Holiday season really hurts the post count so I'll try and keep going but there's a high chance that my sparse posting will continue until after new years rolls around. That said, on to the juicy topics.
So a lot of the time you aren't on the same skill level as your friends. Sometimes you're just not willing to put that much effort into the game or your friends just don't get the game on the same level that you do. There's nothing wrong with either one but it's something a lot of people struggle with because you really want to play with your friends. So today I'm going to examine some of the systems in various games (again looking at warcraft primarily) and what you as a player can do or what sort of content you should be targetting to play with your friends to have a good time.
Step 1) Don't PvP. As much fun as you think it would be, you're both just going to get frustrated. Take a look at something like league of legends. They have a system in there for seperating people of differing skill levels, and while it doesn't work all the time things get crazy when groups of varying skill levels get together. I have some pretty unfun experiences in that game when I go to play with some of my friends who spend a fair bit more time in that game than I do. Just don't PvP. You may do it if one of you is a healer and one is a crazy dps pvper and you're doing bgs. Aside from that there's not much in it that will lead to fun engaging pvp.
Step 2) Don't play things with a skill difficulty too low or two high. This might seem obvious but I can't tell you how many times people who love the engaging experience of really struggling just find it annoying when others aren't keeping up with them. The same goes for playing in a situation that you find yourself in way over your head. Find that middle ground where you can both enjoy it. I find myself really enjoying situations that are mostly relaxing for me, and difficult enough that we both have to at least pay attention.
Step 3) Don't take any of it seriously. This is seen a lot in board games but bleeds over into all sorts of environments. I'm sure many of you have been there where there's one guy at a party that is taking any sort of competition way to seriously. I've lost friends to a board game called Diplomacy. If you've played it you'll know what I mean. You're going to regret taking things too seriously when you're just playing to have a good time with friends. This is also far more important for the person of higher skill level though everyone should go in understanding that this is just for a good time.
So what does all this lead to in warcraft? LFR. LFR is probably one of the greatest inventions for this. It's not so easy that you can go afk and kill, though some people do and there's a special place in hell for you right beside the people that talk or use cell phones during movies. This is a place where you can take things really lightly and still have a good time. Alternatively 10m raids, and this is where I think the 10v25 distinction really shines. 10m raiding is really really good for people who are on weird schedules to find like minded players with similarly odd skeds with which to raid. Challenge modes are also an amazing thing for these types of people. You don't have to go in there expecting gold. Aiming for silver with a group is just as good if that's what people are ready for. You don't expect to go in and kill heroic bosses the first time you see them, challenge modes, and most things in life, are going to be the same.
Lastly I wanted to say that if you aren't enjoying it, just stop. There's no reason for you and your friend to get upset with each other and storm off. It's just a game ultimately, especially if it's not where you guys normally game. If you normally play these games separately then just part ways and come back to it another time. You're not progression raiding, you're not going for gladiator titles. You're just aiming to have a good time with friends you don't normally play with seriously.
So like I said earlier I'm really busy lately. We just finished getting Garalon and Wind Lord down this week. Wind lord is really easy compared to garalon. Things just fall into place after you've been working on it for a night and he dies on a pull you didn't feel good about in the first place. That said I'm super happy to have garalon down and I'm not looking forward to re-killing him next week.
If I don't get a chance to say it, I wish everyone out there a happy holidays however you celebrate it. I'll see you all in the new year, and keep on rollin'.
13 December, 2012
23 November, 2012
Shhh, it's a secret
This is the second half to the article from last time, you should check it out if you haven't already though it's not important.
I'd like to consider another of the major differences between cataclysm and mists. We knew what was coming for cata. We knew ragnaros was coming. We knew deathwing was going to try and destroy the world. We "knew" that the abyssal maw was going to be a feature once we got through the zone. The entire expansion had this build up and a lot of player foreknowledge.
Mists doesn't do this. Sure we know who the eventual bad guy of the expansion is, and sure it's not that hard to guess even if you don't already know. That said there is relatively little knowledge on how we're getting there or exactly what's going to happen in between.
I think this is a pretty big deal for a lot of games out there. How many games do you know that had promised certain features early on in their development cycle only to cut them later on because they couldn't get it done or found it was a lot more complicated than imagined or just didn't get around to it until it was far too late to do a good job of it so they dropped it from the game?
If we didn't expect the abyssal maw, we would never have been upset about not seeing it. I really do like the way mists is playing out in that I have absolutely no idea what the next raid tier is going to look like. I don't know what instance it's going to be, where on the continent we'll find it or even what sorts of enemies we'll be fighting. My first guess is some faction related thing like champs from ToC but for an entire instance but I have absolutely no basis for that aside from the feeling of escalating tensions between the factions and the content coming in 5.1.
I think this is an important part of MMOs specifically. This is because MMOs are constantly "updating." They are evolving and changing. We need to keep the mystery alive the way mists has been. I really think that not divulging things to the audience is a great way of keeping them engaged and excited. A little bit of knowledge is ok, take a look at the Wrathion legendary quest chain. I'm super excited about demons now. The conclusion I've drawn from that quest line so far is that I should be expecting demons for the next expansion. I am likely to be really disappointed when it hits should it not be demons but the next expansion is a topic for another day.
I know today's post is brief compared to others but I just wanted people to think about how much they know before hand. This can apply to anything including the encounters themselves. If you're a progression guild you really can't afford to ignore the PTR or previous strats but you can try and avoid spoilers plot wise. I try to avoid spoilers wherever I can. Sure I want to know real bad what's coming down the pipe but I find it so much sweeter when I take things in as they are meant to be revealed by those who are producing the content.
Lets hope mists keeps delivering the goods. Now that the biggest part of the progression race (the extra nights) part is over I should get back to a "real" update frequency.
I'd like to consider another of the major differences between cataclysm and mists. We knew what was coming for cata. We knew ragnaros was coming. We knew deathwing was going to try and destroy the world. We "knew" that the abyssal maw was going to be a feature once we got through the zone. The entire expansion had this build up and a lot of player foreknowledge.
Mists doesn't do this. Sure we know who the eventual bad guy of the expansion is, and sure it's not that hard to guess even if you don't already know. That said there is relatively little knowledge on how we're getting there or exactly what's going to happen in between.
I think this is a pretty big deal for a lot of games out there. How many games do you know that had promised certain features early on in their development cycle only to cut them later on because they couldn't get it done or found it was a lot more complicated than imagined or just didn't get around to it until it was far too late to do a good job of it so they dropped it from the game?
If we didn't expect the abyssal maw, we would never have been upset about not seeing it. I really do like the way mists is playing out in that I have absolutely no idea what the next raid tier is going to look like. I don't know what instance it's going to be, where on the continent we'll find it or even what sorts of enemies we'll be fighting. My first guess is some faction related thing like champs from ToC but for an entire instance but I have absolutely no basis for that aside from the feeling of escalating tensions between the factions and the content coming in 5.1.
I think this is an important part of MMOs specifically. This is because MMOs are constantly "updating." They are evolving and changing. We need to keep the mystery alive the way mists has been. I really think that not divulging things to the audience is a great way of keeping them engaged and excited. A little bit of knowledge is ok, take a look at the Wrathion legendary quest chain. I'm super excited about demons now. The conclusion I've drawn from that quest line so far is that I should be expecting demons for the next expansion. I am likely to be really disappointed when it hits should it not be demons but the next expansion is a topic for another day.
I know today's post is brief compared to others but I just wanted people to think about how much they know before hand. This can apply to anything including the encounters themselves. If you're a progression guild you really can't afford to ignore the PTR or previous strats but you can try and avoid spoilers plot wise. I try to avoid spoilers wherever I can. Sure I want to know real bad what's coming down the pipe but I find it so much sweeter when I take things in as they are meant to be revealed by those who are producing the content.
Lets hope mists keeps delivering the goods. Now that the biggest part of the progression race (the extra nights) part is over I should get back to a "real" update frequency.
13 November, 2012
Didn't make the cut
Early on in the cataclysm expansion cycle the players were curious about a place known as the abyssal maw. Shortly we all learned exactly what that place was meant to be. A raid instance. The events in the nearby zones of vashj'ir set up a clear story of what was taking place and a bunch of possible bosses, or rather some possible posses.
So what happened, why did we never get the abyssal maw as a raid instance. Why was it that we only got Firelands, as nice as that place was?
The short answer, is development time. It's something that comes up with almost everything I try and discuss related to the game, specifically with things related to projects the developers would need to undertake. This is a commodity. It is extremely scarce and extremely valuable. If something takes a small amount of dev time, then it's much more likely to get into the game. There's a lot that goes into how long it takes to develop a piece of the game, and one of those pieces is how far along you already are in the game.
Imagine you're writting a story. You have an assignment for class or perhaps taking part in NaNoWriMo (Nation Novel Writing Month). You get pretty far along over the first half of the month and then come up with a phenomenal way to change something have already written. You could have this exact same problem when writing any sort of essay for a project. It's much harder to change things once you've already started it. If you had the idea earlier on, not saying that you're bad for not having done so but inspiration isn't something you can control, you could have integrated it in your original design.
When designing a game this problem explodes and fractures into a thousand other problems. In a way it invalidates some previous time spent on the game, and in the game world, especially in an MMO where you are literally racing against the attention span of your audience, you need every moment you can get your hands on. As great as the people at Blizzard are, they are still human and have needs outside of running their game.
When it comes down to it you are left with a couple choices. You can delay the release of your content to change or improve what you have, but you can't do this forever. You do have deadlines and you do have to beat that attention span of your audience. You can drop the change or improvement you want to put in, provided it's not vital and you have the time for it. This is what happens a lot and while it's unfortunate, it often leads to better games. You can sometimes put it on the side-burner and work on it later. This is what they're doing with things like character models.
So unfortunately, as we saw, the abyssal maw was dropped from the raid release schedule. I'm not entirely sure I buy the whole "we wanted to see if 7 bosses would last people 5 months" argument because clearly that's absurd. There just wasn't enough time for the developers to bring enough new fights to cover two instances, at least not to do that and have it up to the same standard of quality we had been used to before then. Dragon soul was really a let down. In addition to the dev time to design fights for the raid, there was art time to make a cohesive set of armor for both instances. Sure they had the fire and water thing going on between the two, but that really restricts what you can do and forces you to make a lot of decisions that a lot of people might not be too happy with. The artists likely didn't want to create and entirely new zone that already has a fairly set theme to it. That's still a lot of work.
I haven't actually worked for or on any games that got past the "this is a great idea" phase, but my understanding is that this happens all the time. It's hard to see in games because part of their job is to make the game feel complete, to avoid making it feel like something wasn't included. It's really a shame because a lot of times some small adjustments might take a lot of work and there just isn't enough time in the day to get everything done.
Hopefully when asking for content in the future we can all be a bit more understanding of what goes on behind the curtains. They aren't trying to cheat us out of game material and they aren't slacking at their jobs. They work just as hard as you would, and are trying to put out the best game they possibly can.
I think there's more to this topic than what I've mentioned already, and specifically regarding the abyssal maw and firelands, but I'll save that for next time. Next week is rough with Terrace launching but I hope to have something more for you guys before too long.
So what happened, why did we never get the abyssal maw as a raid instance. Why was it that we only got Firelands, as nice as that place was?
The short answer, is development time. It's something that comes up with almost everything I try and discuss related to the game, specifically with things related to projects the developers would need to undertake. This is a commodity. It is extremely scarce and extremely valuable. If something takes a small amount of dev time, then it's much more likely to get into the game. There's a lot that goes into how long it takes to develop a piece of the game, and one of those pieces is how far along you already are in the game.
Imagine you're writting a story. You have an assignment for class or perhaps taking part in NaNoWriMo (Nation Novel Writing Month). You get pretty far along over the first half of the month and then come up with a phenomenal way to change something have already written. You could have this exact same problem when writing any sort of essay for a project. It's much harder to change things once you've already started it. If you had the idea earlier on, not saying that you're bad for not having done so but inspiration isn't something you can control, you could have integrated it in your original design.
When designing a game this problem explodes and fractures into a thousand other problems. In a way it invalidates some previous time spent on the game, and in the game world, especially in an MMO where you are literally racing against the attention span of your audience, you need every moment you can get your hands on. As great as the people at Blizzard are, they are still human and have needs outside of running their game.
When it comes down to it you are left with a couple choices. You can delay the release of your content to change or improve what you have, but you can't do this forever. You do have deadlines and you do have to beat that attention span of your audience. You can drop the change or improvement you want to put in, provided it's not vital and you have the time for it. This is what happens a lot and while it's unfortunate, it often leads to better games. You can sometimes put it on the side-burner and work on it later. This is what they're doing with things like character models.
So unfortunately, as we saw, the abyssal maw was dropped from the raid release schedule. I'm not entirely sure I buy the whole "we wanted to see if 7 bosses would last people 5 months" argument because clearly that's absurd. There just wasn't enough time for the developers to bring enough new fights to cover two instances, at least not to do that and have it up to the same standard of quality we had been used to before then. Dragon soul was really a let down. In addition to the dev time to design fights for the raid, there was art time to make a cohesive set of armor for both instances. Sure they had the fire and water thing going on between the two, but that really restricts what you can do and forces you to make a lot of decisions that a lot of people might not be too happy with. The artists likely didn't want to create and entirely new zone that already has a fairly set theme to it. That's still a lot of work.
I haven't actually worked for or on any games that got past the "this is a great idea" phase, but my understanding is that this happens all the time. It's hard to see in games because part of their job is to make the game feel complete, to avoid making it feel like something wasn't included. It's really a shame because a lot of times some small adjustments might take a lot of work and there just isn't enough time in the day to get everything done.
Hopefully when asking for content in the future we can all be a bit more understanding of what goes on behind the curtains. They aren't trying to cheat us out of game material and they aren't slacking at their jobs. They work just as hard as you would, and are trying to put out the best game they possibly can.
I think there's more to this topic than what I've mentioned already, and specifically regarding the abyssal maw and firelands, but I'll save that for next time. Next week is rough with Terrace launching but I hope to have something more for you guys before too long.
09 November, 2012
Been away for a while
Been a couple weeks since I posted. I'm pretty swamped lately with raid and the rest of real life. I'll be back in a bit.
In the meantime you should go check out a channel on youtube called extracreditz. If you enjoy what I have been writing about at all it's is more than worth your time to check them out. They are phenomenal and are talking about, what I believe to be, extremely important topics.
I promise there will be more in the next few weeks once the big progression race is done.
In the meantime you should go check out a channel on youtube called extracreditz. If you enjoy what I have been writing about at all it's is more than worth your time to check them out. They are phenomenal and are talking about, what I believe to be, extremely important topics.
I promise there will be more in the next few weeks once the big progression race is done.
25 October, 2012
Contact your local Blizzard CM
This is mostly about some problems I have with the way pally tanks are set up right now. Don't get me wrong I absolutely love the position we're in and really don't want to get nerfed so this isn't about us being on a bad position class balance wise. This is about gear.
As many of you know, our best gear options is basically any piece of str plate without crit. I love having more gearing options even though I'm not thrilled with haste so good. This is a lot better than the previous models where it's "stack mastery and ignore the rest." That said, I have a few issues that I'd like to bring up.
1 - Haste gear isn't tagged for prot in LFR/world bosses/bonus rolls. This means that should I want to use my bonus roll on something like heroic Gara'jal (which hopefully we'll have down tonight or tomorrow) I'm only hoping for the boots. This is really frustrating since if I want either of those pieces I have to queue for LFR as ret (which I'm not very good with nor do I have gear for it) which introduces the problem of me getting gear with crit on it.
2 - I really don't want to take gear away from dps classes. I'm fine if our gear is intended to be the same and we're supposed to compete for gear but right now I just feel terrible for rolling on things like the hit/haste gloves from Elegon. This really only bothers me because it feels similar to the old warriors taking leather gear with ArP. I have access to a lot more gear than they do for tanking but because the haste is better I am ignoring gear that is "for me" in favour of gear that is "for them."
3 - Tier gear. Our 4p is incredibly good. This means we want to take sub-optimal gear in exchange for that 4p, which I feel is somewhat the intended design for set bonuses instead of "decide which four pieces you want because the 4p is that good all the time." That being said we are probably going to seriously look at the ret set bonuses every tier because if the 2p is good, we're more than likely to take that instead of our own 4p. Imagine something like, hitting CS or Judgement gives you some haste buff. That's something I'd take if ret gear was better than prot. Putting this into perspective, I want the ret gear more than the prot gear right now.
The complaining aside, I really do like having more compelling gear choices. My qualms mainly remains with not having the game support the value of haste to us.
Last thing I wanted to mention was looking at enchants. Tanking enchants are somewhat interesting this time around, and I do have some problems with them. I'm going to post what EJ says for prot pally enchants since it somewhat echos my own feelings:
Dancing Steel > River's Song >> Windsong >>> Colossus.
I hate Colossus just as much as the guys over at EJ do. Over the course of an entire Will of the Emperor fight I got a total of 250k absorbed. Sure that means it proced maybe 40+ times, but the shield size is awful. 7k shield just doesn't cut it. To put this into perspective, on will of the emperors, a single dodged or parried attack due to DS or RS will be the same. Sure you can't garuntee and the nature of avoidance from str-parry and dodge but it's more about hedging the bets against you than making a large difference.
The problem I have here is that the dps enchant is better than the tanking enchant. I'd be fine if it was some crazy secondary stat buff but it's a stat that means next to nothing for us. It increases dps (marginally since most of our ap comes from vengeance anyways) and gives us some parry.
Sure rivers song has an official twice the proc rate when compared to dancing steel so you'll have more uptime but there's two reasons that's not really relevant. First is that str-parry conversion doesn't suffer from DR. It's str to parry % not str to parry rating. Secondly the duration on DS is 12s, the duration on RS is only 7.
They are also not on the RPPM system as of yet, contrary to what you might read on the internet the blizzard post doesn't say anything but windsong and elemental blast or whatever are using the new system.
That's mostly what I had to rant about tonight, we've got gara sub 10%. Don't forgot to complain on the forums in a civilized manner, use theck and EJ for sources.
As many of you know, our best gear options is basically any piece of str plate without crit. I love having more gearing options even though I'm not thrilled with haste so good. This is a lot better than the previous models where it's "stack mastery and ignore the rest." That said, I have a few issues that I'd like to bring up.
1 - Haste gear isn't tagged for prot in LFR/world bosses/bonus rolls. This means that should I want to use my bonus roll on something like heroic Gara'jal (which hopefully we'll have down tonight or tomorrow) I'm only hoping for the boots. This is really frustrating since if I want either of those pieces I have to queue for LFR as ret (which I'm not very good with nor do I have gear for it) which introduces the problem of me getting gear with crit on it.
2 - I really don't want to take gear away from dps classes. I'm fine if our gear is intended to be the same and we're supposed to compete for gear but right now I just feel terrible for rolling on things like the hit/haste gloves from Elegon. This really only bothers me because it feels similar to the old warriors taking leather gear with ArP. I have access to a lot more gear than they do for tanking but because the haste is better I am ignoring gear that is "for me" in favour of gear that is "for them."
3 - Tier gear. Our 4p is incredibly good. This means we want to take sub-optimal gear in exchange for that 4p, which I feel is somewhat the intended design for set bonuses instead of "decide which four pieces you want because the 4p is that good all the time." That being said we are probably going to seriously look at the ret set bonuses every tier because if the 2p is good, we're more than likely to take that instead of our own 4p. Imagine something like, hitting CS or Judgement gives you some haste buff. That's something I'd take if ret gear was better than prot. Putting this into perspective, I want the ret gear more than the prot gear right now.
The complaining aside, I really do like having more compelling gear choices. My qualms mainly remains with not having the game support the value of haste to us.
Last thing I wanted to mention was looking at enchants. Tanking enchants are somewhat interesting this time around, and I do have some problems with them. I'm going to post what EJ says for prot pally enchants since it somewhat echos my own feelings:
Dancing Steel > River's Song >> Windsong >>> Colossus.
I hate Colossus just as much as the guys over at EJ do. Over the course of an entire Will of the Emperor fight I got a total of 250k absorbed. Sure that means it proced maybe 40+ times, but the shield size is awful. 7k shield just doesn't cut it. To put this into perspective, on will of the emperors, a single dodged or parried attack due to DS or RS will be the same. Sure you can't garuntee and the nature of avoidance from str-parry and dodge but it's more about hedging the bets against you than making a large difference.
The problem I have here is that the dps enchant is better than the tanking enchant. I'd be fine if it was some crazy secondary stat buff but it's a stat that means next to nothing for us. It increases dps (marginally since most of our ap comes from vengeance anyways) and gives us some parry.
Sure rivers song has an official twice the proc rate when compared to dancing steel so you'll have more uptime but there's two reasons that's not really relevant. First is that str-parry conversion doesn't suffer from DR. It's str to parry % not str to parry rating. Secondly the duration on DS is 12s, the duration on RS is only 7.
They are also not on the RPPM system as of yet, contrary to what you might read on the internet the blizzard post doesn't say anything but windsong and elemental blast or whatever are using the new system.
That's mostly what I had to rant about tonight, we've got gara sub 10%. Don't forgot to complain on the forums in a civilized manner, use theck and EJ for sources.
15 October, 2012
MV is amazing
I'm finding it's really hard to find time to write these days, especially with all the farming that I have to do. I've actually got 3 characters (should be more but I've been lazy) all farming for mats while getting some friends to fish for me.
I don't like dailies, I don't like the intense time investment outside of raid. I'm ok with a little, like planting your farm every day for food (which would have been a wonderful idea if not for the extra 5 hours of fishing/killing turtles I have to do for every raid night). I like the idea of making the feasts a smaller stat gain than personal food, this seems like a fine idea. The problem I have is that to get the extra 25 stats for non-stam food takes a completely absurd amount of time to farm. It's probably not worth it.
Second, flasks. I understand that the wrath model with frozen lotus was a decent one. I also understand that the economy on some servers is really really bad. That said, the guild has to drop 60k every week to get it's raiders flasked, minus alchemists and their double long flasks. We could change to elixirs, which sometimes come out on top anyways but there's two major problems there.
1. Alchemists still benefit more from flasks since the double duration applies while death completely negates that part of mixology. This means that for alchemists elixirs are even more expensive than flasks.
2. There are only 2 guardian elixirs. Dodge and Armour. This means that only tanks will get the benefit of using two elixirs and the stat gain from a flask once again beats out the elixir gain.
Sure you can buy golden lotus with motes of harmony, and you can farm motes with your farm. Assuming you only spend so much time in raids a week, it shouldn't be too bad. 1.6 spirits * 7 days in the week = 11.2 spirits exclusively from farming in a given week. 3 lotus per spirit means basically 33 flasks per week. So for the non-alchemists this means 33 hours of raiding per week is covered by you spending your entire farm on harmony...This isn't too bad, but try to get everyone on the raid team using their farm for motes for the guild. I highly doubt the average player will spend 33 hours a week raiding and flasked the whole time. Since I forgot to add alts, you can multiply it by the number of characters at revered or higher. 1.2 for a revered character, 1.6 for an exalted one. Things get pretty easy for flasks at that point. Ultimately you can provide golden lotus for yourself once you hit revered with 1.2 spirits per day, ignoring any lucky picks or immediately ripe plants. That takes care of flasks, but oh wait how the hell are you planning on dealing with food now.
This is sort of the conundrum. Not only do you have to deal with your farm, but as a serious raider you have to get all your dailies done to get the rep to even be able to spend your valour points. This also applies to your justice points. This means that your time investment per day is somewhere in the realm of 2-3 hours after farming for raid mats and getting your dailies done. That has just turned my 12 hour raid week into nearly a 30hr "raid" week. This is ridiculous.
Thankfully, blizzard has provided us raiders with what I think has been one of the best raid instances I have seen. The lore may not be flowing out of the walls, but the mobs and encounter design are. I have no felt this good about raiding in a really really long time. I think sinestra was the last time I was actually excited about a boss kill and didn't just think "It's about [expletive] time." Spine came closest but in the end it the feeling there was more one of finishing a marathon and collapsing to the ground just happy to be finished. Sinestra felt like something we worked hard for an accomplished. Not until doing stone guard on heroic (Yes, I'm only 1/6 H right now, we are having some issues with feng) did I really feel happy about killing a boss. We managed about world 150 25m, US 70ish. This is the best I have ever done while raiding and I feel like this time it was really about being good at the game and working really hard in the raid instance.
All the fights I feel are extremely well designed and, at least on 25m, extremely well tuned. Elegon is a perfect example of getting things just right. Our first 25m kill of that we were within 10-20s of the enrage after having a couple 2-5% wipes. It was what I remembered of raiding back in the black temple or the first time we got kael'thas down, or especially lady vashj. This raid instance is phenomenal, and has really raised the bar on encounter design. I also think, judging by completion rates, that there has been a much better job trying to keep the 10 and 25 raids relatively equal. I don't want to get into that debate because I do have opinions and people will get upset but the reality is they are different raid sizes and require different things out of not only the raiders themselves but out of those who organize the raids.
Thank you blizzard for making me remember why I absolutely love to raid. I can't believe you made an encounter that is almost exclusively about spreading and stacking at the right times, and managed to make it truly difficult in the appropriate gear. I can't wait until heart of fear and terrace get launched, I doubt we'll get all of MV down before it launches but we can try.
Lastly I wanted to remind all of the prot pallies out there that you're not OP. Competing on the healing charts and damage charts while tanking is how we're supposed to be. Keep on being awesome guys.
I don't like dailies, I don't like the intense time investment outside of raid. I'm ok with a little, like planting your farm every day for food (which would have been a wonderful idea if not for the extra 5 hours of fishing/killing turtles I have to do for every raid night). I like the idea of making the feasts a smaller stat gain than personal food, this seems like a fine idea. The problem I have is that to get the extra 25 stats for non-stam food takes a completely absurd amount of time to farm. It's probably not worth it.
Second, flasks. I understand that the wrath model with frozen lotus was a decent one. I also understand that the economy on some servers is really really bad. That said, the guild has to drop 60k every week to get it's raiders flasked, minus alchemists and their double long flasks. We could change to elixirs, which sometimes come out on top anyways but there's two major problems there.
1. Alchemists still benefit more from flasks since the double duration applies while death completely negates that part of mixology. This means that for alchemists elixirs are even more expensive than flasks.
2. There are only 2 guardian elixirs. Dodge and Armour. This means that only tanks will get the benefit of using two elixirs and the stat gain from a flask once again beats out the elixir gain.
Sure you can buy golden lotus with motes of harmony, and you can farm motes with your farm. Assuming you only spend so much time in raids a week, it shouldn't be too bad. 1.6 spirits * 7 days in the week = 11.2 spirits exclusively from farming in a given week. 3 lotus per spirit means basically 33 flasks per week. So for the non-alchemists this means 33 hours of raiding per week is covered by you spending your entire farm on harmony...This isn't too bad, but try to get everyone on the raid team using their farm for motes for the guild. I highly doubt the average player will spend 33 hours a week raiding and flasked the whole time. Since I forgot to add alts, you can multiply it by the number of characters at revered or higher. 1.2 for a revered character, 1.6 for an exalted one. Things get pretty easy for flasks at that point. Ultimately you can provide golden lotus for yourself once you hit revered with 1.2 spirits per day, ignoring any lucky picks or immediately ripe plants. That takes care of flasks, but oh wait how the hell are you planning on dealing with food now.
This is sort of the conundrum. Not only do you have to deal with your farm, but as a serious raider you have to get all your dailies done to get the rep to even be able to spend your valour points. This also applies to your justice points. This means that your time investment per day is somewhere in the realm of 2-3 hours after farming for raid mats and getting your dailies done. That has just turned my 12 hour raid week into nearly a 30hr "raid" week. This is ridiculous.
Thankfully, blizzard has provided us raiders with what I think has been one of the best raid instances I have seen. The lore may not be flowing out of the walls, but the mobs and encounter design are. I have no felt this good about raiding in a really really long time. I think sinestra was the last time I was actually excited about a boss kill and didn't just think "It's about [expletive] time." Spine came closest but in the end it the feeling there was more one of finishing a marathon and collapsing to the ground just happy to be finished. Sinestra felt like something we worked hard for an accomplished. Not until doing stone guard on heroic (Yes, I'm only 1/6 H right now, we are having some issues with feng) did I really feel happy about killing a boss. We managed about world 150 25m, US 70ish. This is the best I have ever done while raiding and I feel like this time it was really about being good at the game and working really hard in the raid instance.
All the fights I feel are extremely well designed and, at least on 25m, extremely well tuned. Elegon is a perfect example of getting things just right. Our first 25m kill of that we were within 10-20s of the enrage after having a couple 2-5% wipes. It was what I remembered of raiding back in the black temple or the first time we got kael'thas down, or especially lady vashj. This raid instance is phenomenal, and has really raised the bar on encounter design. I also think, judging by completion rates, that there has been a much better job trying to keep the 10 and 25 raids relatively equal. I don't want to get into that debate because I do have opinions and people will get upset but the reality is they are different raid sizes and require different things out of not only the raiders themselves but out of those who organize the raids.
Thank you blizzard for making me remember why I absolutely love to raid. I can't believe you made an encounter that is almost exclusively about spreading and stacking at the right times, and managed to make it truly difficult in the appropriate gear. I can't wait until heart of fear and terrace get launched, I doubt we'll get all of MV down before it launches but we can try.
Lastly I wanted to remind all of the prot pallies out there that you're not OP. Competing on the healing charts and damage charts while tanking is how we're supposed to be. Keep on being awesome guys.
10 October, 2012
Vengeance is stupid
First week of raids are done (and then some) and I have a lot to say about them. I didn't get to do elegon since I was out of town for the past weekend, I also missed most of spirit kings. Aside from that I returned in time for will of the emperor and we did clear up to garaj'al before I had to leave.
So instead I'm going to talk about some mechanics and problems with the current state of affairs for tanks. Braces yourselves.
It seems that everyone in the world knows that tank damage is broken except for blizzard. They *buffed* monk aoe damage recently. We had a trash pull where our monk tank was doing over 200k dps while the next closest people were doing in the 120ish range if they were lucky. They nerfed pally tanks damage significantly particularly through censure, but that just made us switch to seal of insight which almost triples our healing done and actually lets me compete with both healing and damage and damage taken (low side on that is ideal).
I honestly think this is the expression of vengeance. They took the cap away so being able to tank incredible incoming damage means you can do obscene outgoing damage. In the case of a pally, our heals also scale with vengeance which means we get to do crazy things. But vengeance really is the problem. There is no cap, it scales with damage on you, though thankfully unimitgated, which means you want to stand in bad stuff for more vengeance. Sure avoiding damage counts for vengeance now but does avoiding pools on the ground count? It does not. We're still encouraged to take extra sources of damage to try and push out increasingly large numbers. For example, several nights ago while working on will of the emperor I managed to get #1 on the damage charts, yet only ranked 100ish for all pally tanks. I was 6th on feng earlier in the week, first on stone guard and yet my rankings on both are relatively low.
As much as I enjoy kicking the crap out of our dps, I think it's wrong. I'm not doing anything to be a stellar tank when it comes to damage, I think I'm doing very well when it comes to damage taken but my damage is almost entirely out of my control. It's also out of control in general. I don't mind doing competative damage. I'm ok with being at the bottom of the chart but not by much. The problem comes in when I'm now gearing for haste because it's not only a relatively strong tanking stat but it's an extremely strong dps stat for me. I don't mind it, don't get me wrong, but the fact that dodge and parry are basically wasted ilvls means that I would like some other stats to go through with.
I've already discussed alternatives to vengeance and so have many many other sources. Vengeance is a problem and I don't think blizzard is ready to do anything about it right now, especially since they missed the best opportunity to do so.
That's all for now really, busy life keeps these short. I'll probably have more on the weekend. Enjoy the tier, I feel it's pretty awesome so far.
So instead I'm going to talk about some mechanics and problems with the current state of affairs for tanks. Braces yourselves.
It seems that everyone in the world knows that tank damage is broken except for blizzard. They *buffed* monk aoe damage recently. We had a trash pull where our monk tank was doing over 200k dps while the next closest people were doing in the 120ish range if they were lucky. They nerfed pally tanks damage significantly particularly through censure, but that just made us switch to seal of insight which almost triples our healing done and actually lets me compete with both healing and damage and damage taken (low side on that is ideal).
I honestly think this is the expression of vengeance. They took the cap away so being able to tank incredible incoming damage means you can do obscene outgoing damage. In the case of a pally, our heals also scale with vengeance which means we get to do crazy things. But vengeance really is the problem. There is no cap, it scales with damage on you, though thankfully unimitgated, which means you want to stand in bad stuff for more vengeance. Sure avoiding damage counts for vengeance now but does avoiding pools on the ground count? It does not. We're still encouraged to take extra sources of damage to try and push out increasingly large numbers. For example, several nights ago while working on will of the emperor I managed to get #1 on the damage charts, yet only ranked 100ish for all pally tanks. I was 6th on feng earlier in the week, first on stone guard and yet my rankings on both are relatively low.
As much as I enjoy kicking the crap out of our dps, I think it's wrong. I'm not doing anything to be a stellar tank when it comes to damage, I think I'm doing very well when it comes to damage taken but my damage is almost entirely out of my control. It's also out of control in general. I don't mind doing competative damage. I'm ok with being at the bottom of the chart but not by much. The problem comes in when I'm now gearing for haste because it's not only a relatively strong tanking stat but it's an extremely strong dps stat for me. I don't mind it, don't get me wrong, but the fact that dodge and parry are basically wasted ilvls means that I would like some other stats to go through with.
I've already discussed alternatives to vengeance and so have many many other sources. Vengeance is a problem and I don't think blizzard is ready to do anything about it right now, especially since they missed the best opportunity to do so.
That's all for now really, busy life keeps these short. I'll probably have more on the weekend. Enjoy the tier, I feel it's pretty awesome so far.
28 September, 2012
Servers down, time to type
To start, I think Mists is the best thing that's happened to warcraft so far. The levelling process feels so much smoother, the dungeons are more entertaining. Graphics upgrade wasn't huge but is noticable. The heroic dungeons are a bit easy but I'm perfectly fine with that depending on how the challenge mode and raids play out.
It's still in the first week but there's a ton of information I can share with people. I'm not going to write a rep guide because those exist out there, and I'm going to try to avoid anything that's already been done that isn't too hard to find so here it goes.
What to do when you hit 90.
After hitting lvl 90 what should you do? The first things I would highly recommend are unlocking the various dailies. Since there are no caps on daily quests you can do basically every daily quest you have access to every day. So which factions do you have access to? Also this is how you get to spend your JP and VP since all the items you can buy with those currencies are tied to reputations Honoured = JP. Revered = VP
The black prince. No spoilers here but you do need to pick up a quest to go see wrathion. This is related to the legendary gem upgrade. It's important you get this because you rep up by killing mobs of various types that you'll find anyways by doing your other dailies.
Doing the dread wastes quests should put you in line to do the klaxxi quests. You should be able to hit honoured with them through just the zone quests and one or two days worth of dailies. They are pretty easy dailies and at exalted you get extra weapon choices that seem mostly for xmog but are actually really nice if you don't get a 463 by then. Depending on which set of dailies you get you will be getting black prince rep.
Temple of the white tiger in Kun-lai summit has a quest involving Anduin that should unlock the golden lotus quests for you. Golden lotus rep is required for access to many other factions and it is really really slow going. The mobs you kill for these quests also generate black prince rep, most of them. You also unlock new dailies upon hitting honoured so keep an eye out for those.
Anglers and cloud serpent factions are also available and their dailies do reward valour points and the lesser charms of good fortune. which means it's a really good idea to get started on them but their rewards aren't as important as the other two factions you have access to. The rest of the factions you do not get access to right away. At least shado-pan and august celestials require the golden lotus rep. You can pick up quests that let you know about this at the main shrine area in the vale of eternal blossoms.
Many quests offer 450 gear, heroic dungeons offer 463 gear with some 470 gear from the last boss if you're lucky. Professions have felt very easy to level up this time around, engineering is a bit of a hassle but it's pretty streamlined and the profession kickbacks show up pretty early for most of them. I think that vast majority are available at 550 while one or two of them might not be available to a fair bit higher. Alchemy you can get lucky with discovering the flask early.
I also haven't discovered anything about flask cauldrons or feasts, so if anyone can tell me with certainty how they work this time around please post a comment.
That's pretty much it for level cap right now. You can start your farm and do some pokemon battles as well but neither really increases your player power much unless you're focusing on cooking, in which case you really want to get the tillers rep and farm going (in valley of the four winds).
Servers are almost up soon and I have chores around the hose to get done before then so I hope you all are enjoying the levelling process and new content. P.S. Sha of anger and galleon are pushovers.
It's still in the first week but there's a ton of information I can share with people. I'm not going to write a rep guide because those exist out there, and I'm going to try to avoid anything that's already been done that isn't too hard to find so here it goes.
What to do when you hit 90.
After hitting lvl 90 what should you do? The first things I would highly recommend are unlocking the various dailies. Since there are no caps on daily quests you can do basically every daily quest you have access to every day. So which factions do you have access to? Also this is how you get to spend your JP and VP since all the items you can buy with those currencies are tied to reputations Honoured = JP. Revered = VP
The black prince. No spoilers here but you do need to pick up a quest to go see wrathion. This is related to the legendary gem upgrade. It's important you get this because you rep up by killing mobs of various types that you'll find anyways by doing your other dailies.
Doing the dread wastes quests should put you in line to do the klaxxi quests. You should be able to hit honoured with them through just the zone quests and one or two days worth of dailies. They are pretty easy dailies and at exalted you get extra weapon choices that seem mostly for xmog but are actually really nice if you don't get a 463 by then. Depending on which set of dailies you get you will be getting black prince rep.
Temple of the white tiger in Kun-lai summit has a quest involving Anduin that should unlock the golden lotus quests for you. Golden lotus rep is required for access to many other factions and it is really really slow going. The mobs you kill for these quests also generate black prince rep, most of them. You also unlock new dailies upon hitting honoured so keep an eye out for those.
Anglers and cloud serpent factions are also available and their dailies do reward valour points and the lesser charms of good fortune. which means it's a really good idea to get started on them but their rewards aren't as important as the other two factions you have access to. The rest of the factions you do not get access to right away. At least shado-pan and august celestials require the golden lotus rep. You can pick up quests that let you know about this at the main shrine area in the vale of eternal blossoms.
Many quests offer 450 gear, heroic dungeons offer 463 gear with some 470 gear from the last boss if you're lucky. Professions have felt very easy to level up this time around, engineering is a bit of a hassle but it's pretty streamlined and the profession kickbacks show up pretty early for most of them. I think that vast majority are available at 550 while one or two of them might not be available to a fair bit higher. Alchemy you can get lucky with discovering the flask early.
I also haven't discovered anything about flask cauldrons or feasts, so if anyone can tell me with certainty how they work this time around please post a comment.
That's pretty much it for level cap right now. You can start your farm and do some pokemon battles as well but neither really increases your player power much unless you're focusing on cooking, in which case you really want to get the tillers rep and farm going (in valley of the four winds).
Servers are almost up soon and I have chores around the hose to get done before then so I hope you all are enjoying the levelling process and new content. P.S. Sha of anger and galleon are pushovers.
19 September, 2012
Finally DS is done
It's been a long time, and for the most part a pretty good run, but now that dragon soul is officially off the raiding roster for me I wanted to take a detailed look at each boss and the raid tier as a whole and highlight the good and the bad. One last thing before we get started is that I highly recommend people take a look at the new crafting stuff for MoP. There is a phenomenal change regarding raid craftables.
So the raid tier as a whole was pretty short. 8 Bosses, only 5 of those had trash. The loot distribution was interesting and I've decided the idea of a "grab bag" drop is pretty lame even if you do it right. It's a nightmare for raid comp (ensuring all loot goes to someone) because your entire raid is going to say "I need something from the grab bag." I did like the interaction with VP trinkets and spine o' deathwing. I'll talk about the way spine and madness dropped gear when I get to them.
Morchok/Kohcrom. These guys were pretty cool. I've always wanted a fight where you'd have to split the raid up into two and go function individually. I was hoping for something a bit more seperating but it's a good start to showcase that it's a decent mechanic. Sure it's the first boss and anyone who can get to heroic modes can get heroic morchok down in a few goes, but I think the fight was entertaining. It's simple and straightforward, good for the first boss, and still requires people to be doing the right thing. I was also a fan of the tanks getting something to do (at least while "progressing" on it). Interesting loot drops, hand of morchok really bothered me but I'm going to wait until I get to madness to talk about that one. Good amount of trash, a bit unfortunate that on heroic you had to clear the sides, or at least we did but it was interesting and fit the lore/flavour of the instance.
Zon'ozz. We did some crazy strat for zonozz that didn't matter much to me being a tank but I think the setup of the fight generated a whole lot of opportunity for cheese. I really enjoyed the way heroic black phase functioned, in fact even on normal it was pretty interesting. The stacking dmg taken mechanic was interesting and fun for great numbers but the fight outside of the black phase was mostly uninteresting. Decent fight but felt almost like filler. Lots of hinting at old god influence but it really stopped here and at yor'sahj without counting DW himself. In summary, meh.
Yor'sahj. I really really liked the concept behind this fight. A few critical decisions about the fight design made it wonderful. First, all the abilities that were given to the globules, now referred to as oozes, combo together in some way. Yellow is giant in that every abilitiy except blue gets a benefit. Blue is terrifying in that you have no mana, red wants you to stay close while green wants you to spread out. All these things I find really cool on their own but planning for dealing with groups of them is awesome. The added ability to pick, or the requirement for some burst dmg to get rid of the oozes is a huge addition to the fight. Cooldown usage is hugely important since the spawns are ~1m 40s apart meaning your 2m CDs wont be up for for two phases in a row. The randomness makes it so you can't just plan the whole fight out and have to react. Lastly the fact that you can only kill one before the others go immune is something that could be debateable. It'd be something to help with farming it, which is always good in my opinion, but I can see why it wasn't there and both options are quite valid and an integral part of the fight. Just imagine how different it would be if you were allowed, and in many cases still unable due to dps requirements, to kill more than one. Size of the room was important. All in all, great fight and I wish we could see more of this level of design in encounters.
Since those last two bosses are non-linear meaning you could take 'em out in either order their difficulty was pretty spot on. There was no obvious order and without looking at exact kill numbers I remember many guilds going each way at the same time that we were progressing on it. I know we spent a fair bit of time progressing on each before getting either one. I don't even remember which one we settled on killing first though I think it was zonozz and the yorsahj the following night or something. My one problem here involves weapons again. Specimen slicer is a relatively early drop in the instance, more on it when we reach DW weapons.
Hagara. Another fight I think was really well designed, which the numbers were tuned a bit better and the lightning phase was a bit less buggy. One problem I had with the fight was lightning phase required so much pre-fight setup, not as much after doing it for 8 months but it probably added maybe 15 minutes to our raid every week, possibly more, trying to get everyone in the right spot. It's a touchy subject because you need to have some sort of pre-fight planning going on but hagara felt excessive. I liked the flow of the fight, even focused assault, though I wish there wasn't such an imbalance in tanks for that mechanic. I'm sure it'd be fine now, post 5.0 with all the changes, but before it was so bad that I got sat for our dk tank. That and our dps was a bit on the low side and it was a 1-tank encounter. I'm not opposed to 1 tank encounters but since the numbers are so small it's basically either both your tanks get competitive dps sets, which they can't because raid optimization forces you to send the dps gear at the dps, or you sit half your tanking roster because of a 1 tank fight. We did zonozz with 2 tanks because of the second claw tentacle but we probably didn't need to. Dps wasn't an issue for us there, so we opted for a second tank. I'll probably go on for a long time if I don't save that topic for another day. Summary, not a bad fight. Some bugs made it rough. Ice phase was trivialized by cheesing mechanics that I really hope were just overlooked. A simple ramp up on dmg from inside the bubble would have removed the stack up in the middle and nuke the crystals strat. Fun fight but clearly lacking in some areas.
Ultraxion. The standard "patchwerk" fight. I'm glad to see these every once in a while. Once per tier might not be the best frequency but with more bosses each tier it might not be a bad thing. I enjoyed the tank swap mechanic, made me pay attention. I really liked the way they made the dps pay attention while still trying to max dps. The more I think about it I really don't like the extra action bar buttons. I think instead I would have preferred something like "does x% of your max hp" on fading light to force people to use personal cooldowns. It could have been something like 80-90% so that they had to. Most classes have something to deal with it. Shields would be helpful for it as well. Hour could have been proximity like bloodboil was or like morchok stomp. I just hate the extra action bar thing even though it's a pretty neat solution to something like that. Nothing wrong with this fight, highlighted baddies who couldn't hit buttons or who didn't listen to mechanics. Not as much fun to farm but the fight was just tuned so well pre-nerf that I can't help but having a soft spot for the fight.
Warmaster Blackhorn. Aside from the buggy deck fire I think this was another phenomenal fight. I normally don't like dealing with add waves as part of the fight but they did it so well here. Every add had a well defined purpose in the fight and each person in the raid had a job to do. Soaking the barrages and onslaught I thought was a brilliant mechanic. This forces you to take damage while still letting you decide how much you take. It was an organizational nightmare but I think it was a brilliant mechanic. Optimizing how much of the damage you took was really important. Now with the nerf it doesn't matter because if you're good you can avoid deckfire on the first broadside, but during progression it was great. Again if deck fire wasn't bugged I think this would have been one of the best encounters in the raid. When blackhorn came down the tanks had to pay really close attention to basically everything they were doing. On heroic the two adds on the ground was probably more exciting than almost any other tanking job in the instance and it made me feel amazing when both tanks timed the swaps perfectly. I know it's not a huge deal but it just felt good. Goriona was interesting, especially her consuming shroud. The way people handled it was great, aoe heals only was pretty smart. There were some issues with things like bane of havoc cheesing and some interesting mage tricks soaking onslaughts. Great fight.
Spine of Deathwing. There are some truly great things about this fight and some real problems with this fight. First the good. I really enjoyed tanking this fight towards the end of it. I've never felt more active as a tank than that. I wouldn't want to do it often but damn it was unique and I really got to make a difference to the raid by being a good tank and kiting the adds well. The earlier part of the fight was pretty uninteresting especially when we hammered down the strat. We had issues healing but that was more a problem with us deciding to handle it poorly than any individual healer's performance. I think the fight concept was truly unique and exciting. The problem with the fight is that it was so tightly tuned, some might say overtuned that initially there were many guilds class stacking. Unfortunately not every class has identical dps over a 20s burst period. The fight was great in that it pushed everyone to their limits but the downside is it highlighted some class design issues. Unfortunately legendaries also made a huge difference which leads into a fairly large loot problem that comes up involving dragonwrath, fangs, spine trinkets and DW weapons. All in all this was another great fight with a huge learning curve. Better tuned than H rag (which was a fair bit overtuned imo) and more unique and iconic than H rag.
Madness of Deathwing. To put it simply I was really underwhelmed by this boss. The biggest problem is that it wasn't as difficult or intense as spine. It wasn't nearly as intense as spine. So many guilds got spine down and then felt like madness was the reward for killing spine. I think we took something like 10-15 attempts to get heroic madness down after nearly 10 times that on spine. We didn't actually fight deathwing either. We fought pieces of him that were falling off or pieces of the gold god corruption that were assaulting us. I thought the idea of the aspect buffs and platform order was interesting, especially with the meta achievement stuff that wanted you to start on each one. Ultimately the fight is just a bit of a wash. It's really lame considering it's the last fight in the expansion.
Lastly the loot issues with the last two bosses I'm actually going to save for another day as well. It's a pretty huge topic all on it's own and I think just examining the bosses is plenty for now. All in all DS was a sub-par raid with some really great highlights. I don't think firelands was great either but it had entirely different problems. Blizzard solved their difficulty curve issue for the most part. In FL you hit H rag basically completely unprepared for it. Spine wasn't nearly so big of a jump from warmaster. That said I think both of these past two tiers were a bit underwhelming and I can't wait to see the new exciting raid content in mists. MoP looks like they've basically taken care of everything I had an issue with.
Tanks changed a lot over this expansion and I think for the vast majority of it, it was for the better. Threat became trivial in exchange for focusing on survival and TDR. DKs got huge quality of life improvements. Paladins and warriors got probably the biggest upgrade to gear in that we actually have to pay attention to the stats on it instead of just stacking mastery and ignoring the rest until we stop having anything to gear for. I'll probably talk more about that later.
In review cataclysm felt like a giant test for a lot of things blizzard wanted to do. Smaller raid sizes turned out to be undesirable, content takes longer than they thought they could produce it. People wanted more things to do outside of raid, which there really wasn't any of in cataclysm. We're seeing a lot of these changes come into place and I for one am super excited about how amazing mists is shaping up to be.
That's the last you'll hear from me for a little while. I'm offline for the weekend, ISP issues, and starting sunday it's all about prep for the levelling extravaganza. I might do something like twitter to throw updates about levelling and whatnot but we'll see. I don't have the bandwidth to stream anything unfortunately but I will try and get some sort of update thing going on more to chronicle the adventure than anything else. Also expect more pictures on here come MoP. Catch you guys on the other side.
So the raid tier as a whole was pretty short. 8 Bosses, only 5 of those had trash. The loot distribution was interesting and I've decided the idea of a "grab bag" drop is pretty lame even if you do it right. It's a nightmare for raid comp (ensuring all loot goes to someone) because your entire raid is going to say "I need something from the grab bag." I did like the interaction with VP trinkets and spine o' deathwing. I'll talk about the way spine and madness dropped gear when I get to them.
Morchok/Kohcrom. These guys were pretty cool. I've always wanted a fight where you'd have to split the raid up into two and go function individually. I was hoping for something a bit more seperating but it's a good start to showcase that it's a decent mechanic. Sure it's the first boss and anyone who can get to heroic modes can get heroic morchok down in a few goes, but I think the fight was entertaining. It's simple and straightforward, good for the first boss, and still requires people to be doing the right thing. I was also a fan of the tanks getting something to do (at least while "progressing" on it). Interesting loot drops, hand of morchok really bothered me but I'm going to wait until I get to madness to talk about that one. Good amount of trash, a bit unfortunate that on heroic you had to clear the sides, or at least we did but it was interesting and fit the lore/flavour of the instance.
Zon'ozz. We did some crazy strat for zonozz that didn't matter much to me being a tank but I think the setup of the fight generated a whole lot of opportunity for cheese. I really enjoyed the way heroic black phase functioned, in fact even on normal it was pretty interesting. The stacking dmg taken mechanic was interesting and fun for great numbers but the fight outside of the black phase was mostly uninteresting. Decent fight but felt almost like filler. Lots of hinting at old god influence but it really stopped here and at yor'sahj without counting DW himself. In summary, meh.
Yor'sahj. I really really liked the concept behind this fight. A few critical decisions about the fight design made it wonderful. First, all the abilities that were given to the globules, now referred to as oozes, combo together in some way. Yellow is giant in that every abilitiy except blue gets a benefit. Blue is terrifying in that you have no mana, red wants you to stay close while green wants you to spread out. All these things I find really cool on their own but planning for dealing with groups of them is awesome. The added ability to pick, or the requirement for some burst dmg to get rid of the oozes is a huge addition to the fight. Cooldown usage is hugely important since the spawns are ~1m 40s apart meaning your 2m CDs wont be up for for two phases in a row. The randomness makes it so you can't just plan the whole fight out and have to react. Lastly the fact that you can only kill one before the others go immune is something that could be debateable. It'd be something to help with farming it, which is always good in my opinion, but I can see why it wasn't there and both options are quite valid and an integral part of the fight. Just imagine how different it would be if you were allowed, and in many cases still unable due to dps requirements, to kill more than one. Size of the room was important. All in all, great fight and I wish we could see more of this level of design in encounters.
Since those last two bosses are non-linear meaning you could take 'em out in either order their difficulty was pretty spot on. There was no obvious order and without looking at exact kill numbers I remember many guilds going each way at the same time that we were progressing on it. I know we spent a fair bit of time progressing on each before getting either one. I don't even remember which one we settled on killing first though I think it was zonozz and the yorsahj the following night or something. My one problem here involves weapons again. Specimen slicer is a relatively early drop in the instance, more on it when we reach DW weapons.
Hagara. Another fight I think was really well designed, which the numbers were tuned a bit better and the lightning phase was a bit less buggy. One problem I had with the fight was lightning phase required so much pre-fight setup, not as much after doing it for 8 months but it probably added maybe 15 minutes to our raid every week, possibly more, trying to get everyone in the right spot. It's a touchy subject because you need to have some sort of pre-fight planning going on but hagara felt excessive. I liked the flow of the fight, even focused assault, though I wish there wasn't such an imbalance in tanks for that mechanic. I'm sure it'd be fine now, post 5.0 with all the changes, but before it was so bad that I got sat for our dk tank. That and our dps was a bit on the low side and it was a 1-tank encounter. I'm not opposed to 1 tank encounters but since the numbers are so small it's basically either both your tanks get competitive dps sets, which they can't because raid optimization forces you to send the dps gear at the dps, or you sit half your tanking roster because of a 1 tank fight. We did zonozz with 2 tanks because of the second claw tentacle but we probably didn't need to. Dps wasn't an issue for us there, so we opted for a second tank. I'll probably go on for a long time if I don't save that topic for another day. Summary, not a bad fight. Some bugs made it rough. Ice phase was trivialized by cheesing mechanics that I really hope were just overlooked. A simple ramp up on dmg from inside the bubble would have removed the stack up in the middle and nuke the crystals strat. Fun fight but clearly lacking in some areas.
Ultraxion. The standard "patchwerk" fight. I'm glad to see these every once in a while. Once per tier might not be the best frequency but with more bosses each tier it might not be a bad thing. I enjoyed the tank swap mechanic, made me pay attention. I really liked the way they made the dps pay attention while still trying to max dps. The more I think about it I really don't like the extra action bar buttons. I think instead I would have preferred something like "does x% of your max hp" on fading light to force people to use personal cooldowns. It could have been something like 80-90% so that they had to. Most classes have something to deal with it. Shields would be helpful for it as well. Hour could have been proximity like bloodboil was or like morchok stomp. I just hate the extra action bar thing even though it's a pretty neat solution to something like that. Nothing wrong with this fight, highlighted baddies who couldn't hit buttons or who didn't listen to mechanics. Not as much fun to farm but the fight was just tuned so well pre-nerf that I can't help but having a soft spot for the fight.
Warmaster Blackhorn. Aside from the buggy deck fire I think this was another phenomenal fight. I normally don't like dealing with add waves as part of the fight but they did it so well here. Every add had a well defined purpose in the fight and each person in the raid had a job to do. Soaking the barrages and onslaught I thought was a brilliant mechanic. This forces you to take damage while still letting you decide how much you take. It was an organizational nightmare but I think it was a brilliant mechanic. Optimizing how much of the damage you took was really important. Now with the nerf it doesn't matter because if you're good you can avoid deckfire on the first broadside, but during progression it was great. Again if deck fire wasn't bugged I think this would have been one of the best encounters in the raid. When blackhorn came down the tanks had to pay really close attention to basically everything they were doing. On heroic the two adds on the ground was probably more exciting than almost any other tanking job in the instance and it made me feel amazing when both tanks timed the swaps perfectly. I know it's not a huge deal but it just felt good. Goriona was interesting, especially her consuming shroud. The way people handled it was great, aoe heals only was pretty smart. There were some issues with things like bane of havoc cheesing and some interesting mage tricks soaking onslaughts. Great fight.
Spine of Deathwing. There are some truly great things about this fight and some real problems with this fight. First the good. I really enjoyed tanking this fight towards the end of it. I've never felt more active as a tank than that. I wouldn't want to do it often but damn it was unique and I really got to make a difference to the raid by being a good tank and kiting the adds well. The earlier part of the fight was pretty uninteresting especially when we hammered down the strat. We had issues healing but that was more a problem with us deciding to handle it poorly than any individual healer's performance. I think the fight concept was truly unique and exciting. The problem with the fight is that it was so tightly tuned, some might say overtuned that initially there were many guilds class stacking. Unfortunately not every class has identical dps over a 20s burst period. The fight was great in that it pushed everyone to their limits but the downside is it highlighted some class design issues. Unfortunately legendaries also made a huge difference which leads into a fairly large loot problem that comes up involving dragonwrath, fangs, spine trinkets and DW weapons. All in all this was another great fight with a huge learning curve. Better tuned than H rag (which was a fair bit overtuned imo) and more unique and iconic than H rag.
Madness of Deathwing. To put it simply I was really underwhelmed by this boss. The biggest problem is that it wasn't as difficult or intense as spine. It wasn't nearly as intense as spine. So many guilds got spine down and then felt like madness was the reward for killing spine. I think we took something like 10-15 attempts to get heroic madness down after nearly 10 times that on spine. We didn't actually fight deathwing either. We fought pieces of him that were falling off or pieces of the gold god corruption that were assaulting us. I thought the idea of the aspect buffs and platform order was interesting, especially with the meta achievement stuff that wanted you to start on each one. Ultimately the fight is just a bit of a wash. It's really lame considering it's the last fight in the expansion.
Lastly the loot issues with the last two bosses I'm actually going to save for another day as well. It's a pretty huge topic all on it's own and I think just examining the bosses is plenty for now. All in all DS was a sub-par raid with some really great highlights. I don't think firelands was great either but it had entirely different problems. Blizzard solved their difficulty curve issue for the most part. In FL you hit H rag basically completely unprepared for it. Spine wasn't nearly so big of a jump from warmaster. That said I think both of these past two tiers were a bit underwhelming and I can't wait to see the new exciting raid content in mists. MoP looks like they've basically taken care of everything I had an issue with.
Tanks changed a lot over this expansion and I think for the vast majority of it, it was for the better. Threat became trivial in exchange for focusing on survival and TDR. DKs got huge quality of life improvements. Paladins and warriors got probably the biggest upgrade to gear in that we actually have to pay attention to the stats on it instead of just stacking mastery and ignoring the rest until we stop having anything to gear for. I'll probably talk more about that later.
In review cataclysm felt like a giant test for a lot of things blizzard wanted to do. Smaller raid sizes turned out to be undesirable, content takes longer than they thought they could produce it. People wanted more things to do outside of raid, which there really wasn't any of in cataclysm. We're seeing a lot of these changes come into place and I for one am super excited about how amazing mists is shaping up to be.
That's the last you'll hear from me for a little while. I'm offline for the weekend, ISP issues, and starting sunday it's all about prep for the levelling extravaganza. I might do something like twitter to throw updates about levelling and whatnot but we'll see. I don't have the bandwidth to stream anything unfortunately but I will try and get some sort of update thing going on more to chronicle the adventure than anything else. Also expect more pictures on here come MoP. Catch you guys on the other side.
13 September, 2012
Challenge modes and other things
Challenge modes have been a pretty big topic lately so I thought it might be a good idea to examine them and shed a bit of light on them.
What are challenge modes? They are the same 5m dungeons that you did for levelling and heroic dungeons but with a couple twists. They drop no loot. They are timed. They are higher difficulty than heroic dungeons, some bosses or trash even have new mechanics. Your gear is limited so you cannot out-gear the challenge.
Essentially the intent is to have content that doesn't grow old because it's extremely difficult and you can't out-gear it. It will have leaderboards so you can continue to compete with people by being even more awesome than them. It's also been stated that bronze is going to be hard, gold is going to be crazy.
I think they're awesome and a wicked new way to excite hardcore players. I'm going to be charging them as soon as I've got the gear for it. However, there's some problems with it I'd like to highlight along with some really key components that make it a great new direction for the game.
It's 5m content. This means that group composition is going to be extremely important and can vary a lot. We're likely to see comp comparison intensity similar to arenas. For maxing aoe/single target dps we might see things like a physical only group or a caster only group. We might see people trying to get away with things like 4 dps on trash with a paladin tank doing the minor aoe heals and mega self-heals. Perhaps something similar with a dk. People are going to try to max the effective group's dps in every situation. We're going to see certain specs and combos really shine and some fail miserably. This is both good and bad for several reasons.
1 - We're going to examine class balance and design under a light that it may not meant to be seen under. This is similar to the spine encounter. We saw mages and rogues get taken because of their 20s burst dps potential. Perhaps the aoe pack burst potential will make it so that you are almost forced to take say boomkins for example. Alternatively, and this is something we saw in H Rag they'll have balanced the instance as a whole. That is to say we'll need both great aoe burst, aoe sustain or single target burst/sustain. Who knows.
2 - In raids we see a lot of things like dropping healers for more dps or the other way around. Perhaps in challenge modes we're going to see a necessity of taking a hybrid for certain parts of the run, maybe the only person healing is a hybrid. Imagine some fights we've seen on the ptr, I can't remember the names but the one on the wall with a guy that has almost no unavoidable damage. I can't imagine a benefit to bringing a healer to that specific fight. This means that your healer might be required to have a dps spec/gear or just make sure that you've taken talents that let you do crazy dps. Examples include a lot of monk's abilities, paladin lvl90 talents and many of the druid talents such as heart of the wild.
3 - Connection issues will be a deciding factor sometimes due to the incredibly tight time restriction. Someone lagging? Too bad you'll only get bronze now. Little tricks are going to be giant. Can your tank survive that second trash pack? If yes you better be pulling it or else you're losing valuable time. I can't see a group functioning without a b-rez, or at least without being at a significant disadvantage. Someone lags a half second trying to run out of a fire and you don't have a brez means you're done the run basically.
4 - Lack of gear scaling means you're really looking at how people are playing. It was mentioned though after looking for some time I can't find the source, that you're going to need raid level hit cap for the challenge modes as oppose to the old dungeon hit cap. This means +3 lvls instead of +2 lvls hit cap. You're going to need a base level of gear to get in, but you can't gear up over that limit. Gear will not scale up, it only scales down. This is both good and bad as you really need to push yourself and your groupmates as players, but bad in that if someone is underperforming how do you deal with it, when comp is so tight this can be a problem.
Those are a couple of the things I've thought about considering challenge modes. It might sound like I'm being very critical of the concept but I really do love it. I think this is a phenomenal concept for the game, I'm more just curious about how they're going to expand it with new dungeons that usually come out with the new raid tiers. The rewards I imagine will be something like weapon mogs or the like since there isn't room for a whole new set of challenge gear every tier. That said I'd love to see some cool new rewards in future tiers.
So that's challenge modes, and we've got mop around the corner so there's a thing or two I wanted to address briefly before the last week pre-mop.
We've got the scenario going live next week, with a different version for both alliance and horde. I highly recommend getting into those when you can because my understanding is that they will only be available for a short time. They will award a feat of strength. If you don't already have a horde and alliance character it might be a bit late to level them but if you look around or have some really nice friends I'm sure you can find a way to get someone up to the right level in time to see both sides. I've already got one of each and, if I have the time, might post some of the details here for people who are unable to see both sides. That said you should also read the book, it's pretty good and imo shows why we alliance think there's a horde bias over at blizzard, also shows why I have an aversion to more christie golden novels. Bring back Grubb or perhaps try and snag some of the warhammer writers 'cause those guys know what they're doing.
There's been some sneaky class changes recently that most people wont have picked up on without reading all your class changes closely. They're documented but mostly as small notes, a lot changed and you can't expect everything to make the front page.
For paladins specifically. Divine protection has changed. The base version and the glyphed version have swapped places. 40% magical is now the base version with the 20/20 version being glyphed. -10% physical dealt debuff is now only applied by your aoe. This shouldn't be an issue in 25m raids but 10m and dungeons this might be significant. DPS shamans should keep the debuff up on their own but all tanks only apply it via their aoe now.
There's a couple more but I can't remember them right now. Enjoy the new content, I'll probably get something posted before mists goes live but once it does I'll likely be missing for at least the first week and a half. Also, if you guys see just below the post there's some like/+1/etc things that you can hit. It really helps out and makes me feel better to see you guys hit those.
Edit: I stand corrected on the theramore scenario availablility. You just need two other level 85 friends of any class to do it (for the first week it's out). After that, it just goes to 90 and it will work the same. (Only needs three people.)
What are challenge modes? They are the same 5m dungeons that you did for levelling and heroic dungeons but with a couple twists. They drop no loot. They are timed. They are higher difficulty than heroic dungeons, some bosses or trash even have new mechanics. Your gear is limited so you cannot out-gear the challenge.
Essentially the intent is to have content that doesn't grow old because it's extremely difficult and you can't out-gear it. It will have leaderboards so you can continue to compete with people by being even more awesome than them. It's also been stated that bronze is going to be hard, gold is going to be crazy.
I think they're awesome and a wicked new way to excite hardcore players. I'm going to be charging them as soon as I've got the gear for it. However, there's some problems with it I'd like to highlight along with some really key components that make it a great new direction for the game.
It's 5m content. This means that group composition is going to be extremely important and can vary a lot. We're likely to see comp comparison intensity similar to arenas. For maxing aoe/single target dps we might see things like a physical only group or a caster only group. We might see people trying to get away with things like 4 dps on trash with a paladin tank doing the minor aoe heals and mega self-heals. Perhaps something similar with a dk. People are going to try to max the effective group's dps in every situation. We're going to see certain specs and combos really shine and some fail miserably. This is both good and bad for several reasons.
1 - We're going to examine class balance and design under a light that it may not meant to be seen under. This is similar to the spine encounter. We saw mages and rogues get taken because of their 20s burst dps potential. Perhaps the aoe pack burst potential will make it so that you are almost forced to take say boomkins for example. Alternatively, and this is something we saw in H Rag they'll have balanced the instance as a whole. That is to say we'll need both great aoe burst, aoe sustain or single target burst/sustain. Who knows.
2 - In raids we see a lot of things like dropping healers for more dps or the other way around. Perhaps in challenge modes we're going to see a necessity of taking a hybrid for certain parts of the run, maybe the only person healing is a hybrid. Imagine some fights we've seen on the ptr, I can't remember the names but the one on the wall with a guy that has almost no unavoidable damage. I can't imagine a benefit to bringing a healer to that specific fight. This means that your healer might be required to have a dps spec/gear or just make sure that you've taken talents that let you do crazy dps. Examples include a lot of monk's abilities, paladin lvl90 talents and many of the druid talents such as heart of the wild.
3 - Connection issues will be a deciding factor sometimes due to the incredibly tight time restriction. Someone lagging? Too bad you'll only get bronze now. Little tricks are going to be giant. Can your tank survive that second trash pack? If yes you better be pulling it or else you're losing valuable time. I can't see a group functioning without a b-rez, or at least without being at a significant disadvantage. Someone lags a half second trying to run out of a fire and you don't have a brez means you're done the run basically.
4 - Lack of gear scaling means you're really looking at how people are playing. It was mentioned though after looking for some time I can't find the source, that you're going to need raid level hit cap for the challenge modes as oppose to the old dungeon hit cap. This means +3 lvls instead of +2 lvls hit cap. You're going to need a base level of gear to get in, but you can't gear up over that limit. Gear will not scale up, it only scales down. This is both good and bad as you really need to push yourself and your groupmates as players, but bad in that if someone is underperforming how do you deal with it, when comp is so tight this can be a problem.
Those are a couple of the things I've thought about considering challenge modes. It might sound like I'm being very critical of the concept but I really do love it. I think this is a phenomenal concept for the game, I'm more just curious about how they're going to expand it with new dungeons that usually come out with the new raid tiers. The rewards I imagine will be something like weapon mogs or the like since there isn't room for a whole new set of challenge gear every tier. That said I'd love to see some cool new rewards in future tiers.
So that's challenge modes, and we've got mop around the corner so there's a thing or two I wanted to address briefly before the last week pre-mop.
We've got the scenario going live next week, with a different version for both alliance and horde. I highly recommend getting into those when you can because my understanding is that they will only be available for a short time. They will award a feat of strength. If you don't already have a horde and alliance character it might be a bit late to level them but if you look around or have some really nice friends I'm sure you can find a way to get someone up to the right level in time to see both sides. I've already got one of each and, if I have the time, might post some of the details here for people who are unable to see both sides. That said you should also read the book, it's pretty good and imo shows why we alliance think there's a horde bias over at blizzard, also shows why I have an aversion to more christie golden novels. Bring back Grubb or perhaps try and snag some of the warhammer writers 'cause those guys know what they're doing.
There's been some sneaky class changes recently that most people wont have picked up on without reading all your class changes closely. They're documented but mostly as small notes, a lot changed and you can't expect everything to make the front page.
For paladins specifically. Divine protection has changed. The base version and the glyphed version have swapped places. 40% magical is now the base version with the 20/20 version being glyphed. -10% physical dealt debuff is now only applied by your aoe. This shouldn't be an issue in 25m raids but 10m and dungeons this might be significant. DPS shamans should keep the debuff up on their own but all tanks only apply it via their aoe now.
There's a couple more but I can't remember them right now. Enjoy the new content, I'll probably get something posted before mists goes live but once it does I'll likely be missing for at least the first week and a half. Also, if you guys see just below the post there's some like/+1/etc things that you can hit. It really helps out and makes me feel better to see you guys hit those.
Edit: I stand corrected on the theramore scenario availablility. You just need two other level 85 friends of any class to do it (for the first week it's out). After that, it just goes to 90 and it will work the same. (Only needs three people.)
06 September, 2012
Possible loot solutions
With the recent look at some of the gear problems there are several solutions that I'd like to examine. These will range from removing drops entirely to changing the way gear itself is designed. Please keep an open mind as I know some of these are terrible ideas, they still need to be examined.
1 - Turn everything into a point based system. Imagine valour points working for every single piece of gear. It lets you control which items you get first, which items you upgrade fastest. There is absolutely no RNG. This sounds like a great system when you first think about it, however there are some glaring faults that *really* crush this way of designing drops.
First you have to consider that the fun part about seeing what loot a boss drops is gone. I know it's exciting, especially the first time you kill a boss, to see what items it drops. Second there is no longer a restriction of what loot you can get farming, for example, morchok week in and week out. That's an exaggeration but imagine a guild working on spine heroic for a couple months and eventually getting enough tokens for heroic spine level trinkets. The difference between normal and heroic points are also a problem. Sure you could stipulate that each boss has it's own set of tokens but then again you have some crazy problems that come up with distribution and so on.
Second is that your entire raid is going to gear up at the same time, basically. Lets say you get 100 points when you kill a boss, you then notice that the amazing weapons (or shields for tanks or whatever) everyone wants are exactly 2200 points. 22 bosses down the road (give or take a few for raiders who are mia some weeks etc) your entire raid is going to get a gigantic boost in gear, imagine a boss dropping 25 pieces of loot and each one goes to a raider who will greatly benefit from it. This just doesn't work. There are more reasons this doesn't work but from what I've already mentioned you can see why it doesn't.
2 - Tokens (not points). Imagine your tier tokens, but they apply to every piece of gear you have. A ring token, a mail boot token. This makes the disparity between armour types more relevant but stats and comp much less relevant. It retains the nice part about loot "dropping" and the speed at which the raid gears up. Makes it easy for raid leaders to organize raid to make sure that all of the bosses drops go to someone instead of having to ask who needs what.
It's not quite that elegant in that you still don't get the same form of "oooh loot" as other people. It also suffers from being able to be funnelled at certain people in the raid like tanks or healers to the exclusion of all else which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. This already happens somewhat but to a much smaller degree. For example, during DS most guilds threw tier tokens at their tanks for the 4p bonuses. This sort of system would make that happen every tier. An added advantage is that you could design more set bonuses (like the old school 8p bonuses) but does that really add things and still let you choose gear?
It's a decent system but leaves a lot to be desired. I should've mentioned earlier but only thought to now, I really like the idea of the gear being available in game for you to see and examine before it drops. The Dungeon Journal does this already but something like a vendor where all your int rings, for example, are beside each other and you can look at them all real nice. This has ups and downs but ultimately I like it.
3 - Change the way you design gear. After guessing at an average raid comp I went back to my guild's website and checked our raiding roster. We're down to 28 right now but at 30 we had the following: 4 strength dps, 6 agi dps, 2 tanks, 9 healers and 9 int dps. From this I took a quick glance at how the classes were distributed among armor types. We had 2 non-cloth int dps. Our agi dps was spread 3/3 among mail/leather. Healers are pretty well distributed. So perhaps some re-arranging of things is in order.
My first thought would be to merge mail and leather. This solves a lot of problems and I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing just yet. After doing that my other thought was to make all healers wear mail. I don't like this second choice at all but it's an option. I would like to emphasize that mail and agi are virtually indistinguishable outside of the way they look and the tag that says "leather" or "mail." Both use agi or int. Both have 1 healer 1 int dps and 4 agi dps specs tied to them. This is before mists and in my opinion make even more sense with the addition of monks.
The down side to this, which is a pretty big one, is that we lose a lot of class flavour. The idea of wearing a leather jerkin and a mail shirt is a very noticeable one. Sure you could still make the art to match the intent of the class and transmog exists for those who would prefer it otherwise. You'd lose some of the armour balancing of the two but you could bake that into a class bonus if you really thought it was important. Examples being that hunters get something called "ruggedness" increases armour from gear by X %.
You could also do something like change spirit to the primary stat of healers. There are enough of them in the raid at a given point such that they almost constitute more than any other dps primary stat, int being the exception. That is why I thought putting them on their own armour set would be nice but that just makes things feel weird. I mean you could let them mog back to what they normally feel like but you'd lose something when all your healers are wearing the same gear. That said, I still think leather and mail should be merged. Would save a lot of problems. Alternatively you could change the available weapons to some classes. Let ferals/guardians use daggers. Lore it by making it part of their claws or something, makes sense to me. I'm a bit curious to see how they handle hunter weapons now that they are going to be even more unique than int on plate. Lastly you'd also have no conflict of classes feeling similar among the two armour types the way mages and warlocks already feel similar.
All that said, I really think this is the least intrusive way of handling this problem I perceive. This solution offers a solid response to the problem while changing the least drastically. The one greatest problem I feel, which I realise is almost a slippery slope fallacy, is that it's a really short hop from here to making everyone wear one type of armor with only a few stats on it like "awesomeness."
4 - Quests. There's a few ways to handle the idea of loot via quests. I use the term quests loosely since you could also treat this as sort of a vendor system.
My thought is have something like a quest for every item that people want. yes it's a lot of quests but you don't need to put a lot into them since the idea would be someone is crafting you the gear and all they need to do is tell you what they need. So something like the "hand of morchok" axe would require you to get 2 hands from morchok or something like that. Of course only morchok is going to drop it but you can tune the way things drop to desired rate of gear gain. You could also have gear require multiple boss kills. You would also have multiple people able to get the same gear with the same drops, or also use the same item to get crafted into multiple items. For example perhaps the same item that is required for a str+haste proc trinket would be used for an int or agi+haste proc trinket. You could really really add some flavour to the game with something like this.
There is the problem of added dev time and the idea that you want multiple items might make it frustrating to see things that span multiple bosses when you haven't killed all of them. They could set it up in various ways to alleviate some of this. Another major problem is that it requires players to check things out before they enter the raid and adds time outside of raid that is basically required if you want to have a shot at loot. I'll guarantee you every raid leader will give one of these items to someone who knows what they're getting out of it than to someone who doesn't. I think similar items like the algalon quest or similar were very interesting and wouldn't be that out of place.
I really like this idea because it really breaks the idea that every raid boss is hoarding these items. It made sense with classical western dragons hoarding loot, which I'm fairly certain is where the idea came from, and brings it more in line with the idea that you can salvage mystical materials from extremely powerful foes. It also makes people a bit more attached to their gear when they know that the giant two handed sword they're swinging was once the incisor of deathwing or that the trinket they're using that gives them amazing haste or crit is really an old god minion's tentacle that's infusing them with strange power. That sort of thing I feel is missing from the game. This may also help remove the whole "you got gear and I didn't" thoughts from LFR. Sure you see them get a bracelet from hagara that will turn into gear but you have no idea if it's something you also wanted that they're getting from it.
I think this idea has a lot of problems the least of which is the extra dev time putting the quests and deciding how things will drop. It's another layer of loot to concern themselves with. It has another problem in that it requires people to look around outside of raid to examine gear. They could still just look up BiS lists if they really wanted and check out the mats for each of them.
The last part I wanted to mention in this is the opportunity for quests. You can put these quests basically anywhere you want. You can have them on faction people that only unlock once you hit some reputation level that's either associated with the raid or anything else for that matter to control how gear flows in. Imagine as a dev you got to control, even later into the expansion, the rate at which people could get into instances. You could toggle rep gains such that as the expansion progressed it was easier to rep up the first raid instances. The amount of control you have over this system is phenomenal.
5 - Alter drop rates of items to match representation. This means that, if you expect x% of the raiding community to play enhancement for example, you'll make those weapons drops in the appropriate %age. There are some really really obvious problems with this system including varying raid comp, lack of addressing RNG since it still will happen and ultimately punish people for playing unpopular specs. Using tanks as an example, I'd never get a shield. Since less than half of a role that is 1/5th of the raid in 10m and 2/25 of the raid in 25m the chances of a shield dropping would have to be astronomically small to be fair for the raid, which would make it pretty unfair for me. Also think about a group that uses 2 shield tanks, for which they would fight to the death for the first shield since they may not see another one.
This is, in my opinion, a heavy handed approach and one that I feel has been used (that or we've gotten horrible RNG with the shield) to a minor degree if at all. I don't like this solution because it acknowledges a problem with loot design but goes for the first solution that might occur to them.
The only benefit I can see is that in the grand scheme of things drops will be consistent. This however doesn't help the guild with 2 shield tanks that hasn't seen the shield for the entire tier.
I want to mention that I'd like to see some acknowledgement of the problem with weapons right now. Specifically with agi weapons. 1 class likes fast agi weapons. 1 class likes slow agi weapons. 1 class likes 2h agi weapons. 1 class likes ranged agi weapons. With monks it appears like that'll change slightly but since I don't know much about brewmaster or windwalker monks I'm going to leave them out for now. I only know they don't like fast agi weapons, or at least I don't think they do.
With the changes to tanking stats str weapons are much more rounded, as long as they stick to hit/expertise/mastery on them. That would be uninteresting but it's still miles better than us tanks have had so far.
If you guys have any other ideas on how to fix the RNG problems with loot or even interesting ways of handling loot generation and distribution please leave a comment. I find this sort of thing extremely interesting and would love to hear the way some of you might approach this problem. I haven't covered all of the ways, just the ones that occured to me that I thought warranted some sort of discussion, or that I at least thought was cool.
Until next time, just keep rollin'
1 - Turn everything into a point based system. Imagine valour points working for every single piece of gear. It lets you control which items you get first, which items you upgrade fastest. There is absolutely no RNG. This sounds like a great system when you first think about it, however there are some glaring faults that *really* crush this way of designing drops.
First you have to consider that the fun part about seeing what loot a boss drops is gone. I know it's exciting, especially the first time you kill a boss, to see what items it drops. Second there is no longer a restriction of what loot you can get farming, for example, morchok week in and week out. That's an exaggeration but imagine a guild working on spine heroic for a couple months and eventually getting enough tokens for heroic spine level trinkets. The difference between normal and heroic points are also a problem. Sure you could stipulate that each boss has it's own set of tokens but then again you have some crazy problems that come up with distribution and so on.
Second is that your entire raid is going to gear up at the same time, basically. Lets say you get 100 points when you kill a boss, you then notice that the amazing weapons (or shields for tanks or whatever) everyone wants are exactly 2200 points. 22 bosses down the road (give or take a few for raiders who are mia some weeks etc) your entire raid is going to get a gigantic boost in gear, imagine a boss dropping 25 pieces of loot and each one goes to a raider who will greatly benefit from it. This just doesn't work. There are more reasons this doesn't work but from what I've already mentioned you can see why it doesn't.
2 - Tokens (not points). Imagine your tier tokens, but they apply to every piece of gear you have. A ring token, a mail boot token. This makes the disparity between armour types more relevant but stats and comp much less relevant. It retains the nice part about loot "dropping" and the speed at which the raid gears up. Makes it easy for raid leaders to organize raid to make sure that all of the bosses drops go to someone instead of having to ask who needs what.
It's not quite that elegant in that you still don't get the same form of "oooh loot" as other people. It also suffers from being able to be funnelled at certain people in the raid like tanks or healers to the exclusion of all else which is sometimes good and sometimes bad. This already happens somewhat but to a much smaller degree. For example, during DS most guilds threw tier tokens at their tanks for the 4p bonuses. This sort of system would make that happen every tier. An added advantage is that you could design more set bonuses (like the old school 8p bonuses) but does that really add things and still let you choose gear?
It's a decent system but leaves a lot to be desired. I should've mentioned earlier but only thought to now, I really like the idea of the gear being available in game for you to see and examine before it drops. The Dungeon Journal does this already but something like a vendor where all your int rings, for example, are beside each other and you can look at them all real nice. This has ups and downs but ultimately I like it.
3 - Change the way you design gear. After guessing at an average raid comp I went back to my guild's website and checked our raiding roster. We're down to 28 right now but at 30 we had the following: 4 strength dps, 6 agi dps, 2 tanks, 9 healers and 9 int dps. From this I took a quick glance at how the classes were distributed among armor types. We had 2 non-cloth int dps. Our agi dps was spread 3/3 among mail/leather. Healers are pretty well distributed. So perhaps some re-arranging of things is in order.
My first thought would be to merge mail and leather. This solves a lot of problems and I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing just yet. After doing that my other thought was to make all healers wear mail. I don't like this second choice at all but it's an option. I would like to emphasize that mail and agi are virtually indistinguishable outside of the way they look and the tag that says "leather" or "mail." Both use agi or int. Both have 1 healer 1 int dps and 4 agi dps specs tied to them. This is before mists and in my opinion make even more sense with the addition of monks.
The down side to this, which is a pretty big one, is that we lose a lot of class flavour. The idea of wearing a leather jerkin and a mail shirt is a very noticeable one. Sure you could still make the art to match the intent of the class and transmog exists for those who would prefer it otherwise. You'd lose some of the armour balancing of the two but you could bake that into a class bonus if you really thought it was important. Examples being that hunters get something called "ruggedness" increases armour from gear by X %.
You could also do something like change spirit to the primary stat of healers. There are enough of them in the raid at a given point such that they almost constitute more than any other dps primary stat, int being the exception. That is why I thought putting them on their own armour set would be nice but that just makes things feel weird. I mean you could let them mog back to what they normally feel like but you'd lose something when all your healers are wearing the same gear. That said, I still think leather and mail should be merged. Would save a lot of problems. Alternatively you could change the available weapons to some classes. Let ferals/guardians use daggers. Lore it by making it part of their claws or something, makes sense to me. I'm a bit curious to see how they handle hunter weapons now that they are going to be even more unique than int on plate. Lastly you'd also have no conflict of classes feeling similar among the two armour types the way mages and warlocks already feel similar.
All that said, I really think this is the least intrusive way of handling this problem I perceive. This solution offers a solid response to the problem while changing the least drastically. The one greatest problem I feel, which I realise is almost a slippery slope fallacy, is that it's a really short hop from here to making everyone wear one type of armor with only a few stats on it like "awesomeness."
4 - Quests. There's a few ways to handle the idea of loot via quests. I use the term quests loosely since you could also treat this as sort of a vendor system.
My thought is have something like a quest for every item that people want. yes it's a lot of quests but you don't need to put a lot into them since the idea would be someone is crafting you the gear and all they need to do is tell you what they need. So something like the "hand of morchok" axe would require you to get 2 hands from morchok or something like that. Of course only morchok is going to drop it but you can tune the way things drop to desired rate of gear gain. You could also have gear require multiple boss kills. You would also have multiple people able to get the same gear with the same drops, or also use the same item to get crafted into multiple items. For example perhaps the same item that is required for a str+haste proc trinket would be used for an int or agi+haste proc trinket. You could really really add some flavour to the game with something like this.
There is the problem of added dev time and the idea that you want multiple items might make it frustrating to see things that span multiple bosses when you haven't killed all of them. They could set it up in various ways to alleviate some of this. Another major problem is that it requires players to check things out before they enter the raid and adds time outside of raid that is basically required if you want to have a shot at loot. I'll guarantee you every raid leader will give one of these items to someone who knows what they're getting out of it than to someone who doesn't. I think similar items like the algalon quest or similar were very interesting and wouldn't be that out of place.
I really like this idea because it really breaks the idea that every raid boss is hoarding these items. It made sense with classical western dragons hoarding loot, which I'm fairly certain is where the idea came from, and brings it more in line with the idea that you can salvage mystical materials from extremely powerful foes. It also makes people a bit more attached to their gear when they know that the giant two handed sword they're swinging was once the incisor of deathwing or that the trinket they're using that gives them amazing haste or crit is really an old god minion's tentacle that's infusing them with strange power. That sort of thing I feel is missing from the game. This may also help remove the whole "you got gear and I didn't" thoughts from LFR. Sure you see them get a bracelet from hagara that will turn into gear but you have no idea if it's something you also wanted that they're getting from it.
I think this idea has a lot of problems the least of which is the extra dev time putting the quests and deciding how things will drop. It's another layer of loot to concern themselves with. It has another problem in that it requires people to look around outside of raid to examine gear. They could still just look up BiS lists if they really wanted and check out the mats for each of them.
The last part I wanted to mention in this is the opportunity for quests. You can put these quests basically anywhere you want. You can have them on faction people that only unlock once you hit some reputation level that's either associated with the raid or anything else for that matter to control how gear flows in. Imagine as a dev you got to control, even later into the expansion, the rate at which people could get into instances. You could toggle rep gains such that as the expansion progressed it was easier to rep up the first raid instances. The amount of control you have over this system is phenomenal.
5 - Alter drop rates of items to match representation. This means that, if you expect x% of the raiding community to play enhancement for example, you'll make those weapons drops in the appropriate %age. There are some really really obvious problems with this system including varying raid comp, lack of addressing RNG since it still will happen and ultimately punish people for playing unpopular specs. Using tanks as an example, I'd never get a shield. Since less than half of a role that is 1/5th of the raid in 10m and 2/25 of the raid in 25m the chances of a shield dropping would have to be astronomically small to be fair for the raid, which would make it pretty unfair for me. Also think about a group that uses 2 shield tanks, for which they would fight to the death for the first shield since they may not see another one.
This is, in my opinion, a heavy handed approach and one that I feel has been used (that or we've gotten horrible RNG with the shield) to a minor degree if at all. I don't like this solution because it acknowledges a problem with loot design but goes for the first solution that might occur to them.
The only benefit I can see is that in the grand scheme of things drops will be consistent. This however doesn't help the guild with 2 shield tanks that hasn't seen the shield for the entire tier.
I want to mention that I'd like to see some acknowledgement of the problem with weapons right now. Specifically with agi weapons. 1 class likes fast agi weapons. 1 class likes slow agi weapons. 1 class likes 2h agi weapons. 1 class likes ranged agi weapons. With monks it appears like that'll change slightly but since I don't know much about brewmaster or windwalker monks I'm going to leave them out for now. I only know they don't like fast agi weapons, or at least I don't think they do.
With the changes to tanking stats str weapons are much more rounded, as long as they stick to hit/expertise/mastery on them. That would be uninteresting but it's still miles better than us tanks have had so far.
If you guys have any other ideas on how to fix the RNG problems with loot or even interesting ways of handling loot generation and distribution please leave a comment. I find this sort of thing extremely interesting and would love to hear the way some of you might approach this problem. I haven't covered all of the ways, just the ones that occured to me that I thought warranted some sort of discussion, or that I at least thought was cool.
Until next time, just keep rollin'
30 August, 2012
Good/Bad Design (Why I hate the forums)
Seems like these days people are just throwing around the terms "bad design" without really understanding what makes for good or bad design. For the most part I feel the developers are using it correctly and I really applaud their efforts to continually improve upon the game and really work hard to get the best game possible. Sure they make mistakes, as does everyone, but they do get around to fixing them. They also often break things when they go to fix other things but what more do you expect with a game that I suspect is running off of code 8 years or more out of date.
Enough ass kissing time to get into the discussion here. I'll throw out a disclaimer saying that I don't have any actual formal education in game design or systems design but over the years I've played a lot of games, I make it a bit of a hobby of mine if I have the money to at least try all the big games in my favourite genres and analyse them.
First up, what are the goals of design? When you design anything you're going to have objectives, things you want out of the game and things you want people to take out of the game. For example in designing a game like Minecraft the goal is to deliver a world where, using mining concepts, one can build or create basically anything they wish. That's a bit of a broad concept but something more specific would be like in some Final Fantasy games. I'm going to use 8 as an example, sorry if you haven't played it before. Most people say it was a poorly designed game and I tend to agree with them but maybe not for the same reasons. If the intent of the combat design was for you to do one of two things, being spam summons until you're sick of their animations or draw all the magic in the world and just do your regular attack, then it was a great design, as it was accomplished. They focused on the game outside of combat which had some great depth.
Looking at a game like warcraft there are hundreds if not thousands of directions the game can go, and needs to go. There are so many facets of the game that each needs to have it's own design philosophy and scope. Heroic raiding content can't bleed over into levelling content because the two are almost mutually exclusive in terms of design. However things like class balance or class flavor do bleed over into every aspect of the game and need to be addressed at almost every turn.
Good design promotes you doing things that are intended, bad design is things that you don't want people to do but they'll do anyways because it was either unintended or an easy exploit. An example of this is potions. I don't know what the intent behind it was, but the fact that you can double pot on most fights is, imo, bad design for the simple reason that it forces you to spend double your resources on progression fights for a relatively small benefit. Other examples include things like using holy wrath for fish for divine purpose procs.
The talent trees are a great example of what I think is great design. The concept is that the designers want you to have everything you need for your spec come baseline. This means you can't skip things that are central to your character like moonkin form, shield of the righteous, combustion. These sort of talents were basically required, that means everyone took them because they were so strong. The game was designed with the assumption that you had certain talents and in many cases you didn't even have to choose between your best talents because they wanted you to have all of them. You weren't going to see a prot pally that had to choose between shield of the righteous and word of glory. Prime glyphs were in a bit of a similar situation and I think that's been mostly taken care of as well. I understand that people may not like it but I've not yet heard someone who hasn't presented a good argument for "we like it when you can make a wrong choice." For the most part it's people who do have the "right" spec.
But I digress. A lot of times you use design to promote certain behaviour. For example, a lot of DKP systems don't want you to hoard dkp, they want you to actively spend it to get any upgrades you want to help the raid team. People by nature want to hoard their dkp to win the really big ticket items, so you design systems that discourage hoarding, things like a cap or some form of %age decay. It doesn't have to be those and I'd argue that decay is awful anyways but those are the types of things you might use to promote spending. You can't lose the dkp if you've already spent it, and you can't gain dkp if you're sitting at the cap. This isn't a discussion about dkp systems so I'm going to move on from that.
One more element I'd like to address with design concepts is that you don't want to make people do things they wont enjoy. Farming roughly 2 hours worth of mats per hour of raiding back in vanilla and to a lesser extent TBC was not fun. They made a lot of that better with things like mixology for alchemists, connected AH, guild banks, cauldrons, feasts etc. This promotes collective efforts. That is each person can help a little bit of the time, or for the guilds that want to specialize and focus though they have that option to put a few people in charge of guild resources which means thy don't have to go farm, they just have to manage the resources to being in the required consumables.
There are so many elements of design in this game and I can only really touch on a few at a time especially without having taken a class or anything but the last one I wanted to touch on today was the idea that you want people to see what you produce and you have to design around that constraint. Looking back to examples like Naxx-40 and Sunwell we see that less than 2% of the wow population even managed to step inside those instances before they were considered out-dated. Caveat: the last raid of the expansion is a rough thing to do because of how varied skill levels are. They have changed the way they release content since then which solved most of that issue but we still have the problem of people not getting to see the destruction of deathwing before it's obsolete. This is where things like LFR and the growing nerf comes in. You don't want to spend a lot of dev time on something that only 5% even of your population will observe. It's a waste of time that could be spent on things like making better encounters, fixing more bugs, updating models, or anything really.
So what I ask of the population on the forums. Please stop throwing around good and bad design to further your argument unless you really understand what it means. There are some legitamite concerns with good or bad design I'm sure but that doesn't mean you can use that as an argument for anything you don't like. LFR was not bad design, the way it handled loot was bad design and they're fixing it. Gating content the way they have in the past was, imo, bad design. A certain spec of your class that you like doing less damage than other classes is *not* bad design, as long as it's viable and your class has something competative to play it's not bad design. Adding more things for us to do in the game is not bad design.
And that's my rant on design. I'm pretty busy with 5.0 so this post wasn't really as thought out as my previous ones have been so I'd like to make one last comment. If you're a tank, and still getting 2 impales, we run it pretty close a lot of the time, stop attacking after the first impale to let your other tank get aggro. Impale gives you like 100k attack power, we can't do anything.
Enough ass kissing time to get into the discussion here. I'll throw out a disclaimer saying that I don't have any actual formal education in game design or systems design but over the years I've played a lot of games, I make it a bit of a hobby of mine if I have the money to at least try all the big games in my favourite genres and analyse them.
First up, what are the goals of design? When you design anything you're going to have objectives, things you want out of the game and things you want people to take out of the game. For example in designing a game like Minecraft the goal is to deliver a world where, using mining concepts, one can build or create basically anything they wish. That's a bit of a broad concept but something more specific would be like in some Final Fantasy games. I'm going to use 8 as an example, sorry if you haven't played it before. Most people say it was a poorly designed game and I tend to agree with them but maybe not for the same reasons. If the intent of the combat design was for you to do one of two things, being spam summons until you're sick of their animations or draw all the magic in the world and just do your regular attack, then it was a great design, as it was accomplished. They focused on the game outside of combat which had some great depth.
Looking at a game like warcraft there are hundreds if not thousands of directions the game can go, and needs to go. There are so many facets of the game that each needs to have it's own design philosophy and scope. Heroic raiding content can't bleed over into levelling content because the two are almost mutually exclusive in terms of design. However things like class balance or class flavor do bleed over into every aspect of the game and need to be addressed at almost every turn.
Good design promotes you doing things that are intended, bad design is things that you don't want people to do but they'll do anyways because it was either unintended or an easy exploit. An example of this is potions. I don't know what the intent behind it was, but the fact that you can double pot on most fights is, imo, bad design for the simple reason that it forces you to spend double your resources on progression fights for a relatively small benefit. Other examples include things like using holy wrath for fish for divine purpose procs.
The talent trees are a great example of what I think is great design. The concept is that the designers want you to have everything you need for your spec come baseline. This means you can't skip things that are central to your character like moonkin form, shield of the righteous, combustion. These sort of talents were basically required, that means everyone took them because they were so strong. The game was designed with the assumption that you had certain talents and in many cases you didn't even have to choose between your best talents because they wanted you to have all of them. You weren't going to see a prot pally that had to choose between shield of the righteous and word of glory. Prime glyphs were in a bit of a similar situation and I think that's been mostly taken care of as well. I understand that people may not like it but I've not yet heard someone who hasn't presented a good argument for "we like it when you can make a wrong choice." For the most part it's people who do have the "right" spec.
But I digress. A lot of times you use design to promote certain behaviour. For example, a lot of DKP systems don't want you to hoard dkp, they want you to actively spend it to get any upgrades you want to help the raid team. People by nature want to hoard their dkp to win the really big ticket items, so you design systems that discourage hoarding, things like a cap or some form of %age decay. It doesn't have to be those and I'd argue that decay is awful anyways but those are the types of things you might use to promote spending. You can't lose the dkp if you've already spent it, and you can't gain dkp if you're sitting at the cap. This isn't a discussion about dkp systems so I'm going to move on from that.
One more element I'd like to address with design concepts is that you don't want to make people do things they wont enjoy. Farming roughly 2 hours worth of mats per hour of raiding back in vanilla and to a lesser extent TBC was not fun. They made a lot of that better with things like mixology for alchemists, connected AH, guild banks, cauldrons, feasts etc. This promotes collective efforts. That is each person can help a little bit of the time, or for the guilds that want to specialize and focus though they have that option to put a few people in charge of guild resources which means thy don't have to go farm, they just have to manage the resources to being in the required consumables.
There are so many elements of design in this game and I can only really touch on a few at a time especially without having taken a class or anything but the last one I wanted to touch on today was the idea that you want people to see what you produce and you have to design around that constraint. Looking back to examples like Naxx-40 and Sunwell we see that less than 2% of the wow population even managed to step inside those instances before they were considered out-dated. Caveat: the last raid of the expansion is a rough thing to do because of how varied skill levels are. They have changed the way they release content since then which solved most of that issue but we still have the problem of people not getting to see the destruction of deathwing before it's obsolete. This is where things like LFR and the growing nerf comes in. You don't want to spend a lot of dev time on something that only 5% even of your population will observe. It's a waste of time that could be spent on things like making better encounters, fixing more bugs, updating models, or anything really.
So what I ask of the population on the forums. Please stop throwing around good and bad design to further your argument unless you really understand what it means. There are some legitamite concerns with good or bad design I'm sure but that doesn't mean you can use that as an argument for anything you don't like. LFR was not bad design, the way it handled loot was bad design and they're fixing it. Gating content the way they have in the past was, imo, bad design. A certain spec of your class that you like doing less damage than other classes is *not* bad design, as long as it's viable and your class has something competative to play it's not bad design. Adding more things for us to do in the game is not bad design.
And that's my rant on design. I'm pretty busy with 5.0 so this post wasn't really as thought out as my previous ones have been so I'd like to make one last comment. If you're a tank, and still getting 2 impales, we run it pretty close a lot of the time, stop attacking after the first impale to let your other tank get aggro. Impale gives you like 100k attack power, we can't do anything.
24 August, 2012
Item distribution part 2
So the second part is the other side of the coin I flipped last time around. I looked at wasted loot, and why it poses a problem to those focusing on progressing the raid team as fast as possible. This time we're going to examine the problem in which many people are trying to get the same piece of loot.
I'd like to start off by saying that this is basically the same problem that is expressing itself in multiple situations. I'm not saying it's a huge problem or that it's something that *needs* to be fixed since it does add another layer to raid comp and raid management.
Previously I assumed that half your raid roster is going to be using int gear. Half of that half is likely to value spirit highly, they will likely also value spirit even more in mop according to initial testing but the point still stands, and reforging will always make this the case. I'm going to use rings, trinkets, and weapons for this example for a few reasons. First you need 2 rings and you can play with them alot, this also means there more options for you, which diminishes the problem. Do rings drop twice as often? Not really but there are more of them from which to choose, generally. Trinkets are somewhat specialized even for healers vs dps. Weapons are also something you can mix/match and highly sought.
Examining DS rings we have 5 options, 2 of which have spirit the other three do not. 2 rings without spirit also have hit. So at this point we have 2 rings that exclusively for healers, 2 are exclusively for dps. 1 is for either and 2 of the rings are lower ilvl but from vendors. If you're maximizing rings based on ilvl and total itemization points you actually don't have any choices, there are only the two options for you. Reminder: I'm talking only of the rings with int on them. Also all rings are unique equipped. I'm ignoring the fact that ele shamans and boomkins don't require it since they can use the hit and spirit rings though at the very least the boomkins wanted the rings I've designated "healer" rings and not the one designated a dps ring. It balances out in the and I promise.
This means that all 15 of your casters are extremely likely to use the Ring of the Riven. This only drops from Hagara. If you are the luckiest group in the entire world and get 2 every week, and yes she can drop 2 at a time we've seen it once, you will be done in just under 2 months of farming it. If you're even moderately lucky and you get 1 every week, your'e done in 4 months. Most of us haven't been that lucky and my guild still needs something like 3-5 of them after farming heroic madness for over 4 months, having hagara heroic on farm for 8 months now. As a minor detail imagine you have some rotating members on your roster since changes are likely, we don't have anything near the same roster that we did at the start of the tier. This means that you need closer to maybe 17 or 18 over the course of the tier not counting off specs (which in many cases are actually important for progression).
The other two rings are in the grab bag shared loot which I really don't want to get into right now since that's another big page about the system that could work but really hasn't.
So that's rings, clearly there needs to be a solution for it since they aren't even that big of an upgrade by themselves. To put this into perspective, most gear has roughly 600 secondary stat points, split across two stats, where the rings are under 400. Helms have over 700 secondary stat points, not counting gems/socket bonuses which are also much more impressive, rings don't even get enchants of any sort which isn't really significant because you'd put the same enchant on your old weapon, but the point is they aren't a huge slot but if you really want it for your bis set to max your hit rating or whatever stat it is that's most important you have to put a lot of emphasis on beating other people to it. This is a problem.
Lets look at trinkets now. There isn't that much of a problem here this tier since madness dropped a trinket for everyone but tanks, and one for tanks come 5.0. So we only had to consider one trinket for everyone which makes it basically the same for everyone else with a nice middle ground. The problem this time around was the lack of available trinkets (the really good ones were in the grab bag loot slot or not very good). We still haven't seen more than 1 or 2 heroic windward hearts I think. You can see that there would also be a problem here without a spine like loot table that emphasized trinkets. Looking to firelands we had issues with trinkets since each role had 2. 2 agi trinkets, 2 healer trinkets etc.
Lastly I wanted to look at caster weapons. This was less of an issue in DS due to dragonwrath, however if we look at items that are not dragonwrath to evaluate the situation without legendaries we get the following: 3 2h weapons, 1 spirit, 1 regular, 1 from madness with a proc. 3 1h weapons, same distribution here. So there are 6 choices (assuming you paired up the mh with an appropriate oh which just means you have to wait a bit longer for the drop).
This is an altogether different problem due to the nature of progression. Since the really nice weapons that everyone wants are on the last boss, which isn't a problem it's just a different way you have to look at the drops, you're going to basically choose "staff or mh/oh." Some cases this isn't even a choice. Shamans and holy paladins will always pick the 1h + shield. I'm going to get a bit technical here to look at exactly how the secondary stats play out. Going to ignore madness weapons since they pose some interesting problems (especially since there is no non-spirit offhand at the 410 level).
There are 4 secondary stats that healers want, and 3 of those are also dps stats, 4 in the case of moonkins. There are 4 dps stats, one of which is exclusively dps.
Mastery: everyone
Crit: Everyone
Haste: Everyone
Spirit: Healers/Ele/Boomkin
Hit: Dps.
This means that there are 4P2 = 12 options for secondary stats on items considering that they have one stat higher than the other and 4 secondary stats. Lets assume we change this to just pick which stats are there since they aren't likely to have 2 items which have the same stats but flipped in value. 4C2 = 6 different options. Lets assume all healers want spirit, this changes it to 3C1 = 3 options for healers. Simiarly dps may not always want hit but it's a pretty strong stat for them and excess can be reforged away.
If you are not using a shield, the only offhand has spirit on it (410 level). Paladins cannot use a staff. This means that all cloth casters will use the non-spirit staff. I'm not terribly familiar with the stat weights of resto druids and healy priests but my understanding is that the mh/oh combo is best for priests and the staff better for druids. I could be wrong here.
After examining these numbers I've come to the conclusion that int weapons are entirely bottlenecked. This may change in mop with the increase in desirability of spirit for healers but as it stands too many people want the same weapon. There's a lot of options and in the DS expecience we had one person actually try out the spirit staff from blackhorn, I think 1 or 2 people used Ti'tahk while working on finishing up DTR more for trying it out than anything.
So we again had half the raid going for a split of 2 choices for the most part. Half wanted the healing mace and an offhand. Half wanted the hagara staff (if they didn't have DTR) and the ele shaman wanted the dagger from dw and a shield.
To conclude the last two posts I want to mention we got our first heroic hagara kill on dec 28 according to one of my guildies achievements. It is now, almost, august 28th. That's 8 months, or nearly 35 lockouts. We've disenchanted more gear than we've used by this point I'm sure but after 35 kills of a boss we still have people who need very specific loot. This was even worse during progression because that sort of things makes a huge difference. Getting BiS gear is really nice but the important part is that while you're progressing the problem being brought to light here is that we are disenchanting gear that no one on the roster needs due to us already having it, example being int plate belt from ultraxion, while we could benefit greatly from different gear dropping.
Maybe this is part of the game but we already maximize our raid group by making sure that if there is someone available that night who needs a piece of gear, that gear will not get disenchanted and will go to the raid team. We have no control over what drops, but we do have control over how we form the raid around what might drop. This doesn't really impact our raid decisions I don't think but it is frustrating for a large portion of the raid team and for a large number of guilds that see something like windward heart not drop in the 4+ months we've been farming it while we still have something like 8 players who want it.
I'd really like to hear what people think about the way loot drops are handled right now. If you have suggestions for what the loot system should be that would be great. If you want to share examples about your guild or other guilds you know that have similar drop problems please share as well. More data points are always good. Right now I'm not entirely sure that this is a major problem but I find it extremely interesting and something that one can really investigate. I'll likely look at this a bit more in the near future but I wont be able to really sink my teeth into anything until we get into raiding in mop since when that comes I might be able to trick my guild into helping me with a little project I have in mind that might make numbers easier to check out.
5.0 next week. Have a bunch of fun checking things out before MoP goes live.
I'd like to start off by saying that this is basically the same problem that is expressing itself in multiple situations. I'm not saying it's a huge problem or that it's something that *needs* to be fixed since it does add another layer to raid comp and raid management.
Previously I assumed that half your raid roster is going to be using int gear. Half of that half is likely to value spirit highly, they will likely also value spirit even more in mop according to initial testing but the point still stands, and reforging will always make this the case. I'm going to use rings, trinkets, and weapons for this example for a few reasons. First you need 2 rings and you can play with them alot, this also means there more options for you, which diminishes the problem. Do rings drop twice as often? Not really but there are more of them from which to choose, generally. Trinkets are somewhat specialized even for healers vs dps. Weapons are also something you can mix/match and highly sought.
Examining DS rings we have 5 options, 2 of which have spirit the other three do not. 2 rings without spirit also have hit. So at this point we have 2 rings that exclusively for healers, 2 are exclusively for dps. 1 is for either and 2 of the rings are lower ilvl but from vendors. If you're maximizing rings based on ilvl and total itemization points you actually don't have any choices, there are only the two options for you. Reminder: I'm talking only of the rings with int on them. Also all rings are unique equipped. I'm ignoring the fact that ele shamans and boomkins don't require it since they can use the hit and spirit rings though at the very least the boomkins wanted the rings I've designated "healer" rings and not the one designated a dps ring. It balances out in the and I promise.
This means that all 15 of your casters are extremely likely to use the Ring of the Riven. This only drops from Hagara. If you are the luckiest group in the entire world and get 2 every week, and yes she can drop 2 at a time we've seen it once, you will be done in just under 2 months of farming it. If you're even moderately lucky and you get 1 every week, your'e done in 4 months. Most of us haven't been that lucky and my guild still needs something like 3-5 of them after farming heroic madness for over 4 months, having hagara heroic on farm for 8 months now. As a minor detail imagine you have some rotating members on your roster since changes are likely, we don't have anything near the same roster that we did at the start of the tier. This means that you need closer to maybe 17 or 18 over the course of the tier not counting off specs (which in many cases are actually important for progression).
The other two rings are in the grab bag shared loot which I really don't want to get into right now since that's another big page about the system that could work but really hasn't.
So that's rings, clearly there needs to be a solution for it since they aren't even that big of an upgrade by themselves. To put this into perspective, most gear has roughly 600 secondary stat points, split across two stats, where the rings are under 400. Helms have over 700 secondary stat points, not counting gems/socket bonuses which are also much more impressive, rings don't even get enchants of any sort which isn't really significant because you'd put the same enchant on your old weapon, but the point is they aren't a huge slot but if you really want it for your bis set to max your hit rating or whatever stat it is that's most important you have to put a lot of emphasis on beating other people to it. This is a problem.
Lets look at trinkets now. There isn't that much of a problem here this tier since madness dropped a trinket for everyone but tanks, and one for tanks come 5.0. So we only had to consider one trinket for everyone which makes it basically the same for everyone else with a nice middle ground. The problem this time around was the lack of available trinkets (the really good ones were in the grab bag loot slot or not very good). We still haven't seen more than 1 or 2 heroic windward hearts I think. You can see that there would also be a problem here without a spine like loot table that emphasized trinkets. Looking to firelands we had issues with trinkets since each role had 2. 2 agi trinkets, 2 healer trinkets etc.
Lastly I wanted to look at caster weapons. This was less of an issue in DS due to dragonwrath, however if we look at items that are not dragonwrath to evaluate the situation without legendaries we get the following: 3 2h weapons, 1 spirit, 1 regular, 1 from madness with a proc. 3 1h weapons, same distribution here. So there are 6 choices (assuming you paired up the mh with an appropriate oh which just means you have to wait a bit longer for the drop).
This is an altogether different problem due to the nature of progression. Since the really nice weapons that everyone wants are on the last boss, which isn't a problem it's just a different way you have to look at the drops, you're going to basically choose "staff or mh/oh." Some cases this isn't even a choice. Shamans and holy paladins will always pick the 1h + shield. I'm going to get a bit technical here to look at exactly how the secondary stats play out. Going to ignore madness weapons since they pose some interesting problems (especially since there is no non-spirit offhand at the 410 level).
There are 4 secondary stats that healers want, and 3 of those are also dps stats, 4 in the case of moonkins. There are 4 dps stats, one of which is exclusively dps.
Mastery: everyone
Crit: Everyone
Haste: Everyone
Spirit: Healers/Ele/Boomkin
Hit: Dps.
This means that there are 4P2 = 12 options for secondary stats on items considering that they have one stat higher than the other and 4 secondary stats. Lets assume we change this to just pick which stats are there since they aren't likely to have 2 items which have the same stats but flipped in value. 4C2 = 6 different options. Lets assume all healers want spirit, this changes it to 3C1 = 3 options for healers. Simiarly dps may not always want hit but it's a pretty strong stat for them and excess can be reforged away.
If you are not using a shield, the only offhand has spirit on it (410 level). Paladins cannot use a staff. This means that all cloth casters will use the non-spirit staff. I'm not terribly familiar with the stat weights of resto druids and healy priests but my understanding is that the mh/oh combo is best for priests and the staff better for druids. I could be wrong here.
After examining these numbers I've come to the conclusion that int weapons are entirely bottlenecked. This may change in mop with the increase in desirability of spirit for healers but as it stands too many people want the same weapon. There's a lot of options and in the DS expecience we had one person actually try out the spirit staff from blackhorn, I think 1 or 2 people used Ti'tahk while working on finishing up DTR more for trying it out than anything.
So we again had half the raid going for a split of 2 choices for the most part. Half wanted the healing mace and an offhand. Half wanted the hagara staff (if they didn't have DTR) and the ele shaman wanted the dagger from dw and a shield.
To conclude the last two posts I want to mention we got our first heroic hagara kill on dec 28 according to one of my guildies achievements. It is now, almost, august 28th. That's 8 months, or nearly 35 lockouts. We've disenchanted more gear than we've used by this point I'm sure but after 35 kills of a boss we still have people who need very specific loot. This was even worse during progression because that sort of things makes a huge difference. Getting BiS gear is really nice but the important part is that while you're progressing the problem being brought to light here is that we are disenchanting gear that no one on the roster needs due to us already having it, example being int plate belt from ultraxion, while we could benefit greatly from different gear dropping.
Maybe this is part of the game but we already maximize our raid group by making sure that if there is someone available that night who needs a piece of gear, that gear will not get disenchanted and will go to the raid team. We have no control over what drops, but we do have control over how we form the raid around what might drop. This doesn't really impact our raid decisions I don't think but it is frustrating for a large portion of the raid team and for a large number of guilds that see something like windward heart not drop in the 4+ months we've been farming it while we still have something like 8 players who want it.
I'd really like to hear what people think about the way loot drops are handled right now. If you have suggestions for what the loot system should be that would be great. If you want to share examples about your guild or other guilds you know that have similar drop problems please share as well. More data points are always good. Right now I'm not entirely sure that this is a major problem but I find it extremely interesting and something that one can really investigate. I'll likely look at this a bit more in the near future but I wont be able to really sink my teeth into anything until we get into raiding in mop since when that comes I might be able to trick my guild into helping me with a little project I have in mind that might make numbers easier to check out.
5.0 next week. Have a bunch of fun checking things out before MoP goes live.
19 August, 2012
Musings on item distribution, part 1
I was going to write something about getting prepared for MoP but you can find those things anywhere and I don't think I'd be adding anything to the discussion. If that is something you want to read up on I suggest checking out ZAM's youtube page which has some videos about that hosted by Lore. Instead I'm going to talk about item distribution and how gear competition and gear drop rates are very important and what considerations need to be taken into account when designing new classes or a new set of raid drops.
Gear is a barrier to content. If we all had the best gear in the game things would be a lot easier. Gear has so many functions it'd be hard to enumerate all of them. To include some of them:
Gear competition then becomes very prevalent because it directly increases your player power. This makes it so that everyone wants some of the same stuff. I'm going to ignore secondary stats because it's not entirely relevant in my opinion to the discussion on designing gear and how it drops w.r.t. class design.
Gear competition is a good thing. It gives you a reason to work harder for the gear and in a lot of cases work within a system of loot distribution set up by your guild. Most places use the term DKP though the initialism is fairly out-dated since, to my knowledge, it's from the old Everquest days where dragons where some of the most important things you were killing, and getting points for. That aside your raid still has to determine who gets the gear, and from a raid perspective there are a couple things that are really important to us.
First we want as little gear as possible to go to waste. Seeing something drop and get disenchanted when there are legitimate upgrades that could have dropped is almost soul crushing. To give an example ultraxion right now drops the plate healing belt almost every week we step into DS. We have had something like 2 or 3 windward heart's since the launch of DS, only one of which was heroic. Every time we see that belt we get a little frustrated, and it was worse when we were progressing through but now it's still a bit of an issue.
This issue comes down to how many people want a given piece of gear. There's been acknowledgements of the issue facing plate healing gear already and there's no elegant or good solution for it right now. Some have suggested making holy paladins wear mail or giving their talent tree a conversion factor to make ret or prot gear ideal for them. Both solutions are clunky and pose more problems than they solve. This is a specific case of a much milder problem that faces raids that I really wanted to examine.
I have a hard time imagining more than 2 holy paladins in a 25m raid. I'm sure it happens but if you're trying to progress you're really missing something with more than 2, lets assume you have 1 backup holy paladin on the bench as well. That means over the entire tier of content you want the item to drop only 3 times. Compare this to something like spirit rings. There are 7 specs in the game that desire spirit rings, 2 of which are dps, the other 5 (6 with monks) are healers. 25m raids usually have about 5-7 healers depending on the encounter, and on the raid team are likely to have 8+ healers. Throw in an elemental shaman or two and a boomkin or two and you have a huge demand for spirit rings, hell int rings in general are extremely high in demand. I'm exaggerating a bit in the example by comparing a 1-spec item to one of the largest samples of gear in raids, int gear.
So lets examine some more gear to see what we expect an average piece of gear to have in terms of competition, weapons are fairly common so I'll start with those. They're also some of the most saught after items in the game beside trinkets. As a side-note I'm going to consider things like SMF/TG as two different specs and look instead at how many of a given role we're going to see since 2h vs 1h str weapons is mostly the same when it comes to what class you're bringing. I'm also going to start considering MoP since it makes it a bit easier on me.
2h Strength weapons: Arms, Fury, Frost, Unholy, Ret, Blood. 6 Specs.
1h Strength weapons (including tank weapons): Prot, Prot, SMF, Frost, (not sure how desirable this will be for blood). 4 specs.
2h Agi weapons: Feral, Guardian, Brewmaster, Windwalker 4 specs
1h slow agi weapons: Enhance, Windwalker 2 specs
1h fast agi weapons: Rogues (technically 3 specs)
Int weapons: I'll cover this later since it's a big can of worms.
Huge spread on how many classes want the weapons so lets break it down some more. You're going to have 2 tanks in your raid at almost all times. Occasionally one will switch to a dps spec on a fight that only requires one tank but this is somewhat rare (1 encounter in DS, 1-2 in FL depending on how you did baleroc). So you're going to need 2 total of a 2h str and a 1h str. These may or may not be shared among the dps depending on secondary stats but I suspect that we're going to see less haste/crit/dodge/parry on weapons and more hit/exp/mastery/procs in the future.
You're going to use a mix of str and agi melee and mostly int ranged with a hunter or two (maybe three if they can all stay online at the same time). A health mix of thse catagories is helpful to raid comp. Lets examine a 10m raid and a 25m raid beside each other to check out how they stack up with themselves and against each other.
10m uses: 2 tanks, 2 healers, 3 melee, 3 ranged. 10m comp varies wildly and can't support a terribly large raiding roster because you change such a large portion of the comp with each change, it's hard to support all the buffs etc.
25m uses: 2 tanks, 6 healers (on average, fights change this number which is something I'll discuss later), this leaves 17 dps slots for a mix of melee and ranged so we'll assume that we err on the side of ranged with 8 melee and 9 ranged (I feel this is pretty typical of my raid though I don't have any control of who comes into raid or whatnot and I don't actively monitor it).
So we can assume that in a 25m raid there are roughly 4 str plate dps, 4 agi melee, lets say 2 agi ranged and 7 int ranged. Assuming that the raiding roster supports more than just a 25m raiding team lets up the numbers to say +1 for each category. This puts us with a raiding team of maybe 30ish people, 5 plate dps, another 5-8 agi dps (mix of melee and ranged thanks to hunters), and 8-9 int casters. Looking at weapons that means we will need roughly:
4 2h str weapons (1 tank, 3 dps)
5 1h str weapons (1 tank, 2 dps)
Some combination of int weapons that the various classes can use, at least 7 of which can't have spirit, and another 8 that may or may not have spirit, these may come in the form of mh+oh or staves but that's another layer of complexity I don't want to deal with right now, total of 15 items (yes, half the raid roster probably uses int)
3 2h agi weapons
2 fast agi weapons (1 rogue)
2 slow agi weapons(1 enhance)
2 (or more depends on how many hunters) ranged weapon.
0-2 str shields depending on which tanks you're using
Tally it up that's 32 items I've listed, not counting off hands for casters. 4 of these items are because of dual wielding, with up to 2 more for tank shields and a the caster off-hand issue I'll talk about later. This brings my fictional raiding roster down to 28 people, I'm also only considering main spec for now since you can essentially double-dip for off-spec items in the list and it's not that important for progression outside of healers/tanks also having a dps spec in a case where you can't just bring in a dps replacement.
The distribution of the weapons is something I find more interesting than exactly how many you need, and the interesting part doesn't come until you consider str shields and 1h agi weapons.
In my raid group we tank with a pally and a dk. One shield is needed. We have one currently raiding rogue. We need (ignoring legendary daggers) 2 daggers. If the rogue isn't there for that fight they go to waste. We need 2 enhance weapons, such as no'kaled. We don't always have a hunter in the raid even though we try to and we have only 2 raiding hunters right now last I checked.
So the problem is, lets say you get lucky the first month and all your agi weapons drop (lets even say on heroic so you don't have to worry about upgrading them). Any additional weapons are now basically disenchanted. Enhance weapons might go to the resto with an enhance offspec but the rogue daggers are worthless. Tanks might want offspec weapons, ferals and windwalkers might want healing weapons. These drops are now worthless for your raiding group. Crunching these numbers we see that there is a similar problem in plate int gear. In fact plate int gear is even worse because you essentially need to provide an alternative to tier gear which means you have just created 2 sets of gear for 1 spec instead of something like 3 sets for 4 specs in mail agi gear, this is where secondary stats are important to consider.
This is all just part of what it means to have gear drop from bosses and some of the benefits and problems with it. I haven't even gotten into the social aspect of distributing the loot and competition, this is just about how few want it in these cases. There are other cases where you run into too many people wanting the same thing, which can be a real problem in 10m raids where each piece of gear means a lot more for the raid and because of the limited comp options you are more likely forced into a situation where more people desire a smaller set of loot. So far mostly I've just wanted to demonstrate that random drops are random just by looking at weapons, which for the most part are shared between classes and a smaller number of them are available compared to say "chest pieces."
Next time I want to talk about int gear and show that has basically the exact opposite problem in some cases like weapons, trinkets, and jewellery.
Gear is a barrier to content. If we all had the best gear in the game things would be a lot easier. Gear has so many functions it'd be hard to enumerate all of them. To include some of them:
- Making content you've already beaten easier.
- To help you get over hurdles you're having trouble with
- Prestige, it looks nice when you have gear.
- Game Lore. It just makes sense to wear gear and have it magically enchanted for things.
- Lets the game designers pace content
- Another facet of player strength to optimize, which leads to a more in-depth game.
Gear competition then becomes very prevalent because it directly increases your player power. This makes it so that everyone wants some of the same stuff. I'm going to ignore secondary stats because it's not entirely relevant in my opinion to the discussion on designing gear and how it drops w.r.t. class design.
Gear competition is a good thing. It gives you a reason to work harder for the gear and in a lot of cases work within a system of loot distribution set up by your guild. Most places use the term DKP though the initialism is fairly out-dated since, to my knowledge, it's from the old Everquest days where dragons where some of the most important things you were killing, and getting points for. That aside your raid still has to determine who gets the gear, and from a raid perspective there are a couple things that are really important to us.
First we want as little gear as possible to go to waste. Seeing something drop and get disenchanted when there are legitimate upgrades that could have dropped is almost soul crushing. To give an example ultraxion right now drops the plate healing belt almost every week we step into DS. We have had something like 2 or 3 windward heart's since the launch of DS, only one of which was heroic. Every time we see that belt we get a little frustrated, and it was worse when we were progressing through but now it's still a bit of an issue.
This issue comes down to how many people want a given piece of gear. There's been acknowledgements of the issue facing plate healing gear already and there's no elegant or good solution for it right now. Some have suggested making holy paladins wear mail or giving their talent tree a conversion factor to make ret or prot gear ideal for them. Both solutions are clunky and pose more problems than they solve. This is a specific case of a much milder problem that faces raids that I really wanted to examine.
I have a hard time imagining more than 2 holy paladins in a 25m raid. I'm sure it happens but if you're trying to progress you're really missing something with more than 2, lets assume you have 1 backup holy paladin on the bench as well. That means over the entire tier of content you want the item to drop only 3 times. Compare this to something like spirit rings. There are 7 specs in the game that desire spirit rings, 2 of which are dps, the other 5 (6 with monks) are healers. 25m raids usually have about 5-7 healers depending on the encounter, and on the raid team are likely to have 8+ healers. Throw in an elemental shaman or two and a boomkin or two and you have a huge demand for spirit rings, hell int rings in general are extremely high in demand. I'm exaggerating a bit in the example by comparing a 1-spec item to one of the largest samples of gear in raids, int gear.
So lets examine some more gear to see what we expect an average piece of gear to have in terms of competition, weapons are fairly common so I'll start with those. They're also some of the most saught after items in the game beside trinkets. As a side-note I'm going to consider things like SMF/TG as two different specs and look instead at how many of a given role we're going to see since 2h vs 1h str weapons is mostly the same when it comes to what class you're bringing. I'm also going to start considering MoP since it makes it a bit easier on me.
2h Strength weapons: Arms, Fury, Frost, Unholy, Ret, Blood. 6 Specs.
1h Strength weapons (including tank weapons): Prot, Prot, SMF, Frost, (not sure how desirable this will be for blood). 4 specs.
2h Agi weapons: Feral, Guardian, Brewmaster, Windwalker 4 specs
1h slow agi weapons: Enhance, Windwalker 2 specs
1h fast agi weapons: Rogues (technically 3 specs)
Int weapons: I'll cover this later since it's a big can of worms.
Huge spread on how many classes want the weapons so lets break it down some more. You're going to have 2 tanks in your raid at almost all times. Occasionally one will switch to a dps spec on a fight that only requires one tank but this is somewhat rare (1 encounter in DS, 1-2 in FL depending on how you did baleroc). So you're going to need 2 total of a 2h str and a 1h str. These may or may not be shared among the dps depending on secondary stats but I suspect that we're going to see less haste/crit/dodge/parry on weapons and more hit/exp/mastery/procs in the future.
You're going to use a mix of str and agi melee and mostly int ranged with a hunter or two (maybe three if they can all stay online at the same time). A health mix of thse catagories is helpful to raid comp. Lets examine a 10m raid and a 25m raid beside each other to check out how they stack up with themselves and against each other.
10m uses: 2 tanks, 2 healers, 3 melee, 3 ranged. 10m comp varies wildly and can't support a terribly large raiding roster because you change such a large portion of the comp with each change, it's hard to support all the buffs etc.
25m uses: 2 tanks, 6 healers (on average, fights change this number which is something I'll discuss later), this leaves 17 dps slots for a mix of melee and ranged so we'll assume that we err on the side of ranged with 8 melee and 9 ranged (I feel this is pretty typical of my raid though I don't have any control of who comes into raid or whatnot and I don't actively monitor it).
So we can assume that in a 25m raid there are roughly 4 str plate dps, 4 agi melee, lets say 2 agi ranged and 7 int ranged. Assuming that the raiding roster supports more than just a 25m raiding team lets up the numbers to say +1 for each category. This puts us with a raiding team of maybe 30ish people, 5 plate dps, another 5-8 agi dps (mix of melee and ranged thanks to hunters), and 8-9 int casters. Looking at weapons that means we will need roughly:
4 2h str weapons (1 tank, 3 dps)
5 1h str weapons (1 tank, 2 dps)
Some combination of int weapons that the various classes can use, at least 7 of which can't have spirit, and another 8 that may or may not have spirit, these may come in the form of mh+oh or staves but that's another layer of complexity I don't want to deal with right now, total of 15 items (yes, half the raid roster probably uses int)
3 2h agi weapons
2 fast agi weapons (1 rogue)
2 slow agi weapons(1 enhance)
2 (or more depends on how many hunters) ranged weapon.
0-2 str shields depending on which tanks you're using
Tally it up that's 32 items I've listed, not counting off hands for casters. 4 of these items are because of dual wielding, with up to 2 more for tank shields and a the caster off-hand issue I'll talk about later. This brings my fictional raiding roster down to 28 people, I'm also only considering main spec for now since you can essentially double-dip for off-spec items in the list and it's not that important for progression outside of healers/tanks also having a dps spec in a case where you can't just bring in a dps replacement.
The distribution of the weapons is something I find more interesting than exactly how many you need, and the interesting part doesn't come until you consider str shields and 1h agi weapons.
In my raid group we tank with a pally and a dk. One shield is needed. We have one currently raiding rogue. We need (ignoring legendary daggers) 2 daggers. If the rogue isn't there for that fight they go to waste. We need 2 enhance weapons, such as no'kaled. We don't always have a hunter in the raid even though we try to and we have only 2 raiding hunters right now last I checked.
So the problem is, lets say you get lucky the first month and all your agi weapons drop (lets even say on heroic so you don't have to worry about upgrading them). Any additional weapons are now basically disenchanted. Enhance weapons might go to the resto with an enhance offspec but the rogue daggers are worthless. Tanks might want offspec weapons, ferals and windwalkers might want healing weapons. These drops are now worthless for your raiding group. Crunching these numbers we see that there is a similar problem in plate int gear. In fact plate int gear is even worse because you essentially need to provide an alternative to tier gear which means you have just created 2 sets of gear for 1 spec instead of something like 3 sets for 4 specs in mail agi gear, this is where secondary stats are important to consider.
This is all just part of what it means to have gear drop from bosses and some of the benefits and problems with it. I haven't even gotten into the social aspect of distributing the loot and competition, this is just about how few want it in these cases. There are other cases where you run into too many people wanting the same thing, which can be a real problem in 10m raids where each piece of gear means a lot more for the raid and because of the limited comp options you are more likely forced into a situation where more people desire a smaller set of loot. So far mostly I've just wanted to demonstrate that random drops are random just by looking at weapons, which for the most part are shared between classes and a smaller number of them are available compared to say "chest pieces."
Next time I want to talk about int gear and show that has basically the exact opposite problem in some cases like weapons, trinkets, and jewellery.
14 August, 2012
With a vengeance (update)
Short post today, just wanted to mention some things that have been mentioned wrt vengeance that are quite exciting.
1 - Damage formula changed from 5% damage taken to 2% unmitigated damage. This is phenomenal specifically because this *should* mean before armor, which is why it went down to 2%. This should be roughly no change from live outside of blocking/shields etc will also generate vengeance.
2 - There was talk on the forums of taunting giving some form of vengeance. There are a bunch of ways this could be implemented or managed but the idea is spot on as a solution for one of the biggest problems facing vengeance.
I'd like to mention I still think this isn't the best solution however it is a major jump in the right direction. Just wanted to mention these important updates and let everyone know that Aug. 28 is patch day for 5.0.
1 - Damage formula changed from 5% damage taken to 2% unmitigated damage. This is phenomenal specifically because this *should* mean before armor, which is why it went down to 2%. This should be roughly no change from live outside of blocking/shields etc will also generate vengeance.
2 - There was talk on the forums of taunting giving some form of vengeance. There are a bunch of ways this could be implemented or managed but the idea is spot on as a solution for one of the biggest problems facing vengeance.
I'd like to mention I still think this isn't the best solution however it is a major jump in the right direction. Just wanted to mention these important updates and let everyone know that Aug. 28 is patch day for 5.0.
10 August, 2012
With a vengeance
They beat me to it again. Vengeance. The mechanic I've hated ever since I understood why it was bad. Recently Blizzard has made some really really good adjustments to the mechanic, solving some of the major problems with vengeance. This doesn't fix the spell but it goes a long way.
I'd like to say that I'm not against tanks doing higher damage. I'd also be happy with "you do no damage but only taunts pull threat from you." We already have a 500% threat modifier for help with scaling, and vengeance is a mechanic to help with that scaling. We do need a mechanic to help us scale, it's a problem that comes out of how fast damage dealers scale their dps compared to how fast tanks scale their dps. With the 500% scaling modifier it allows us to scale 1/5th the speed and still keep ahead on threat, which is really all we *need* when it comes to damage.
So why isn't vengeance, in it's current implementation, all that it promises to be? I'm going to go over some of the traditional problems it's had, even the ones that have been fixed. It's important to see them to examine some solutions to the problem.
1 - Inverse scaling with tank gear. As a tank we want to take less damage. If we take less damage we get less vengeance. We want more vengeance. This is a problem. This problem has been FIXED. We now continue to generate vengeance when dodging and the amount gained is calculated before dodge/block/parry/miss etc. This fixes the desire to take more damage to do more damage. Good job blizzard.
2 - Tank AoE in 5m groups, and while levelling in general. Tanks shouldn't be beating dpsers at dps. It just shouldn't happen unless something is really really wrong. Vengeance isn't really the problem but it most certainly doesn't help, removing the cap works against it but in my experience I'm usually not capped anyways but who knows. This problem extends to 10 v 25m raids where more damage is going to be coming out in 25m raids (because there are more people) meaning you have a higher vengeance stack in 25m. Tank damage is more important in 10m than it is in 25 simply due to it being a larger portion of the raid. Vengeance does nothing to help work this problem out, it'd be easier for either the game to be designed with the expectation that tanks do no damage, or take steps for them to have their damage much more reliably.
3 - It is currently half of our ap, and it's going to be more come MoP. We also have no control over it. According to GC it will be nearly 2/3rds of our source of AP. This basically means that we can't control where our damage is coming from gear wise. I'm a little glad that I don't have to worry about dps stats like haste or crit, and I'm ok with hit/expertise so long as we can cap vs parry without going through crazy hoops. I'm also ok with hit/expertise because without them we only have 3 secondary stats.
4 - This is the big one. Ramp up time. This is a huge problem and is basically why this mechanic is doomed to failure. I think I need to set up another list of reasons why ramp up time defeats the purpose of this mechanic and the majority of it is related to early in the fight.
4.1 - Most issues with tank threat is in the first 10-20 seconds of the fight. When a fight starts, most dps burn all their cooldowns. They are doing more damage in the first bit, usually, than they will be doing at any other point in the fight. A lot of the time heroism is best used at the start to coincide with these for maximized dps. Tanks don't benefit a lot from haste, as a prot pally pre-mop I don't get any benefit. Once mop hits I do get some benefit, but it's still pretty lame. This is when we *most* need the benefit of something like vengeance, more than at any other point in the fight we need that extra damage right at the start. Tricks and MisD can only do so much.
4.2 - Early fight tank swaps. I can't tell you how many times I've had the dk I tank with rip mutated tentacles or ragnaros right back after I taunted. A tank that has a full stack of vengeance will be doing ~ 3x dmg compared to the tank that has none and is about to taunt. This is somewhat fixed by the "you gain average any time you would be below it." But this really doesn't solve the problem. It helps by reducing the time lag between taunting and being able to compete with threat. This isn't an issue later in the fight where the "you must exceed the tank by 10% threat" rule comes into it's prime. 10% extra threat from the first 30 seconds in a fight is a *much* smaller value than 10% threat at the 5 minute mark. The same rule applies to picking up new adds in a fight, though usually they don't need to be tank swapped.
4.3 - Tank DPS while not tanking. When you aren't tanking and vengeance has fallen off you are doing 1/3rd your damage. This is again counter to the design of the mechanic though it's less important since if you're not getting attacked you aren't the one generating the threat. It may restrict the encounter design to work around this sort of thing, especially in 10man where you'd be losing a considerable amount of boss damage.
With all those points put out, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something so please feel free to let me know, we come to a point where I feel like I'd just be complaining or "armchair dev"ing as it's been called. I want to state again that the idea of inflating tank dps isn't an issue. What I don't want, at least under the active mitigation model, is to have another thing contending with my rotation. Choices like SotR vs WoG are interesting, however choices like changing our rotation from emphasizing hopo gen for said abilities to other options for increased damage are not interesting choices, especially when our abilities scale different with ap. They're a very good reason for me to stop enjoying tanking.
In summary: Good job on the changes. I think these will go a long way to making tank scaling, which we have to remember is the sole purpose of vengeance as mentioned recently. Despite these changes I think there really has to be a fundamental change in the way tank scaling is dealt with. Vengeance almost causes more problems than it solves. I really think some of the suggestions over at Sacred Duty have a lot of merit and without spending some time and making sure I don't tread on the toes of those suggestions too much I don't have a really good solution just yet.
I really like the idea of giving tanks a %age based increase to damage done in some way. Mostly because it lets the threat modifier double-dip. If we can increase our raw damage by some small amount it lets the threat scale off of it by 5x and an additional 5x the modifier. For example a 5% increase to damage done from the tanks in some way gets the total modifier to 1 * 1.05 * 5 = 5.25. Change that to 20% tank damage modifier and we have effectively changed the 500% threat modifier to a 600% threat modifier without drastically changing the way we deal damage. It also doesn't have any of the crazy side-effects of things like shield barrier/WoG getting out of control.
Seeing big numbers is fun but if I have to see numbers half the size of what I'm seeing right now to fix some of these glaring problems, fine. I'd even be ok, though I really wouldn't enjoy it as much, with doing something like 20% of my actual damage with increased threat if it got the job done better than vengeance.
In any case, I think I'm working myself up so to avoid getting upset about something that isn't even on live yet I'll sign off and remind all of you to keep being awesome. See you folks later.
I'd like to say that I'm not against tanks doing higher damage. I'd also be happy with "you do no damage but only taunts pull threat from you." We already have a 500% threat modifier for help with scaling, and vengeance is a mechanic to help with that scaling. We do need a mechanic to help us scale, it's a problem that comes out of how fast damage dealers scale their dps compared to how fast tanks scale their dps. With the 500% scaling modifier it allows us to scale 1/5th the speed and still keep ahead on threat, which is really all we *need* when it comes to damage.
So why isn't vengeance, in it's current implementation, all that it promises to be? I'm going to go over some of the traditional problems it's had, even the ones that have been fixed. It's important to see them to examine some solutions to the problem.
1 - Inverse scaling with tank gear. As a tank we want to take less damage. If we take less damage we get less vengeance. We want more vengeance. This is a problem. This problem has been FIXED. We now continue to generate vengeance when dodging and the amount gained is calculated before dodge/block/parry/miss etc. This fixes the desire to take more damage to do more damage. Good job blizzard.
2 - Tank AoE in 5m groups, and while levelling in general. Tanks shouldn't be beating dpsers at dps. It just shouldn't happen unless something is really really wrong. Vengeance isn't really the problem but it most certainly doesn't help, removing the cap works against it but in my experience I'm usually not capped anyways but who knows. This problem extends to 10 v 25m raids where more damage is going to be coming out in 25m raids (because there are more people) meaning you have a higher vengeance stack in 25m. Tank damage is more important in 10m than it is in 25 simply due to it being a larger portion of the raid. Vengeance does nothing to help work this problem out, it'd be easier for either the game to be designed with the expectation that tanks do no damage, or take steps for them to have their damage much more reliably.
3 - It is currently half of our ap, and it's going to be more come MoP. We also have no control over it. According to GC it will be nearly 2/3rds of our source of AP. This basically means that we can't control where our damage is coming from gear wise. I'm a little glad that I don't have to worry about dps stats like haste or crit, and I'm ok with hit/expertise so long as we can cap vs parry without going through crazy hoops. I'm also ok with hit/expertise because without them we only have 3 secondary stats.
4 - This is the big one. Ramp up time. This is a huge problem and is basically why this mechanic is doomed to failure. I think I need to set up another list of reasons why ramp up time defeats the purpose of this mechanic and the majority of it is related to early in the fight.
4.1 - Most issues with tank threat is in the first 10-20 seconds of the fight. When a fight starts, most dps burn all their cooldowns. They are doing more damage in the first bit, usually, than they will be doing at any other point in the fight. A lot of the time heroism is best used at the start to coincide with these for maximized dps. Tanks don't benefit a lot from haste, as a prot pally pre-mop I don't get any benefit. Once mop hits I do get some benefit, but it's still pretty lame. This is when we *most* need the benefit of something like vengeance, more than at any other point in the fight we need that extra damage right at the start. Tricks and MisD can only do so much.
4.2 - Early fight tank swaps. I can't tell you how many times I've had the dk I tank with rip mutated tentacles or ragnaros right back after I taunted. A tank that has a full stack of vengeance will be doing ~ 3x dmg compared to the tank that has none and is about to taunt. This is somewhat fixed by the "you gain average any time you would be below it." But this really doesn't solve the problem. It helps by reducing the time lag between taunting and being able to compete with threat. This isn't an issue later in the fight where the "you must exceed the tank by 10% threat" rule comes into it's prime. 10% extra threat from the first 30 seconds in a fight is a *much* smaller value than 10% threat at the 5 minute mark. The same rule applies to picking up new adds in a fight, though usually they don't need to be tank swapped.
4.3 - Tank DPS while not tanking. When you aren't tanking and vengeance has fallen off you are doing 1/3rd your damage. This is again counter to the design of the mechanic though it's less important since if you're not getting attacked you aren't the one generating the threat. It may restrict the encounter design to work around this sort of thing, especially in 10man where you'd be losing a considerable amount of boss damage.
With all those points put out, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something so please feel free to let me know, we come to a point where I feel like I'd just be complaining or "armchair dev"ing as it's been called. I want to state again that the idea of inflating tank dps isn't an issue. What I don't want, at least under the active mitigation model, is to have another thing contending with my rotation. Choices like SotR vs WoG are interesting, however choices like changing our rotation from emphasizing hopo gen for said abilities to other options for increased damage are not interesting choices, especially when our abilities scale different with ap. They're a very good reason for me to stop enjoying tanking.
In summary: Good job on the changes. I think these will go a long way to making tank scaling, which we have to remember is the sole purpose of vengeance as mentioned recently. Despite these changes I think there really has to be a fundamental change in the way tank scaling is dealt with. Vengeance almost causes more problems than it solves. I really think some of the suggestions over at Sacred Duty have a lot of merit and without spending some time and making sure I don't tread on the toes of those suggestions too much I don't have a really good solution just yet.
I really like the idea of giving tanks a %age based increase to damage done in some way. Mostly because it lets the threat modifier double-dip. If we can increase our raw damage by some small amount it lets the threat scale off of it by 5x and an additional 5x the modifier. For example a 5% increase to damage done from the tanks in some way gets the total modifier to 1 * 1.05 * 5 = 5.25. Change that to 20% tank damage modifier and we have effectively changed the 500% threat modifier to a 600% threat modifier without drastically changing the way we deal damage. It also doesn't have any of the crazy side-effects of things like shield barrier/WoG getting out of control.
Seeing big numbers is fun but if I have to see numbers half the size of what I'm seeing right now to fix some of these glaring problems, fine. I'd even be ok, though I really wouldn't enjoy it as much, with doing something like 20% of my actual damage with increased threat if it got the job done better than vengeance.
In any case, I think I'm working myself up so to avoid getting upset about something that isn't even on live yet I'll sign off and remind all of you to keep being awesome. See you folks later.
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