I seem to be enjoying the topical nature of some of the discussions that I see happen very frequently on the forums and what some other people have to say about them. I find myself disagreeing with a lot of what people say but there are some extremely good points out there so I thought I'd try to analyze some of the loot systems and mechanics in the two games and compare them to see how they function and where they sink or sail.
To start I think the important part is to address why is gear important and why do we have things like stats on them. What use are they and why do we want them? These answers appear simple at first and are the core of almost any RPG type game.
Gear, what is it good for? There are several ways to direct player power in an rpg. The first and most common, and often the easiest, way to approach player power is through one's "Level." This can be thought of in many different ways but ultimately it comes down to either spending a certain amount of time in the game or completing a certain amount of content or even just rewarding players for participating in the game. Levelling can be something completely different and have a different function in the game, but the concept of a level and what it grants players is universal. With levels come increased base statistics, increased health and a way of comparing yourself to other players including the way you might interact. For example a warcraft player of level 50 would likely destroy a player of level 15 even without trying. A warlock might throw out a corruption to toy with a lower level but even if the level 50 player was having a bad day and zoning out, clearly they're going to win. This is player power.
What happens when two players are of the same level? They have the same statistics, the same abilities, the same skill level even. What differentiates them? This is one approach to why we want gear. It's a form of player power beyond level. This is especially useful when the game designers want to limit your level to make content relevant to you. Imagine that same level 50 warlock going into the stockades. Not really that much fun. It would be the same if there was no real level cap and a level 86 paladin went into the black temple when it was the toughest content. So having a level cap has to happen and you want to motivate players once they hit this level cap. People like getting things, especially as rewards for accomplishing things. Players also want an easier time going back to do things again. For example, once you've cleared Dragon Soul a couple times, H Firelands should be a lot easier for you. You shouldn't have the same difficulties there as you did the first time you entered the instance. So gear increasing power level is an essential part of the game especially due to the vast amount of content at the level cap.
This brings us to stats. D3 takes a somewhat different approach to stats on gear than WoW does. In Warcraft there are specific pieces of gear that have fixed stats. They drop from fixed locations and fixed NPCs. You can find out what they are ahead of time if you wish, and if you want to go kill the same one over and over again to try and get that specific item, you know where to go and you can get it several times if you really want to. D3 on the other hand sticks to it's design philosophy in that things are completely random. You'll find a gear with random stats, you'll find it anywhere in a large area from any npc (higher chance from some such as bosses/champions), and even an item with the exact same name might have a couple different variants. One might have 32 dex with some other stats, one might have 36 dex with the exact same other stats. This is just how that game functions. Running the same content over and over again to get those items is exactly what defines diablo. The bosses are a lot easier, there's no lockout system the way there is in wow and you can bring basically anyone you want with you (the npcs scale directly with the number of people in the group).
So with these two varying stat systems, which one is "better?" The short answer is neither, they both suit their game styles. The long answer takes a look at how exactly the stat systems are set up.
Warcraft has the following stats (going to ignore tanking stats since it's easier this way):
Primary stats-Strength, Agility, Intellect.
Secondary stats-Spirit, Haste, Crit, Hit, Expertise, Spell Penetration, Mastery
It also has some pvp stats.
D3 has a much larger set of stats so I'll list a couple of them:
"Primary" attributes-Strength, Dexterity, Intellect
"Secondary" attributes-Chance to crit, Crit damage, Attack speed, Life on hit, Life on kill, Vitality (stamina), extra damage in various elemental types, resistances, armor, and I'm sure I've missed various stats.
So the primary stats in each system are usually valued more than the secondary ones, as fits the names. Because of the implimentation however there are some problems that crop up. Both suffer from the problem that your primary stats are just so incredibly more valuable than your secondary stats that you take them to the exclusion of all else. In D3 primary stats increase all damage you do by 1% for each point in your class' primary stat while in WoW it's just attack or spell power that you get from them.
In warcraft this is less of a problem because the design team can fairly accurately predict how much strength you're going to have at a given point since you're going to get it on all of your gear, every piece for you is given strength and you are expected to have those pieces instead of ones that use agility for example (it helps that it's usually restricted by cloth vs plate as well). D3 is completely different, gear has random stats so it may not even have *any* dexterity on it at all. An item might have a bunch of dexterity and no vitality or it might have an increase to experience gained on an item that requires level 60 (haven't seen this but in theory it can happen unless blizzard has specifically coded this case out). This is part of the game, getting the gear with ideal stats just functions differently and makes it harder for the designers to predict where you fall at a given point in the game, though the auction house greatly mitigates this and you are expected to use this to help with your gear.
So lets devise a couple metrics to compare the two systems. I'll propose that the ability to generate extra content for the game and how that factors into the loot system is important (think warcraft patches or diablo expansions). Also important is comparing players that have a similar "level" of gear and how their stats might stack up against each other (similar gear should mean similar player power). Complexity of loot system is important for depth in game (choosing the right stats instead of the wrong is part of the game). Availability of loot is important. There are more metrics that one could use and if you think of any that are important please let me know but these are sufficient for now.
Generating content: The WoW system of gear requires that the designers know how it's going to scale and how much content to create before tossing in more levels to the game. They have to have a way for things like crit and haste to depreciate (usually with level). D3 system since attack speed and crit are the only ones that suffer from crazy scaling problems (I know the %age based increases create crazy scaling problems but not the same way) they have to be limited. This just means not throwing more than x% attack speed or crit on gear. Both systems allow extra content quite easily.
Similar gear level, Similar stats: WoW's system really hits home with this while still allowing players to play with different secondary stats like haste or mastery. Mastery might be really bad for you and you should grab haste instead (I think some type of hunters are in this situation) but similar gear levels means you'll have similar amounts of agility meaning that for the most part you're hitting as hard as the other guy and there aren't terribly huge disparities in player power generally speaking. D3 system does not support this philosophy. In D3 two players can both be decked out in A1 inferno gear while one player has 1000 dex and the other with barely 500. Double the dex, double the damage. Sure the second guy might have 20k more hp or armor and resistances of an a4 barbarian but the damage output and player power is going to vary VASTLY. Since the game is almost exclusively PvE (especially right now) this isn't so much an issue but in terms of completing the difficult inferno content this is a glaring problem. I do not think a normalized stat distribution is a good solution for this problem under the D3 design philosophy, though I don't have a really good alternative. WoW item system clearly has the advantage here and D3 has some glaring problems.
Complexity of loot systems: Warcraft has stats that all interact in very straightfoward ways. Attack power and spell power make you hit harder. Haste makes you hit faster, dodge makes you dodge more attacks. There's a couple cases where things get confusing such as mastery or things like the additional parry you get from strength but those are still somewhat straight forward. How the stats interact with each other is completely different and makes for a great system with some scaling issues occasionally (see: fire mages) but isn't too bad that it stops players from even trying. D3 most stats just don't interact with each other at all with 2 very specific exceptions. Str/Dex/Int give you armor/dodge/resist respectively and those stats reduce all damage take in some way and stack with each other. Armor reduces damage from spells, and you can resist physical damage. Dodge is the way you think it works, and over a large number of attacks it will normalize itself. The plethora of secondary stats in D3 makes the system a bit confusing, tedious and troublesome, but is the core of the game. Sometimes trying to figure out how much vitality or armor you *should* have, or what your effective health should look like compared to how much damage you need is hard to discover for yourself. This presents a problem but again is part of the game design. Both systems function well in their settings and I think D3 has some glaring flaws again that need to be addressed, though I don't have a solid solution for them just yet.
Lastly availability of loot: This is somewhat loosely defined such as where the loot comes from, how often you can get the loot and what sort of effort you need to put in to get the loot. WoW comes on the predictable effort in, minimal (but still present) rng and not capable of farming, though the effort is much larger to take down the boss. D3 is the polar opposite of this. You can farm out gear, though you are at the whimsy of the rng gods. You don't know how much farming you have to do but once you get to the point to farm things are fairly easy which means farming a boss over and over again isn't a problem. I like the WoW system better but it does hurt the replayability of the game drastically. D3 you could play over and over again because it's just fun and relaxing to kill the bosses and because you really need that pair of gloves with 120 dex.
Summary! They are two different types of systems and Warcraft has a very robust workable system that is amazing for the competitive environment with a few flaws, for example after clearing 8/8 H DS for months now we have only seen 1 windward heart, few breathstealer bands and the like. Most of this is the problem with shared loot tables but you can suffer from terrible rng. D3 on the other hand isn't designed for a competative, progression oriented group of players. With that in mind it still has some issues but for the most part is pretty decent, though the main criticism I see lately is that it does not have the same breadth of stats as D2 did (though I'd say just wait on it I'm sure that more will come later in the development cycle, stop hating on them).
All in all loot and gear is extremely important and I'm sure I didn't get through all the points on it. I know there are people out there who hate gear and would rather see it gone from games and I'd like to hear what your arguments are and why you don't like gear as a function of player power at level cap.
That's all for now on gear (I look back and I've written more than I intended and probably covered less than intended) so a little bit of an announcement. I'm moving next week and will be mostly without internet starting middle of this week ending middle of next week. I will try and get something out for next weekend but at the very latest I'll be back the weekend of June 8th. Also I'm happy to recieve feedback in any way (questions, comments, complaints, rage anything really) so feel free to either pester me here on blogger or through google+
27 May, 2012
21 May, 2012
D3 and continuing beta
Not much has happened recently since D3 just launched (with a couple problems). A lot of time at blizzard is seen to be smoothing out all of the problems so I thought I'd talk very briefly this week about online game launches and the like. I'll be starting with considerations that need to be addressed, how they've been addressed in the past and what sort of problems have come up in WoW and other games.
1) Competative nature of online gaming. The first concern is that everyone should have an equal footing going into the new content. In terms of D3 this meant making the pre-download available such that download and install concerns did not effect the race for the world first inferno clear. For Warcraft something similar could happen, and in my opinion should, in the sense that you might pre-install MoP and blizzard might just turn on access to the new content on release night. I.E. servers go down at maintenence on tuesday when everyone has already installed and when the servers are back online MoP is open to everyone who has it.
2) Global Play. I've taken the term from the D3 service carrying that name but I mean something slightly different. The earth is round, like a ball. This means that it's different times around the globe. Many people sleep during various hours of the day because of the different light levels. How does one handle the launch on a competitive level across so many regions. Historically blizzard has dealt with this by releasing the game at midnight in one of three regions, using again D3 as an example as it is the more recent launch. They launched in Asia, Europe and the Americas each at midnight in a timezone in one of those regions. NA servers went live at midnight PST where the EU servers had been up for the previous 8 hours. This seems to run counter to the idea that both regions should be on a similar footing for going at content. This is a problem that comes up with patches, not only with expansion releases. The reason that it's not a huge issue with expansion launches is that there is so much content the time lag becomes smaller. This does not mean that it isn't an issue, it's just that with a larger amount of content to run through the effect becomes diminished. This is going to be a large problem for a long time since there is no clear fair way to deal with the simple fact that the world is round and while we live across it, we all want to be awake during the daylight hours and that is how our society functions.
3) Availability. With the digital era this is not so much of a problem that's come up but since the game is competitive and people do want to get online as fast as possible the game needs to be available to as many people as possible early on. With digital downloads and games moving away from physical copies on CDs this is becoming a non-issue except in one specific case:
4) Collectors Edition. I could go on for hours about how much of a problem this is, or even DLC or other pre-order bonuses but since I'm specifically talking about a game that has free content patches and a long time between expansions, relatively anyways, I'm going to stick to CE. Simply put it's a more expensive version of the game that comes with goodies. There are a couple rules to the goodies including that none directly effect player power or convenience. They are mostly aesthetic with some being unrelated to the game directly. For example, blizzard has historically included art books and soundtracks in their CE packages. The extra stuff is almost always very worth the extra money being involved. The major concern is supply. Again, looking at the D3 launch since it's extremely recent, there was an almost inconceivable lack of supply. Knowing some friends who work at Gamestop I've heard stories of how many people are looking for the CE and not getting one. I myself looked pretty hard to find one. The only ones available by the time of launch were on ebay. There were some exceptions such as a couple that popped up from various retailers like newegg or wal-mart. In fact I've heard horror stories of some who have pre-ordered the CE and when they went to retrieve it, it had already been sold. Now, according to sources, there is a wild search for any available copies. If you are still looking for one I suggest you either get one from ebay (at double or more the cost) or talk to your local game stores and find out how long until unclaimed pre-orders are up for grabs.
5) Testing. Something that has come up a lot recently and I will likely spend another week talking about instead of spending a lot of time here, this is necessary and important. Some people are upset about MoP beta but this is a true beta and not just a demo the way many betas have been. A topic for another time.
You can see where my concerns mostly lie and why this is an interesting topic. Until next time, comments are more than welcome and thoughts on some of the difficult topics such as global launches are encouraged.
1) Competative nature of online gaming. The first concern is that everyone should have an equal footing going into the new content. In terms of D3 this meant making the pre-download available such that download and install concerns did not effect the race for the world first inferno clear. For Warcraft something similar could happen, and in my opinion should, in the sense that you might pre-install MoP and blizzard might just turn on access to the new content on release night. I.E. servers go down at maintenence on tuesday when everyone has already installed and when the servers are back online MoP is open to everyone who has it.
2) Global Play. I've taken the term from the D3 service carrying that name but I mean something slightly different. The earth is round, like a ball. This means that it's different times around the globe. Many people sleep during various hours of the day because of the different light levels. How does one handle the launch on a competitive level across so many regions. Historically blizzard has dealt with this by releasing the game at midnight in one of three regions, using again D3 as an example as it is the more recent launch. They launched in Asia, Europe and the Americas each at midnight in a timezone in one of those regions. NA servers went live at midnight PST where the EU servers had been up for the previous 8 hours. This seems to run counter to the idea that both regions should be on a similar footing for going at content. This is a problem that comes up with patches, not only with expansion releases. The reason that it's not a huge issue with expansion launches is that there is so much content the time lag becomes smaller. This does not mean that it isn't an issue, it's just that with a larger amount of content to run through the effect becomes diminished. This is going to be a large problem for a long time since there is no clear fair way to deal with the simple fact that the world is round and while we live across it, we all want to be awake during the daylight hours and that is how our society functions.
3) Availability. With the digital era this is not so much of a problem that's come up but since the game is competitive and people do want to get online as fast as possible the game needs to be available to as many people as possible early on. With digital downloads and games moving away from physical copies on CDs this is becoming a non-issue except in one specific case:
4) Collectors Edition. I could go on for hours about how much of a problem this is, or even DLC or other pre-order bonuses but since I'm specifically talking about a game that has free content patches and a long time between expansions, relatively anyways, I'm going to stick to CE. Simply put it's a more expensive version of the game that comes with goodies. There are a couple rules to the goodies including that none directly effect player power or convenience. They are mostly aesthetic with some being unrelated to the game directly. For example, blizzard has historically included art books and soundtracks in their CE packages. The extra stuff is almost always very worth the extra money being involved. The major concern is supply. Again, looking at the D3 launch since it's extremely recent, there was an almost inconceivable lack of supply. Knowing some friends who work at Gamestop I've heard stories of how many people are looking for the CE and not getting one. I myself looked pretty hard to find one. The only ones available by the time of launch were on ebay. There were some exceptions such as a couple that popped up from various retailers like newegg or wal-mart. In fact I've heard horror stories of some who have pre-ordered the CE and when they went to retrieve it, it had already been sold. Now, according to sources, there is a wild search for any available copies. If you are still looking for one I suggest you either get one from ebay (at double or more the cost) or talk to your local game stores and find out how long until unclaimed pre-orders are up for grabs.
5) Testing. Something that has come up a lot recently and I will likely spend another week talking about instead of spending a lot of time here, this is necessary and important. Some people are upset about MoP beta but this is a true beta and not just a demo the way many betas have been. A topic for another time.
You can see where my concerns mostly lie and why this is an interesting topic. Until next time, comments are more than welcome and thoughts on some of the difficult topics such as global launches are encouraged.
13 May, 2012
Homogenization
I'd like to talk about homogenization today since it's coming up in the tank community in a different sense than other roles or classes.
So what does homogenization mean? To start it's simply when things become similar. For example, this comes up in pvp a lot in the form of "this class has some type of ability that I don't have." An example here is something like warrior's have charge, they have several charges. Enhancement shamans and ret pallies have no charge like mechanic. We don't have a way to instantly be near our target. We have ways to move quickly or slow our opponent (which often the other classes have in some way such as hamstring or chains of ice or spring). Now for melee classes in pvp this is a pretty big deal, tough there are ways around it. Paladins have ways of moving faster and ways of limiting how fast others move. It's not a charge but it does help them close the gap.
Tanks are a bit different since they have certain requirements to be balanced. A straightforward example is something like ultraxion. If any tank was missing a 3m 50% dr cd (or something similar since warriors have a bit smaller cd and dr on their big cooldown) they would have trouble surviving the hour of twilight mechanic. It's not the greatest example but you can see how, being the tank, you need to have similar responses to boss mechanics or you are in a very real danger of being sat for said boss if you are unable to deal with it as well as other tanks. If there is even one tank that doesn't have a counter to these abilities you run into a problem of "a double [class] tanking comp just doesn't work." This isn't usually a problem since most guilds I've raided with over the years have avoided (by choice or intent) a comp of double one class for tanking but I've also been in raids where we've had situations like a double pally tank was the only setup we had. Sometimes just getting the 10 or 25 people together to get into the raid, and it's extremely frustrating when you're having problems with a mechanic because you're missing something on your tank. I always think of tanks as the "fulcrum" of the raid, and if they aren't all equipped to deal with bosses in certain ways there are large problems.
Blizzard has been pretty good so far in keeping the tanks comparable. For a while there (specifically 4.2) death knights had an issue with the way they were taking damage but that was mostly fixed with some changes to slow down the spike damage. Death knights suffer from the problem that they are so incredibly different from the other three tanks that making them "the same" has it's problems. There's a lot of reasons they're so different primarily due to the fact that they were designed significantly later than the rest of the classes. However they still have much of the same toolkit as we do.
However there is a danger with homogenization, which is that the classes become too similar. This is where I'm really happy about how blizzard is handling the active mitigation. I'd like to briefly point out that I'm going to exclude DKs from the majority of the comments here since they aren't getting the same rework as the rest of us tanks. Firstly, our self buffs are all going to be balanced around being able to hit the bosses, making more stats useful (that's for another time though since I do have a lot to say about two stats that have a cap). They also have a design of building up resources to generate your defensive buffs. So there's this back and forth that you're playing with your class. Build up to x hopo/rage and spend for a fairly significant buff. The great part about being different here is how it's implimented right now (remember things are still in beta and the numbers may not be 100% accurate as they change very often):
Paladin: 30% physical damage reduction for 3s.
Warrior: Block everything for 6s.
Druid: Increase dodge by 10% for 6s
They're all somewhat similar in the long run. You can save up more resources to chain 2 of these together for some boss burst (the occasional 20% frenzy) and their total uptime is similar. This is the good sort of homogenization since it lets blizzard tune incoming boss damage more easily since they know how and how much damage tanks will be taking.
The second point I find in the talent trees, it's similar functions but drastically different talents that make this interesting. Druids and warriors get their tank talent tier at 30 and paladins get it at 45. Taking a brief look at the talents there's some similar functions and I can't help but feel that paladins get the nicer ones though nothing gamebreaking.
Druid: Nature's swiftness, duration and size of next heal increased by 50%, cost is free and usable in all forms. (1m cd)
Renewal, basically desperate prayer from priests. self-heal for 30% of your hp. (2m cd)
Cenarion ward: HoT version of earth shield with one charge. Next time you get hit you have a 6s hot. (30s cd)
Warrior: Enraged regen, 15% of max hp heal now, another 15% over 15 seconds.
Second wind: you regen health when under 35% hp (and some extra rage gen outside of that)
Impending Victory: changes victory rush into a 30s cd deals dmg and self-heal for 10% hp
Paladin: Selfless healer, judgement lowers cast time of flash heal (instant at max stacks) and large heal when used on others.
Sacred Shield: Yes, it's back. wog crit chance up by 30%, shield when you get hit.
Eternal Flame: HoT for 30s, uses holy power.
As you can see they all server a similar function and at least as a paladin I know what I'm taking, however they are all very different in flavor, but all serve similar functions while allowing some varying flavors. Looking at a druid it's entirely about how you want to heal yourself and how often. It's the same choice for warriors, how often do you want to heal and how you want to heal. Paladins don't have that same style of choice but they do have several that help them heal/shield themselves. Sacred shield is just so strong right now in comparison to the others, but again that's another point.
Lastly I'll just mention shield barrier vs word of glory vs "guard" (monk) and how they're similar but with different flavors. I know I haven't mentioned much of monks just yet but they're still fairly new and I haven't had a whole lot of time to work with them on the beta yet, though I do intend to once lvl 90 is unlocked as well as on live when the expansion is up and running. I'm sure they'll have a similar issue to DKs in that they function differently, but we'll see how things go.
In any case, things are looking good for tanks in the expansion and I'm pretty excited, lets hope things keep going in the same direction.
So what does homogenization mean? To start it's simply when things become similar. For example, this comes up in pvp a lot in the form of "this class has some type of ability that I don't have." An example here is something like warrior's have charge, they have several charges. Enhancement shamans and ret pallies have no charge like mechanic. We don't have a way to instantly be near our target. We have ways to move quickly or slow our opponent (which often the other classes have in some way such as hamstring or chains of ice or spring). Now for melee classes in pvp this is a pretty big deal, tough there are ways around it. Paladins have ways of moving faster and ways of limiting how fast others move. It's not a charge but it does help them close the gap.
Tanks are a bit different since they have certain requirements to be balanced. A straightforward example is something like ultraxion. If any tank was missing a 3m 50% dr cd (or something similar since warriors have a bit smaller cd and dr on their big cooldown) they would have trouble surviving the hour of twilight mechanic. It's not the greatest example but you can see how, being the tank, you need to have similar responses to boss mechanics or you are in a very real danger of being sat for said boss if you are unable to deal with it as well as other tanks. If there is even one tank that doesn't have a counter to these abilities you run into a problem of "a double [class] tanking comp just doesn't work." This isn't usually a problem since most guilds I've raided with over the years have avoided (by choice or intent) a comp of double one class for tanking but I've also been in raids where we've had situations like a double pally tank was the only setup we had. Sometimes just getting the 10 or 25 people together to get into the raid, and it's extremely frustrating when you're having problems with a mechanic because you're missing something on your tank. I always think of tanks as the "fulcrum" of the raid, and if they aren't all equipped to deal with bosses in certain ways there are large problems.
Blizzard has been pretty good so far in keeping the tanks comparable. For a while there (specifically 4.2) death knights had an issue with the way they were taking damage but that was mostly fixed with some changes to slow down the spike damage. Death knights suffer from the problem that they are so incredibly different from the other three tanks that making them "the same" has it's problems. There's a lot of reasons they're so different primarily due to the fact that they were designed significantly later than the rest of the classes. However they still have much of the same toolkit as we do.
However there is a danger with homogenization, which is that the classes become too similar. This is where I'm really happy about how blizzard is handling the active mitigation. I'd like to briefly point out that I'm going to exclude DKs from the majority of the comments here since they aren't getting the same rework as the rest of us tanks. Firstly, our self buffs are all going to be balanced around being able to hit the bosses, making more stats useful (that's for another time though since I do have a lot to say about two stats that have a cap). They also have a design of building up resources to generate your defensive buffs. So there's this back and forth that you're playing with your class. Build up to x hopo/rage and spend for a fairly significant buff. The great part about being different here is how it's implimented right now (remember things are still in beta and the numbers may not be 100% accurate as they change very often):
Paladin: 30% physical damage reduction for 3s.
Warrior: Block everything for 6s.
Druid: Increase dodge by 10% for 6s
They're all somewhat similar in the long run. You can save up more resources to chain 2 of these together for some boss burst (the occasional 20% frenzy) and their total uptime is similar. This is the good sort of homogenization since it lets blizzard tune incoming boss damage more easily since they know how and how much damage tanks will be taking.
The second point I find in the talent trees, it's similar functions but drastically different talents that make this interesting. Druids and warriors get their tank talent tier at 30 and paladins get it at 45. Taking a brief look at the talents there's some similar functions and I can't help but feel that paladins get the nicer ones though nothing gamebreaking.
Druid: Nature's swiftness, duration and size of next heal increased by 50%, cost is free and usable in all forms. (1m cd)
Renewal, basically desperate prayer from priests. self-heal for 30% of your hp. (2m cd)
Cenarion ward: HoT version of earth shield with one charge. Next time you get hit you have a 6s hot. (30s cd)
Warrior: Enraged regen, 15% of max hp heal now, another 15% over 15 seconds.
Second wind: you regen health when under 35% hp (and some extra rage gen outside of that)
Impending Victory: changes victory rush into a 30s cd deals dmg and self-heal for 10% hp
Paladin: Selfless healer, judgement lowers cast time of flash heal (instant at max stacks) and large heal when used on others.
Sacred Shield: Yes, it's back. wog crit chance up by 30%, shield when you get hit.
Eternal Flame: HoT for 30s, uses holy power.
As you can see they all server a similar function and at least as a paladin I know what I'm taking, however they are all very different in flavor, but all serve similar functions while allowing some varying flavors. Looking at a druid it's entirely about how you want to heal yourself and how often. It's the same choice for warriors, how often do you want to heal and how you want to heal. Paladins don't have that same style of choice but they do have several that help them heal/shield themselves. Sacred shield is just so strong right now in comparison to the others, but again that's another point.
Lastly I'll just mention shield barrier vs word of glory vs "guard" (monk) and how they're similar but with different flavors. I know I haven't mentioned much of monks just yet but they're still fairly new and I haven't had a whole lot of time to work with them on the beta yet, though I do intend to once lvl 90 is unlocked as well as on live when the expansion is up and running. I'm sure they'll have a similar issue to DKs in that they function differently, but we'll see how things go.
In any case, things are looking good for tanks in the expansion and I'm pretty excited, lets hope things keep going in the same direction.
06 May, 2012
Another crack at this
So I've tried to do this before and life has usually gotten in the way. Should be better this time around since I've got the time, energy and drive to stick to it. Some better planning this time should help a whole ton as well.
To start, about what will I be writing? Primarily World of Warcraft. My expertise is primarily in the tanking world though I do spend a fair bit of time dpsing and very occasionally healing. I play other games and will very likely comment on those as well. I play LoL, will be playing Diablo 3 and I really like to try out the new MMOs and betas for other games. Right now MoP is around the corner and I'll talk about that a lot I figure. I love looking at the way games are designed, the choices that the devs make in how they set up the game.
Who am I? I often go by the online handle "Diceone" when it's available to me, picking other names as appropriate. I play tanks in almost every game I play as that's what comes most naturally to me. I currently play a paladin tank called "Surgat" in warcraft in [A]Adapt of US-Spirestone, we ranked roughly 115-120 US 25m for dragon soul depending on the websites you go to for rankings. I play other characters as well, especially for our alt runs so I've played many other classes/specs but not that frequently. Outside of the game I'm a math student focusing in number theory and the like, primarily probability, set theory, those sorts of things. I'm a pretty big nerd.
So where do we start?
Active Mitigation. What is it? Simply put the answer is using your resources to reduce the amount of damage you take. Death knights have this to a much lesser extent right now, or rather to a much different extent than is planned for the rest of us tanks. Death Knights have death strike, using their runes for healing and a shield. This is somewhat different than the plan for the rest of us but it's the same basic idea.
Guardian druids and prot warriors are going to have a straightforward model of building up rage to use it for mitigation. The expectation isn't to have this mitigation available all the time. This is a bit like the current implementation of holy shield except it wouldn't be on a cooldown and would cost resources. Us paladins are losing holy shield and instead getting something that functions similarly but is tied to our use of shield of the righteous. Beta currently has us taking 30% less physical damage for 3 seconds after hitting our shield slam. This is easy to model though makes things a bit complicated in that paying attention to the enemy swing timer could be very useful, and this essentially requires mods to track well and get the most benefit out of. This is just my gripe with the way it's currently implemented but the idea is sound.
I like having our defense abilities tied to our offensive ones and since our resource generation will be tied to our hit it makes 2 more stats relevant to tanks. This bring sus up from 3 to 5. This is a huge difference since we get 2 secondary stats on our gear it was simply a matter of picking our best two and reforging into them. Having more stats makes things actually interesting, while I despise having to deal with stat caps I can't think of another way to make other stats interesting since those are basically the only other stats (aside from haste and crit, which would make a mockery of being a tank).
So back to the idea of works. We have abilities that generate our resources. Crusader strike/Judgement for paladins, I think mangle for guardian druids, and shield slam for warriors. Since I know paladins best I'll try and model how we're going to work.
Crusader Strike: 4.5s CD (3 Globals, effected by haste by sanctity of battle)
Judgement: 6s Cd (4 globals, also effected by haste via sanctity of battle)
Shield of the Righteous: 3 Holy Power, 1.5s cd, 3s buff (at the time of writing this anyways, it's changed so much lately this is likely to not be the final version but works for example) Not on the gcd
Best modelling is done mid fight so lets assume we have just used our shield of the righteous and our buff is active for the next 3s. I'll count things off in terms of globals and loot at worst case scenario (No grand crusader procs meaning minimal holy power gains). This means it takes 6 globals to rebuild our holy power to the point where we can use shield of the righteous again. The buff lasts only 3s or 2 globals. Time between shields gets reduced slightly from judgement, but lets assume that we get 1 judgement in for every shield, reducing the time drastically depending on when it comes in. If we can hit shield and in 3 globals CS > Judge > CS it's still not fast enough to keep 100% uptime, which is very important. You can also see how low values of hit would drastically reduce uptime, a missed judgement or crusader strike is a large amount of lost holy power.
So in the best case scenario we can have one global, usually only one boss swing. Howveer as the fight goes on we're going to have varying uptime as the cooldown on our abilities is somewhat variable as well. Avenger's Shield cooldown gets cleared. So we looked at a best case from no holy power, and it's obvious to see that if we store up to 5 holy power with our shiney new "boundless conviction." We can set ourselves up for some lucky uptime on it with good grand crusader procs, the point is that we can't sustain 100% uptime even at extremely high skill levels but this way of preventing damage is interesting, engaging, and leaves a lot of room for skill differentials. This is also extremely easy to tune. Something as straight forward as 30% damage reduction is extremely easy to tweak. Increase or decrease the %age reduction would have a drastic effect. Increasing or decreasing the duration would be another easy thing to tweak. This makes it a fairly decent mechanic, one to be aware of but nothing you really have to actively pay attention to. Using it on CD wont make you a bad tank, but possibly holding on to it for maybe a global or two might pay off big time. This seems to be what the designers are going for, and GC said something recently along the same lines.
In short, bears, wars and pallies will all be functioning around similar active mitigation and while the specific numbers differ slightly the concept is the same and can be tuned equally. Bears get something that drastically increases their dodge chance and warriors had something concerning block the last time I checked (they're also going through a lot of changes right now so it's hard to nail anything down). This is a great start to the new approach to tanking. I feel like the one improvement I'd make is to have bear/warrior abilities be similarly tied to offensive abilities such as lacerate or revenge, but that is a topic for another time.
That's it for now, I'll have something each weekend and possibly some filler stuff that is time relevant though I'm not entirely sure how I want to handle something like that just yet. See you guys next week.
To start, about what will I be writing? Primarily World of Warcraft. My expertise is primarily in the tanking world though I do spend a fair bit of time dpsing and very occasionally healing. I play other games and will very likely comment on those as well. I play LoL, will be playing Diablo 3 and I really like to try out the new MMOs and betas for other games. Right now MoP is around the corner and I'll talk about that a lot I figure. I love looking at the way games are designed, the choices that the devs make in how they set up the game.
Who am I? I often go by the online handle "Diceone" when it's available to me, picking other names as appropriate. I play tanks in almost every game I play as that's what comes most naturally to me. I currently play a paladin tank called "Surgat" in warcraft in [A]Adapt of US-Spirestone, we ranked roughly 115-120 US 25m for dragon soul depending on the websites you go to for rankings. I play other characters as well, especially for our alt runs so I've played many other classes/specs but not that frequently. Outside of the game I'm a math student focusing in number theory and the like, primarily probability, set theory, those sorts of things. I'm a pretty big nerd.
So where do we start?
Active Mitigation. What is it? Simply put the answer is using your resources to reduce the amount of damage you take. Death knights have this to a much lesser extent right now, or rather to a much different extent than is planned for the rest of us tanks. Death Knights have death strike, using their runes for healing and a shield. This is somewhat different than the plan for the rest of us but it's the same basic idea.
Guardian druids and prot warriors are going to have a straightforward model of building up rage to use it for mitigation. The expectation isn't to have this mitigation available all the time. This is a bit like the current implementation of holy shield except it wouldn't be on a cooldown and would cost resources. Us paladins are losing holy shield and instead getting something that functions similarly but is tied to our use of shield of the righteous. Beta currently has us taking 30% less physical damage for 3 seconds after hitting our shield slam. This is easy to model though makes things a bit complicated in that paying attention to the enemy swing timer could be very useful, and this essentially requires mods to track well and get the most benefit out of. This is just my gripe with the way it's currently implemented but the idea is sound.
I like having our defense abilities tied to our offensive ones and since our resource generation will be tied to our hit it makes 2 more stats relevant to tanks. This bring sus up from 3 to 5. This is a huge difference since we get 2 secondary stats on our gear it was simply a matter of picking our best two and reforging into them. Having more stats makes things actually interesting, while I despise having to deal with stat caps I can't think of another way to make other stats interesting since those are basically the only other stats (aside from haste and crit, which would make a mockery of being a tank).
So back to the idea of works. We have abilities that generate our resources. Crusader strike/Judgement for paladins, I think mangle for guardian druids, and shield slam for warriors. Since I know paladins best I'll try and model how we're going to work.
Crusader Strike: 4.5s CD (3 Globals, effected by haste by sanctity of battle)
Judgement: 6s Cd (4 globals, also effected by haste via sanctity of battle)
Shield of the Righteous: 3 Holy Power, 1.5s cd, 3s buff (at the time of writing this anyways, it's changed so much lately this is likely to not be the final version but works for example) Not on the gcd
Best modelling is done mid fight so lets assume we have just used our shield of the righteous and our buff is active for the next 3s. I'll count things off in terms of globals and loot at worst case scenario (No grand crusader procs meaning minimal holy power gains). This means it takes 6 globals to rebuild our holy power to the point where we can use shield of the righteous again. The buff lasts only 3s or 2 globals. Time between shields gets reduced slightly from judgement, but lets assume that we get 1 judgement in for every shield, reducing the time drastically depending on when it comes in. If we can hit shield and in 3 globals CS > Judge > CS it's still not fast enough to keep 100% uptime, which is very important. You can also see how low values of hit would drastically reduce uptime, a missed judgement or crusader strike is a large amount of lost holy power.
So in the best case scenario we can have one global, usually only one boss swing. Howveer as the fight goes on we're going to have varying uptime as the cooldown on our abilities is somewhat variable as well. Avenger's Shield cooldown gets cleared. So we looked at a best case from no holy power, and it's obvious to see that if we store up to 5 holy power with our shiney new "boundless conviction." We can set ourselves up for some lucky uptime on it with good grand crusader procs, the point is that we can't sustain 100% uptime even at extremely high skill levels but this way of preventing damage is interesting, engaging, and leaves a lot of room for skill differentials. This is also extremely easy to tune. Something as straight forward as 30% damage reduction is extremely easy to tweak. Increase or decrease the %age reduction would have a drastic effect. Increasing or decreasing the duration would be another easy thing to tweak. This makes it a fairly decent mechanic, one to be aware of but nothing you really have to actively pay attention to. Using it on CD wont make you a bad tank, but possibly holding on to it for maybe a global or two might pay off big time. This seems to be what the designers are going for, and GC said something recently along the same lines.
In short, bears, wars and pallies will all be functioning around similar active mitigation and while the specific numbers differ slightly the concept is the same and can be tuned equally. Bears get something that drastically increases their dodge chance and warriors had something concerning block the last time I checked (they're also going through a lot of changes right now so it's hard to nail anything down). This is a great start to the new approach to tanking. I feel like the one improvement I'd make is to have bear/warrior abilities be similarly tied to offensive abilities such as lacerate or revenge, but that is a topic for another time.
That's it for now, I'll have something each weekend and possibly some filler stuff that is time relevant though I'm not entirely sure how I want to handle something like that just yet. See you guys next week.
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