Reflecting on Wrath

No, the title doesn't mean I rolled a Warrior and pwned a Druid. It means I'm taking today to look back on WotLK and point out what was fun... and what wasn't.

Naxxramas: Fun. Naxx was where I first learned to raid, since a couple forays into Kara the week before WotLK came out really don't count. Because of this, (and the low quality of the guild I was in at the time,) it was tuned appropriately for me. The fights were varied enough to each be interesting, ranging from truly tank-and-spank like Pathcy, to things demaning some strategic contribution from everyone, like Heigan, Sapphiron and Loatheb. Overall, it was an excellent place to learn to raid for beginning players, and every expansion should have something like Naxx.

Original 5-Mans/Heroics (pre-Dungeon Finder): Meh. They were really fun the first time or two through them, but on my umpteenth run looking for Gal'darah's Signet in regular Gun'drak just so I could reach the 535 defense cap for Heroics really sucked. 5mans are fun about twice. Then they're fun on Heroic mode as long as they remain appropriately challenging for some reason other than your party sucks. Being "forced" to run them beyond that is poor design and should be done away with.

Glory of the Hero: Fun! These ranged from "so easy a caveman could do it" to "legitimately challenging with a group of 5 seasoned raiders." It was a fun achievement in ~213 gear. A word to the wise: don't go trying to do this in the Dungeon Finder. It makes you an asshat.

Vault of Archavon: Awful. While it was fun when Naxx was fun, (because I was bad,) it degenerated into something ugly. By putting all four bosses on the same raid lockout, it made it basically impossible for people who need the lesser bosses to actually do them. And really, the only real challenge in the place is being online the one time your faction gets VoA this week. Like the dungeon finder, the rewards were too good; they encouraged us to do unfun, unhealthy things. Also? Never tie raid access to being on the populated side of your server again! >.< Obsidian Sanctum: Fun! Easy enough to show your bad casual friends a raid with no real fear of failure, yet individually punishing even on regular mode (I.E. people who ate flame waves got repairs.) And then the hard modes... wow were those fun in appropriate gear. Granted, I never got to down OS+3 in ilvl ~213 gear, but we did manage OS10+2 after a few weeks, and that was some of the most hectic fun I've ever had.

Eye of Eternity: Not fun. Take a raid, add clunky vehicle mechanics, a mandatory class, (a non-tank DK for Grip-Chains on the Power Spark,) and flying combat, and you have a recipe for a buggy, clunky, awkward raid. It was easy enough, but it just wasn't fun.

Ulduar: Fun! I never full cleared it. On regular. It was plenty challenging, the art and story was truly epic, and it kept me occupied for an entire patch cycle. What more can you ask for in a raid? Another note, this is the first time they did vehicle combat right. FL+0 was tuned easily enough that you could work through the various vehicle UI problems and learn the new controls bring your non-raider friends and still have a fair shot at it. And after that, the farm content wouldn't get tiresome, because you could crank the difficulty to fit your raid group. We did FL+3 in appropriate gear, and it was fun. I also recently went back to tackle the hard mode achievements (in ICC gear) and one of them at least was still hard and fun: Firefighter. To anyone who has never done Firefighter, I strongly recommend going back to do it before level 81. You'll be glad you did.

5man ToC: Fun! While I'll admit that I didn't specifically like the jousting or the Wall-O-Text, neither detracted enough from the instance to make me dislike it as a whole. The epics falling from the sky cause a crash in the Abyss Crystal market, but I think that this was one of the best ways to ensure that newcomers could gear up quickly. Certainly it was much better than ~50 random heroics. The random bosses were a nice touch, and this was legitimately hard in ilvl 200 gear, putting it properly in progression after the original Heroics and Naxxramas.

ToC raid: Mixed. This was fun the first time, and remained fun until we had beated it. Which didn't take very long. The fact that hard modes were separated from regulars was, I think, a bad idea, and thankfully it seems that they have at least somewhat learned from this for ICC. This was the first time they scaled-up the old sources of emblems, to give Conquest. That, I think was a mistake, they should have made most things give Valor, and leave Conquest in Ulduar and H 5man ToC, so that gearing up remained a proper progression in all parts.

Heroic ToC raid: Fun! Still hard, still fun now. Unfortunately, it's not incentivized now. Give it a shot if you haven't before. You'll need a free night and some good players though; out-geared or not, it still won't tolerate sloppy play.

Dungeon Finder: Mixed. It was very novel to be able to group in ~30 seconds, as opposed to ~30 minutes, and being able to chain-run an alt was great... for about a week. The rewards were too big on the Dungeon Finder, and that led to many people running beyond when hey stopped having fun. Please don't use rewards to get us to do something we hate. Use them to get us to try something we might like.

Heroic 5-man ICC: Fun! Challenging, rewarding, full of plot, everything I look for in a 5man. Halls of Reflection was particularly fun with a group of 4 of my ToC25-raiding friends. That said, it's specifically not fun to tackle challenges with people whose skill, motivation and gear are a crapshoot; HoR should never have been a random dungeon, though having it available to queue specifically for it was a good call.

ICC: Fun! Like Ulduar, it had fights ranging in difficulty so that everyone and their alts can see a few fights, while being a true challenge as you get deeper in. I refer to Funship Battle by that name for obvious reasons, and I've still yet to kill the Lich King (mostly for lack of trying; I haven't played since the warsong went live, and we were damn close before that.) I do wish that a full clear wasn't required for hard modes, however; I wish we could set Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, and a few others to medium mode so they wouldn't be so boring.

Priest Cataclysm Changes: Because a million and one other posts just weren't enough.

It would be poor form to comment without a link, so... Priest Cataclysm changes from the WoW forums.

One-by-one I'm going to post my thoughts on the changes.

New Spells: Heal, Mind Spike, Inner Will, Leap of Faith Life Grip.

Heal was "added" to enable a new style of healing whereby healing is less frenetic and a lot more about minimizing overheal. The new (old really, vanilla was like this) healing environment where mana matters and health pools are much bigger than heals will be a nice change of pace, and I think it and the new middle-ground heal spells are good for the game in general. Now the devs will be able to produce more varied fights, the old hard-enrage and heal spamming fights can still work, they'd just need to be short, and if all goes as planned we'll also have more slow and mana-managing fights like Vezax.

Mind Spike is... kind of useless, IMHO. We already have (Improved) Devouring Plague spam for things with very low health, and for anything that lasts even a few seconds, I'd prefer to DoT it up. It only takes ~8 seconds to make my DoTs better than a quick, weak burn rotation. Ah well, another spell for lolsmite and on the off chance that I get spell-locked while shadow, I guess it will be helpful.

Inner Will sounds good. I can't see wanting to intentionally screw my spellpower very often, but I'm sure we'll find a few fights to use it in, and it will make things like the run from the Brann event in HoS to Sjonnir the Ironshaper a little faster.

And finally Life Grip, my personal favorite upcoming Priest spell. Life Grip promises to be riotously full of griefing potential, much like certain other hilariously fun and useless abilities like Mind Control. Unlike certain other mostly-useless abilities, I can see Life Grip being legitimately useful for more than just Instructor Razuvious Must Die! and Who Needs Bloodlust? It can function as another "shield" type heal, by preventing damage someone would have taken had you not moved them, and I expect it will also see use in a few kiting and other movement strategies.

Mechanics Changes

The new version of haste-scaling for DoTs is interesting, to say the least. At the very least, it will improve shadow's hast scaling, but it will also simplify the rotation a bit. I'm okay with the rotation getting mildly simpler if we get mildly stronger, I can view it as a necessary evil. Of course, for healing this changes things a lot, particularly if Radiance scales to haste. I hope something similar is worked out with our Weakened Soul duration being shortened by haste also.

SW:D as an execute? Cool. More to think about if you want to do more damage; exactly how it should be.

Priests as viable good tank healers? Sweet. In keeping with the above mention of using the right heal for the job, multiple sizes of bubble is also nice.

O noes, what ever will we do without our spirit buff? Oh right. Basically the exact same thing we've been doing. I actually like this; you no take candle!

The 5-second rule is gone? I'm not sure if I care about that either. On the one hand, I (sort of) liked the old complexity, since it offered the opportunity to squeeze out extra mana if you pulled off some convoluted strategy, in theory. In practice, however, we've been solidly in the 5sr for ages anyway, may as well just make it official.

Talent Changes

Much of this section I've already commented on above.

Power Word: Barrier. Cool. I hope this means that the role of a disc priest won't be "shield everyone once, than do it again" anymore. Other than that, this is also one of many announced ground-targeted AoE heals (the others are for other classes). This sounds like a fun change, switching healing from Grid whack-a-mole to actually paying more attention to the fight itself.

Chakra. Being able to specialize for many different healing roles sounds good in theory. However, since they posted that they've also mentioned that they intend to have some special UI to indicate your Chakra status, and get an "in the zone" feel. This, I'm vehemently opposed to. New UIs typically break, and broken UIs cause wipes. Please just use something that works. I recommend a few different buffs, one for each state.

Mastery

Absorbtion: how bland. The mechanic is simple, but it does emphasize what makes Discipline unique, so, bland or not, I think it'll work out alright. This will also be fairly easy to balance, and helps to cover an old issue that there was no gear for priests who commonly get assigned to shieldbot.

Radiance: cool. Again a simple mechanic, but instead of increasing an effect we already had, it tacks on a new effect to spells that never had it. This is also a fairly simple thing to balance.

Shadow Orbs: not enough information. I think Blizzard doesn't yet have a clear idea of what this will do, so I can't really fault them for not telling us yet. As it stands, it sounds somewhat like a graphical version of Shadow Weaving. If executed well, this sounds like it could be an amazingly involved mechanic, if executed poorly, well, we may find ourselves saying "wait for 5 shadow orbs before applying SW:P."

In the hope that Shadow Orbs is awesome, here's a small handful of suggestions for the use of shadow orbs.

• If they deplete over time, make sure it's not yet another excuse to rush pulls. 40 seconds out of combat seems like little enough time that farming orbs before a boss pull isn't really viable, but long enough time that you don't need to hurry between trash packs or risk wasting orbs.
  
• The brief mention of "spending" shadow orbs to empower a single spell or to perhaps cast an entirely new spell sounds excellently fun.
• There should be a balance struck between hoarding shadow orbs for their passive damage bonus and spending them for the powered-up spells. Ideally the chance to gain a shadow orb would be based off your mastery rating, but the chance goes down for each shadow orb you have. So higher mastery leads to a higher maximum number of shadow orbs, and spending more orbs on spells allows you to gain orbs back more quickly.
• They should be spendable for a damage boost, so that keeping a balance between the passive boost of having them and the immediate boost of spending some is worthwhile. Ideally this balance should not be "pop an orb whenever you hit the maximum number." It should also not be "pop an orb whenever you have one."
  
• They should also be spendable for utility effects, like temporarily making VE raid-wide, making Inner Will look more like Sprint, making Fade get you out of combat, or making Dispersion a real immunity effect. Clearly some of these are pretty powerful, so they should require a large number of orbs, possibly so many that you can't even use some of them unless you have enough mastery on your gear to be able to have that many orbs.
• Speaking of which, having the maximum orbs vary with mastery, and having certain uses for them that only become available as your maximum increases sounds incredibly fun as well. It's like leveling up and getting new spells when you're already at the endgame.

Well, that's my two coppers on the topic of the priest changes for Cataclysm. Here's hoping for another amazing expansion.

On Expansions

I just read a post by Tobold (yes, I realize I'm behind the times,) about the difficulty of balancing Cataclysm. His central argument it that, in order to "future-proof" the level 81-85 zones, they need to be tuned so that someone who just turned level 80 a year from now, someone in greens and blues with little raiding experience, can handle the world and normal-mode 5man mobs. Trouble is, most of the players right now are in at least 4 piece t9, and have appreciably more skill than a fresh 80, even if I think that amount of skill is a pittance. So we have the challenge of trying to set Cata up to be enjoyed immediately by a group ranging from fresh 80s to 11k-DPS beasts, and later to still be enjoyable by mostly fresh 80s, or even fresh 78s if Cata is to follow the tradition.




So what do we do? Here's my take on some of the options.

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Option 1: ...and I jizz in my pants.

Cataclysm follows ICC in difficulty and progression; world level 81 mobs have ~60k HP and deal about 2.5k DPS on cloth.

The reason for even considering this option is because it appeals to me personally. With my about 5k DPS when alone against a low-HP mob, fights would run about 12 seconds per mob, as they do now for a fresh 80 against level 80 world mobs. At 2.5k DPS for 12 seconds, I'd be taking a net 750 DPS (after self-healing, armor and other survival-oriented class abilities) from the first mob, and about 1750 for each thereafter, putting me at risk of dying to a two-mob pull, in need of CC for a three-mob pull, and funtionally dead as soon as the fourth aggros. Add in minor mob gimmicks/avoidable attacks, and the world mobs become a solo raid. For players not at the top-end of current content, 2-3man grouping would render such fights doable to the current average player, and a common 5man team of fresh and unskilled 80s could handle these as well. Personally, this option has my seal of approval; It would be like I just ate a grape.

However, this would make the 78-85 range all but impossible for a truly casual player. Even a good casual would only be doing ~2k DPS when they arrived at level 80, and forced grouping, either in the form of raiding to get up to speed, or grouping in order to finish "solo" quests, would mean progression and remaining casual are mutually exclusive. R.I.P. Option 1.

Option 2: WoW, so easy a retard can do it.

Business as usual, tuned for bad fresh 80s. World mobs have ~14k HP and deal maybe 400 DPS on cloth. No gimmicks, mobs all virtually reskinned clones of eachother (like in WotLK.)

This option is fairly likely; Blizzard's current policy seems to be "Hardmode raids are for the hardcore, Raids are for almost everyone, and world mobs should be soloable three-at-a-time by a retard." If we take a bad fresh 80, we'd find ~600 DPS, possibly lower armor types than normal, and no item enhancements. At this rate, fights last 23 seconds per mob, and the mobs deal about 170 DPS for the first mob, and 320 for each beyond the first. At this rate, this bad fresh 80 can take two at a time from full health, and might even manage three or four if they use crowd-control, heals or kiting.

If this sounds rediculously easy to you... well, I point you to current level 80 world mobs. They have 12800 HP and deal ~250 DPS on cloth; they're even easier. I accidentally oneshotted one of them when I went to go check that data. On my crappy Mage alt. So clearly it's neither too easy for Blizzard nor too easy for the 'tards. But I suppose that's OK; everyone says the game starts at level cap anyway. It could, however, be better than this.

Option 3: Operation Vanilla WoW

Tune for the average player now (t9, 20k HP, 3k DPS,) nerf it later. Mobs would have about 25k HP and deal 900 DPS on cloth.

This was how the old world was handled. Once upon a time you'd have elites wandering around outside every instance, sometimes before you even got to the meeting stone. Places like Moonbrook had mages with a gigantic aggro radius that could pyroblast you for half your health from accross the subzone. Then they buffed players. Then they buffed them again. Then they nerfed the old-world mobs. Then they buffed players again. Then they nerfed the mobs again. And here we stand, with an old world that's so easy a retard could do it.

I actually don't prefer this option to option 2; it's still no challenge to me, and people will whine when they go to nerf it later. In the mean time, some bad casuals may quit because they can't handle it, reducing the amount of money spend on improving the endgame for the rest of us.

Option 4: The only serious one.

Tune the world mobs for the bads, tune the "group" quests for the good casuals, tune the 5mans for the ICC raiders, nerf 5mans later.

This is the "something for everyone" approach, and the approach which has made WoW the massive success that it is. Up until now, they've done it as "world mobs for morons, group quests for morons with friends, 5mans for three morons a tank and a healer, and raids for everyone else," and that's how I expect them to handle Cata. If, however, we can get some of the levelling game tuned for the high-end players, then the game needn't "begin at level cap" and we might go back to enjoying levelling, rather than trying to get it done as fast as possible.