Send in the animals

Last time I talked about the DnD spell Animate Objects, where you attack your enemies with chairs.  This time I want to look at Conjure Animals to see how that spell stacks up.  Conjure Animals is a *lot* more complicated because it gives a similar choice betwen a few big summons or a ton of small ones, but there is a lot of variety in the summons.  Animated objects always have the same stats, but a wolf is not the same as a giant wasp!

The two spells share the same fundamental flaw - the game is balanced around the idea that attacking once for 15 damage is about the same as attacking twice for 10 damage, which is about the same as attacking 8 times for 6 damage.  This idea is patently absurd, but all the summon spells and indeed the entire Challenge Rating system is based upon it.  Yesterday we saw that animating a ton of small objects is vastly superior to a big one, and with animals it is the same.  Pick the big one, you get a huge, tough critter than hits for 10 damage / round.  Pick 8 small animals though, and each of them hits for 5 / round.

Conjure Animals lets you summon 1 CR 2 animal, 2 CR 1 animals, 4 CR 1/2 animals, or 8 CR 1/4 animals.

Animal              CR     Dmg/animal   Total damage

Giant Elk             2             11                11

Brown Bear         1             9                  18

War Horse           1/2          7                  28

Wolf                    1/4         5.5                 44

You see the problem.  Sure, swarms of animals are at risk of being Fireballed, but they deal preposterous damage.  A fighter at level 5 swinging with a big sword probably does about 20 damage a round, and we don't want summon spells to completely replace fighters.  Given that, I think summoning a Giant Elk that is worse than a fighter but has a ton of health is a reasonable thing.  It lasts a full hour, has as many hitpoints as any characters in the group, and some animals have special abilities like flying, tracking, swimming etc that you can leverage.  It is a spell I would happily cast.

However, summoning swarms of weak animals is a huge problem.  If you max out on stuff like wolves your fighters are going to feel utterly useless.  The wolves do several times as much damage as they do, and if the enemies do decide to start chopping through the wolves that is *great*.  The wolves have 88 HP total!  They will still do a ton of damage and save your group a huge amount of incoming damage too.

The solution here is simply to nerf the number of animals you get when you go for lower CR ones.  Instead of doubling the numbers each step down, I would change it from 1,2,4,8 to 1,2,3,4.  Nice and easy, and it actually works out well with the damage numbers.  The CR 2 is the worst still, but at least the others all deal similar overall damage.

The other issue with this spell is that it is extremely overpowered when cast at higher level.  If you level up Fireball from 3rd to 5th level, for example, the damage goes up 25%.  However, if you level up Conjure Animals from 3rd to 5th level, you get *double* the animals.  This is a problem!  It makes all higher level summoning spells a joke compared to Conjure Animals, and uplevelling spells is supposed to be a way of filling in spots, not invalidating high level spells.  The way I would fix this is to make the spell summon 1 more animal of CR 1 at level 5, or one extra CR 2 animal at level 7.  This is still worth doing, but leaves room for actual high level summon spells to compete.

Even after both of these nerfs Conjure Animals is still better than any other summon spell in the book, I think.  At 5th level it deals more damage than the Bigby's Hand or Animate Objects spells, and it makes Conjure Elemental and Mordenkainen's Sword look like ridiculous jokes on multiple fronts.  Even after my suggested nerfs, I think you have to make the types of animals that are summoned be determined by the GM, and have the GM pick weak animals.  I tried to pick the best animal types for my numbers above, but if you instead pick randomly the spell is a lot more fair.  Many of the animals have worse attack routines than the optimized ones above, and that would reduce its power level reasonably.

I like the idea of summoning animals to attack your enemies.  It is also cool that their abilities are based on the abilities of the base creatures.  As usual, the theme is good, but the math sucks.

Send in the chairs

The Animate Objects spell in DnD is thematically great.  You are in the middle of a fight in a workshop, and you cause the bench, a couple of crowbars, and a table to rise up and bash away at your enemies.  You could also use it to help carry people, break stuff, or accomplish other tasks.  Awhile ago MattInTheHat came up with a *fantastic* plan for the spell - he threw some coins at his enemies, telling them to buy some better insults, then animated the coins and bashed them with them.

This was a great dramatic moment.  The coins were marvellously effective.  I eventually picked up the spell myself and paid for a bunch of small metal pieces with my character's initials on them so I could toss them at my enemies and do similar things.  This is all well and good, except that it is hideously unbalanced.

The way the spell works is that you get 10 slots of objects.  The bigger the object, the more slots it takes up, but the more damage it does.  However, tiny objects are a huge outlier in terms of their damage per slot.  Consider the chart below, written against AC 16.

Size    Slots    Damage  Hit      Total Damage  Dam/Slot/Round

Tiny    1          1d4+4     +8              4.225        4.225

Small   1          1d8+2     +6             3.575        3.575

Med     2          2d6+1      +5            4               2

Lrg       4         2d10+2     +6            7.15          1.789

Huge    8         2d12+4      +8           11.05        1.381

The problem is obvious.  The thing that really matters is the damage per slot, and tiny things utterly dominate that metric.  Large things hit hard, but there are so few of them that they do terrible damage.  It feels to me like you ought to want to animate big stuff if you can, but the opposite is true.  You might think that coins are perhaps too small to work, and that is reasonable.  (The spell does not specify.)  However, you could always just have 10 daggers on a bandolier or somesuch, if need be.  

The real thing we ought to figure out is how good *should* the spell be?  I will use the spell Disintegrate to benchmark just how absurd Animate Objects is.  Disintegrate is a single target 6th level spell that does 75 damage with a save to avoid.  Animate Objects, if up levelled from 5th to 6th and used on Tiny objects does 78 damage with attack rolls - quite similar.  However, Disintegrate is a single action, and Animate Objects does that damage every round!  Also Animate Objects uses many attacks that can all smash enemy concentration and also will take attacks of opportunity if they enemy tries to move.

It is clear to me that Animate Objects on tiny objects is completely busted.  It is the best single target attack, and is as powerful as a fighter, but the spellcaster can cast other spells while the objects beat down.

So how do we fix this?  There are two basic approaches - first, to restrict how often you can use it, and second to change the numbers.  The first one would entail insisting that tiny objects be of highly specific sizes.  You could insist that they be the size of a sword, for example, so that having 10 of them on your person is extremely difficult, and thus you could only use Animate Objects under specific circumstances.  Unfortunately there are ways around that - I would probably have a summoned minion carry around a box of swords for me to animate in that case.  This approach also doesn't fix the issue that large objects are terrible.

The other approach is to fix the numbers.  Generally small things have the problem that they have low strength so they do little damage, but these small things have massive dexterity and use dexterity for their damage rolls.  I don't see any reason why we need to shackle ourselves to the listed strength and dexterity numbers.  The tiny object get many attacks, which is especially powerful against casters, so their damage should be the weakest overall.  Large things are harder to come by and are often restricted by their size, so they should hit hard.  Here are my suggested new values:

Size    Slots    Damage  Hit      Total Damage  Dam/Slot/Round

Tiny    1          1d4+1     +5              1.75           1.75

Small   1         1d8          +4             2.025         2.025

Med     2         2d6+2      +6             4.95           2.475

Lrg       4         2d12+3    +7             9.6            2.4

Huge    8         4d12+5    +9            21.7           2.713

These new values look a lot better.  If you have a bunch of small things they are still fantastic at bonking spellcasters many times to disrupt casting.  Their damage is still good, and definitely worth casting.  If you animate big stuff it is worse at disruption, but hits very hard.  (But still not nearly as hard as the base version of the spell on tiny objects.)  Tossing coins at people is a fine thing to do, animating swords does better damage, and finding chairs or tables or anvils to punch people with is better yet.  That feels way more appropriate thematically, and stops this spell from being quite so brutal.  

Having some spells be better than others is fine, but you have to keep the best ones from dominating everything.  Fireball, for example, is so overpowered that it is often the best thing to cast in a single target situation, even though it is obviously designed for AOE.  That is a problem.  Animate Objects, as written, is similar.  It is supposed to be a spell you maintain over many turns, but it is actually the best one shot single target attack.... and then it keeps doing that every turn.

Next I may tackle Conjure Animals, which has many of the same problems that Animate Objects does.  Summoning a horde of wolves or bears delivers absurd damage in the same way, because the game is designed around the idea that 4 attacks for 10 each is about as good as 1 attack for 20.

Climb on my back

In the past couple weeks I have been doing a lot of carries in WOW.  The ways it works is I am in a bunch of discord channels and an advertiser posts a run.  Boosters like me reply if the post suits them, and then we gather into a group in game and carry someone through a dungeon.  The ad will tell us how much we get paid, how difficult the dungeon will be, and who they need.

This pays extremely well.  I make 4 to 10 times as much gold carrying people as I would doing anything else in the game.  It isn't trivial to get that gold though, as you need to have a high level of skill to do dungeons with one or two people in your group who are incompetent or even afk.  The value of the gold I earn means I am being paid between 4 and 10 dollars an hour depending on the run, which isn't a great hourly rate, but I am being paid to play WOW, so I can't complain that much.  In the end though it isn't like I convert this gold to dollars, I use it to pay for all the potions and food and other junk I need to play as well as my monthly subscription.

The booster community is an interesting place.  People seem to think that I mostly get paid to carry totally incompetent people to rewards they don't deserve, but that hasn't been my experience so far.  Mostly it is people starting off a brand new character who want some good gear but who don't want to spend months trying to work their way up.  They pay some money to get carried to a bunch of good gear so they can get into the content they actually want.  The others are people who are able to do the content but who struggle to find groups.  They don't want to spend hours trying to find people to run with and then have the group fall apart.  

Instead they pay 15 bucks so that a group of friendly, highly skilled people show up and efficiently beat the dungeon with them... and at the end, the buyer gets all the loot!  I can see people looking at it like a movie ticket, where they pay a modest sum and get the experience they want.

I am not interested in buying a boost at all, ever, but I can understand people who do.

There are downsides to boosting though.  The main one is that you need advertisers who sit in trade chat and group finder and constantly spam advertise their services.  I could apply to be one of those advertisers, but I would be miserable.  Even if the gold per hour is better, and I am sure it is, I am not interested.  However, the constant spam does annoy and frustrate players who want to find groups the normal way, without paying for the service.

That spam doesn't affect me.  Trade chat is useless, and is just there for people to post memes, chuck norris jokes, and political diatribes.  I have it turned off.  I have a simple mod that blocks all of the advertisers in group finder when I am looking, so I don't even see that.  For me boosting is all upside.  I don't care if other people buy boosts in general, and I like it a lot when they pay me stacks of gold to do fun activities.  I play the game to do challenging stuff with my buddies, and I don't care if somebody else buys an achievement I worked for by opening their wallet.  The important part is the striving and the improvement, which a buyer misses entirely.

Mostly the people I run into while boosting are a lot like the people I run into anywhere else.  Generally we get along and things are fine, but occasionally I run into a jackass who annoys me.  

One thing about boosting that I often see is people complaining that boosters are giving Blizzard money, and that any new and difficult content is just Blizzard cooperating with boosters do make tons of money.  The idea is that if something is hard, buyers will purchase tons of subscription tokens for real money, sell them for gold, and use that gold to pay me to boost them.  

This makes zero sense.  If there are 1 million players who never buy boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars a month.  If most of those players are buying or selling boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars per month.  No amount of boosting can change that - everybody buys exactly 1 subscription per month.  All that happens if lots of boosting is occurring is that the best players don't pay for their subscriptions because they get subsidized by the buyers.

Boosting is here to stay, and I think we all ought to just get over it.  Focus on playing the game your way, and don't worry about what everyone else is up to.  If you don't boost, then nothing the boosting community does affects you.  Those top skilled players were not going to show up for your run anyway... if they weren't getting paid, they would just be doing something else entirely.

Cash money

Naked Man and I often lock horns about money.  Not real world money though, just the currency that we use in our RPGs.  Recently we have been talking about how our characters interact with gold and how we would like for it to work.  NM loves the idea of gold mattering to characters.  He is a big fan of them seeking out treasure to buy the things they want, keeping track of expenses, and budgeting.  In his ideal world we would each keep track of exactly how many coins we have of each denomination and have fun collecting old and obscure currencies that we can then try to convert into more useful coinage.

I, on the other hand, built a whole roleplaying system where player wealth is described simply by Destitute - Poor - Professional - Landowner - Mayor - Royal - Monarch.  What level you are at tells you what stuff you can buy and what you can own.

I often give NM trouble because in our DnD game I do a lot of rounding of money and don't bother to keep meticulous track of it.  I also complain about pricing of things when those prices don't make sense to me.  For example, early on we ended up in a big city and I wanted to learn spells.  The prices seemed ludicrous to me, because to learn a single level 1 spell was 1000g.  1000g could buy me a decent magical item, so the idea that it cost 1000g to just look at someone else's spellbook for an hour seemed absurd to me.  Who in the world is paying those prices?  The person selling the spells doesn't even expend anything when they make a sale!  These strange prices often come up because we are combining sources from a variety of editions, some of which are decades old.  This leads to some strange situations.

For example, in our last session we suddenly got rich.  Up until this point we had accumulated roughly 30,000g between all of us.  About half had been spent on various things like spell research and magic items, and the rest we were carrying around in cash.  In this session we sold a bunch of items we had gotten in our recent adventure for a total of 70,000g.  50,000g of that was in just 2 items that we were selling because they weren't much use.  It makes sense in the lore of the world that these items would be valuable and sought after - they had a history and were completely unique.  Unfortunately that windfall makes it hard for us to take money seriously otherwise.

How do you make yourself worry about small change when you randomly stumble upon single items worth as much as all the loot you have ever seen?  I think DnD has always had this sort of problem because as you level up you find more and more expensive and powerful things, and this leads to out of control inflation from the perspective of characters.  

It is hard to worry about spending 100g on something when you will randomly open a box and find 10,000g in it!

This trouble is exascerbated by our current campaign style.  We are on the clock trying to save the world from apocalypse.  Adventurers that take long breaks and choose their missions based on monetary rewards can interact with world economics in fun ways.  Do we go fight the ogres, which is easy, or do we delve into the lich's tomb, which is dangerous, but probably much more rewarding?  That is a good question.  However, our adventures are often part of saving the world and so we don't have a lot of choice.  Chasing ogres for cash isn't happening.  I suspect that interesting monetary dilemmas are extremely hard to maintain in a race to avoid armageddon.

One thing NM has wanted is for spell components to be expensive.  He likes the idea of spells that have expensive components that we have to either find or pay for as a way to bleed off some of our money.  That works for me, but it is a tricky balance to strike.  Recently I came upon a bunch of spells, some of which had expensive components.  However, the spells were extremely weak, much worse than other ones that didn't have any extra cost.  That isn't going to make for any interesting decisions - why would I pay 1000g to cast an inferior spell?

After some back and forth NM decided to improve those spells and suddenly there were some interesting choices.  A few of the spells were decidedly more powerful than similar free ones, or at least offered a unique perk.  I like that situation, as it lets me choose between free spells or spending cash on something new and exciting.  I have to decide what to prepare each day, so I face the challenges of figuring out when I will need the big guns and getting ready to spend resources on them.

There are ways to make gold interesting in a fantasy RPG, but I don't know that they end up being worth the effort.  When I think about fantasy stories none of them ever involve the characters taking months off to go fight trivial opponents to collect cash.  That isn't a bulletproof argument though, because we aren't playing a book, we are playing a game, and these are different things.  

When I am running games I don't think I am willing to put in the effort to build a complete economic system for the players to interact with.  It is just too much, and I am not interested in something half baked.  NM, on the other hand, seems dead set on including an economics simulator in his fantasy RPG.

Going walkabout

I recently finished running some gamers through a one shot scenario in my roleplaying game Heroes By Trade.  Overall they seemed to have a great time, and the experience gave me some insight into one particular rule in DnD that I did not include in Heroes By Trade.  Naked Man gave me a lot of flak for not having it, but now that I have seen people's reactions I am sure I made the right decision.

That rule is attacks of opportunity.  The basic idea is that if you do something that leaves you open your opponents can take advantage and bash you.  That outline looks fine, but the way DnD implements it is disastrous.  The key problem is that 'leaving yourself open' includes simply walking away from the enemy.

This means that once a melee character closes in, you are stuck next to them.  This is especially true if the melee character has a single huge attack, because often you lose half of your HP if you move away, so you are trapped next to them for the duration of the battle.  

I can see where this comes from.  Old DnD fighter design was that fighters walked up to people and bashed them.  They had no options, no choices.  If a ranged character was a bit faster they could simply walk away and keep on shooting and the poor fighter was absolutely wrecked.  It seems kind of silly that a ranged character who is slightly faster can so trivially defeat a melee type, so the designers decided to make it punishing for anyone to walk away from a melee combatant.  Walk away, you get smashed.

They solved the problem wrong.

The problem is that melee types have no options.  You don't solve that by locking down ranged people so that *nobody* has any options!  You solve it by giving melee characters meaningful ways to keep people in range.  Unfortunately the solution they went with is to keep fighters mind numbingly boring and make it extremely hard to maneuver around a battlefield.  Once people lock swords, everyone stands in a pile fighting.  

The players in my test game were DnD veterans.  When a monster walked next to them they wanted to move away, and then looked at me with big, sad eyes, asking if they were going to take an attack of opportunity.  I said no, because my game doesn't have such a thing.  Their faces lit up with glee, and they moved around the battlefield to find a better vantage point.  The players clearly wanted to wander, and in Heroes By Trade you can.

Of course you do have to solve the problem of melee being trivially defeated by ranged folks who keep on running away.  My solution is to give melee options.  They can knock a ranged person down, preventing them from running and making them easy to bash.  They can grab a slippery caster, keeping them within reach.  They can dash madly across the battlefield to get in position to thump.  They can't always do all of these things of course, compromises must be made, but they have ways to keep a ranged enemy pinned down, just as the ranged enemy has ways to escape.

I am extremely pleased with my choices, particularly after seeing the results in this game.  Players have a lot more fun when they are actively involved.  It is more exciting to choose to use Immobilizing Shot to pin an enemy in place that to simply walk next to them and have attacks of opportunity keep them close.

People want to make choices, to have control over their fate.  They also like to be able to run around in a fight and do exciting things.  Attacks of opportunity prevent both of these things.  Good riddance.

Bad Blizzard

For many months now Blizzard, the game company behind behemoths like Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and other iconic games has been mired in controversy and legal trouble.  The state of California is suing them for a variety of things including sexist hiring, promotion, and pay practices, failure to resolve sexual abuse complaints properly, and destroying documents  to cover up their problems.

After reading the court filing and hearing many of the complaints brought forward it is clear that Blizzard has enormous problems with entrenched sexism at the company.  There was one senior executive in particular who was widley known to grope many women at Blizzcon in particular and people regularly had to pull him off of women when he was drunkenly grabbing them.  Nothing was ever done about this, it was simply accepted as the way things are.  There are no end of other horrendous stories though, like women being sexually assaulted and then moved to other teams to spare their attacker from facing any consequences, as well as regular events where male employees would go on drunken 'cube crawls' to harass the women working there.

It is a neverending parade of awful.

Blizzard's initial response was to deny all allegations and blame overzealous regulators in California for overreacting.  The media, player, and employee response to that was *extremely* negative thankfully and the people in charge quickly decided that heads had to roll.  You know you have to do something when the people playing your game are killing an NPC named after one of your executives over and over again just for spite.  They fired Blizzard's CEO and the head of HR and began terminating all kinds of other employees caught up in the scandal.

That is all well and good.  I want those people fired, and prosecuted where appropriate.  This sort of thing is never going to be quickly or easily resolved though.  Entrenched cultural norms take a long time to change, and a rapid leadership swap just isn't going to fix everything.

The question is, what should I do about it?

Complaining on the internet is my first response of course, but should I delete all Blizzard games?  Should I refuse to ever give them money again?  I thought about it a lot and came to the conclusion that other game companies are often bad in similar ways.  Decamping to one of their games isn't really helping anything.  Awful treatment of women is extremely common in that industry.  Most likely what I would be doing is supporting a game company that just hasn't been caught yet.

I think the thing I should focus on is not trying to punish Blizzard, but rather to create a community in WOW that has the values I support.  I should speak up about sexism wherever I see it.  I should refuse to accept it from the people around me.  I should do this both in person and on forums that I frequent.  This is something I have always done to an extent, but I should push it harder now that I know just how bad things are.

There are a lot of people whose response was 'Burn Blizzard to the ground'.  I am not going that far.  I want the leadership purged, and I want to see huge numbers of abusive people get fired.  I am totally willing to accept slower content updates and worse response time as Blizzard sorts itself out and restructures.  I want the games I love to be built by a company whose values I can get behind.  That isn't true right now, but I have hopes that this will be the catalyst for it to be true in the future.

A great mistake

The newest content patch for World of Warcraft is coming in 11 days, and I am looking forward to it a great deal.  Partly this is because we desperately need new stuff, but part is that Blizzard is adding a broken new legendary item in for my class and spec, and they don't seem to realize how absurd it is.  The community at large hasn't seemed to grasp it either, as most people seem to think it is decent but no big deal.

They are so wrong.  This new item is called Divine Resonance (DR) and it is going to break things for paladins of the Kyrian covenant.

Here are the basics.  A normal legendary item should be adding roughly 5% to your overall output.  On single target that amounts to something like 300 damage per second.  Healing per second is much more complicated, but it is reasonable to think of them as having similar value.  My current legendaries add about 300 dps on single target, and as much as 500 dps on fights with many targets.

DR interacts with a 1 minute cooldown that I already have.  After that 1 min cooldown is used, it casts a spell every 5 seconds for 30 seconds, so I get 6 casts.  That spell does damage, generates holy power, and has an additional effect.  First I will do the calculations for my damage spec, Retribution.

First, single target.  For Retribution the spell that is cast is Judgement.  That does 3325 damage directly.  It also makes the target take 25% more damage from my big finisher.  Sometimes that will overlap with other things, so it is probably only worth about 20% on my finisher, which is 1347 damage.  It also provides 1 holy power to cast more finishers, which is worth about 20% of a finisher, which is another 1347 damage.  That means on average each one of those hits is worth 6020 damage.  I get 6 of those hits each minute for a total of 602 damage per second.

So on single target this legendary is worth double what other legendaries are.   That is nuts.  However, is it any good on multi target fights?  I will assume 5 targets for now.  The initial hit is still 3325, but the finisher bonus is significantly worse at 930.  The holy power is better though, clocking in at 4140 damage.  Thus DR is worth 840 dps on five targets.  It isn't as much better on multi target, but it is still absolutely my best option by a huge margin.

Retribution

                    1 target    5 target

Current        300           500

DR              602            840

Now to examine how this legendary works for tanking when I am Protection spec.  This mechanic is quite a bit more challenging to model because Holy Power has multiple uses while tanking.  I will go with my worst case estimates though, to be cautious.  The spell that is cast by DR when I am Protection is Avenger's Shield (see Captain America) which hits up to 5 targets so as we add more targets the ability gains dramatically in efficacy.  Also I heal for every damage dealt by it, so I get both offence and defence.

First, single target.  Avenger's Shield does 1744 damage.  It heals me for 1744.  Also it gives me a holy power, which is worth 237 damage and 2576 healing.  As such, it gives me a combined total of 630 dps, counting healing as dps.  This doesn't even describe its full power though, as this also grants me significant defensive benefits that are extremely hard to quantify.  I won't have to quantify them though, as DR is so busted that side benefits aren't even needed.

On five targets things get out of control.  The base healing and damage increase by five times, as does the holy power damage.  The holy power healing is unchanged.  The total here is 2120 dps.  This is off the charts.  To put it in perspective, I have another legendary that I use most of the time that is purely relevant in AOE.  It does 2370 dps on five targets and is nigh worthless on single target, plus all of its benefit is in damage with no defensive ability at all.  Realistically I only use that because I have no other good options.  If I was using a good all around choice I would be getting roughly 300 dps overall, similar to what I would get for my other spec.

Protection

                    1 target    5 target

Current        250            350

DR              630            2120

That 2120 number is a huge, monstrous outlier.  Now it should be noted that 5 targets is the optimal number for DR.  If I chose any larger number of targets it wouldn't get much better, and if I chose less targets it falls off mostly linearly.  Still, at any number of targets this is a ludicrous ability.  My total output is roughly 6000 dps (again, counting healing and damage both), so 2120 is inappropriate.  It is quite reasonable to model this as averaging 1000 dps over a whole dungeon, making it vastly more powerful than any legendary for any class.

What is funny is that these calculations above haven't even captured the whole problem.  There is a new power for the Mikanikos soulbind that reduces the cooldown of the ability that does this, by as much as 33% on 5 targets.  I will almost for sure be using that, which raises the 5 target effectiveness over 3000 dps, making it a 50% increase in throughput.

So here is the question:  Should it be nerfed?  There are two approaches to answering this.  First, yes, it is silly overpowered, and should be brought into line.  Second, Retribution and Protection paladins aren't used in *any* high end optimal raids or dungeon groups.  None.  They are trash tier.  Clearly this will help, but I don't think it will actually result in them being overpowered overall.  I suspect it will raise them from trash tier to respectable.

If you are a game designer and you make a huge mistake like this but the people who benefit from your mistake are still totally in line with other groups, should you fix it?  Ideally of course you nerf this legendary but buff the specs that aren't working well, but Blizzard seems set on leaving my two specs as weak, so they aren't going that route.

I don't get to decide that they should buff me and nerf this absurd legendary.  They should, but Blizzard isn't likely to listen to my plan.  As such, I will use the thing and be totally busted and hope that they conclude that overall I am still fair, so it should sit as is.

Race and species

I got an email from the creator of Gloomhaven about his new game Frosthaven.  The email addressed a bunch of changes he is making in the new game that centre around cultural sensitivity, character choice, and race.  He brought a consultant on board to teach him about how to write cultures well and avoid dumping on cultures not his own.

I like this idea.  Gloomhaven was a tremendously fun game but it had some issues when it came to the way the players made choices.  You had to side with the religious colonizers in the big cities against the native populations, for example, if you wanted to play the game.  You also got stuck massacreing children in scenario 3, which a lot of people weren't on board with.

Naturally many people were extremely angry about this and demanded refunds.  The idea of treating native groups as people rather than obstacles or resources to be exploited is not a comfortable one for a lot of people.  It would make them question the righteousness of their ancestors, after all.

I am glad to see a creator take a stand though.  I am sure it cost him many sales of Frosthaven, but taking a public stance against colonialism and racism is a good thing.

One thing in his email of particular interest to me was talk about the way that we reference different groups in fantasy settings.  The standard method is to call dwarves, humans, elves, etc. races instead of species or some other word.  This is odd though, since clearly dwarves and humans are not simply races - their differences are not just minor and cosmetic.  They can't interbreed and have wildly varying abilities.  Species is clearly a much more accurate descriptor, and yet it is not the one we use typically.  One potential issue with using the word race in this way is that it reinforces the idea that races of humans are drastically different in temperament, ability, and potential from one another.  Human races are not different in these ways, and throughout history when people try to make the argument that they are this different it is to justify atrocities and position some races as subhuman.

In DnD and many other settings some different species can produce offspring together, such as elves and humans producing half elves.  This is similar to the real world though, where ligers (lion / tiger mixes) actually do exist.  Lions and tigers are still different species though.

This brings me to the way I wrote my own fantasy setting.  I used the word race when I wrote it without thinking about it too much - it was just the standard way of talking.  In my world the different species come from totally different sources as each was created by a god like entity with a particular purpose in mind.  Clearly species is a more accurate way of referring to them.  Interbreeding is possible in a limited way - humans can interbreed with any other species, but the children are always human.  (Humans were created to embody Growth, which is why this is the case.)

The most obvious problem with calling fantasy groups races instead of species is when one race is the BAD PEOPLE and they happen to have dark skin while the group with light skin is GOOD PEOPLE.  Orcs and elves are like this in DnD, and the recent version has moved away from it, for good reason.  I stayed away from that trope, and gave each group different priorities and tendencies that arise from their origin, none of which is just 'This one is evil, so you can kill them without worry.'

When I look at the species in my world the ones I love to hate the most are dwarves.  They are from Tradition and they value conformity, continuity, obedience, deference to authority, and sanctity.  I want them to die in a fire.  However, lots of people in the real world wouldn't see this as evil at all, and in fact they love those ideals.  Dwarves are the group I personally identify with the least, but they definitely aren't a stand in for evil.

On the other hand, gnomes in my world are hippie free love anarchist vegetarians.  I think they are great, but they would certainly be the villains for some folks, especially the MAGA types.

Overall I am happy with my design for the species in my world.  They are varied and none is simply branded as Team Bad.  However, species is a better word for these groups because it is both more accurate and also avoids the problems spilling over from the way we talk about race in the real world.

I guess I have some editing to do.

Hot dates with gamers

My WOW guild is recruiting.  We need a bunch of bodies to fill the roster for when new content arrives, and it is going to be tricky to make that happen.  Primarily this is a problem because we stopped raiding, and getting new applicants when you aren't raiding is .... rough.

But this won't be a problem because the guild tapped me to help out with recruiting.  Surely I can beat the odds, right?

This seems to be the way it goes.  Every guild I get into lets me into raids to do damage because they need a body, they realize I am good and I become a regular, and then eventually I end up being a main tank because some other tank quits and there I am, ready to step in.

Once I become a main tank I eventually end up being asked to be an officer.  The guild / raider relationship escalator seems inescapable for me.

The first thing I noticed when I started doing work on the recruitment problem is how recruiting for a WOW guild is just like a dating website and people all make exactly the same mistakes in both situations.  Awhile ago I wrote a blog post about how people's dating profiles were garbage because they tried to be too generic and inoffensive.  Sure, you can get a lot of first dates by being nice and friendly and asking for a partner who is kind and smart and funny, but those first dates are going to be trash because you haven't weeded out all the people you hate.  You have to put in tons of dealbreakers like religion, politics, and bad habits.  This will make sure that when you do end up on first dates you have a much better chance to actually like your date.

WOW guilds are the same.  They all talk about their friendly atmosphere, how they want everyone to feel at home, and request people who are knowledgeable and prompt.

Useless.  Nobody recruits by saying "We won't make you feel at home, we are a bunch of assholes, and we want to recruit idiots who never show up."  If nobody would ever say the opposite of what you are saying, then what you are saying is pointless.  It is exactly the same as "I like travel and good food." on a dating profile in that it rules nobody out and accomplishes nothing in terms of telling people what you actually want.

The raiders are no better.  They are all hardworking, efficient, easygoing people, according to their advertisements.  BOOOOORRRRRRIIIIINGGG.

The one thing the two groups can use to sort each other is raid times.  It works out exactly like dating sites use location - you have to match that, or nothing happens.  If you are in Hong Kong it doesn't matter how great you are, we aren't dating.  If you raid while I am asleep, we aren't a raiding team.

I want to make our advertisement actually good.  We are on a huge server with hundreds of raiding guilds, so there is no shortage of applicants.  The trick is figuring out how to stand out from the crowd, and you don't do that by putting down a bunch of generically 'nice' statements and raid times and hoping.  However, at this point my guild leader made it clear that she doesn't want me going off and being aggressive in our guild advertisements.  I am sure that I could get great people doing it my way, but I am not the one in charge, so for the moment I have to do it her way.

The trick, I think, is that I need to be good at recruiting, make it clear I can get the job done, and then push to get let off the leash.  When you first get handed responsibility you often have to put in that time to make it clear you can follow instructions and do it the normal way so that you can earn the trust to do something more imaginative.  For now I will write a mostly normal recruiting post, but in the back of my head I will be creating the real one, the one I want to use when I finally get to do it my way.

Also, if you happen to want to raid mythic in WOW, hit me up!

Temporarily dead

Sometimes being right sucks.

A couple of times over the past six months I made the prediction that my guild in WOW would not make it to the end of the current raid, Castle Nathria.  We are a middle of the road guild and only raid six hours a week, the combination of which limits our ability to kill stuff.  In previous tiers there were gradual power gain systems that kept the guild on an upward track, but this expansion those systems didn't exist.  As such we ended up killing 7 of 10 bosses on the highest difficulty level and then packing it in until the next tier of content arrives.

I was pretty sure exactly this thing would happen.  I think a lot of the folks in the guild are disappointed, but you can tell when things are going downhill and you have to accept that it is coming.  We had been dying to boss #7 for several weeks and we were pulling in random people from the group finder or lower tier people in the guild just to get enough bodies to raid.  Combine that with a lot of the core people feeling burnt out and anyone could see that we couldn't continue.  The guild leader told us we had one more week of attempts and then we would quit, but just before our time ran out we finally killed it.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that we didn't have to give up in despair after 170 wipes, and mostly everyone logged off and isn't coming back until new stuff is out.

I am entirely okay with this.  For me raiding is about community and striving against a challenge, not so much about killing any particular boss.

Still, this outlines a real challenge in game design for Blizzard.  People complain a lot about gradual power gain systems that rely on players constantly doing activities in game to keep up with them.  They don't like the idea that they *have* to keep doing stuff to maintain maximum player power.  Plus many of the top players complain that Blizzard lets the casuals (like me) kill stuff by handing out power increases instead of just saying 'git gud nub'.

On the other hand, players love gradually improving their results.  Let the players beat everything on day 1 and the players will be upset and leave - make it so they can't beat anything and they will quit that game too.  Set it up so that they slowly improve enough to defeat things that formerly were impossible, and you have an experience that people will stick with forever.

It does seem kind of odd that people would feel so good about challenges becoming consistently easier to surmount so that they can get past them without any self improvement, but that does seem to be the way it works.

As far as I can tell the next tier of content is going to be the same as this one.  There will be many challenges, and we will get better gear to help us overcome them, but there will not be any big, important gradual power increases outside of that.  It seems likely to me that my guild will be in the same place six months from now - most of the way through the new content, but burnout, frustration, and lack of skill will prevent us from finishing it up.

I don't care much if we kill the final boss or not.  No big deal to me.

What is a big deal is culture.  I like these people, both socially and as people to play a game with.  Each guild has different ways of talking, different jokes that are okay, and different levels of dedication.  Finding a place that matches you in these regards is far more important than any boss kill, to me.  After all, nobody ever got happy by killing one more boss.  They do get happy by finding a peer group that brings them joy though, and this is what I found with this group.

And heck, maybe they will surprise me with greater skill and success than before.

Ethics in video games journalism

A new tier of content is coming out in WOW, and with it comes a wave of terrible reporting designed to leverage outrage for clicks.  Outrage journalism has been around forever, but I think the way our media consumption is structured these days amplifies it.

Given that it shouldn't be any surprise that when people talk about new content in video games they try to make things sound EXTREMELY BAD and VERY SERIOUS no matter what the thing actually is.  I should be expecting this, but apparently I am not entirely jaded yet.

Recently I saw a perfect example of this when Preach Gaming was reporting on something on the public test realm for the new patch. 

Characters have legendary equipment.  In the new patch we were all expecting to be able to upgrade that equipment, and that is the case.  The way this will work is when you go to the new zone you will be able to do quests that award tokens, and with enough tokens you can upgrade your gear.  You won't be able to do it all that quickly, because these tokens are limited by how many quests appear each day.  I would expect it would take a couple weeks to upgrade a legendary piece, but we don't know for certain yet.  The tokens can be sold on the auction hall too, if people are so inclined.

This news is not outrageous, or even exciting.  It is precisely what we would expect.  However, the headline was that you will have to be rich to upgrade your gear in the new patch, because wallet warriors will buy all the tokens and leave the poor people to rot.

Outrage!  Anger!  Why would blizzard only let rich people do things!

Which is of course nonsense.  The vast majority of the playerbase won't use the auction hall at all for this, and will just do quests to get their upgrades over the course of a few weeks.  If you are broke and don't want to pay any money for your upgrades.... then don't.  I certainly won't be doing so, and I have a bunch of gold saved up.

Will there be rich people blowing giant wads of cash on day 1 to upgrade gear?  Yeah, I expect so, but so what?  You don't need to beat everyone in the world to the punch, just wait a couple weeks and get your stuff at the same rate everyone else does.  Unless you are one of the elite few pushing for world first, it just doesn't matter to you that someone else is buying a tiny bit of power for a few weeks until the world catches up.

Trouble is, saying "New system in the patch is fine, and pretty much expected.  Everyone will get their stuff by playing the game normally for a little while." generates no outrage, no clicks, no engagement.  It is true and boring.  "Poor people will be cut out of the game and have no fun." gets a lot of people wound up, so creators see an incentive to put out that kind of content.

It is all kinds of sad.  Blizzard does make mistakes, no question.  Calling them out on those mistakes is fine.  But if you are ranting and frothing about every damn little thing, you have to admit that you aren't actually interested in game mechanics - you are interested in villifying someone in a desperate attempt to make yourself seem more relevant and popular.  You are trying to find meaning (and profit) in being part of a mob that is intent on destruction for destruction's sake.  Mobs typically do proclaim that they are trying to save something sacred, but once they get going that is rarely what keeps them moving.

If you really are interested in how rich people oppress the poor, the real world has no end of examples.  You don't have to make things up.  But let's be real here, people who thrive on outrage reporting aren't looking for justice; they are looking for an angle to wind up their audience with lies.

Read my lips: Gradual power gain

I have said for awhile now that the WOW Shadowlands expansion has a problem with its raid.  The issue doesn't spring from the raid itself though, but rather the lack of gradual power scaling in the expansion as a whole.  Previous expansions had you gain power through both gear and other systems, and in Shadowlands people simply aren't gaining power through other systems, so midrange guilds like mine are struggling to kill later bosses.

Blizzard apparently agrees with me.  They have metrics about how many guilds are killing what bosses on what schedule, and they clearly are finding that people are getting brickwalled too much.  Every week they push out another big nerf to a raid encounter to continually make things easier so we can keep on progressing.  Sometimes they just flat out lower boss health, sometimes they tweak damage numbers, and sometimes they outright change mechanics.

I agree that they should do this, given that they put themselves into a bad situation.  There are two outcomes at this point - no changes, and guilds get stuck and quit, or keep on nerfing things so we can keep going.  Clearly the second way is better for subscription numbers, and also for fun.

However, Blizzard put themselves in this stupid situation and they need to stop it from happening in the next tier.

It sucks to constantly feel like your practice doesn't matter, and the best way to progress would simply be to wait for a month till the fights are easier.  It isn't a good feeling at all to know that killing bosses isn't a matter of slowly getting good enough to do it, but rather a waiting game until Blizzard decides it is time to nerf the boss.  All of that is ASS.

In the next tier they need to implement something to stop this nonsense of constant nerfs.  In previous xpacs they had awful grinds holding back this slow power gain, but that has its own problems.  People do not like feeling like they have to play trivial content 14 hours a day to get better in order to not let their guilds down.

The solution is simple.  Give us a weekly quest that takes 15 mins and gives us 1% more damage.  Make sure people who show up late or miss weeks can make those weeks up and catch up to the current cap.  The top tier guilds will be mostly unaffected, and midtier guilds like mine will slowly overpower content.  We will do it at our own pace, and we will know that practice matters a lot because 1% more isn't a huge deal each week.  By the end of the tier we will end up with 30% more damage though, and that will be plenty for us to kill everything.

We need slow power gain.  Blizzard's constant nerfing means they know that we need this.  All that remains is for them to listen to me and implement it.  

Hopefully they do it right.

I am not that good

The World of Warcraft Shadowlands expansion is doing very well.  Blizzard has confirmed that subscriptions are higher now than they have been in many years, and the general reception for the expansion has been positive compared to other expansions.  The numbers bear this out too - Normal and Heroic raiding participation is way up, and vastly more guilds are killing bosses now than were doing so in the last couple expansions.  It isn't just raiding though, as participation in all endgame content has gone way up in terms of raw numbers.

There is one place where the numbers are lower though, and that is the peak of raiding challenge, Mythic difficulty.  Numbers are down compared to last expansion, and I am confident they will get much worse as time goes on.

The reason for this is the lack of a power grind in Shadowlands.  In previous xpacs people got more powerful just by playing a lot and this let them overcome challenges by virtue of slow power inflation.  Shadowlands has little in the way of power inflation compared to earlier times, and this means that guilds are struggling to make the numbers checks in Mythic raiding.  I talked about this earlier when the first guilds were killing Mythic bosses, and now the numbers have borne out my projections.  The top guilds are still able to clear raids in a couple weeks just like before, but middling guilds like mine are struggling.  We are used to slow power inflation letting us beat content eventually, but with no more power inflation on the horizon we are going to have huge problems beating the harder bosses.

Currently we have downed 4 Mythic bosses.  We will get more so long as we keep at it, but the struggle is going to be real.  It is especially difficult because these folks are used to a progression pattern where they beat all the stuff, just not that quickly.  Perfectly fine for people who raid 6 hours a week and are fairly relaxed about it.  A shift into being a guild that doesn't beat all the stuff will be tough to swallow, even if it is due to larger trends that have little to do with how we play.  Just because other guilds are having the same struggles doesn't mean we are going to be happy about this.

I like the raiding I am doing, and I intend to keep blasting away at it.  If we don't kill all the stuff I am totally okay with that.  I like practicing and playing on challenging content and eventually getting some kills, but I am not especially hung up on any particular goal.  This isn't a big problem for me personally.

Still, I don't quite know how to feel about it.  Not having the pressure to constantly grind away to get those incremental benefits is a positive, but I actually love the overall system of gradual improvements in numbers combining with gradual improvements in execution leading to victories.  I am glad to not have that feelings that I have to play all the time doing stuff that is boring... but getting brick walled with no way to progress out of it is not great.

The biggest advantage to gradual power inflation is the social flexibility it grants you.  If you get stopped by a boss you can't quite do enough damage to beat, you can either boot weaker players from your group to get past it, or you can wait until inflation gets you over the hump.  Being able to keep playing with people who are fun to play with but who aren't quite there in terms of numbers is great.  In the scenario where we stop progressing in terms of numbers we may well end up in a spot where we either have to accept that we can no longer accomplish new goals or be super mercenary about who plays with us.  

Both of those options suck.  I don't want to boot good people over 5% performance.  I also don't want to just stop having new things to do.

This isn't some theoretical thing either.  Right now I have item level 222.  I am going to hit a hard cap at 226, and likely won't quite make it there.  That is, I can expect to do 5% more damage from gear eventually.  There is nothing else that will improve my abilities.  If we are 6% off from killing a boss, that boss isn't going to die.  We have finished all the grinds the game has offered us, and I don't think it is enough.

I don't want another infinite grind where I am offered the chance to play 14 hours a day slowly getting a number bigger.  Yuck.  I just want a thing I can do every week to get myself something quite small.  Just 1% more output would be plenty, since that means by the time new content arrives I will be doing 12% more than I am right now, which should be sufficient to beat the entire raid.

People like slowly getting to their goals.  They like seeing new things, and constant, gradual progress.  We are happiest not when we get it all at once, nor when we get nothing, but rather when we get a string of victories over time.  Now it just remains for Blizzard to make that happen.

Giving away loot

In the WOW Shadowlands expansion loot is contentious.  Blizzard decided to dramatically cut back the loot awarded in this xpac, and while I am generally happy with the new pace the changes have not been particularly popular.  The major complaint from where I sit is that by far the best way for me to get better gear was to do pvp.

I don't like pvp much, especially serious pvp.

But I do like being the best I can be for when I am doing raiding and dungeons, so I did some pvp to get gear.  A system where players who want to be optimal absolutely have to play one game mode in order to get loot for other games modes (which do drop loot of their own, just not enough) is flawed.  I think there should be benefits for people who do multiple types of content at a high level, but each content mode needs its own comparable advancement path.

Some numbers.  First, everyone gets loot two ways.  First, you can get loot as you do content during the week.  Second, you can get loot in your vault at the start of each new week.  The vault has many options, but you can only get one item from it no matter how much content you do.  Doing more content just gets you more choice.  

Imagine you are a Heroic raiding type of person.  Your raids drop item level 213 gear, and your weekly vault awards 213 gear.  If you did pvp at a similar level you get 213 gear during the week, and 213 options in your vault.  So far, so good.

However, that same person is probably doing dungeons at level 12, which gives them 203 loot from each dungeon, and 220 loot in their vault.

This leads to some bizarre situations.  If you are doing level 12 dungeons you probably don't need level 203 gear, it is already obsolete.  As such, dungeons don't give you anything except a shot at much superior gear at the end of the week.  This doesn't fit with the other modes, but I do understand where it came from.  Dungeons can be run over and over, and if they awarded 213 gear from every level 12 dungeon, it would be too easy to fully gear up.

This also means that everyone has to do dungeons because it gives the absolute best stuff in the vault.  That is, this happens up to a point.  Gear caps out at 226, but from raids and pvp you can get 226 both in the vault and from doing content.  Dungeon gear caps at 226 from the vault, but the stuff from every dungeon caps at 210.  Once you reach this cap you are stuck, and running dungeons no longer awards loot that matters.  That isn't good, and it meant that people like me ended up doing pvp because no matter how good I am at dungeons, the loot is trash and if I want to be my best self I should go do pvp so I can raid and do dungeons.

I hate being shovelled into content I don't like in order to do content I do like.  I could just ignore it of couse, but the fact is that my gear makes a huge difference to which groups I can get into and what things I can do.  Sitting and waiting for the vault each week when I could be improving myself is not how I want to play.

Blizzard has developed a solution for this.  It is a bit kludgy, but it does address the problem to some extent.  Their idea is that you will be able to get badges in dungeons, and you trade in those badges to upgrade your dungeon loot.  At the top level you will be able to upgrade loot to 220.  This is worse than pvp and raiding, but it is a big improvement over what we had before.

Trouble is, 220 is still less than 226, which means dungeon loot is going to be worse than everything else.  This grants an upgrade path for dungeoneers, which I like, but I don't see a reason for it to stop short.  Dungeons scale infinitely, so at the highest levels they are monstrously difficult.  Raiding at the highest level is hard, but a level 30 dungeon is actually impossible.  You can pick some dungeon level below that which is ludicrously difficult and gate the gear behind that.  There is no worry about giving it away too easily.

There is one catch though.  When you are getting gear from raids, that gear is random.  Most of the time it has fixed stats, but every so often you get a piece that has an extra on it.  These bonus abilities don't increase damage or healing directly, but they help a bit.  However, since all the gear you get from raiding is random, if your Bracers of Beatdown drop, you put them on whether or not they have that extra bonus on them.  However, if you are running dungeons you can run a crapton of them looking for Pauldrons of Smacking that *also* have that extra bonus.  They will start at a low level, but then you can upgrade them to level 220.  This means that people upgrading dungeon gear will consistently have extra bonuses on their gear, so it is a little better than the level 220 it appears.

That extra bonus isn't enough.  To give a proper comparison, if you were in full 220 gear with every piece with a small bonus, and someone else was in full 226 gear with no bonuses, the 226 character does about 9% more damage and has 6% more health.

The 220 character gets to move 20% faster, regain 10% of their damage dealt as healing, and negate 12% of all area of effect damage they take.  The 226 character is better, and realistically they will get some extra bonuses on their gear, just not as many, but those extra things make quite a difference.  Of course an actual character is going to have a mix of those things, but this gives some context for what kind of tradeoff we are making.

Other people mostly scoff at extra bonuses on gear.  They don't care much about regaining health or speed.  I like those extra bonuses a lot!  I love being fast, and a lot of the time I would happily trade 6 levels on my gear for an additional 5% movement speed.  I know I am in the minority in this, but I am confident in my calculation.

People ignore things like speed because it doesn't show up in a simulator.

But in simulators you always live to the end of the fight, and in real game play being slow means you die to stupid stuff sometimes.

In any case, much as I might nitpick this, it is at least a step in the right direction.  Letting everyone play their own form of content and get geared up doing so is a great goal, and I don't mind at all if doing multiple forms gives an edge - I just want that edge to be smaller than it is.

Swords are bad, get a wand

In WOW there is always a struggle to balance melee and ranged damage dealers.  Baseline ranged have a huge advantage that they can attack from all kinds of places while melee are pinned near the enemies.  In theory this is balanced by melee having a better toolkit of survival and disruption abilities, and this works pretty well in 5 person dungeons and pvp.  It doesn't work that well in big raids.

This is being a serious problem right now in the Castle Nathria raid.  My guild, like many other guilds, has realized that we have way too many melee.  There are a lot of fights where you have to run away from the boss for awhile and stand around and this is awful for melee and perfectly fine for ranged.  We aren't melee heavy in theory - our damage is split roughly even melee/ranged - but that split is terrible for the raid we are doing.

It doesn't hurt that most of the top damage dealers in terms of raw numbers are ranged, so a melee has to be exceptional to get a spot even on fights where they aren't unduly punished.

I am playing a melee character.

I am not super worried about being booted from the raid team because I am the top damage dealer for the raid about half the time and always finish top 4.  They are going to keep me around because at our level you still see large variance in performance within a spec, and I consistently deliver.

But the other melee players are probably feeling worried, and their worry is justified.  

I don't have any good answers for them either.  Swapping classes to a ranged class is possible, but catching back up isn't fast and most people don't want to swap.  If we can't win with the composition we have then management is faced with the terrible prospect of recruiting ranged players and booting melee players, including people who have been around awhile.

No easy answers.

This is also going to compound the problem I talked about last time.  This xpac has no infinite grind to increase player power.  That feels good in a way, because we don't feel obligated to grind.  However, it has the issue that guilds like mine are in bad shape.  We have good players, but we will probably need some kind of slow power gain to actually beat the entire raid.  It is made worse by the fact that we have what should be a normal mix of melee and ranged, but is bad right now.  Top guilds just force people to reroll or recruit whoever they need.  We don't do that.

I was looking into some options for how I could fix this by respeccing out of a melee role.  I don't want to play a holy paladin healer, as I haven't done that in most of a decade.  That would have helped us a little.  I investigated playing a prot paladin healer and I think it might actually be pretty good.  Nobody in top guilds is running a tank spec player doing full heals, but I always look for these weird spots to shine and I am a believer that this could be a good strategy.

Protection paladins have good throughput.  My main heal is one I build up by attacking, and then BOOM it drops a huge heal.  I can hit it about every 5 seconds for 21500 healing (if I am targetting someone at half health), which also puts a 4000 point shield on me.  4000 healing/sec is not enough to be a proper healer, especially because I don't bring big raidwide healing cooldowns.  However, being essentially invincible, healing for 4000/sec, and also delivering 2000 damage/sec is a good set of things to do.  I also have the advantage that if a tank ever dies I just step in and start tanking no problem.  I am slightly squishier in my weird healing spec but only slightly, so me stepping in to tank for strategy (or to recover from calamity) is a fine thing.

Mostly people don't want me to try weird stuff like this.  They go with what normal raid groups do.  However, I think in this case it would actually be quite strong in many fights.  Sometimes you need exactly 4 healers to get through a fight, in which case this build of mine is bad, but sometimes you need 4.5 healers and I can be an excellent .5 of a healer.

So far nobody has decided that we need to get rid of melee badly enough to get me to heal as a tank.  I can't decide if I should wish that it would get that bad so I can try my crazy thing, or if I should wish that things just work.

The consequence of no grind

My guild just finished up the current WOW raid on heroic mode.  We are now ready to start working on mythic.  This is slower than the group is used to, but that is explained by the raid being harder than expected.  I like that, and I am perfectly content with slightly slower progression.  In the previous expansion I landed in the middle of a patch and didn't get to experience most progression.  Now I get to see the whole thing start to finish, which is great.

However, we have some problems.  Castle Nathria is a tough raid.  One of the hardest start of xpac raids ever.  The absolute top guilds cleared it in 8 days or so, which isn't unusual, but I am concerned for middling guilds like mine.  In previous expansions there were mechanics to let weaker guilds gradually beat extremely hard content.  Initially Blizzard just put in % bonuses, but those didn't feel good.  Lately they have been adding in slow grinds that let players gradually get more powerful so the weaker players can slowly overpower difficult content without feeling like it was handed to them.  In the previous raid tier we had Corruption, which increased my damage by about 40%.  This allowed me to put out sufficient numbers to do content that the best guilds beat without that bonus.

This expansion we don't have those systems that slowly power us up.  There are a few small things like sockets from Venari, additional conduits, and gradual gear increases, but if the best players in the world beat the content at 220 item level, and my guild gradually gears up until we are fighting the bosses at 226 item level, we are only getting an 8% increase over them.  Even with sockets and conduits we are still only going to be 15% better than them in raw numbers.

That won't be enough.  We have good players, and some middling players, but the absolute best in the world are more than 15% better than us, especially when you consider that they can stack classes to have any composition they want while we simply have to run with the group that we have.  Given their class stacking options we might well only have a 10% advantage by the time we arrive at the final boss.

It seems entirely possible that we will simply be flat out unable to defeat the mythic raid this tier.  It won't be just us, either - any guild that is more than 10% worse than the best in the world isn't going to be able to win.

I get why Blizzard did this.  They wanted to get away from infinite grinds where players felt obligated to play forever for marginal increases to power.  They wanted to just make the game about getting your gear and then being able to log off for the week if you want to.  I get that, and I don't disagree.

But the consequence is that if the raid is extremely hard for the best, then the pretty good cannot win, ever.

If we can't beat the final boss before the next raid tier arrives, that isn't a disaster.  I will just keep on practicing to beat whatever it is we can beat.  Still, I bet there will be a massive outcry about this once other people realize what is happening.  They haven't seen it yet because they are used to beating bosses a couple months after the cutting edge people do.  When they finally realize they cannot do so, then a reckoning will come.

It turns out that even though people complained about the infinite grinds those infinite grinds had a purpose.  Getting rid of them has consequences that we will have to grapple with, whether or not this is a net positive change in general.