Gear Resets and Checkpointing

When dealing with class balance issues, Ghostcrawler is fond of the phrase “all other things being equal,” but they never really are. That’s actually the point of progression, to move across the equality gap from those who wipe to those who kill. We all want to be in the group that kills enemies, but we don’t want everyone to be in that group or it means that the content is easy enough that we haven’t accomplished anything. That isn’t from an elitist perspective. I’m not a hardcore progression raider myself, and my guild still wipes on “easy” content. Sadly, at this point I still expect half the raid to die on Heigan during a Naxx10 run (though we won’t wipe on the fight). There  has to be some kind of reward to justify effort (basic human nature).

Some people look to gear as a reward. Some people like to experience the content. Some people just like performing a social activity with friends. There’s the thrill of (virtual) conquest, proving yourself against competitors, etc. We all have our own reasons for venturing out at all, but we won’t be out there fighting if we don’t see some kind of reward. For the reward to have value, it must be earned. For it to feel earned, there must have been a challenge involved. For there to be a challenge, there must be evidence that someone else has not attained the reward. For social rewards, the fact that people want to play with you and not others is reward enough. It doesn’t matter if your gear isn’t as good, or if you haven’t seen all the content. For progression raiders, downing content that others can’t is the reward, even if you have to partner up with the anti-social dregs of MMO society. Everyone chooses their own reward, and feel satisfied when they achieve it, even if it isn’t what they are expected to want. That’s why wanting something that not everyone else has isn’t really elitist. We all want that, but the “something” in the equation is not always the same, so the people who don’t have it, don’t necessarily miss it. We can all feel superior about something, without requiring others to feel inferior for their lack.

At the center of the storm over content tuning is always the gear debate. Gear is a reward, a trophy, a tool, and sometimes a weight around your neck. It had a status associated with it in olden times in Azeroth, because good gear was difficult to obtain, and very bad gear abounded (spirit on a warrior set? that drops in a dungeon?). Getting gear gave status. It also checkpointed your progress. If you didn’t have the gear, you simply couldn’t advance. That meant that gear wasn’t simply some one’s focus, it mattered to everyone on some level. Some people haven’t yet adapted to the changes that have happened since those days.

With the coming of TBC, Blizzard made a decision. They actually wanted people to see the content they worked so hard on. That meant it had to be accessable. Basic MMO theory requires you to checkpoint content however, so that people will have to spend time playing to get through it. Their initial offering was the badge system, with better and better offerings over time, so that if you missed out on (or couldn’t handle) the raid earlier, you get handed better gear to catch you up and get you in to see content. You still have to grind to get it, but it’s running easier content repeatedly rather than wiping until you get drops. Progression raiders have to raid the content at its hardest to open the next tier earlier than anyone else, but eventually others have a route to catch up and see it too before it’s gone. That keeps the raiders raiding to stay at the bleeding edge, and more casual players grinding to catch up when the opportunity presents itself.

They made a second change however that complicates the matter. They changed how they design encounters to make them move involved. There’s more to do, with more specialized roles within the raid. You might still be a dps, but now you’re also designated to click a cube at the proper time, or kill a certain type of add at the correct time and place. They also reduced raid sizes so there’s less room for error. As a result, raids have stopped being checkpointed checkpointed by gear, and become checkpointed by “skill.” I put that in quotes because skill isn’t a monolithic quality. There are many skills involved in any fight, and everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. People with skill in some areas still struggle with certain fights, or raiding in general.

And despite gear resets and how easy it is to get gear, it doesn’t help anymore. Blizzard’s strategy to get people to see content is compromised by the content itself. Don’t believe me? Gevlon put together a crew that raided Ulduar in all blue gear. I know people in our guild that struggle in Ulduar 10 with badge gear comparable to Ulduar 25 or ToC. Think that Heigan reference above was incidental? There is no way to outgear the dance. None. You either learn it or you die, and that’s only the most obvious case. Some fights let you get by with a few people underperforming, but for the most part, if you want to down bosses, you have to learn to play. Gear resets and procurement options haven’t made raiding accessible, because they no longer can. Variations in skill affect outcomes far more than variations in gear.

Gear just doesn’t matter as much anymore. The easy of obtaining it may make those angry that view it as the reward for their efforts, but the irrelevance is also starting to irritate raiders who view their efforts as opening up the content. Not only can you get to the content without putting in the wipes anymore, the wipes and gear grind aren’t really doing all that much to help you get through the new content either. Hard modes are an invitation to face a greater challenge for better gear, but the better gear really isn’t needed anyway. That makes the effort pointless unless your personal reward is to beat challenges that no one else can. If that’s not your bag, then you may as well skip it and do the “easy” normal mode a couple times, get bored, and quit.

There’s a more insidious side yet though. Remember those who can get gear just by grinding the easy heroics? All that grinding gets them epic gear, but doesn’t offer comparable training for high end content. Gear resets help those who have developed the skills to catch up quickly after a break, or gear alts, but all that gear won’t get those who struggled with appropriate level gear through the content. The badge grind is a waste of time for those people. Worse yet, they think they should be able to handle the harder content because they have the gear for it, so they wipe endlessly against an “easy” fight because they’re out of their league no matter what their gear says. I’ve seen it happen. The gear reset is a red herring. It deludes people into chasing gear when they really need experience. Right now the game doesn’t care much what your gear looks like (within reason). If you know what you’re doing, the gear will come quickly enough. If you’re struggling, all the upgrades in the world won’t help much.

There’s been a lot of discussion about gear resets lately, but very little about the current relation of gear to progression. If we’re going to have gear resets to get people into content, gear has to matter enough to be a checkpoint, so that the reset actually matters. That’s not where we are yet. Cataclysm has the opportunity to change that (as I alluded to with the potential for boss expertise), but it requires a conscious decision by Blizzard to have gear negate skill, so that seeing content when it drops requires a very skilled group, but seeing it after a reset can be done with gear upgrades. That would mean bringing the “M&S” closer to the performance of skilled players than some may like, and exacerbate the effect of gear differences on pvp combat. I’m not necessarily advocating the changes, but if that’s not what Blizzard intends to do, then gear resets are pointless anyway.

If they do want to keep the current system, where skill trumps gear, what line should they walk? If they want to balance gearing up alts and newcomers to match their skill level with putting people into appropriate raid based on their experience, Wrath launched with almost the perfect system. The tiered badges was a good idea, but Blizzard made a slight mistake with it. Badges should drop that buy gear a tier higher than the drops themselves. For example, they could have dropper iLevel 200 gear in heroics, 213 in Naxx, 226 in Ulduar, but made Heroic badges buy 213 gear, Naxx badges buy 226 gear, etc. The net effect would allow skilled players (newcomers or alts) to catch up faster (because the badges for your current run level buys gear for a raid two levels higher), allow less skilled players to get a small edge in gearing for the raids they’re ready to run to ease them into raiding, and the system is sustainable with no true gear resets to obsolete your efforts overnight.

It’s Blizzards game, and it’s their design decision. They have options, but they will have to address the system eventually, because the current model has problems, and makes less and less sense as the game continues.

Chill of the Throne

So for all the talk about avoiding another Sunwell Radiance style debuff in Wrath, Blizzard just announce that Icecrown Citidel will have one. For the most part, I’m glad it will. I spend most of my time healing, and nothing irritates me more than having bosses kill tanks in 2 hits. Nothing like looking back at the logs and seeing a tank go from 100% health to dead in 1.5 seconds. I also don’t like spamming my biggest heal all the time, even if my Paladin healers are among the best prepared to do so. Most of us understood, long before the Dev conceded the point, that the problem lies with high avoidance. Tanks are supposed to take damage, and we’re supposed to heal it. The more often the boss misses, the more damage he needs to do when he does land a hit. That’s fine with a sufficient heath buffer, but health pools haven’t scaled nearly as much as damage has in Wrath, so the buffer for the big hits is gone. So either they needed to buff tank health tremendously (and risk a pvp imbalance that some of could care less about), or they needed to nerf avoidance and have fewer, smaller hits. They chose the nerf. If that makes for more predictable, more managable damage, I’m all for it. There may be some balance issues between classes, as I’ve noticed my Paladin’s avoidance scaling better than my Druid’s (currently the Paladin leads by ~10% with slightly worse gear). The Druid should benefit from a slight armor advantage to offset this, but I’m not sure he does anymore with all the nerfs that have come down the line.

While it’s evidence of poor planning, it does foreshadow the future of tanking after Wrath in Cataclysm. A few days ago they began to speculate on the Cataclysm tanking changes over at World of Raids. Something I missed is that removing defense from gear also removes avoidance. I should have realized that sooner, since I’m in the habit of adding the ~5% miss boost my Paladin gets from defense that my Druid does not when comparing stats. Ghostcrawler has also been talking about adding expertise to bosses, so that your avoidance scales downward as you go to higher grade raids (i.e. the additional avoidance you get each tier is offset by increased boss expertise). That means that tanks will be treading water on avoidance, scrambling each tier just to get upgraded avoidance … so they can get hit just as much as before. That would let Blizzard smooth out the damage spikes though, without resorting to a last minute debuff that wipes out a good chunk all at once. It would also restore the relevance of gear to the game (but more about that in a later post).

A lot of the Mastery information discussed in the article can only be speculation at this point, but it does make sense to replace non-scaling stats (+def rating, +hit rating) with a stat that doesn’t cap and can scale with gear (Mastery). Until we actually get to see Mastery in action though, I don’t think there’s much that can be said about it.

Lastly they mentioned the block changes. Changing block from a value to a percentage is something I have mixed feelings about. They had a choice here. The current system is broken because the tanks that block have a flat damage reduction from it, while those that don’t get a scaling damage reduction. There were two ways they could go to fix this. They could either give a flat damage reduction to all tanks in some form (and they did this for Druids with Savage Defense) or they could move block to a scaling damage reduction (as it looks like they will for Cataclysm). The benefit of the former option is that they gain more control over increases in damage reduction. If the bosses in the next raid hit for 2k more per hit, you can just add 1k to the tank’s block, and count on the healer to 1k more out of their gear. The math is a lot simpler. Apparently concern over trash mobs makes too much block too powerful, and Blizzard decided to go the other way and make it all scaling. So block will become the equivalent of an occasional armor boost. Non-blocking tanks (hopefully Druids too and not just DKs), will likely get a slight armor advantage that sits midway between the hit and block amounts.

Overall, the changes for 3.3 and on into Cataclysm might be a bit demoralizing for tanks that get to watch their stats drop and lose some of their power on packs of mobs out in the world, but it’s better for the healers, and good for the game at large.

alt.update

Since I posted the healer comparison, not having the priest in it has gotten to me and I’ve been on another leveling binge. It still stuns even me that with the server maximum of 10 toons, my lowest level is now 47. By level 47, my first toon (Turla) had gazed upon the stronghold of his enemy at Orgrimmar (level 25), held his first epic (level 40 – summoned by the Mithril Order trinket) and had discovered his true calling (tanking – the revelation coming while tanking Sunken Temple at 50 with Avenger’s Shield). Ahlora has, well, leveled to 47. It seems like a bit of a letdown, but there are some experiences you just can’t repeat. I’ll never again be able to walk into Feralas from Desolace for the first time again, or have my first griffin ride again. But then, every toon I’ve leveled goes through various phases, where I figure out new abilities, new rotations, or have to retire old strategies that haven’t kept up. So I thought I would post an update of my latest leveling experiences.

Ahlora

My Warrior and lowbie on Velen, at level 47. She started with the gold, heirlooms, and experience of someone with multiple 80s, but there’s always a catch. I knew from the beginning that my wild Fury warrior would struggle with the lack of +hit gear at lower levels. Missing a lot begins a bad spiral where you not only lose the damage from the miss, but you also get starved for rage and lose your special attacks as well. Warriors need to hit their enemies. I’d already made a beeline down to the 3% hit boost talent, but it wasn’t working the miracles I needed.

Miracles do happen though. It started when I put in a little time in the city working on her blacksmithing to get her some plate gear, since she can wear it now. Doing so I spotted the nice dps plate gloves, and started thinking about if it would be worth making them. That hung at the back of my mind. Then I went out to collect candy buckets.

I made an easy level doing nothing more than flying around Azeroth, mostly afk time, while I did some reading on the internet. I came across an article on warriors that was mostly on Whirlwind (which I don’t have yet but I’m familiar with in principle), but mentioned something that caught my eye, “instant slams”. Slam is an ability that I got while leveling but never use, because it has a cast time. As a seasoned paladin, I know all the bad things that happen when you cast anything with a cast time in melee combat. Having them instant (and not replacing your regular attack like Heroic Strike so you build rage better) would be very hot. So I started digging down through the talent tree while I collected candy buckets. It’s down far enough that I can’t get it yet, but it has a chance to proc on Heroic Strike, Whirlwind, and Bloodthirst. So I went looking for Bloodthirst.

I found it in the tree, within reach with a respec. It’s an instant strike (woot!) that does damage, and causes your next 3 attacks to regen 1% of your max health each. I’m a big fan of anything that gives you a little heath back. It’s way out of your core function in a dungeon most of the time, but it’s great for reducing downtime, and I’m all about reducing downtime when I’m leveling. I was pretty stoked. It cost 20 rage though, which is a lot for a low hit fury warrior. I went looking for a talent or glyph that might reduce it.

I did find a glyph, but it didn’t reduce the cost. It doubled the healing. That’s way cool. I just had to find a solution to my hit problem. About that time, I finished collecting candy, and looked in my bags. There it was, staring me in the face. Chewy Fel Taffy. Adds +5 to hit, and stacks up to 4 times. There was the hit rating I needed to make the stretch. Added to my elixer (+10), and my lowly +4 hit ring, and I was up to about a 4-5% boost. And then I remembered the gloves, which required level 40, and would therefor take a TBC enchant, like the +15 to hit enchant.

Taken all together, my new improved Bloodthirsty Fury machine went out and smoked the mobs. She went from kill to kill cutting down enemies like a knife through warm butter. I finally parked her when she ran out of rested state, after 4 levels of glorious slaughter. The candy is limited in supply, but by the time it expires or it runs out, she’ll be 49 and can equip the +24 hit trinket to make up for it. Soon enough she’ll be in Outland where she can get actual +hit gear, and gear with sockets that will happily take LK hit/expertise gems. =)

Valruan

My priest and last healer to climb the leveling ladder. I’d slowed down on questing with him, as I was starting to get the occasional alt runs with a guildie who recent transfered over a Protection Paladin of similar level. Questing as shadow isn’t bad once you get into the 40s, but healing dungeons is still more fun, and gets better gear (aside from the heirlooms of course). I did get a chance to dps a run as shadow during that time, and hated it. No shadow AoE made trash a burden, and his mana regen wasn’t keeping up well either. I did well enough on boss fights, but most of the time I felt like I couldn’t really pull my own weight, and went back to healing on runs.

After posting though, I hopped back into shadow spec and did some questing. Between dungeons and questing, he climbed through Outland, started into Northrend, and has now hit 70. In the process, he’s also gotten more of his healing toolkit, and I’m starting to get a feel for how it goes. I haven’t tried any Northrend dungeons yet, so I won’t comment on healing quiet yet, but I’m not feeling the small toolkit blues anymore. He’s also parked for the time being, having run out of rested state. When he gets some rested state back, he’ll be ready with his epic flyer and most of Northrend left in front of him (doing half of Borean Tundra took him from 68-70).

Ugart

My Warlock has been in a strange limbo most of his life where I figure out all the cool things I can do with him, then park him the shed and don’t do them. The class is pure crazy with all the stuff going on, and I probably made more changes to his play than any other toon as he leveled. I went from fear kiting the early levels, to having my minion tank my teens and twenties, to drain tanking from the thirties through the sixties (with more dots and more power the whole way). In Northrend I dual specced a demonology spec and discovered I could run him just like a hunter, except without buying ammo, and without healing him most of the time. Now he has enough talent points to have his Felguard tank two while he drain tanks a third. I partnered with a guild hunter in Zul’Drak today, and I watched her health drop slowly every time she took on a mob herself (she’s MM and her pet just can’t hold agg), while I’d dot one up for my pet and move on without looking back. With her extra dps, I’d dot one up for my pet, dot another one up, then move my pet over (since he had enough agg to hold the 1st one for the few seconds it had left to live), and move on, repeating the process. It was literally chain pulling. I didn’t bother staying for the kill, just pulled and pulled.

That said, for as fun as he is, he’s a dps class, and I never get to dps in group content anyway. Even when I do, I usually get bored once I get the rotation down. It isn’t as challenging as tanking or healing and can’t hold my attention for as long. With my Priest and Warrior resting up, I sent my heirlooms back over and worked on him anyway, but he’s just never going to be a priority.

He’s been idling at 74-75ish for a while, and now he’s climbed up to 78. 77-78 are hard levels, not content wise, but it’s the stretch where you can see the end, but it’s painfully just out of reach. Literally nine times out of ten when I hit the cap (4 times at 70, and 5 out of 6 times at 80) I hit cap the same session where I hit cap-1 level. Seeing the end of my XP bar just does something for me that gets me through no matter how long the levels were before it. I’m almost there on my Warlock, and I’ve hit it earlier than ever. As more heirloom gear is introduced, the XP boost makes zones give more and more, and I get further and further ahead of the expected level. I hit 78 in Shalozar Basin on my first couple 80s. Now I’m 78 on Ugart and not done with Zul’Drak yet. I might hit 80 in Shalozar at this rate.

I might keep questing for the enchant mats (he’s my oldest, but 3rd highest enchanter out of 4), but he’ll likely never see the inside of a heroic or raid. Sad, but for as many alts as you can level, there’s only so many you can gear up and actually use.

Korus hasn’t moved an inch. He’s a hair shy of 62, but he’s just so squishy that it’s hard to get excited about questing where you might be stuck in close quarters combat. Mages require space to operate like no other class does. He’ll level again eventually, but as a dps class, a squishy, and competing against other projects, it may be quite a while before I can find any time for him.