Life of a Nin

It is a near certainty that in any game like World of Warcraft where there is an incentive to progress and a punishment to failure that a system using talents and stat points will produce optimal builds. We have seen in the past many one trick pony builds exposed and curtailed quickly because players were not doing what was expected. Ghostcrawler has recently confirmed this approach once again by ensuring that retribution paladins (and protection though that is a smaller issue) will not and cannot make effective usage of spell power plate for fear that they would become over powered as healers. This of course seems a rather odd decision given that the overhaul of talents allows paladins to have only a few and inefficient heals directly within the base paladin architecture.

This approach to KISS is in many ways sensible, if there is only one build then that is the build that will be used and the game can be easily balanced around it the other approach however of allowing multiple builds including what would formerly have something like 31/0/40 holy (sheatheadin iirc) exist within the meta. Indeed this is explicitly what other games do. Taking magic the gathering as an example, the core set of each expansion brings 350 ish new cards into play with linked mechanics, an the. Two smaller expansions related to this with their own internally consistent mechanics. Each time a new set is introduced we see old decks adapt to the new using the new cards as well as entirely new decks formed from the new set with cards that might have been considered worthless in the previous set alone.

In WoW we have a very stagnant game controlled by evolution of power rather than mechanics. Imagine instead of the gear evolution what altered was our capabilities. So on Naxx we might have our basic abilities, the 31 point talent trees we know and love with say 35 talent points. When you clear naxx not only does your gear upgrade scaling your power but you gain access to new abilities as well. Each new tier brings out say an 11-16 point talent tree and some new talent points. Each tree is focused toward the fights of the next tier allowing blizzard to create fights that a normal build could not handle, but by the last tier allowing extensive customisation.

Of course this isn't new, subclassing has been known nearly forever in role playing, however making it dynamic bases on the new training and technologies we have unlocked would be interesting. Each new tier would be a new mini game with a new meta and each new expansion a consolidation to the 'best' talent tree.


-- Post From My iPhone

The Blizzard controversy has shown us something, irrespective of where you stand on the subject from pure apathy to moral outrage the common thing that can unite people is that the use of a tag rather than a name is not generally offensive or bad.

Many of us already use them, many of them are relatively famous. There however is no real way to provide these across a wide spectrum, we do not actively link our online spheres together nor do we have a central source of identity. The US government has proposed a scheme for identity providers, but the question becomes why do we need or want to pay for these services. As with gravatars we should be able to single source our identities, tying them together as we wish and giving the information to who we specify.

Blizzard and co shouldn't be aiming to create identities for us, but rather allowing us to create identities as we wish. If we need to further sub-domain this, a Blizzard only identity for example then we might consider Blizzard-Identity, or any other kind of identifier we wish, locally we are still Identity however we can also be globally recognised under that system as well.

Free identities for all!

What can really be said, what needs to be said really. As with all storms in a teacup the overreactions to this have been rather amusing and interesting to read, thankfully it has all blown over and the risk of our dinner set being disrupted has been quelled.

It has been said by many that it is impossible to balance the 10 and 25 man versions of a raid due to the expectations of each. If we work under the current assumptions that buffs will not be totally homogenised (Tank, Healer, Magic DPS, Physical DPS) and that abilities will remain scarce (bubbles for damage prevention,2 target healing, shiv, disarm etc). Then it becomes difficult to create an encounter that utilises these rare abilities on a 10 man, however not so in a 25 man where it is reasonable to expect 2 of every class with the 5 remaining slots representing overflow from healing and tanking classes.

Blizzard however actually have a way around this. We saw it in Naxxramas where the 10 man had two mind control orbs and the 25 required at least one priest (after they removed the taunt rotation to stop the boss simply being kited around). This mechanic was seen partially as unfair (making the mind controller act as a tank rather than as a DPS or Healer), however shows the easy way to make fights like this work, the vehicle mechanic / posession,or pets.

So we have a fight that requires a disarming move, on 25 man we expect 2 warriors and 2 rouges, on 1 we might not have either... instead the raid leader pulls out the handy disarmomatic 5000, usable only once (unless you survive) that gives her or her designated player the abilities that are required. It might be an NPC we "call on", a pet (see Grizzly Hills or Zul'Drak), an item we can buy or even one that drops in the fight (see Kael'thas). Working around special mechanics is actually nice and easy, and the added difficulty of a secondary ability or swapping a weapon mid combat is not going to make or break the difference.

The second major issue that we can see are effects that involve movement. Ok things like defile won't fall into this, in that case the penalty should be different such as the tick period or expansion size of the ability to make it equally penalising. However think of Hodir with his NPCs. Except we reverse this, 10 man has 9 NPCs, 25 man has 3 (the required buffs to make the DPS in the fight). Each of these NPCs though acts according to a minimally intelligent script (see the jousting knights in North Icecrown, each appears to have a slightly different response pattern to jousting in terms of stand off and charges). They act as DPS or healers or whatever, but also act to chain abilities. A 25 man now has 25 bodies in it each under intelligent control, the 10 man movement fight has 15-20 only some of them truly intelligent. We can actually balance the fights without having to shrink or expand rooms.

The best bit is that these NPCs can actually be non-friendly such that their job is to cause chaining effects, kiting the adds effectively and positioning them becomes part of the fight (2 people nearby each other representing minimal movement room), they don't even have to do damage themselves, merely be annoying to build the same level of difficulty into the game.

In a chance to be difficult and present an alternate view, from the tales of EU-Silvermoon.

It has been pondered amongst the blog rolls of many why some people do not find guilds, why pick up groups form for content and what draws people into the game if they are not in a guild with a consistant group of friends. Often however for many of us a guild is restrictive, forcing us to raid certain days, to carry players that we would kick from a group if they didn't bear the same tag as us, or even simply to stay at a fight beyond the time we want to or risk sanctions.

Silvermoon is a strange server. It is a relatively hardcore raiding server yet is very friendly to undergeared players. We tend to have three gearscores characterised as "I just hit 80 (again)", "Noob", and "Don't even ask". Players in the first category tend to get a carte blanche, simply no one asks them for more dps, or expects them to have it, the other members of the party simply carry them through which ever heroic it is without question. Our middling gearscores tends to be the worst treated, simply being less than 5,000 score and wanting to raid is unlikely unless you are the raid leader, its doable through heroics and crafted gear so put in the effort. For everyone else, everyone has an achieve and gear somewhere.

Almost since the day the Lich King was downed we have had pick up groups running at him, and downing him. My first kill of him came at the 10% buff with a four pull from scratch moment (well really a lie, I had pulled him twice before in guild for the laughs at 0% but then went afk for a while). The buff has since increased to 20% and the tactics required to down this boss have changed massively in that time. So what follows is a random trade chat pug.

I had logged in last night with the intention of finding some badges to farm (not really sure why since neither of my mains needs them other than for bank gear or off sets at the moment). In trade I spotted an extended raid aiming for Lich King with the remaining bosses down, seeking only a discipline priest. I logged (at this point I should explain that I have played discipline exactly four times, a heroic (which I swapped to holy half way through), ICC 10 for 3 bosses, and ICC 25 for 10 bosses, and now... Thankfully I had done Lich King before so I knew what to do, but this time I was on the other side of the massive damage.

I have to say that this fight is totally different as a healer than as tank, well not really but the stuff I care about is. I was on bubble spam for infest duty and dispel duty for the plague so essentially refreshing a PW:S on everyone after infest (to negate it completely), dispelling the disease runner, and occasionally throwing heals to help cover the Paladin healer's downtimes for mana. Overall it wasn't that bad, it took 7 pulls from start to end with disconnects killing three, two downed by defiles, one by a val'kyr and defile combo and the last by the death of the Lich King. The huge buff altered the tactics used totally, our off-tank died at the transition into phase two leaving us with the MT handling the spirits and the Lich King, our tank healer getting continually Val'kyr'd (we brought two locks and a hunter, and we got 1 use of their avoidance mechanics between them). One thing to note, with a discipline priest and the buff to health the best tactic to deal with the vile spirits now seems to be a scrum / American football solution, just run into them and make them go pop! Four waves of spirits (one when I was taken into the Frostmourne room resulting in two more deaths from our suicidal charging solution) and the Lich King fell to his knees, dropping loot that was worse than that from a normal ICC 25... sad priest was very much sad, but I had a new title.

So here it is in slightly more dramatic form!

Larisa recently commented on my last post to note that my intention of making larger instances goes against the currently published Blizzard motivations to create smaller more PUG / short raid night friendly instances. While I do believe short instances can be effective if they are correctly themed and scaled to be the size they are. The pumping station that was Serpent Shrine Cavern was sensibly scaled to around 6 bosses reflecting its limited size and scale; similarly Tempest Keep felt correctly sized at four bosses as a command module of a starship. Scaling beyond this however as a full starship or operations centre we would have expected to see more:

Perhaps for Tempest Keep we might have expected an Engineering Section, an armoury or weapon section and navigation / command; for Serpent Shrine areas for breeding and training, multiple control sites and then the pumping areas themselves. Instead we saw small disconnected areas with no logical motivation behind them (what role did the bosses in SSC or TK actually play in their areas?).

Instead we can have a more thematically correct instance (think Zul'aman or Zul'Gurub) but in an accessible way. Rather than building a monolithic instance like Icecrown Citadel with 12 sequential bosses (effectively) vs 3-5 interconnected instances.

Our Icecrown model becomes something akin to:

............................--------- Plague Wing ----|
Ramparts -------------|.........................|
............................|-------- Blood Wing----- x---- Frostmourne ---- Lich King
Nerubian Tunnels --|.........................|
.............................--------- Frost Wing------|

Sorry for the dodginess of the diagram, essentially we have two entrances into the instance each as a separate instances, We then have the interior wings (either gated as their own instances or a single instance) and then the final wings. Thus progression is available for PUGs as they can approach these in small parts, being saved to a semi-fail PUG will not totally lock you out of the instance (provided you can approach the other entrance).Similarly guilds starting the instance don't feel tied to a single boss that is stopping progress and we can build in exceptions.

Furthermore if our instances are thematically based and linked in we can do funky things with boss ordering (a large scale version of the Iron Council) allowing us to create scaling difficulties before hardmodes.

A base boss in each wing may drop 1 item and 0 tokens with the end wing boss dropping 1 and 1 token. If we approach them in reverse order (thus activating a scaling hardmode like Flame Leviathan) the end boss drops 3 items and 2 tokens with the others scaling similarly. This gives us a reason to do things in a non-standard order.

Taking ICC Plague Wing this would be something akin to:

Engage Professor Putricide with Precious and Stinky
Engage Professor Putricide with Precious or Stinky
Engage Festergut with Stinky
Engage Rotface with Precious
Engage Professor Putricide
Engage Fester/Rotface

So our regular modes are their boring selves. However we can engage the bosses with additional difficulty to increase their rewards and difficulty. The Hardmodes would of course stack with these effects making fights that scale towards a difficulty like Lich King.

For progression guilds the best approach to these instances is to hit the hardest normal modes first and then work in a balance of hardmodes scaling uptowards hard hard modes. Loot rewards those willing to make the effort and try new things rather than simply approaching bosses in a linear order.

We can then further tie in other instances towards this. Our two tier 10 instances might have an interlink that lets you skip the outer instance of the other instance. Again this gives flexibility to a guild to approach instances in new ways.

It needs more thought, but I think I prefer approaching instances as a thematically linked and interesting group of raid locks rather than distinct and unlinked raids that may not further the story we are seeking.

So I was thinking (always a bad plan) that Icecrown Citadel feels a little small to realistically represent the citadel of the Lich King himself. So using some photoshop (Gimp) magic I present a rashly thought out larger Icecrown Citadel.

Citadel Layout

In this expansion we see the citadel holding 25 bosses and subdivided into five sub-instances gated such that the completion route is the outer ramparts, the four inner sections of the Necropolis, then the upper fortress leading to the frozen throne.

Lets take a look at the overall concepts:

The Outer Ramparts

This consists of the current four bosses. Our heroes enter from a back route from the Pit of Saron encountering Lord Marrowgar and his minions, eventually breaking into the lower sanctum of the Death Knights and Lady Deathwhisper.

These two sections should feel a lot like a break into sections of the citadel we don't normally see, the resurrection chamber and the Death Knight barracks leading into Lady Deathwhisper acting as a priest to the newly risen Knights. This lets us break through from the rear into the ramparts where we destroy the anti-air defences (think 3 mini-bosses guarding anti-air guns), and mount our capital ship rising up towards the main citadel body.

The Inner Necropolis

This section (vaguely reminiscent of Naxxramas... well they had to get the architecture somewhere!) houses four independent wings unlocked by the death of Deathbring Saurfang (Killing 4 bosses opens your raid-lockout to these 4 instances, clearing all 4 of these opens the upper citadel). Each wing is themed as with Naxxramas hosting Plague, Construct, Death Knight, and Risen. Each wing can approach any boss in any order however like a giant version of the Assembly of Iron doing them in different orders results in different power levels and the true hardmode of each boss being doing them last (or activating the alarm on the section to activate all hardmodes).

As each section is independent it allows guilds suffering on a single boss to attempt progress on the four different wings, while allowing pugs to complete the first four then join upto four different pugs that week (or a single really successful pug).

This large section gives us a really strong way to gate the instance as a whole, 18 bosses spread over effectively 5 instances means we can produce a very difficult first area with this area serving to make unlocking the upper fortress difficult.

The Upper Fortress

The upper fortress is exactly what we have already, the commanders and research arms of the Lich King's forces. This section should ideally be ungated however with the bosses being harder.

I would like to really see the hardmodes of these bosses being tied together, Rotface and Festergut must be engaged on hardmode to trigger that of Putricide etc. Each of these fights should have a much stricter DPS, Healing and Tanking requirement than the lower citadel. This area is designed to force the players to really focus and test the players even on normal modes with the hardmodes being equivalent in difficulty to the Lich King at least.

The Frozen Throne

Not much more to do there, the Lich King alone on his throne. I would have preferred to see this fight being much more epic with waves of adds eventually thinning to be the raid against the Lich King while our NPCs engage and distract the adds and lieutenants to give us our single shot at ending the menace.

Gating the Instance

Simply gating based on a strict timetable is a little dull and limits the playability of the game. I would like to see this instance treated more as an event rather than a raid. The two weeks prior to the unlock of the outer ramparts begins with a series of 5 man and daily quests relating to Pit of Saron and the breakthrough into the under citadel.

Once the instance opens we have two active bosses, Lord Marrowgar and Lady Deathwhisper representing the reclaimation and newly risen Death Knight areas of the citadel. This section is not linked into the main body of the citadel so we instead break onto the ramparts starting the second set of events limiting the ammunition and downing the mini-bosses on the ramparts to enable our capital ships to fly into the airspace. This runs concurrently with Deathbringer Saurfang's mini-event to gather explosives and munitions to break through the citadel's armour.

Once we are inside the citadel itself we have four wings of the citadel. This section is cut off from the upper citadel due to a lack of power caused by our penetration efforts. Each end zone boss downed combined with a series of daily quests allows us to gather power cores to charge up the internal supplies of the citadel gaining access to the upper citadel.

The upper citadel is gated by progress, overall boss kills within the citadel and daily quests on each of the three zones (plague, blood and frost) result in forcing the lieutenants back into the fortress to defend their zones. The death of all bosses unlocks the Lich King himself.

The Bosses

I think I should leave this to a different post, trying to cover 25 bosses in a single post will likely be hard. Overall the idea is to make each boss more involved and the hardmodes especially punishing rather than the walkovers that many were.

If anyone has been following the Healing forums recently they will have noticed that Ghostcrawler replied to a thread complaining about tracking absorbs (generally attributed to the last cast absorb player rather than the actual player) saying that this was relatively difficult to actually do. He did however give us a call for armchair programmers to try and solve it, so I thought I should look at the problem. The thread is here for anyone interested.

The Problem

Firstly we need to clarify our problem, "absorbs aren't reported" is a very large issue with little breakdown. We can break this down into:

• Absorbs aren't reported accurately
• Absorbs aren't attributed to a specific player

Secondly, lets see what Ghostcrawler actually said.

Tracking Healing

Tracking healing is easy as each heal event is discrete, even residual heal type effects like Prayer of Mending generate discrete healing events. We can break these events down as:

Player casts heal
Server compares current health, heal value, crit, then returns response
Player sees awesome heal, logs show healer is awesome

Tracking Absorbs

In contrast absorbs are only resolved on damage, the cast itself is an independent event. This means we have to track a group of absorbs on the target:

Absorb 1
Absorb 2
Absorb 3
...
Player Health

Firstly we need to worry about ordering the absorbs, first come first served, first in last out, shortest duration first? Then we need to consider usage, if a PW:S has already lost 50% of its strength, should it be displaced by a new absorb making it more likely the disc priest won't get the bonus mana for the shield consumption before it lapses?

Ok, so we need a working assumption for this. I would say sensibly it should go in shortest duration first (giving us the maximum absorption over time). This means when an absorb is applied we need to store:

Absorb ID - Strength - PlayerID

Each time a hit is resolved, we then have to resolve each of these effects in turn as a discrete, but simultaneous event:

{Damage -> Absorb 1 -> Response / Effects
Apply Effects}

{Damage -> Absorb 2 -> Response / Effects
Apply Effects}

{Damage -> Absorb 3 -> Response / Effects
Apply Effects}

{Damage -> Health -> Response / Effects
Apply Effects}

This makes an absorb far more costly in terms of processing to deal with as a single hit can trigger multiple player's effects on the target as well as multiple absorption calculations, and we need to create multiple responses (though these could be aggregated).

So what does this look like?

Each player / enemy / object now maintains an absorb list sorted in the order we wish to have them handled(95% chance this exists currently, or is handled by buff code)

Each player / enemy / object must now maintain a list of who applied the buff (90% chance this already exists, addons can typically see "playerid"s associated with buffs)

Each hit must now trigger multiple responses (100% chance this doesn't exist or this problem wouldn't exist).

So it should be relatively simple to implement tracking these. The combat log would look like:

DATE TIME SPELL_ABSORB,GUID,"TARGET",FLAGS,GUID,"CASTER",FLAGS,SPELLID,"SPELL NAME",SPELLSCHOOL,ABSORBAMOUNT

20/09 12:00:00 SPELL_ABSORB, 0x00, "Alice", 0x00, 0x01, "Bob", 0x00, 00001, "Power Word: Shield", 0x01, 1000
20/09 12:00:00 SPELL_ABSORB, 0x00, "Alice", 0x00, 0x02, "Clarisa", 0x00, 00001, "Power Word: Shield", 0x01, 10000
20/09 12:00:00 SPELL_ABSORB, 0x00, "Alice", 0x00, 0x03, "Dave", 0x00, 00001, "Power Word: Shield", 0x01, 200
20/09 12:00:00 SPELL_DAMAGE, 0x00, "Alice", 0x00, 0x05, "Evil Dude", 0x00, 00002, "Hitty Spell", 0x01, 0

4 Events each considered concurrent with 3 absorbs and the final player takes 0 damage.

My Conclusions

As an armchair programmer (actually a really nice comfortable leather office chair but ignore that) I don't see why this should be problematic. Absorbs already cannot be simply treated as an additive absorption source (since they are removed over time) meaning the system must track individual absorbs. Each absorb effect should track its owner (to allow for one absorb per caster functionality) meaning our attribution system is present. This means that all the system currently lacks is the reporting mechanism, which is in place but not utilised.

Assuming everything is in place, a few hours coding to get the message responses in place and tested (since something always goes wrong) along the lines of:

@absorb_code / buff_handler
report(..., absorb strength, absorb remaining)

Assuming we lack attribution of identifiers, a few days coding to get it in place since the framework already exists for other buffs so it is a design, port, test scenario.