlier in the next tier.
Basically, on a difficult boss, when we're fairly close to a first kill but are having trouble closing out that last 10%, the raid lead will start asking the lowest DPS people to step out. Because normal and heroic raids scale now, the average DPS of the raid increases while the mobs get weaker. We got our first kills of Heroic Botanist and Heroic Gul'dan this way.
I don't approve of this tactic. To me, a raid team is a team, and you win or lose with that team as a whole. I'm perfectly fine with having minimum requirements to join the team, but once you're in, you're in.
If we didn't use this tactic, we would progress a little slower, true. Maybe we would have killed Botanist and Gul'dan a week later. But we have plenty of time.
I also think we're using this tactic as a shortcut instead of tightening up our strategy and positioning. We aren't a Mythic guild, and thus our basic handling of mechanics is not as good as it could be.
But it's really hard to argue with success. The raid leadership will point out that they only do this when it's "necessary", after we've already wiped for a couple days and no one objects in raid. But no one really want to be the person holding back the group, either. And it's hard to say that yes, we should spend one or two extra weeks wiping when we could be progressing and working on new bosses.
But because it's successful, we're reaching for it earlier and earlier. I think we wiped on Botanist twice as much as we wiped on Gul'dan. How much will our tolerance erode in Tomb of Sargeras? One night of wiping? As soon as we have a 20% wipe?
There are minor spoilers for Your Name in the post, and there may be larger spoilers in the comments.
I saw Your Name (Kimi No Nawa) on the weekend. It's about a boy in Tokyo, Taki, and a girl in the countryside, Mitsuha, who start dreaming that they are the other person, even though they are complete strangers.
It was a popular movie in Japan, and is in a two-week run in some North American cinemas. There was a full theatre when I went to see it. Though I do live in Vancouver, which has a large East Asian population. Amusingly, I was the only non-white, non-East Asian person there.
The movie was quite good, with interesting and engaging characters. In particular, I thought it was "well-balanced". Some comedy, some drama, some romance, some moderate action, a touch of scifi/fantasy, a bit of Japanese religious mythology, and even an explosion.
One of the problems I have with modern western movies is that they seem to have lost that sense of balance, and often tend to extremes. An action move is 90% action with very little characterization. Romantic movies are intensely romantic. Indie movies tend to be very quirky and not very normal.
Your Name is also relatively short, clocking in at 1h 45m. Again, this is quite good, as it packs a lot in that short time frame.
Your Name is not a perfect movie, though the anime community hypes it up a lot. In particular, if plot holes bother you, there is one major plot hole, though it's not strictly a plot hole. On reflection, it's extremely unlikely the characters did not do or realize X. Kind of like characters not calling the police when they have a cellphone and in a situation which warrants it. But if you just let that go, or attribute it to the "magic dream" blinding them to it, it's more than good enough.
I recommend Your Name, especially if you can catch it in theatres. You may only have a week to do so, however.
Despite my feelings about the ME3 ending, I picked up Mass Effect: Andromeda last night. Here are my initial impressions from about an hour of play.
Facial Animations
I usually don't pay attention to internet complaints about graphics. To my non-artistic eyes, pretty much every modern game looks good.
However, the facial animations in ME:A are horrifically bad. Lips move, but the entire rest of the face has been botox-ed into immobility. My current head-canon is that it's a side-effect of the cryogenic sleep process, and everyone's face has simply not thawed yet. It looks really terrible, and is extraordinarily distracting.
I'm playing with the default Sara Ryder, and her eyes have pupils which are not centred correctly. It looks like she constantly has her eyes half-rolled up.
The biggest problem, though, is that's there's a clear mismatch between the quality of the head model, and the quality of the animations. This actually makes the problem worse. Maybe if the models hadn't been aiming for "realistic" so hard, the animations wouldn't stand out so much.
ME:A graphics spiked in quality the moment the characters put on their helmets.
Now, that being said, perhaps you get used to it. It wasn't nearly as distracting at the end of my play session.
Story
The story is just starting up. It's interesting how they leave everything from the original series somewhat ambiguous. In some ways, it's like the story is set in Mass Effect universe, but ignores the plot of the Mass Effect games.
So far, the writing is okay. It's not good, but it's not bad either. It kind of reminds me of a author with potential writing her first novel. It could get a lot better, but it might not either.
One interesting thing Bioware has done in conversation this time around is to categorise responses as either emotional, logical, casual, or professional. It's a very explicit way for you to define your character, especially as not all choices have all options. Sometimes you have to decide between emotional or logical. But other times, you might have logical versus professional. My tentative feelings on this system are positive, as it provides a nice framework for choices.
As a side-effect, options which are purely informative are also labelled, so you can go through all those without accidentally making a true choice.
Combat
Now we get to the outstanding part of the game so far. The combat is excellent so far. Powers work well. The shooter mechanics are crisp and nice.
I'm probably going Tech/Arms, and the tech powers are interesting, and combo nicely with each other. There's a lot of powers and skill trees for RPG enthusiasts to enjoy.
Combat feels good in this game, and that's a major positive for the game.
Conclusions
When you think about it, the facial animations are probably disproportionately distracting. But I can guarantee you that it's the first thing you notice when you start playing the game. The story is very generic at the moment, but hopefully the writers hit their stride and pick it up as the game goes on. But the combat mechanics are quite fun and well done.
If you've been following the top guilds and the World First races in WoW, you'll notice that a lot of the top guilds have been calling it quits. I think the higher-than-normal burnout has two intertwined causes, and it's hard to propose solutions without understanding those causes.
First, I don't think the long hours during the race itself is an issue. The world-first guilds have always raided intensely during the first couple of weeks. Ciderhelm talked about it in his guide to Time Management way back in Vanilla/TBC. You raid intensely for two week, and then have a very relaxed schedule for the next four or five months.
The current issue facing edge guilds is that to be competitive, each raider needs multiple "finished" characters.
First, the multiple part. Edge raiders need multiple characters for split runs as well as to swap characters around to have an optimal setup. There's always been a degree of this in WoW, but the number of characters needed has steadily increased. I believe that edge raiders are now expected to have four or five characters they can switch to for progression.
Second, the "finished" part. A finished character is one which is fully geared and maximized from the previous tier. This is the major change in Legion. Before Legion, it was fairly easy to finish a character, especially if you were in a guild which regularly cleared Mythics.
But Legion increased the amount of work to finish a character significantly. Now you need Best-in-Slot legendaries, maximized Artifact Power, and Warforged/Titanforged gear to be truly finished.
Now, this is actually great for those of us who play one main character and aren't at the cutting edge. There's always the chance of upgrading. Maybe you'll get a titanforged piece, or a new Legendary. I've only got 40-something points in my Artifact Weapon, so more AP is always useful.
However, for the edge raider, this is murderous. Where Ciderhelm once touted a intense two weeks, then a relaxed schedule for 4 months, the modern edge raider spends all her time trying to finish her character, chain-running content for AP and the chance of titanforged gear. And due to the first requirement of needing multiple characters, she has to do this on four or five characters. No wonder they are burning out.
The big problem, of course, is that the longer path to finishing a character is excellent and enjoyable for the vast majority of the population, even if it is burning out the edge raiders.
In the next post, we will look at potential solutions.
Magic: the Gathering has several constructed formats. The flagship format is called Standard, and basically consists of all sets released in the last couple of years. As new sets are released, older sets rotate out, so the pool of cards from which to build decks changes regularly.
Lately, the Standard environment has had a lot of issues. Earlier this year, WotC banned 3 cards, the first time cards have been banned in around five years. And even after that, the resulting environment is not perceived as healthy, and there are calls to ban more cards.
Proposal
Right now, WotC really has only one way to affect the Standard environment: banning cards. New sets in the pipeline have already been finalized. Changes made to sets in production won't show up for over a year.
I propose that WotC add a new Virtual Core Set for Standard. This would be a list of already printed cards from older sets which are now legal in the current Standard. I envision a starting list of about 50 cards, 10 from each color, which are "staples" of traditional Magic. The Core Set would not be cards that you build a deck around, but be mostly utility and sideboard cards to help weaker decks challenge the stronger ones. Not the stars of your deck, but role-players. "Engine" cards, finishers, and "flashy" cards would come from the current sets in print.
A candidate staple for the Virtual Core Set
Advantages:
This would provide a second, less-drastic mechanism for tuning Standard. Instead of the only option being to ban or not ban cards, WotC could first try adding or removing cards from the Virtual Core Set. If Standard needs a little more graveyard hate, rotate in some more graveyard hate.
This would allow WotC to add cards to Standard without affecting Limited formats. This allows WotC not to have to worry damaging a good Limited environment by reprinting a strong card meant for Standard.
Allows WotC more breathing room when it comes to reprints. Sometimes reprints are necessary, but don't fit in the set thematically, or have to replace a new card. This avoids that issue.
Cheap. There used to be a Core Set made up mostly of reprints. But since most players already had the cards, and the Core Set was at a lower power level, it didn't sell well. A simple list of allowed cards has a minimal cost, in contrast. There should be a healthy supply of most cards that would be in the Virtual Core Set from previous sets.
I think a Core Set would provide a stronger "baseline" for Magic in Standard. There would always be a little counter-magic, a little burn, etc. that adds additional support for the main themes from the released sets.
Disadvantages:
Standard legality becomes more complex. Right now, it's just cards in the legal sets minus a handful of banned cards. Standard would become cards in the legal sets plus cards in the Virtual Core Set minus the banned cards. Depending on how often the Virtual Core Set changes, keeping track of whether a deck is legal or not would become harder for more casual players.
Virtual Core Set cards might oppress or crowd out new cards. For example, let's say Counterspell was added to the Virtual Core Set. Obviously it would displace any counters from the new set, and may end up killing whole potential strategies.
