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.

The great failure

Shadowlands has been by and large a strong expansion for WOW.  In particular I commend Torghast and the first raid as being especially fun.  There is one thing that stands out as being a horribly designed disaster though:  The new mission table.

I like the idea of recruiting heroes and sending them out on missions.  Ever since this mechanic appeared in Warlords of Draenor I have been a fan.  It made me feel less like an errand boy delivering goods and more like an important leader, which is appropriate considering the lore and history of the world.  Each expansion has brought a new implementation of the mission table, and this new one is the first catastrophic failure.

It looked good at first glance.  Heroes all have unique abilities, and positioning matters since each side has a front row and a back row.  Some units attack in a cone, or attack the furthest away unit, or defend their teammates.  In theory this seemed like it could be a deep tactical subgame for WOW.

In practice it is a pure numbers grind, and the numbers are rubbish.

Attacking targets in the back row *seems* like it is a way to take out casters.  However, because all of your units bash into the front line and the back line has plenty of health, you want every attack to smash into the same enemy in the front.  Attacking back line enemies is useless.  Units have all kinds of special abilities but they can simply be summed up by figuring out their damage per round and ignoring any unique traits.  All you do with most covenants is fill up your ranks with random heroes and make sure your level is high enough to plow through the enemies.  Strategic decisions are nearly irrelevant to the outcome.  It simply doesn't matter that enemies have a cone attack, or a bleed, or a heal.  You deal with every threat the same way.

So the system is a complete failure when it comes to delivering on its obvious promise of strategy.  How does it do otherwise?  Since there isn't any strategy that matters, you would imagine it would be trivial to balance at least.

Unfortunately the balance is completely busted.  The Night Fae have troops that permanently reduce enemy damage done by 20%.  You put four of those in a group with a healer and they can beat any mission.  The rest of your heroes don't matter, you just send out that one comp and it beats everything.  The game has challenging plot missions and as you do them the level of the missions you face rises.  After awhile of smashing everything with your broken comp none of your other heroes can beat anything and they are utterly worthless.  You have level 30 heroes going up against level 50 missions and they are helpless.  

The Night Fae situation is a disaster because of one stupidly overpowered ability.

Kyrian, on the other hand, has troops that are utter garbage.  Instead of 'all enemies do 20% less damage, stacking', the Kyrian troops do 'a few allies take 10% less damage, not stacking'.  The Kyrian don't have any powerful way to do anything, and their heroes are weak.  If I want to beat a level 30 mission as Kyrian, I will need to slowly grind my way up to level 40 to even stand a chance, and I might need be level 50.  Those level 30 missions can be beaten by Night Fae at level 15 without any difficulty.

Simply put, they completely screwed up the numbers.  Many heroes are nigh worthless, and there are some outrageously broken ones.  That would be fine if every covenant had a mix of both, but they don't.  If you are Night Fae you get tons of materials, cash, mounts, pets, and other rewards.  Kyrian get basically nothing.  Both of these situations are wretched.

This basically comes down to the system having some cool ideas at the outset, and the numbers being written in 5 minutes by some intern.  I could easily take the ideas presented in the system and make numbers that would make sense and be enjoyable for players.  What players want is a way to level up heroes, defeat missions that seem appropriately challenging, and eventually earn the big rewards.  They don't want to grind endlessly for seemingly nothing, and they don't want to instantly crush all opposition without thought or creativity.

The mission table is a small part of the game admittedly.  This isn't wrecking it for everyone.  Still, covenant choice is not supposed to work out this way, and it is clear that the subgame was incompetently built.  It is so messed up though that I don't expect any fixes soon.  My guess is they will just write it off entirely until a big update happens in six months and then rebuild it from scratch.  It is a black mark on their record, no doubt, because this isn't some tricky thing that is tough to notice.  Anyone who played it through would have seen how wretched it is, and if they didn't then either there was no testing or the testing was as badly done as the original design.

Let them play

In game communities there is a lot of judgement about how other people choose to play games.  The casuals deride the hardcore players as sweaty neckbeards with no life, and the hardcore players mock the filthy casuals and their lack of skills and dedication.

I got hit with a wave of this over the past few weeks as I have been carrying people through the Torghast dungeon in WOW.  Torghast drops important resources for crafting legendary gear and people want their shiny loot, so off to Torghast they go.  Even though most people seem to enjoy it, they often don't enjoy how challenging it can be.  They could practice harder and git gud, but many of them choose instead to pay me large sums of gold to beat the dungeon for them instead.

I have no problem with this.  

Partly this is because it is making me rich, naturally, but also I just don't see the issue.  It doesn't matter to me if they could get better by themselves or if they just can't do it.  It doesn't matter to me if they are doing easy content where they don't 'need' the legendary anyway.  They like playing the game, they want to get more powerful, and this content is being a struggle.  They would rather pay so that the experience they can have is one where some tough dwarf paladin tanks all the monsters while they shoot at them.  I would rather have the experience of having 50,000 more gold, and I don't mind being a tough dwarf paladin tanking all the monsters.

Everybody wins!

But people get really upset.  When they see my advertisements I get lots of hateful whispers with people yelling at me to get out of Looking For Group chat, or making unwarranted assumptions about my hygiene, age, marital status, and general attractiveness.

When I advertise in Torghast chat I get people yelling about how anyone who can't do the content themselves is garbage, and how they should never ever pay for a carry.  One conversation went something like this:

Me:  Selling Torghast carries for 50k gold.

Random person:  Anyone who can't do this themselves is awful.  They should quit WOW.  How can they be this bad?  If they need a carry, they should join my group, I will do it for free.  It is trivial!

I found it kind of funny.  Even if a weak player heard it, would they really want to join a group with an entitled asshat who is busy telling them how wretched they are?  Much better to pay 50,000 gold to run with someone who is helpful and non judgemental, I think.

I don't understand that desperate desire to trash talk people who play differently.  Their progress isn't affecting your progress, and if they can't do Torghast themselves they aren't going to be a high ranked player in any format.  All they are is just one more random person trying to make numbers go up and hopefully enjoying the process.  Just accept that one person's fun is not another person's fun and move on.

There is nothing to be gained by trying to push other people down to make yourself feel higher.  If you want to feel good, find a serious challenge, work hard, and overcome it.  Other people not required.

Except when those people are carrying you through dungeons for large sums of cash, I guess.  Those people you do need.

Making the money

The economy of WOW in Shadowlands has not been good to me.  When SL launched a lot of people talked about how Blizzard was making crafting powerful and important again because legendary items were going to require crafters in order to be made.  If you want a legendary ring you need a jewelcrafter, a legendary plate helm requires a blacksmith, etc.  These legendary pieces have 4 levels, and in order to learn to craft a level 2 you need to make 15 level 1s.  Then 15 level 2 pieces to learn 3, and 15 3s to learn 4.  These recipes cost a *lot* of gold to make.  For example, to get to max level making rings I will have to spend 1 million gold on materials.

This certainly makes crafting important, but it doesn't end up being good for crafters most of the time.  The trouble is that the endgame of this system is always degenerate.  Either you end up with only a tiny number of crafters who make the huge investment to get to max level and they get to gouge the server savagely, or you end up with a ton of people going broke trying to get there and then none of them can make back their investment at all and they all lose a truckload of money.

Fundamentally the issue is that one crafter can handily supply the entire server with gear.  The *only* incentive to being the second crafter in the market is to undercut other people.  You cannot increase supply or produce alternatives, you can only provide competition.  Unfortunately for every crafter who actually reaches level 4 there are 45 low level items to sell off, and there are not nearly enough buyers for that.  Most people only need one or two legendaries, and they can buy rings, necklaces, cloaks, and eight different armor slots.  All those crafters have way too much stock and not nearly enough customers.

A far better model for a crafting skill is alchemy.  You can make potions and such, like everyone can, but if you level up a particular reputation you get a daily cooldown to make a valuable resource.  Because it is only once a day you can't supply the whole server, so new people entering that market still have something to contribute.

All the legendary crafting doesn't work at all like that.  You have an enormous up front cost you may never be able to recover and what you get at the end is the privilege of fighting to undercut your rivals.  The people who camp the auction house win, and everyone else sells nothing.

Crafting systems that require camping the auction house *suck*.

WOW already rewards the auction house campers plenty, we didn't need more of that.

I got wrecked by this system.  I realized that there would be competition, but I figured I should level my ring and necklace production up to max so I could provide stuff for my guild.  I thought the auction house would be full of overpriced stuff and this would help people out.  That didn't happen though - the auction house is full of rings and necklaces priced at a fraction of the cost of materials.  I had guildies ask me to craft things for them and I told them they shouldn't get me to do it.  Buying materials for me to craft would cost them far more than simply buying the finished products.

Right now I am about halfway through level 3 on both rings and necklaces.  I have lost a good 300,000 gold so far trying to level my crafting and I have helped nobody in my guild in the process.  At this point I will probably finish up and get to level 4 in the hopes that at some point I will be able to make money from it.  I can't recover all of my losses so far, and I might as well slowly finish up my leel 3s any time the price of goods rises above the cost of materials.

It gets worse though.  I am on an extremely high population server with a massive economy.  On a small server the legendary recipes are going to be a disaster because nobody can afford to get all the way up.  The lack of customers will be crushing, and so lots of people will be locked into only getting level 1 legendary items.  There are so few buyers that crafters cannot afford to craft their way up, so everybody gets locked out of the market completely.

There are two fixes I can think of right away, but both would have needed to be in the game at launch - now is too late.  The first is to simply change that 15 to a 5.  Producing one third of the items to level up would make it an investment, but the markets would not be flooded.  Crafters who put in the time would be able to sell their goods, and competition would naturally control the prices to keep them a bit above material cost.  The other angle would be to change the system much more substantially and remove the learning system entirely.  Have a daily cooldown to product one resource, and have crafters have to use 1 of those resources for a rank 1 item, 2 for a 2, etc.  This would encourage crafters to do their cooldown and would work fine in markets of any size.  Want a plate hat?  Get a blacksmith to make their Special Bar of Ore for four days in a row and make it.  Profit for crafters, accessibility for buyers.  Best of all worlds.

Instead we are stuck with a mess of a system where a few people who gambled big get to gouge customers and the others lose their shirts, and people in small economies get screwed.  Not ideal.

The best thing

In my last post I talked about how the WOW expansion Shadowlands is good, and worth buying.  What I failed to mention was the best thing about the expansion so far - Torghast.  This is a zone you can run with between 1-5 players, and like many other roguelikes and dungeon crawlers of recent years, you do it by accumulating tons of interesting powers and upgrades and using them to defeat extremely powerful enemies.

Torghast has a bunch of different tilesets and the settings look fantastic.  There are dungeons full of furnaces and lava, gigantic towers rising from the mist, and twisted, metallic halls.  Torghast has different layouts and designs each time you zone in, enough of them that even if they aren't random they manage to keep on being fresh.  Each wing has different enemies and themes and they all come in a variety of difficulty levels.  Blizzard aimed for dark and scary and they hit the mark.

I LOVE running Torghast.  I would be doing it even if wasn't fun because it drops important stuff, but I just like doing it.  Many of the buffs you get are simple like +3% crit chance, but there are also lots of powerful and interesting things like "At the start and end of Avenging Wrath, cast Divine Toll."  I know most people won't have any idea what that means, but trust me, it is bonkers.  The best part though is the combos.  Casting Divine Toll for free regularly is great, but if you also get the power "Divine Toll stuns all nearby enemies for 3 seconds." it gets hilarious.

I think the way they have done the design of the powers is great.  Common powers are always useful but weak, rare ones are more powerful, but more narrow, and then there are ultra rare ones.  There are specific mobs that have unique abilities and they give you new powers that are linked to their abilities in theme.  You can even collect powers that let you blow up enemies and turn them into more powers, and this lets you get even more interesting and unique abilities.

There are definitely some dud powers.  A part of those are not great but they are thematically cool so I am on board with them, like "Maw Rats explode on death for 2000 damage."  Others are just totally worthless and have no interesting combo potential, so they are always a pass.  I don't mind some powers being worse, and I don't mind powers that are tricky to combo, but I want everything to be useful at some point.  There are a few things that are truly junk though, and I would fix that, if I were in charge.

However, the best thing about Torghast is the vast sums of money you get from running it.

Most people don't many vast sums.  In fact they lose money.  However, there are a lot of players who aren't that great but who still want the rewards.  Also it is undeniable that some classes and specs are better than others.  I play one of the best specs, Protection Paladin, so I can smash it easily.  In fact I can smash it while towing another person along with me.  A person who is paying for the privilege.  Paying an awful lot.

Previous to this I was running dungeons to earn cash, making about 5k/hour.

Now I am getting customers to pay me to run them through Torghast and I am making 50k/hour instead.  That is an incredible rate!  The real struggle isn't the dungeon - it is the logistics.  You can't trade money across servers, but you can group up across servers.  Finding people on my server who want to pay is tough, so I have been making alts on other servers, accepting payment there, and then doing the runs.  Now I just have to figure out ways to get that money to the server I am actually on!

I say 50k/hour is an incredible rate, but in terms of real dollars it is only 5$/hour.  That doesn't sound ideal, but it turns out to be an enormous amount of ingame currency to buy all the fun things I want.  And honestly... 5$/hour to run a fun dungeon with crazy powers and unexpected challenges?  Sounds pretty good!

One of the best things about Torghast is the way you can just run it over and over.  The previous expansion had something similar called Horrific Visions, and while that was fun, it had a cost to enter.  That meant a lot of mind numbing grinding in order to get to play, and that meant that people were reluctant to help others because helping meant grinding for your entry fee.  Torghast has no fee.  You just go, and you are either good enough, or you are not.  Also you aren't on a timer so if you need to afk to pee or answer the door you can do that.

I hope that they continue to support this new game mode.  Regular updates and changes to powers, new tilesets, and added difficulty will make this continual fun and I expect they can do that fairly easily.  Right now the balance isn't perfect, as tanks are particularly powerful, but since you can get a group together and do it and you aren't competing directly against other players I don't mind that so much.  There won't be a competitive Torghast scene, it is just a fun thing to do.

I like that.  I like it a lot.

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.