This blog is now being continued over at my guilds new website.
Check it out at: http://intentguild.com/category/blogs/mage-vs-player/
Peace
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
"The Arena Mini-Game"
Also known as "Duels in a box" and similar disparaging names. There seems to be a large portion of the playerbase (well, the forum-going playerbase, lol) which has a distinctly unpleasant view of the arena. Be it a hardcore raider or a battleground hero, most of them proclaim that these sandbox duels aren't "true pvp" or the real world of warcraft. They equate it to some sort of mini-game, like say, the snake vs monkey game-mode that came with metal gear solid 3.
A friend of mine I hadn't seen in a long time recently moved nearby. I was thinking of showing him a bit of what wow was like. At first, I considered him showing some footage I caught of us fight heroic halion on fraps, but I quickly came to a realisation. Raiding does not look exciting from a gameplay perspective. Why is this? The answer is quite obvious: large amounts of raiding involves standing in one place, pressing 2-3 buttons over and over. Now, alot of people who say that are disparaging raiding - I'm not, I enjoy raiding. However, it's hard to deny that alot of what drew me to wow in the first place - the large variety of class abilities, the interesting ways of handling mobility vs damage, and in the case of pvp, the fast pace is absent from raiding. Not to say that raiding holds nothing of what initially brought me to wow - the "epic feel" of raiding and the very cool and stylized environments are sweet too, but that's less of a gameplay feature.
In fact, in many real ways, raiding is the actual mini-game of wow. Arena has certain restrictions of course (largely the inability to use external items such as potions, flasks, grenades along with a very few certain abilities), but at its core, arena incorporates far more of what wow actually -is- than raiding does. There's a big thread on the wow forums I was just reading, where people are complaining about being forced to spec into "situational" abilities such as dragon's breath in order to learn living bomb. Dragon's breath is an absolutely core, iconic fire mage ability that is extremely useful in any situation... except for fighting raid bosses. There are plenty of other abilities like this too. Any fire mage who focuses on 5mans, battlegrounds, arenas or even just farming will tell you that they love dragon's breath and how it's saved their butt plenty of times, but it suddenly becomes situational when applied to raiding. There are many, many abilities like this, but how many are the reverse? How many are only useful in raiding and nowhere else? Well, there's a couple of threat-based abilities such as soulshatter which serve no real purpose in pvp or soloing, but those are only there to support the shoe-horned in "aggro" system that wow uses (as do most mmos, in all fairness). Not only does raiding have no way to make use of a large number of class abilities, it has to create a few new ones simply to make it work. The reverse could be argued of arena and pvp of course, an example would be dispersion, which was most likely implemented with pvp being the primary idea behind the ability, except that all such abilities are useful in all other aspects of the game (except only "situationally" in raiding).
When you're leveling your character, learning how to play wow, when do you use soulshatter? How about dragon's breath? All that arena does is take all of the abilities you learn while leveling (bar a very few ones) and force you to learn to use them well against thinking opponents. To be sure, arena has a few limitations of its own, but they are nothing like the staggering suspension of disbelief required to deal with pve because of the completely different ruleset created by the aggro system, combined with the majority of mobs being immune to various defining class skills.
So what is the real "mini-game"? What is the real wow? I'm not so sure I'd necessarily chalk anything up to being the real wow. WoW is a package deal. Even rated bgs will still have their own ruleset, I expect that (sadly) stuff like swiftness potions won't be allowed, and I'm not sure playing capture the flag truly captures the essence of warcraft. But one thing is for sure, having almost all of your abilities actually useful is a big part of what makes pvp so involving, so fun, and raid encounter designers would benefit alot from taking that on-board.
A friend of mine I hadn't seen in a long time recently moved nearby. I was thinking of showing him a bit of what wow was like. At first, I considered him showing some footage I caught of us fight heroic halion on fraps, but I quickly came to a realisation. Raiding does not look exciting from a gameplay perspective. Why is this? The answer is quite obvious: large amounts of raiding involves standing in one place, pressing 2-3 buttons over and over. Now, alot of people who say that are disparaging raiding - I'm not, I enjoy raiding. However, it's hard to deny that alot of what drew me to wow in the first place - the large variety of class abilities, the interesting ways of handling mobility vs damage, and in the case of pvp, the fast pace is absent from raiding. Not to say that raiding holds nothing of what initially brought me to wow - the "epic feel" of raiding and the very cool and stylized environments are sweet too, but that's less of a gameplay feature.
In fact, in many real ways, raiding is the actual mini-game of wow. Arena has certain restrictions of course (largely the inability to use external items such as potions, flasks, grenades along with a very few certain abilities), but at its core, arena incorporates far more of what wow actually -is- than raiding does. There's a big thread on the wow forums I was just reading, where people are complaining about being forced to spec into "situational" abilities such as dragon's breath in order to learn living bomb. Dragon's breath is an absolutely core, iconic fire mage ability that is extremely useful in any situation... except for fighting raid bosses. There are plenty of other abilities like this too. Any fire mage who focuses on 5mans, battlegrounds, arenas or even just farming will tell you that they love dragon's breath and how it's saved their butt plenty of times, but it suddenly becomes situational when applied to raiding. There are many, many abilities like this, but how many are the reverse? How many are only useful in raiding and nowhere else? Well, there's a couple of threat-based abilities such as soulshatter which serve no real purpose in pvp or soloing, but those are only there to support the shoe-horned in "aggro" system that wow uses (as do most mmos, in all fairness). Not only does raiding have no way to make use of a large number of class abilities, it has to create a few new ones simply to make it work. The reverse could be argued of arena and pvp of course, an example would be dispersion, which was most likely implemented with pvp being the primary idea behind the ability, except that all such abilities are useful in all other aspects of the game (except only "situationally" in raiding).
When you're leveling your character, learning how to play wow, when do you use soulshatter? How about dragon's breath? All that arena does is take all of the abilities you learn while leveling (bar a very few ones) and force you to learn to use them well against thinking opponents. To be sure, arena has a few limitations of its own, but they are nothing like the staggering suspension of disbelief required to deal with pve because of the completely different ruleset created by the aggro system, combined with the majority of mobs being immune to various defining class skills.
So what is the real "mini-game"? What is the real wow? I'm not so sure I'd necessarily chalk anything up to being the real wow. WoW is a package deal. Even rated bgs will still have their own ruleset, I expect that (sadly) stuff like swiftness potions won't be allowed, and I'm not sure playing capture the flag truly captures the essence of warcraft. But one thing is for sure, having almost all of your abilities actually useful is a big part of what makes pvp so involving, so fun, and raid encounter designers would benefit alot from taking that on-board.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Wizard Cleave Woes
Hey guys, I know I haven't posted for a while, but there's been a good reason for that! My teammates on Kolz quit for HoN, so I haven't really had a whole lot on the arena front to use a basis to report from. I have just started gearing up my human mage a little, I've been playing wizard cleave with like 200 resil and it's been.. interesting.
Frankly, I don't like wizard cleave. Now, there can be some fun parts, I often find myself laughing at loud at how ridiculous our burst can be. But at the end of the day, I often don't feel we outplayed the other team when we won. Rather, they made a small mistake and our absurd damage won it for us when that happened. Someone gets a little out of position, misses an interrupt, choses the wrong target or doesn't go defensive extremely quickly and they will end up dead insanely fast.
Both of the two wizard cleave variations I've been running have a shaman, and I've gotta say that while I've generally been of the opinion that our damage is either fine or, on occasion, low, with heroism it just feels stupidly high. You can sit in one place and turret so much damage into someone it's absurd, and packing so many casts into a short period of time makes it easier to hang onto your procs till you've got a bunch lined up (fof/brain freeze/trinkets) before blowing someone away.
The 3.3.3 mage changes look nice. I'm not sure how I feel about more burst being tied to the rng proc that is brain freeze, but I guess proc management is an almost unavoidable part of frost these days. My rough estimate is a ~3% damage increase to frostbolt, and around 1k more damage on a crit brain freeze against resil targets. 1k extra damage on a shatter combo is certainly nothing to sneeze at, I expect that I will feel pretty happy with our pvp geared damage once again after this patch.
Other than that, I've just been playing dk and holy paladin in arenas. Doing okay, but I didn't get alot of games in early season so points have been a little slow. I expect to replace my skill'troll with a tier 2 wrathful weapon in 3 weeks on my dk... 3 weeks >< Well, what're you gonna do. Priority on the paladin is still to replace my furious and conquerors pieces. I'll try and get some decent teams on a mage so I can start blogging on more mage arena-based stuff again in the near future, and maybe I'll fit in some dueling/bg related stuff. 'Till then, adios!
Frankly, I don't like wizard cleave. Now, there can be some fun parts, I often find myself laughing at loud at how ridiculous our burst can be. But at the end of the day, I often don't feel we outplayed the other team when we won. Rather, they made a small mistake and our absurd damage won it for us when that happened. Someone gets a little out of position, misses an interrupt, choses the wrong target or doesn't go defensive extremely quickly and they will end up dead insanely fast.
Both of the two wizard cleave variations I've been running have a shaman, and I've gotta say that while I've generally been of the opinion that our damage is either fine or, on occasion, low, with heroism it just feels stupidly high. You can sit in one place and turret so much damage into someone it's absurd, and packing so many casts into a short period of time makes it easier to hang onto your procs till you've got a bunch lined up (fof/brain freeze/trinkets) before blowing someone away.
The 3.3.3 mage changes look nice. I'm not sure how I feel about more burst being tied to the rng proc that is brain freeze, but I guess proc management is an almost unavoidable part of frost these days. My rough estimate is a ~3% damage increase to frostbolt, and around 1k more damage on a crit brain freeze against resil targets. 1k extra damage on a shatter combo is certainly nothing to sneeze at, I expect that I will feel pretty happy with our pvp geared damage once again after this patch.
Other than that, I've just been playing dk and holy paladin in arenas. Doing okay, but I didn't get alot of games in early season so points have been a little slow. I expect to replace my skill'troll with a tier 2 wrathful weapon in 3 weeks on my dk... 3 weeks >< Well, what're you gonna do. Priority on the paladin is still to replace my furious and conquerors pieces. I'll try and get some decent teams on a mage so I can start blogging on more mage arena-based stuff again in the near future, and maybe I'll fit in some dueling/bg related stuff. 'Till then, adios!
Friday, February 12, 2010
MS getting changed?
Ghostcrawler on healing debuffs:
I agree it's an issue and we do have some plans.
However, we're going to back off of talking about Cataclysm for a little bit. We're excited about it, so we've been wanting to share our philosophy, plans and ideas as they relate to class design. However, it may be a little too soon. I think it's clear that some players are mistaking our excitement for Cataclysm as our giving up on Lich King. ("Cataclysm will fix it.") That's not our intent nor plan, but I can understand how you might draw that conclusion. We'll talk more about the upcoming expansion soon (tm).
I'm sure I'm not the only player who thinks that 50% mortal strike is just too hard to balance. I've taken to playing a healer class again recently (holy paladin this time), and the difference between mortal and no mortal strike is just mind blowing. As long as mortal strikes exist in their current form, you would need absolutely mind blowing burst (alot of the popular wizard cleave variations) or a very very high amount of CC in order to get anywhere without one of the three classes that have a 50% MS on your team. For comparison, although the frost mage and shadow priests 20% MS is somewhat noticeable, it's not a night and day difference when it comes to attempting to outheal damage like a 50% MS is... more of a nice but not overpowering advantage in terms of sustained pressure.
So how do you balance mortal strike? There are a few different possibilities that people (including myself) have suggested. The first and most obvious one is simply to nerf all mortal strike effects. 30% seems like a much more reasonable number, large enough to notice but not bringing the same black-and-white qualities of current MS. Would you buff or nerf the current caster MS effects? Maybe even remove? I'm not sure.
Another possibility is just to give everyone an MS effect of some sort, or just make it so widespread that almost any team is going to have it. This has the advantage of freeing up arena team compositions alot, but blizzard has already stated they want to cut healing and damage relative to health pools. If they implemented this change, they would probably have to buff healing appropriately to be able to keep people up through MS a bit better, which is something I don't think they will (or should) do.
One possibility that I believe was first suggested by Affix was making caster mortal strike and melee mortal strike both 25%, and making them stack. I'm actually not a big fan of this - for a start, it does feel like "artificial" game balancing - using a single debuff to force teams into certain compositions instead of how the classes work together in general (like how rmp works for example, classes that amplify each others strengths and cover each others weaknesses). On top of that, it restricts the amount of viable comps even further than the current mortal strike system. I understand alot of people feel stacking melee or stacking casters can be cheesy, to an extent I agree. However, it's important to remember alot of people feel that say, RMP is cheesy as well... whatever beats you often gets described as so. Also, personally I don't have a problem with the idea of stacking two wizards so much as the way it's played right now - spamming damage on whoever is in line of sight most of the game instead of focusing on scoring interrupts + CCs.
Lower the uptime of mortal strikes. This is probably my favorite solution - maybe even leave them at 50% (or nerf them a little, who knows), but make it so that they're not up all the time. Rather, you apply them when you need to burst, much like you might apply a CC to a healer. There would probably have to be a bit more to applying them than just hitting an instant ability too - maybe it could have a very high energy/rage/focus cost. Something that makes you make sure you want to do it before you actually hit it, or penalizes you for using it at a bad time.
I agree it's an issue and we do have some plans.
However, we're going to back off of talking about Cataclysm for a little bit. We're excited about it, so we've been wanting to share our philosophy, plans and ideas as they relate to class design. However, it may be a little too soon. I think it's clear that some players are mistaking our excitement for Cataclysm as our giving up on Lich King. ("Cataclysm will fix it.") That's not our intent nor plan, but I can understand how you might draw that conclusion. We'll talk more about the upcoming expansion soon (tm).
I'm sure I'm not the only player who thinks that 50% mortal strike is just too hard to balance. I've taken to playing a healer class again recently (holy paladin this time), and the difference between mortal and no mortal strike is just mind blowing. As long as mortal strikes exist in their current form, you would need absolutely mind blowing burst (alot of the popular wizard cleave variations) or a very very high amount of CC in order to get anywhere without one of the three classes that have a 50% MS on your team. For comparison, although the frost mage and shadow priests 20% MS is somewhat noticeable, it's not a night and day difference when it comes to attempting to outheal damage like a 50% MS is... more of a nice but not overpowering advantage in terms of sustained pressure.
So how do you balance mortal strike? There are a few different possibilities that people (including myself) have suggested. The first and most obvious one is simply to nerf all mortal strike effects. 30% seems like a much more reasonable number, large enough to notice but not bringing the same black-and-white qualities of current MS. Would you buff or nerf the current caster MS effects? Maybe even remove? I'm not sure.
Another possibility is just to give everyone an MS effect of some sort, or just make it so widespread that almost any team is going to have it. This has the advantage of freeing up arena team compositions alot, but blizzard has already stated they want to cut healing and damage relative to health pools. If they implemented this change, they would probably have to buff healing appropriately to be able to keep people up through MS a bit better, which is something I don't think they will (or should) do.
One possibility that I believe was first suggested by Affix was making caster mortal strike and melee mortal strike both 25%, and making them stack. I'm actually not a big fan of this - for a start, it does feel like "artificial" game balancing - using a single debuff to force teams into certain compositions instead of how the classes work together in general (like how rmp works for example, classes that amplify each others strengths and cover each others weaknesses). On top of that, it restricts the amount of viable comps even further than the current mortal strike system. I understand alot of people feel stacking melee or stacking casters can be cheesy, to an extent I agree. However, it's important to remember alot of people feel that say, RMP is cheesy as well... whatever beats you often gets described as so. Also, personally I don't have a problem with the idea of stacking two wizards so much as the way it's played right now - spamming damage on whoever is in line of sight most of the game instead of focusing on scoring interrupts + CCs.
Lower the uptime of mortal strikes. This is probably my favorite solution - maybe even leave them at 50% (or nerf them a little, who knows), but make it so that they're not up all the time. Rather, you apply them when you need to burst, much like you might apply a CC to a healer. There would probably have to be a bit more to applying them than just hitting an instant ability too - maybe it could have a very high energy/rage/focus cost. Something that makes you make sure you want to do it before you actually hit it, or penalizes you for using it at a bad time.
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