More wiping

I am still addicted to It's A Wipe!  Running a raiding guild where I can raid exactly when I want to rather than on a fixed schedule is really fun!

This game does a lot of things right that I find rare in any game, let alone one developed by a single person.  The standout surprise is how good the numbers are in the fights.  As you push through the game the dungeons get more challenging both strategically and numerically and it strikes a nice balance between requiring farming without requiring *too* much farming.  Gear scales up quite dramatically between dungeon tiers, roughly doubling in efficacy.  This works out well in that new tiers of fights are extremely difficult at the start but become pretty trivial by the end - it actually feels a lot like raids did in WOW in terms of that ramp up.

The developer did a good job tuning those numbers correctly, especially in that the final dungeon tier is really quite challenging even if you are almost fully geared out from the previous dungeons.  It is the last challenge after all (until the expansion!) so making it a bit of a brick wall is completely reasonable.  There are a lot of decisions to make in terms of who you take to the dungeon and how you are going to gear them and it is not clear to me what the optimal answers are.

Luckily that doesn't mean that there are no bad choices - on the contrary, there are a million ways to play stupidly.  What I really enjoy in games though is a situation where there are a bunch of interesting ways to be good.  If there are a million ways to play and one hundred of them are solid then there is a lot of room to play around hunting for the *perfect* solution without feeling like experimentation is just a waste of time.  I like finding the ideal setup but I want the sense that once I find it there might still be something out there a touch better and that is easiest to achieve when there are many ways to be good.

There are a couple of exceptions to the rule of good balance though.  Trinkets are really weird items and their abilities are all over the map unlike weapons and armour which are fairly predictable.  The good trinkets boost spell power, dps, crit chance, hit points, or armour.  These are all totally reasonable choices that you will use at some time or other.  The trinkets that boost damage usually give a ~10% boost, hit points go up by 10-200% (which isn't as broken as it sounds because dps classes with excess hit points aren't actually much better) and armour is useful.  So far, so good.

Then there are the awful trinkets.  Not just subpar, but on the verge of having no game effect.  Specifically there are trinkets to increase or decrease threat generated by 8%.  The way threat works is you assign a tank to each enemy and the enemies attack that tank no matter what.  Even if the tank never hits that particular enemy and the rest of the raid is beating on them the tank holds aggro.  How a small change in threat generation was supposed to be useful when tanks have literally infinite threat is a bit beyond me.  I am totally okay with items that aren't very good but these aren't a skill tester - they just don't do anything.  You can tell an item has issues when it does 8 of a thing and you wouldn't consider using it if that number was 1,000,000 instead.

The final dungeon in It's A Wipe! is changing my tactics a fair bit.  The main consideration is that there is a boss that mind controls one party member each round and dealing with that is an issue.  Your healers, wizards, bards and tanks just hit the tank for 1 damage so they are no problem.  Rogues stab the tank for a lot of damage so that is bad.  Mages however hit the entire raid for 50 damage which probably kills all of your wizards and mages!  Until I manage to farm up HP trinkets for all my wizards and mages I basically can't take a mage to the final dungeon.  That particular mechanic seems way out of line if I was actually playing with real people - the mages would be on the forums crying up a storm.  In this case though it just means I try to win with my mage riding the bench.

It's a Wipe!

Ziggyny told me about a new game on Steam called It's A Wipe! which is essentially a simulation of being a raid leader running raids with a bunch of annoying and incompetent raiders.  It is cheap in all senses of the word - art and animation that would be reasonable for a game released in 1985 and a price tag of $5.  I don't mind incredibly craptacular graphics if I can get a good core game though, and It's A Wipe delivers.

You play as a raid leader and so one of the characters is your own.  The other nine are drawn from seven different classes with a variety of specializations across buffing, dpsing, healing, and tanking and divided amongst AOE and single target specialists.  The raids are very much drawn from World of Warcraft (unofficially, of course) and just like in WOW you need to pick your raid and your strategies based on what sorts of fights you are having difficulties with.

You get to both direct your raid in fights and also perform the other challenges of raid management like talking to players who need extra attention, worrying about which raiders deserve the next drop, and figuring out who to bench.  Raiders all come with personality quirks like being hardcore raiders and never wanting to take a night off or being particularly obsessed with loot and taking it hard when they get passed over.  Initially I tried to have a deep roster so I could bench people on a regular basis when they needed time off but eventually I settled on running just ten total raiders and just taking nights off now and then when people got burned out.  This meant that they geared up faster because they weren't sharing loot and that I never had weird raid compositions.

The fights themselves have enough interesting mechanics to force you to pay attention but just like real raiding as your gear improves you can eventually trivialize mechanics and just brute force your way through.  The initial raid dungeon is pretty boring but the ramp up works pretty well, I think.  There are a ton of different commands you can enter to tell your raiders to swap roles, heal a specific target, change dps targets, get out of the fire, hug the monster, and more.  The trick is that these raiders often get bored and do things you do not like.  Sometimes the healer will decide to start attacking and you need to yell at them to get back to healing but you also need to tell people to get out of the fire.  This is a challenge because you can only yell one thing a round so you have to prioritize.

There are some issues with the game, primarily that of combat speed.  There are some combats that take a long time and have limited inputs and the fastest possible game speed isn't very fast at all.  I would have liked a game speed called Ludicrous to actually be Ludicrously fast instead of just twice as fast as Normal speed.  It would be good to be able to speed past the spots where there aren't a lot of decisions to be made because the fight is already on farm.

I don't think It's A Wipe has a ton of longterm potential because once you have beaten it I don't know that it will be worth going through again with a different team.  However, for the price tag I think it is a real win especially if you have fond memories of raiding in times gone past.  You can have fun learning raid encounters on a friendly schedule and gear up and that is good times.  It is a game worth playing.