Balancecraft

Solve The Immediate Problem

2010-01-20T15:08:00.000-08:00

I'm a programmer. When writing code, it's common for something to go horribly wrong. When a program fails, you look at the result, trace it back to a root cause, research the cause, find a solution, and implement it. In World of Warcraft, when learning difficult content, it's common to wipe on a boss. What do you do after a wipe?

In my ideal world, after everyone dies, you look for the root cause of the wipe. Maybe a tank died. Did he die because he positioned the boss wrong and was out of range of healers? Did he die because he failed to click a tanking CD? Did he die because healers were busy with something else? Maybe there wasn't enough DPS and the boss enraged. Did people spend too much time running from place to place? Were there multiple targets, and the DPS were focused on the wrong target? Don't just look at the base cause, look at the root cause, dig deep until you can figure it out.

When a root cause is determined, then you find a solution. Look for something that you can realistically change in order to bring the fight closer to completion. If the tank was in the wrong place, make sure he knows where the right place is next time. If there aren't enough heals to go around, add a healer. If there's too much movement, determine a new place to tank the boss.

When you've determined a cause and decided on a solution, and this is the absolute hardest part, PUT IT INTO EFFECT IMMEDIATELY. Don't sit around and argue about the effects of a solution, don't wait thirty minutes while you decide if it's the best possible solution. Just come up with something and try it.

Ultimately, this is my largest issue with attempt limited bosses. I would prefer to be able to test a variety of strategies quickly, but attempt limits really require that you focus on as many different problems per attempt as you possibly can, which leads to long debates between boss pulls, which turns raiding from a skill check to a forum discussion. Ah attempt limits, is there any problem I can't trace back to you?

Bad Information Pisses Me Off

2010-01-14T18:05:00.000-08:00

So, I follow Gravity's twitter feed. Occasionally it leads me to an interesting blog post, because he apparently reads every WoW blog in the history of ever. Today, bored at work for a bit, I ran into this post about some random guilds experiences with Festergut and Rotface. I enjoy reading about other people, it's always interesting to see what people are doing and how they think. However, I noticed this line standing out:

Remember: infections increase over time, and are not tied to Rotface’s hp, so bring the pain fast and hard is essential.

This is wrong. The quickest way to work that out is to check kill times. He was complaining about 7 minutes being too long for the fight to drag on and that they were getting overwhelmed around the 6 minute mark. Our slow kill of Rotface took 4 minutes. We were getting overwhelmed around the 3 minute mark. I pulled down parses of the two fights, checked the time difference between applications at the start and end of the fights. Unless I'm highly mistaken, and I'm willing to be proven mistaken, the point at which it swaps from one timer to another is entirely based on HP, not time. I left the numbers at work and I'm not going to pull them down again right now.

--Update: A comment was left on his site explaining what they think is happening, my data (in a comment on this post and that post) does not seem to match up with thier datamined information
--Update 2: I stand corrected, there are links to WoWhead timers that appear to be correct in the 2nd comment on this post.

I flipped through his site a little bit looking for more information, how he decided it was HP related, anything really. That led me to this post also about Rotface. But these interesting tidbits:

1. Don’t run in a circle around the room

Wrong! You do want to run a circle around the room. There's no reason not to.

3. Don’t run through a tank spill unless your Hand of Freedom is off cooldown

Wrong! If you're kiting properly, you'll be so far ahead of your ooze that the slow from going through a spill will not cause you to enter melee range of your ooze. If you can't get freedom, pop a cooldown (A damage reduction one). That'll negate the damage you take from the ooze while you run through until you can get back in range of a healer.

In terms of deadliness: big ooze melee > running big ooze through raid > running over the tank spill.

Wrong! If you run the ooze through the raid, every member of your raid will take 8,000 damage every 2 seconds. If someone gets Mutation, they're in danger of dying. If your tank doesn't dodge for a bit, he could take heavy spike damage. The alternative is to move Rotface around. Guess what happens when you move Rotface... Your DPS goes down! Considering that his major problem with the fight was the duration of the encounter and that he's using a strategy that mandates bringing extra healers and moving around a lot, I'm really not surprised

It just bothers me like hell when someone posts information that is wrong and dangerous. It bothers me when someone posts helpful strat info on a boss they failed to kill.

All It Takes Is One

2010-01-14T02:59:00.000-08:00

So, back in BC there was this cool thing where you needed consumables to raid. Slap a temporary buff on your weapon, eat your food, pop your flask, chain pop mana potions, and if you find some odd consumable that mysteriously stacks with everything else be sure to use that too. The result was hours of farming to do serious raiding. Thousands of gold poured into spamming hundreds of consumables a night just to remain competitive. And of course bosses then have to be designed around that. If you could spend a thousand gold to double your HP for 10 minutes, bosses would have to hit twice as hard. If they didn't, you could spend a grand to trivialize the encounter. But if they crank the boss damage, you have to spend a thousand gold or the encounter is impossible.

As long as there is an extreme end which a guild can go to in order to trivialize content, all it takes is one guild to do it for the entire game to fall apart. As soon as guild #1 goes for it, every other guild has to go for it as well to remain competitive. Guilds that can't put in the time will fall by the wayside. They'll complain that it's unfair or dumb. It doesn't matter how dumb or unfair the situation is, competitive guilds will have to do it. In BC, this was consumable farming. In Cataclysm, I fear it will be alt raids.

Attempt limits were put in place to prevent people from giving a boss 300 attempts per kill and to prevent guilds that can raid for 8 hours a night from getting guaranteed world firsts just by slamming their heads into content. I will tell you right now that if this keeps up for Cataclysm, attempt caps will make the situation worse. Consider a guild that can raid 40 hours a week vs a guild that can raid 12. If an attempt takes 10 minutes and you have 30 attempts, that's 300 minutes or 5 hours. Guild 2 does 5 hours of effort split across two nights and is done for the week. Guild 1 does 5 hour of effort, then mandates 35 hours of leveling alts. Given a month's time, Guild 2 does 5 hours of effort for their 30 attempts while Guild 1 does 10 hours of effort- 30 attempts with their mains and 30 attempts with their alts. Then they mandate 30 hours of leveling per week.

This situation is inevitable. The only question is which guild will start the madness season. I desperately hope that Blizzard does something to counter the attempt cap issue before it gets out of hand; I'd prefer a BC style 10 hours of farming per week to making Cataclysm's high end a game of who can level the most alts fastest. It will be a nightmare of epic proportions.

PS, there are already guilds powerleveling secondary mains to 80 to run same-class alt raids, this isn't some far-fetched "maybe one day" future.

Care

2010-01-13T01:58:00.000-08:00

Right now, you are reading a blog I write about World of Warcraft. Either you care about WoW or you care about me. Lets just assume it's the WoW thing. You care about this topics enough to take some time out of your day, engage your mind and learn something. This isn't unique. Odds are you read other WoW blogs. Odds are you read EJ and you occasionally discuss WoW with real-life friends.

Odds are, when you join a 5-man heroic group you are the one doing the carrying, not the one being carried. And therein lies the problem. Jeff Atwood explained this concept a long time ago in relation to programming. People who come to a website to learn are people who already know too much. The people we need to help are the people in heroics, the people in Dalaran, the people in those trash low-tier guilds that are working on Ulduar, or would have been except TOC and the first part of ICC gives them better gear easier. The problem is that those people will never come to this site, or EJ, or most likely even the WoW forums. I have no problem with that. Some people will be better at WoW than others. Those people simply don't care about their performance in WoW.

Care is an interesting thing. It defines everything in life. If you care about doing your job well, you'll most likely research it in your spare time, work to better your performance, and eventually be recognized for your effort. If you care about your significant others, family, or whoever else you have in your life, you'll put in the time it takes to solidify meaningful relationships. And if you care about a video game, I guarantee that you will master it.

I don't have much more than a warm fuzzy feeling to throw out there. Just make sure that you care about the things you do and you do the things you care about because really that's the key to happiness. And if you ever want a job done right, from fixing a car to getting a piercing to landing on the moon, try to make sure the job is done by someone who cares about it, not someone who's just doing what they have to.

Life lesson of the day. Whenever I get around to my next post, I'll explain what happens when 33 people care way too much about a damn video game.

Both EHP and Tank Balance Are Irrelevant

2010-01-11T11:02:00.000-08:00

The days of Patchwerk and Brutallus are long past. There is no encounter right now where the entire mechanic is that the boss hits you so hard that you die. The last one on that level was Algalon. I guarantee you there is no boss right now who will kill you with straight melee outside of a defined phase.

In the past, the way to test a tank was really testing healers as much as tanks. Sure, your tank had to optimize gear for Brutallus just to stay alive, but if the tank isn't getting instagibbed, the fight turns into healing the damage rather than surviving it. Now, however, Blizzard is trying to test tank skill by having short, defined periods of extremely high damage. Outside of these short burst phases, healing is mostly background noise; Healers aren't challenged and tanks aren't in danger of dying. These phases exist to test how well your tank can chain cooldowns. The shorter ones really just test whether or not your tank is awake.

Because of this, I really don't think a 1-2% difference in tank optimization, or even a 10-15% difference is meaningful. Say you're the worst tank, and have 50,000 HP. The best tank has 55,000 HP and equivalent mitigation. If the boss hits for 20,000 every second, you're both taking heavy damage but neither of you are in danger of dying. If he enrages and his damage triples, both tanks die. If you pop a CD, you're down to around 30,000 every second, and you're back to neither tank being in danger.

There aren't any tests of gear optimization or straight EHP at the moment; Just tests of popping CDs correctly. Optimize your character, certainly, but don't cry if tanks are slightly out of line.

No Seriously, Attempt Limits Are Dumb

2010-01-08T15:04:00.000-08:00

Professor Putricide has an attempt limit of 10. How many attempts do you think the average member of Premonition used? The answer is roughly 20. Some did the encounter as few as 15 times, some did it as many as 30.

You see, we run 4 10-man groups, which means our 33 main raiders and 7 alts (Or more often, roughly 25 main raiders and 15 alts) each do the fight in 10-man, which means some people saw ~5 attempts in one group and ~5 attempts in another group. Then we run a 25-man run with alts, where we learn the 25m version of the encounter, scoring everyone more attempts. Then we run a 25 main run, where everyone is on their main and we go for the kill. If someone ran on two characters in 10m and two characters in 25, they could have seen up to 40 total attempts, though the actual values are lower because we rarely took the full 10 attempts for a kill.

But really now, what did they accomplish by putting in a cap of 10 tries? Nothing. We could spend as much time as we want learning the fight in a variety of different settings before touching our actual attempt cap. There was no, "Learn the fight as fast as possible" pressure because if we don't get a kill in an alt run, who cares? There was no, "Don't mess up or we're screwed" pressure because we walked into the real limited run with hours of experience in the fight, a solid handle on what to do, and 10 full attempts left.

When Arthas is released and there are 20 total attempts, is it really going to be a challenge? Will we say, "God I hope we learn this as fast as possible or we're SOL from our 20 attempts" or will we say, "Good thing I spent 20 attempts in two different 10-man runs and 20 attempts in an alt-25 run before coming here, otherwise we might have some actual trouble."

Also, as pointed out by Xav, if this keeps up, the best way to organize a guild would be to have N many main raiders who all have an alt of the exact same class as their main; That way, you can double up on attempts. Will anyone be crazy enough to try that? I guarantee some guild will, if Blizzard keeps this up for Cataclysm. And as soon as one guild tries it, everyone will have to in order to remain competitive. Attempt caps are dumb. Please stop.

Trickle Down

2010-01-03T13:10:00.000-08:00

Here's a thought experiment. I have no idea what would happen, there's no right answer, just think about it.

What do you think would happen if, in the space of one day, the top 100 WoW guilds all decided to quit the game. As in, the majority of members decide they're done with WoW forever and the remaining members feel that they enjoyed the friendships and don't want to go through the struggle of making new guilds and finding new friendships.

We'd be losing some huge names. Even aside from the rank-1s in each region and the runners up that you've probably heard of, Elitist Jerks is around rank 70. What would happen to the community if EJ suddenly disappeared? If the best players in the world decided that WoW is no longer enjoyable, would the game still be as popular?

I want to believe we have that power. I want to believe that losing EJ, losing the serious progression pushes with guilds fighting for the renown of their country, losing the feel of doing something incredibly difficulty faster than everyone else would put a serious dampener on the game and make Blizzard strongly consider what they're doing to the high end of WoW. However, I have a sinking feeling that Blizzard's opinion is that if the top 100 guilds ceased to exist, there'd be no pushback against making WoW an even simpler game, thus giving it an even wider audience.

On the one hand, I commend what they've done with easy modes. I really feel that all video games need to have a mode that allows you to interact with the story without having to learn the complexities of the game in order to allow the medium of video games to become more meaningful to our culture. However, what Blizzard is doing right now is really forcing people into the easy mode and a lot of top guilds are displeased with the results. I'll be watching intently when Cataclysm is released. Blizzard might be making this exact gamble.

Variant Skill, Attempt Caps, Rambling

2009-12-28T19:06:00.000-08:00

There are two major types of video games. There are games where discovering the proper strategy is the difficult aspect and games where enacting the proper strategy is the difficult aspect. Of course, it's more of a spectrum than two absolutes, but I'll provide games as close to the absolute as I can.

First, consider the game 3 in Three. If you've never heard of it, I suggest taking a look, though getting it running on a modern computer is quite a hassle. It's basically a logic game, with around 50 puzzles. In nearly every single one, if you can answer the logic puzzle, you're done. For example, in one puzzle, called Level 8, it gives you a set of clues, each of which leads to a word ending in the sound -ate. For example, "to blow up" would be "inflate." The difficulty is in discovering what to do; There's zero difficulty in typing in the correct word.

On the opposite end, consider Ikaruga. That's a video showing exactly how to do the 5th level. With that information, do you think you could pick up a copy of the game and copy what he did?

Games where solving the puzzle is more challenging than performing the actions were much more popular when games were new. The issue is that in the modern day, with the advent of communication and the internet, the entire challenge of the game can be bypassed. To be fair, people who truly enjoy the puzzle-solving aspect will solve the game on their own with no help, and that's all well and good. However, as soon as one person has solved the puzzle, all information necessary to perfect the game is available.

World of Warcraft sits on a very interesting line in this regard. While PvP is necessarily the latter, PvE is effectively the highest level of competition in the former. The entire challenge is solving the 'puzzle' of the boss fight. Once it's been solved, once you have a strategy, the fight is repeatable. If you post a video of a world first kill, there are usually dozens of copycats very soon afterward. Notable exceptions have been Firefighter and Yogg-0.

This is why people say WoW doesn't take any skill. Because once the strategy is well known, the puzzle has been solved and anyone remotely competent can copy the solution. It's the root of the attempt cap- It's supposed to better showcase skill when all it really does is forces people to spend more time solving the puzzle in simulations rather than in attempts. It's supposed to separate out bads by preventing them from finishing the boss, but all it really does is focus a lens on who does and does not have the right strategy.

I personally despise the attempt cap system. I hate it abjectly. I feel that fights as complex and difficult as the original Firefighter or Yogg-0 cannot coexist with an attempt-capped system, and as such the system will inherently lower the top-end of the game. But if fights were designed where the challenge was in performing the boss fight rather than in discovering the strategy, maybe attempt caps could finally go away.

Maybe I'm just dreaming of the world I want rather than the best course of action for WoW itself. Who knows.

The Great Shadowmourne Project

2009-12-26T12:46:00.000-08:00

Shadowmourne will not be fully available until theoretically 36 days from now. Lets say that you're not going to be getting your guilds' first Shadowmourne. However, you want to get that axe as fast as possible. It is unclear whether or not shards for the last step will drop for multiple characters at the same time. In order to maximize potential, it's in your best interest to earn your own Shadowmourne between now and then. The only hard part of this is 25 Primordial Saronite.

On my server, each Primordial Saronite is worth P on the AH. Your current starting gold is S. D is the number of days before you can start earning shards for Shadowmourne. You can look at it two ways; Either you need to increase your wealth by a set amount every day to finish off a Shadowmourne or you need to increase your wealth by a set percentage every day.

If you want to do a set amount, it's simple:
(25P - S) / D = amount

If you want to do a set percentage, it's a little harder:
(25P / S ) ^ (1/D) = rate

If you start with 5,000g, Saronite is worth 3,000g, and there are 45 days left, you need either:
~ 1,560g per day
~ 6.2% wealth per day
[This is where I started]

If you start with 15,000g, Saronite is worth 3,000g, and there are 36 days left, you need either:
~ 1,670g per day
~ 4.6% wealth per day
[This is where I am]

So go get auctioneer and get to work, it's not that hard really. Even if you're starting around 5kg right now, you only need 7.8% wealth per day. That's only 390g right now! Start scanning the AH and do some dailies and you're on the right track.

Emblems of PAIN

2009-12-24T09:25:00.000-08:00

In both 3.2 and 3.3, Blizzard has decided to revitalize the Heroic scene. I can completely understand the reasoning. If 10% of their player base is dedicated to raiding and 80% does heroics more than raids (The remaining 10% being chronic levelers) then it's good sense to focus on Heroics, add new ones, improve their rewards, and keep them relevant. If you can force the top 10% of players to do heroics, that even makes it better for the middle 80% because they can get carried. I'm assuming that getting carried, while not the best thing ever, is better than wiping repeatedly in dungeons. Just a guess.

Unfortunately, the way Blizzard has chosen to do this is excruciatingly painful for anyone who wants to absolutely maximize their performance in raids.

I am a raider in one of the top guilds worldwide. It's my goal to maintain the best possible gear I can, both because I want to be as good as I can be and because I don't want to let down my guild. All guild members are required to be proficient at all roles. So, I need to have an ICC level tanking set in addition to an ICC level DPS set. Furthering this, ICC heralds the release of Shadowmourne, a 2H legendary, which it's also in my best interest to get. Since I'm most likely not first or second in line for Shadowmourne, it would be prudent of me to get as many materials as I can for that myself.

Now, looking at it simply, that's:

(90 + 90 + 90 + 60 + 60) * 2 = 780 badges for each tier set (Need all 5 pieces for various sets).
23 * 25 = 575 badges for Shadowmourne
30 * 2 = 60 badges for Sigils

That's a minimum of 1,415 badges.

Presently, ICC gives you 8 per week. Done in 10 and 25, that's 16. 5 more for the raid weekly gives you 21 badges. Doing heroics nets 14 badges a week. Doing the daily heroic each day gives you almost as many badges as doing ICC 10 and 25. Daily heroics plus the raid weekly, which so far has been Naxxramas twice and Malygos once, is *definitely* more than ICC.

Even at max production rate from ICC (12 bosses * 2/boss * 2 runs) = 48 + 5 [Raid weekly] + 14 [Weekly heroics] + 14 [Heroics on an alt] + 5 [Raid weekly on an alt] Nets 86 badges per week, or 17 weeks of doing the heroic daily twice a day, full clearing ICC twice, a week, and doing the raid weekly twice a week.

I understand incentivizing heroics. I understand wanting to pull raiders down so they can help out newer/less-geared players. But putting forth something like this is soul draining. Of course, it has led to The Great Shadowmourne Project, which I'll talk about tomorrow, so it can't be all bad.

World of Logs

2009-12-23T11:46:00.000-08:00

Ok, so, hopefully your guild is using World of Logs to record your raids. I get requests from old friends via facebook occasionally to review raid performance, help out with boss strats, figure out what's going wrong, etc.

You'd be amazed how much you can learn from a WoL parse; I highly suggest you spend a little time reviewing each raid. You cannot improve if you don't know what you're doing wrong, and sometimes you can find really strikingly obvious mistakes in WoL that should be fixed immediately.

Now, let me make one point; Premonition is really cool about mistakes. I think one of the first things Xav said to me was that it's a terrible idea to dwell on mistakes, because then we'd never get any real raiding done. Following this philosophy, Premo gives a *ton* of leeway; If you're doing something wrong, you're far more likely to be told, "Hey, this is what you're doing wrong, you'll do way better if you correct it" than, "Hey, you did something wrong, get out of my guild." Point being, don't look at your raiders, determine someone was attacking the wrong target, and gkick them. Once people know you have access to all this information, people will do the right thing more often.

First off, it's pretty easy to find someone in World of Logs. Lets say I want to look up how Kailee did on a specific fight

http://worldoflogs.com/realms/#realms-en_US

That lets us go to any realm, which lets us select any guild on that realm. Pretty easy to find Kailee's guild from there: http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/2335/

Now you can go to a specific fight and compare damage numbers; Maybe looking at DPS, then damage per hit to see if any discrepancy is based on gear, look at number of each attack used based on time and figure out if discrepancies are based on rotation differences, anything you want!

But there's even more information than meets the eye. Using the Query Browser (Work out the stuff on your own, I'm lazy) you can get:

[20:49:32.562] Eydis Darkbane begins to cast Twin's Pact
[20:49:42.437] Parn's Shield Bash interrupts Eydis Darkbane's Twin's Pact

[20:50:17.125] Fjola Lightbane begins to cast Twin's Pact
[20:50:30.734] Parn's Shield Bash interrupts Fjola Lightbane's Twin's Pact

[20:51:02.093] Fjola Lightbane begins to cast Twin's Pact
[20:51:16.140] Nahid's Wind Shear interrupts Fjola Lightbane's Twin's Pact

Awesome, now we have time sets. During the first one, people attacking Lightbane are doing it wrong, during the second two, people attacking Darkbane are doing it wrong. each tick is one second, the fight starts at 20:47:15 (4830). So our first cut is 20:49:32, which is 2:17 later or 137 ticks, and lasts 10 seconds, so 4967 to 4977. Cutting to this point, we can go to Lightbane's Damage Taken by Actor

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/ib0ootwyef49pcch/details/135/?s=4967&e=4977#tab-dmgactor

Doing that for the rest:
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/ib0ootwyef49pcch/details/134/?s=5012&e=5025#tab-dmgactor
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/ib0ootwyef49pcch/details/134/?s=5057&e=5071#tab-dmgactor

And thus you can see who did damage to the wrong target; You can see that a rogue on the second one either didn't swap or swapped late. Of course, this hardly scratches the surface of what you can do with world of logs; It's really awesome for all sorts of raid-browsing information.

Use it, learn from it, improve yourself and your raid.

Now With More World Firsts

2009-11-06T14:04:00.000-08:00

So, I suppose I should get back into this stuff. With the change to mandatory BNet accounts rather than WoW accounts, I don't know enough about the login procedure to reasonably do a MitM attack against WoW, so the Annihilation server is going offline, most likely permanently. So, that all cleared up, back to discussing balance.

First off, I really don't care about tanks anymore. Somehow, whether it be the cosmic force of the universe, the lack of focus on tanks, or actual balance somehow occurring, tank differences aren't really in the spotlight anymore. It's probably in large part due to the fact that this tier didn't focus on tank survivability except for a few fights where tank balance wasn't on the order of, "Warriors have it easier than DKs" but on the order of, "Warriors are capable of tanking this encounter and DKs are not." Which, when you get right down to it, sucks, but leaves a lot less to discuss.

Second, when I last was blogging consistently, I was a member of Obsolete of Whisperwind. I'm now a member of Premonition of Sen'jin, so a little more cutting edge.

Anyway, Icecrown Citadel testing is happening. Lots of it. So lots of awesome boss design discussion and thoughts on how bosses will require personal responsibility, situational awareness, and significant levels of skill. Blog inc.

Aaaand I'm back!

2009-06-16T09:54:00.000-07:00

Hokay so, I was out for a while spending all my free time writing a sexy little program, for those who didn't know; Ultimately the idea was to make a personal client for WoW that removes everything except the chat interface. With that, you can log on from work and chat with friends in WoW without being actually logged on to the game. It's mostly functional though not really amazing code- Never went back and cleaned up the whole thing. It works on private realms like Mangos but it is NOT functional on live realms due to a CRC version-check hash which I was incapable of working out. So, oh well. It was a fun month of reverse engineering, packet sniffing and programming.

Anyway, I'm done with it for now, so I have free time to get all blog-o-riffic. Hooray!

DK Tanks, General Vezax

2009-05-26T00:55:00.000-07:00

I really should have screenshotted this or recorded WWS or something, but ultimately I feel like DKs are retardedly overpowered for tanking General Vezax.

For people who don't know, the fight is pretty simple if devious. Upon entering combat with General Vezax, you cannot regenerate mana. Physical/Melee mana-dependant classes are allowed to regen some, but less than normal. During the fight, 8 Saronite Vapors spawn. Killing a vapor leaves a poison cloud; If you stand in the poison cloud you regenerate mana and take damage, exponentially stacking. So, when doing the easy mode, it's pretty simple- Split up your healers into groups of two (one, for 10-man) to diminish the effect of overhealing. When any healer in the current group hits 50% mana, they call for a vapor and the next set takes over. This repeats until the boss is dead. The first few times we did it, the fight really was terrifying; Now, the easy mode isn't threatening at all.

The hard mode switches things up. First off, you're not allowed to kill any vapors. So, zero mana regen allowed for the duration of the fight. Second, 4 minutes in, if you haven't killed a Saronite Vapor, the hard mode activates- An add called the Saronite Animus spawns. This add does an AOE on the raid that deals a small amount of shadow damage and increases shadow damage taken... So you have to burn it down. He doesn't just sit and cast, he attacks, so he must be tanked. To recap, zero regen, constant AOE damage, damage on two tanks. Remember, mana regen is both healers AND DPS. So your casters? Not happy. There are some mechanics that allow casters to do a ton of damage for greatly reduced mana but there's still a cap on the total damage they can do. I might write something eventually about how Vezax favors melee even AFTER the 20% attack speed debuff melee suffers... But thats for another day.

Today is for DKs being overpowered. The simple reason is Death Strike. As Blood, you can increase the healing by 50% up to 15% of your HP per hit. As Unholy, you have three diseases and thus heal 15%. As Frost, you're stuck at 10%. But, the trick is that this is manaless healing. A LOT of manaless healing. Without blowing any CDs, you're looking at 30% of your HP every 10 seconds. Used reactively with a high avoidance set and rotating CD usage, you can generally negate a strike every five to ten seconds without costing any mana. During our attempts on Vezax' hard mode in 10-man, we consistently pushed to the 10-minute enrage with zero difficulty... Three healers, 2 tanks, 5 DPS. Healers would OOM or be very close to it at the 8 minute mark and we would survive two full minutes with almost zero external healing on the MT... Via Death Strike, Death Pact, and Gift of the Naaru (<3) the level of self healing I could perform made me nigh unkillable. We did not successfully complete the hard mode because our casters constantly went OOM- We would have had it with ease if we dropped a caster for a melee DPS, and we considered either solo-tanking it or dropping to two healers, but we were running at 2 AM so we just killed it and moved on. However, I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I was not a Death Knight, possibly if I wasn't specced Blood, our attempts would not have pushed anywhere close to the enrage. With the MT doing as much healing on himself as the healers were, sometimes more, the fight is simply far too easy.

Random Values

2009-05-26T00:53:00.000-07:00

Somehow,
99a4a404031e022ff3227a27e888961f
354338042652a7da5e4af64ff9b3943cce14c6b0d0913c306479142f1181fc8a
e7672573b00fbe155efcee9fabb14b22e7db0a0a

Combine to form
adbedea42b139cbfd165b212089634297c8fc67f

So that's what I'm going to spend the next week figuring out. It's going to be fun.

In other news, have a real post...

It's coming.

2009-05-24T02:18:00.001-07:00

It's coming.

AFK, BRB, Programming

2009-05-22T10:56:00.001-07:00

Two things.

First off, all my spare time of late has been spent writing a massive program that will terrify everyone within a five mile radius, but I can't really talk about it until it's finished. Because of this, my blog has been moved to the back of my list of things to do for a few weeks... Posts will be sporadic at best, as they have been since I started this about two weeks ago. Hopefully I'll be done in 3-4 more days. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier.

Second, I saw this post and couldn't stop myself from posting a little more...

Jewelcrafting Change

Read that, then come back.
C'mon, seriously.

Finished? Good...

From my blog:

Switch Dragon's Eye gems to standard colors instead of prismatics
If JC gems followed the color of base gems, then we would not have the issue of stat-stacking in JC that we get currently, since JC gems could never give a larger-than-intended bonus. They would also provide no benefit in terms of meta activation, which would also help decrease stat stacking along with the overall power of JC. JC gems may need slightly more stats to combat the advent of epic gems, but if this change does not go through, JC will still provide more stat benefit than any profession in addition to free meta activation (And thus huge flexibility)

Source

10 vs 25

2009-05-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

I've recently looked into 10-man vs 25-man raids and peoples opinions regarding them. It's by no means scientific but I've heard quite a few people state they enjoy 10-man raids much more than 25-man raids. I'm wondering exactly how much enjoyment is correlated to progression. I've stated before that everyone wants overcomeable challenge. I propose that people who enjoy 10-man raids more than 25-man raids enjoy them because they're easier.

10-man raids are tuned for a lower level of gear than 25-man raids. A group with solid 25-man Naxx gear will have a significantly easier time running 10-man Ulduar than running 25-man Ulduar. I wonder if the point of overcomeable for a lot of guilds is more the Ulduar-10 level than the Ulduar-25 level. While my guild didn't experience this much, I can definitely envision some bosses in Ulduar being almost impossible to kill with a weak guild. I have horrible visions of 20-minute Mimiron attempts, wipe after wipe in the arena or the tunnel on Thorim, three distinct add packs in Freya... All kinds of horrible possibilities.

So, my thoughts on this are two-fold. One, it's in Blizzard's best interest to make the game as fun as possible in order to generate as many sales as possible and as much continuing business as possible. To that end, is it better for WoW as a whole to balance down to the 10-man level? I can see arguments going both ways. Hardcore raiders have few enough challenges as-is, making the game even easier would be a terrible thing (from their perspective). Casual players make up the vast majority of WoW, but having something to shoot for, knowing that there exist a set of players that aren't casual, gives casual players some dream of progression. I'm not qualified to talk about that sort of thing.

More importantly though, why do 10 and 25 man raids have to be separate difficulties? Why can't 10 provide the same reward with the same difficulty level but just be smaller? The current argument goes something like, "If 10 and 25-man raids offered the same rewards, no one would do 25-man raids." This means that there's some inherent reason that people prefer 10-mans over 25-mans. The ease of 'coordinating' a 10-man raid vs a 25-man raid is generally the huge difference people point out but I don't buy that at all. Personally I feel like if you bumped the rewards from 10-man up the same level as 25, 25-man raiding would die out. But if you bumped both the reward and the difficulty of 10-man raids up to that of 25-man raids then you'd see about the same representation you see right now.

This is largely academic. Even if Blizzard wanted to try putting 10 and 25 on the same level they simply can't until the next expansion without totally borking either the 10 or 25 progression path- aka 10 tuned to the 25m difficulty level and requiring higher tier gear sets or 25 granting no upgrade from one tier to the next. Personally, I find 10-man raids more fun simply because I enjoy learning hard content but I don't enjoy wiping to retards. I can field 15 intelligent players, but 25 is just too much of a stretch.

Set Bonuses vs Distinct Progression Paths

2009-05-11T12:10:00.000-07:00

Ghostcrawler has stated in the past that 10-man and 25-man raids are intended to be entirely distinct progression paths. I'd like that clarified slightly--
Are players who clear both 10 and 25-mans intended to have a significant advantage?

The advantages from doing 10-man raids in addition to 25-man raids are split into two broad categories- Hard and Soft rewards. Hard rewards are things additional gear. You'll gain more pieces of gear total from doing both 10 and 25 than from picking one and sticking with it. Since we can't change that without some sort of insane overhaul to the game, the worth of hard rewards has to vary so that getting more isn't a significant advantage. Soft rewards are things like experience with content and a deeper understanding of fights. I don't believe these can ever be extracted completely, but it's a debate whether they're even meaningful. For now I'd like to focus on hard rewards, specifically gear.

The biggest issue, in my opinion, is set bonuses. For most if not all classes, the two and four piece set bonuses on tier 8 are absolutely stunning. As a tanking Death Knight, I consider my 4pc T8 bonus overpowered in the extreme- Or I would if every other 4pc T8 wasn't equally overpowered. That's a good thing. We like saying, "Wow, this is awesome." The problem, however, is that both 10-man and 25-man pieces contribute to the same 4pc bonus. If we assume that getting a 4pc bonus is a huge jump in player strength and we can get pieces from both 10 and 25 man raids it provides significant incentive for people to do both sizes. Going back to the pieces/player/run concept, in 25-man, 5 bosses drop 2 pieces of T8 and in 10-man 5 bosses drop 1 piece of T8. In 25 man, it's .4 pieces/player/raid, in 10-man it's .5 pieces/player/raid. A person doing only 25-mans will get all 4 pieces in roughly 10 weeks. A person doing only 10-mans will get all 4 pieces in roughly 8 weeks. A person doing both will get all 4 pieces in roughly 5 weeks. Emblems of Conquest and Emalon both give additional ways to acquire gear quickly. In the case of Emalon it's simply additional incentive to do both the 10 and 25-man versions of raids. Emblems of Conquest are even more incentive but *only* if you're clearing 10-man hard modes (which is something GC has acknowledged in the past).

A significantly less important issue involves the initial gearing up during the release of a new expansion. Upon the release of Wrath, the difference between 10 and 25 was meaningless. The difference people looked at was attainable gear vs current gear. If I'm using an ilvl 180 blue, I don't care if I'm upping it to an ilvl 213 or an ilvl 226 epic- It's a huge upgrade either way. A 25-man raid clearing Naxxramas could attain roughly 60 pieces of epic loot per run, or 2.4 pieces of loot per player per run. Adding in Malygos and Sartharion you're looking at maybe 2.6 pieces of loot per player per week from 25-man raids. From 10-man raids, you're looking at maybe 35 pieces of epic loot total, or 3.5 pieces of loot per player per run. A player completing both 10 and 25 man raids can get geared up from blues to solid epics twice as fast as a player who is gearing up from one or the other. I mean, that should be pretty obvious to most people- If you raid more, you get geared up faster. There is almost no solution that can prevent this upon the initial release of an expansion. However, this won't be an issue until the next expansion is released, so we can let that rest... for now.

If players are intended to have a significant advantage by clearing both then that's perfectly fine and top-end players will continue to do both for a huge list of reasons. If we're intended to focus deeply on one style of raiding then the incentives for doing the other size of raids needs to be reduced. Removing the ability for both levels of gear to affect one tier-set would be a step in the right direction- Though only a first step, with many more that would have to follow after.

Easy Modes Are Easy

2009-05-04T14:25:00.001-07:00

Obviously this is cause for concern. I've seen four general complaints from people regarding the difficulty modes in Ulduar. Each one is basically retarded and I'm tired of hearing them so I'll form some quick arguments against them in hopes of directing people here to shut them up.

Complaint #1: Easy Modes Are Easy
Yes. That's the point. The goal is for easy modes to eventually be puggable. Not necessarily right away, but eventually people will pick up reasonable gear and the strategies for each boss will become widely known. Most bosses in Ulduar allow 2-3 skilled players to carry an entire raid group under the sole condition that you do easy modes. The first boss where I don't feel this is the case is Mimiron. Mimi, Vezax, and Yogg-Saron all require adequate levels of attention from your entire raid.

Complaint #2: Easy Modes Are Hard
No. If they're hard for you, you're probably doing something wrong. Maybe your strategy is bad, your players are bad, or you're asleep. I'm not kidding on that last one- We lost a rogue on Mimiron because she fell asleep during the boss fight. Don't do that. If you're having a serious problem with an easy-mode fight make sure everyone knows what to do and is paying attention. Up until Mimiron, bashing your head against a fight repeatedly will take it down. Mimiron and beyond you need to add some skill to the headbashing but it's all still relatively straightforward.

Complaint #3: Hard Modes Are Hard
Yes, again this is the point. You're not intended to walk in and defeat a hard mode. Some of the hard-modes are intended to take the limit of possible skill, luck, and dedication. If one player is underperforming, if you're missing raid buffs or synergy, if you don't have a solid strategy worked out, if you're praying to get lucky on one aspect, or if you're just doing it wrong somehow, expect to die. A lot.

Complaint #4: Hard Modes Are Easy
No, you're wrong. Either you're in a top-tier guild and trolling, you exploited a bug, you don't know what you're talking about, or you fought a pre-buff version. Do note that Blizzard tends to be buffing hard modes to make them even harder than they currently are.

Sustainable Strategy

2009-04-24T13:47:00.001-07:00

A sustainable strategy is one which can be repeated week to week, isn't reliant on bad luck and can survive a small number of deaths. It's basically the difference between farm status and getting a kill. Increasing gear level even one step, like pre-Naxx to post-Naxx or Naxx to Ulduar can make weak strategies viable, but you should avoid falling into this trap. For example, in Burning Crusade I did Void Reaver the normal way many, many times. Months later, just before the release of 3.0, I did a pug with a small guild on my server. Their strategy hurt my brain. Ultimately, they had everyone in melee range except for two hunters who ran in circles avoiding explosions. No one in the middle had to worry about the orbs but 23 people were taking VR's AOE instead of the normal 10 or less. Additionally, everyone had a 10% threat ceiling instead of the standard ranged 30% window. A few star healers were healing so much that with VR's knockback they would pull aggro halfway through the fight. The strategy is definitely viable but it's significantly harder than the standard "stay at range and avoid death balls" strategy. The prevelance of badge gear, however, allowed them to occasionally succeed with that kind of madness.

One of the primary goals for a sustainble strategy is for it to be simple. For one, complexity can be very hard to repeat or sustain; For a time our strategy on Ignis relied on no less than four players working perfectly. A Death Knight had to get mobs into a scorch, a druid would root them there, a hunter would Distracting Shot them into the water and a warlock would kill them. Keeping up a chain like that is extremely difficult and the entire thing was replaced by the death knight learning how to play (I take all the fault for that one >_>). Additionally, complexity is extremely hard to transmit. If one of your raid members has to be replaced imagine how you'll feel explaining the job to their replacement. "When the death knight calls for it, you root the enemy in scorch. However, be sure to have a different enemy targetted so that you can root it and free the first one whenever it's called out or the hunter won't be able to pull it around later." vs. "DPS the boss". Personally I trust most of the core of my guild to pick up even complex strategies reasonably quickly but it's mostly unnecessary; A complex strategy is a sign that you might be doing something wrong.

Additionally you should avoid strategies based on luck unless you hate your raid members. If part of your strategy involves, "pray that this event doesn't happen" then it will happen on your most perfect kill attempt. I can't think of any good examples that have happened to my guild, but I'm sure there have been Sartharion strategies where the MT getting a void zone results in an automatic wipe due to tricky or very tight positioning. If you've failed to account for any mechanic in a boss fight and you're just hoping that it goes well, you need to change your strategy. Focus on aspects of a fight which can become much easier or harder based purely on luck and find a way to do it better. Something similar if not exactly what I'm getting at is Auriaya. During our first few attempts we all stacked then killed the defender. It leaves a void zone which kills people extremely quickly and having the whole raid there meant some people would die every time. To combat this, we tried to Grip the defender out of the raid then stun it. However, the defender is unpredictable and its pounce causes it to ignore pretty much every pull mechanic, thus we can't guarantee that the defender will die where we want it to. An easy way to deal with this is to have the raid spread out; The defender will die on top of someone and only one person will have to move out of the void zone each time rather than the entire raid plus we don't have to deal with trying to move around a wildly pouncing cat.

If possible, personal responsibility should be thrown onto a few specific players. For example while fighting Freya she will occasionally spawn a Gift of Eonar- A small tree which grows for a while and then heals all of Freya's allies. Rather than say, "Anyone who sees a tree should kill it" say, "Johnny and Bob focus on killing trees." We have our guild leader and one trusted rogue focus on killing any trees which happen to spawn; This frees up a lot of DPS so that they no longer have to think about anything but killing whatever happens to be in front of them. Just make sure that it's people you trust to perform their role! You don't want someone to be like "But wait, how do I click the manticron cube? It failed and I have this debuff...."

A higher-level aspect of sustainable strategies relies entirely on trust. Mimiron is a perfect example of this- If you trust everyone that isn't you to perform their job properly it frees up a huge amount of mental strain. I don't worry about calling out missiles or spinups for other people; I assume that they'll deal with it themselves thus I don't have to spend the time processing where a missile is going or who is going to be hit with a spinup, I just get away from it myself. In phase 4 I focus only on the small set of attacks which is dangerous to me and ignore which direction the middle or head is facing; It's not important. A similar idea is letting the back half of 4H work on their own- For example in 10 man you have 8 people in front and two in the back, a tank and a healer. Now the entire back of the room doesn't matter to the front, it's something they don't have to worry about. The same situation happens in Sartharion+3; By leaving one tank and two healers on Sartharion, Sarth is effectively not part of the fight for the other 22 raid members. Ideally they won't spend any time whatsoever thinking about Sartharion's position or breaths- That's ALL dealt with by the 3-man Sartharion Squad. In the same vein, the 3-man Sartharion Squad shouldn't have to worry about anything the other 22 people are doing; It's useful to know when adds in the portal are going to die but it's not really necessary since you can just watch Sarth's buffs and act accordingly.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that you should make sure your strategies are sustainable or else a small change in guild roster, raiders, bad luck, or a small stupid mistake could destroy a perfect attempt on a simple raid boss.

Personal Responsibility

2009-04-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

Personal Responsibility is the largest factor in turning an easy fight into a hard fight without significantly changing mechanics. Lets examine two concept fights quickly to see how this plays out.

In our first fight, we're up against a giant demon. There's a cube in one corner of the room. Every 45 seconds on the dot, he begins a 5 second cast. At the end of the cast, he enrages and does a ton of damage to the main tank unless someone in the room clicks on the box.

In our second fight, we're up against a giant demon. There's a cube in one corner of the room. Every 45 seconds on the dot, he begins a 5 second cast and tosses one player a key. At the end of the cast, he enrages and does a ton of damage to the main tank unless the player with the key clicks on the box.

There's nothing stopping you from tanking him at the box. It's not an issue of "One player has to run over, taking more time." The only change is that the boss chooses which player has to click the box rather than your raid choosing. This tiny change has a huge impact on the difficulty of the fight.

A second huge distinction is the difference between an improper reaction killing one player vs an improper reaction killing an entire raid. This is the difference between Mimiron and Deconstructor. In Mimiron, if you're targetted by a misile and you don't move, you die. But who cares? If one retarded DPS dies, our Mimiron attempt isn't over. Of course, there are individuals like the main tank whose death can signal the end of a fight but in general it's not a big deal. On the other hand, if you don't move out of the raid with Light or Gravity bomb you might kill everyone and effectively wipe the raid.

So, we have two questions- One player or any player and one death or a raid wipe. There are examples of all possible combinations of the two, though the rarest by far is any player-one death. A good example of this is something like Yogg-Saron's portals, where any player can choose to enter the portals and work on his mind but any player who fails inside the portal dies (without wiping the raid).

It all comes down to personal responsibility and quality of players. There are fights like Hodir where you can let your terrible players kill themselves and laugh it off while they're dead, but you'd better get on replacing them right quick; A badly timed gravity bomb on one of those same players has a good shot at wiping you on Deconstructor.

Percentages

2009-04-22T04:01:00.000-07:00

Just quicky while it's on my mind; Percentages are bad.

For example:
10% of 60,000 is 6,000
115% of 6,000 is 6,900
200% of 6,900 is 13,800

Lastly, 13,800 twice every 10 seconds is 2760 HP/S.
Assuming a reasonable/sane critrate, it is only 2,000 HP/S though.

But hey, if you want me to be able to solo heroic content when I'm raid buffed, then thanks for lettuce gnomes. I'll see if my numbers work out in game some time tonight...

Aww, Death Strike can't crit. That means it tops around 1400 HP/S, about the same as a terrible L80 healer can pull; I've survived instance runs with a healer at ~1k HP/S.

The Four Types

2009-04-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

I would argue that there are four types of raiders in WoW. A player can be either Aware or Unaware and either Good or Bad at their role.

I'll add a diagram in here later on.

Lets take a look at each of our four corners.

A player who is Good/Aware is what you want all your raiders to be. This player will make you fall over sideways when you see the DPS charts for Hodir. They'll never die to void zones, fires, falling rocks, poison clouds, or other retardation. They'll move when they get Gravity Bomb and Light Bomb. They might pull aggro here and there but 90% of the time it'll be the tank's fault for not getting enough threat rather than the DPSer's fault for attacking early. Good/Aware healers will never let someone die. Their mad feats of survival will be spoken of unto 8 future generations. Vezax clouds stop functioning and they get no mana return during the fight? Who cares, they don't need it. A tank in this category will always get an add off the healer, can hold multiple adds or a boss and adds, and STILL manages to dodge lightning in Thorim, or missiles in Mimiron, etc.

The rest of the corners are slightly more depressing. Lets go with a Good/Unaware player. This guy is the bane of your Naxxramas run, because he'll seem to do pretty damn well. He might top the meters on patchwerk or blow you away on Gluth. He might die on Thaddius, but hey I bet he just lagged or something, right? As soon as you hit Ulduar, this player disappears. He kills everyone on Deconstructor. He can't kite eyes on Kologarn. He eats Flash Freeze. His DPS is solid when he doesn't have to move around or think much about what he's doing but as soon as you put him on new content or challenging content he'll bite the dust left and right. Sure his DPS is great on farm content, but if his DPS drops 80% on new content and he dies half the time, is he even useful anymore? Healers in this category are likely to forget to heal themselves or can't pay attention to more than one or two people at a time. Tanks in this category are fine MTing a boss, but never ask them to do anything more complex; They won't be able to handle constant add streams or move enemies around much.

Next on the list is a Bad/Aware player. This guy is interesting. His DPS on Patchwerk is atrocious. He's beating the tanks, sure, but not by much. You're never really sure why his DPS is 50% of that of other players of his class in the raid, but apparently there's something your other DPS is doing right that he's doing wrong. On the other hand, his DPS never changes and you've never seen him die. You just have to wonder, does it MATTER that he isn't dying? Who cares that he's alive if he's not putting out any DPS? A healer in this category should always be placed on raid healing. If you put them on the MT, the MT will die. Whoops, my HP/S was too low! But on the raid, they can always see who's taking damage and heal them back up. Just takes... a couple... seconds... to... finish... Tanks in this category pick up all the adds everywhere in the room, then die. At least he got them off the healers! Too bad he only has 30k buffed HP and all his gear is gemmed for spell penetration!

Last, we have the terrifying and horrible to behold Bad/Unaware. This guy makes you cry every time you have to invite him to a raid. As a ranged DPS, he dies to patchwerk 90 seconds into the fight. You didn't think it was possible, but he does it anyway. His damage is atrocious during the 5% of each fight where he's alive. In the thirty seconds it takes for him to find the nearest void zone or eat the first breath on Sartharion he doesn't break 2k DPS. Tanks and healers in this category are extremely dangerous to have. A bad unaware tank won't pop cooldowns to survive incoming burst and will stand in fire at the same time. A healer in this category will probably die pretty early on, but it won't matter because their healing on the MT isn't noticeable and they let people die all over the place if they're raid-healing.

I don't feel like the four corners are entirely distinct; It's a huge gradient and people can end up anywhere on the map. There are levels of skill as well as levels of awareness; Some people will live on Thaddius and Deconstructor but can't quite match up a cozy fire with Starlight. Some people can kite Constructs into the fire every single time but can't react to a random spawn add entering a fight. You can probably think of hundreds of other examples.

Naxxrammas let a lot of people slip through because it's so easy. There are many fights where it's difficult to tell where on the awareness scale someone falls. You might notice a lot of players' DPS decrease from what it was in Naxx because they can't handle the movement in Ulduar well. You might notice some people faceplanting that you weren't worried about before. These are the people that just can't react fast enough in new content but didn't need to since they memorized Naxx

Suboptimal Performance

2009-04-19T12:15:00.000-07:00

Ghostcrawler made the comment recently that players do not perform at maximum efficiency. Ever. This is an interesting point. It's relatively simple to figure out the optimal rotation and from that optimal gearsets for individual characters. But how do we know what someone is going to do wrong? There's probably only one BEST way to play your character, but there are hundreds or thousands of ways to play your character WRONG.

To be honest, I struggle with this one. My best guess is that Blizzard has projected numbers for situations. For example, using purely hypothetical numbers, they want a Warlock to do 5,000 DPS at the optimal level in a specific tier. Then they can balance hard-mode content off something close to that number. My guess as to normal mode content is that blizzard cuts it by a percent, I'd say roughly 40%. So, if they're seeing 5,000 DPS from top of the top players, they'll balance easymode content for the assumption that an average Warlock is doing 3,000 DPS.

The big problem is really the PTR. You see, it's very easy to tune content to hardcore players via the test realms. Players in high-end guilds are more likely to have scheduled raid times that aren't being utilized because they're clearing current content too fast thus giving them scheduled blocks which can be spent on the PTR. They're more likely to go to the PTR as a guild rather than individually, allowing easy group setup and testing. They're more likely to stick around through bugs because they've dealt with it all before. All of this means that Blizz most likely doesn't get good numbers for easy-mode testing on the test realm.

The Beta, on the other hand, is a different story. Sure there were a multitude of high end guilds that did serious testing in beta, but there was also a multitude of mediocre or downright terrible players that were in beta for reasons like Blizzcon or various contests.

Blizzard has stated many times that Ulduar was intended to be more difficult than Naxxramas, and it definitely has been. But it's interesting to think that if Blizzard intended for the easy mode of each to be clearable by 90% of the playerbase and based their tuning off the PTR for Ulduar vs the Closed Beta for Naxx, you'd see roughly the same difficulty increase that we actually have.

Correlation is not causation. It probably isn't meaningful or sane. Just something to think about.

Ulduar Released

2009-04-16T10:21:00.001-07:00

Yeah as you probably know 3.1 is out, which means Ulduar is out, which means my guild has been running late nights trying to get in the freaking instance and get things done, so I haven't had a lot of time to post.

So far, we've been destroyed in the 25man due to server stability issues. Day one we did Flame Lev in one shot, and Razorscale in 3. Ignis destroyed us because of bugs on day 1 and we didn't go back day 2.

Day two we messed with Deconstructor for a bit and didn't realize we were effectively doing the hard mode until our third attempt. Our fourth attempt, we got him to 50% but had some issues with adds. We'd have killed him on a fifth attempt, but we had to wait between 30 and 60 minutes between attempts due to server stability issues (HURR DURRRRRR)

10man, we did FL+1 and Razorscale day 1 before getting stopped at Deconstructor due to RL issues- My internet was down, so I was playing from a net cafe, and the place closed in the middle of our last attempt, gfg. Day two we killed Decon, attempted Ignis for a while, decided he's too hard and walked on. Two-shotted Kologarn, three on council, effectively one on Auriaya, then went to Hodir. Watching a raid of people that've been up for three days trying to dodge icicles was amazingly hilarious. More 25m tonight, cleaning up 10man late friday.

Soon as I'm not spending all my time focused on Ulduar, I'll get back here with something useful.

Interesting Solutions to Difficult Problems.

2009-04-12T13:43:00.000-07:00

Iron Council in Ulduar has 3 bosses. The hard mode is based on killing Steelbreaker last.

Steelbreaker has a one-shot attack called Fusion Punch on a roughly 15 second cooldown. He also picks a target and causes them to meltdown; i.e. they do an absurd level of damage, then after 60 seconds they die. It's like Vaelestrasz from BWL if you remember that. However, he ONLY picks the main tank.

Every time a player dies, Steelbreaker's damage goes up by 25%. Blowing cooldowns, you can survive with ONE death. A second death will be pretty much GG.

Thus, we have a roughly 2 minute timer from the start of the Steelbreaker phase. Present theory is that you have two tanks on him. Tank one gets Meltdown, survives for 60 seconds, then dies horribly while tank two taunts, tries to survive maybe two fusion punches, and if he's not dead and you're out of CDs you lose, or if Meltdown ends on the 2nd tank, you lose.

I pose a different theory; Note first that I have not attempted this fight as the PTR has been unstable every time I've logged on and no kind GMs have ported me into the instance freely to allow my guild to test content. Alas.

What if a non-tank soaks the first Meltdown? And the second?

As a Death Knight, I should have the survivability via IBF and AMS to survive 6 consecutive fusion punches (IBF, AMS, VB, VB(Still), AMS, IBF). That puts us at 90 seconds deep, with one tank instead of two (So a little more DPS), and one DPS is doing ridiculous damage because they get Meltdown, meaning that the kill should happen EVEN FASTER, allowing more wiggle room.

Did Blizzard consider this option? Is it prevented in some manner? If Meltdown is unpredictable, then I could see it being non-viable, but if even the first Meltdown can be caught, this is an extremely simple way to nullify some of the difficulty of the fight. I'd bet money that the sum total of Blizzard's design team and the raid testers that have seen all the content is better than my top of the head creativity, but who knows? There have been some exciting issues in the past.

We'll see what happens when Ulduar hits; I'm pretty optimistic that the design of the dungeon will be flawed in many places, allowing us to make clever use of game mechanics to get a solid set of hardmodes down in week two. Onward, to Ulduar!

The Stamina Treadmill

2009-04-09T10:19:00.000-07:00

The state of tanking and healing in WoW really seriously bothers me.

Say you have 50% avoidance and bosses are hitting for 60% of your HP, attacking once every second. This means you need to be healed constantly. To be precise, you need to be healed for on average 30% of your HP each second with spikes up to 60% of your HP each second. Next tier comes out. You get to 60% avoidance, but even with more stamina, bosses are hitting for 80% of your HP once a second. There's no buffer zone. Healers are crying. ALGALON SMASH or some such (We can pray). Now, you need to be healed for on average 48% of your HP each second, with spikes up to 80%. But, does the average mean anything anymore? The odds that you'll be struck at least twice in three seconds are 35%. I would posit that in such situations, healers have no more leeway with 60% avoidance than with 50% avoidance. I would posit that up until maybe 75% avoidance or higher, healers would not see any significant breathing room. In other words, stacking avoidance in this scenario does not in fact help you survive in any way shape or form.

So say that of your 60% avoidance, 10% is from gems. Switch it out. Swap it allll to Stamina. We've shown that reducing incoming damage won't offer you significant survivability, thus your only option is to increase your HP, giving you a bigger buffer zone. But wait! Now that our HP is higher, the boss is only hitting for 70% of our total HP. This isn't as challenging as Blizzard intended, and thus they increase the boss' damage until he's hitting for 80% of our new HP. And now our poor avoidance tank from the beginning is getting hit for 90% of his HP. If healers though healing the stamina tank was scary, they think healing the avoidance tank is an absolute nightmare, even though he's taking significantly less overall damage.

This CAN be mitigated via avoidance. When you reach roughly 80% avoidance, you're dodging and parrying SO many attacks that healers can actually notice and respond to easy patches. However, the levels of avoidance necessary to provide breathing room for healers have been removed from the game since they were ridiculously unbalanced. I wholeheartedly agree with that, but it still means that stamina stacking is basically a necessity.

Right now, the game for healers is based around HP/S. Blizzard can increase the strain on healers by increasing the damage that a tank takes, forcing them to heal higher, spikier damage. Mana is no concern, the only question is whether they can pump enough heals in few enough GCDs to keep a tank alive through ridiculous burst. I disagree with this model entirely. It funnels more and more healing to one target, actually makes RNG much worse because the odds of getting an unlucky 10+ consecutive hits enters the realm of probability.

How do we fix it? The way GC has talked about before. What if we tripled everyone's HP and torched mana regen and HP/S? What if the game wasn't always about OH MY GOSH IT SPIKES SO BIG and instead was about some bosses being big spiky damage, some bosses being medium but constant damage, and some bosses being spread AOE damage (with mixtures of the various types of course)? Tanks would have to balance surviving spikiness with decreasing overall damage taken, or else healers wouldn't be able to keep up, or would run OOM! Yeesh, I haven't heard things like that in months. Healers would have to know which heals are efficient, and when they can use big slow efficient heals versus fast medium OH GOD heals, etc etc.

I can't claim that this idea is necessarily a good thing, I can't claim that everyone hates the current mechanics, and I can't claim that this will ever get changed. I just absolutely despise the fact that as each tier increases, we MUST stack stamina above basically all other stats to have a reasonable chance of survival.

Edit: Friends of yore, forgive me, I'm becoming an EHP tank :(

Ten Percent

2009-04-05T04:04:00.000-07:00

Random is everywhere in WoW. Most spells have a range of damage. All weapons have a range of damage. Did you hit or miss? If you hit, was it a crit? Did your talents proc? How about your trinkets or weapon enchants? Maybe your embroidery?

In each action, a multitude of things can happen or not happen entirely randomly. When we talk about increasing DPS, increasing healing, or increasing survivability, we invariably talk about the midpoint, the average DPS something will grant. Moving from 20% crit to 26% crit is generally an increase of about 5% total damage (126/120). But if at the end of a fight you cast precisely 100 spells and 40 crit, how powerful was that increase to your crit chance? And what if only 15% crit?

So, this led me to a question. If we look at the *average* damage a player will do, what are the odds that he'll spontaneously do 10% more than normal? I'm going to be dealing only with crits here. Proc chances and things are beyond the scope of this project.

Lets normalize. We're casting 100 spells, each spell does 10 damage. A crit is 20 damage. At 30% crit, we're expecting 1300 total damage. This equates to 70 hits and 30 crits. A ten percent increase would be 1430 total damage, or 57 hits and 43 crits, or 43% crit chance.

The odds that we get 30 crits within 100 attacks is given by (CritChance^(NumCrits)) * ((1-CritChance)^(TotalAttacks-NumCrits)) * (Number of possible combinations of NumCrits and (TotalAttacks-NumCrits)) For example, given 2 coin flips of a fair coin, the odds of getting one head and one tails is .5^1 * .5^1 * 2 ([HT] or [TH] are both viable) which is .5 * .5 * 2 or .25 * 2 or .5, which makes sense, as there are four total options and two lead to the desired result. So, that math definitely works, and I feel better.

Crit Chance, Num Crits, and Total Attacks are all determined by our calculation. However, the number of possible combinations of crit/hit is harder to get at since we're dealing with reasonably large sample sizes (100). This is actually given to us by the formula [(Total Attacks)! / ([Num Crits]! * [Total Attacks - Num Crits]!)] or in our case 100! / (30! * 70!)

Thus, our whole formula is

(CritChance^(NumCrits)) * ((1-CritChance)^(TotalAttacks-NumCrits)) * ([TotalAttacks]! / [(NumCrits)! * (TotalAttacks - NumCrits)!])

In the case of 30/100 crits with a 30% crit chance, this is:

.3^30 * .7^70 * 100! / (30! * 70!) = 8.68%

And this tells us... What? Pretty much nothing. The odds of getting EXACTLY the right number of crits is relatively low. Hopefully you already knew this. But see, we're looking for something more. We want the chance of a range of values. For example, the chance of getting AT LEAST 10% more damage means the chance of getting 43 to 100 crits. Ultimately, we have to use summation. As in, we have to pick a total and a crit chance, then calculate it for each integer value. I don't like doing that by hand, so I wrote a small program to do it for me. I won't be reproducing intermediate steps, just end results.

43-100% crit, or 10% or higher improvement: .4% chance
0-17% crit, or 10% or higher drop: .2%

37-100% crit, or 5%+ up: 8% chance
0-23% crit, or 5%+ down: 7.5% chance

Hmm, with 100 casts, the odds of a 10% increase are almost nil and the odds of a 5% increase are pretty unreasonable. But nothing right now takes that long. For example, with a 2 second cast spell, killing Patchwerk in 2:30, we're looking at 75 casts. And the burst phases of most fights are much shorter, for example the Tenebron phase of +3 should be lasting less than 45 seconds or MAYBE 30 casts. So lets say 40% crit, 30 casts. Midpoint should be 12, 16 is roughly a 10% increase.

30 casts, 40% crit
16-30 crits: 9.7% chance
0-8 crits: 9.4% chance

5% variance:
14-30 crits: 28% chance
0-10 crits: 29% chance.

Interesting. Even on a short fight with a high crit chance, the odds that you'll crit significantly more than you should is pretty low; a 10% increase is definitely possible for an individual, but you'll almost never see the whole raid get even a 5% DPS increase.

I'm quite surprised, I was expecting to see crit give a much higher variance. This is actually pretty cool, since it means that a bad group will almost never get lucky and do a ton of DPS, and a good group will almost never have terrible luck and lose a ton of DPS. Which means if you're seeing variance in your raid's DPS, you should probably look at external factors, like void zones spawning three deep around your mobs.

Edit: Source for the program is here-
http://www.saichotictech.net/WoW/Binomials.lua

The Standard WoW Forums

2009-04-03T17:28:00.000-07:00

Profession Balance

C/Ped my discussion on professions over here, and ended up doing quite a bit more math to prove that JC is overpowered. Pasting that back here:

I *will* go ahead and do the math for everyone having epic gems. I'll use my current armory as a base for the math.

--
Socketed pieces + Bonus

Head
Obsidian Greathelm
B: 8 str

Shoulder
Hateful Gladiator's Dreadplate Shoulders
Y: 4 crit

Chest
Hateful Gladiator's Dreadplate Chestpiece
R,Y:6 resil

Gloves
Deadly Gladiator's Dreadplate Gauntlets
B: 4 crit

Waist
Flame-Bathed Steel Girdle
B: 6 str

Legs
Hateful Gladiator's Dreadplate Legguards
R,B: 6 str

Feet
Death Inured Sabatons
R,B: 6 hit

So, with rare gems, the max str we can get is

10 * 16 = 160 Str (A red in each socket, ignore the socket bonus)

With JC gems, the max Str we can get is
7 * 16 = 112 (Red gem in every socket that doesn't give a str bonus, and in the red on the legs)
3 * 27 = 81 (JC in the Head:B, Waist:B, and Legs:B)
6 + 6 + 8 = 20 (Socket bonuses)

213, a 53 str increase. The bonus is intended to be 32 (Without the socket bonuses it'd be 33, a perfectly viable number)

Stormjewels grant 20 str. Assuming that's right for epic gems, max without JC:

10 * 20 = 200 Str

With JC
7 * 20 = 140
3 * 27 = 81
6 + 6 + 8 = 20

241, an increase of 41, still over 25% more than other classes get.

But wait, I totally gave in on the idea of meta sockets. Assuming that we MUST activate a crit+Critdamage meta, that means we have to have 2 blues in the non-JC setup. Minimizing the impact puts a purple in the head and in the legs. The rare-gem setup drops from 160 str to 158, making JC a 55 str increase at rare-gem levels, and the epic-gem setup drops from 200 to 194, making JC a 47 str increase at epic-gem levels, or almost 50% more than the 32 attainable by other professions.

Once again, this is only really meaningful if you're stacking one stat to the extreme, but when you are the benefit from JC is significantly higher than that of any other profession. It will get better with epic gems but it still won't be balanced.

--

The results of posting this over there are a study in why I stopped reading the WoW Forums. A long time ago, I played a warlock. There were some things we'd proven, and for a while any time someone said, for example, "Use Curse of Weakness, Curse of Recklessness is too dangerous" I would post math to the contrary. After a while, I got tired of reproducing the math constantly, and just said, "X is wrong, Y is right." By the time I started doing that, I had so much of a following that it didn't matter WHAT I said, people would follow me, and even if I was wrong I had a horde of people saying "Listen to Psy, for he is right, because he was right before."

That sort of thinking, along the lines of, "I'm not going to back up my position with anything other than a gut feeling and some anger," along with the community's acceptance of it, really destroys the forums' usefulness.

Professions, Continued

2009-04-01T13:35:00.000-07:00

This is the 2nd in a 2-part series. The first part is here: Professions
Please read that first.

I actually didn't know how Mixology worked until researching professions. Now that I've looked into it, I feel that alchemy is the most flexible profession since its benefit changes every time you pop a new elixir. Tired of getting a +37 spell power bonus? Pop a mageblood flask and your profession is now granting you additional Mp5. The issue Alchemy faces is that aside from four specific stats granted by flasks, you must pick one offensivee and one defensive stat in which to gain a bonus. Also, if you're not doing farm content and your greatest benefit comes from elixirs rather than flasks, you'll go broke extremely fast popping two elixirs every boss attempt.

Scaling
Most professions do not scale. Their buff is static, from now until the next expansion. Note that Blizz never added new ring enchants or gave us a different set of flasks; We were basically using the same things at the end of Sunwell that we used learning Kara and Gruul.

The two exceptions to this rule are BS and JC. Blacksmithing grants a bonus proportional to available gems. When epic gems are released, the bonus granted by BS will grow. Right now, BS has relatively equal power compared with other professions, but its flexibility is arguably tied with Mixology. With the release of epic gems, BS will be significantly more powerful than any other profession, and still arguably the most flexible.

JC scales inversely with gem level. When epic gems are released, the benefit per JC gem will drop. However, JC still has the bonus of being able to get you socket bonuses and meta activation for free. With epic gems, JC will most likely grant you equal base power with the other professions, but will be slightly stronger than average because it allows you to stack one stat very high while still activating metas and getting set bonuses.

So, now we have a scale of professions. There are five rough tiers

Jewelcrafting
~~Blacksmithing and Alchemy
Leatherworking, Enchanting, and Inscription
Tailoring
Mining, Skinning, and Herbalism

So, I have two questions and two suggestions

First, my questions--
Is Blizzard happy with the balance of gathering professions being significantly weaker than other professions?
I could see this going either way. Personally, I feel that the external use of a profession should not affect its raid viability but my roommate feels that since gathering professions tend to be easier to level and more rewarding, they should be less powerful in terms of buffs. I will leave discussion of HOW they can be made more flexible for another day.

Which profession is closest to "balanced" in your eyes? Do we want to buff everything up to the level of Jewelcrafting, or do we want to nerf JC down to Alchemy level and buff the rest up to there?
Personally, I feel like BS/Alchemy are the "best" professions balance-wise, as they give you huge flexibility without going overboard in terms of power. It'd be nice to see everything below those two become more flexible, and JC drop down to their level. However, it's entirely possible that JC is the baseline that we should be aiming for, in which case we should crack down and figure out how to buff the other professions to provide equal buffs elegantly. For my suggestions, I assume current BS/Alch are the baseline.

On to the suggestions--
Switch Dragon's Eye gems to standard colors instead of prismatics
If JC gems followed the color of base gems, then we would not have the issue of stat-stacking in JC that we get currently, since JC gems could never give a larger-than-intended bonus. They would also provide no benefit in terms of meta activation, which would also help decrease stat stacking along with the overall power of JC. JC gems may need slightly more stats to combat the advent of epic gems, but if this change does not go through, JC will still provide more stat benefit than any profession in addition to free meta activation (And thus huge flexibility)

Change the BS sockets to be colored, one yellow and one blue, and affect the socket bonus on the piece of gear they are added to.
This would help decrease stat stacking, since you couldn't place, say, a full stamina gem in both and still get the full effect of your profession. Additionally, it pushes you toward using split-color gems, which helps prevent stat stacking, and with a blue and a yellow socket it gives you viable options without forcing reds everywhere (People might do it anyway, but at a cost.) This gives you the same sort of split that Alchemy does with elixirs where you must choose one offensive and one defensive benefit, preventing you from stacking any one stat really high, except flask buffs.

Make the BS sockets "Tiny" sockets that can only handle rare-level gems
This will prevent BS from scaling while no other profession scales along with it. It wouldn't be too hard to come up with some sort of meta explanation ("The sockets BS can add to your gloves are very tiny. Epic gems simply don't fit") and the transition to epic gems won't cause problems.

With the changes I've presented, all non-gathering professions except Tailoring and Engineering would be on very even footing. Some would be more flexible, some would allow slightly more of one stat or another, but the differences would be minor enough that no profession would be "The Raider Profession."

I haven't studied Tailoring in depth, nor have I taken a significant look into Engineering. I feel that both are weak right now. I know engineering is getting a significant buff. If this thread turns out well, I'll see if I can make comparisons between the effective DPS improvement of Eng and Tailoring vs the other professions, since simple stat comparisons won't work. There are two overall schools of thought regarding these two professions. The first is that they're unique and we should balance them taking uniqueness into consideration. The second is that different is inherently inequal and they should be homogenized into the standard +Stat role in some manner. I'm a bigger fan of uniqueness, but it does make them extremely hard to balance

--I will be crossposting this to the WoW forums to get some feedback on my questions and suggestions, hence some of the wording. Putting it here as a reference to get some feedback from friends first.

Professions

2009-03-31T21:48:00.000-07:00

Presently, there are 11 professions in WoW. Each profession grants unique buffs to the user. I've split the buffs into categories and listed the maximum benefit of each profession:

Gathering
Skinning: Master of Anatomy
Herbalism: Lifeblood
Mining: Toughness

Armor
Tailoring: Embroideries - Darkglow, Lightweave, Swordguard
Leatherworking: Fur Lining - Attack Power, Spell Power, Stamina, or 60 Resistance to any school.
Blacksmithing: Two Free Sockets - Bracer and Glove

Buff
Enchanting: Ring Enchants - 32 Attack Power, 19 Spell Power, 24 Stamina
Alchemy: Mixology - Effects vary. Flasks: 37 Spell Power, 64 AP, 13 MP5, or 220 HP

Expansion
Jewelcrafting: Epic Gems. Too numerous to list.
Inscription: Inscriptions (Hurrr)- Axe, Crag, Pinnacle, Storm

Hilarious
Engineering: A variety of oddities- Primarily Hand-Mounted Pyro Rocket and Hyperspeed Accelerators

Now that we have a compiled list of the effects of each profession, we can talk balance. Engineering is a very incomplete profession, and as such will be left out of basically all discussion. Several changes are coming in 3.1, and I will wait until it's out to judge it.

Flexibility
While there are three roles in the game, they're often split into four for buff purposes: Tank, AP-DPS, SP-DPS, and Healer. Many professions have four choices specifically for that reason. There are two huge balance issues in terms of flexibility. First and foremost, the gathering professions are completely and totally inflexible. They grant a buff. Enjoy it. Mining will never improve your DPS. Skinning will never improve your survivability. End of story.

On the other end of the spectrum, Jewelcrafting and Blacksmithing provide an absurd level of flexibility. Since Blacksmithing allows ANY two additional gems to be placed freely, you can stack one stat to about the level of another profession, or you can spread out the benefits between stats. You can also improve a number of stats that other professions do not, and you can modify your choices very easily. Jewelcrafting doesn't have quite the same range as Blacksmithing, but it still has far more choice and flexibility that most professions don't.

The only other flexibility issue is relatively minor. Tailoring lacks a survivability bonus and its healer effect is weak at best, making it slightly less flexible than "average" choices.

A friend of mine asked me for a more specific explanation of flexibility- For example, when would it become a real issue? A Ret Pally isn't going to swap her AP Inscription for a Healing inscription, she's simply going to use them on different piece of gear. However, there's one huge scenario where flexibility comes into play. Say your class greatly benefits from crit rating, so you picked Skinning and maxed it for some crit. Suddenly, there is a change! Now you need to stack Str, and crit isn't nearly as powerful for you anymore. Maybe Blizz hotfixed a mechanic or changed some balance isse. Suddenly, your choice of profession is weaker. However, if you picked JC or BS, you just switch some gems! HURRRRR.

Alternately, say you're sitting right at the hit cap. Then, you get a new piece of gear, and lose a tiny bit of hit. You can just replace a Str gem in your prismatic glove socket with a Str/Hit gem and you're good to go. No need to worry about socket bonuses or anything, and you can replace varying levels of Str with Hit, or vice versa.

Power
In many situations, bonuses are relatively balanced. It's difficult to quantify the effect of Lifeblood, but for example going from 3 Rare Stamina gems to 3 JC Stamina gems is an increase of 17 Stamina per (41 - 24) or 51 total. In comparison, the Mining bonus is precisely 50 Stamina, and a single-point difference is too small to worry about. However, Mixology grants only 220 additional HP. This is worth less than 20 stamina. While this MIGHT be made up for by the assumed benefit of an alchemist stone and a healing potion, the effect on survivability of an additional 30 stamina is MUCH greater than the benefit from popping a bigger potion, which you can only use once during a fight.

Jewelcrafting, however, is too powerful. It has TWO side effects. Since the JC gems are prismatic, they give you free meta activation for having three in your gear, and they give you free socket bonuses on pieces that you couldn't normally get. For example, consider this trinket: Figurine - Monarch Crab If you wanted to stack stamina, you could use two 24 Sta gems for 48 extra Sta, or a 24 Sta and a 12 Sta 12 Str, for a total of 45 Sta and 12 Str (including the socket bonus). However, with a prismatic JC gem, you get 24 Sta, 41 Sta, and the +9 bonus, totaling 74 Sta. This means the JC gem is equivalent to 26 stamina in that slot. Three gems used in such a manner would grant you 78 Sta, more than 50% higher than the other Sta bonuses. That's not counting the number of gems you DON'T need to place in your gear in order to activate metas, giving you even GREATER freedom to stack an additional stat.

The only possible manner in which JC could decrease in power is that as we move towards epic gems, the gap between a JC gem and a standard-epic gem will be much smaller. Even so, using JC gems to complete socket bonuses with an off-color gem would still likely grant an even bonus with other professions and still give you free metas. The solution here is to make JC gems non-prismatic, which would mean you still have to work to get the meta bonus and you can't use JC gems to stack a single stat significantly higher than other classes.

It's getting very difficult for me to peruse this list from my links in a text editor, so I'm going to post it and mull it over for a day or so, and then post any other significant discrepancies I can find. I mean, everyone kinda knows JC/BS is ridiculous right now, but I don't think anyone has quantified why. It's also fun looking at how bonuses to a specific stat from different professions are almost equal.

Overcomeable Challenge

2009-03-26T22:20:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants the exact same thing out of a game. Every single person. Every single game. That one thing is overcomeable challenge. I don't know if "overcomeable" is a word, firefox tells me it isn't, but it doesn't have a suggestion under a different spelling, thus I declare that it is in fact now a word.

The idea is simple. Say you're doing PvE. What you want is to get to a boss and say, "Wow, this guy is a challenge." Then, you want to kill him. That's it. Alternately, if you're a fan of PvP, you want to go into, say, a 3v3 arena, fight for a moment and exclaim, "Wow, these opponents are difficult!" Then, you want to crush their faces into the murky waters of the ruins of Lordaeron.

There are two pieces of this process, and both are mandatory. First, you MUST recognize difficulty. If you walk into a raid, pull a boss, and kill him accidentally on your first attempt by working out what you're supposed to do on the fly, you'll have no sense of accomplishment. Alternately, if two weeks down the road you're making no progress you'll feel like the content is impossible. That's why I like that phrase so much. Overcomeable. Challenge. Both parts are equally required.

But wait! There's a problem with this! If the challenge is overcomeable, you've passed it. As long as we assert that there can only ever be a finite amount of content in a game, then at some point you'll run out of things to do and things to kill. And it gets worse! Challenge means something different to EVERYONE. For example, I don't find Sartharion 10+3 to be a challenge. Thousands of people do. I don't consider Patchwerk, Sapphiron, or Kel'thuzad to be challenging, but most likely tens of thousands of people do.

And that's sort of the issue with gearing up. When you don't have gear yet, a lot of things are tuned to be a solid challenge, but still doable. My first kill of Sapphiron 10-man in a previous guild was incredibly tight on mana. However, with more gear the fight becomes less challenging and the feeling of accomplishment for having succeeded diminishes.

A good parallel is in PvP, where the matchmaking system has to be very, very well done. If I walk into an arena, obliterate my opponents, and laugh my way into 2 more arena points, then no one benefits. I don't feel like I accomplished anything, I most likely didn't learn anything from the fight, and the other players didn't feel like they ever had a chance or could have done anything better. To one side it wasn't overcomeable, to the other it isn't a challenge.

My mind is kinda floating right now and I'm starting to ramble. I have more to say on this topic, and I'll condense it into something a little more... sane... some other day. The big points are:

Everyone wants content that is challenging but doable, everyone has a different definition of challenging, and people in the very high end will always blow through challenging content and sit around bored because they've run out of things to do and everything they've done before is no longer challenging. Also, Blizzard is amazing at creating matchmaking systems which link players of equivalent skill so that rofflestomps don't occur too much, though this is shown off better in W3 and SC than in the arena.

Fire Healers for Being Good (Tanks too!)

2009-03-25T23:45:00.000-07:00

DPS is awesome. You have 15 DPSers on Patchwerk. They kill him in 180 seconds. Their DPS doubles after a few months and you kill him in 90 seconds. Hooray, progress! Your raid can move faster, there's less time for a boss to gib someone randomly, dangerous abilities like Polarity Shift happen less total times during a fight, so the randomness and the chance of failure decreases significantly.

But not everyone is so lucky. Healers see it the worst. In the beginning, Patchwerk does, say, 30,000 DPS to your tanks. Each healer can sustain 5,000 HP/S, so for a good buffer you have 7-8 healers. But your tanks' gear increases. Incoming damage drops 20% across the board, and you're taking 24,000 total incoming DPS. At the same time, healers' HP/S goes up 20%, so each one is healing 6,000 HP/S. Now it only takes 5 healers to reach a solid buffer zone. The same thing can happen with tanks; In the beginning, you need multiple offtanks to help with adds or some such, and as time goes on you can drop a tank out. That's a somewhat rarer situation though.

This is an extremely annoying effect of gear increases. I mean, it's possible that you have a few people who start out enjoying healing but later want to switch to DPS, or your healers don't care about stepping on each others toes and like to be able to slack off. Who knows. I consider it a problem, though, that as gear increases, healer numbers can dwindle. The other issue is massive healing variance per fight. For example, patchwerk takes a solid amount of healing. However, many fights can be done, and done more efficiently and faster, with less healers. It's not currently feasible for healers to switch to DPS on the fly since the healer requirement changes too often and costs too much. However, with the advent of dual-specs I'm betting we'll see a lot of guilds pick 2-3 healers as swaps, who'll switch to DPS relatively consistently. Blizzard has declared repeatedly that they won't redesign fights under the assumption that you can just ask half your DPS to dual-spec to tank or anything, but I wonder if we'll see much tighter DPS constraints relevant to healing considering that dual-specs have made it easier to minmax.

I wish I had some sort of solution to this issue, but I really don't. I can't think of a way to make it so that healers and DPS see efficiency increases without eventually decreasing the healing and tanking requirements. That said, I feel healing as a whole needs a revamp. More later.

QUICKIE!

2009-03-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

I'll post something real later, but I just felt like calling attention to this:
AMS Nerf: Ambiguous Wording (WoW Forums)

(Summary: AMS will absorb a maximum of 50% of your HP in damage, so if you have 60k HP, and you're hit for 100k, AMS will absorb 30k, you'll take 70k, and you'll still die.

Compare with:
100% Reduction: Never a Good Idea

Off to work!

Raid Sizes, and an Apology

2009-03-24T22:52:00.001-07:00

I definitely stopped writing for a few days, and definitely got yelled at by a lot of people. >_> <_< Less that, more text. HURRRRRR

So, raids. Presently, raids are 10 or 25 people. The "or" is the difficult part there. You see, fight complexity does not change between 10m and 25m versions. I realize that I'm using the same 2-3 fights for every single example here, but I'm going to have to go back to them AGAIN, simply because there's not a lot of content yet. WTB Ulduar. Anyway take... *drumroll please* Sartharion! With 3 drakes up, Sartharion requires three tanks. One tank must be on Sartharion himself, one tank must be on Drakes, and one tank must be on Adds, encompassing both fire elementals and whelplings. The issue is that 10-man Sartharion requires the SAME number of tanks, in the same roles. Yes, I know it's possible to do 10m with 2 tanks and a warlock, or in incredibly overgeared situations, there have been reports of the drake tank picking up adds as well, but in the vast majority of situations, 25+3 takes 3 tanks, and 10+3 takes 3 tanks.

Now, healing requirements fluctuate. I'm not going to lie, I don't know precisely how many healers are working various roles, but in general 25m takes 6-7 healers, and 10m takes 3 healers. Filling in the remainders, we're looking at roughly:

25m:
3 tanks (12%)
7 healers (28%)
15 DPS (60%)

10m:
3 tanks (30%)
3 healers (30%)
4 DPS (40%)

See the problem?
If you wanted to make two 10m groups out of your 25m raid, you're going to need some DPS or maybe ONE healer to swap over to tanking. Healing remains relatively static, though when you reach the point that you only need 5-6 healers (A huge issue, that I'll deal with another time...) the disparity shows up there as well.

This has been a big problem with my current raid group. We don't have a lot of spare players laying around, and while we have players with a lot of offset gear, most people don't want to spend time learning their offspec purely to attempt one of the most difficult fights in the game. Thus, each week, 25 of us can do S25+3, but only 10 of us can do S10+3, because the other 15 people, despite their skill, desperately lacks tanks.

Don't get me wrong, this situation isn't common. However, it's generally uncommon because 25-man fights require one or two tanks and 10-man fights also require one or two tanks, not because the tanking requirement is scaled down for 10m versions. I completely expect to see fights requiring 3 tanks in 25m Ulduar still require 3 tanks in 10m Ulduar, leading to the exact same situation repeating. I do feel that if a fight requires 4 tanks in 25m, it will be scaled back to allow less than 4 tanks in 10m.

The question is how to balance 10m raids to require reduced numbers of tanks without changing the difficulty of the fight. However, I feel that it's doable. For example in Sartharion, if you're attempting +Drakes, you could either remove adds from the fight but increase the HP and damage of drakes to compensate for the lack of adds, or you could have adds gain threat based off the drakes so that the drake tank is holding adds and drakes, but slightly decrease the damage output of adds (so that it's survivable). I'm sure there are other viable solutions as well.

Requiring the same number of tanks in 10m runs as 25m runs is a dangerous precedent.

Devs, and DK Tank Threat

2009-03-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

Quite a lot of people I know will occasionally (or, in the case of a few, very often) bash posts and ideas presented by the devs or their representatives. Primarily, one dev, who I bet you can guess, that posts very often... This always bothers me. Consider if you posted constantly regarding class mechanics, researching, discussing, changing, and commenting on every spec of every class all day long. You're not always going to get things right, and people will get angrier about the one mistake you make than about the hundred things you get right. If the game were less complex, then maybe it'd be problematic. As things stand, I really doubt that any single person could go on forever without any issues.

Anyway, on to an actual post.

All three specs of Death Knight are intended to do equal damage. We are going to assume that this is the case, and that a deep (meaning 51+ points) spec of any tree with reasonable point allocation is going to do equal damage. While this can't be perfectly dead on, they're probably (hopefully) close. A Blood DK will have Dancing Rune Weapon up for roughly 30 seconds out of every minute. An Unholy DK will have Gargyole up for one minute out of every 3 minutes. Both of these abilities have an uptime of 33%. They don't have to do equal damage, because they can be balanced around "making up" for the rest of the spec. Frost has no similar pet-based ability.

The issue, then is that if all specs are equal, and part of the damage for Unholy and Blood comes from pets, then threat for a tanking DK will be higher as Frost than as either Blood or UH. The only possible counter to this is that DRW and Gargoyle are both abilities based off of Runic Power, and RP can be funneled directly into Rune Strike instead of other RP-based abilities, hopefully for more threat. Tomorrow, I'm going to delve into the mathematics and work out whether there's an actual imbalance or not.

Yes, this is because it's late.

Nothing Today

2009-03-18T23:55:00.001-07:00

Come back tomorrow >_<

Busy schedule is busy. I'll make up for a missed post somehow.

Tier-Based Changes

2009-03-17T13:32:00.001-07:00

WoW, like many MMOs, has three primary roles. Tanks, Healers, and DPS. Their roles are something I'd like to look into deeply later on since it's not as easy to sum up as you would expect, but for now, we'll just go with this:

Tanks decrease total incoming raid damage.
Healers prevent death.
DPS kills targets.

I played a Warlock from early Vanilla (Magmadar attempts) until late BC (Brutallus, HOOOO). I don't recall what my damage output was like against Ragnaros, Nefarian, or C'Thun, but I definitely remember dealing ~1k+ DPS in Kara and Gruul, pushing up to 2-3k DPS in Sunwell. I watched Recount and WWS, modified gear, improved, regemmed, respecced, and tried to do slightly more DPS, both overall and on each individual boss, every single week. And I did! My DPS went up. And up, and up. Recount proved it. WWS proved it. Say I did 2400 DPS one week. I get a new piece of gear, next week I'm doing 2450 DPS. Improvement! Right?

I played a tank as well, since my guild only raided 3 days a week during BC. So I ran pugs, as a prot warrior. I didn't really have a stat to track. All I knew was that if I lived, I was doing well, and if I died, either I messed up, or healers messed up, or someone messed up. I got better at picking out when healers were terrible, or when DPS was slow, or when I'd tried to strafe move and accidentally turned my back. I started tracking avoidance, and damage mitigated. If I used to avoid 70% of attacks, and now I avoid 72%, I'm living longer! If I used to block 2,500 damage, and now I'm blocking 2,600 damage, I'm living longer! Right?

My roommate plays a druid. He's the fastest druid in existence, whipping out the Tree Dash to catch up with me as I charge headlong into pack upon pack of add. We talk mechanics all the time, often about Lifebloom, efficiency, regeneration, and throughput. Tiers go up. He has more mana, which means more heals. More spirit, which means more mana per time. More Spellpower, which means each heal does more. Thus his ability to heal constantly increases. Right?

But each of these points is wrong. That's the tricky thing. You see, you can't measure someone's increases in a vacuum. There's no denying that a Sunwell geared tank will survive better against a Karazhan boss, or that a DPSer in Sunwell gear will kill Gruul faster. The question is whether a pre-Kara tank can survive in Kara longer or shorter than a pre-Sunwell tank in Sunwell.

A DPSer will always see their damage increase. But while they'll feel warm and fuzzy, thinking "Yes! I'm doing 10% more damage!" They won't realize that bosses have 20% more HP, thus boss fights are taking longer and longer. Tanks and Healers will feel the pinch more though. If your tanks HP has gone up 50%, but your healing per cast has only gone up 30%, you'll feel like your healing power has actually decreased. If a tanks HP has gone up 50%, but a boss' damage has gone up 60%, his survivability will feel lower, even though he's got significantly better gear.

Additionally, tank survivability has to be based off both incoming damage and incoming healing. This is problematic, because avoidance does not decrease tier to tier. In other words, if you used to take 50% of attacks in Tier 1, and you take 40% of attacks in Tier 2, the attacks have to hit significantly harder, and then have to be inflated by the increase in HP/S. So while before, you were hit half the time for 40% of your HP, now you're being hit a little less than half the time for 70% of your HP, increasing the strain on healers, the danger of tank spike death, etc.

Anyway, my point is that overall, DPSers will see their damage increase from tier to tier while tanks and healers won't see their survivability or actual healing potential increase from tier to tier. Even if the DPSers understanding of the change is somewhat flawed, they at least have a number to look at, saying "it got bigger!" while tanks just say "I'm dying just like I did ever so long ago" and healers say "I can't keep you up through this" followed by "Oh wait, I can."

Describing Bosses

2009-03-16T22:18:00.001-07:00

I've mentioned before that I enjoy vehicle fights. Part of that is probably a lack of new mechanics, something we've suffered from for quite a while. I've been looking back at boss fights recently, and nearly every fight can be mastered by asking these four questions:

1) Is there a place I do NOT want to stand?
Generally, this means void zones, fire walls, poison clouds, falling rocks, whirlwinds, or any other source of damage that can be avoided by moving. If there's a small area where damage might be occurring, you do not want to stand there. This is one of the first things people generally learn about bosses. However, this can also be things like spreading out; The place not to stand is "Near anyone else."

2) Is there a place I DO want to stand?
Power Sparks, Thaddius buffs, Anti-Magic Zones. If moving to a specific location will greatly increase your damage or survivability, you want to stand there.

3) Is there a time I do NOT want to DPS the boss?
If a boss has a spell reflection shield, a threat wipe, a damage shield, a bubble, or some other means to negate your damage or hurt you for attacking, you want to either stop DPS or find something else to attack during that time.

4) Is there a time I DO want to DPS the boss?
If a boss has a "weakened" phase, a phase that you want to get through quickly, a damage multiplier, or any other effect which increases your total damage or efficiency for a short period of time, you want to burn CDs and DPS as hard as possible during that time. This can be as simple as burning CDs during Heroism, if a boss has no weakened state.

I am specifically excluding the role of tanks, as their job is often expressed in very different terms, for example "Kite along this path during X ability" or "use Cooldowns to prevent instagib from X ability," which doesn't translate to my proposed system, though is equally simple to describe. Perhaps that'll be a post for another day.

If you invite a new player to a raid, that is not a tank and maybe not a healer, nearly every fight can be summed up with whichever of these four points happen to be applicable. For example, on Anub'rekhan, you do NOT want to stand near Locust Swarm, and you do NOT want to DPS him during Locust Swarm. On Malygos P1, you DO want to stand on Power Spark, and on Malygos P2, you DO want to stand in the Anti-Magic Zone. On Sartharion, you do NOT want to stand in Void Zones or Lava Walls.

A huge number of bosses can be summed up this way. Hopefully though, a few will come to mind that can't be described by this at all. Kalecgos, for example, doesn't have an easy description of where to stand and where not to stand. Positioning and DPS targets doesn't tell you how to kite striders on Vashj, or how to toss cores up to people who can use them. Also, on Sartharion, while a large portion of the fight (Everything in the standard realm) can be described in this manner, knowing when to enter the twilight realm cannot be defined so easily.

A good measure of a fight, in my opinion, is whether it can be described in the given terms. You'll find that a lot of fights in Naxxramas really can be summed up that easily, including Sapphiron and Kel'thuzad. Malygos is similarly easy to describe, though P3 is mildly unique in that just describing where to stand and who to attack doesn't teach you how to play a dragon. You'll also find that a lot of the really fun and really exciting fights that you remember enjoying learning, practicing, and executing all defy such simple description.

It looks like a majority of Ulduar will be pretty simple, sadly. You DO want to stand by the cozy fire, you DO want to stand by the glacier patch, you DO want to DPS Hodir. Hopefully the hard modes will add significant levels of depth, and not just increase the gearchecks.

100% Reduction, Never a Good Idea

2009-03-15T20:41:00.001-07:00

The concept of reducing all damage taken to 0, even if it's only a specific type, for example melee damage, spell damage, or even just shadow damage, is a terrible, scary idea.

The first time we saw this was tanks pushing 100% avoidance in Burning Crusade. A few classes could get gear sets that allowed you to avoid 100% of melee attacks. Threat became problematic, sure, but it was a very solid setup for an offtank, significantly decreasing the strain on healers, both in terms of HP/S and in terms of split focus and attention.

It was also implemented with the Warlock talent Nether Protection, which allowed a warlock to become entirely immune to Fire and Shadow spells for significant periods of time. This gave warlocks a HUGE advantage in many fights in Black Temple, Hyjal, and Sunwell, simply because raid damage tended to be either Fire or Shadow based.

Currently, 100% avoidance is doable with cooldowns and trinkets, however most of the high-avoidance cooldowns are being nerfed or removed and some of the talents that allow us to reach higher levels of avoidance are being changed as well. One thing sticks out to me, though. The talent Magic Suppression allows Anti-Magic Shell to absorb 100% of all spell damage, in addition to making you immune to negative magical effects.

Many abilities that are intended to function as "Kills you instantly" actually function as "Deals an insane amount of damage." For example, void zones on Kel'thuzad merely do insane amount of shadow damage. Some back-of-napkin calculations place the void zone as dealing 70,000 damage, a number that's definitely not survivable... Unless you have Magic Suppression and pop AMS.

Now, presently, 100% spell absorption is powerful, but it's definitely not game breaking. There's no situation where absorbing 99% of spell damage still gets you killed, but absorbing 100% won't. However, it's entirely possible that some ability will rely on killing you instantly if you make a mistake, but base itself off high damage bursts instead of a death-touch, and when we start seeing things like that, people will be crying about Magic Suppression and how DKs are ez-mode because they can mess up and still survive.

But really, do we need to make the spell a full immunity to all spell damage? It seems like the balance constraints it implies are far more dangerous than the coolness aspect of having the talent. Could just be me, we'll see what happens.

The Definition and Implementation of Skill

2009-03-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

I often hear people say that WoW doesn't require skill, or that WoW isn't a challenging game. Most often, this is said by people that have completed all raid content without attempting a single achievement. Other times it's by high-end raiders who have completed all content months ago.

So what is skill? I would say that skill is the ability to observe a change in the environment and react accordingly. For example, Sarth+3. You see a void zone on the ground. You move. You have observed a change in the environment, and reacted. A fire wall is coming, you find the hole in the wall. On Illidan, he starts casting Shear and you Shield Block. You're dragging a fire elemental in a circle, and an eye beam is coming, so you dodge the eye beam without the elemental gibbing your raid. You can probably list thousands of examples.

Varying levels of skill are determined by the number of possible changes, the difficulty of observing a change, the time you have to react, the complexity of the necessary reaction, and the penalty for failure. There are hundreds of examples of each of these. For example, adding drakes to Sartharion does not change the difficulty of seeing a fire wall or your allowed reaction time, but it does change the penalty of failure by increasing fire damage taken and decreasing HP. It also increases the number of possible changes, in that void zones can spawn. Changing void zones from red to blue was a decrease in the difficulty of observing a change.

Mods generally help to observe changes more easily, thus increasing your allowed reaction time. For example, a mod can tell you when Fire Wall is about to spawn, so that you don't have to wait for the fire wall to exist fully in order to get away. They also help to move all information to one location, so that instead of watching a cast bar to see if a boss is casting an ability while watching a time to see when the next phase is going to happen, you can just watch one location which will say "Cast Incoming" or "Phase changing". An interesting idea for increasing the difficulty of an encounter arbitrarily is to reduce the effectiveness of boss mods. For example, using random timers instead of static timers so you can't prepare for an event, or removing spell reporting from an event so that mods can't easily tell you what's happening, and you just have to use your eyes.

Anyway, there are many tools at the designers' disposal for modifying difficulty based on skill, and with the advent of hard-modes for bosses, hopefully we'll see some clever ways these get changed up.

Voice is a Thin Pipe

2009-03-13T13:42:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in Skill vs Coordination that it's much harder for a tank to use external cooldowns than internal cooldowns, primarily because keeping track of what is available and communicating clearly is harder than looking at your own skills and clicking one that's ready. However, communication is a huge aspect of many fights in WoW.

For example, when fighting Malygos, he'll spawn Power Sparks that drift in. The tank needs to pull Malygos away from the spark a tad, while the raid positions between the spark and the dragon. While it's possible for the entire raid to look for the power spark, find it, orient themselves during Vortex, and move in the correct direction, it's much easier to have one player call out where the vortex is and have every other player base their movement off those calls.

Similarly, in Sartharion+3, a Fire Wall is generally a death sentence. While you're in the Twilight realm, you cannot get hit by Fire Wall. However, if you kill the last acolyte in Twilight, everyone in the portal goes back to the normal realm. If a fire wall is coming across as you port out, you're pretty much going to eat the fire wall and die. Thus, it's common to have people outside the portals inform people inside the portal when to kill the last add.

There are many, many situations that are made significantly easier by rapid communication, which generally means voice communication. However, it's my opinion that one goal of UI mods should be to remove the necessity for that level of communication. For example, in Sartharion, mods generally announce when a Fire Wall is moving across the field, but they don't announce when the fire wall has ended. If they did, we could remove some communication and let the mods announce when we're clear to kill an add. Similarly, when fighting Rasuvious, Controllers don't actually need to communicate too much as long as they're watching enemy debuffs. Since Taunt and Bone Shield have the same duration, you can simply see when the other controllers taunt is about to wear off, and use your own taunt and bone shield. Many guilds (including mine) will of course communicate pretty much constantly during Rasuv to be safe, but it's not an actual necessity.

On other bosses, a variety of simple tricks can allow you to reduce the necessary level of communication or attention required from each individual. For example, on Malygos, sparks can only spawn from four corners, and Warlocks can exit Vortex. What this means is that our resident raid leader warlock will look for where the spark is, demonic circle out of vortex, and then place a new demonic circle in the corner the spark is coming from. When everyone lands, the main tank faces the demonic circle and starts backing up, so that he's constantly facing Malygos but pulling Malygos away from the spark. Similarly, the entire raid moves toward the circle while facing Malygos. In this manner, even if we can't call out where people should be going, people still know where to go.

In short, communication suffers from lag, isn't always clear, and can be made unnecessary via UI mods and clever tricks. While it has MANY benefits, I feel as though it's a tiny bit of a crutch, and you should still be able to play perfectly without any sort of voice chat. Pro Tip: If you can only see the fire walls because someone on vent said "Fire Wall, left side" you might be bad at WoW.

Balancing against the upper limit

2009-03-12T19:48:00.000-07:00

Imagine a game with three DPS classes (Ignore tanking and healing for now.) Our first DPS class, "Mcweaksauce" can pull 4,000 DPS. Our second "Balanced" can deal 5,000 DPS, and our last, "Imba" can deal 6,000 DPS. It'll take some time to gear up to these levels, so we'll assume players are doing slightly less DPS in the beginning. If we assume a raid has 25 players, of which 3 are tanks and 7 are healers, we have 15 DPS. What should the assumed damage of a raid be?

Most guilds will have a mix of all classes. Assuming a reasonable distribution, we could balance the raid around have 15 Balanced players, for a total of 75,000 DPS. If you're below 75k raid DPS, you're in trouble, either brushing up against enrage timers or getting two waves of adds on fights like Sartharion, or two teleports on Noth (lol?)

Then, we can set up progression. Fights 1, 2, and 3 only take 60K raid DPS. Fights 4-6 take 70k, and fights 7-10 take the full 75k. This means people can gear up on the initial fights, and only later manage the difficult ones. But, we have a problem. While an AVERAGE raid might have to take time progressing through easy content, a raid full of Imbas might be able to clear the whole place while undergeared. And god help any guild with too many Mcweaksauces, they'll never make it past the first sector, even with gear.

This exact problem happened early in Wrath. A few classes, primarily BM Hunters and DW Death Knights, and Sub Rogues were doing so much DPS that stacking them gave a raid a huge advantage. Some of this was due to bugs, some were mere oversights where DPS issues hadn't emerged on the PTR. The result, however, was relatively devastating; Encounters that should have been extremely difficult were instead trivialized. "Gearing up" didn't exist at all. By the time bugs and absurd-DPS issues were resolved, people had enough gear that the real versions still weren't difficult.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Blizzard can never, ever balance all classes completely. There will always be some unpredictable side effect of a talent combination or gear setup that causes some class to be stackable for extreme damage. That issue is something that basically has to be taken in stride and reacted to rather than prevented. However, there's another issue that's entirely predictable that has the same symptoms.

Consider a class called Supercooldowns. This bad boy can pump out 5,000 DPS. But there's a catch. Every 30 minutes he can use an ability called Spinach that triples his damage for a full minute. If a fight lasts 5 minutes he will normally do 1.5 million damage. However, every 3rd or 4th attempt, his cooldown will be up. He'll do a blistering 2.1m damage, 40% more than normal. Now assume every class is built this way. Once every 30 minutes, they can do 40% more damage over the course of a fight. Do you balance a fight against their normal damage, and trivialize the encounter when cooldowns are available? Or do you balance a fight against their high-end damage, and make fights impossible when the cooldown is unavailable?

This may seem like a nonissue. Sure, most long CD abilities were struck from the game in 3.1. Furthermore, most long CDs don't equate to triple damage or a 40% increase across a fight. However, even things that increase damage by 5, or 10% across a fight, which aren't available on repeating attempts, can cause problems. The two primary examples that come to mind are Doomguards for Warlocks and Army of the Dead for Death Knights. Doomguards are a 60 minute cooldown that can increase your DPS by around 500 across a fight, a solid 10% increase in most situations (Maybe a tad less.) Army of the Dead can add roughly 100,000 damage on top of your total during a given fight with no opportunity cost, as it can be precast right before the fight starts, thus consuming no runes and no GCDs during combat.

Doomguards are being nerfed, both damage-wise and cooldown-wise, though their damage may still be higher than other pets and their cooldown is still a full 30 minutes. Army of the Dead has no such modification in store. However, I have a suggestion. First off, make it only castable in-combat. This means that you MUST dedicate 8 seconds and 3 runes to summoning your ghouls, time and resources that could have been spent doing something else. Second, retain their threat level so they're still a viable last second save in some situations, but halve their damage. That should mean that the cost of casting them in combat is relatively equivalent to the damage you could have output in the same time, especially when you take the loss of flow into account.

Overall, long CDs are bad. Take them away.

Skill vs Coordination

2009-03-11T16:38:00.000-07:00

My good friend Zdravi brought up some interesting points about my previous post. While he had a lot to say, one major concern was the difference between skill and group coordination. The DPS method for the bronze drake relies on not just working out the rotation, but on having a buddy nearby who also knows the rotation, who can coordinate trading back and forth with you, and thus even if one player is extremely skilled, they'll still be relatively weak until they have a skilled partner.

It's my opinion that coordination is much more difficult to get than skill. My proof of this is Sarth+3. I'm going to assume you're familiar with the strategies for +3, and you've attempted it, defeated it, watched it, or will at least understand my references. If not, go youtube a video or something.

Present raid strategy involves having some overlap between the acolytes of Drakes 2 and 3. During this period, a breath from Sartharion will deal an absolutely absurd level of damage. For this reason, Bear druids and Death Knights are generally used to tank Sarth. Druid/DK cooldowns allow easy survivability. However, other classes ARE capable of tanking it, they just need external cooldowns. For example, a warrior might have to call out for Pain Suppression and Hand of Sacrifice to survive some breaths. The problem is that it takes time and thought.

As a Death Knight, I can switch on the fly. I can think, "Ok, next breath is Icebound Fortitude" and then have Anti-Magic Shield come up JUST before a breath, and use AMS instead. That doesn't cause problems. Whereas, with a warrior, you'd have to think, "That's the last of my CDs, I'll need a Sacrifice for the next breath," and call out for the CD, and pray that the player assigned to use their CD watches and casts it at JUST the right time to prevent a one-shot breath. It's much easier for an individual to manage a set of their own cooldowns than for 3 players to manage the whole groups set of cooldowns.

As time goes on, individual skill becomes more of a given. Especially in high-end guilds, players are EXPECTED to perform at the limit of their ability. At that point, I feel group coordination becomes the real test. Things like tossing Vashj's crystals across the room, positioning properly in Kael'thas, or the original 4H are all much more entertaining than a Patchwerk-style "We beat the enrage because we aren't terrible."

Vehicles: Blizzard's Intelligence Test

2009-03-10T14:30:00.000-07:00

There is an inherent limit to skill in World of Warcraft. Assuming a static game, at some point theorycraft will show the BEST way to play your character, the BEST way to set up your raid, the BEST way to react. Which is why the game isn't static. The game changes, and the way we play our classes changes. However, Blizzard tends to change small things, and rarely changes the overall direction of a class. As time goes on, we get faster and faster at returning to maximum efficiency after a change. While expansions with many new talents and a few new abilities cause us to shift models around and rerun our simulations, the actual effect on our characters tends to be minimal. As an example, Affliction was a powerful spec in early BC. It was overshadowed by Destruction later on, and with the advent of Wrath, returned to its former glory. But did the playstyle change? Ultimately it was still maintain DoTs, cast Shadow Bolt in downtime, Life Tap to avoid OOMing. The change to Drain Soul meant it became worth casting at the end of a boss fight, but that's really the only change. Even the upcoming patch won't really change the playstyle, it'll just switch up how many DoTs are on your target at once.

As time goes on, and our understanding of classes becomes more and more mature, more players will be at the limit of each class. Not everyone will become godlike masters of WoW, but each individual tends to increase in skill over time, albeit at wildly varying rates. So how do we suppress this constant increase? How do we make content difficult while assuming that players are constantly gaining skill? Well, first Blizzard introduced DKs, which was quite a challenge. DKs have basically been an arms race between Blizzard and The Community, wherein Blizzard wants DKs in a specific place in terms of tanking and survival, whereas the community wants DKs to deal more DPS and survive longer. Since the class is still very new, neither side had accurate models, and odd builds like 32/39 DW skyrocketed in effectiveness while tanking builds became largely overpowered. But that's just one arena.

By far the more interesting challenge is vehicles. Each vehicle a player can use is like playing a very tiny but entirely new class. Learning how to use a vehicle properly is Blizzard's intelligence test for the community. You can see this in the Malygos encounter. Many players cannot figure out how to properly use their dragons without outside assistance. Even with the entire skill set in front of them and time to look it over, many people cannot figure out what to do on their own.

The Oculus is an even better example. I love the instance, because you're confronted with the challenge of mastering a class that you haven't seen much and don't use all the time. You don't get to practice outside on the target dummies or solo to get the feel for it, you're in a group, with a variety of new vehicles, and a few enemies in front of you.

Because of the fact that vehicles are a nonstandard mechanic, Blizzard occasionally tries to be blunt about how to properly use each vehicle. For example, the amber (bronze) drake in Oculus has three skills:

Shock Lance
Stop Time
Temporal Rift

Can you figure out, on the fly, without being told, the optimal way to DPS a boss, assuming you're in a group? This is a relatively easy one, but I'm always surprised at the number of people that can't work it out. The answer is to talk to another player on a bronze drake. First, you use Temporal Rift, while he uses Stop Time, then Shock Lance, and immediately hit Temporal Rift. This will give your ally quite a few shock charges. As soon has he has them up, and your Rift is up, he hits Shock Lance then puts up Temporal Rift. You alternate back and forth like this until the boss is dead. This can be done rapidly, without any voice chat, as you just need to make sure another player's Rift is up when you Lance so that you do extra damage and they get charges, and if you don't have any charges, Rift until you do. Assuming everyone knows the strategy, you can do absurd levels of damage this way, including a 5-bronze kill of Eregos on Heroic.

As I mentioned before, I'm always surprised by how many players simply cannot work that out. Person after person rides a bronze drake and spams Shock Lance, or just keeps Temporal Rift up the whole time without ever attempting to DPS themselves. This isn't just the case with pugs either; I've met many players in top-level guilds on my server that couldn't work out proper strategies for the drakes in Oculus and couldn't figure out how to heal or DPS on Malygos. However, I've definitely found a correlation between skill in WoW and skill on vehicles. Generally, the people who get vehicles right are the same people that don't stand in void zones, don't get hit by lava walls, and don't get shocked to hell on Thaddius without having to be told that THIS fire is just as bad as ALL fire.

Vehicles may be a silly gimmick, but they're a really solid way of separating the different levels of player in your guild and they're a fun challenge and an interesting dynamic for boss fights. Of course, considering the number of people that hate Oculus because it's "so hard," adding more vehicles to future encounters may not be the best business strategy. Ah well.

Socket Bonuses: A Tricky Line

2009-03-09T23:08:00.000-07:00

Socket bonuses are a very interesting mechanic from a design standpoint. Sockets in general ignore a few common rules of WoW, which makes balance somewhat odd, and bonuses only serve to complicate the issue.

Stats in WoW resist stacking. For example, an item of the same level may have 100 stamina or 100 intellect or 70 stamina and 70 intellect. This provides incentive not to stack one specific stat. For example, casters are eventually looking at a trade off of 2-3 spell power for 20-30 haste. Even if other stats are much less powerful, eventually the tradeoffs are high enough to make the stat worth it. This is, of course, given gear that even allows you to make such a choice.

Sockets, however, stand outside this law. A gem may have 16 strength, 24 stamina, or 8 strength and 12 stamina. No bonus whatsoever for not stacking a stat. However, sockets are a prime example of opportunity costs. Say you're melee DPS, and you want to stack strength. A socket bonus of strength on a piece of gear with a yellow socket may convince you to spread your gems out a little bit. The two big questions are what stat we put for a bonus, and what color socket we attach to it.

If a class wants a red stat, say spell power, and a piece has a red socket, you may as well put the socket bonus into the stat weighting of the item. For example, the socket bonus on Sash of Jordan may as well be part of the armor. Oftentimes this is done on specific pieces that blizzard intends to be powerful, implying that Blizzard intends stat stacking on that item. Another perfect example is the engineering tank gun, Armor Plated Combat Shotgun.

The opposite end of the spectrum is items whose socket bonus is useless and thus is always ignored. While Blizzard tends to be good about not putting spirit on warrior gear, stamina tends to pop up on DPS gear and is largely ignored. This was much more of an issue in the BC days than it is right now.

In general, Blizzard appears to pick one stat per color, for example a Druid will have spirit for Blue, spell power for Red, and intellect for Yellow. Then, an item with one red socket will have a bonus equal to 1/4 of a yellow or blue gem. If an item has, say, a red socket and a yellow socket, there will be a bonus equal to 3/8 of a blue socket. Not all gear follows this precisely, but quite a bit does. It's rather elegant.

This formula DOES have breaking points. Helms are presently excitingly odd. Take this piece for example: Obsidian Greathelm. With an 8 strength socket bonus on a blue socket (since the Meta isn't questionable) there is no reason to ever use a single-color gem. Placing a 16 strength red gem will net you 16 strength, while a purple 8 strength + 8 stamina gem will net you 16 strength and 8 stamina. If socket bonuses increase in power, we'll see more and more people using split-color gems rather than single-color gems. This would be a very elegant way to move some of the burden off red gems and on to orange and purple gems.

Notice any oddities on the socket colors and bonuses on your gear? Feel free to comment.

Late Post Today

2009-03-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

I won't be able to post a full article until late tonight.

Blog Formatting

2009-03-08T11:27:00.000-07:00

Given the size of my posts, I'm looking for a way to take up more horizontal space, so that each paragraph appears a little smaller and you're not staring at wall upon wall of text.

That said, don't expect my post sizes to decrease at all. I'm regularly cutting large sections of posts because while there's a lot of information to convey, I simply can't get everything I want to in a post of even remotely reasonable size.

Edit: Horizontal size modified, that might be a bit better.

Blockin' It.

2009-03-08T10:25:00.000-07:00

Warriors and paladins have shields. HURRRR. A large part of this article will be review and very tiny bits of math explaining the different ways we decrease damage. If you know this already, skip to the bold title a little bit down

Lets think about this for a second. Warriors and paladins have shields. Druids and death knights do NOT have shields. This means that druids and death knights are not capable of blocking, which in turn means that other stats must be modified so that we take the proper level of damage. While druids are not capable of parrying, that's a much weaker distinction, as parry is just another form of avoidance. In fact, parry is much weaker survivability-wise than dodge as it takes significantly more parry rating for 1% parry than dodge rating for 1% dodge and the DR cap on parry is roughly half that of dodge.

So, we have three manners in which we can reduce total incoming damage. The first is avoidance. Avoidance is dodge + parry + (opposed) miss. An avoided attack does not deal any damage. While avoidance is typically thought of as a straight percentage decrease to total physical damage, its power is inflated against enemies that hit for a large portion of your HP as having multiple strikes land in a row can be deadly, especially given situations where you cannot increase your HP to absorb an additional strike. Avoidance is based entirely on the RNG, and thus is extremely unpredictable and can be volatile at standard levels.

The second is percentage-based reduction. This works on any attack that is not avoided. The most common percentage is from armor. Increasing armor is a constant decrease, percentage-wise, on damage done. If I have 50% DR from armor, and move to 60% DR from armor, all physical damage coming in will be decreased by an additional 20%. Other forms of Percentage are many cooldowns. Shield Wall, for example, is a solid percentage-based DR, as is Icebound Fortitude, etc.

The last form of damage reduction is block. After an attack has landed, and has been decreased by all percentage modifiers, block is applied. Not all attacks will be blocked of course, but on a blocked attack, damage is reduced by a set amount; Namely your block value, which is [str/2 + shield block value (on gear) + the block number on your shield]. Of course, there are modifiers to block from talents etc etc etc. The point is, block is a static damage reduction.

So, this is why block is an issue. Death knights and druids only have avoidance and percentage DR, both of which apply as percentages to total incoming DPS. If we said that a boss does 50,000 DPS before armor and avoidance, and we know that a DK has 60% avoidance and 60% damage reduction from armor, we can prove that the total incoming damage is 50,000 * .4 * .4 = 8,000 DPS. Similarly, if a bear druid has 52% avoidance and 67% DR from armor, his total incoming DPS is 50,000 * .48 * .33 = 8,000 DPS. I'm excluding talents and cooldowns and things to illustrate a point; Including them is beyond the scope of this article. Anyway, by varying armor and avoidance but keeping the final result intact, we can balance classes to be equally powerful but with a unique feel.

Or can we? In the same situation, that boss is attacking a warrior. What's his final DPS? Well, we'll say he has 50% DR from armor and 50% avoidance. That's 12,500 DPS, but we haven't included block. But... we can't illustrate the effect of block without knowing the boss' attack speed! Let's say our trusty warrior has 2,000 block value. If the boss is attacking once a second, then we're removing 2000 every 1 second, thus we're down to 10,500 DPS. If the boss is attacking every 4 seconds, then our poor warrior isn't feeling that block much at all, he's still suffering 12,000 DPS. And if the boss is a ninja that attacks every 1/4 of a second, his block is inflated absurdly, decreasing our total to 4,500 DPS. Since Block is a static reduction rather than a percentage reduction, it is worth significantly more in situations with lower damage per strike, given equal damage per second.

I, personally, feel that the Avoid/Decrease%/DecreaseStatic set of damage reduction abilities is EXTREMELY solid. It provides us with three distinct and unique ways of mitigating damage, and allows us to reallocate based on the fight. Avoidance is much easier to stack than armor, and a percent of avoidance decreases damage just as much as a percent of armor, but it's spikier, causing healer issues, making the difference justified. Static damage reduction fluctuates based on what you're tanking, and you can have a high block set for trash or Heroics, and a high avoidance/armor set for tanking bosses.

What This Means

Everything up until now should have been review. But, it tells us some dangerous things. First off, DK and druid tanks will almost always have significantly higher DR from avoidance and armor than warriors and paladins, since they need to have enough DR to equal the effect of block. Since block is a static reduction instead of a percentage reduction, this means that bosses that hit ridiculously friggin' hard will almost always strike DKs and Druids for much less than they'll strike Warriors and Paladins. In the absurd other end of the spectrum, opponents whose strikes are very weak will almost always be tanked easier by Warriors or Paladins. This is part of the problem we're seeing with tanks right now. The other portion is the fact that magical damage doesn't affect all classes the same way. I'll get to that another day.

Anyway, regarding heavy hitting bosses, we can fix this by looking at warriors' block value. For example, in the explanation I gave before, a boss is dealing 50k DPS. A DK with 60% avoidance and 60% armor decreases that to 8k. A druid with 52% avoidance and 66% armor also decreases that to 8k. A warrior with 50% Avoidance and 50% armor decreases that to 12.5k. Given that his block value is 2,000, this means that for balance to be achieved, we can modify the opponents attack speed until damage is equalized. In this case, we need to remove 4500 damage, and we're blocking for 2k, which means that we need to block 2.25 attacks per second, or the boss needs to strike ever .44~ seconds. This is an extremely easy way to change the damage warriors and paladins take without affecting DKs and druids, and I believe it has already been stated that we'll be seeing this effect in Ulduar.

The Effect On Low-End Threat

But, one interesting note that doesn't get picked up a lot is that over time, block will become so powerful that low end content is decimated by it. Furthermore, since block is directly related to strength, warriors and paladins can increase their survivability in low-end, trivialized fights while increasing their threat. Forceful Deflection was intended to be a similar mechanic for Death Knights; Ditch some survivability for threat via strength and you'll get at least a little bit back. Unfortunately, Forceful Deflection works off a percentage decrease instead of a static decrease, thus its effect on survivability on low-end content is nowhere near as powerful as block. I don't know if druids have a mechanic that is at all similar to this. I'm not nearly as well versed with bear tanks as I ought to be.

I predict that you'll still see druids and DKs slightly overpowered tank-wise in Ulduar, but that bringing either one to tank older, farm-content is going to get more and more questionable. When we see druids and DKs tanking new content and warriors and paladins tanking old content, a small change will be made to normalize threat levels across varying content and increase warrior and paladin survivability. I'd really like to see the addition of static reductions for every class in unique, class-fitting manners, but I also feel like that won't be implemented as it's too much homogenization.

Blood Tanking: God Mode

2009-03-07T13:52:00.000-08:00

Today's foray into the world of balance will focus on Blood Death Knights. This is ripped directly from a post I made on the Elitist Jerks Forums.

--

For a long time, primary tanking theory has revolved around EHP. The concept is simple; Stack Armor and HP so that you have a large buffer zone. That way, if your avoidance fails and you get hit 4, 5, 6 times in a row, you won't get destroyed because healers have enough time to react to the drop in HP. I have always been a huge fan of avoidance tanking. In BC, the major issue with avoidance tanking was rage starvation; As a warrior, if you don't get hit, you don't get rage, and thus you don't get threat. EHP guaranteed that you would be hit often enough to retain solid rage levels and thus solid threat. The second issue was spikiness. Even with high levels of avoidance, it's still possible to be hit repeatedly. With EHP, you have a solid buffer for those situations, whereas avoidance tanking requires healers to watch for spikes and get quick heals off.

There's no question whatsoever that you take less damage when avoidance tanking than when EHP tanking. However, healers have no issue right now maintaining high mana levels while pumping huge heals, and thus people consider the HP buffer to be more important than the decrease in damage brought on by avoidance tanking. The proposed changes to healer mana regeneration may be enough to push more people toward avoidance.

It's relatively well known that avoidance scales exponentially with respect to itself. For example, going from 0 avoidance to 10% avoidance is a mere 10% damage reduction. However, going from 70% avoidance to 80% avoidance is a 33% damage reduction. Because of this fact, as your avoidance increases, avoidance becomes a better stat to stack. And because avoidance works as a multiplier on HP, as your HP goes up, avoidance becomes a more powerful stat to stack. Which means in the long run, everyone will be stacking avoidance, eventually. To combat this, and in an attempt to prevent people from reaching the mythical and oft-videod 100% avoidance, Blizzard implemented diminishing returns on avoidance. As your avoidance gets higher, you need more and more rating to add an additional percent. However, there's a serious latent issue with the DR calculation. Diminishing returns on avoidance excludes anything that gives a % value. For example, a talent that adds 5% to dodge does not affect diminishing returns.

The previous three tanking classes were all equal in terms of avoidance from talents. Warriors and Paladins receive 5% each to Dodge and Parry, while Druids receive 10% to dodge (since they are incapable of parrying). However, Death Knights can receive a whopping 22% avoidance that is unaffected by Diminishing Returns; 5% to Dodge from Anticipation, 10% to Parry from Blade Barrier, 3% to boss-miss from Frigid Dreadplate, and an additional 4% Parry from Runeforging.

At low gear levels, say 20% avoidance from gear, this isn't a HUGE deal. If a warrior has 30% avoidance and a DK has 42% avoidance, The DK is taking roughly 17% less damage. This is a number that could easily be made up for via things like the ability to block, the innate damage reduction on Defensive stance, or a number of other factors. However, when we reach the extreme end of avoidance, say 55% from gear, we're in dangerous territory. A warrior at this point would have 65% avoidance, while a DK would have 77% avoidance. The DK would be taking 35% less damage than the warrior. As avoidance available on gear increases, the gap widens even further.

The issue of spikiness can be mitigated two ways. First up is the talent Vampiric Blood, which I still hold is wildly overpowered. The general rule is that an avoidance tank will have significantly lower HP than an EHP tank, and thus has less of a buffer zone. Vampiric Blood allows you to have 15% more HP for 30 seconds out of every minute. My standard high-avoidance set has 27k HP, while my high-HP set has 32k HP (both unbuffed). Vampiric Blood raises the avoidance set to 31k, drastically reducing the difference in buffers.

The second manner in which spikiness is reduced is the talent Will of the Necropolis. WotN can actually be considered to be additional HP, based on your current HP. For example, from 100%, your HP is increased by roughly 17%, as an attack dealing 117% of your HP will be reduced to (117 * .85) = 99.45% of your HP. The vast majority of the time, the talent will act as between half and a third of that value (5-8% effective increase in HP).

So, anyway, the whole point is that DKs can have way more avoidance than other classes due to talents that give us undiminished avoidance. Also, the spikiness issue is reduced by some exceptionally powerful talents. And lastly, DKs suffer no penalty from not being hit, and thus the only meaningful reason NOT to stack avoidance is threat concerns which are, honestly, laughable right now.

To test my theory that avoidance-based DKs are exceptionally powerful, I gathered a few friends to do some testing on Patchwerk. Not a kill, just 6 minutes of 1-tank, 1-healer PW.
Video: YouTube - Patchwerk 10 (High)
Healer was in about half blues ( Armory Link )
Final screenshot of recount showing avoidance levels: http://www.saichotictech.net/WoW/PatchwerkAvoidance.jpg
70% avoidance from regular melee, 73% from Hateful Strikes. As time goes on, it'll only get worse. Either Talents must be added to diminishing returns, or DKs need to have their avoidance talents nerfed significantly. Otherwise, we'll be pushing 100% avoidance with almost no concerns whatsoever come Ulduar.

On a side note, if any boss is ever given the DW attack penalty in WotLK, avoidance tanking will be even more hilariously overpowered.

--

As an update from the time I posted this, MMO-Champion is showing the latest news regarding Blood Tanking, and DK Tanking in general: Will of the Necropolis has a 15 second cooldown, significantly decreasing its power. Vampiric Blood has been nerfed from 30s/1m (50% uptime) to 30s/2m (25% uptime). This changes the worth of high avoidance stacking, since damage will be much spikier now. Furthermore, Blade Barrier has been dropped from 10% parry to 5% overall damage mitigation, leaving DKs at 9% standard avoidance and 12% max avoidance from talents, bringing us much closer in line with other tanking classes.

As a tank, I have a lot more to say about how stats and talents interact with each other and why I feel the warrior is the perfect balance of multiple stats, but that's for another day.

Introduction

2009-03-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

In general, I will be illuminating issues with specific classes, where they're either too weak or too powerful, and comparing one class' potential against the potential in other classes. Then, I'll propose solutions, and see how close I get to Blizzard's final changes.

Issues will not always be balance. Sometimes, I'll highlight the effect of complexity, where one class spams one button while other classes have to perform difficult rotations or use abilities based on a priority system. Other times, I'll discuss areas where one class has a default state that feels incorrect, and explain what I feel the intended goal is for a class and how it's not measuring up.

I'm doing this for a variety of reasons. I often have an intriguing idea, work out the math for it, and have a minor revelation on the proper working of a class, but don't share it. What good is unshared knowledge? Other times, I'll discuss an idea with a few friends, and we'll come to a conclusion, and then only our guild benefits. Hopefully by making all this public, we'll get more input on our mad ideas, and we'll be able to help more people understand how best to play their class and how best to interact with other classes. Furthermore, I desperately want to work for Blizzard. I'm a software developer by trade, and working on WoW, or their upcoming MMO, would basically be a dream job. To that end, many of the things I discuss will delve into the terrifying worlds of Math and Programming.

To start off, I will be posting at least one entry a day for the next thirty days, without fail. Stick around, read up, offer suggestions, lets see what happens.