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go to fix other things but what more do you expect with a game that I suspect is running off of code 8 years or more out of date.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.
30 August, 2012
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.
07 August, 2012
Beaten to the punch
After thinking about what to write about recently and what exactly I really wanted to dive into, I was beaten to the punch by Theck and most of what I'm about to say is really just echoing his points.
Back into the concept of content design and who gets to consume it blizzard has added several feats of strength to the beta. These feats are entitled "Cutting Edge:..." They are for completing the final heroic encounters without the nerf to content. Lets dive into that a bit.
Currently the plan is to continue the DS style nerfs in future content. After some undetermined amount of time they will start nerfing content the same way they did during DS. They will start with 5% and move on to 10% and so on. I'm not going to comment on these nerfs as they are right now as that's a whole new can of worms I am sure I'll have plenty of time to expose but the point is they are doing these nerfs and we can expect them to continue.
These FoS are for completing the raids without this buff. They are feats because, and I don't have an official source for them but the implication seems to be, they will become unavailable once the tier of content is no longer considered "current." An example: Sometime in March maybe tier 15 gets released, if you don't already have your t14 "cutting edge" feats then you will not be able to get it any longer. This means you can't go and outgear the encounters later to have the same achieve. This essentially puts the feats on a timer, which imo can be compared to arena seasons loosely.
As I mentioned in earlier weeks, I don't really like the nerf but I do agree that it serves a purpose. It solves a problem that has no real simple or beautiful solution. The problem that I, and if the forums are an indication, the majority of the raiding population sees is the argument that we can just turn it off. It's pretty clear why that's not a good argument but blizzard really doesn't seem to see it the same way. I mean we could go into a raid encounter without enchants and that would be the same as turning the "enchant" buff off, but is anyone going to do that? No. We aren't going to make the encounters arbitrarily more difficult for ourselves. Sure you can say something about the way the encounters are designed, especially regarding player stats and whatnot but when you start talking about nerfs that concept goes straight out the window.
I'm going to say again, I don't hate the nerf, I just wish they would time it better if possible. I don't like being where I am in the raiding game with the nerf going live when it does. That, unfortunately, is going to happen to some group of people and it's nearly impossible to get around that. There are some alternatives thrown out there like "targetted" nerfs to abilities or whatnot though I think that's asking too much of the devs.
But I digress, I wanted to talk about these feats and some other matters regarding raiding in mists. These cutting edge achievements really give raiders something to push for in raiding outside of third party ranking websites. I didn't always think about it this way but one of the major things lacking in WoW was an in-game way of marking your progress. Sure there was gear but gear may not always drop and due to group dynamics and shared resources it doesn't always go to you (whether it should or not is not something I'm really concerned about). Sure there's time stamps on achievements but in my experience nobody looks at those timestamps unless they're pointed out.
In summary, I think these are great. They're great for the raiding community and they're a great incentive to join the raiding community. Currently I think some people who want to do really well think of joining really high ends guilds that push for world ranking, which while totally acceptable is somewhat unrealistic in the majority of cases. I consider myself a good player but I just don't have the time to devote to guilds like vodka or blood legion or premonition. I may or may not be skilled enough, I'd like to think I am but I really have no clue what it takes to compete at that level, I also enjoy playing with the friends I've made where I am now. These sorts of things lead to a lot of people wanting to join the raiding environment and then getting fed up with not doing all that well, it's sorta like pvp when you start and expect to hit a 2k rating right off the bat but get stuck around 1700 and improve slowly.
So what is it that these feats do? They provide a goal for people that is a lot more realistic. Something you can see that might be just out of reach but still obtainable. It's something I think is great for the game in so many ways. Now if only blizz could do something to incentivize 25m raids so we see some parity between that and 10m or at least some way to seperate them.
That was a bit more than I was expecting about the feats so I'm going to call it a night there. I still want to get some thoughts down regarding the raid release schedule and what exactly it means for heroic mogushan specifically. In any case, hope you enjoyed the long weekend for those in Canada, and keep looking forward to MoP.
Back into the concept of content design and who gets to consume it blizzard has added several feats of strength to the beta. These feats are entitled "Cutting Edge:..." They are for completing the final heroic encounters without the nerf to content. Lets dive into that a bit.
Currently the plan is to continue the DS style nerfs in future content. After some undetermined amount of time they will start nerfing content the same way they did during DS. They will start with 5% and move on to 10% and so on. I'm not going to comment on these nerfs as they are right now as that's a whole new can of worms I am sure I'll have plenty of time to expose but the point is they are doing these nerfs and we can expect them to continue.
These FoS are for completing the raids without this buff. They are feats because, and I don't have an official source for them but the implication seems to be, they will become unavailable once the tier of content is no longer considered "current." An example: Sometime in March maybe tier 15 gets released, if you don't already have your t14 "cutting edge" feats then you will not be able to get it any longer. This means you can't go and outgear the encounters later to have the same achieve. This essentially puts the feats on a timer, which imo can be compared to arena seasons loosely.
As I mentioned in earlier weeks, I don't really like the nerf but I do agree that it serves a purpose. It solves a problem that has no real simple or beautiful solution. The problem that I, and if the forums are an indication, the majority of the raiding population sees is the argument that we can just turn it off. It's pretty clear why that's not a good argument but blizzard really doesn't seem to see it the same way. I mean we could go into a raid encounter without enchants and that would be the same as turning the "enchant" buff off, but is anyone going to do that? No. We aren't going to make the encounters arbitrarily more difficult for ourselves. Sure you can say something about the way the encounters are designed, especially regarding player stats and whatnot but when you start talking about nerfs that concept goes straight out the window.
I'm going to say again, I don't hate the nerf, I just wish they would time it better if possible. I don't like being where I am in the raiding game with the nerf going live when it does. That, unfortunately, is going to happen to some group of people and it's nearly impossible to get around that. There are some alternatives thrown out there like "targetted" nerfs to abilities or whatnot though I think that's asking too much of the devs.
But I digress, I wanted to talk about these feats and some other matters regarding raiding in mists. These cutting edge achievements really give raiders something to push for in raiding outside of third party ranking websites. I didn't always think about it this way but one of the major things lacking in WoW was an in-game way of marking your progress. Sure there was gear but gear may not always drop and due to group dynamics and shared resources it doesn't always go to you (whether it should or not is not something I'm really concerned about). Sure there's time stamps on achievements but in my experience nobody looks at those timestamps unless they're pointed out.
In summary, I think these are great. They're great for the raiding community and they're a great incentive to join the raiding community. Currently I think some people who want to do really well think of joining really high ends guilds that push for world ranking, which while totally acceptable is somewhat unrealistic in the majority of cases. I consider myself a good player but I just don't have the time to devote to guilds like vodka or blood legion or premonition. I may or may not be skilled enough, I'd like to think I am but I really have no clue what it takes to compete at that level, I also enjoy playing with the friends I've made where I am now. These sorts of things lead to a lot of people wanting to join the raiding environment and then getting fed up with not doing all that well, it's sorta like pvp when you start and expect to hit a 2k rating right off the bat but get stuck around 1700 and improve slowly.
So what is it that these feats do? They provide a goal for people that is a lot more realistic. Something you can see that might be just out of reach but still obtainable. It's something I think is great for the game in so many ways. Now if only blizz could do something to incentivize 25m raids so we see some parity between that and 10m or at least some way to seperate them.
That was a bit more than I was expecting about the feats so I'm going to call it a night there. I still want to get some thoughts down regarding the raid release schedule and what exactly it means for heroic mogushan specifically. In any case, hope you enjoyed the long weekend for those in Canada, and keep looking forward to MoP.
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