Tag: pvp

Just Listen You Idiots!

Posted on by Gazimoff

It doesn’t matter what MMO I talk about, I’ve only ever played two thirds of the game. It doesn’t matter if it’s World of Warcraft, RIFT, Star Wars: The Old Republic or any of the countless other worlds I’ve kicked around in. Whatever the game, I’ve avoided PvP completely.

I’ve not always been like this: back in the vanilla days of WoW I’d play my hideously overpowered mage and have huge amounts of fun. Looking back, I think that my interest in PvP plummeted when all these special rules and exceptions came in. Resistance gear. Diminishing returns. Trinket rules. Yadda yadda. It went from being one game to three, all forced together like three unruly brothers.

Which is why the last few months have been incredibly strange. On the one hand there’s Guild Wars 2, where I’ve spent huge chunks of my beta time in World versus World (versus World versus World… etc). And then there’s Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes, a game that I’d describe as MMO PvP without all the MMO crap that goes along with it.

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The Movement-Based MMO of the Future

Posted on by Gazimoff

If there’s one thing that the recent MMO betas have shown me, it’s that I need to raise my game. The days where I’d be able to casually stand at the back, throwing out spells and dodging the occasional bad stuff are fading fast. The new world order is in keeping characters moving purely in order to survive.

For those of us brought up on a diet of Warcraft, Rift and Star Wars, spellcasters have been in a priviledged state where most of the PvE combat is managed for us. We have a small selection of abilities to choose from, a list of easy-to-spot things to stay out of and a simple role to do. It also makes for boring combat – once you have a fight memorised you’re laughing.

But changes are on the horizon. In the future breed of MMOs roles are more loosely defined and combat systems have been revamped. Instead of staying at range and just flinging spells, Spellcasters are likely to be taking a much more active role in the future. As I’ve found to my cost recently, this isn’t going to be an easy one for many of us to adapt to.

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The Necessity of End Game

Posted on by Gazimoff

Today’s article is a guest post from Honor’s Code.

Let me put on my armchair Game Designer hat for a moment. Put yours on as well and join me as we think about AAA MMOs.

I think we can agree on the goal. All of us, from the bean counters at production houses, to the developers, the QA Testers, to the players themselves, want a great game. What we want to create is a great ride, an experience if you will. We want an experience that can be picked up and enjoyed and shared with a wide variety of people. This is necessary to create a reliable and sustainable fan base which in turn brings in enough revenue, with whatever business model is used, to keep the servers running and keep us and our employees gainfully employed.

While we can all agree on the goal, how to get there is the topic of vigorous debate. At a high level, we want an immersive world with many fun activities to engage in. We know that different people find different activities fun, so we will need a wide range of activities. We don’t want to force any players to do things they find ‘unfun’ so many of those activities will need to be optional.

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Mages and Patch 4.2

Posted on by Gazimoff

A lot of us have been in a kind of holding pattern since 4.1 came out. Some of us have been focused on mopping up the current tier of raiding, like a roast dinner with lashings of gravy that you just need a bit of bread to polish off. Others have been filling a few gaps here and there with the troll content, using the new epics to fill a couple of gaps in our gear.

Patch 4.2 is approaching. With it comes the new Firelands raiding and questing zone, the new Mage legendary staff, a new tier of armour (and a new round of sympathy for Priests) and a truckload of other stuff besides. Putting the new juicy content to one side though, there’s the inevitable class changes as well. It’s early days so far and there’s a promise of more to come, but Mages are already tasting both sides of the nerfbat.

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Mages & PvP – Fun, Lethal, or Both?

Posted on by Gazimoff

This guest post is from Bordy, a veteran player of games and dealer in lethal puns. You can find his unique brand of humour on Twitter @snuffleorc

I have played WoW since the retail release. Gazimoff is the one to blame for getting me into it. It was by no means though my first MMO. That honour goes to Ultima Online. Playing with a dial up connection and (in current terms) an incredibly slow PC, I both loved that game and hated it.

My recollections of the game now are vague, so my apologies for anyone who knows better, but to me the world was pretty standard fantasy fayre, although gameplay was fun. Unlike WoW, the game was classless and you picked and chose skills from across a range, meaning that the ultimate combination became so widespread that the bulk of characters were effectively (as far as I could tell) fighter-mages.

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What Cataclysm Means to World PVP

Posted on by moguestposter

This guest post is from Bordy, a longtime friend who doesn’t have a blog of his own and so decided to use mine. You can find him on Twitter @snuffleorc.

Who among us Vanilla Veterans does not look fondly back to the mass battles between Southshore and Tarren Mill? Cataclysm wasn’t what ended these, but it certainly prevented it ever recurring, with the loss of Southshore as an Alliance town.

Southshore and Tarren Mill were roughly equidistant from faction cities (Ironforge and Undercity respectively). The geography of the land was suitable to mass PvP too: No town walls, roughly flat (albeit with a small slope), mostly open ground with minor cover/obstacles and a small tower in the middle. Designers of battlegrounds should take note!

Of course what actually put an end to the SS vs. TM battles was the creation of battlegrounds. These could be instanced and thus enabled Blizzard to spread the server load of all those wanting to participate. The old SS/TM battles could get very laggy, as fun as they were. Battlegrounds though do not, for the most part, offer mass PvP in open ground. Warsong Gulch is just too small (in as far as combatants go), Arathi Basin has a few more combatants and of very uneven terrain. Eye of the Storm again splits forces up. Alterac Valley comes close at times, but is spread out and more recently simply involves a chase to kill NPCs. Strand of the Ancients, Wintergrasp, and Tol Barad all involve assaulting and defending.

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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.

The Spark of Excitement

Posted on by Gazimoff

Hype is a wonderful thing. It serves to promote new products and bring them to our attention. It’s also there to help build up excitement; to get us thinking about what fun we’ll be able to have when we’re finally able to get our hands on whatever it is that’s being promoted.

The problem I have with hype is that by making tomorrow look so incredibly exciting, it makes today feel positively mundane. It’s like I’m being reminded constantly about the boring drudgery of my boring life. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to take a holiday. Fly south for the winter, do something interesting, that kind of thing. Wait for the snow to blow over and come back home when everything is shiny again.

I think Larisa mentions the same thing – we’re all beginning to feel a bit down at the moment. It’s like we’re being sent picture postcards from Cataclysm saying “Wish You Were Here”, yet we can’t fly out there for another 6 months or so when the ash cloud finally moves.

But hang on a minute – our lives aren’t dull and boring. We do exciting things on a daily basis, they’ve just become a little jaded and tarnished over time. If there’s anything that’s making us feel run down, it’s the routine and repetition we end up in. The boredom of repetition though is self-inflicted – we can choose to break that repetition if we desire.

So I’m making a commitment to myself. I reckon that I only play about a quarter of all the game has to offer. I normally do endgame raiding, heroic dungeons and some light RP. I always play spellcasters, moving them in the same direction and clicking the same hotkeys. Considering how much of the game there is available, that’s pretty feeble.

It’s time to mix it up a little. Time to make my own excitement.

I’m going to try and get my rogue up from level 50 to level 80. I’m going to learn the mechanics of the class, find the parts that entertain me and make me smile, and make him my own.

I’m going to get to grips with PvP in earnest. I’m going to get a full set of PvP-ready gear on my mage, kit him out properly, learn the ropes and get an arena team going. I’m going to try and find Gnomageddon’s desire to set things on fire.

I’m going to work on some roleplay themes that have been bubbling away for a while, and stop being a passive consumer of roleplay. I’m going to try and present more of a story to those I play with in order to generate in-game excitement and interest for them today.

There’s also another side to this. It means that I’m not going to be moaning at how boring things are at present and how there’s nothing for me to do, because it simply isn’t true. There are stacks of easy achievements that I don’t have, there are tons of quests that I’ve never done. I’ve not even begun to exhaust the range of content there is in the game.

This spark of excitement is something that’s inside all of us. We had it when we first started playing the game, and it’s still with us now. We’ve just grown used to it, forgotten that it’s there gathering dust in some corner of our being. It just needs to be pulled out and cleaned up a little.