Archive for the ‘Cataclysm’ Category

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Mar
09
2010

Should healers have to deal with mana management?

So, the healing forums have been having a pretty big discussion lately (over the last few weeks) about how much mana management should matter in Cataclysm, and how spell choice plays into managing mana.

As someone who survived healing from the early days through now, I remember having to make more… intelligent decisions about what heals to use when mana was a limited resource.

I remember the days of using down-ranked Healing Touches weaved between other spells. In Burning Crusade, we didn’t really make that many choices about spells (my resto druid spammed rolling lifeblooms, and my shaman spammed chain heal). I remember the days of actually having a macro to cancel my long cast spells, though. Even at the beginning of WotLK, mana seemed like something that was a slightly more limited resource.

The problem right now, though, is that you have to use your fastest heals at the expense of everything else. This encourages people to heal with less efficient, more expensive spells (which is why Glyphed Healing Touch is seeing a resurgence, and why HOT raid healing even works). There doesn’t seem to be a way to tell good healers from bad healers. Meters just reward healing “first”, and people don’t really judge healers any other way. Since you can’t run OOM, you may as well just spam your fastest and least efficient heals all the time.

In Cataclysm, the goal seems to be a desire to return to the original game’s style of healing, where you need a team of healers to manage their mana and heal “smart” instead of healing first. Where you will have to actually spend time choosing what sized heals you want (maybe unglyphed HT’s long cast time will make it back as a useful tool?). I think that there would also have to be less AOE raid constant damage, as it is the AOE healing that really tends to be the most spammy and the least mana efficient a lot of the time (with the most limited healing tools). For single-target healing, most of the classes have those small, medium, big options. For raid healing, none of the classes have much variety in tools (and for paladins, they just have nothin at all). So, perhaps raid healing is a place where the developers should look at the tools that the healing classes have, to see if they want to give us more choices in what spells we use for AOE healing.

Mana management can be an interesting part of the healers’ game.  I hope that it leads to interesting changes in Cataclysm, and that it makes the game more fun instead of more frustrating. So, I think that healing spell variety has to be interesting and meaningful if mana management is going to be part of the healers’ job in Cataclysm once again. If one or two spells are obviously just better than the rest, then we’ll just spam ourselves OOM and get frustrated, so there has the be the right mix of tools and the right balance. Can we achieve all of this next expansion? Only time will tell. I personally think that mana management can work as an interesting part of the game, because it has been in the past. However, I think there is also a lot of risk.

Posted in Cataclysm, Restoration Healing Trees, Uncategorized | 16 Comments »

Mar
02
2010

Cataclysm Gear changes for druids

So, they announced more details about their plan for Cataclysm gear, which has set off a posting frenzy across the WOW community.

Most of it was stuff we already knew. The summary is that they expect bear & cats to share gear, while they expect resto & moonkin to share gear. This sounds great in theory, but is likely going to cause problems in the long run, and it’s going to take months of Beta testing everything to get all the “nobs” tweaked right to pull this off.

However, please keep in mind that we have multiple months to get everything working right, and that there will be some variety & customization for our gear, and that the sky is definitely not falling (well, except for moonkin who can make stars fall out of the sky on demand).

Overall, they seem to be simplifying gear to a great extent. First, please realize that this is only a plan, and that some things will change between this post & Cataclysm being released. Here’s a rough summary and analysis, rather than a copy/paste of that thread. If you want to see what exactly they said, then go read the original thread. Below combines some of the knowledge from earlier posting, along with what was released today. In all cases, the existing stats on gear are going to change. However, you should wait until we know what individual pieces will look like before you start stocking up on additional gear. There will be several months to get things all straightened out before things go live. Cata is still a long time away.

For cats & bears, stats on leather armor will include:

  • Cat & bear gear will have roughly the same amount of stamina, which will be high like the other classes (so bear won’t need as much additional scaling for stam).
  • Leather gear for cats/bears will likely have a mix of: stam, agility, crit, haste, mastery, hit, & expertise.
  • Bears may need to gear for STR accessories for more tanking-related stats shared with other tanking classes (though bears still can’t block/parry), but this point still isn’t entirely clear. Dodge rating would probably only be on the STR items.
  • Resilience will still be good for PvP.
  • Haste will be a more attractive state for melee specs.
  • Reforging will help with getting your bear & cat sets to have the right combination of stats. However, reforging won’t be perfect (IE. you won’t be able to convert all of that yucky parry/block into dodge at a 1 to 1 conversion rate).

For Resto & Moonkin

  • We’re expected to gear basically the same between resto & moonkin (they said that before WotLK; we’ll see how well that actually works out).
  • Leather caster gear will have a mix of: Int, stam, spirit, haste, crit, & mastery.
  • Resto druids will be happy, and not much is changing for them in terms of gear stats, and everything is happy in tree-land.
  • Moonkin (and elemental shaman) won’t have hit rating itemized on their leather/mail. Instead, we’ll have talents that convert spirit to hit rating. We can still use DPS caster accessories with or without hit on them as needed.
  • It is likely that there will be some leather caster gear without spirit on it (I really hope so). If moonkin ends up with too much spirit (ie. hit rating) from gear, we can either complain to get more non-spirit items, or we can suck it up and reforge (and take the 50% stat penalty) to convert spirit to another more useful stat. However, until we see what happens to the gear, we just have to trust that in most cases, gear will be itemized in a way that makes sense. Also, if other casters end up with too much +hit rating gear, they will have to do the same thing, so it should balance out in the end.
  • My bet is that we’ll end up needing to reforge a couple pieces of gear to get a decent set, but I’m hoping that reforging works out right in the end.
  • We lose mastery if we pick up cloth instead of leather.
  • Spell penetration & resilience will be available for PvP gear.
  • It should be harder for moonkin to reach the hit/haste/crit caps in Cataclysm compared to now.

More About Reforging (ie. what people should be concerned about right now):

Reforging is really what all of druids dreams for the future are tied up in. Bears will need reforging to turn Warrior tanking items into druid tanking items, or to turn rogue leather into tanking leather. Moonkin still won’t have gear perfectly itemized for them, and will need reforging to turn healing gear into moonkin gear (especially for balancing around the spirit/hit cap). For bear druids, there needs to be some way to turn STR accessories into better things for bears without losing itemization points along the way, since bears are likely going to be expected to use them (ie. parry & block rating need 1 to 1 conversions to dodge for bears, or bears will be more limited in the gear they can tank in).

In conclusion:

This isn’t really anything super new or shocking. We have had huge changes to our stats every expansion, and we have survived every time in the past. Cataclysm will bring new and exiting changes, and nothing marked for Cataclysm is set in stone yet. They could make it through part of testing and realize something just isn’t working right, and completely change it to something different. That’s just part of the game, and we’ll adapt just like we always do.

Posted in Cataclysm, Druid - General, Feral Bear tanking, Feral DPS Cat, Moonkin Balance DPS, Restoration Healing Trees | 6 Comments »

Feb
26
2010

Recap of Twitter answers for druids

There were 2 questions relevant to druids in the latest twitter #blizzchat.

  • Q. Is there any ETA on tree / moonkin form graphical update?
    A. Moonkin is hard because Moonkin players are so in love with that form. It’s tough to change it at all. We currently hope to do a new tree form for Cataclysm, but no promises.

I think what moonkin would like more than a complete revamp is just color customizations of the already existing forms. A quick re-color (tied to our hair colors) would be a lot of fun, even if the basic forms weren’t changed for moonkin. Color customization is more important for trees & moonkin, really. More colors, please!

Also, moonkin & tree form (and ALL the forms) need to look different for Worgen & Trolls compared to their NE & Tauren counterparts. Since we won’t likely be able to fight outside of forms as druids, the new races need very distinctly different forms so that the new races can be fun.

  • Q. Has there been any thought of changing Eclipse to charges so that Moonkin dps doesn’t suffer so much from moving?
    A. Yes. Expect a major overhaul in Cataclysm that keeps the same basic idea (alternating from Arcane to Nature) but in a way that is more core to the class. Like everything though, there is the risk that we may decide this idea sucks once we see it in action.

This is something I’m super excited to see. I can pretty much promise you that the moonkin players will give you great feedback on anything that you tinker with during Cataclysm testing. We can’t wait to see what the developers ideas are for making moonkin a more fun spec to play! If their first idea for the Eclipse mechanic comes out funky, we’ll do whatever we can to help it work out in the end.  I think moonkin need to see a lot of revamp & change to bring us into a better place in Cataclysm, but that’s what expansion talent revamps are really all about.

I’m glad that they are at least willing to consider fundamentally changing how Eclipse works, which gives me hope that maybe they’ll make the changes necessary to moonkin so that we don’t feel like we’re always an expansion behind everyone else and just trying to play catch-up all the time. I’m really excited to see what may be coming for moonkin in the future. This next expansion will be really fun for moonkin (yes, I can still sound hopeful from time to time).

Posted in Cataclysm, Moonkin Balance DPS, Patch 3.3 WotLK, Patches, Restoration Healing Trees | 11 Comments »

Feb
18
2010

Can moonkin be fixed before Cata?

Okay, so Ghostcrawler has posted in multiple balance druid threads in the damage dealing forum in the last week. He shot down two ideas (ie. a glyph for wrath haste scaling, and Owlkin Frenzy buffs). He seems to be paying attention to moonkin, and to changes that will come before Cataclysm, but there doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut way to fix moonkin’s problems without major talent tree overhauls.

What are the problems?

  1. Wrath scales poorly with haste, causing there to be a soft-cap of around 400 haste rating, where after that rating level, your wrath cast time drops below a second and clips the GCD (when Nature’s Grace is active). Also causes problems when Heroism is up.
  2. Eclipse has been buffed too many times, and now makes the crit cap for Starfire be too low, and Eclipse makes up too large of a % of our overall DPS. Eclipse is also a clunky & uncontrolled mechanic, leading to big RNG swings in our DPS not being reliable (ie. we have good RNG days and bad RNG days, with larger DPS swings up and down  than other classes have to deal with).
  3. Moonkin have to stand rooted in place to do good damage. For example, on Festgergut in ICC, I’ve deemed myself a “melee moonkin” so I can pump out between 2,000 and 3,000 more DPS than if I was in range (a bigger swing than any of our other ranged damage dealers). Lack of mobility effects both PvP and PvE moonkin.
  4. Given that the fight mechanics require a lot of moving around and we scale poorly with stats, we tend to fall behind on DPS compared to people who don’t have those same movement or scaling problems. In some fights in ICC 25-man, I can come in 4th place on the meters & in the same instance, I can also come in 11th place; since my DPS goes up and down all over the place, which isn’t happening to the other people in my raid (ie. they stay relatively the same & I move up and down willy nilly).
  5. Moonkin don’t do well in PvP. Given that all of Moonkin’s mechanics are designed around doing good PvE damage, moonkin have very few good PvP abilities, and lack the defensive cooldowns or escape mechanics that other classes have. Combined with clunky damage dealing mechanics and no burst-damage cooldowns they can use on demand (and how hard it would be to maintain an Eclipse rotation in pvp), moonkin haven’t been doing well overall in Arena teams all expansion (with very few exceptions of moonkin who have managed to “stick it out).

Are there ways we can fix these problems before Cataclysm? What are the real fixes these problems need?

  1. No. Well, not without some clunky mechanic like the glyph that GC doesn’t like. The real fix for poor haste scaling is that Nature’s Grace needs to be removed for Cataclysm’s talent changes, where the trees can be designed around the talent’s removal without being a huge nerf. Anything else is just going to likely to be clunky (like the glyph option).
  2. No. Eclipse can’t be fixed until Cataclysm either. What moonkin’s rotation needs is about 2 more spells that we can mix into our rotations, in which case Eclipse would be much more easily modified at that point. In addition, other talents can be put in the mix to reduce our dependency on Eclipse forcing us to do more than just cast starfire. In addition, Eclipse wouldn’t need to be as strong if Wrath didn’t clip the GCD so much (ie. wrath was actually desirable to use in PvE). They could also take wrath out of our rotation and give us something else that was a medium cast-time nuke, and save Wrath for being a PvP spell (where fast cast times are more favorable).
  3. No. To fix our problems with movement-heavy or target switching fights, the changes they could make to our overall rotation and new spells could help address that “rooted” problem. For example, an instant-cast direct damage spell that did decent burst damage could be timed to use while moving when movement was predictable (and typhoon or refreshing DOTs just doesn’t fill that role well enough).
  4. Yes, the developers can boost our overall DPS so that we don’t fall behind the other classes.
  5. Not really. Moonkin PvP needs the talent trees redesigned, new abilities implemented, and new “on use” defensive/offensive cooldowns to stand much of a chance in pvp. Moonkin could also use an imp barkskin talent like exactly what they gave to resto druids instead of moonkin. There are little things Blizzard can do to make life for PvP moonkin more tolerable, but there’s no fix for a spec that is totally broken for PvP.

What can be changed before Cataclysm?

  • This is something that a newer moonkin blogger, Random Moonkin Generator, has been mulling over, and suggests things like: removing haste from celestial focus, changing improved insect swarm (ie. making wrath crit more & starfire do more damage to help increase the crit cap for Lunare Eclipse starfires), making nature’s splendor increase duration of IS & moonfire more, having our DOTs scale with haste or crit from talents. Some of these I’ll talk about below, but you should go read that thread, too.
  • The fastest solution to falling behind on DPS is just to give flat damage increases to talents like Earth & Moon that can easily be removed for Cataclysm, and work great without having to do too much testing. That’s what they did with Earth & Moon once already in 3.3. They could just tack on an additional damage bonus to imp moonkin form or something.
  • The easiest solution would be to do nothing and make us “wait until Cata”, so that in Alpha/Beta testing for Cata, the whole talent tree can just be re-designed from the ground up (or something like that).
  • Better scaling with gear? I like the idea of having DOTs scale better with gear.  Our tier 9 set bonus allowed moonfire to crit, which was a nice temporary way of DOTs scaling with our crit. However, once you upgrade to T10 gear, none of our DOTs scale with either haste or crit. It might be interesting to have one (or both) of our DOTs scale better with either crit or haste. It doesn’t fix the immediate problems of wrath and starfire scaling, but it’s something interesting that could be examined.
  • Reducing Starfire’s Crit chance? If the possibility of crit-capping Starfire on Eclipse procs is problematic, the crit bonuses given to starfire through imp insect swarm or improved Faerie Fire could potentially be changed to flat damage increases instead of crit increases. Imp insect swarm would be the most obvious candidate, since only starfire gains crit from that talent. The crit for starfire on imp IS could also be turned into X% haste, and then the haste from Celestial Focus could be removed and turned into something else.
  • Celestial focus – If the haste was removed from CF, then it could be possible to give some PvP effect that helped with their survivability or offensive ability. Moonkin PvP could still really use something to give them a chance to be more than just a training dummy out on the field of battle.
  • Owlkin Frenzy is another talent that could be changed to help moonkin PvP. I’m sure the devs could think of something (ie. make it reduce how much damage the moonkin are taking from players as they get beat on, for when they’re not able to take advantage of the damage boost). They could also just put a clone of Imp Barkskin into the balance tree so moonkin could actually shift out of moonkin form some time, and increase the usefulness of barkskin for them. They could also give moonkin the ability to cast heal spells in form (maybe just 1 or 2).
  • Changing the moonkin Tier 10 2-piece bonus? This is somewhere that they could adjust something that would effect high-end raiders more than everyone else at this point. The OOC proc damage increase mechanic contributes to the randomness of damage swings, since you could have OOC proc 5 times in a row, or not proc at all. It would also keep moonkin from finding ways to “force” OOC to proc (even mana expensive ways that consume reagents). The damage bonus also doesn’t last very long, so you could miss out on it while moving too much. It doesn’t matter too much what  they changed it to, so long as it gave a more steady damage boost, rather than more random burst. They could also just swap the T9 2-piece with the T10 2-piece, since people at lower gear levels are likely less concerned with gear scaling problems (ie. people wearing all T10 could really use the crit scaling for moonfire). People at lower gear levels would also be able to better absorb the RNG-nature of the OOC proc bonus, and would have absolutely no effect on people wearing 2 pieces of each.

Conclusions:

  • There are many other changes the developers could decide to do to help moonkin PvP and PvE. However, only the developers can really decide what they want to change now versus what can wait until Cataclysm.  Anything from minor changes to large changes could be done at any time, and it’s really up to them to decide what it is they actually want to do. GC seems to want community feedback at the moment, but he isn’t really giving us directions on what we should be focusing on for our suggestions. It feels more like trying to shoot at moving targets in the dark, where we only know when we missed the target.

Posted in Cataclysm, Moonkin Balance DPS, Patch 3.3 WotLK | 14 Comments »

Feb
06
2010

Cataclysm Gearing: Is reforging something to look forward to?

Okay, so my moonkin is having a terrible time trying to gear up in ICC. I’m having a hard time finding things like belts & bracers out of the 25-man instance that would be worthwhile, and I had to pick up a crit/spirit dagger off Morrow (paired with an off-hand I had from the ICC 5-mans). All the upgrades I really want are either in the 10-man or from badges.

All my gearing frustration, however, just makes me want Cataclysm to come sooner. So, lets take a look at what has me so excited about gearing my moonkin in Cataclysm.

Here’s a quote from my post at the Blizzcon Class pannel:

Reforging – Customizing gear. Relatively cheap. Given to blacksmiths, leatherworkers, tailors, Jewelcrafters, & Engineers. Reduce one stat for more of another (some restrictions apply).

Now, there are tons of items right now where I go: That would be great except that it has X stat instead of Y stat. We could turn a spirit-heavy resto item into a spirit-light moonkin item (since we were told no spirit for moonkin).

So, I did some digging around, and here’s is some info I’ve been able to dig up on reforging:

It’s too early to go into a lot of detail on the new features, but the basic idea here was to make an undesirable drop possibly more desirable. It still shouldn’t compete with gear that is actually itemized for you.

As an example, letting someone turn stamina into a dps stat is something we’d be unlikely to do (or at least impose a lot of restrictions) since that lets you turn an undesirable stat for most characters into something good.

Think of reforging more as a consolation prize or as a way to work around things like hit caps, and not the kind of thing that clever players are going to be able to use to vastly min max their character power.

Along with this one here:

Imagine reforging could work like enchanting, where there are specific recipes that everyone knows. Example: “Converts Spirit into 50% equivalent hit rating on gloves.” I’m not saying it would work like this, but something along those lines would be pretty comparable to existing features.

I still think that being able to turn spirit into a DPS-friendly stat, or changing hit rating into another stat (OR adding hit rating to an item if needed) could be a very powerful use fo this feature. I would like to think that they would design Reforging so that hybrids like moonkin (who they never really want to design specialized gear for) will benefit a lot from this kind of change. We don’t really need to change stamina into damage dealing stats, but we will benefit from being able to turn healer gear into DPS gear.

What stats moonkin should want in cataclysm:

What stats resto should want in cataclysm:

  • Int (will give SP), spirit, haste crit, & the new mastery stat.

So, the theory would be that moonkin could potentially take the healing gear with spirit and turn it into something worthwhile for us, and resto could take something without spirit to turn it into something with spirit.

But there’s always a catch. Here are the Potential Problems:

  • It may only remove half of the unwanted stat, leaving gear with half the unwanted stat (ie. hit or spirit for caster leather). So, that gear really would be sub-optimal and perhaps make the reforging system not actually all happy like I first thought it might be.  This would leave Blizzard still having to make leather without spirit on it for moonkin, as we wouldn’t be able to remove all the spirit from healing leather.
  • EDIT: It may also potentially be designed take more than it gives back, IE. taking all the spirit but only giving you half the value back in another stat, which would mean the item ends up not really being a replacement for well-itemized gear for that slot. If you have to do this for half your gear for end-game raiding, suddenly you are losing out on an awful lot of stats you could have had with better itemized gear in the first place.
  • If Blizzard has further incentives for classes to use their highest armor type (in this case, leather for druids), moonkin may be more prohibited from wearing cloth than we already are, and the reforging system may have raid leaders being more reluctant to let moonkin take cloth drops. Add to that the fact we can’t roll “need” on cloth from 5-man dungeons, and things may still be tricky for moonkin to gear up in Cataclysm.
  • Blizzard has a long history of not wanting to make item drops that only one spec of one class will want to wear. Since Moonkin & elemental shaman are niche-specs that tend to not be super abundant in raid groups, I’m betting that these two specs will still have a hard time gearing up in Cataclysm raid dungeons, since Blizzard may see reforging as the best way to let us turn healing gear into DPS gear, which could potentially leave moonkin with really still sub-optimal gear and no way to turn all the junk stats into stats we want.

Conclusions:

Reforging has the potential to be a great opportunity for Blizzard to deal with specs like moonkin & elemental shaman that can’t just DPS in healing gear (and shouldn’t heal in hit rating gear), but don’t otherwise share gear with anyone else.

However, the only way for reforging to fill this role is if ALL of spirit or hit rating can be removed from an item and converted into a wanted stat for other specs that share the gear. Otherwise, Reforging is never going to let casters and healers share gear, and will leave us with the same problems with gearing that we have right now. It also needs to give back enough of the wanted stat so that you aren’t losing huge chunks of stats if you are forced to reforge rather than be given good options for your gear. These may also be the only two stats where removing all of it from an item should need to be an option. I’m sure melee classes would benefit from being able to remove all the hit from an item, so that they could turn hit-rating pieces into something useful for them after they reach the hit-cap. In this case, everyone could win.

Posted in Cataclysm, Druid - General, Moonkin Balance DPS, Restoration Healing Trees, Shaman | 19 Comments »

Jan
31
2010

Talent guides of the future: Is all choice good choice?

Okay, so it’s no secret that I spend a LOT of my time coming up with talent guides. I’ve done talent guides for leveling. Talent guides for end-game raiding. Analysis of what talents I think are good. Analysis for what talents I think are bad and should be changed. I also apologize in advance for just rambling theoretically about guide writing and talent choices. None of this reflects actual things we know are coming, but I want to talk about the implications & problems with a possible design philosophy that I don’t necessarily agree with.

While I originally passed over one of GC’s posts last week, there was something that caught my eye today that I wanted to nitpick a little bit. The original post you should have all read is here. Context matters, so you should go back and read the full blue post. I’m not going to repost the whole thing. Instead, the quote I’m interested in particular says:

Because you earn passive bonuses just for spending points in the tree, those fun, niche or utility talents won’t seem as expensive as they do today. We want to create a lot more choices where you are choosing utility vs. utility. We want to see far more “cookie cutter” build guides that say “Spend the last 5-10 points where you want.”

First, I like the idea of the passive bonuses. It takes away the need to spend the majority of our points just on things that essentially say “increases damage/healing by X”. That’s a great goal to work on.

On the surface, more choices seems like a good idea. The idea of more utility talents and more options seems like a neat goal.

However, where I have problems is his last sentence about writing guides that tell people to just spend 5 or 10 points wherever they want. When I do that in one of my guides, it usually means that none of the options are good anymore and you can just dump some points into basically “garbage” talents, or that the choices just aren’t meaningful so I’m basically giving up on trying to make a decision.

Talent choices should still be meaningful, and there SHOULD still be choices. However, there is a right and a wrong way to allow for choice. All the choices have to theoretically not just be throw-away talents that people think are bad, but put left-over points into anyway. I don’t have a problem with presenting 3 or 4 different talent specs, like I do for my healing guide right now. I don’t mind 5-man healing specs looking different than 25-man raiding specs looking different from PvP healing specs. I don’t even mind if the talent trees allow enough flexibility that people can disagree about the right spec to have, or can choose not to follow the cookie-cutter build if they want.

However, I do mind the possibility of either having talents being so desirable OR undesirable that we can’t present a good “cookie cutter” spec in our guides. The goal should be, instead, for people to not WANT to follow the cookie-cutter builds, and for people to find neat paths of their own through the talent trees in places where it better matches their particular play-style.

At the point where we say “spend the last 10 wherever you want”, I feel like I’m not doing my job as a guide writer. A “best” spec should always emerge out of guide writing, because that’s the entire point of what people like me do. In testing phases, I’ve been known to spend hours jumping off cliffs trying to reduce my health enough to test HOT healing in a controlled environment. Having HOT overheals show up in the combat log was a significant improvement to my personal testing quality of life, because I’d do practical testing rather than using spreadsheets and simulations, so having the #’s show up with less effort meant I could waste less time running back up hills.  Guide writers go to great lengths to be confident in the talents that they recommend to people, and being 10 points short isn’t going to be something that the guide writers will ever do. That’s just part of guide writing: fill up the talent tree & present it for other people to decide whether they follow you or not.

If we are investing in utility, it should be useful utility. Giving us bonuses that seem neat but have no real impact on our playstyle are just throw-away talents, and it’s usually at the point of throw away talents where we suggest just to dump points wherever. For moonkin/cat druids in a PvE raiding environment, our job is to be doing damage to the boss. We want to be investing points in talents that are going to help us do our job to the point where we aren’t just going to get laughed out of guilds like we were in the original days of the game. It doesn’t matter if we can daze things unless daze is an important part of the boss mechanic. In the days of redundant buffs, giving people more options to spec into redundant buff talents (that may be wasted in some circumstances) isn’t really an improvement to the trees.

The goal shouldn’t be to have guide writers suggest that people just dump points wherever. At that point, why bother writing the guides at all? The goal (instead) should be to get guide writers to have to write about decision points in the trees and how to decide between options based on their playstyle, which I do in my resto druid healing guide right now. I offer multiple decision points & help my readers be informed about their choice between options for different PvE healing build choices. For example, you may have to choose between having Celestial focus or not in a healing build (which is an interesting choice). Another interesting choice ends up being whether or not to pick up several other talents (empowered touch, living seed, revitalze), – depending entirely on whether or not they are good for your particular playstyle. I think it would be interesting for the talent choices to differ with slight differences in playstyle, for example – for there to be clear PvP talents versus clear PvE talents for DPS specs, OR multiple ways to come up with good DPS specs that alter how you do your DPS rotation (ie. mangle-focused versus shred-focused builds for cats, or something like that).

The good talent trees of the future are ones that allow for choices to be made based on playstyle, where there will still be clear guidelines for guide writers to follow about what are good choices for a certain playstyle. I like the idea of “choose your own adventure” talent trees, but there is always going to be one right path down talent trees for people who are trying to maximize their DPS, healing, or tanking potential – and if the talent points aren’t helping the player accomplish their goals, then people shouldn’t be investing points in those talents in the first place. I would rather feel like the talent trees are too full than feel like they are too empty, and the only time I’m going to throw my hands up and force my readers to choose totally on their own is when the trees are too empty and the choices aren’t meaningful.

More often than not, the talents we skip are ones that aren’t meaningful to our roles. So, improved barkskin is a really interesting PvP talent, but I would never pick it up for PvE. If the choice for me was between imp barkskin and imp tranquility, I wouldn’t care because both of them I consider to not be useful talents for my healing role. For my moonkin, if I had to decide between genesis & dreamstate, it wouldn’t be a meaningful choice, since neither of them would actually increase my DPS potential by enough to care.

So, the choices of the future need to be meaningful, without swinging the other way and feeling like the talent trees are so full of “bloat” that we can’t make a decent enough spec out of it. There has to be a clear pathway through the tree for a particular playstyle and role because that’s how we make sense and meaningfulness out of our choices (IE. I choose a tank healing build because I want to tank heal – OR, I choose a Panzerkin tanking moonkin/feral build because I’m a crazy tanking moonkin, OR I want to be a restokin that picks up both moonkin & tree form). We want the talent choices to meaningfully reflect a play-style, and for our investments to feel worthwhile based on the spell combination and role that we have chosen.

The choices should still be meaningful, and the guide writers should still be able to make enough sense out of it to come up with the carefully crafted “cookie cutter” builds. Even if we have to come up with multiple builds, and points where we ask people to make choices, these trees will still be complete. Figuring out the “best” specs to have for a given role & playstyle is part of the game that we play – and it’s something I enjoy doing.

The goal should be to have interesting choices, not to take away the role of cookie-cutter specs.

Posted in Cataclysm, Druid - General | 24 Comments »

Jan
28
2010

Lore Matters: War of the Ancients book series

So, over Christmas break, I had long airplane flights. So, I took the Warcraft: War of the Ancients trilogy book series with me as reading material to keep me from getting bored on the plane.

For as much as some people dislike Richard Knaak’s work, I actually found this series to be important for me. It helped me with realizing who Deathwing is, and why his coming back in the next expansion is really a terrifying thing for Azeroth. In addition, I learned a lot about Malfurion and the early history of druids in the book series. I also realized that it would have been helpful for an introduction as to why Illidan was the big bad guy of the Burning Crusade expansion. I didn’t play any of the Warcraft games before WOW, so I tend to have frequently missed out on important lore things.

Lore is important for feeling connected to the storyline in the game. Lore is important for knowing WHY we’re fighting, and WHO we are fighting. It is easy to get distracted by game mechanics, and lose the story along the way.  The lore-based books help make the world feel bigger (and older) than it feels as you go through various quests and raid encounters. It makes the battles feel bigger and more hopeless in ways that gives you a reason to want to fight.

An example of being disconnected to the Lore: I complained one week when we were learning Ulduar about how I felt cheated because the keepers don’t actually die. I think it was just unfulfilling to keep defeating but not killing the bosses (I knew they helped us on Yogg, but I didn’t quite “get” what was going on). My boyfriend responded to this complaint by spouting off the reason why they don’t die (something about our objective being to free them, not to kill them). I don’t remember the specific details, but I got caught up in the fight mechanics and forgot to pay attention to WHY we were doing it.

I read the Arthas book at some point so I would feel more connected to the lore surrounding Northrend and the Lich King. I thought it was really helpful for me to do that, since I wanted to feel more connected to WHY we were in Northrend fighting.

Deathwing is one scary beast. I’m also starting early to study up on lore that I think is relevant to Cataclysm so that I don’t feel so disconnected from the WHY. Deathwing used to be a normal dragon, but the old gods corrupted him and made him go a little bonkers. He betrayed the rest of the dragons, and did a lot of bad things. When you know the story behind where Deathwing comes from, the idea of his getting free to wreak more havoc on the world is pretty scary, and is much more motivating to fight against it.

One of the other great pieces in the War of the Ancients book series is that there is a lot of information about Malfurion Stormrage, and what the early druid spell casting actually looked at. I never really quite understood the love triangle between Malfurion, Illidan (his brother), and Tyrande (NE priestess).

One of the things this book series has is detailed descriptions of how Malfurion’s druid spells worked (ie. seeds that burst into flames: “Malfurion threw the seeds into the bat’s maw. The monster convulsed immediately… A fiery glow erupted from within Varo’then’s mount. The captain tried to maintain control, but to no avail. The bat flailed around, shrieking. A moment later, it burst into flames. Malfurion had used the seeds’ inherent heat during earlier battles…” (Knack, 2005, The Sundering, Pg. 287). This is definitely a spell we don’t have anymore, but I think “flaming seeds” should be something that the we should start looking into learning how to use again (on second thought, maybe not with the name “flaming seeds”).

The small amount of Malfurion lore in this book series actually made me really excited at the prospect of the Malfurion book that is supposed to be released sometime relatively soon.

Posted in Cataclysm, Druid - General | 14 Comments »

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