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.
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