It is good

 I have been playing the new Shadowlands expansion for WOW for the past week.  The xpac was delayed a lot at the last minute which led many people to worry that the game was going to be a mess.  A big company announcing a delay a month before launch is worrying, no doubt.  The answer is in though, and Shadowlands is good.

Good doesn't mean perfect.  There are bugs here and there, and the heavy population servers are groaning under the load, but by and large things work and are a lot of fun.

The levelling experience is quite narrow and on rails.  You have to play through the campaign in order, visiting one zone at a time.  There are lots of side quests and such to do, and the campaign story is polished and interesting, so I was happy with it all told.  I don't think I would want to play through such a thing twice, but thankfully Blizzard set it up so alts don't have to do so.  The zones are widely varied in terms of aesthetic and style, and I enjoyed the variety of experience.  The visuals are great, and the marriage of appearance and mechanics is consistently good.

In short, if you like WOW, you will like Shadowlands.  It is a strong mix of choice and direction, and could quite reasonably be described as peak WOW from a casual play perspective.

The dungeons are well executed too.  There are tons of unique mechanics and themes, and the dungeons reflect the zones they are situated in extremely well.  They act as the culmination to storylines, and they do this in a way that is satisfying and fun.  The encounters are enjoyable, the difficulty is reasonable, and even though I just spent the week spamming dungeons all day long I am looking forward to playing more.

So how about the numbers?

The numbers are good!  Blizzard had big problems trying to balance things a few months ago.  They wanted legendaries and covenant abilities to be huge and mighty, but they discovered that balancing them across all the classes and specs was impossible.  They resorted to making things much weaker, and I think their final pass got it pretty tight.  I have gone over my legendary abilities many times and they all seem to clock in between 4 and 6 % more damage.  Some favour one style over another, but nothing stands out as being overpowered.  I want to build a whole bunch of them for various specs and situations, which strikes me as a good thing.

I liked the Kyrian aesthetic and abilities, and they suited my paladin class, so I chose them.  It seems both thematically appropriate and powerful.  Still, I can see reasonable arguments for every covenant choice if you aren't trying to min/max those last few %, which is close enough.

As to whether or not classes are balanced I can't say for sure.  I do more damage than everybody else so far, but it is had to know how much of that is gear, how much of that is me, and how much is class balance.  However, I am confident that Blizzard is keeping a close eye on things, and they seem willing to make adjustments to get things in line as necessary.

When the raid opens in a week and a bit we will start getting real data on class balance.  There will always be winners and losers, but based on my experiences in quests, pvp, and dungeons things are in quite reasonable shape, certainly good enough to get a thumbs up for a launch incorporating so many new mechanics all at once.

There are bugs.  Especially the Kyrian flying world quests have some issues, and I am avoiding some of them.  However, if a major launch like this only has 'some optional quests don't work sometimes' as the big criticism, you have to consider that a win.  There needs to be some work done to improve world quest text, direction, and bug fixes but most of them work flawlessly so it isn't a thing to fuss over too much.

Plus I got a new frog mount!  Bugs aside, you gotta respect the frog mount.

Interface advice

One of the most valuable things a WOW raider can do is to have a good interface.  A great player will cap out at mediocre output with the default interface, and no matter your skill level a properly built interface will make a huge difference in how you play.  This is a basic bit of information about how I did my interface for those who I am going to be raiding with in the upcoming expansion.

The way I did it is not the only way.  Lots of these decisions take into account things like my hand size, alternate specs, and how I have been playing for many years.  I have had my stun on Q for 15 years and it isn't going to change now, no matter what else happens.  Still, the principles are useful to anyone, and in any case seeing how other people build an interface can give you good ideas.

This is my party setup.  The basic principle is that every piece of important information has to be available without looking all over the screen.  If your character bar is in the top left, you won't notice when you take a lot of damage.  If you do, you won't be looking at your feet to see if you are standing in fire.  You also want your important cooldowns visible without having to look at the bottom of your screen.  Here is my setup:

My character health bar is in a prominent spot.  Above my health bar at 1.  I have all of my defensive cooldowns.  If I see my health bar is low, I don't have to look all over the screen - I have my defensives right there.  I have my debuffs shown below it at 2., so it is super obvious to me if I get a particular boss debuff, and it is right beside my health bar so I can check my full status all at once.  The big icon near the 1.  is the remaining duration on Divine Shield.

At 3. are my reminder icons.  These tell me if I am lacking an aura or my rune buff.  As soon as I put those buffs on, the reminder icon vanishes.  This way I am always reminded before a pull to get those buffs up, and I don't have to put that on my memory.

4.  is my target.  It it set up to have a *huge* cast bar so if my target is casting the entire bar is taken up with the cast.  I want to be completely sure that I don't miss casts.  Also I put wings, my interrupt, and my stun right beside the enemy frame here.  If a cast is happening, I can see, without moving my eyes at all, exactly which options I have to stop it.

5.  is my rotation helper.  I use Hekili because it is excellent for ret and prot paladins.  This lets me focus on dodging goo without staring much at my abilities and cooldowns.  Right below it is my holy power display.  I recommend everyone get some kind of rotation display, but each class needs to hunt down the best solution for them.  Just make sure you aren't staring at the bottom left of the screen and standing in fire because you can't see your character while figuring out your rotation.

6. and 7. are my focus and target of target displays.  I want to have those just in case, though honestly I don't look at them much.

8. is the most important part of the interface, so pay close attention here - the damage meter.  Notice on the bottom how Redcape has done all the damage and other people haven't.  This is just how it is.

Okay, so now we have what the bits are.  Now how do we make them this way?

The health bar for me, my target, target of target, and focus are all created via Shadowed Unit Frames.  I use the default raid and party frames though, as I find they do what I want.  SUF lets you easily set up different arrangements for each frame, which is great.  For example, I think it is crucial to have the cast bar for your target be extremely obvious.

The extra icons at 1. and 3. are made via Weakauras.  You can find tons of weakauras at https://wago.io/weakauras so if you have a specific thing you want a icon for, hunt there.  I have weakauras to show me the duration of all of my defensives, important buffs, and cooldowns right next to where the button is.  Weakauras also provides the holy power display below my Hekili bar at 5.

The buttons surrounding my character frame and target frame are made via Bartender.  This gives you extra bars you can rearrange, so I put bars on the screen near the frames and made the bars click through.  This way they don't interfere with anything, but I can easily put buttons right next to the raid frames that they are associated with.

In raids my group frames shifts.  This can be done in Interface - Raid Profiles in the default interface.  In 5 person content I want all party members right beside me, in raids I need it set further away.

Now that we have the appearance out of the way, I should talk a bit about buttons.  Personally I like using my mouse for all movement and my left hand for all spellcasts.  This works great for prot and ret, but wouldn't work for healing.  (This is part of the reason I don't heal...)

My setup is that I have my basic 12 buttons mapped to 123456qwerty.  The bar above it is mapped to shift-123456qwerty.  The bar above that is mapped to ctrl-123456, and then to custom buttons.  This allows me to easily use 24 keybinds, and have another 12 awkward ones.  I don't want to ever mouse click an ability in a fight, because that leads to death.

My mouse has 7 buttons on it.  I have them mapped to back up, strafe left, strafe right, move forward, autorun, mark target as skull, and mount up.  This way I never have to slowly keyboard turn, I can just mouse turn and strafe.  There isn't much reason to ever use the turn buttons, as mouse turning plus strafing is all you ever really want to do.  I want to be able to move and turn at full speed with the mouse while hitting abilities at maximum speed.

If you have any other questions or comments (feel free to criticize my interface if you think there are things I could improve) please comment away.

Multi pronged attack

Back in the day when I was running DnD campaigns I would try to have monsters make multi pronged attacks.  I found that if all the monsters were just beating on the characters trying to reduce their HP to zero, the fight wasn't that interesting.  You can have multipronged attacks by simply having archers shooting at the party while melee beaters run in from another angle, but that still lets the party respond in fairly simple ways.

I much preferred making the extra attacks entirely different from the main one.  For example, on monster could be grappling characters trying to swallow them, while the other is reducing their Charisma score.  Is it more of a problem that someone gets chewed on, or that their essence is drained away?  Not an easy thing to figure out!  You can also have enemies trying to execute prisoners, set fire to houses, or any number of other things.  Forcing the party to balance threats that are orthogonal to one another makes for exciting gameplay.

We had an entertaining example of a multipronged attack in my DnD game with Naked Man last week.  We hopped through a portal and were immediately attacked by a group of Shadows, a Ghost, and Wraith.  The Shadows drain Strength, the Ghost possesses people, and the Wraith bashes down.  The Wraith was fairly predictable in that it was attacking our HP, which scales with level.  The Shadows attack our Strength though, and that is a stat that doesn't improve as we level up.  Our defenses against Shadows stay basically the same from level 1 to 20, but since we are higher level encounters contain ever greater numbers of them.

This situation leads to some silly circumstances.  If we encounter the Shadows in a big room, I Fireball their end of the room and they all die instantly.  Trivial encounter.  This time though we were in a tiny space, surrounded on all sides.  The Shadows started draining our Strength and AOE effects were not usable.  We could have easily had someone die on round 1 with nothing they could do about it, against monsters that are rated to be utterly trivial to us at this point.

It ended up that we used a lot of resources fighting off all the undead, but we did win.  The issue is that the battle was so binary.  Both sides can wipe the other out nearly instantly without any recourse.  This just isn't true for other weak monsters like orcs, which have the same difficulty assigned to them as a Shadow, but who are no threat whatsoever to a high level party like ours.

The Ghost gave us real trouble too.  Being able to possess one of our people and fight against us is a devastating blow, especially when we have no idea at all how to stop it.

I love the idea of one monster bashing, one monster messing with brains, and a third group of monsters attacking in another totally different way.  However, I don't know that it worked out as well as we could have hoped.  Being possessed doesn't give you a lot of fun choices.  In a computer game it would be fun, as the player still would control 3 characters.  However, being taken out of the battle with a single roll before you get a turn isn't great.  Nobody wants to sit out a long, intricate encounter entirely.

The glass cannon Shadows didn't work out that well either.  We summoned some critters to distract them, and Naked Man was left with a choice.  He could have the Shadows ignore our summons and beat on us, in which case he probably wipes out a character, or maybe all of us.  Alternatively he could have the Shadows attack the summoned monsters, which pretty much removes the Shadows from the fight entirely.  Neither answer is particularly satisfying, and it comes from Shadows being set up in a binary all or nothing sort of way.  He chose to have the Shadows bash on our summoned critters and we beat the fight.  I think that is the better choice, but he obviously didn't like it.

It is a tricky thing to evaluate.  I love the idea of multipronged attacks, but without customizing monsters to the party it seems quite difficult to make the reality match the fantasy.  DnD has this thing where characterse get better at resisting HP reduction with level, but most other sorts of attacks are just as good at high level as at low level, and that puts encounter designers in a weird place.  If you don't attack HP, your critters are locked into being trivial or deadly, with almost no room for challenging in the middle.

I am worried about Bron

I have been looking at some of the new stuff arriving for WOW in the Shadowlands expansion.  I am going to be joining the Kyrian covenant so I wanted to see what their soulbinds look like.  Soulbinds are essentially a new talent tree only available to members of a given covenant.

It is neat to see how they have changed things from WOW's inception to now.  In old WOW they would have had an ability like "Do 2% more damage."  A modern version of that is the following:

Each time you use an ability that is different from the previous ability you gain 1% versatility for 6 seconds.  This stacks up to 3 times.

This is an awful lot like 2% more damage.  It can change your rotational choices in edge cases, but mostly you just ignore it completely and get your ~2% more damage.  You can't get that excited about this ability, and it will never become a balance issue.  This next one though is *quite* a different story.

After 90 ability uses, summon Bron.  Bron attacks and heals your targets for 30 seconds.

What the heck is this?!?  Does Bron do 10% of your overall damage?  1%?  Does it deliver a truckload of healing?  I sure don't know!

From a casual player perspective this is a fantastic ability.  Every couple of minutes without warning a big friend parachutes in and fights for you.  I love that.  You don't have to worry about it, it does useful things, and I bet the visual is entertaining.

From a game design perspective this worries me.  It is exactly the sort of ability that ruins the player experience because players will always optimize the fun out of everything if you let them.  If Bron is nearly useless we can avoid this issue, but that is kind of sad for Bron.  If Bron is good though, then players will want to have all of the burst from Bron occur in a specific window, usually the first 30 seconds of a fight.  Players will build addons to track how many ability uses are left, and set themselves to 85/90 so Bron will spawn 7 seconds into the fight once they are in position and their setup abilities have all been cast.

It could be that instead they want Bron to do healing 30 seconds into the fight, so they set themselves to 68/90 instead.  You will have raid teams setting up target dummies so people can get their Bron to the correct number, and raiders who accidentally went over their 90 asking for the team to wait another 2 minutes so they can get Bron primed again.  Arena players will do the same in their prep phases, desperately spamming abilities to get Bron to the exact right point.

All of that is contingent on Bron being good.  You can't let such a fun, flavourful ability be powerful, or everyone will optimize it until they hate themselves.  Boring abilities can be good, but interesting ones, not so much.  A lot of Shadowlands stuff has gone this way as Blizzard realized that covenant powers that were excellent presented huge balance issues and made people feel trapped in a particular covenant whether they liked it thematically or not.  They nerfed the covenant powers dramatically because at least that way the casual people wouldn't feel too badly about taking a suboptimal covenant.  I expect Bron will be looked at the same way, and Blizzard will make sure Bron does 2% of a player's overall damage so it probably won't be worth it to obsessively optimize it.

Babysitting players so that they won't ruin their own fun in an attempt to generate bigger numbers is one of the unfortunate parts of a game designer's job.  It is one of the things modern WOW does well, especially if you consider Classic WOW as a comparison, where players spend all their time farming up buffs and consumables to defeat utterly trivial content in slightly fewer seconds.  

Silly secrets

Secret doors are silly.

This isn't a universal truth, but it is where we have arrived due to extreme overuse of the trope.  When playing DnD or other similar games I can absolutely imagine secret doors being used in ways that are fun and immersive.  In the creepy old manor occupied by a vampire there could be a secret prison located in the basement, but the only easy way to get there is a secret door located behind a bookcase that leads to a tiny stairway.  That scenario works.

The problem is that somebody saw a secret door in a movie or something and decided that they had to put a couple of those in their DnD module.  Then somebody else saw that, and decided to put six secret doors in *their* module.  After years of this we are stuck with games that assume that there will be secret doors scattered everywhere, and no adventure is complete without them.

This progression takes the secret door from a memorable event to an annoyance.  Searching every room for secret doors is drudgery, and leaves the game feeling stale.  A secret door should be a singularly exciting event, not 

"Okay, we search the room for secret doors.  Not because we have *any* reason to think there is one, but becasue they are absolutely everywhere so we search everything for secret doors."

"You find a secret door."

"Fine, mark it on the map, moving along."

What great adventure, such excitement!

A good rule of thumb is that if the characters will never remember finding the secret door, nor care about where it leads, it shouldn't exist.  Solving the puzzle to figure out which piece of the intricate fireplace to push on to get to the secret laboratory is a fine thing to do.  Finding a generic secret door in a featureless wall that goes straight to the next room and which has absolutely no reason to exist is boring and pointless.

This is largely true of all kinds of things in gaming.  If the players have an optimal choice that they should always take you should automate it away.  This is especially true if making that choice takes time at the table to resolve and isn't exciting or fun.  Figuring out a puzzle to open a secret door embedded into a fireplace - fun!  Rolling to see if you find a secret door in every featureless chunk of wall - awful.

The solution is one that scenario designers and GMs have to implement.  No secret doors unless they are rare, unique, and engaging.  If you aren't describing something that catches player interest, and if they aren't legitimately surprised to find it, cancel that secret door and just put a regular door.  I know that every scenario designer wants to surprise players with new and unexpected things.  Unfortunately secret doors have been so overused that they don't fill that function anymore; we need something different and fresh to entertain our jaded, cynical brains.

An ordered list

When I first saw 5th edition DnD I thought its handling of magic items was excellent.  In older editions magic items got complicated and felt a lot more like an optimization problem than like a fantasy adventure.  Characters had to be decked out in magic top to bottom, and had a variety of slots that needed to be filled.  You needed magic boots, magic belt, 2 magic rings, magic hat, etc.  Fantasy stories don't have these absurd numbers of magic items, and this felt to me like it could be better.  5th edition simply has 3 slots for magic items, which reduces the total number of items you need.  I liked that plan.  

I don't like the plan much anymore.  At low levels those 3 slots aren't relevant because you don't have enough magic items.  At medium levels you swap magic items around the party until everyone has their 3 slots full.  At high levels new magic items either are better than your current ones and bump an old one off, or they are useless.  In my campaign with Naked Man we regularly find new items that he is excited to tell us about, consider them, and then try to figure out how much money we can sell them for.  Everyone already has their 3 items, so a new item with niche use or which simply isn't that powerful is worthless.

I can't even save up for later.  I know that I will have 3 attunement slots now and will never get more, so if an item is bad, no point in keeping it.  I do want characters to have different values for items, but a system where most new acquisitions are met with 'meh, I guess we can sell it' isn't working well.

Characters pretty much have an ordered list of magic items, and everything below 3rd place is junk.  That doesn't have to be the case.  Right now the system is bad - it doesn't matter at low level, is okay at medium level, and is bad again at high level.  We should start with 1 slot and go up to 5 or so over time.

A conversation with Naked Man left me thinking about how to implement this.  One thing he pointed out, which is entirely true, is that many characters make their last meaningful advancement choice at level 3.  After that they just use feats to buff stats and continue to get the abilities that are listed.  No other choices are made.

We can potentially solve both of these problems simultaneously.  Feats have the trouble that there are a few great ones and a ton of rubbish ones.  Improving all the terrible feats so that characters consistently take them would be useful - raw stats should be a default just in case you happen to hate all the listed stuff, not the standard thing everyone does.  Right now though I don't want to rewrite all the feats.  

Instead I think I should simply add a new feat to the game:  Mighty Spirit.  Add 1 to your total number of magic item slots.  In addition to this I would also start slots at 1 instead of 3.  Of course this needs to be counterbalanced by giving characters more feats.  My initial thought is to add new feats at level 6, 10, 14, and 18.  This would mean that a player who wanted to take tons of weird feats is welcome to, people who just want more stats can do that, and somebody who wants to have a huge number of magic items can make that happen.

While taking another copy of Mighty Spirit doesn't sound exciting in itself, it opens up some really cool options.  When you take it you aren't just increasing a number, you are adding some powerful new abilities to your character.  By the time peopel are high level they likely all can use a bunch of magic items, but the degree to which this happens is player controlled, giving them more impactful choices.

I want magic items to feel impactful.  I want people to have real choices later in character life that matter, and aren't just +2 to a stat.  I think we can do these things at the same time.