Only 262,974.5 More Minutes of SoO………at the Earliest

Well folks, I’m as astonished as the rest of the internet, but Blizzard has announced September as the earliest possible release date for WoD and as late as December.  Unless some content is added, this will give us the largest span without new content in the history of WoW (check the dates you ICC naysayers).  The surprising thing for me though is that Blizzard isn’t really speaking to the fact that something huge must have changed since Blizzcon’s talk of “You’ll be amazed by how much is already done”.  In fact, throughout MoP there has been a lot of talk about faster content updates.   I’d like to talk through some of the implications of this announcement.

Faster Content

This is the part that bothers me.  We all enjoyed the idea of faster content while it was being touted as a prime feature of MoP.  Admittedly, we had no time to get bored thus far.   But my guild didn’t even kill the Sha of Fear Heroic before ToT was released.  We, like most average to slightly above average guilds had just barely cracked into the heroic bosses of tier 14 and BOOM, here comes ToT.  I know there are many guilds out there that were done with Heroic Sha of Fear and were parked waiting for the next patch, but completion rates don’t lie.  Most raiders fall into my camp.  My guild could have happily trudged along in tier 14 for another two to three months, easily.  Maybe more.  Months later, we were all now merrily toiling away in ToT.    My guild was farther along this time.  We had about half the tier cleared on heroic when ToT was released.  But again, we could have easily stayed in ToT another month or two while we mopped up (*giggle*) the remaining heroic bosses.  Let’s add those two spans together.  Assuming Blizz had waited another three months to release ToT and another two months to release SoO……we’d have five less months of slogging through SoO before WoD is released, which would have made it the shortest stint between a final patch and an expac in WoW history.  Incidentally, this whole year+ fiasco was predicted in multiple forum posts while the patches were being machine-gunned out.

As it stands, we are staring a solid year with no content updates in the face, all in the name of faster content updates   <——- irony.  Five months of downtime is a pretty steep price to pay for a bullet point.   My concern here is for the stability of my guild, as well as all the other guilds that form the WoW community.  As burnout sets in, filling raid slots is going to become a big problem.   Between ICC and Cata, the guild I was in disintegrated and the server I was on went from a constant bustle to a ghost town.  The server has stayed that way until now too, necessitating a server transfer.

Who was Blizzard pacing this fast content for?  It wasn’t my guild, or the average guild.  It was for the best of the best hardcore guilds who, now that they’ve killed Heroic Garrosh, are all unsubbing until WoD as a thank you for Blizzard’s deference.  The rest of us peons are left in the unenviable position of trying to fill out 25 raid slots with a playerbase that has checked out mentally until WoD because of the enormous stretch of time ahead.

Blizz, I love you baby but please learn from this.  It’s the third time we’ve had a huge gap between the last patch and the expac, each time taking a bigboy bite out of our playerbase.  Playerbase isn’t even my real issue though.  Each time this has happened, it has cost me many good friends who no longer play the game.   These friends are why I log in.  You are eroding the thing that keeps me logging in.   Please, for the love of the old gods, learn your lesson!

Rushed Content

The two counterarguments to the forum QQ  I see is “but you don’t want them to rush it out, do you?” or “go ahead and unsub.  Nothin’ wrong with a break.”.   No, I don’t want Blizzard to rush it out.  They should make sure they have a solid expac ready to ship before they ship.  But no one asked them to rush it.  Anyone can see that there are a lot of enormous systemic changes to the game slated for WoD.  Common sense dictates this will take some time.  Again, the problem the players have is twofold.

1.  If the development cycle is going to end up longer than it has ever been, please do not talk about releasing content faster throughout the expansion.

2.  We would all much rather wait a little longer for individual patches than to wait a year+ for the expansion.

No one benefits from rushing out content.  That’s not what the players are asking.  In fact, the players aren’t asking for anything at all.  They are just trying to bring to light the fact that Blizzard ‘made love to the canine’ this time.  Many feel lied to because of the talk as recently as Blizzcon implying that the release will be sooner than it has been in the past.  At least with the previous two pre-expac lulls, Blizzard had not talked for the entire expansion up to that point about faster content, then announced at Blizzcon that the expac was farther along than we think, only to release a year after the previous patch (at the earliest).

My point here is this, the ship has sailed.  It is too late now to rush any content out.  We’re all going to have to just deal with a year+ of SoO and Blizzard will have to just take the time they need to make something good.

As to “go ahead and unsub.  Nothin’ wrong with a break.”  Yes! There is!  The ‘something’ wrong with a break is that it will leave the guilds left behind decimated and struggling to progress.  That’s a big problem!  Especially when it could have easily been avoided this time.

What Does It All Mean?

What can we expect over the next six months?  Well, I expect the completion rates to slow down considerably and for recruiting to become harder and harder until late summer, when it will pick up slightly.  That is, unless Blizzard announces a release later than September.  In which case it will run into large console releases, giving players even more reason to stay unsubbed.  This delay could be a huge coupe for a couple competing MMOs out there.  Namely, The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar.  I tried the beta for ESO and wasn’t really terribly impressed.  However, I am told that the experience greatly opens up at slightly later levels.  I would expect many players will give it a go now that the SoO wind has been taken out of our collective sails.  The real danger for WoW though is Wildstar.  Wildstar has an art style that is very clearly in the same vein as WoW.  It has a colorful and diverse setting as apposed to the more standard setting of ESO.  Lastly, the Wildstar devs seem to have avoided the pitfall that has plagued every new MMO released in recent memory.  They are focusing heavily on the endgame, including providing several different options for progression for different types of players.  Let’s be honest, every game that has been proclaimed as the WoW-killer has failed to make a significant impact.  This is all due to the developers succumbing to the temptation to backburner end-game in favor of early game.  A fatal mistake.  End-game comes faster than anyone would guess and if there’s nothing their for the first few hardcore players who make it, they will loudly make this fact known, scaring off many of those who hadn’t even made it to max level yet.  SWTOR, WAR, GW2; they all slipped on this same banana peel.    Wildstar is clearly avoiding it.   How will WoW fair during the longest content lull in it’s history against a triple A MMO with an interesting setting and action oriented combat who is not tripping itself out of the gate with no endgame?

We shall see.

>luvbacon<

5.4, One Month Later

It’s been a little over a month since we set foot into SoO,………..so I thought it’d be good to take a look back and discuss our feelings with the rest of the group.  Hi, my name is Luvbacon and I’m a WoWaholic.

1. The Raid

This was the biggest addition, so let’s cover it first.  Overall, I’ve found the pacing of this raid to be among my favorite, ever!  ToT was a tough act to follow in my opinion, but Blizz managed to even upstage it’s lofty heights in many ways.  The fights were solid, but I do have to say that up to perhaps Dark Shaman, or maybe even a few bosses later, the difficulty was a good bit undertuned. Let’s go boss by boss for the 2nd half bosses since I covered the early bosses in my previous entry.

Dark Shaman – This was a solid “stay out of poo” style fight, further complicated by the need for both tanks to handle an unusual tank mechanic.  One tank needs to kite the ooze away fast! The other tank needs to carefully position the earth guy so his shoulders are always parallel with a wall, else we get a can-can line of angry elementals waiting eagerly to plant a boot in our backside with Vegas-like pizzazz!!

General Nazgrim – Mostly an add management fight.  If you assign a dps to handle each caster and make sure you’re dropping snares for the assassin, plus be sure the OT picking up the Whirling Sword Ballerinas, it’s pretty easy really.  To me, one of the weaker fights in here.

Malkorok – We got to see the Heroic Tortose ‘healing = shield’ mechanic on this one again.  Very cool!  The mechanic significantly changes the healing playstyle.  Which is fantastic! Often dps will have to switch up their role a bit; interupts, stuns, etc.  Tanks too.  But healers are usually just same old same old.  Nice to have something different here.  There was just enough going on in this fight to keep me engaged; Catching swirly pools, watching the cleave/pwn floor triangle of doom, making sure to not be in the ‘splosion after the third cleave.  Then stacking, running out for debuff, dispels.  Pretty solid fight.

Spoils – A classic add fight, with the added wrinkles of splitting the raid and the neccessity of both sides finishing within the timers.  Not a lot to it aside from the tanks figuring out the rythmn for box opening, but a fun change of pace nonetheless.

Thok – On the surface, this fights seems simple and fun.  The initial stack phase taxes the healers (win!), then phase two requires the dps to kite effectively without sending the giant dino through the buffet line.  You get to choose which door you open first, giving you the option of handling one of a few additional hazards in a preferred order.  Nice!  My only problem with this fight is that often, players get double fixated.  Which often means ‘You Die!!! :D’ of no fault of your own.  This is not fun!!  I have absolutely no problem wiping again and again on a boss when the wipes are due to errors from raid members.  No problem!  But when it’s due to the early and unavoidable deaths of people who have been double focused, NO THANKS!  Blizzard, could we once and for all decide that moving forward you will make every effort to eliminate player deaths that the player or raid team can do nothing to avoid?  This does not make the game more fun or the encounters more dynamic.  It adds NOTHING to this game except tedium and frustration.  This one mechanic sullies an otherwise finely tuned raid worth of boss fights with a ‘wait for a lucky pull’ style fight.  Dumb.

Blackfuse – Great fight!  I really enjoy this one.  Sure, it makes my Resto Shaman soul shudder with fright thinking of how little time I have to stand and cast, but it sure is fun to plan out positioning, assign dps to deal with the conveyor belt, then see it all come to fruition in that one perfect pull.  Also, I love!….LOVE! that the adds take dmg from the whirling blades and fire.  It’s extremely fun to park them in their own poo and watch them die to it.  Do this again please.

Paragons – My guild just killed these guys last night.  We were prepared for a tooth breaking night of wipes but ended up killing it on our 3rd pull without even bothering to eat food yet.  I think making the fight a set order somewhat trivialized the fight. Color me underwhelmed.

2. Class Changes

I’m just going to cover a few of the classes I play or the differences I’ve noticed from guild members.

Resto Shaman – I can say without a doubt that Resto Shaman are now very competative with other healers, for both spread and stacked fights.  Between the Chain Heal Glyph and Rushing Streams, plus a buffed HTT, we’re sitting pretty.  I am still hoping for some serious changes in 6.0, but this is primarily due to a desire to have more control over my heals.  My top three heals (HST, CH, and HR) are all smart heals.  My necessary in-combat choices are fairly minimal this patch, which is what I’ve always loved about healing.   As a healer, you can’t simply follow a priority and do massive dps.  You have to think on the fly, make judgement calls about mana management, healing priority and planning for spike damage.  This patch, none of that is neccessary.  Just keep Healing Rain on the floor, keep Healing Stream Totem on CD, Chain Heal to fill, and fight the urge to play a Hearthstone match during trash, because you’re healing doesn’t suffer from it much anyway and Hearthstone is lots and lots of fun.

Holy Paladins – The loss of Eternal Flames’ ability to blanket the raid with mastery shields was a bummer.  No doubt.  So I gave both Sacred Shield and Selfless Healer a try.   Sacred Shield to me has the huge downside that, sure, you can keep a Sacred Shield on both tanks, but who does the 3rd one go on?  It’s hard to predict dmg.  I’d almost rather the shields were stronger but there were only two.  Add to this the fact that my mastery already adds shields, and now I’m sniping my own heals with another ability.  Um, pass.  Selfless Healer was a lot more intriguing.  I had already been trying to stay close to a target so I can hit Crusader Strike on CD, so this made that playstyle even easier by allowing me to substitute Judgement for Crusader Strike and not have to stand within melee range.  The cast time buffs were just a bonus here.  I really like this talent.  But for me, I am now too married to the use of Eternal Flame for single target healing.  I usually end up sticking with it.  Blizz should probably just consider making Eternal Flame a baseline Holy ability and replacing the talent with something else.  I don’t see Holy Paladins ever not using this thing.  As far as H-Pal’s relative power.  It’s safe to say they are no longer the healing overlords they were in 5.2.  I think this is more due to absorbs overall becoming less dominant due to fight mechanics.

Hunters – I was concerned that the removal of readiness would be too big of a change for Hunters and that their dps would end up suffering.  But my guild Hunter consistently ‘splodes the roof off the top of the log week in and week out.  Raidbots also has them doing well again for SoO.  I think it’s fair to say that the reports of the death of the hunter class have been greatly exaggerated.

Warlocks – Sadly, Locks can no longer figureskate around the raid while maintaining a perfect rotation punctuated only by rude emotes directed at competing dpsers.  They’re back to being curse flinging turrets with a mobile filler (if specced) only.  As far as their dps, still solid.  No worries.

Disc Priests – These dudes have been cruising for a bruising, nerfwise, for most of the expac.  It seems their day has finally come.  But as I mentioned, not only them, but Holy Paladins seem to have been toned down.  I suspect it’s more that the fight design is making pure throughput healing more valuable.  The Malkorok fight, in particular, uses the absorb healers’ own tricks against them.  It seems to weigh heavily in favor of pure throughput.

3. Valor

As I predicted, one month in and I am 200 valor shy of the 3k cap and have nothing to upgrade. Unless I win a drop tonight, I will be wasting valor.  This problem was painfully obvious from the get-go, but I understand where Blizzard is coming from.  I agree that with the introduction of LFR and now Flex, upgrades from a vendor have outlived their usefulness.  However I do not see this working without also raising the maximum valor from 3k up to 5k, or even 6k.  This would give the player more room for rng to swing in our favor before we let valor rot.  If I were to win nothing this week, I will have lost 800 valor, since I cap on accident now that I’m running Flex every week.  In three weeks or so I will probably win a pile of epics and will almost definitely be about 800 valor short of upgrading them all.  <inserts thumbtack into thigh>

4. Timeless Isle

There are some things I really enjoy about this hub.  I don’t feel  cheated if I don’t grind out a certain number of quests here each day, because there are basically no quests.  The downside of this, is that I feel NO drive at all to go here other than on Tuesday to kill Ordos and a Celestial.  I literally have not set foot here since last Tuesday.  In fact, once players had their legendary cloaks during week one, the noticeable population of the island plummeted.    I like where they were headed with this, but players will not do content without a reward of some kind.  Why should I get my coins from the island when I can knock out a few daily hubs that I now vastly outgear and can steamroll, and in doing so I will also finish capping my valor too?!  To Monday morning quarterback a bit, I would propose Blizzard steals a page from GW2’s playbook.  Make the island largely unstructured, but add in some biweekly events that change it just enough to make it interesting.  Kind of like what was done for Shieldwall/Dom, with the periodic scenarios.  Piece out some evolving content to provide at least some semblance of structure and I think you’d have a winner.

In retrospect, I stand by my assessment that this was a solid patch with just a few lessons to be learned.  Keep these coming Blizz.  Well done.

<luvbacon>

Why I Play WoW: closeted WoWers outed!

Perhaps as you read this from your work monitor, hoping upon hope that none of your coworkers notice that the subject matter is World of Warcraft, you may consider why you bother to subject yourself to the scorn or at the very least suspicion of those around you.  Oh their incredulous glances! Or if I were to just drop a post on your Facebook saying “Can’t wait to raid Heroic ToT with ya tonight bro.  Gonna drop some bosses and get sum phat lewtz!!1!!!”, how mortified would you be?  Religious or Political perspectives of all flavors and extremes are fair game for social media and generally not subjected to too harsh judgements (if moderated well and not painted on my feed mercilessly).  But WoW,  now that’s a whole other thing.  We of the cheeto painted t-shirt and well-worn lounge pants; we basement dwellers understand a pain and ostracism that few can relate to.  So what compels us to endure said scrutiny, finger-waggle, and wary eye?

There’s something special about wiping again and again on a particularly challenging boss with e-friends you really like.  Then you have that one perfect pull.  The stars align.  The sky opens.  That last 2% with all 10 still alive and well.  When you know the boss is going down at last.  And finally, the death blow lands.  The boss drops.  Ventrilo erupts with nerdy orgasmic eruptions and epithets of joy as well as some assorted expletives.  The ceremonial screenshot is taken with as much nerd-bling (finish line, guild banner, trees, pets, anoying spell graphical effects, et ceterea, ad infinitum, caveat emptur) on screen as possible.  There is this sense of profound accomplishment and gratification.  This mountain-top, brass ring, whatever.  The feeling is something I have never quite been able to replicate in other activities.  Even many real-life accomplishments somehow lack this same punch of ethereal satisfaction.

For me raiding with chums is an extreme source of fun, relaxation, and satisfaction.  For you, maybe it’s your pvp team or even your rp circle.  I could see that being extremely compelling too, though it’s not for me (my attempts at rp always devolve into my character being named sumthing like Lord Fartfactory of the Browncloud Marsh, chasing people with offensive and offputting emotes).  Whatever your WoWbag is, it’s probably that same feeling.  Hard to describe.  But impossible to replicate elsewear.

If you’re like me, your interest in WoW wanes and waxes over the course of an expac.  Sometimes 6 hours a day, sometimes I may only log in on raid nights.  But wherever I am within the cycle, I still make time for my fix of that rush of accomplishment with my buddies.  One more pull on the boss.  Last pull of the night.  Then the unexpected kill!

There is simply nothing in the world like it.

The few times I have found myself between guilds for long periods of time, those have been the times I have quit WoW for long stretches.  Without those connections and the shared sense of accomplishment, there is no tether tieing me to the game.  The loot doesn’t matter.  The progression doesn’t matter.  The game doesn’t matter… without the people.

This is why in some ways I really hate things like LFR and the dungeon/scenario/pvp queue system.  Because they have eroded these bonds between players.  They have made the other players simply a means to an end, raising a generation of cata-babies who are not driven by these relationships or the sense of shared accomplishment.  They want their drive-thru loot and their instaqueues.  When presented with challenges; be it 20-30 wipes on a boss, or prepping for a boss fight with videos and raiding strats, or just making the extra effort during the encounter to stay out of fire and put out the extra dps or healing to get the kill, they crumble.  Because they simply are not playing the same game I’m playing.  They’re playing a single player rpg with other players.

That’s my deal anyway.  What’s yours?

>luvbacon<

P.S. Any kindly Blizzard employee or generous benefactor, have mercy on me and grant luvbacon a Hearthstone beta key.  I promise I will only use it for good.  With great power comes great feigned civility.

5.4 and Your Resto Shaman: Understanding your changing patch-notes

Apologies dedicated reader.  I’ve been on vacation and just now have been able to summon up the motivation to write this column.  Honest, it’s not you, it’s me.   However, in my absense it seems the patch notes have solidified to a great degree and are approaching a release candidate.  So let’s take a look at what we’ve got here.

We have some serious buffs on the way folks.  Yay!

• Chain Heal’s effectiveness will no longer decrease with each jump (up from a 30% reduction to healing with each jump).
• Healing Rain’s radius has been increased to 12 yards (up from 10 yards).
• Purification now increases the healing done by Healing Rain by 100% in addition to the ability’s current effects.
• Riptide’s mana cost has been reduced by 25%.
• Conductivity has been redesigned. Casting Healing Wave, Greater Healing Wave, Healing Surge, or Chain Heal, increases the duration of Healing Rain by 3 seconds. Damaging an enemy with Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Earth Shock, or Stormstrike increases the duration of Healing Rain by 3 seconds.
• Healing Tide Totem is no longer a talent and is a baseline ability for all Shamans. Additionally, this totem will now heal 12 raid members (up from 5) when used in a 25-player instance.Stone Bulwark Totem’s initial damage absorption shield now absorbs an additional 33% in damage.
• New Talent: Rushing Streams. Rushing Streams replaces Healing Tide Totem talent, increases healing done by Healing Stream Totem by 15%, and causes the totem to heal 2 targets at once.
• Totemic Restoration has been replaced with a new talent, Totemic Persistence.
• New talent: Totemic Persistence. Summoning a second totem of the same element no longer causes the first totem to be destroyed. Only one non-Fire totem can benefit from this effect at a time.
• Unleashed Fury – Earthliving Weapon effect now applies to the Shaman, not the target.

Let me break things down a bit.

1. Healing Tide Baseline

This change has been long overdue.  You cannot expect a resto shaman to choose anything other than a massive raid save cooldown if given the option.  Blizzard finally realized this and bit the bullet to give it to us baseline.  In fact, all specs get it.   The side benefits of this change are that Blizzard now feels obligated to buff it to be in line with the other healers’ CDs  like Tranq and Revival (before, they stood behind the ole’ “It’s only a talent, doesn’t need buffs, mmk”) and that a new talent was added in it’s place.

• New Talent: Rushing Streams. Rushing Streams replaces Healing Tide Totem talent, increases healing done by Healing Stream Totem by 15%, and causes the totem to heal 2 targets at once.

This talent is super!  It takes one of our highest HPS abilities and buffs it by 15%, then doubles it!!  So yeah,  it’s good.

2. Spread Healing Stuff

The Chain Heal change is actually about a 15% throughput buff for the spell.  Couple this with the change to the glyph (it now adds only a 2 second CD instead of 4),  and you have yourself a bonified spread heal ability in our toolbox.  Blizz also tried to help with riptide by reducing the penalty from the glyph to only a 75% reduction of the initial heal (used to be 90%) in exchange for making it instant.  However, this is still not enough to get shaman using it.  Pass.  Why are shaman one of the only classes with these types of poor trade-off glyphs?  If they want us to use the thing, trade the up-front heal with a stronger and faster hot.  This would prevent it from being OP in PvP and would also make it viable for PvE.  Till then, no one’s gonna use it Blizz.

The new Rushing Streams talent will make a solid impact on our constant spread healing.  I admit though, adding more passive smart healing to our class seems like the easy way out.  Here’s hoping they have more substantial plans for 6.0, but if not, at least our numbers look decent thus far.

Alternately, one could choose Ancestral Guidance for a large spread healing CD.  Now that we don’t have to choose between it and HTT, it becomes a real possibility.  Though I believe  Rushing Streams may be a little too good to pass up.  Conductivity though, seems to be a loser on this tier.  Hm, do I choose throughput, throughput, or QoL?  Not a real choice I’m afraid.

3. Stacked Healing Stuff

You’ve got to hand it to Blizz; they are a tenacious bunch.  No matter how often they hear that Resto Shaman do not WANT their alleged “stacked healing niche”, they refuse to give up on this turd-with-lipstick ( that is the expression, right?) idea.   Last tier resto shaman ended up dead last, not only on spread healing fights, but also on the stacked healing fights (all 3 of them) that we were supposed to be so very good at.  Blizzard feels this is a huge tragedy so they buffed our stacked healing, then buffed it more, then buffed it again for good measure.  It is now a HPM gain to cast Healing Rain even on only one target.  Good balancing Blizz (j/k, you know I luv u baby).   They increased the radius of healing rain by 2 yards and buffed it’s throughput by 100%.  That was not a typo. 100%.  This illustrates how desperate they are to make it seem as if there is even a need for a stacked healing specialized healer in the modern game (there isn’t, but they’ll wait till 6.0 to aquiesce).  Why do they continually use healing rain as the dial to adjust resto shaman throughout?  Please, pick anything else!!!!!   Also, it seems strange that they were extremely concerned that Chain Heal would be used constantly, only to buff healing rain in such a way that it will be used constantly, even on just 1 target!!!   Nah, the truth is, they want shaman weak at spread healing.  They are dedicated to the myth that there is a spread and stacked healing niche in this game.  The truth of the matter is that spread healing is the way the game is going.  Stacked healing is a relic of the past.  It will continue to decrease, and shaman healers along with it until Blizzard turns around on this pants-on-head concept of the “stacked healing niche”.

4. Quality of Life

Convenience; It’s always good.   We had a pretty solid QoL change this patch and one that won’t really affect us.

• Unleashed Fury – Earthliving Weapon effect now applies to the Shaman, not the target.

• New talent: Totemic Persistence. Summoning a second totem of the same element no longer causes the first totem to be destroyed. Only one non-Fire totem can benefit from this effect at a time.

UF was a stupid talent for Resto Shaman.  It rquired you to remember who you last unleashed on so you could be sure to cast a single target heal on them within 10 seconds. Hopefully they weren’t healed up to full because if so, grats on the wasted talent.  This change gives us some versatility.  You can unleash on whomever, then cast a single target heal on anyone with the full buff.  This will make it quite good for fights with heavy single target healing, should they ever exist…..   Till then, my elementals will still be peeing  on me every 2.5 minutes.  Totemic Persistence though is a nice QoL buff that we’ll actually get use out of.  No longer will I have to clip my , now godly, HST to drop Mana Tide or HTT.  Nice!!

Final Thought

Overall, this patch adds some solid buffs to resto shaman, and though they may not have been all spread healing buffs like we’d hoped, I feel they will increase our throughput in SoO enough to make us a viable healer in each fight.   My read on this is that Blizzard wants to do a complete overhaul but decided not to do it this patch and will instead do it in 6.0.  I don’t think they can stand behind the mythical “stacked healing niche” much longer and remain credible.

I guess we shall see

>luvbacon<

Response: Are MMOs too easy?

This is a response post to a good article by Mark Kern, a developer working on Firefall, that poses the question “Are MMOs too easy?”.

Check out the original article here: http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/7540/Have-MMOs-Become-Too-Easy.html

The two-point gist of Kern’s piece was this;

1. As WoW began dumbing down questing with the quest helper, by raising xp gained exponentially, and by giving out easy to obtain quest gear that dwarfed raid gear from the last xpac, they attracted the masses of casual gamers.  Thus creating an industry phenomenon  and putting a bullseye on the goldengoose casual market for the rest of the MMO industry.  This required every other developer to respond in the easy-content arms race.

To sum up this point with a quote from the article;

Sometimes I look at WoW and think “what have we done?” I think I know. I think we killed a genre.

2. That an MMO should be about the journey to level cap, not the end-game.

I think these are both very valid and popular opinions.  I will respond in detail to both points.

1. Did WoW make MMOs easy-mode?

First, let’s consider what MMOs were like before WoW.   I played Star Wars Galaxies for a year or so before WoW.  I never player EQ but from the descriptions I’ve heard, it seemed to be on par with SWG when it comes to the overall playstyle, except maybe more PvP focus in SWG.   The SWG leveling experience consisted of grinding out experience by picking up kill missions, running to the waypoint and killing the nest of whatever beasty the mission sent you to.  This was most efficient with a group.  But the group was really just to boost the xp and damage so that the xp gain was faster.  As far as I know of EQ, leveling consisted of grinding mobs in groups to gain xp.

Was that style of gameplay really more difficult than WoW questing?  No, not at all.  I had a group of people.  We would basically just mow down weaker enemies for the xp until we were maxed out.  Same for EQ.  I’d say questing in WoW is more challenging than this simply because there is a chance you will pull too many mobs and die.  There was basically no chance of death in a good SWG xp group.  If I chose to solo, which the game was not designed for, it was a much more punishing experience but truth be told, levels could still be gained with the right build.  Just slower.  EQ was similar.  But also had an additional punishing element in that death often required long corpse runs from timbuktu.   I would concede that this style of gameplay was far more punishing and far less accessible than modern questing.   Don’t forget that we also have the option nowadays to run dungeons (my preferred method) or do PvP in order to gain levels.  Both of these would be considered far more accessible and far less punishing and less time-consuming than leveling in classic EQ or SWG.

But essentially, the leveling experience consisted of grinding mobs in groups to gain xp until level cap.  Is this the much touted “journey” of which this article speaks?  It completely relied upon other players to make it compelling in any way.  If you were on a friendly server, grats!  You were going to have a good experience.  If you could get into a good guild, grats!  You were going to have a good experience.  If not, you were out of luck.   How is this different than today?!!!  You can quest grind with a buddy today just as you could then.  You can grind dungeons in a guild group from lvl 1 to lvl 90.  The difference between the game today and pre-WoW is not difficulty in the leveling.  It’s accessibility, a much lower time requirement, and lack of punishing mechanics.

Let’s consider end-game content.  PreNGE SWG’s end-game was basically PvP, crafting, or a handful of PvE encounters.

• PvP was fun at times.  Especially if you were on one of the crazy rivalry servers where it was basically constant war.  Fun!  You needed to gather the best buffs for you and your team and just getting buffed was an hour long process.  The actual PvP itself lacked much of the depth that modern PvP has.  CC was almost non-existent.  It was mostly a ‘let’s trade punches’ kind of fight with some status ailments added in to spice it up a bit.
• Crafting was also pretty compelling.  I ran a competative armor shop for a while. You had to plant your harvesters on randomly spawning minerals and collect them for your wares.  Depending on the stats of the minerals, your armor/weapons/whatever could be significantly higher or lower quality than what someone else made.  It required dilligence in gathering minerals, dilligence in maintaining your shop, and dilligence just to grind out the crafting to get capped in the profession (most used self-sustaining macros though tbh and didn’t even level it themself).
• Lastly, endgame PvE was not really enough to sustain one’s total playtime.  You could grind challenging monsters like Krayt Dragons for rare items.  There were a few somewhat taxing encounters and even an early attempt at an instance.  The trinity was present, but not completely neccessary much of the time.  A tank was only marginally more survivable than anyone else.  And any player could grab healing skills and do a bit of healing if they liked.  Kind of GW2ish really. EQ was more about camping open world bosses.  I’ve heard horror stories of camping a boss for days on end only to have another guild get the kill. Fun?!  Don’t know about that, but definately less accessible, more punishing, and more time consuming.

Compare this to today’s end-game;

• PvP -has an established goal and reward system that creates linear progression.  But moment to moment gameplay has far more depth than it did before.  CC, healing, defensive CDs, snares. All of these make the gameplay interesting in a way that the back and forth punch-trading of SWG could never hope to match.  More structure also means more balanced encounters, since at least the number of players will be even during a Battleground.  In SWG it basically came down to who had the most people.  Is that really harder?  I don’t think it is.  I think skill is much more important in an even match than it is in a 50 on 15 zerg.  It is harder to be a good PvPer in modern WoW than it was in SWG.  Maybe not more time consuming, but certainly requires more skill.  When 5 players from each team enter an arena for a fight to the death, there’s little else at play but skill.
• Crafting isn’t really a fulltime end-game pursuit in modern MMOs.  But in SWG though it was compelling, it only really required a commitment to spend the time needed in order to be successful and the persistence to follow through.
• PvE – Much like PvP, this has become far more structured with scripted encounters in instanced environments.  I do not think it is even a fair comparison to compare modern WoW to SWG or EQ, because the PvE content was basically nonexistent in SWG and was basically camping a spawn in EQ.  Instead I will compare modern WoW raids to Vanilla WoW raids.   Vanilla WoW raids were quite heavy on tank and spank fights with a few variations thrown in from time to time.  There was little required of the average player except to dps/heal/tank.  The first fight in Blackwing Lair is a good example of what constituted a complex fight by Vanilla WoW standards.  It required one player to mind control the boss and break eggs, but the other 39 players proceeded as usual.  Modern Normal mode raids require a raider to avoid the fire/acid/tornado/water/cloud, to heal/dps/tank, to at times interrupt, and to manage some type of special mechanic in nearly every fight.  I can think of no fights in tier 15 that could be considered a tank and spank fight.  There is always some special mechanic integral to winning the encounter.  Bump it up to heroic mode and now it is a totally different game when compared to Vanilla.  Heroic modes require peak play from all players, constant movement, skilled execution of fight mechanics.   There is not a single fight from vanilla WoW that comes close to the difficulty of even the simplest of Heroic Mode raid bosses in the Throne of Thunder.  Consider Challenge Mode dungeons.  These are some of the most taxing dungeons I have ever run, requiring me to CC, dps, Heal, and use cooldowns expertly to get the group through.  They also require skillfully timed use of invis pots to circumvent as much trash as you can to hit the unforgiving timer.  There was nothing to rival even the easiest Challenge Mode dungeon in SWG or EQ on shear difficulty.

This is a simple matter of the assumption that if content is accessible, it is also easy.  If content is inaccessible, it is difficult.  This is false.  By this logic, one could simulate the hardcore nature of oldschool play by simply requiring that every time their WoW character levels up they have to stop playing, run around the block, and when they get back read a chapter of A Tale of Two Cities before they can play again.  This is roughly the amount of tedium, additional time consumption, inaccessibility, and punishment that was found in old-school MMO gaming.  It’s a ridiculous idea, I know.  But isn’t it on par with what we used to do?

**Find me one old-school encounter as hard as Heroic Lei Shen and I’ll concede the whole point**

2. Should an MMO be about the journey to max level, not endgame?

This point reminds me of a little game called Star Wars:The Old Republic.  During development they made similar statements about the leveling process being vital and telling  story being important.  Let me ask you though, how long did it take you to hit max level in SWTOR?  (If you bothered) Let’s be very generous and say it took two months on average (which we know it didn’t).  I have played WoW on and off for 8 years.  Let’s assume I would play SWTOR for half that; 4 years. That means the leveling process would take a little over 4% of that time.  What would possess you to focus on something that will only occupy me for the first 4% of my playtime?!!!!!!  This is a ridiculous idea.  Not even old-school MMOs did this.  Their “journey” consisted of a thumb-tack-in-thigh mob grind in groups.  They were as much a race to end game as modern MMOs are.  It just took longer to get there.  Regardless of how long you choose to make your game, players will reach the level cap extremely fast.  You must know this.  Once they do, you have to have something for them to do.  Several somethings, if you’d like to be competitive.  Is this because we players are lazy or lack skill?  No.  It seems this way because again you are equating punishing, time-sink, inaccessible gameplay with challenge.  They are not the same thing. MegaMan is a challenging game.  Waiting for your tax refund is a punishing time-sink.

Who’s to say your “journey” can’t begin at end-game?  In reality, that’s exactly what happens.  Any MMO player knows that the real game begins when you cap level.  To me it begs the questions, why do we even need levels at all?  Why not simply start players at max level?  GW2 does this for PvP. It seems to work out fine.

What innately makes the leveling process more compelling as a journey than end-game?  Nothing really.  I can confidently say that had I been merely leveling this whole time in WoW with no end-game, I would most definately have long since quit the game.  End-game is the truly compelling part of the genre.  That ever growing, ever expanding sense of power and achievement that no arbitrary level number can match, is the reason we play MMOs and the reason we measure our /played in years, not weeks or months.

That’s my perspective anyway.  What’s yours?

>luvbacon<

Do the meters matter? MS Excel – Deathmatch

Damage meters have historicaly been one of the first addons developed for new MMOs.  This makes perfect sense, really.  The essence of the fantasy that pulls us into MMOs is 1. I am powerful, and 2. I am special.  Damage meters help us to measure just how powerful and how special we are.  In the past, changes to dps specs have often come about because discrepencies of damage per second have come to light through dmg meters/logs, and the discrepency has been brought to the attention of Blizzard, who in turn buffs/nerfs appropriately to give us a more balanced raid environment.  But how much do they really tell us?

Teh Dee Pee Ess

When we’re talking about measuring the performance of a dps player with a damage meter or log, this works perfectly.  After all, aside from staying alive, damage is your one and only job as a dps spec.  So damage done is a pretty solid measure of ones performance on a given fight.  Sure, there are a few possible exceptions; “Hey, that moron isn’t switching to the LOA!!! SHIV HIM IN THE THIGH!!”  “Hey, he’s multidotting on a health reset council fight!! Fart in a jar and mail it to him!!”.  But by and large, damage is a good indicator of ones performance level.  For tanks and healers though, this is not nearly so cut and dry.  Let’s start with tanks.

I R TNAK

Tanks have four jobs really;

1. Stay alive – This is an easy one.  If you’re tank keeps dieing, that’s a problem.  Obviously, there could be a lot of reasons for this; your healers could be failing, your tank could be underusing CDs or not using CDs, your tank could be firestanding.  A lot of this can be shown on the damage taken by spell category.  This shows a lot about how well the tank is doing.  But to compare your MT to your OT is going to give a skewed picture of what’s really going on because the MT probably will have more time on the boss and therefore have more damage taken by a given ability.  Here’s where a damage taken per second metric would be useful.  I’ve never seen one though.  An easy solution is instead of comparing MT to OT, compare your MT to a similar raidgroups MT for the fight.  They will likely have similar uptime on the boss.
2. Keep aggro – This one’s pretty easy too.  If dps are dieing to boss melee attacks, your tank is failing here.  This isn’t always completely his fault.  Some tank classes don’t have great snap aggro.  So a dps that goes full on bloodlust-battlerager-zerker mode immediately may find themself getting instagibbed and losing the fight early.  Not really a tank issue.  But back to the subject, not something a meter can really show you.
3. Position the boss correctly – This one requires the use of ones eyes as well and can’t be monitored through the meter/log.
4. Do dps – Here we go!  This one is all meter.  But with the way vengeance works, tank dps can really be all over the place and we still may have no aggro problems at all. Dps for a tank is largely more of a bonus and not a direct true measure of tank skill.

All in all, the meter/log can show you a good bit about how well a tank is performing.  Through damage taken by spell, and comparison with other tanks, you can see how good a tank is at surviving.  Can you tell if one class is less desirable than another through this method.  Yes!  Look at an MT of one tank class from a similar guild with similar gear and compare to an MT of another class, similar guild/gear.  How much damage did they take from the same boss?  That’s a good indicator.  You’ll need to look at several to make sure there isn’t a significant skill difference blurring the results, and even compare on raidbots for aggregate performance using thousands of logs.

WTB HEALZ

Healers are in kind of a different place then dps or tanks though when it comes to measuring performance.  This is because our job is really about saving players from death more than anything else.  One healer may be knocking the ceiling off the healing done meter, but if they’re not catching low health players before they die, then they’re not doing their job.  Also, if they waste spells in such a way that they oom, leaving them without mana when they need it.  Additionally, the healing done metric is easy to manipulate to make one healer look better than another, to the detriment of the raid.  For example; if I time a large cooldown for just before another healer is set to use their CD, they will waste their CD and I will be much higher on the healing done meter.  Having played with players who do things like this in the past, I can tell you, it is exasperating to know that CDs that could be used to win the fight are being sacrificed in this fashion on the altar of epeen.  But does all of this mean that the meters don’t matter?  Can we gather no useful information about healer performance from HPS or Healing Done?  ….Ok, so the way I phrased that, I’m not sure if I should answer yes or no……    Of course meters matter!!! Just not in the cut and dry way we would prefer.  You can’t measure which healers are saving lives over padding the meter.  It’s just not something you can know from a meter.  A good way to determine this is to two heal with a healer you’re trying to evaluate.  If folks are dieing, that may indicate that they’re not prioritizing well or are making some other kinds of bad judgement calls.

What about an overall healing spec’s performance?  This is where World of Logs is really useful.  When looking at thousands of logs from players of all skill/gear/progression levels, a lot of the inconsistent ‘wrenches in the works’ like player skill and raid comp get ironed out with that much data.  This is because you are likely to have hundreds of other players with nearly identical skill and raid comp.   Statistical outliers get mellowed if you add enough data.  This is why scientific studies use a lot of subjects, not just a few.  The more people you study, the less impact the wierd cases have on the results.  World of Logs has a ton of data!  That’s good.  It means the average results are a pretty accurate indication of what a given spec is capable of.

What about absorbs? Quit peaking at my notes!  Absorbs do have a large impact on the throughput of more direct throughput healers like shaman, h-priests, druids, and monks.  They effectively put a ceiling on our throughput by preventing healable damage from occuring.  But is it really relavent?  The raid environment we are now in leaves the raid’s health pool with either everyone near full health, or everyone below 50% briefly before a raid CD is used and everyone is back at full health.  Absorbs extend the ‘full health’ part of that cycle.  Meaning direct throughput healers have little to do; effectively getting presniped™.  Basically, if you’re not a disc priest or holy pally, you’re going to look a bit worse than you actually are on WoL, assuming you’re running with either a Disc or an H-Pal in your raid.  Be sure to factor that in.

But is the overall performance of the spec represented accurately, relatively?  Yes.  That’s the area where you can accurately make some determinations.  So it is safe to say that if a spec is underperforming in HPS by a considerable amount, than yes! There is a problem. They are not putting out as much healing as other specs.  With as much data as is available, all variables like raid comp, skill, gear, progression level, do not make a meaningful impact on the results.  The data can be interpretted as-is when looking at overall spec’s power level (OVER 9000!!1!1!!!).

So why am I hearing on the forums that HPS doesn’t matter in regard to whether a spec is underperforming and in need of buffs/fixes? Well that’s an easy one.  It goes back to our two prime drives for playing an mmo.  The idea that 1. I am powerful and 2. I am special.  When one’s spec is very powerful or arguably over-powered, the last thing they want is another spec to get buffed up to be competative.  Than they would not be as powerful or as special, relatively.  Sure, it’s true that HPS is not a completely all-encompassing measure for what makes an effective healer, as we discussed earlier.  Nor is it an accurate measure of whether a spec is keeping the raid alive.  But it is a fairly accurate measure of a specs overall power and potential.  To dismiss it completely tips their hand, illustrating that they truly have no interest in balanced gameplay and merely want to preserve their advantage.  If their spec were suddenly at the bottom of the HPS dog-pile, I am confident we would observe a stunning reversal of their opinion.  Had HPS been dismissed in 5.1 resto druids would not have received the buff that they deservedly received in 5.2.  In fact, to dismiss HPS completely is to say that any healer classes who have ever been buffed based on HPS underperformance (read: all of them), did not need a buff at all.  It’s called willful ignorance and it’s en vogue right now.

>luvbacon<

Virtual Realms: How the cool kids say “Server Merge”

You have to love the chain of events here.  Blizzard deeply discounted server transfers for a week.  The next week they announce a feature which makes server transfers largely unneccessary.   Win!!   Glad I didn’t transfer.  <Points and laughs at players who transferred last week>

Let’s take a look at Virtual Realms;

Virtual Realms are sets of realms that are fused together, and will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm. Players on the same Virtual Realm will be able to join guilds, access a single Auction House, join arena teams and raids, as well run dungeons or group up to complete quests.

The good

• Low and Medium pop realms will now have a much larger pool for recruitment for raids and PvP, as well as any group content
• This change will save countless raid teams from oblivion.  Reruitment has become horrendous as of late on my server, which isn’t even low pop.  I can only imagine what it’s like for a low pop server.  This will open up a world of possible recruits.  Can’t wait!!
• A much more active AH

The bad

• Nothing
• Some players will inevitably QQ about their beloved low pop realm becoming suddenly filled with other players.  My advice; this game is designed to have a large number of players.  If you do not like a large number of players, this probably is not the best game for you.
• Economy –  Some will become confused on the way supply and demand work.  They will expect that their low pop AH will soon see greatly increased prices.  Nope.  As supply increases, prices go down.  Low and Medium pop servers will almost definately see immediately lower prices on trade goods.  The downside, you’re ability to ‘Robber Baron’ it up <Twirls mustache> on the AH will be minimized.  Unless you are up for a new part time job of checking for undercuts, selling stuff will become much more challenging.

This change makes so much sense.  In fact, back when CRZ was first implemented it seemed clearly aimed at low pop realms, but didn’t fix any of these problems.   This is long overdue.  WoW does not work if your server is flawed in some way; not enough players for recruitment, crazy economy, etc.  With the playerbase looking as if it’s begun a permanent decline, as is expected by a game this old, it is vital that something is done now to preserve the community size neccessary for the game to work.

Do servers even matter anymore?

Nope. After this change, there really is not going to be a single server identity any more.   It basically makes all the servers included in the Virtual Server into one large server.  Hi, this is just a server merge without the bad press that comes with using the term server mergers.  That’s all.  In truth, I think they should just go the extra step and link all the North American servers into one Virtual Server, all the EU servers into one Virtual Server, and so on.   They could create different instances of zones to limit population in a given area.  This is common in many different games.  I mean, it’s 2013! (Where’s my flying car?)  Eve has had a single server for as long as WoW has existed.  Let’s do dis!!

The return of Community?

Many are heralding 5.4 as the return of community.  Between Flex raid and Virtual Realms; could be!  With virtual realms, you are going to see more people in SW/wherever horde will park in 5.4, than you have in some time.  We talked about Flex last week, but it is a fantastic step toward taking your friends into a raid without restriction.   I predict that LFR will become the last resort raid and Flex will become the casual raid.  Casual guilds will take whoever is online in and kill things rather than queuing with strangers in LFR.  This means, you will know the people you’re raiding with.  Not to say there won’t be pugs.  But to me, this looks like a a guild raid.

A side rant – I’ve heard players for years heralding the community feeling from Vanilla and how it is no longer part of the game.  This is usually pinned on LFD and LFR for making the game ‘World of Queucraft’.  I beg to differ though.  I played in Vanilla.  Sure, there were a few server rivalries that played out primarily on the realm forum.  But honestly, who did you interact with every day?  It was the same people you interact with every day now!  Those who share your guild tag.  This has not changed!  The guild rivalries from Vanilla only really mattered to the precious few who bothered to frequent the realm forums.  Occasionally it would bleed over into trade chat.  But that’s it!  That’s the long vaunted “Community” idealized by the rose-colored-glasses-wearing old-timer.  That plus the fact that you couldn’t sell enchants on the AH, so you had to spam in trade for an enchanter.  Truth be told, most people just went to a guildy like they do now!  But if community means getting rid of LFD, LFR, and enchanting scrolls, than you can keep it!!! No thanks!

>luvbacon<

/Flex Raid and it’s ramifications

My mind is blown!  Blizzard finally created a ‘Beer League’ difficulty between LFR and Normal mode.  More surprisingly though, the raid allows you to take any number of players between 10 and 25.  The raid simply scales in difficulty and boss health to suit the number of players you have with you.  Wow!  Let’s take a look at what this change will mean.

Good!

• Scalable raid size is a feature I have personally been asking for for some time.  This solves an extremely common problem for many guilds.  “We have 21 people but need 25”  or “we have 14 people but only need 10”.  This is a fantastic solution for this problem!
• Having a raid difficulty that is easier than normal mode but tailored to fit the group you have is a fantastic idea!  There are many guilds out there that really enjoy hanging out together but are not seeing much success in normal modes.   These people have thus far been stuck busting their teeth on bosses they can’t kill.   Now, they will have a new option tailored for them.

So how long will it be before Blizzard adds this scalability into normal or even heroic mode raids?  I hope, soon!  If you think about it, it’s just plain silly that in 2013 (it’s 2013!!! where’s my flying car?!!!) a raid group with 23 people instead of 25 is just plain out of luck to raid.  Or a raid group with 13 people gets to sit 3 peeps to fit 10 man.  These are archaic limitations that serve no purpose in this day and age.  Scalable dmg/health has long been used to balance raids like DS, or even tier 14.  It’s high time they use it to open up options for guilds and raids.  How many 25 man guilds have imploded due to inability to consistently field 25 folks.  My guild recently made the shift to 10 mans for this very reason!  Though we all prefer 25 and have about 17-19 players always on for raids.

Bad 😦

• If you are a hardcore or semi-hardcore raider; Congo-Rats! You just got a new mode you’ll need to clear for gear each reset.  At least, until you outgear LFR and flex with normal mode loot. Enjoy.  At the beginning of Mists, we saw a kind of a mass exodus once players started hitting end game and realized there was a mound of dailies for them to complete each day.  Blizzard’s position was “Do the ones you want to do.  You don’t have to do them all every day”.  But recently we have seen tweets and posts in which Blizzard reps take ownership of some of those issues admitting that players will take advantage of everything they can to gain some in-game advantage and that having dailies be so very important contributed to burnout.  In light of this, is it smart for them to add more we will need to do each week to keep up with the Joneses?

It’s a delicate balance to create new content, make it enticing, but not so enticing that it will feel posatively mandatory and contribute to burnout.  Where’s the line?  If your server is anything like mine, the player population is dwindling fast with guilds transfering to higher pop realms as fast as their little cowardly legs will take them.  How much of this player loss is due to burnout from having too many neccessaries to do each week to stay competative.  Sure, this is all fairly subjective stuff.  To one player capping valor is an absolute must.  To another, it’s hit or miss.  To one player, getting your 50 lesser charms is a must, to other players it’s nice if you manage to do it but fine if you don’t.  The ones at risk of burnout are the ones who will do it all.  Take me for example; I cap valor each week, usually on two toons. I get my 50 charms each week, usually on two toons.  I run LFR each week, usually on two toons.  This change will effectively add another raid night into my schedule of things I must do to keep up.

An easy solution would be to link Flex and LFR resets?    This would eliminate the extra raid night I can look forward to with the change as is.  The downside to this would be casual players who do not raid normal/heroic would have only one option instead of two.  These are the players that Blizzard fantasizes about in bed at night.  So I do not anticipate the lockouts being shared.  More likely; Blizzard will end up linking the lockout between flex and normal/heroic mode.  This would allow casual raiders to get in LFR and flex each week, but save normal/heroic mode raiders from ourselves.  But would also prevent us from accessing the higher ilvl gear found in Flex.  Truth be told, I don’t see how Blizzard is going to please everyone with flex.  Someone will get the short end.

While on this subject, why do we even have raid lockouts any longer?  What’s the point?  Blizzard showed us they have the ability to simply lock us out of loot after we’ve killed the boss once, in raid finder.  Why not simply expand this out to the rest of the game?  This way, I can fill in for a buddies raid for a boss kill or two even if I’ve already killed them.  This would be amazing!  Blizzard would respond “We don’t want tanks to get used and abused to no end by making them kill boss after boss with no chance at gear because a buddy needs it”.  I would respond “Hey Blizzard,  do tanks have some dirt on you or sumthin?  We’re big boys and girls.  We have an n key and an o key and can use them together to fix this potential problem”.

Anyway, I think flex raid is a fantastic addition to the game, even with the potential problems it raises.  I really hope to see the same concept expanded out to the other raid difficulties.  Color me stoked.

>luvbacon<

Addendum 6/10:  So Blizzard mentioned the idea of using this flexible raid system in Normal and Heroic modes and they expressed reluctance at the idea due to balancing concerns.  I think this is a very real concern.  Raids would end up pinpointing the perfect number of players for a given encouter to manipulate the system. “This fights best with 16 players.  This next fight needs 13” etc.  But I think there is a way around this problem that would still allow a lot more flexibility in a raid roster.  They could change 10 man raids to 10-15 man raids.  They could also change 25 man raids to 20-25 man raids.  This would singlehandedly save many 25 man guilds from oblivion and would allow 10 man guilds to field all of their guildies instead of benching several.  Your thoughts?

Taste My Tears!!!! Resto Shaman Woes

Cards on the table.  This is a straight up QQ entry.  However I am going to endeavor to make this a well organized and well thought out QQ that lays out what I perceive to be the weaknesses and neccessary changes to our class and spec.  I assure you my tears are delicious!

Resto Shaman are in a bit of pickle this tier when it comes to keeping up with the Jones’s.  Especially in 10 man!  We curl in a fetal position after each 10man raid praying for comfort from our loved ones.  But our loved ones are in bed cuz the raid went late.  A cursory look at WoL shows that R-Sham are taking a wolloping from pretty much everyone at the moment when it comes to HPS.  Let me go ahead and get the counter argument out of the way.  You’ll say “Luvbacon, you blubbering infant, there’s more to keeping a raid alive than HPS” and I’ll say “I may well be a blubbering infant, but rest assured, there is candy I’m being denied here!!! also, what pray tell is the concrete empirical measure you would instead have me use?”.  The answer is, there is none.  Those who would poopoo the QQ of the moistened faced masses of Resto Shaman constantly painting the Healing forums with sob post after sob post, are left with an argument that can roughly be translated “sure, the only measure with which we can assess healing shows your class is sadly lacking but suck it up you wusspants kitten and eat my healing dust.   I’m sure you’ll get used to the taste of turd eventually.”

I am not going to bother making the argument here that we are lagging behind.  We all have access to a web browser and World of Logs is a public site.  The logs do not lie.  They clearly show our position.  Instead I’d like to discuss what I believe to be the primary reasons for our difficulty and also to propose some solutions.

I observe two primary weaknesses in our spec that need to be addressed.  The first is somewhat minor:

Deep Healing (Resto Shaman Mastery)- This mastery is seen often with some mythical reverence by other healers who see us smash an astronomical crit on that one occasional low health raider.  I cannot deny the usefulness of a mastery that makes us heal the most exactly when it’s needed most.  However, consider the current healing climate.  Absorbs are at their strongest level ever!  By their very nature, they prevent damage from occuring, actively fighting against our mastery or even just negating it in many normal mode encounters.  In Heroic Raids (or PvP) our mastery truly has a chance to shine because targets spend considerably more time below 60% health, the point where our mastery starts to do something useful.  But look at completion numbers for Tier 15.  The average raider is not 12/12 normal yet.  So the average Resto Shaman is getting little effective use out of their mastery.  The next normal mode raid you run, take a glance at health bars every here and there, being sure to notice when they’re above 60% health.  It’s a huge majority of the time!!  Our mastery does nothing at that health level.

/2 WTB Mastery that works 100% of the time PST.

The next issue is the big one:
Spread Healing –  While working on Heroic Jin’rohk 10 man yesterday, this weakness  became corner-of-table-in-funnybone apparent while I was observing my Resto Druid counterpart heal the lightning phase.  The phase requires basically 100% movement.  This means my useable healing tools are

• Riptide – A small instant heal with a very small HoT on a 6 second CD.  I have the option to glyph this (if I happen to be a moron) so that the CD is removed but the instant heal portion is also removed.
• Spirit Walker’s Grace – This is useable every other Lightning Phase and allows me to cast on the move.  But it only opens my useful spells up to single target heals.  I can’t use Chain Heal because the jump range is so pitifully small that I’ll never get anywhere near max targets unless we’re stacked.  I have the option to glyph Chain Heal (if I happen to be a moron) to increase the jump range to something better in exchange for a CD added to a spell that already has several conditions for it to function at full power (limited jump range, riptide on initial target).  Not to mention, if I do jump through each of these hoops, it still heals for less HPS than GHW or HS and for less HPM than HW.  So I am stuck single target healing a spread raid and falling painfully behind on HPS.
• HST – Our smart heal totem plop.  Ironically, they call it a smart heal but what they really mean is “You guys are too dumb to use an actual healing ability well.  We’ll artificially pad your numbers”.  This provides a bit of spot healing to the raid, but again, only heals one target at a time.
• HTT – Our I-Win button.  useable every other lightning phase.  Nevermind that we MUST talent into this thing, effectively removing a tier of talents  in order for us to get an ability we are clearly being balanced around.  Every healer but Paladins now have an I-Win button on par with this.  Not to worry Holy Paladins, your Mastery is your I-Win button that last through the entire encounter.

Contrast this with Resto Druids for this fight.  Their available tools are

• Rejuv – A much stronger instant HoT than Riptide, even when factoring in Riptide’s up-front heal.  This also benefits from their mastery and each target they lay this on becomes a potential Swiftmend target.
• Swiftmend – An instant heal they can pop on any target they have a HoT on.
• Swiftmend Puddle – This gets dropped on the floor every time they they use Swiftmend.  It’s sort of like a really weak Healing Rain.
• Mushroom – Once the joke of jokes in their repertoire, now buffed to Jesus mode.  As long as these are laid before the phase, they can be ‘sploded instantly to give an aoe heal.
• Wild Growth – Instantly applies a Hot to 6 raid members on a 6 second (off the top of my head) CD.
• Tranc + Spirit Walker’s Grace (w/ Symbiosis) –  Every other lightning phase this can be used.  it’s the Druid I-Win button.  On par with HTT.

It becomes apparent that Druids are in a much better position than Shaman when it comes to spread/movement healing.

Let me take a quick detour and answer what I know will be your next objection.  You’ll say “Luvbacon, you simpering but barrel chested brute of a scholar, you are using the absolute best of the best spread heal/movement healing class to compare yourself to.  Of course you’ll come up lacking” to which I’ll answer “Put on some pants!!!! What would possess you to leave the house that way?!!!! Look, none of the other classes are much worse off than druids!”  Priests have as many on-the-move heal options as Druids and Disc’s absorbs allow them to frontload the phase so less healing is even needed.  Same deal for Pallies.  Eternal Flame Blanket + giggle at the Shaman.

Blizzard asserts that Stacked healing is meant to be the Shaman’s niche and we’re supposed to be terrible at spread/movement healing.  This would suggest that we should be handing the other healers their butts on stacked fights like Megaera.  Is this the case?  Check World of Logs for your answer and get back to me on that >.>  But assuming this were actually the case, consider how many stacked encounters there are in T15.  I count 2 of 12/13.  2………    Spread healing is not something that can be a niche strength anymore! The game has changed and most fights now require near constant movement and most actively have mechanics in place to discourage if not forbid stacking.   No, that ship has sailed and the days of tank and spank are long gone.  Now it’s either give every healer the neccessary tools to do the job, or live with a gimped class.  Thus far Blizzard is going with the ‘live with a gimped class’ option.

So, now that I’ve thoroughly moistened your monitor with my tears, let’s have the Luvbacon prescription for a better Resto Shaman tomorrow.

1. Create a new ability that shares a Cooldown with Healing rain.  This ability would provide solid spread healing on the raid and could not be used with Healing Rain (to avoid making Shaman the must-have go-to Jesus class).  Something like this;

Scattered Showers  

Shares Cooldown with Healing Rain

Applies Scattered Showers of Healing rain to 6 low health raid members, following the player and healing them for xx health every xx seconds.

2. Remove the Cooldown from Riptide baseline.  The mana cost should be plenty to regulate it’s use.  This seems to work fine for Priests and Druids equivilent abilities.

3.  Fix Chain Heal.  This ability is so very clunky to use.  In order to get a full power Chain Heal currently you need to find a target clustered with max number of targets in need of healing.  Cast riptide on a target.  Wait out the GCD.  Begin casting Chain Heal on that Riptided target.  Wait out the (long) cast time.  Pray to God earnestly that the intial target doesn’t get healed to full, that no one else in the cluster gets healed to full, that no one moves out of range breaking the chain and negating all of this effort.  Blizzard can buff this ability as much as they like and it still will not effectively help our spread heal issues until they fix it’s many shortcomings.

•  Give it the glyphed jump range baseline.  The party line used to be “We don’t have the technical ability to imcrease the jump range”.  So they added a glyph, illustrating that they do now have that technology but want us to gimp the ability further with a long CD in order to benefit from it.  Weak.
•  Remove it’s dependance on Riptide completely.  Was a bad idea to begin with imo.
• Make it instant and give it a cooldown equal to it’s cast time.

That would do it.

Now let me end my tearful Tammy Faye/Swaggert diatribe with a concession.  If my proposed changes were made, it is very likely that with Healing Rain at it’s current power level Resto Shaman would userp the seat of our Current Healing Overlords; Disc Priests and Holy Paladins.  Far be it from me to injure the fragile egos of these paragons of the mending arts.  No, no, not at all.  I would be more than willing to see Healing Rain nerfed down to an acceptable level, if it meant that I would now be of use during the 90% of the raid when my raid team is running around like their butts are on fire.

One clarification: I am in no way advocating nerfs to Resto Druids (God knows they’ve eaten their share of dirt this expac) or any other healer.  I would merely find more enjoyment in this class with the same tools other classes have available.  We Resto Shaman are tired of being a liability.

These are my thoughts. What are yours?

>luvbacon<

What = compelling content?: or dailies/scenarios/collections, YAY!!!!!!! ???

I made the assertion in my previous entry that players resub because of PvP, Raids (or LFR), RP, or because they love their guild.  Not because of dailies or scenarios or collection grinds.  So that begs the question, what qualifies as compelling content?  What is the content that sucks my credit card out of my wallet to resub?

From Blizzard’s perspective the idea is this; do they devote the time and resources on a few 5-mans or one single  raid when they could devote those same resources and time to scenarios, dailies, or collection grinds and end up with 3 or 4 times the amount of “content”?  In their mind having tons of things for the players to do means getting more resubs.  The recent announcements of subscription number losses beg to differ though and so do I.  By their logic with more things to do this expac than ever, they should see sub numbers at least climbing if not at an all-time high.

The development team is inexplicably picturing the average casual player (read: golden goose) excitedly typing in his/her password to log in for their couple hours of daily playtime.  They can’t wait to spend that time on…..Dailies?!  Scenarios?!  Grinding bones on Isle of Giants?!    Um……….probably not.   The type of casual player they are hoping to keep is not spending his/her in-game time doing dailies/scenarios/collections.  They are either in a random BG, or more likely, they are in LFR!   You have 17 wings of LFR to do each week guys!!! (I’ve been known to exagerate) They don’t have time for much else.  The hardcore player, on the other hand,  is banging out dailies to get their precious Mogu Runes (the preciousssss <gollum voice>) and rep for mounts/tabards/shinies.  Or knocking the collections out for the mounts/pets that a casual player could not care less about.  Or doing scenarios to valor cap, something a casual player doesn’t worry about.  The point is this.  Blizzard is allocating resources to develop “content” that players are really only doing so they can do the OTHER content that they actually care about!!  Why not just make MORE of the content that they CARE about?!!!!   (lotsa exclamation points in this post.  Less coffee next time I think)

Let me break down what I have found to be ‘Compelling’ content so far in this expac.

1. Raids – The raid encounters in MoP have been some of my favorite ever!  From the epic feel of fights like Elegon, the gameplay juxtaposition of fights like Tsulong, the altering Tank roles of Garalon…….with only a couple glaring exceptions (I’m looking at you Hide Mechanic on Lei Shi and Vehicle fight +Raid Wipe mechanics of Amber Shaper), this has been an amazing couple tiers of raiding!  An absolute blast to work through.
2. Challenge Modes – I have not spent a ton of time on these but the time I spent was definately a schoolgirl gigglingly good time.  Wipe after wipe after wipe with basically NO reward to look forward to, somehow equaled REALLY compelling content for me.  I’m a weirdo.  What can I say?
3. Heroic Scenarios – Now I know what you’ll say, “But Luvbacon, you devlishly handsome and debonaire scalawag, you just poopoo’d Scenarios for nigh three paragraphs”, to which I will reply “there’s no denying your keen powers of observation my good sir but you do have a bit of mustard on your shirt”.  However, there is a world of difference between a regular scenario and a Heroic Scenario.   Here’s a quick list of things I can do at the same time as a regular Scenario and still be successful; read a book, watch tv, have an intimate encounter with my wife, weed my garden, cook dinner, write a blog post 😉   Now!!  Here’s a list of the things I can do at the same time as a Heroic Scenario and still be successful;  Nothing!!! You’ll die if you don’t pay attention!1!!!1!!!!  Somehow, just having a bit of challenge takes the bumpy-ride-with-hemeroid annoyance of regular scenarios and makes it something mildly enjoyable.
4. Shieldwall Dailies Story Progression Quests –  mind you, not the dailes themselves.  God no!! I put a thumbtack in my forearm to remind me I’m still alive while I do those.  Nah.  I mean those one-off quests that move the story forward that would lead you to a different place to accomplish a task.  I liked those!  I felt like I was doing something significant.
5. My First Time Questing through Jade Forest – Subsequent times I employed said thumbtack.  But the first time was shear joy working my way through a wellcrafted story that progressed organically and made an actual impact, albeit a bad one, on the world I see.
6. Thunder Isle One-Off Solo Scenarios – These were great!!  I actually had a hand in changing the world around me and making new quest hubs available.  Also, some of the mechanics were a little challenging.  Nice!

Fatty Goatsteak!!!

So yeah!  Everything else in this expac has not been compelling to me.  Least of all dailies.  Now I know what you’ll say; “Luvbacon, you dashing rapscallion with poet’s soul and cocksure swagger! I armoried you and you are exalted with all MoP factions.  You did all the dailies!!”, to which I will reply “Stalker.  Sure I did.  I’m a pretty hardcore player.  I’m gonna do whatever will give me an advantage or something to flex epeen over.”  But that doesn’t mean constantly adding busywork like this into the game is going to do anything for it’s longevity and it’s ability to attract the ever-tantalizing casual market.  Far from it!!  In fact, those bits of content did nothing to keep me subbed and if anything, pushed me toward burnout.  I did them because I love raiding.  If they really want to keep me they should spend resources on more of the stuff I love, not the stuff I do because the carrot is just too darn good to pass up.

What has been compelling content for you in MoP so far?

>luvbacon<

Addendum 6/28: I recently played through Brawler’s Guild up to rank 8 so far and I have to add it to my list of compelling content.  I ended up with a cool shirt that gives me a cosmetic buff (kinda like Precious Ribbon) and the title Brawler.  So not really a lot of tangible reward, but it was somehow very satisfying to work through.  Try it out!