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Warlocks as the MoP Baseline
If you look at nothing else regarding the Mists of Pandaria Talent Calculator, browse the warlock section. Having looked at all the classes, it is pretty clear which among them have received the most designer attention. Which is not to suggest this pre-alpha build indicates which classes will be screwed or whatever. I’m simply saying that if the warlock design can be considered a baseline, Blizzard has a very real chance at blowing everyone’s fucking minds.
Demonic Portal alone… here, just let me show you again:
*cue the sound of one jaw dropping*
The sheer number of potential shenanigans boggles the mind. Set this up in a WSG flag room. Set this up in an AV tower. Set this up for your raid team as a handicap accessible ramp for those that struggle moving out of the fire fast enough. Set this up between the goddamn mailbox and AH. Five charges is not a lot, but I bet there will be a Glyph for more.
I don’t want to call a spell like this a “game-changer,” but I am finding it difficult to express what it does in any other terms. So many “new” spells and abilities in WoW are iterations of what came before. Malefic Grasp is the Affliction filler and acts as equal parts Drain Life and Shadow Bolt, with a speeding up of DoT damage innovation. Refreshing, and feels like something Affliction should do. Demonic Portal though is so out of the box that it feels like I have to approach the game in a fundamentally different way, even though it technically is an iteration too (“What if everyone could use a warlock’s Demonic Circle?”).
The rest of the warlock spells/talents show a similar level of left-field thinking. Look at the T3 talent line-up:
- Spell Drain: Next single-target spell/ability focused at you deals no damage and heals you for half of what it would have dealt. Lasts 4 seconds, 15 second cooldown.
- Soul Link: Probably same ~X% damage reduction.
- Sacrificial Pact: Demon sacrifices 50% of its HP to make you immune to damage for 10 seconds. 3 minute cooldown.
I think Spell Drain is going to be redesigned completely by the time Blizzard is through – no way it lasts with a 15 second cooldown – but all three of those are really, really hard choices. Yeah, raiders will probably stick with Soul Link unless the boss has an uber-move you can cheese with Sacrificial Pact, but I’m looking at this from more of a PvP standpoint. Or, hell, what about leveling/soloing old instances/running heroics/etc? Tough choices.
Now, look at T4:
- Blood Fear: Your Fear is instant, but costs 10% of your maximum health.
- Burning Rush: Your Life Tap causes you to move 25% faster for 8 seconds.
- Dark Bargain: Absorbs damage equal to 20% of your maximum health, lasts 30 seconds. Any shield remaining when the spell expires is dealt to you in damage. 30 second cooldown.
When I read this tier, I forgot these talents were from WoW; it felt like I was reading off some Dragon Age: Origin interpretation of a warlock. In a good way. These choices are more… warlock-y than warlocks have been in WoW since their inception. Before this, there was what? DoTs and Life Tap? Outside of the class quest to unlock the Succubus, I felt there was always a bit of weird, thin line between mages and warlocks. DoTs + pets vs nukes, sure, but once DoTs are up the warlock simply nukes too. And there never seemed to be much conceptual distance between Destruction warlocks and Fire mages. Now, with this kind of flavor and direction? Much, much better.
Everything can change between now and the Beta, let alone between the Beta and release (and the hotfixes, and mid-expansion overhauls, etc). But if the remaining classes can siphon off even a fraction of the creative juices oozing from these pre-alpha warlocks, MoP could end up making WoW feel like an entirely new, high fidelity experience to even the most bitter of veterans. I am indeed that impressed.
Thoughts on MoP Paladins
General:
- Judgement has a 6 second cooldown, 30 yard range baseline. At level 5. Cool.
- No Auras anymore. Crusader Aura is passive, self-only.
- Well, Holy paladins get a ridiculous cooldown version of the missing Auras.
- Blinding Shield has returned as Blinding Light.
- It will surf through beta, then hotfix-nerfed Day 1.
- Seriously, Hungering Cold gets a cast time, and another instant mass-AoE spell is designed?
- Plus, paladins. What’s not to nerf?
Talents:
- T1 – Speed of Light is a real oddball cooldown here. Consider that it is another 20% DR on a 1 minute cooldown for Holy, on top of Divine Protection, on top of Divine Shield, on top of Hand of Protection, on top of Devotion Aura (20% less Fire/Frost/Shadow damage, immune to interrupts/Silence for 6 seconds), on top of potentially Ardent Defender*. And you move faster with it up. The Prot version of Speed of Light increases damage done by 10% and is thus the more “raid tank” choice, but what does extra damage and moving faster have in common really? And Ret will skip it to grab the somewhat clunkier Long Arm of the Law. Or potentially Pursuit of Justice depending on how quickly Holy Power expires.
- T2 – We already tried the 6 second stun on a 30 second cooldown, Blizz. You said it didn’t work. As excited I am about Burden of Guilt, Repentance is really the only logical choice.
- T3 – /yawn. I want Sacred Shield as a tank, assuming the boosted healing doesn’t evaporate when the bubble pops, but I’m pretty sure Blessed Life will be required all the time, by every spec, everywhere. Constant raid damage, anyone?
- T4 – Selfless Healer is P-I-M-P. Thank you for bringing back my Ret from Wrath. Besides, it was getting a little dumb that warriors and rogues could heal themselves better/faster than my paladin while leveling.
- T5 – This whole row needs redesigned.
- T6 – Ditto this row. Boring.
- Misc – Blessed Life + Pursuit of Justice is actually a pretty funny talent “combo.” The more you damage a paladin, the faster they run around. Wish they would turn that more into a paladin kit.
Specs:
- [Ret] Nothing too terribly different than what we have now, aside from extra polish. For example, Inquisition now lasts 10 seconds per Holy Power, up from 4, making it more Slice n’ Dicey. Exorcism is Ret-only, instant-cast baseline, has no cooldown (!), generates Holy Power, and automatically fires ala DK’s old-school Sudden Doom talent (before it got moved to Unholy). Hrm… they might be intending for Ret to not be able to push the button until it lights up ala Arcane Missiles. Actually, yeah, both say “activate.” Lame.
- [Prot] /yawn. Could we have a few more passive abilities, Blizzard? Getting activated abilities at 10, 20, and 40 is too much. I might actually have to use a second row of my action bar.
- [Holy] I don’t roll Holy, but I find those rolling damage reduction cooldowns to be a tad of the ridiculous side.
Overall, I may have gotten a little too excited yesterday over the legitimate 50% snare thing. Especially considering the absolutely batshit crazy insane shenanigans going on in the Warlock department.
Consider yourself foreshadowed.
P.S. Did anyone else notice that mages no longer have Teleport/Portal: Theramore, but Stonard is still on the roster? Blatant Horde favoritism! Unless… unless… Alliance mages can send careless raid/random BG members to Stonard too. In which case: well played, Blizzard. Well played.
*Obviously not all at once, or in that sequence. However… 10 second DivPro, 12 second SoL, 10 second ArdentD, 6 second DevoAura, 8 second DivShield… which leaves you with 14 seconds until DivPro comes back off cooldown. Which you can fill with a 20 second Avenging Wrath, Guardian of Ancient Kings, or you know, actually healing through normal damage.
Paladin Ranged Snare
They did it, they really did it.
*cue We Are the Champions*
Obviously it is on the same row as a 30 second HoJ replacement and the paladin Sheep, both of which are likely to be better picks in a general sense. Obviously it is not game-breaking and who even knows what will be considered “balanced” at level 90. But… my god, gentlemen. To be denied for seven years, to endure the rationalizations as why paladins don’t need a proper snare, and to have this appear at 4 am on a random Wednesday… it is a sweet, sweet release.
A more thorough examination of the newly revised talent trees will have to wait until tomorrow.
P.S. My god, it’s full of stars…
*cue the sound of one jaw dropping*
Character Customization Through Talents
I was really going to leave the talent discussion alone, it being “old news” by now and my having already presented my case. But I keep coming across what seems historical revisionism of sorts when it came to early WoW talents and the number of actually legitimate customization options available. Take, for instance, this passage over at The Babbling Gamer:
[…] When I first played WoW back in 2005, it’s biggest selling point for me was the talent system. It allowed far more character customization than most MMOs out at the time. I tried all sorts of things. I tinkered. I had fun. The Burning Crusade felt like a solid improvement on it. I played with lots of sub-optimal specs, trying to find the one that was the most fun. I don’t min/max for effectivity, I min/max for enjoyability. I don’t care if spec A does 10% more damage while spamming one spell over and over than my spec B complex rotation of silly abilities and half-working synergies. I don’t care that I hardly ever use that heal I spent talent points to get and could be doing more damage without. […]
After some digging around Google, I actually found a website that has functioning TBC v2.01 talent calculators. Booting up the Retribution tree and seeing Crusader Strike as the 41-point talent really takes me back… to a time where I apparently enjoyed auto-attacking my balls with a hammer. And 61 talent points to spend! Those will sure come handy… in filling out all these 5-point talent sinks. You see, leveling up and getting a new talent point is fun. Putting said talent point into Rank 3 Conviction (+1% crit rate, 5 ranks) is at no point whatsoever fun.
So with that in mind, I decided to look at the various class trees and basically remove every talent that did NOT change your gameplay in any possible way. Here are some of the results:
TBC paladin talent tree.
How about the mage?
TBC mage talent trees.
The rubric I used to determine whether a talent changed your gameplay was pretty simple:
- The talent added a button to your hotbar; or
- The talent changed the way you used a button already on your hotbar.
The paladin case was fairly straight-forward: cooldowns, buffs, and abilities only. Then again, paladins have a lot of bleed-over utility that eventually resulted in the “one-man army” effect of Retribution in early Wrath.
The mage tree was a little less straight-forward. For example, I left Improved Counterspell up because it changed Counterspell from a button you only should push at a certain moment (when the target is casting), to a button that could be cast strategically (to deny spellcasting at certain moments). I left Improved Scorch open because the talent makes you actually include Scorch in your rotation to keep up a vital (raid) debuff, changing your gameplay. Likewise, I left Frostbite open even though it simply gives some of your spells a 15% chance to Freeze (root) your target, because that interrupts your normal spell rotation; instead of just chain-casting Frostbolt, when Frostbite procs you’re encouraged to do a Shatter combo of firing an Ice Lance with a Frostbolt in the air. You may or may not have noticed, but Shatter itself I left covered as a talent sink – even if Shatter did not exist, the damage/time limit of a Frostbite proc would still encourage the Frostbolt/Ice Lance combo. Shatter simply increases the potential damage, just like the overwhelming majority of all the talents in TBC trees.
A question arises though: is choosing between damage talents not a choice? Well… yes and no. The easy answer is the one from the Extra Credits video, which is to say that a choice between +10% Frostbolt damage vs +10% Ice Lance damage is NOT a choice, but a calculation. A problem arose, however, when I considered these two talents from Fallout: New Vegas:
Cowboy + Shotgun Surgeon
Granted, Fallout: New Vegas does not have a talent tree per se; it has a perk system. Every two levels you must choose a perk from an ever-expanding list however, so I consider that roughly analogous. So… is the Cowboy perk a choice or is it a calculation? I just agreed that choosing between +10% damage to two different spells is a calculation, and the Cowboy perk essentially gives me +25% damage to a small number of weapons. And yet I am inclined to say it is a legitimate choice. Why? I consider these sort of talents to be stylistic and/or identity choices. In a game with no formal classes, picking the Cowboy perk is the closest thing you can come to differing “specs” in Fallout. A Gatling laser handles a lot differently than a sniper rifle that handles a lot differently than a revolver. Likewise, an Arcane mage plays differently than a Fire mage that plays differently than a Frost mage.
So, going back to the Babbling Gamer quote, we can zero in on this part:
I don’t care if spec A does 10% more damage while spamming one spell over and over than my spec B complex rotation of silly abilities and half-working synergies.
What Warsyde has done is essentially used the old talent system to create an entirely new spec. Maybe create an Arcane mage that takes Ignite and casts Fireball instead of Arcane Blast with a little PoM-Pyro action in the wings? Warsyde did not actually mention any specific spec, but a Google searched turned up this gem of a EJ mage theorycraft thread started 10/16/06, talking about an Arcane/Frost hybrid mage grabbing both Spell Power (+50% crit damage) and Ice Shards (+100% crit damage with Frost spells). That sort of thing definitely would have got my juices flowing at the possibilities. So, yes, choices!
And yet… and yet… maybe not.
See, there was never any question that picking a specialization was a choice. And while the number of talents points available in TBC and the various positions in the trees allowed for the creation of “new” specs like the hybrid Arc/Fire or Arc/Frost mage, what were those hybrid specs really? A fire mage with PoM and Arcane Power, and a Frost mage with absurdly large Frostbolt crits, respectively. You were still basically a Fire mage or Frost mage with different activated abilities. And guess what Fire mages?
ka-POW!
You can have your PoM-Pyro back.¹
In conclusion, the older WoW talent systems allowed space for unsupported hybrid specs to exist, but in actuality these hybrids were almost always simply normal specs using 1-2 different abilities; an outcome basically indistinguishable from the proposed plan in MoP. The rest of the talent choices, and arguably many of the hybridization ones, simply came down to calculations – Arc/Frost was created simply to abuse +crit damage talents, for example. The only real thing we are losing is the ability to gain a number every other level, and sink that number down into a hole.
And while Warsyde can choose between spamming one spell vs a complex rotation of silly abilities with vague (calculated!) synergy, so can a 0/0/0 mage. How complicated one’s rotation should be is definitely a choice, but not one you make with talents.
¹ Yes, I am aware of Hot Streak procs and their simulated PoM-Pyro-ness. It’s just not the same.
Interesting How That Works
As you may have noticed, I’m actually pretty fine with the direction of Mists of Pandaria, pandas in general, and sort of feeding off of the entirely ridiculous vocal reactions against the expansion. Kind of like the opposite of the following Nietzsche quote:
“In every party there is one who through his all too credulous avowal of the party’s principles incites the others to apostasy.”
-Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
In other words, when you come across people who are so vehemently opposed to something (for seemingly irrational reasons), I for one have a subconscious tendency to moderate the behavior by adopting the opposite reaction. For example, I consider myself fairly liberal, but occasionally when I read some of the absurdly reactionary bullshit of other liberals, I suddenly find myself on the other side of the aisle. There is a story about how a police officer shot a dog, and it was presented to me as “If you aren’t upset, you aren’t paying attention. I don’t want my tax dollars supporting this:” followed by a picture of the officer and the dog. Queue a /facepalm.
That being said, after watching the latest episode of Legendary on Tankspot/Gamebreaker.tv, I finally got to see how Mists of Pandaria was actually introduced at BlizzCon. The following Youtube of the actual event is perhaps the most painful thing I have ever seen:
Instead of watching the whole thing, you can skip to 2:30 when it really gets painfully overdone.
Guys, it’s just possible that the curious race we’re going to meet in this mystic land, may just teach us a thing or two about who we are, and why we fight.
I think I hurt the muscles in my neck from having cringed so goddamn hard at the above quote. If anyone’s reaction against Mist of Pandaria is based on having watched that video, you have my full blessings to have gone (and continuing to go) ape-shit over the internet.
I am still fine with the expansion, for the record, but it was clear from the video and overall presentation on how cognizant Blizzard was that people would be upset about a “direction shift.” And in being cognizant of possible negative reactions, Blizzard legitimized them. I believe the expansion would have gone over a lot better if they did not draw so much of a contrast between what came before and what was on the horizon. Don’t remind people of all the outlandish sequel escalation that they have experienced over the last 5-6 years, especially when said escalation had definitive bad guys on the box.
And more importantly, if the Horde/Alliance war is going to heat up, put that in the goddamn teaser trailer. As in, Theramore in flames, Alliance soldiers on the march, something, anything. We know Pandaria will be turned into a fantasy Vietnam, with two superpowers parachuting in to bring a little heat to the otherwise Cold War. The whole Horde and Alliance war is amazingly keyed up, and gets the blood pumping in a way fairly unique in the history of opposing faction gameplay – that linked thread is 177 pages long with ~4000 posts. Put that front and center, and you’d likely find people more amicable to the idea of pandas being srs bsns.
Pandas As iPads, and Target Audiences
Simply put, I see the sort of backlash against Pandaren the same as the backlash against the iPad, when that was first announced. A tablet computer? Called an iPad? The jokes write themselves. Steve Jobs was clearly out of his mind.
A year later, making fun of the iPad’s name was like making a Your Mom joke.
To be clear, I do not expect Mists of Pandaria and pandas in general to take off and sell 15+ million copies like the iPad; this is not a full analogy. Part of that is because WoW has already peaked subscriber-wise, and it’s tough/impossible to break out of a decline when each lost sub severs social threads that kept people logging in long after the novelty of the game experience has ran out.
That being said, the absolute histrionics going on in the blog world regarding pandas has taken on a surreal, manic intensity. Look at this post over on Wolfshead Online:
If I wanted to kill a serious MMO, I don’t think I could find a better way than introducing a playable race of goofy looking walking bears. Any credibility that Blizzard had in the MMO realm has vanished with this horrible decision. What we are witnessing is the unprecedented transformation of an adult MMO into a children’s MMO right before our very eyes. (emphasis added)
I’m sorry, but if you can write something like that or agree with it without being a tad bit embarrassed later, I have a paper bag you can breath into. Credibility? Here is the credibility Blizzard has in the MMO realm:
That's called expanding the base.
According to MMOData.net, the entire MMO field basically only grew by 4 million subs in the seven years WoW has existed. If even a tenth of ex-WoW players move on to try other MMOs, WoW will have done more for the genre than any MMO, ever. Credibility? Christ, how many times have you described something as an EVE-clone, or a Warhammer-clone? I guarantee you there are some very serious men in some very serious suits over at MMO boardrooms that will be seriously considering iconic animals in the future, simply because WoW is doing it. “Dammit Jim, they usurped pandas! How about… elephants? No, no: hippos! Make it so.”
I get it. Pandas happened. I was utterly convinced Mists of Pandaria was going to be an iOS game, perhaps a combo Fishing slash Archeology slash Sudoku premium app that would interface with the Mobile Armory so that what you caught/found/solved could be redeemed for in-game WoW items. Then follow that up with an announcement of The Emerald Nightmare expansion, which could be tone-appropiate sequel escalation to Burning Legion summoning –> Undead Scourge unleashing –> Corrupted dragon world-breaking pattern of WoW expansions.
Hell, considering the established lore of the Emerald Dream as a mystical pre-Sundering continent, complete with fantastical and extinct species mobs, that expansion practically writes itself. And they could even work in the (leaked) Horde vs Alliance war heating up as fueling the Emerald Nightmare’s destructiveness by the power of unhappy thoughts.
If you think about it conceptually, Mists of Pandaria is doing just that. You have the Sha, which are the physical manifestation of bad things, having hitherto been kept in check by the Taoist Pandaren before the two superpowers came and turned the island into a fantasy Vietnam. They also have the mystical continent with fantastical and extinct species mobs. Having mined the pseudo Gothic/Norse mythology to death, going East was simply a matter of time – even the “generally fantasy” Magic: the Gathering went to Kamigawa (aka Japan) eventually.
And now? They still have Emerald Dream as a follow-up option.
Target Audiences
Before I wrap this up, I wanted to touch on some bloggers’ mistaken notions that Blizzard somehow changed their intended target audience with this new expansion. I am not quite sure how else to put it than this: the target audience of WoW has never changed; you changed.
There is no actual indication that Pandaren are going to be a joke race in the expansion; they existed in Warcraft 3, and would have replaced draenei in TBC had the dice fell the other way. If you want an example of an actual joke race, roll a gnome. No, seriously, sign up for a free trial and play a gnome 1-20. There is no bigger joke race than gnomes, and they have been a joke since Day 1. I would argue that Tauren are also a joke race, but that is at least a case of a joke race with /seriousface lore. Gnomes never had serious lore – even the flooding of their capital with radioactive poison, killing off 80% (!!) of their entire race, cannot be presented without a wink from atop a smoke-belching Mechanostrider.
Don’t get me started on goblins, who deviate from being walking euphemisms for capitalistic greed long enough to establish they got their intelligence from mining rocks and turning it into Coca Cola on a volcanic island (that exploded). Or how about the Taunka, Tuskarr, or Tol’vir, all of whom are so cliche as NPC animal races that it would have been jarring if they did not exist in their respective cliche habitats. Remember the Wolvar and Oracles in Sholazar Basin? 90% of that entire zone was a total joke in a Serious™ expansion.
What I will not say is whether WoW was ever objectively serious or not, because that misses the point. WoW was, is, and always will be taken as seriously as you want it to be. MMO-Champion will be posting world-first T14 hardmode kills and hundreds of thousands of people will care, pandas or no pandas. There will be 6+ year veteran players who declare a Pandaria raid boss as their favorite encounter. Tankspot will likely be posting Challenge-mode dungeon guide videos. Petopia may completely transform into a Wowhead-esque database to handle the influx of traffic from the Pokeman battle system. Some of these features won’t be for you, just like new raids only appeal to less than 20% of subscribers. That doesn’t mean the target audience is changing any more than your mother giving a sibling candy first this time (or at all) means she stopped loving you.
If this is the way you normally act, though…
The ultimate bottom line is once you get past the echo-chamber sticker-shock of OMGPANDAS, a month after the expansion releases the game will be exactly as it is: fun, or not fun.
If fun, would pandas actually stop you from playing?
If not fun, did the pandas actually matter?
If you honestly would not play an otherwise fun game because of its tone or tenor, then ironically, maybe it is you who needs to grow up. Or at least breathe into this paper bag until you stop losing your shit, and remember why you play videogames to begin with.
Pandas Aside…
…here is what you may have missed concerning WoW’s next expansion:
Return of Wrath-era Heroics
Difficulty:
In Cataclysm, Heroic dungeons were intentionally designed as gear and difficulty checks on the progression to raiding. In Mists of Pandaria, the Raid Finder will be the appropriate transition from running dungeons to Normal raids. Heroic dungeons will largely be tuned to be about as difficult as they were in Wrath of the Lich King, allowing players to fairly quickly down bosses in PUGs and hit their Valor Point caps. Valor Points will follow a new philosophy with 4.3, as a parallel way to gear up alongside the Raid Finder, but not as a fill-in for boss drops.
Length:
Keep the experience short and focused. Dungeons should be short enough to let you run a couple of dungeons when you feel like it, not just one.
As I may have mentioned before, I am a player that absolutely believed it was a mistake to go towards longer, harder heroics in Cataclysm. Not only was that incongruent with the concept of LFD, harder/longer heroics actually removed content for me. Whereas I would routinely belt out 2-3 heroics on different characters as soon as I logged on in Wrath – before I even got started with whatever I planned on doing for the day – Cataclysm meant I had just the one heroic to “look forward to,” as it would likely take 2+ hours assuming we finished it at all. Yes, they were nerfed… three months later. And nothing quite washes out the taste of a spectacularly failed Stonecore run.
A side-benefit of going back to Wrath-era difficulty is I predict the number of tanks will increase as a result. I feel the same way today as I felt back in April when Blizzard started bribing tanks with BoA goody-bags. Hopefully Challenge runs will satisfy the people looking for non-faceroll content (or at least marginalize their complaints) in the same way Heroic raids (sorta) did.
Reduce “the Dance”
The goals for dungeons and raids in Mists of Pandaria are to create epic and challenging experiences, but Cataclysm also helped us learn where we can improve with the new expansion. The Raid Finder will help with taking that first step into endgame content, and it will be available for all Mists of Pandaria raids. Beyond that, we want to create more easily understandable encounters and move away from mechanics that simply set up groups to fail, while still keeping them challenging.
While I suppose that can be read multiple ways, what I like to imagine Blizzard means is not so much that “the Dance” is eliminated, but rather you can choose who does the dancing. The Lich King’s Defile ability sets groups up for failure, because if it targets your weakest player, you are likely to wipe immediately. I couldn’t tell you how many times I /facepalmed in Professor Putricide when someone who couldn’t kite worth crap got targeted by the orange ooze, or when the panic-under-pressure member dragged Omnotron’s Acquiring Target (or Lightning Conductor) through the raid. If you can imagine that the outcome would have been different if a boss ability targeted someone else instead, how can you really say the encounter was challenging at all?
Obviously that logic can be reduced to an absurd degree (if the quarterback threw to the other receiver they would have won, etc). I guess what I want to get across is that I miss epic boss kills like this one. “Epic” in the sense that despite everything falling apart, we were still able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. In Cataclysm’s raid environment, the guy dying to Mimiron’s landmines would have blown up the raid, or failing to interrupt a 1.5 second cast would be an insta-wipe.
And, hey, I’d also like to move away from bosses that take longer to explain on Vent than they do to fight, e.g. Omnotron, etc.
Harder Leveling?!
Probably not. However:
Q: Will you be making any changes to how stats work?
Yes. […] In practice, this means that upon the expansion’s release, the numbers for Strength, Health, Intellect, damage, and so on will be significantly lower than you’re used to seeing across the board, from level 1 to level 85. It’s all relative, of course — enemies’ and bosses’ stats will be reduced as well, and it should take a level-85 warrior roughly the same number of many sword-whacks and ability uses to kill a level-85 monster as it did before. However, this also means the difference between each level between 1 and 85 will be less significant, so you may find that an enemy 5 or 10 levels below your own will be a little tougher to deal with than it was before.
If grey enemies are “a little tougher to deal with than before,” that is actually a pretty big change. I was looking forward towards a tank with 750,000 HP, but I suppose this will be fine.
Instanced Group Content for ~3 Players
- PvE Scenarios are a way to give new interesting content that doesn’t make sense in a dungeon content.
- Scenarios are more about reusing parts of the world in interesting new ways, and introducing new types of PvE gameplay that we’ve never seen before like PvE battlegrounds.
- They are short instances for a few players, the amount of players can vary depending on the scenario, some of them can be for 3 players.
I am excited for Scenarios in a general sense for that first bullet point, because theoretically it means they could release Scenarios more often. Admittedly, this is Blizzard we are talking about, but I can see some devs whipping up a few extra for when such-and-such MMO gets released without having to bother with justifying it in a lore/progression-sense. I am excited about the 3 number specifically because that was how far my in-game group shrank towards the end of my subscription. We always struggled with things to do other than AFK chat in Stormwind, as LFD with two pugs did not quite excite us in any possible way.
In any case, I think that wraps up my thoughts/reactions to BlizzCon 2011. Now we just have to see how many of them get implemented.
Answering Nils’ Criticism
Nils made a comment in response to yesterday’s post, and I feel a rebuttal is important enough for its own post.
Ok, so in BGs where you can blow people off edges you take typoon. In the others you take Fearie Fire. Was that a hard choice?
Yes. Because I want Typhoon all of the time… but Faerie Swarm could be useful in Arena… but what if I get Dalaran Sewers where the shock value of a Feral druid knocking someone off the edge would be priceless… but endlessly kiting people DK-style would probably be fun too… and hey, would Typhoon be more or less powerful on Magmaw than the AoE root… etc.
The consequences of choosing Typhoon over Faerie Swarm is that you won’t have Faerie Swarm even when there may be a good situation for it. In a raid, there is probably a clear-cut answer of which is more useful, and if it is EotS weekend, then Typhoon would likely be the answer. But that’s not a problem between the Typhoon vs Faerie Swarm choice, it’s a problem with encounter design. And I would still take Typhoon in an encounter where Faerie Swarm is more optimal, as long as Typhoon wasn’t completely useless (i.e. the delta between their usefulness wasn’t too great).
I think everything has been said there. Choices have to have consequences, otherwise they are meaningless. Blizzard repeated attempts to get around this is ridiculous. The reason you have a few choices left in the current talent trees is because it doesn’t matter where you spend your last points!
And it didn’t matter because up until now they were treating the first ~31 talents as “choices” when they really were not. If you are a Ret paladin, you take 3/3 Crusade, period. You take 2/2 Long Arm of the Law, period. And so on. Now, they can give you choices that matter (in the sense I’m talking about), as evident by the druid talents you went over and all the other classes.
You say that there is an optimal, cookie-cutter EJ solution to these problems but I am saying that that is irrelevant. Yes, there will always be an objectively optimal choice assuming the choice has a measurable impact on anything. The only relevant thing though is the distance between the EJ solution and the 2nd best (or 3rd) solution. As long as they are close enough, I can choose which of the two is more fun for me (Typhoon) and still feel happy about that decision even if the “correct” answer is something else. My fun, enjoyment, familiarity, stylistic inclination, ease, etc, will make up the difference.
The only change of note with the new talent trees is that you can change them on the fly. This makes them a mandatory part of the preparation before you do anything of importance (boss fights, arena games, rated BGs …)
Other than every spec of each class having access to cool abilities that were hitherto restricted to individual specs, right? Hell, a Resto druid can have Typhoon and summon treants! Nevermind Assassination rogues with Shadowstep, Arcane mages with Cauterize and Ice Barrier, etc etc. And by removing the ~31 redundant talent “choices” that each spec takes regardless of PvE vs PvP vs leveling vs raiding, this should allow Blizzard to focus on keeping the six actual talent choices we have now interesting and difficult to choose between.
And just based on the rough draft we saw at BlizzCon, I would say they are off to a good start.
More Cookies, Less Cutter: MoP Talents
The Grumpy Elf is not convinced that MoP talents are less cookie-cutter. Neither is Nils. The Elder Game thinks fiddling with talents at all is a waste of time.
All miss the point, I believe.
Let me begin with a quote from Bashiok I posted a few months ago:
Diablo (1) did not have skill trees, it was a feature added to Diablo II, and then more or less copied by World of Warcraft. Some could say to World of Warcraft’s detriment as it’s been struggling with how to cope with a skill tree system, which has huge inherent issues with very little benefit, for years. Diablo III, like Diablo II, is an evolution of the series and game systems.
I agree with that characterization of talent trees, specifically that they have huge inherent issues with very little benefit. Talent trees, as the way they are set up in WoW currently, give the illusion of choice. There is a good Extra Credits video called Choice and Conflict which talks about this issue. Essentially, the “choice” being presented in WoW’s talent trees are really calculations, not actual choices.
If you look up the EJ builds for your spec, chances are you will actually see where the Blizzard designers tried to give you choice in Cataclysm’s revamp. Here is the EJ build for a PvE Retribution paladin:
If you’ll notice, you have 1 extra free point floating around (technically you have 3, but nevermind) – this means there is literally nothing else that will increase your DPS. Choice, amirite? Well… no. Your “choices” are:
- Guardian’s Favor = HoP’s cooldown reduced by 2 minutes, longer HoF.
- Selfless Healer = Stronger WoG’s for teammates.
- Acts of Sacrifice = Cleanse removes snares.
- Divinity = easier to heal you.
- Eternal Glory = sometimes a free WoG.
- Last Word = WoG more likely to crit on low-health targets.
You may not be familiar with Ret paladins, but hopefully that comes across as outrageously boring, because it is. But what about PvP? Here is Ret in PvP:
Know what changed? We got rid of Divine Storm (just AoE for trash), a talent that makes Crusader Strike scale with haste, and then just picked all the WoG-boosting talents and a faster HoJ cooldown. In other words, there is no differentiation there at all. There is technically another PvP build that sacrifices the faster HoJ cooldown for even more WoG healing, but that’s basically it. Ret’s Cataclysm choices are DPS vs HoJ vs WoG-boosting. Pick only one! Just like this new system, except only one choice instead of six.
For fun, I took the paladin tree and blacked out all the talents you either couldn’t get, or were identical whether you chose PvP or PvE. This is what it looks like:
Choices!
Ret paladins are actually a terrible example to use in the Mists of Pandaria talent scheme, since Blizzard essentially took 9 talents from the Ret tree and are asking Rets to “rebuild” the spec with only half as much as they had before. Hopefully that will change before things go Live, but I’m used to the idea of paladins being nerfed into the ground and/or Ret getting screwed, so whatever.
Point is, the talent tree system has always been bad. There was nothing exciting about leveling up and putting a talent point in something that just increased your damage by 10%. Under this new system, you get the 10% damage talent automatically and then get to decide something that is actually meaningful. Nils used the following example under druids:
Level 45
Feral PvP: Faerie Swarm, for more damage, a ranged snare and against cloakers.
Non-Feral PvP: Typhoon, because it is instant and keeps players at range no matter what damage they take.
Feral PvE: Faerie Swarm, because the rest is completely useless.
Non-Feral PvE: Typhoon, because it is instant. But you won’t use it much.
He thinks the obvious choice for Feral PvP is Faerie Swarm. Are you kidding? One of the funnest things in WoW is popping out of stealth and Typhooning people off of ledges, which has traditionally be reserved solely for Balance druids. I would always choose Typhoon, because Typhoon is fun for me. That singular instance of interesting choice is worth the entire overhaul to me. Nevermind my ability to give Ardent Defender the finger and not be too punished for it. And being able to take Shadowfury as an Affliction warlock. Or getting Cauterize and Ice Barrier as an Arcane mage. Or… you get the idea. Some classes have more interesting choices than others, but hopefully these were just rough drafts.
Overall, as an ex-WoW player I am more excited for the expansion than I was three days ago, almost entirely based on these changes alone.
In An Age 
Closer Look: Blizzard’s Q4 2011
Feb 10
Posted by Azuriel
When we last left our intrepid heroes in Q3 2011, WoW had lost 800,000 subscriptions and the following four salient points were made in the earnings call:
I suppose the holiday box sale and Annual Pass count as aggressive marketing, but let me not get ahead of myself. If you want to read along from home, Seeking Alpha will hook you up.
1. Is Bungie not working on Titan?
Eric Hirshberg from Activision Publishing buried this gem 25 paragraphs into vapid gushing of COD and Skylanders:
Looking further out, we continue to lay the foundation for our new universe from Bungie, one of the world’s best developers. Bungie continues to make incredible progress on what we expect to be a genre-defining new IP that will provide us with tremendous new opportunities and which remains one of our key strategic growth pillars for the future.
This may or may not seem a non sequitur, but I have always entertained the notion that the Bungie acquisition might have had something to do with Blizzard’s Titan development. Why?
Let’s look at the entrails. First, both Joe Staten and Rob Pardo have been playing it coy as recently as 2 years ago about Bungie working with Blizzard. But we also know that Bungie’s secret project “Destiny,” is slated as a sci-fi MMOFPS that is, quote, “WoW in space.” If you have a tinfoil hat handy, things can get even more bizarre when you consider that Ensemble Studios was working on a Halo MMO to directly compete with Blizzard… that was code-named Titan. And when Ensemble Studios was disbanded, several ex-members joined Blizzard. And now Bungie is here with a 10-year contract, making a brand new MMOFPS IP to be a “strategic growth pillar” for Activision Blizzard at the same time Blizzard is making a “casual” new-IP MMO that isn’t supposed to compete with WoW… that is code-named Titan.
Technically a lot of this is old news, and the earnings call did not reveal anything new either way. But in reading that paragraph under the Activision Publisher heading, it occurs to me that it is entirely possible that we could see two new, separate MMO properties out of Activision Blizzard even with WoW still sucking most of the oxygen out of the MMO room. In some respects, that outcome is crazier than Titan turning out to be a Blizzard-Bungie joint MMO.
2. Around 1 million Annual Passes sold… in the West.
Another initiative that has been very successful is the World of Warcraft Annual Pass. This program was announced at BlizzCon this past year. Under its terms, players who commit to being a World of Warcraft subscriber for 1 year will get a free copy of Diablo III, unique digital items in World of Warcraft, and other benefits. To date, we have signed up more than 1 million players in the West for the World of Warcraft Annual Pass.
The more I think about that number, the crazier it ends up being. While the Annual Pass appears to be non-binding (your access to D3 will simply go away), can you otherwise imagine another MMO who can count on 1,000,000 Western subscription accounts being locked in for 12 months? That would make SWTOR automatically profitable for an entire year.
3. Mists of Pandaria information out on March 19.
Some of you may have seen recent news about the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria. Last week, we began inviting global press to visit our office to get a hands-on look at the game. The press visit will take place next month, and our players will be able to read the latest news on the game on March 19. We’re looking forward to showcasing the game to our community and collecting more feedback as we prepare for the upcoming beta for Mists of Pandaria.
By the way, that means there is an automatic 1 million beta-testers for Mists, yeah?
4. Chuck Norris was super effective!
Neil A. Doshi – Citigroup Inc, Research Division
Mike, I was wondering if you could provide us a little more detail around the subs for World of Warcraft. What was the impact from some of your marketing efforts? And then how many subs did you add from Brazil? And if you have any comments on trend that you could share with us, that would be great.
Michael Morhaime
Okay. So we were very pleased with the results of the marketing initiatives in Q4. The Chuck Norris spot was very effective. We’ve got over 29 million views of the spot on YouTube. And I think, just looking at how well the subscribership held up during our most competitive quarter ever, we’re very happy with that. Engagement of the player base is very strong. We do not break down regional. We do not provide regional breakdown of subs, but we’re off to a good start in Brazil. And I don’t have any detail on churn.
Nothing to add to that.
As reported everywhere, WoW did implicitly lose another 100,000 subs in the quarter. There have been a lot of “See? Not dying!” posts over in the MMO-Champ and WoW Insider comments, but it’s worth pointing out that A) if someone unsubbed for SWTOR, then they won’t count as “missing” until January, e.g. Q1, and B) WoW launched in Brazil this quarter, as noted above. There are several more high-profile MMO launches coming this year, and let’s not forget that everyone is stuck with Dragon Soul until Mists actually launches… which could be six months from now, or more.
In any event, sub numbers really only matter to me in the context of having objective data by which we can interpret future design philosophy, and MMO player desires by extension. If Blizzard’s reaction to losing 1.8 million subs is to make the game easier, then we can assume that they believe a hard game is why people left.
It’s crude, it’s imperfect, but it is all we really have as armchair game designers.
Posted in Commentary, WoW
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Tags: Activision, Blizzard, Bungie, Earnings Call, Mists of Pandaria, Morhaime, Subscription, Titan