Healer Regen, Fun, and You

With the glut of news coming out of Blizzcon came vibrant discussion (read:QQ) about the ramification of these announcements.  One of the most interesting issues I’ve come across so far was discussed here http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/11/20/warlords-of-draenors-gear-system-and-spirit-as-a-secondary-stat/#continued.  This entry is partially a response to the above article.

To summarize the issue; one of the most exciting changes at Blizzcon is spec specific loot.  This means that in the expac when I switch specs from Enhancement to a Resto, for example, the primary stats on my main armor pieces will change from Agility to Intellect.  This change will happen automatically upon spec change but the secondary stats will remain the same.  So than what about Spirit? Spirit is an unusual case.  Sure, it’s technically a secondary stats, but it’s importance to a healer’s mana pool cannot be overstated.  Haste affects the resource pool of a dpser as well, but the difference is that a dpser will never reach the point of being unable to do anything for long stretches of time because they don’t have enough haste.  However, this is a very real possibility for a healer.  A healer without a good amount of spirit and who is using an inefficient playstyle WILL go oom (out of mana).  This puts spirit in a different category of importance from the other secondaries.   The problem here is that spirit is largely worthless for all but healers.  If it appears on gear at all, it’s wasted unless you’re a healer.  In addition, pieces without spirit become extremely unattractive for healers.  This would effectively exclude healers from the spec-specific-loot party.

Blizzard’s answer to this quandary is that spirit will not appear on the main armor pieces at all.  It will only be present on rings, necklaces, trinkets, weapons, offhands, etc.  These items will be more tailored to a given role and will not change with spec.  They assure us that regen will be balanced with these lower spirit values in mind.  The problem I see with this is that I can upgrade my chest, shoulders, pants, gloves, and helm, and see NO improvement in my mana regen.  That seems….well…wrong to me.  This whole issue brings to light some inherent inconsistencies and questions about healer mana regen.

Swimming in Mana!!!

At the end of every expac we’ve experienced this Scrooge-McDuck-Swimming-in-Money euphoria of having more mana than we know what to do with.  It’s like Christmas!  Spam your most inefficient heal willy-nilly and don’t even worry about mana.  Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but the point remains.   In MoP, we experienced this euphoria much earlier than ever before.  Basically from the moment we received our legendary meta gem in 5.2, our mana worries were largely over.  In spite of this surplus of mana, my raid team still had to work to get kills through ToT and SoO. I still had to work to keep the team alive even though I routinely finished fights (or we wiped) with plenty of mana left.  The healing balancing act remains; prioritize to prevent deaths, keep the group out of spike death range, use raid CDs wisely, conserve mana where possible.  Mana is just much less of a concern than other issues though.  I still find my gameplay to be dynamic and engaging.  This begs the question, do we really need mana regen to be a prime concern?  Does it really add anything fun or interesting to our gameplay?

Going oom is fun?

I remember the days of early cata when Telluric Currents and weaving Lightning Bolts was basically a necessity to avoid going oom.  It was certainly taxing and challenging at times, but I can’t say it was more fun.  In fact, the struggle to conserve mana across all healers retired many healer friends of mine from the healing game altogether.  This is no surprise really.  Hop in a pvp battleground.  It won’t be long before you get chain-stunned/feared.  While you’re grinding your teeth, you will perfectly understand this issue; it is UNFUN to be unable to do anything.  A healer who goes oom is affectively stunned until they can regen some mana.  It is incredibly frustrating to watch a player die, to know they need healed, to know which heal needs to be cast to save them, but to be unable to heal them because you have no mana.    The penalty for poor play is to stand around for 10-15 seconds watching your fellow raiders die while you regen mana.  It doesn’t make sense to me.  The only reason we accept it so readily is that it’s just always been that way.

I’m interested in what it would be like for a healer’s resource to be more like a dpsers resource; energy, for example.  Energy regens at a set rate based on your haste.  You know you’ll always be able to do something in the next second or two, even if you burn through your energy completely.  There’s no ‘Oh, you got a little greedy there.  Naughty naughty. Now stand around for 10 seconds‘ for a dpser.   I would like to see Blizzard head in this direction; a lower overall mana pool, but with exponentially faster regen rate.  This would eliminate the enormous penalty for going oom and would create a new incentive for using more mana efficient spells;  you get to cast more frequently.  This could potentially create a situation where one shaman will tend to use GHW and one will tend to use more HW, both will be effective, but the HW dude will cast more often.

Meh, not sure if that would work, but two things I do know;

1. Going oom is UNFUN

2. No other role faces such a steep penalty for non-optimal play

My Crazy Ideas

Here are a few different ideas to alleviate both of these issues.

1. Make spirit a universal stat to increase resource production/regen rate.  Change haste to only increase attack speed and casting speed, not resource production/ regen rate.  Then add spirit to gear liberally as a secondary stat.  This would make spirit useful to everyone, not just healers, and would add another ‘interesting’ secondary to the slim pool of secondaries that are out there.  However, this would also have the downside that healers would likely want to pass on pieces without spirit. This brings me to my second alternative.

or…

2. Make spirit the primary stat for healers.  Have their regen and throughput scale from it.  For this to work, they would also need to eliminate primary stat gems altogether, which I also think would be a good idea.  Otherwise healers would just stack spirit to hilarious extent like we used to with Int. This would allow healer regen to scale from primary armor pieces and would also serve to make mana regen more of a foregone conclusion, like it’s always been toward the end of an expac.

or…

3. Eliminate a mana regen stat altogether.  Keep Int as our primary stat and simply normalize healer regen.  The benefit of doing this is that our playstyle would not have to change over the course of an expac to suit our current regen level.  This would seem to make balancing healers easier, and would make learning a healing spec simpler since gameplay would not change so drastically upon the release of a new raid tier.  Something else that could be interesting is to iterate on active mana regen mechanics like Telluric Currents.  Make this essential to mana regen rather than simply stacking a stat.  Could be cool.

I’m sure there are other, better ideas out there that would solve these problems.  But no matter the solution, I think it is a good time to address the enormous gulf in playstyle between playing a healer early in the expac and late in the expac.  It’s like two totally different games.  We can’t assume that mana regen is so completely vital to the healer playstyle any longer, since the end of each expac shows us what it’s like to operate without it as a real concern.

<luvbacon>

Let’s talk Blizzcon 2013 news!

Woot! So it’s finally here.  We all have read the deluge of news about what we can expect in the World of Warcraft over the coming year.  I think it’s safe to say we were not  disappointed.  Let’s wade through the news.

Big Deal Stat Changes

Item Squish:   The item squish is finally happening.  Relative power is going to remain where it is but the stats on items as well as the power of spells is going to look more like it did in BC.  Int gems will give you 8 instead of 300 like we would expect from the next expac.  Spells will do 5,000 dmg instead of 500,000.  Enemy health pools will be lowered to compensate.  Also, we will still be able to steamroll old content.   This is all good news!  Honestly though, I don’t really see this having a huge impact on our play.  The numbers will look right after a while.  Till then, it will seem a little wierd, but that’s the only way it will effect us.

Elimination of ‘Cap’ Stats: This one is huge! Stats like expertise, hit, parry, and dodge are all going away.  This change makes a lot of sense.  The stats really did nothing.  You had to hit your minimum on each of these anyway or your dps took a huge hit.  It basically served as a stat “tax” because it took away from straight throughput stats like mastery, haste, and crit.  I see this as a positive change that pushes us to more interesting gear choices.  Plus, caps made reforging a pain (more on this in a bit).

New and Interesting Bonus Stats: We are getting new stats like run speed, aoe avoidance, lifesteal, and sturdiness (no durability loss for the item), and cleave (free splash dmg).  It is also likely that these will only appear on one item type.  For example, run speed will probably only be on boots.  This is very cool!  I am pleased that Blizz is finally trying something new with stats rather than what always amounted to just “Do More Dmg”.  Lifesteal could become a real gamechanger for tanks, and cleave could become vital for dpsers.

Gems: Two things; items will now have a maximum of only 1 gem slot, and gems will now make a smaller impact on your stat distribution.   This will help to even out things like proving grounds or challenge modes and make it less possible to cheese the scaling.  Also, Blizzard seems intent on expanding the level scaling down to include old raid content as well.  This would make balancing much easier for this type of content.

Reforging: “Gone!”  That’s right.  Reforging will no longer be a thing.  The ramifications of this cannot really be overstated.  This is going to bring back BIS in a very real way.  In the live game, it really makes very little difference whether I have haste/spirit or crit/spirit.  I can just reforge to whatever I need.  This will no longer be the case.  You will now be at the mercy of rng.  Don’t get me wrong, I am all for this.  Reforging has stolen a good bit of the magic of loot drops away from the game.  If there are two different mail/spirit bracers in-game, I don’t really care which ones I get.  With reforging, it barely matters to all but the top 1% overlords.  To me and the rest of the peons, it is a marginal difference.  This will make a BIS item a great improvement over the second best.  I LOVE THIS!  Thank you Blizz!  Also, as was mentioned at Blizzcon, this will eliminate much of the tedium necessary when you get a new item.  In the live game, when I get a new item, part of me is bummed, because I know how much of a pain it is to gem/reforge/enchant said item.   No longer a problem.  In a related note, enchants are going to cover fewer slots to further reduce this tedium.  <Thumbs up>

New Models

I love this one too.  This is long overdue imo.  WoW is a beautiful looking game now-a-days.  Jade Forest is breathtaking on ultra.  But right in the middle of the screen likely sits a character model that looks like it came out of Warcraft 3 (because it did).  This needed to be done.  However, this change also reminded me of how people will appose any change, no matter how clearly beneficial it is.  The QQ posts on the forum about the new models are really a surprise for me.  I feel that Blizz did a great job of keeping to the spirit of the original model while still making it modern.

Garrisons

WoW’s equivilent of player housing.

building your Garrison gives you benefits including epic gear, access to professions you don’t normally have in a limited fashion, and customize the buildings in the Garrison for specific customizeable benefits. http://wow.joystiq.com/2013/11/08/garrisons-player-housing-in-warlords-of-draenor/

This has the potential to be extremely cool and compelling.  Epic gear is always good.  Access to professions I don’t have is AMAZING!  Sure, “in limited fashion” I would assume means the top tier recipes are reserved for actual practitioners.  But that seems fair to me.  This could become the next ‘pet battle’, and could potentially foster obsession level commitment from players who actually begin to lose interest in other parts of the game in favor of developing their garrison.  Or it could just be farm 2.0.  Time will tell.  But for my 2c, the difference will come from the amount of impact player choices have on the outcome.  If two players garrisons end up being pretty similar even though they made very different choices, then this will become farm 2.0.  If there are vast differences, this could be huge.

Send followers on missions: Sounds similar to SWTOR’s profession system, in that you can send your npc crewmates on missions to gather or craft items.  I really hope this is the direction Blizz chooses to take things.  Much of the busywork associated with professions is not much fun.  I say, allow us to delegate this stuff to an npc so we can go about the fun business.

Spec Specific Loot Drops

This is a pretty huge change.  They only mentioned this once but it is a gamechanger.  Drops will adjust their stats based on the receivers loot spec.  For example; if their loot spec is heals, plate that is awarded to them will be spell plate.  If their loot spec is ret, it will be strength plate.  Yes Please!!!  I am the DEer for my raid team.  This will save me time in video editing, since I like to make compilation videos of me DEing loot my fellow raiders are looking for when it drops on nights they miss.

Major Raid Changes

Flex System: Let’s get this out of the way.  I called this!  Ok, anyway, the flex system (10-25 people scaled raids) is going to be in effect for the flex equivalent difficulty (now called normal), as well as the normal equivalent difficulty (now called heroic).  I love this!  This will make recruiting so much easier.  It will allow you to bring your entire guild without sitting anyone all the way up to Mythic difficulty.  This is a superb change.  In fact, I hope they add this change well before the expansion launches.  I am going to go on record here saying that I expect the prepatch to happen much sooner than usual this time around so we will see much of the 6.0 feature-set implemented much sooner than expected.  This is just my own wild speculation though.  At any rate, this will go a long way to helping guilds maintain a healthy bench for Mythic.

Lockouts:  All difficulties are now on separate lockouts based only on gear.  What this means is you can run all difficulty levels every week.  In fact, you can run them all as many times as you want.  You only get gear from the first time you kill the boss each week and only one coin on each boss.    This is such a great change.  I would love to be able to help out a second team with normal mode.  Or to just pug into another raid to cap VP.

20 man ONLY Heroics (Mythics):  Blizzard has decided to limit the most difficult content to one raid size, 20 man.  This is to make it easier to balance these encounters.  I feel this is a good change.  20 players is much easier to maintain then 25, not sure why, but this has been my experience.    This is also a long overdue change.  I think it possibly would be better to settle a bit lower than 20 players for this, say…15.  But it would decimate 25 man guilds in BC fashion, so I can understand why they wanted to keep it close to 25.

Cross Realm Grouping: Cross realm groups have been very helpful for SoO so far.  But they will become even more useful soon.  You will be able to form a cross realm group for normal mode (now called heroic) as well.  This is great!  This makes the possibility of cross realm guilds quite likely.

oQueue Style Matchmaking in-game:  oQueue is a fantastic addon that makes cross realm groups easy to form.  It’s a no-brainer for Blizz to co-op this for their own.  I also love the fact that Blizzard seems to be taking a step back from LFR style auto-groups.  They lead to braindead gameplay and no accountability.  Whereas in an oQueue group, that type of play will just get booted because there’s a real raid leader keeping tabs.  Solid system.

All in all, it seems Blizzard is trying to maximize the flexibility in raiding, especially with premade groups, while incentivizing forming an actual group rather than relying on LFR style matchmaking. Luv It!

New Content

Ok, so I honestly don’t have much to say here.  It looks good but honestly didn’t make much of an impression on me yet.  Time will tell.  I do love the fact that they specifically said they are backing away from the idea that leveling should be a long process.  This is a great idea.

Free Level 90

This is an absolutely KEY change! 100 levels is a lot of content to wade through for a new player.  Putting myself in their shoes, it could seem a little pointless to even start.  With a free level 90, that leaves a mere 10 levels to slog through.  I could see a friend trying the game out if it meant they could get a free high level character and play with their friends on day one.  This is a monumental step towards accessibility for a game that every expansion becomes less accessible.  Well done Blizz.  I also love that I get a free level 90 alt.

New Talents

Many of the new talents look to be absolute game-changers; ie. a no pet hunter spec.  We Shaman don’t really get anything mind-blowing.  I’m not going to break them down in detail but suffice it to say, my socks were not blown off by any of them.  Here’s hoping they do something cooler with these.  Colour me underwhelmed.

Those are the highpoints folks.   This could well be a turning point for the game as it has been on a downward trajectory for a good while, subscription-wise.  This addresses all player concerns from MoP and iterates on all the advances made.  This is how you do an expac right.

Can’t wait!

<luvbacon>

[WoW screenshots courtesy of http://www.mmo-champion.com ]