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.