Posted by Spooner | 3 Comments

LFG Tool: First Impressions

This is single handedly the greatest thing to ever happen to the World of Warcraft and I sincerely hope that other MMO games can borrow from it’s amazing inception.

The random dungeon finder has replaced daily 5-man dungeon quests. Using the tool for the first time a day grants 2 emblems of frost and almost 30g. Every subsequent random heroic grants 2 triumph badges in addition to whatever badges drop in the instance. Doing the random normal difficulty dungeon grants triumph badges the first time as well. That’s an awesome way to rack up gear for a fresh 80, and alt, or even an off-spec and be immune to DKP rules or other stipulations. It basically means that you have no excuse to lack the gear to play in Icecrown while skill and a good group are now bigger issues.

When you enter the queue you pick your role, in my case tank, and then during prime time after about 12 seconds you can enter the dungeon! I love it, no mucking about with daily quests or who has what and can you share. No more waiting for everybody to stop being lazy and get to the instance as you are all directly teleported inside. If you lack healers on your realm, no worries they’ll find one for you elsewhere. The groups are always made of 1 tank 1 healer 3 DPS and the groups lately have been remarkable. Doing a full heroic Drak’tharon Keep in 12 minutes without a single death or even dropping below 50% health is incredible.

You get a buff inside that boosts health/dps/healing by 5% and the new need before greed won’t let people roll need on any armor outside of their class level (hunters can’t need on leather only mail armor, and so forth) which to me is actually pretty awesome because it stops a lot of the loot drama. What with Cataclsym on the horizon there really isn’t any reason for plate to be using leather anyway. You can still roll greed and win so if it ever becomes an issue then you can work it out in chat, also remember loot can be traded for 2 hours after it’s picked up to those eligible for the drop.

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Posted by Spooner | 2 Comments

JACE HALL!

So Jace Hall’s one of those internet superstar types that also has a sense of humor, plays the role of executive producer for great games and great TV alike. You want to be Jace Hall. JACE HALL.

Jace Hall had the chance to interview Tom Chilton (Kalgan), J. Allen Brack, and Jeffrey Kaplan (Tigole) and got a bunch of new details about the upcoming expansion and a few other things. Apparently the video is slightly old but was sent to official fansites only recently, it’s still worth watching.

This video honestly, is kind of why I like the Blizzard developers. I’ve shaken their hands at Blizzcon, I’ve enjoyed their games over the years, and they still have a sense of humor.

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Posted by Spooner | 0 Comments

Bring the player, not the QQ

I’m siding with Blizzard on this one 100%. There are still issues with healers being pushed into certain niches and there’s more competition right now for tanks and DPS to fit into a raid since there are more of us, this is proof alone that Blizzard’s design philosophy with raiding is working. Some (if not most) of the players right now in WoW are too new to remember how raiding and dungeon runs used to be put together. I’ll highlight the best part of the quote below because it lets me know Blizzard is aware of the REAL problem. Everybody has their own little agenda, no matter how well they hide it, everybody at some point is out for themsevles.

The design intent is very simple, though it gets lawyered a lot by players asking for buffs.

We want to promote diversity and flexibility in the raid group.

Here are examples of what we DON’T want:

• You have to have a shaman in every 5-player group within a raid.
• You have to have 1 Holy paladin, 1 Disc priest, 2 Holy priests, 2 Resto shamans, 2 Resto druids.
• You have 2 have 2 Holy paladins to heal the tanks.
• You have to have an Unholy DK for Ebon Plague.
• You have to have a warrior MT and a druid OT.
• Etc.

We push niches for healers, to a small extent, so that players don’t just say “Well, druids are the best healers. Let’s take 6 of them.” We want you to get a couple of druid healers and then think that you are probably better off getting a few different kinds of healers to balance out your raid. We want you to be able to raid if your best Holy priest is sick that night by getting a paladin, shaman or druid instead.

Some players like to claim the sky is falling after every set of patch notes, and to be fair, it’s a pretty understandable reaction. But the fact is that the Ulduar raid groups have been more diverse than at any point in the history of WoW. Even the most competitive, cutting-edge guilds in the world don’t all raid with the same mix of classes. From that perspective, the “bring the player” philosophy has been pretty succesful. This doesn’t mean there are no balance problems (or even quality of life or fun issues) left to address. Let’s just keep it in perspective. Not many guilds are running with 8 [fill in the blank of the preceived overpowered healer of the month, probably Resto druids currently], and nobody is going to start doing that in 3.2.

I’m still having a hard time seeing why you can’t substitute DPS classes into this statement and have it be any different… except you don’t push niches for DPS, you do the opposite. Because you realized that “niches” were holding people back.
First, there are more dps slots in the typical raid so even if you bring say 5 mages, you have plenty of room for everyone else. Second, if you stack too many of one particular class then you risk not having enough of the buffs and debuffs you need. Third, there are niches for dps classes too, but they are also not overly rigid niches. If you bring too much melee, you suffer on some fights. If you lack strong crowd control, your pulls may be a little messy.

All I am saying is that the design is, more and less, working. Players are still concerned about being curbed, sometimes only when they are trying to look into the future or having bad memories of the past. But for most guilds out there, it isn’t a problem. In most cases, bringing a more skilled player of any class will have a bigger net effect on your raiding success than bringing someone for their buff or narrow healing or damage niche, provided you have your bases covered.

On the other hand, man did that soundbite stick. I don’t think anything I could say at Blizzcon this year could have that kind of staying power.

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Posted by Spooner | 2 Comments

Tanking gimmick fights, block, and avoidance problems.

So it’s safe to say that designing boss encounters that favor one tank over another dramatically is bad for the game. Why I see so much of it in Wrath confuses the shit out of me but that’s blizzard for you. Anyway, I’m calling bullshit in general on a lot of the tanking issues right now. Block is almost a completely garbage stat at the moment since just about every boss in Ulduar requires you to have many cooldowns to blow through and a lot of health. Block pretty much feels like random armor at this point, and it’s just as lackluster.

The goal they set down was that any class could main tank, ultimately they’ve succeeded but there’s still a massive wall most main tanks will hit and unless you have a solid fallback, you’re done. I broke up the large wall of text below for you folks but you can always find it here, and here.

Even if you could somehow make certain that paladins were the best at some kind of bosses (so that they didn’t just become the trash tank), you are then tied to make sure every raid has a few of those types of bosses. Ulduar becomes 3 warriors bosses, 3 paladin bosses, 4 druid bosses, 4 DK bosses. If one of those bosses is perceived as more difficult, more necessary or rewarding of better loot, then the sense of inequity still exists.

Furthermore, we don’t want every guild to have to keep 4 good tanks on their permanent roster and just slide them in for the right fight. While dual-spec makes that slightly easier than before, we still don’t think it’s fair to demand every guild keep someone on hand who can spec and gear as a Feral druid or Prot paladin.

We’re fine with certain tanks having a slight advantage on some fights, because we recognize that’s probably inevitable as long as the abilities are different. This is going to always be trickier for the hard modes, but again the goal is that you can have any class of tank as your main tanks.

So with that out of the way, what the fuck is up with block? It’s a garbage stat on gear that I would rather have HP stacked. I can’t even say much for dodge and parry either as pure avoidance is very random and you’ll end up realistically being annihilated if one of those hits gets through the RNG.

Think about it this way.

Avoidance is good because it removes a lot of damage. Avoidance is bad because it is unpredictable. If you stack too much avoidance, you are likely to give your healers coronaries.

Mitigation (armor and straight damage reduction) is good because it’s consistent. As you all point out, you can start to learn how much a blow will actually do to you. Mitigation is bad, from a player’s perspective, because it can’t save you. If you have 10 health and dodge, you might live. If you have 10 health and hope your armor will save you… well, it won’t. You become the dreaded mana sponge because you are never avoiding damage completely.

Mitigation also has a risk from a design-perspective that when fights get too predictable they become too easy and unexciting. Imagine a tank with 75% damage reduction and no avoidance. You could calculate from the moment of the first attack whether you will survive the encounter. Heck, you might be able to not even heal the tank and know you’ll survive depending on the specific abilities used by the boss.

Block as a mechanic is somewhere between avoidance and mitigation. Ideally it removes a fair amount of damage (vs. all damage) reasonably often (vs. rarely). If block is up 100% of the time it just becomes armor that you improve through a different stat. We have let block chances creep up frankly because the amount blocked is pretty trivial when bosses are hitting for 40% of your health pool every swing. If this still strikes you as too RNG, imagine abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield that could guarantee 100% chance to block for a short period of time.

We don’t think block is cutting it as a mechanic, but the direction we are likely to take it is probably more of a change than you are considering.

We also don’t think it’s necessary that every tank rely on avoidance, block and mitigation in equal amounts. They can’t get too far apart or someone will come to dominate for certain encounters, but we don’t think the tanks need to be completely homogenized to get what we want either.

If (to make up numbers) the DK and druid get hit for 20K every swing that hits, but the warrior and paladin get hit for 24K half the time and 16K half the time, then that seems like it would work. When the boss emoted that his big hit was coming, you could make sure you had your cooldown ready to guarantee a block.

I agree that nobody wants to be the tank that avoids, avoids, avoids and then gets hit for 4X normal damage. (Then again, part of the problem we had with DKs last patch was their avoidance was just too high.) In my example, the shield-using tanks get hit for 4K more damage 50% of the time. If you’re calling that “spike damage” and saying it’s unacceptable, then I’m afraid nothing can be done to salvage differences among the tank classes.

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Posted by Spooner | 0 Comments

GC on Titan’s Grip and overpowered talents…

So there’s been a lot of talk recently about certain talents being overpowered and thus, they get nerfed. This quote is actually from that same fucking thread about titan’s grip that me and every other news site has been suckling from for the past week. Ghostcrawler has written a small dissertation on talents and Blizzard’s design flow through the whole balanced talents fiasco. They talk about rogues, warriors, shadow priests, hell everybody and anybody in WoW is brought up in this kitchen sink forum bout.

No, it doesn’t become irrelevant, at least in our minds. Here are a few of the problems you run into when some talents are enormously more powerful than others:

1) The talents that “only” provide a 1 or 5% dps increase are viewed as garbage. Players might skip them. They might make the rest of the tree feel lame, which risks players not finding the tree very fun. Think about it this way: if your breastplate had 500 strength on it and your bracers had 10 strength on them, would you even care about the bracers? Would you campaign to get them buffed? Would you make “Lol nobody cares about bracers” posts.

2) Other classes wonder why their 51 point talent can’t provide such an enormous benefit. They think warriors are overly favored or that developers didn’t spend much attention on their trees. Now, we ignore QQ as much as we can, but also ideally players are excited about their classes, and ignoring even a hint of favoritism can go a long way. Despite our best intentions, talents still have grown more and more powerful over time. Compare an old talent like Improved Heroic Strike to a new one like Fire and Brimstone. We want to keep the inflation under control while possible, or +10% becomes the new standard by which talents are measured.

3) Power increase isn’t constant. When you can suddenly get your 51 point talent, your dps shoots up enormously. A level 60 warrior could do much, much higher dps than a level 59 warrior.

4) Here is the most important one. We thing the game works better when talents don’t make up too large of a player’s power allocation. It makes gear drop feel cruddy when so much of your power comes from talent allocation. It makes enchants, tradeskills, buffs and other parts of the game feel paltry by comparison because you are so powerful just by a passive increase to your talents. It means picking the “wrong” spec is brutal instead of just sub-optimal.

Now there are other considerations of course. In the case for Hunger for Blood, we think having an overpowered talent is preferable to the alternative. There are talents like Ruin that provide an enormous dps increase and we live with that. (And to be fair, Titan’s Grip is still overpowered even with the 10% penalty but it’s less overpowered than without the penalty.) If we could find no other way to improve Fury dps, then I’m sure we’d look at TG. But there’s a lot of the tree we can improve.

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