Tag: design

Beta Patch – The Pyromaniac’s Impact

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler Alert: Discussion of Mage changes in patch 12759. In this article, I’ll also be focusing on Impact, Pyromaniac and AoE talents and how they’ll work together in a solo, dungeon and raid environment.

A whole slew of mage changes came out in the most recent patch. The main ones were around armour specialisations and talent masteries. Wearing our normal gear (complete cloth armour) nets a handy 5% increase in Intellect. For fire mages, Mastery now gives us a tasty bonus to the DoT component of our spells. Both the specialisation and mastery appear in our spellbook once we’ve learned them from the trainer.

The new teleport bar that I mentioned after the previous patch has now been fleshed out with all teleport spells. The only snag is that only the Dalaran and Shattrath spells work now, meaning that for most mages it’s now a two-hop trip to wherever we want to go. Even so, it’s still better than catching a boat everywhere.

Apparently there are new teleport and portal spells available to the new Tol Barad PVP zone, although I haven’t had a chance to test these yet. There are currently no teleports or portals to Vash’jir, Deepholm or Uldum, although there are static portals at Stormwind and Orgrimmar.

The other big change is that creature damage has been heavily ramped up from level 65 onwards. Level 82 outdoor creatures now do four times as much damage as they used to, which is horrendous news for cloth classes with little to no damage mitigation.

Currently, solo questing involves constant use of mana shield, counterspell and frost nova. And that’s for every single pull, just to stay alive. Going toe to toe with mobs in Deepholm is an excruciating experience – you have to work hard to take down a single mob. If you have anything add to the fight, you’re toast. Don’t forget that Polymorph won’t help you there as almost everything you fight is an elemental of some description.

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A Good Beta Tester?

Posted on by Gazimoff

I started writing this topic in response to a blue post from Ghostcrawler. It seems that while the beta programme is proceeding at pace, the quality of feedback they’re getting is dropping. Rather than trying to paraphrase the Crab himself, I’ll let you read his words directly.

I hate to go all forum moderator on you guys, but we’ve seen a recent downward spiral in the quality of some of these threads and posts here on the beta forum.

Story time: I started posting heavily in the Lich King beta forums. It was a great experience and lot of players enjoyed the opportunity to be able to have intelligent conversations directly with the developers. I’ve heard over and over ever since then what a positive experience that was for a lot of players. It’s for that reason that I am going to be fiercely protective of the quality of posts here in the Class Discussion forum.

If you see a locked thread, chances are we thought it crossed the line. If you keep making the kinds of threads that get locked, then you’ll be removed from the beta and we will replace you with someone who can provide intelligent feedback. Sorry to sound like a jerk — I hate making these kinds of posts. But we want participating in the beta to be a positive experience.

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Games Within Games Within Games

Posted on by Gazimoff

I used to exclusively play single-player games, drifting from title to title from month to month. After I’d finished eating through the content that the developers had created, the game was finished for me. Achievements or multiplayer modes didn’t exist nearly as much back then, so there wasn’t really anything else left to play for.

Singe I started playing Warcraft, I’ve bought what, maybe a handful of games? All of them titles that I’ve wanted to try out, that have looked cool, that have felt right.

Know how many I’ve completed? Zip. Nada. Zilch.

I must suck as a gamer or something.

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Early Look: Mage Talent Revamp

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler Alert: There’s a fair bit of discussion about the new Mage talent trees. It’s limited to theory, analysis and scenario discussion. Fairly strict game mechanics focus.

The most recent Cataclysm beta push brought with it the overhaul to class talent trees. It’s all part of a grand design – remove the talents that everyone took and integrate them into the core mechanics of the class, while trashing the ones that no-one took. In doing so, drop the size of the trees and reduce the number of points available to spend. You can find Wowhead’s Mage talent calculator here.

It feels like Vanilla all over again.

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The Growing Yet Shrinking World

Posted on by Gazimoff

One of the signs a game is on the decline is when servers are switched off. It doesn’t matter if they’re called realms, shards or any one of a number of different descriptions – mergers and closures are a sure-fire sign that a MMO’s playerbase is shrinking.

No game is immune to the effects of a variable playerbase. Subscriber numbers can fluctuate dramatically from when a game is launched to when it’s finally mothballed. The reasons for mergers can vary: a server with only a handful of players on it can feel empty and desolate, while an under-utilised server may be closed to reduce costs. They’re a staple part of every MMO game’s lifecycle once the post-launch rush has died down and the number of people logging in starts to dwindle.

So how has Warcraft managed to survive without a single server merger since launch while every other game since has been forced to go through it? What makes this game so unique? Arguably it’s the most successful, but that doesn’t make it immune to the changing habits of fickle consumers.

The mysterious thing is servers have merged. Just not in the way you’d normally expect.

Out With The Old

If we timewarp back to early 2005, Warcraft was a very different landscape. We had no dungeon finder, no cross-realm dungeons or battlegrounds. Each realm was its own isolated world, unconnected to any others in its battlegroup. This doesn’t mean that our little realm was a single computer running all by itself – by contrast, there were a whole collection of servers powering our experience.

While there was a Realm Server and database to house all our characters, hold all the Auctionhouse data and manage all the chat channels, there’s also a whole bunch of other boxes as well. The ones we’ve all experienced are the continent servers – these track our movements as well as the monsters and NPCs, govern the loot that we gain and a host of other things. There were times when a continent and everyone on it would vanish into the ocean – that’s when this little box fell over. If you remember early Burning Crusade you’ll remember how many times Outland used to disappear completely.

Of course, the diagram above is heavily simplified, but you get the idea. There’s much more going on behind the scenes. Unless you’re a networking fanatic though, that level of detail would probably bore you to tears.

In With the New

This is all well and good, but how have things changed? And how has it allowed Blizzard to reduce their number of servers? The trick lies in new features that have proven to be incredibly popular.

When cross-realm battlegrounds were introduced they were a godsend. Players were quickly and easily able to find others to fight against, meaning that it didn’t matter if your server had low population as long as your battlegroup had enough players. Arenas were an extension of this, matching groups of players across servers in order to do battle.

The new Looking-For-Dungeon tool moves even further in this direction. Instead of waiting around in a city to try and form a group, players are collected together from across the battlegroup and formed into automatically balanced groups. There are a few hiccups but by and large the system works.

What does this mean? Well, firstly there’s the practical aspects – for almost everything that relies on other people there’s the option of cross-server play.This provides the illusion of a server being busier than it actually is – if you’re able to carry out basic PvP and PvE experiences, you’ll be relatively content with the game.

It also benefits from a technical point of view. By moving the instance and battleground servers into their own discrete clusters, Blizzard can get away with having fewer servers and just balancing the load between them. It’s a clever design – not only do you deliver in-game benefits, but you reduce your server footprint as well.

Virtual Shrink-Rays

Once Cataclysm launches and dies down it’s likely that Blizzard will look for further experience improvements rather than merge servers. There are a couple of obvious things that they could do almost immediately, and I’m almost certain they’re considering them:

  • Cross-realm Raids – tired of getting groups for the weekly raid or the loot piñata? Chances are that some time in the future we’ll be able to queue for a 10-man in the same way we do 5-mans now.
  • Battlegroup Auction houses – I often hear about how this realm or that one has a terrible economy because of it’s low population. By opening the markets up, prices should normalise and people shouldn’t feel the need to transfer just to get reasonable prices.
  • Virtual Northrend and Outland – instead of running continents on two separate servers, place them on the same physical box but as virtual entities. It’s commonly done and would be a way to make low-population continents more efficient to support.

It means that the only thing left untouched is the questing and levelling experience. While refer-a-friend will help pull people together, it’s not necessary in order to quest. There’s the odd group quest thrown in here and there, but they’re mostly inside instances these days. The elite creature wandering outside is now more of an oddity than a regular occurrence.

I think that Blizzard understands how much we attach to our server identity, and how hard we work to find a good home for our characters. As a result of their efforts to improve the ways in which we can play together, they’ve managed to hold off carrying out server mergers for much longer than most.

One day it’s inevitable. Realms will merge, servers will get powered down. For now though, their work seems to be holding that threat at bay.

Website Wizardry… Ish

Posted on by Gazimoff

Apologies for the rather pompous title, but I thought I should actually put a post up about a handful of changes that have either happened or are going to be happening to Mana Obscura over the coming days and weeks. Some of the changes have been a long time coming (well, since the release of WordPress 3.0 at lest), but some of them have only been needed fairly recently.

If you’re reading this in a reader then you’ve probably been completely oblivious to all the changes that have been going on. Content has still been appearing, picked up by your reader and spirited directly to you. The only change may have been an additional footer in your reader posts letting you know where the content came from and perhaps some new stuff that’s appearing on the site.

So what’s been going on? Well I’m glad you asked.

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RealID – What The Forums?

Posted on by Gazimoff

You’ve probably already heard the big announcement about how RealID is going to be introduced to the forums. As we approach Cataclysm, the official Blizzard-run Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo forums will be upgraded to use a player’s real name whenever they post. There’s already a huge amount of discussion on the merits of the idea which are well worth reading.

But why implement the change in the first place? What benefits is it trying to bring and what problems is it trying to solve? To quote some design terminology, what are the requirements and use cases here?

The stated goal behind the switch is to reduce the amount of trolling, flaming and general nuisance that occurs on the official forums. There’s a popular idea based on Gabriel’s Theorem that once you remove the veil of anonymity you remove their desire to behave abusively on forums.

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Polymorph or Polydeath?

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler Alert: Discussion of Mage talents in Cataclysm, focusing on one new talent in particular.

I feel like I’m almost betraying my class by raising this discussion. We’ve been handed a gift almost, a rare glimmering tool that would be oh-so-nice to have. But I don’t like it and really hope that it doesn’t make it out of beta in it’s current form. From what I’ve managed to read on it so far, this new talent could have far-reaching ramifications.

Since Vanilla, us mages have been complaining about  Polymorph. One of the most versatile forms of crowd-control, it suffers from a single flaw – any damage done to the target breaks the spell. There are tools like Glyph of Polymorph that can make maintaining crowd-control a little easier, but in the main it takes a mix of practice and luck to get it right.

Classic situations like a sheep wandering into a Consecrate used to be a big deal back in the original game and even for part of Burning Crusade. Nowadays though, heroic dungeons and raiding are largely an AoE affair. Simply round up the trash, heal the tank and drop Blizzard on the pack of mobs underneath. I don’t think I’ve needed to use Polymorph at all during this expansion, save a few trips into battlegrounds and some dicey solo questing situations while levelling.

Blizzard’s already announced that crowd control will play a bigger part in dungeons and raids in Cataclysm, and I’m looking forward to dusting off my old macros as a result. But they’ve also added a new talent, Improved Polymorph, to help make things a little easier:

When a target you've polymorphed is damaged, that damage is delayed for 3.0 secs.

This talent is right at the top of the Arcane tree – you can have it maxed out at level 11. On the face of it, it looks fantastic – we’ll get a bit of a safety net from all the crazy AoE damage flying around. But what happens if we take it out of the dungeon environment and use it elsewhere?

For solo and questing PvE it still sounds great. I’ll be able to pull a mob using Polymorph, blitz it with a ton of damage over the following 3 secs then finish it off if it doesn’t die from all the damage I’ve dealt it. By having it from such an early level it should also be something I can get into the habit of using, right?

Wrong. Crowd-control is exactly that – controlling a crowd of mobs to make them more manageable. There are snares like Frost Nova and slows like… well Slow, that can help out with single target mob management. But using Polymorph as a three second stun? That just feels like you’re encouraging Mages to learn bad habits.

There’s also the huge PvP issue as well. If I go into a battleground, use Improved Polymoph on a player then burst them down in an Arcane spec, I can probably get close to killing them outright for very little effort. If other people gang up on the target as well, they’re toast. It’s not clear if they get dealt all the damage at once or if it’s only delayed by 3 sec, but either way that’s going to get messy. Considering this is going to be available at early stages, imagine what it’ll do to the twink setup? I know Blizzard don’t balance around early-level battlegrounds, but this does feel excessive.

There’s also the overall battleground and arena fight style to consider. I’m fairly certain that Blizzard wanted to remove the reliance on burst damage in PvP situation. This talent seems to encourage it though – can you make the weasel pop before the polymorph breaks? I know that plate-plate-plate teams have been emerging to counter the rogue-mage-priest team, but still.

That’s not to say all is lost. I’d suggest an easy change to this talent to make it much more balanced and not nearly as obscene:

When a target you’ve polymorphed is damaged, that damage is delayed for 3.0 secs, up to a maximum of x% of the target’s health.

I prefer this as it allows the total amount of damage to be fine tuned, but still handles accidental damage from multiple sources. We’d still get our new toy, but it wouldn’t be completely overpowering.

Why suggest it? I like the concept of the talent and it’s cheapness, so I want it to make it into live. But I’m also aware of how other classes will react to the talent, and want to address that with a suggestion. The last thing I want is for this shiny new toy to be taken away before all mages get a chance to play with it.

Under the Hood

Posted on by Gazimoff

Spoiler alert: In-depth discussion of the planned changes to Cataclysm, primarily focusing on mechanics and core engine changes, leveling experience and endgame experience. All information here is public knowledge unless specified.

Over the weekend an avalanche of news came out about how development on Cataclysm is progressing. In an interesting change the majority of information was shared through a series of interviews rather than through blue posts on the official Blizzard forums (although there are some follow-ups). The removal of Path of the Titans and Guild talent trees are the two big items, along with the changes to Inscription and Archaeology.

What’s interesting is the overhaul the core game engine is receiving in order to make the overall experience better. One of the Ghostcrawler interviews mentions that the game was only expected to last for two or three years. Now they’re not just looking at the capability they need for Cataclysm but also for future expansions and development. In another interview he mentions that the revised game engine will have a number of hooks that can be adjusted, allowing for individual spells and abilities to be fine-tuned much more precisely.

What does this mean? Hopefully it’ll get classes to the stage where individual talent trees will be on an even level, so for example Fire, Frost and Arcane mages should be very close together. You’ll probably still get an “optimal” spec, but the differences between the three should be much smaller. It should also mean there’s less reliance on random-number-generation – something that the Fire tree suffers from immensely.

The problem with building a game engine is that it takes a lot of time and careful planning to pull it all together – especially something as complex as Warcraft. It’s also a problem that doesn’t scale well as you throw additional resources at it – as you scale up a programming team you can easily lose focus on the goal unless you have very tight project management. Having to put a large amount of your coding and design effort into bringing an old, creaking engine up to date is also going to pull them away from generating new content for the expansion.

The end result though is that most of the hard work won’t be visible to the player, at least not initially. It’s like changing stuff under the hood of a car, replacing the engine and upgrading the shock absorbers. It’s still the same car and works in the same way, it just remains unseen unless you flip the lid open and take a look inside.

It should however creep into the game through subtle ways, one of which being the revamped glyph system. In essence, being able to provide additional hooks into the spellcasting (or perform ability) process means that you have greater control over how they can be adjusted. Part of the change to glyphs includes providing a “middle tier” between powerful spell changes and basic cosmetic or remove reagent requirement ones. This middle tier is going to rely on the additional hooks to perform the subtle tweaks to abilities, so that the situational stuff can truly be situational and not incredibly overpowered or ridiculously weak.

There’s also scope for more interesting racial abilities, item bonuses and so on. You might find that items have properties that would work like a glyph, providing unique interactions with the spell casting pipeline in ways we haven’t seen before. It also means that we could get to the stage where an item does different things depending on the class or spec of the character using it.

Of course this additional complexity is going to be a nightmare for one team of people – the theorycrafters. As spells become tweakable in more ways, so the models used to predict their behaviour become more complex. if you think the guys with their spreadsheets and simulators have it bad now, imagine how bad things could get for them in the expansion?

In essence though it feels that in order to get at all the expansion’s content, you’re going to need to roll alts. Both Cory Stockton and Tom Chilton have commented on the amount of new quests that are being sunk into the game in order to sort out the level kinks. Improved crafting profession itemisation should also help, particularly around Inscription. If you’ve ever leveled a mage you’ll understand the frustrations around getting offhand items, rings and trinkets at the lower levels.

What does all this mean for me as a player? Larisa says that all she wants from Cataclysm is good raiding and a good guild, and I can appreciate that. But a hangover from my single-player days is that I want stuff to do in the game – zones to explore, quests to complete and characters to progress. I currently don’t feel that I’ll get that on my main character, and will have to roll an alt if I’m going to truly explore all the changes that have been brought in. Whether it’s a Worgen Mage or a Gnome Priest, I feel it’s going to be restarting that gets me the most out of this impending expansion.

Choose Your Weapons

Posted on by Gazimoff

A while back I mentioned that I had four different weapon sets on my mage and was having trouble choosing which one was the best. Theorycrafting wasn’t really helping me much, with no clear winner emerging. In the end I decided that the best way to test them was to go out, do some target dummy tests and run a few heroics with them. It means that I can test them against my own playstyle as well as getting a feel for each of them.

Unsurprisingly, both Nibelung and Sister Svalna’s Aether Staff came out at around the same for single targets, with Nibelung really coming into it’s own for those AoE sessions in heroics. Abracadaver was only slightly behind, which surprised me as I was expecting a much bigger boost from the haste. I only have 450 haste normally so I’m nowhere near the softcap, although I do get the tier 10 2-piece set bonus most of the time.

The Frost Needle and Scourgelord’s Baton came in last place, and so will be banked. I can’t risk disenchanting them though – if a substantial one-hander or off-hander drop then I’ll need the other one to sit alongside it.

As I was doing all this testing I gradually became frustrated – it didn’t really make sense to me why I could end up with four sets of weapons, all from the same instance and all similar in quality to each other. It wasn’t as if I could say that there was a clear upgrade path, or if there was a clear best-in-slot that I could work towards. Instead, the approach was to offer similar weapons that do similar things, but work in slightly different ways.

  • A sword and off-hand combo
  • A staff with an “on use” ability
  • Another staff with a low procrate ability
  • A third staff with just high base stats and nothing unusual

Frustratingly for me, I couldn’t even decide what I like more as a player. Do I like to be able to just compare raw numbers – if the numbers are bigger on the new item, it’s an upgrade? Do I like to go for things that are a little unusual? I know I don’t like on-use items as I always forget to use them (trinkets being a perfect example), but that’s more preference and playstyle than throwing away good quality gear.

Anyhow, just as I was beginning to settle on which items to keep and which to put into cold storage, along comes this blog post from Tachyon. If you’re not aware of his work, Tachyon is a mage blogger who is heavily into theorycrafting. His best achievements are developing simulators that calculate DPS for a given gear selection and spell rotation. The information he generates is fantastic in terms of working out stat priority and so on.

His latest post on DPS volatility is a real eye-opener – it shows why ten tests or samples are unreliable for calculating DPS, and that you need something like a thousand in order to build up even a rough picture of DPS. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m unlikely to run the same instance with the same gear a thousand times just to test if it’s a marginal improvement.

But more fundamentally though, I’d probably never be able to tell which was the better or worse weapon for me because they’re all so close to each other. That and Lady RNG adds her own influence, distorting whatever results I get. I might end up feeling that the mathematically worst choice gives me the best result just because it’s “lucky”.

It also makes me wonder if any of this will get better in Cataclysm? I mean, I love choice, but I’d rather not have to be a mathemagician just to be able to pick and choose between the huge range of loot on offer to me. It might be that with the Spirit mage changes there will be a clearer choice for us – if it’s got intellect and stamina but no spirit then it’s a mage weapon. I like to have plenty of upgrade chances and I do appreciate the idea of moving away from identikit gear choices as well, but I’d really like it to be easier for me to work out if something is an upgrade or not.

I’m also reminded of the times when I first started raiding. Everything seemed so much clearer – it was an upgrade or it wasn’t. There didn’t seem to be as much choice – Molten Core only really had the Staff of Dominance or the Azuresong Mageblade to choose from. There also seemed to be much more competition for loot, with about nine other players also keen to get their hands on the same gear. I’m not saying that an abundance of choice is a bad thing, but it just seems to take that epic edge off things.

I guess I’m looking forward to Cataclysm all the more as a result – the raid dungeon changes mean that loot will be the same for both 10 and 25-man. This in turn makes itemisation easier, which should make upgrade paths clearer. I’m aware that the expansion isn’t a panacea or cure-all, but I can live in hope.