Posts Tagged ‘Welfare’

Time to Rethink Arena?

This week ended up a lot better for Steptoe and I than our first week in Season 5 (where we ran 1-9), with a 10-6 win ratio out of 16 games. In general we felt a lot more comfortable with the new context and made up some of the ranking losses. The fact that both of us also got ourselves a Titansteel  Destroyer crafted (upgrading from the De-Raged Waraxes we had from Amphitheater of Anguish) certainly helped.

We’re still working on finding our correct skill / gear niche, and the teams we have been facing have been of very various qualities: some quite skilled people without necessarily imba gear, but also some teams which were outgearing us quite massively but showing little to justify it.

The fact that PvP gear can be easily obtained through PvE nowadays (and is much more difficult, in particular for semi-casual players, to obtain through PvP only) got me thinking back to the good old debates we had a year ago.

In practice, with the PvP gear acquisition made very easy through PvE, we suddenly find ourselves in a situation not unlike the WoW classic battleground scene, when T2 / T3 clad players would completely destroy everything in their path by the sheer superiority of their kit, skills be damned. In practice, the ease of obtaining PvP gear through PvE nullifies to quite an extent what the introduction of resilience was meant to achieve: to separate PvE and PvP gear, enclosing the latter in a relatively dedicated manner and rendering crossovers more difficult.

There’s little point in rehashing today the old disputes about the fact that S2 – S4 gear could be used a lot easier for PvE than the reverse. That was the 2007 debate. In 2009, though, the current situation (as well as Ghostcrawler’s repeatedly stated intention to make PvP more about skills, usually applied to BG) led me to rethink the arena.

Currently, until one reaches the point where he wears the entire current season PvP gear, arena matches (of course especially in the noob brackets yours truly operates) don’t just pitch opponents together to measure their respective skill. Gear remains a factor which can compensate for quite some other shortcomings, it is for instance quite a bit more challenging to burn down a DK with 28k HP than one with 20k health (the level you’d typically be at if you start out with crafted saronite sets).

So in any matches below the top and fully geared brackets, the contest isn’t currently just about skills, but the skills / gear combination (just as it was before). The PvE gearing route just adds to the issue however.

If you really wanted to make Arena just about measuring player skills, though, how would you go about that?

Perhaps it is time to rethink the whole PvP gear aspect from scratch, by actually getting rid of it entirely. A notion I used to oppose in 2007 on the reasoning that arena was a valid gear progression path. Well, there’s a saying in French, “il n’y a que les imbeciles qui ne changent jamais d’avis”: only imbeciles never change their minds.

With two more years of arena, what I’d advocate today is the following:

While we talk about rating brackets, this is quite informal. This could actually be formalized into, say, three leagues: novices, pro and champion’s league for instance. A new team starts out in the novice league and (perhaps reusing the current rating system) eventually work their way upwards to the higher leagues.

Upon entering the arena, the gear gets replaced by a standardized gladiator set with different qualities depending on the league. In order to leave some choice in building up your character’s equipment, players can select a set of tokens for each equipment slot (reusing the Gem name prefixes for instance, or the current gear names): each token gives a gear pieces with a baseline of resilience and stamina, and a variable mix of other stats, eg picking an Ornate leg token will add a bit of intel and spellpower to the baseline stats, a Savage leg token adds strength and crit and so on.

You then get the according gear set to match your token selection whenever you enter an arena match, with more powerful versions of the gear depending on the league you’re playing in. The key point is, though, that everyone playing in the same league as you will have the same level of gear.

If you want to tweak your setup, just pick a different set of tokens to emphasize eg haste or more even more defense, all within boundaries set by your league.

As the seasons turn, Blizzard can then adjust the values to adjust the gameplay. For instance Season 5 is pretty much a burst / burn season, but with tweaking baseline resilience, Season 6 (just as it is now) could become more of an outlast season, to provide gameplay variance and strategy evolution.

And how does that work for BGs? Exactly the same way. Using the same token, everyone gets handed out their customized gearsets at the beginning of a game, which could for instance match the middle arena league.

At that stage, all players being on an equal footing gear-wise, the focus will be centered on knowing your class and your adversaries, and exploiting your skills to the maximum.

As for rewards? Just grant a handful of PvE tokens every week, 0 to 1 emblems of heroism for the bottom of the novice league, a handful for emblems of valor for the top of the champion’s league. Enough to incentivize it for the good players, not so much that people would suddenly consider it better to dance in arenas instead of running their heroics.

Leaves world PvP, Wintergrasp in particular, which aren’t bound to instance doors and therefore probably more difficult to provide gear swapping upon entry. Well, if you wanted also to minimize gear impact, one of the possible ways to achieve that would be to expand and tweak the tenacity buff.

Am I completely off my rockers? You tell me.

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As the Year Turns

And here we are, on the brink of 2009, and as usual, it’s time to look back at what changes the year brought.

One year ago, the hot topic in the WoW blogosphere was still the PvE / PvP opposition centered around the notion of Welfare epics. When I wrote my closing post on the matter, I didn’t yet measure how different 2008 was going to be – not only has the topic practically vanished, but as Megan astutely points out, the notion of Welfare epics nowadays could, if used at all, be applied very readily to raiding, whereas PvP gear is currently a lot harder and longer to aquire.

The one thing which hasn’t changed though is that the term is still being used by certain people to demean the achievements of those who are following a different path from theirs, one they deem inferior. 

2008 was largely dominated by the long Wait for the Lich King, and like the end of 2006, the controversies have centered around the hardcore / casual divide and the raiding scene. One thing which has changed drastically though is the reputation of the few dominating figures. In 2006, even me (then still raiding) was following the race to the Naxx world first with interest. Death and Taxes and Nihilum were in a neck-to-neck race and most people were cheering them on. Even if we weren’t directly affected, we could sympathise with all uberguild’s dismay at the reduction from 40-men to the 25-men raiding format.

Two years later, Death and Taxes has suffered from problems but has at least exited the immediate consciousness of the average player rather gracefully. Their opponent, though, through countless name changes, ugly drama, questionable sponsorships but foremost through a series of graceless and classless public tantrums about the difficulty of the game, haven’t just tarnished their name but in the end effect massively diminished the interest of the community in the life and adventures of the überguilds. In my mind they have become like the spoiled, rotten elites living lavishly and criticizing the taste of this year’s caviar and champagne when the unwashed masses are having sausage and beer. In the most ironic development, while they were wallowing in their pride and spitting at the rest of the gamers (with their dwindling cohorts of me-tooers), the world first for the currently most difficult raid achievement in the game, killing Sartharion on 10-men with 3 drakes up, was snatched up by Method.

In the meantime, titles and mounts for PvE feats have become a lot more commonplace, and the introduction of the achievement system has brought an entirely new dimension to certain aspects of the game. Whether by a bit of an accident or clear design, achievements don’t just give raiders more elements to compare and measure up against each other but also allow for different grades of challenges for farmed content. A bit like all those RPGs with several party members where players have developped additional challenges (single character, low level, gametime etc…) but formalized in a quite addictive structure.

I can’t help but wonder how my old 2007 antagonist Stop the Warrior views today’s game. Might give way to an interesting argument.

So here we are, on the brink of the new year. Last night, Steptoe remarked that this was the most hardcore evening he’d ever seen me play: we ran 5 instances in a row together. Which is indeed more than I have ever done in this game. That being said, it was 2 times Violet Hold, Drak’Tharon followed by another pair of Violet Hold runs (Steptoe wanted the plate pantaloons off the voidwalker boss), and Violet Hold isn’t exactly a long isntance – according to my Blessings timers, it takes slightly less than 24 minutes from buffing to exit. It was quite a profitable evening for my paladin, too, with a couple of nice drops.

Steptoe has taken to taking with his Death Knight and is doing well. Let’s also immediatly put one notion to rest: on leveling instances, you do not need to be crit immune as a Death Knight, far from it. Steptoe was level 75 and his gear was around 435ish defense after he got the legplates, with a combined avoidance of about 40%. The healer was a level 74 priest, who didn’t really have too much of a hard time apparently (and since we ran UK the night before when Steptoe was only around 410 defense and the guy came back, that speaks for itself), and throughout the evening the amount of free FoLs I was tossing the tank’s way have decreased quite a bit.

We had two wipes throughout the 5 runs, one early in Drak’Tharon because sometimes a lifetime of experience in not standing in stuff isn’t enough to recognize the stuff you shouldn’t stand in, the second one in VH on the netherstalker boss because of an unfortunate conjunction of me getting hit by an energy sphere about a half second before critting with judgement of blood. Wipe by Bloodicide. Had to happen once.

Regarding Ret performance, I’m a bit peeved about where I was sitting on damage meters. Oh, I came out on top in Drak’Tharon Keep, that one being an undead-heavy instance, no contest. The first two Violet Hold runs, though, I was only third (not by a large measure but still), behind a mage and Steptoe, and in the last two runs, I really had to work my arse off to keep on top against a level 75 boomkin, including eating AP food.

In the end, some gear upgrades, and I dinged Coldweather Flying in the middle of the last run. 3 more levels to 80. Still with about 20 quests in Dragonblight to go, that’s just three zones I’ve seen and used so far. Glad to have my epic fyling back though.

And this concludes my last 2008 post. Whether you level, raid, PvP, and do it casually, softcore or hardcore, I wish you all a very merry evening and a happy new year. To 2009, and may your chosen activities in game and in Real Life bring you joy and merryment.

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Muckbeast on Raiding Design

Cambios is a game dev who may just have started his blog recently, yet posts interesting stuff from day one. Taking on some of the more visible flaws in raiding in current MMOs, he writes:

So 10, 25, 40, 50, or 100 people work together to mindlessly clear trash, follow their little script of brain disconnected button pushes to beat the boss, and now he drops 2 or 3 pieces of loot. This loot will often be useful/needed by multiple players present, so someone loses out. The same item might drop many times in a row, resulting in certain classes feasting while others enjoy famine. Or sometimes loot will drop that nobody can use, and it just gets blown up or sold to an NPC Vendor. NEVER is the entire group happy with the loot that drops or the way the loot gets distributed.

Indeed. One of the major issues at heart of the old Welfare Epics feud of 2007 lies with the difference in loot distribution between PvE and PvP. I think Blizzard recognized the issue when they started expanding the badge system, but I also think they need to make it really pervasive. All instance drops should be token-based in some form, and there has to be in-game rewards for participation for every raid member (as opposed to out-of-game only systems like DKP).

So may elements of boss encounter design are absurdly arbitrary. I have fought bosses who did incredibly ridiculous things that were clearly designed solely with the idea of nullifying a specific class, tactic, or ability for no logical reason other than the devs thought it would be funny. I have fought raid bosses that were immune to all sorts of standard abilities for no apparent reason other than to make you feel impotent. I have participated in raid encounters where mages had to tank a boss… just because. People don’t make mages because they like tanking, folks. They make mages because they like to make things go boom. I have fought bosses where they you have to interrupt some of their spells, but not all of them, because being too good at interrupting their spells triggers some kind of Uber Spell. If the boss possessed the ability to perform this Uber Spell, why isn’t he just doing it all the time? Why punish people for being GOOD at a core mechanic (interrupting spell casting) with this arbitrary result?

In their currently stated best intentions, Blizzard claims to be trying to design designing new encounters more for roles and less for specific classes:

We are adding a new class to Lich King, as well as improving the raid viability of specs such as Arcane mage, Survival hunter and Balance druid. That means you have 30 available specs for 25 slots. There are two ways to design around this problem. One is that there are 25 mandatory specs and 5 that shouldn’t be raiding. Boo. A more fun, interesting and ultimately fair direction is that you actually have some choices in who to bring. Imagine running a raid with no warrior tanks at all. :)

These are good intentions, though. Designing encounters in a way that any combination of these 30 specs can successfully fill the roster in broad categories like tanking, healing, dps, CC and decursing will probably require quite a lot more overlap between classes than we see in TBC. And the first raid to put that theory to the test will be the new Naxxramas. Because unless memory fails me, frost and shadow-heavy builds for mages and warlocks respectively didn’t exactly fare well in there.

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Wrath to End PvE / PvP Gear Dispute

One of the gripes most often heard during Arena Season 2 and Season 3 from part of the hardcore raiding crowd was about the fact that Arena gear was recoloured tier gear, so that an Illidan-killing hero wouldn’t really appear remarkable when walking in areas where arena dancers gathered.

In Blizzcast 3, Tigole announced that this part of the disagreement between arena players and dedicated raiders will be a thing of the past in Wrath of the Lich King:

PvP armor will be different from the PvE armor entirely in looks and colors this time.

Of course, to some people this might be a trivial issue, but for all the people to whom recognition is also part of the values driving their gameplay, this is a welcome change.

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Why I Will Definitely Roll a Death Knight

As I mentioned previously, I’m currently leveling a mage on a new (for me) realm. I picked mage for its fast pace and ease of getting to 70, because for many other classes, having a little stash of gold to buy the best gear available at the AH can make a lot of difference.

Turns out it will be even more so, at least on the realm I’m on. Aside from a steady supply of spirit greens, the AH is desperately devoid of usable kit. Nobody’s really running Azeroth instances any more, and world drops still are heavily tilted in favour of the most useless leveling stat for anyone but priests.

I still believe Blizzard could provide a simple and painless remedy by replacing most of the spirit-based suffixes by the new BC-introduced stuff. That would actually help. It’s something I was thinking about a year ago, though, and I’m not holding my breath. But I digress.

In terms of cap level gameplay, druids and paladins offer the most versatile classes for the casual player who wants to join into group activities with a couple of friends. Groups will always require at least a healer and a tank, and these two can fit the bill. I loved tanking as a pallie, and didn’t mind healing as one either. But that toon is sitting on a PvE realm, and I’m currently playing on PvP.

I’ve never managed to stick to druids beyond level 21. Both classes are toons I’d love playing at level 70, but in both cases, leveling another one up all the way is something I just cannot stomach, at least not for the time being.

While my ideal scenario would be to have Blizzard actually unlock the option of rolling ANY class at level 55 with Wrath, it’s not going to happen in a hurry, because that would officially mean they are admitting old Azeroth is dead and done with. There’s an awful lot of content in there, and I just don’t see them officially putting a nail in its coffin (which they would be doing in that case).

So my plan is to have the mage provide the material support for the rest of my toons on this realm. Once she reaches 70 (assuming she makes it before wrath gets released), I’ll start up on another shammie to eventually have a healer handy.

And the DK? Pretty obvious, of course. It will provide me with a tank for those level 80 group activities. It’s simply going to be the most efficient way to have as many options as possible at my disposal, and starting at level 55 will remove 54 levels of grinding and redoing the quests I start being able to do in my sleep.

And I’m looking forward to it. I just hope the class will be well designed enough to hold its own in that tanking role from go-live onwards, instead of the 3 years of adjusting and tweaking it took for the druid and the paladin to be both viable and accepted as such.

Call it Welfare Leveling

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Catering to the Casuals Indeed

As most of you will have noticed by now, Blizzard, in yet another clear demonstration that the hardcore whining raider-fabricated myth of the complaining casuals is just that, a myth, kowtowed to the tiny but vocal minority and added arena rating requirements both to most S4 arena gear but also, in a slightly more surprising move, to the S4 honour gear.

As had to be expected, the catassing few are very happy about it, to wit, everyone’s favourite faux hardcore raiding blogger is gloating with Shadenfreude.

Aside from reminding the overeager that S4 is still a while off and things may yet change, I’m quite happy about this myself. As things will stand, looks like the only gear to which you can apply the moniker Welfare Epics is the badge loot, which is obtained through PvE only. In one of those delicious bouts of irony, the very term coined by the catassers‘ role model and lead developer Tigole to mock the PvPers now strictly applies to PvE, his very own area of competency in WoW.

What will this change, if it goes live as announced? Well, for the casual arena player, he will actually start and play in the 1300-1700 range and face opponent teams which do not hopelessly outgear him (especially if you combine these rating requirements with the new mechanisms introduced in 2.4.2 to fight point selling). The casual gamer who does arena because it’s one of the activities available to him due to the limited organization and scheduling required will benefit from more competitive gameplay, where mainly S2 and S3 gear balances itself out with the respective skill of all the contenders.

The competitive PvPers will find themselves in the 2000+ range, just as today, not feeling any particular impact except that they won’t be able to get 3 pieces of S4 the day the new season starts. They’ll also fight with their peers and compete for the honours of top rank. Nothing changed here.

Where there could be a difference, a gear aristocracy of sorts, is in the 1700-2000 range, where the teams trying to move upwards will find themselves matched against those from the bracket above who regularly stay around the fringe. Whether this will really create a 2-season gear gap in practice remain to be seen.

As Stop puts it, there’s no fast track through PvP for late level 70 joiners or alts anymore, which means the raiding gear-up game will start again with renewed strength. I expect there to be more drama generated, again, by top raiding guilds poaching geared members of mid-progression guilds, probably just what we need to offset the lack of popcorn moments generated by the pre-WotLK fatigue WoWInsider keeps telling us has already settled in.

All in all, for the casuals, it changes nothing. They will get S2 and S3 gear with no more efforts than what they need to invest today for S1 and S2 gear, but they can start with S0 blues since patch 2.4. That’s enough to enter entry level PvE content with casual guilds if they so desire – at least for DPS and healers. Tanks have, as always, no alternative solutions or fast track to gearing available to them. For the truly hardcore, it changes nothing. Season gear has always been inferior for top PvE content, and that doesn’t change. The only people this will really affect are any PvE players who face itemization gaps, in particular in the weapons department (or runs of bad loot dropping luck), making it harder for them to switch to a different progression path to compensate. Considering it’s that same crowd who appears to be most happy about the change at present, that shouldn’t be an issue either.

In other words, Blizzard chose wisely with their pandering to the loudmouthed crying hardcore minority.

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Matticus Channels Cosmo: 16 New and Sexy Additions in 2.4

Well, Matt, I’m not suffering from writer’s block, but I take your challenge nonetheless.

Here are 16 Patch 2.4 changes and additions worth mentioning:

Shorter 2v2 Arena queues

2v2 has, admittedly, several balance and synergy issues, but one which is more irksome is the queue time on heavily-populated Battlegroups. Due to the sheer number of people wanting to play 2v2, which, let’s face it, is the easiest to set up a team for and requires least coordination, queue times can exceed 15 minutes at peak time. Due to the low organizational requirements, 2v2 will always remain the bracket with the lowest barrier to entry for the most casual player, even if entering it as a brand new green level 70 player is going to be quite an experience.

Well, fortunately, Blue has recently posted that this will change for the better:

There is a change in 2.4.0 that will allow the servers to kick up more arena instances in a shorter amount of time, generally lowering the amount of time it will take to get into a game with an equal amount of people queuing. We want to avoid calling this a one time “queue cure” as we’re still not entirely certain how the changes will affect queue times under full load. Especially considering the increase in activity we see with any major patch release.

I think they’re guaranteed to have some effect, but if it isn’t an adequate impact we’ll need to make further adjustments.

Although I don’t have an arena partner or arena spec at the moment, shorter queue times = win.

The Sunwell Plateau

Part of the current higher-than-average tension between “hardcore” and “casuals” (also in its side incarnation PvE vs PvP) is most definitely due to the fact that the top raiders have run out of content, some of them several months ago. While I definitely don’t like AQ-Style server-wide unlocking events, this one looks to be less mindless grind-focussed than its infamous predecessor. The Isle of Quel’Danas is probably going to be as packed as Hellfire Peninsula was during the first days of TBC’s release, and since I currently don’t play my horde pallie, I’ll give the whole offensive a miss.

Still, the whole Shattered Sun Offensive comes along with a huge amount of new content from solo to five-men to full raids, so people who more or less ran out of things to do will have plenty new stuff to keep themselves occupied for the coming few months.

Of course, the top catassing guilds may very well burn through the new content in two weeks like what happened with MH and BT, but designing content with these people in mind is, fortunately, no longer on Blizzard’s agenda. Either Tigole and his crew grew softer on the catassing part or the rest of the design team has been overshouting them for a couple of months now (in fact, Tigole has been very subdued since his ill-advised Welfare Epics remark). Whatever the reasons, this is full of win for the large majority of the playerbase, hardcore and casual alike, and the couple of sour apples who don’t find the game challenging or fun enough for their taste anymore will move on. Less lag for me, and probably 0.1% less QQ on the o-boards. Not that you’d notice any difference of course.

The New Combat Log

The new combat log is going to increase data collection accuracy for damage meters and for WWS alike. While the change will require all addons working with the log to change, the net result is more precise information from all relevant tools. For any player, hardcore or casual, striving to improve their playing skills, accurate measurement of their performance is a good thing. Always remember, though, that in a group or a raid, you are actually playing an instance, not “top-the-meters”.

Teleport to CoT

Due to the travel time involved, getting to Caverns of Time is almost as much as a pain than going to Kara. Adding a means to teleport from Shattrath straight to the summoning stone is removes a lot of the wait, leaving more time for actually playing the instances.

Intellect Boosting Mana Regen from Spirit

While I don’t play any classes which rely on spirit and the 5-seconds rule as part of their normal routine, this will be huge for priests, druids but also mages. Other classes will spend less time drinking, which equates to less downtime. Now if it would only affect MP5 while casting too…

Faster Weapon Skillups from 1 to 295

Anyone who ever had to skill up a neglected weapon by even a mere 100 skill points will immediately remember what a pain in the nether regions this is. Less mindless killing for skillups? Yes please. The only thing unclear to me is whether it actually applies to weapon skill below 295 or players below level 60. If it’s the latter, the change will be, unfortunately, not noticed by level 70 toons, which would immediately remove this paragraph from the sexy additions to the “badly thought out” list.

Daily Quest Amount Raised to 25

Not that I’d care too much since I rarely do more than 3 dailies (never managed to unlock Ogri’La on the paladin). Still, more choice is always a good thing in my book.

Multi-Target Abilities no longer hit CCed NPCs

I have a bit mixed feelings about this one, actually. It certainly lowers the skill requirements in instances and participates in the dumbing down of the playerbase. On the other hand, it also means less wipes when running with people who lack the most basic CC management skills. An interesting side-effect, though: people who no longer care how they position CC relative to tanks will actually find running with a tankadin more difficult than before if their CC ends up in the Constant Consecration area. Since the Flavour of the Month in terms of 5-men tanks remains firmly in tankadin hands, the dumbing down may result in a couple of unexpected and hilarious wipes. Then again, good tankadins don’t really need CC in the first place.

Mana Cost Reduction on Regrowth

I don’t play a drood but from what they tell us, this is a very nice change, which actually gives them more variety in their spell casting rotations. As a recovering healadin, having just one single heal which makes up most of your casting routine (at least there’s cleansing and protecting to break the monotony) is something which gets pretty dull. More tools to keep your party or raid group alive, more varied gameplay? Yes please.

Avenger’s Shield Won’t Hit Critters Anymore

I love this one. Imagine the following pull: 3-mob group to the left, another group farther back on the right. The closest mob of the left-hand group stands at the right side of that group. Your tankadin positions himself and pulls with Avenger’s Shield on the closest mob of the left group, expecting all three mobs to have a good does of front-loaded threat on them.

Unfortunately, there’s a pesky critter sitting, unnoticed, between the left and right group, and Avenger’s shield actually bounces over it to hit the closest mob of the right-hand group. Your group now has to deal with 6 mobs instead of 3, 4 of them without any frontloaded threat.

Sounds familiar? Won’t happen again. Win.

Turn Undead Rank 3+ working on demons

Makes sense. Though why not Rank 1 and 2 escapes me. Then again, I think the last time I’ve ever used Turn Undead was on my level 26 alliance paladin desperately trying to survive an unexpected meeting with Morladin in Duskwood while bubble was on cooldown. And that was before TBC got released. So it’s a sexy but pointless change for the sake of consistency.

Partial Vanish Debugging

There’s been various abilities which would leave a rogue stealthed when using plain normal stealth but break vanish. Bug fixing is always nice in my book, and vanish has been plagued by bugs for a long time now.

New Stormstrike Icon

I’m kidding. Shamans get little love in this patch, and one of the more jaded shammies out there once commented on a message board “it will be changed to a middle finger Blizzard is pointing at shamans”. ‘Nuff said.

BG Honour calculation changes

There’s no more diminishing returns per kill until an opponent dies 51 times, and honour gets awarded on the spot. If it helps diminish the AFKing in the peace cave, I’m all for it.

Horde AV starting point moved back

This is a change for the better, and will help balance the map. In the same spirit, actually mirroring the whole map perfectly would definitely remove any claims of map imbalance and make it all about teamwork and tactical skill. This has been suggested for much longer than I’ve been playing AV and should come back.

In the same vein, joining AV as a group is something I have very mixed feelings about. If the group is 5 or 10 friends joining together, I rather like it. But with the extremely soft matchmaking happening, getting steamrolled by a 40-men preform AV for 0 honour (which you probably never will be allowed to join if you don’t have 350+ resilience, which you won’t be able to get in a hurry because the bloody AV premades kill you over and over for 0 honour) is going to be utterly detestable.

Warsong Gulch changes to Flag Carriers

In a valiant effort to shorten the pat situations where both sides could have been hiding with the opposing flags for ages, Flag Carriers will now appear on the map within 45 seconds and will get a 50%/100% damage increase debuff after 10/15 minutes. I like it but I still don’t think it goes far enough. Add reinforcements like in AV, each cap and kill taking off from the enemy reinforcements, and you could pretty much guarantee much more action-packed games lasting 15-20 minutes tops, and perhaps even kill the mindless HK farming which happens way too often. One can always hope…

And that takes up to 16 changes. There’s actually more to be highlighted, but Cosmo said 16, so 16 it is.

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PvE Preforms for Heroics

One of the complaints in the never-ending PvE vs PvP debate is that the lure of honour gear empties the pool of people willing to run heroics.

I’d argue that heroics stopped being an attractive proposition for many players when the key requirements lowered the bar, even if that sounds a bit counterintuitive. In practice, though, and my relatively limited heroics experience confirms this, the easier access to heroic mode exposes you to running with unexperienced and sometimes massively under-geared players, leading to massive wipe-fests and mounting repair costs. Not exactly a fun experience, now, is it?

Of course, this is far from an isolated observation, the blogosphere at large has been quite negative about the honoured-rep heroics, in particular PUG runs of course.  But bad PUGs are expected, and guild runs can actually be worse, simply because the lack of bond with random server denizens 1 to 4 gives you more freedom to call it quits without remorse, whereas a run with undergeared guildies may actually leave you feeling duty-bound to sit it out.

What you can do, though, is take a leaf out of the PvPers’ book and assemble a Heroics Preform. Yes, like the BG preforms. Recruit on server chat and realm forums, put up a schedule, and set gear requirements just like a BG premade will require certain resilience and HP values. I’m willing to bet that you will be able to find enough people who will be more than ready to run with like-minded serious and experienced players on a regular basis. What a Heroics Preform will bring them is the reassurance that they will be running with people who know what they are doing and removing the risks tied to undergeared noobs who wander in with greens and no clue about the pulls.

Just like any serious raid leader or BG Preform leader does it, though, do not compromise. Not meeting gear standards? Gear up before you apply. One of your regular Preform Members missing? Don’t waste time LFM, just cancel until next time. Not running will actually do better for your Preform’s reputation than running with a sub-optimal group.

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Random thoughts on Welfare and Patch 2.4

With reliable predictability, the 2.4 test patch notes brought a new round of QQing on the topic of loot distribution.

The debate has, however, not evolved at all since last time, and the same cheap shots get thrown around. As usual, of course, it’s a tiny but vocal fringe of hardcore PvE players doing all the complaining.

From what I’ve skimmed through, while buying PvP kit through PvE tokens is certainly a good move to allow players more versatile gearing options (and plugging some PvE itemization gaps), I notice that from what I could see so far the insignia trinket which is claimed to be necessary for Archimonde seems not to be on the list, an oversight in my opinion. I have no issues with raiders loathing PvP getting access to the gear they need for raiding through pvE only.

I did entertain myself quite a bit with the thought of just how much more uproar there would be if Blizzard had actually announced they would make things equal for both progression paths and allowed the purchase of PvE gear through Marks of Honour.

That being said, and to reiterate some of my former points, to raiders who keep complaining that arena and BG siphon players away from their raids or that they get PvP-geared people performing subpar in PvE content, my message is the following:

If you have these issues, it isn’t PvP which sucks. Chances are, it’s your raiding. Your guild’s organization, the lack of motivation, the lack of progress, are most probably all to blame to a certain extent.

If you recruit DPSers in S2-S3 gear who output 500DPS on boss fights in SSC / TK (warning, theorycraft, these numbers are based on hearsay from me, I don’t raid this kind of content and never will myself, end of the disclaimer), it’s both your recruitment and your class leadership at fault, not PvP. These players obviously do not perform how they should, so you should either not recruit them in the first place, or educate them how to do much better. If you leave your raiders with an “anything goes” mentality, your progress will stall, motivation will be low, and your guild reputation will, accordingly, drop. Which means you will have trouble recruiting anyone but these very PvP-geared dregs who have no clue how to perform in PvE.

Demand more from your players and create an overall climate where your raiders strive for excellence, do not tolerate slacking. Do not take players who aren’t making the effort to adapt to your current progression level in that 25th spot, don’t piggyback them through content. Although it may sound frustrating, you would be better off 24-manning easier content for shards (and plugging some small equipment gaps), or even canceling for lack of raid-ready attendance rather than giving even one player the impression that it isn’t a big deal that he’s slacking in gear or in gameplay (but do advise them and train them on what you want them to do).

Arena teams striving for high ratings recruit based on resilience score and won’t take undergeared people. Why would you tolerate players joining your raids while being far from the hit cap, or missing 500 +healing for the content you are tackling?

The top guilds are very demanding but their players are highly motivated. If you don’t foster a culture of excellence your raiders won’t be motivated to surpass themselves.

And this has very little to do with PvP gear, I’m afraid.

On Similar Matters

Blessing of Kings on Raids

Regular readers will remember I’ve often found myself in arguments with Blessing of King’s Rohan, even quite vehemently so, mainly on topics where two cultures clash, like raiders and pvpers, or casual-dedicated-hardcore players.

It is however worth noting that Rohan isn’t just one of the leading experts on paladins in PvE, he is also one of the voices worth listening to when Raiding is being thought, analyzed and changes considered.

He sums up his current views on where Raiding should be going in a clear and concise post which I wholeheartedly agree with and recommend you read if you didn’t already.

Blessing of Kings: Recap

On Similar Matters

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