Kulldam

For those that read this article from the front page, nothing has been really changed or added. I realized since these are my rants and opinions, and therefore not directly a "Guild" thing, it would be best to move it to the blog and off the front page.

With Wrath of the Lich King winding down, I wanted to take some time to write down all the good, bad, and even ugly aspects of the game either introduced, or expanded upon, during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, to hopefully put out into the collective consciousness that is the WoW community some of the ideas that worked well and even the others that were downright terrible.

As always, I encourage feedback and discussion about any of this stuff because I'm pretty passionate about all the topics I've written about here.

Good: Variety of Encounter Mechanics

While many raiders, especially those who have been playing WoW for quite a while, might condemn Wrath of the Lich King for it's overall lack of interesting raiding content, namely a Naxxramas rehash and phoned-in Trial of the Crusade, one aspect of WotLK raids that stood out was the wide variety of new and interesting encounter mechanics.

Ignoring Naxxramas since virtually everything was there copypasta'ed from the previous incarnation, every other raid zone we've seen in WotLK has introduced a number of new mechanics, a handful of which were so interesting they can (and surely will) be used in numerous future encounters to come.

Vehicles

Although vehicles were not an addition solely exclusive to the raid game in WotLK, they certainly made for some very interesting new mechanics in a few fights. It's also worth noting that WotLK wasn't really the first expansion to introduce vehicle "mechanics" into a boss fight, as controlling a ghost during Gorefiend from Black Temple was virtually the same idea, since you no longer controlled your character and instead had a new set of abilities to do your job.

Having said that, WotLK certainly was the first true vehicle implementation into the raiding scene, and it made Malygos and Flame Leviathan exceptionally interesting fights, offering a nice diversion from the normal role most players have come to expect. Instead, a tank could be a DPS, and DPS could be a tank, and everyone could try strategies they normally might've had to ignore.

Aura of Despair, General Vezax

In my opinion, one of the most brilliant encounter designs over the entirety of the expansion was a fight that didn't get as much credit as it deserved, which was that of General Vezax from Ulduar. The developers decided to make a very bold move and removed mana regeneration outright during this fight via Aura of Despair, and instead allowed mana to be recovered via the saronite pool mechanic if needed, forcing healers primarily to be very conscious of mana usage and overheal (basically for the first and only time in the expansion, it's worth noting).

Then of course, the Hard Mode went the extra, vital step by removing even the saronite pool mechanic altogether, forcing healers to be completely self-reliant on initial mana pools only, which made for some very cool "healer rotations" to keep everyone alive until the fight could be completed.

Self-Damaging Adds

Collapsing Stars from Algalon of Ulduar and Dark Nucleus from Blood Princes of Icecrown Citadel both really fall into this category and while the concept is simple, designing these entities to deal damage to themselves over time while still being vital to the success of the raid is very interesting.

In the case of Collapsing Stars, having the Stars take damage over time forced the raid to find a way to reliably kill each star in a pattern and with enough time between each so as not to cause multiple explosions back-to-back, thereby wiping the raid. Had the Stars kept their current health indefinitely until taking damage, the fight would've been so dramatically easy by comparison it would be almost pointless, but instead this one simple change turns the entire fight into a much more challenging endeavor, for the better.

Sanity

Yogg-Saron's Sanity mechanic works on many levels, but primarily made for interesting gameplay because it's one of the first raid abilities that forces the individual player to be completely self-responsible for the entire duration of a fight. That is, obviously many (perhaps even the majority) of abilities used by enemies in raid encounters require players to be self-responsible, but for a singular moment out of many -- if you stand in front of the dragon you'll get flame breathed and die. However, Sanity added the debuff and counter mechanic, which dramatically changes the formula such that a player cannot simply pass a single binary pass/fail check once or multiple times throughout the fight, but instead must continuously monitor his own stack and adjust his play based on the speed at which it climbs.

Literal Line of Sight

Yogg-Saron also introduced a sub-mechanic of the Sanity ability above for the first time, which was that of literal Line of Sight. Usually, when a raider thinks of line of sight, she thinks of it from the perspective of her position relative to the boss, but Yogg-Saron added a new way to handle Line of Sight, by actually involving the player's current "facing" into the equation, thereby simulating the actual act of a player character facing, and therefore looking toward or away from, a particular boss or area.

In the Yogg-Saron fight, requiring players in both the brain room and up top during Phase 3 to watch their own facing to avoid Sanity loss was a very cool new mechanic we'd not seen prior.

Light/Dark Orbs, Val'kyr Twins

While there have obviously been plenty of mechanics during past raid encounters that buff player DPS, nearly the entirety of the Twin Val'kyr fight from Trial of the Crusade utilized the floating orbs and a yin-yang system to make for some really interesting interactions.

Forcing the raid to split and choose individual buffs, and thereby encouraging or discouraging collection of various colored orbs, while also increasing or decreasing damage dealt and taken, made for an exceptionally fun fight. Adding on top of that the special abilities mechanics of the bosses, forcing players to swap colors mid-fight, created the epitome of "controlled chaos", and I hope such mechanics will be utilized in the future and expanded upon.

Leeching Swarm, Anub'arak

Prior to Defile as certainly one of the most discussed raid mechanics from WotLK, Leeching Swarm took the tried and true concept of a raid-wide DoT, and altered it in two very small, but exceptionally important and interesting ways to completely change the dynamics of the fight.

First, instead of dealing a specific amount of damage every tick, it dealt damage based on a percentage of current health of the player. This, of course, encouraged the raid to keep player health low so the actual damage per tick was as low as possible.

Second, of course, Leeching Swarm also actually causes Anub'arak to heal from the damage soaked from each individual player, hence the Leeching aspect. This part of the mechanic even further encouraged the raid to keep current health as low as possible during this phase of the fight, yet in combination with other things going on, such as Penetrating Cold and tank damage, made for some really interesting healing requirements and setups to be successful during this battle.

Necrotic Plague

First, let me say one thing that no one really mentions, but stands out as severely fucking annoying regarding this ability: Giving dispels a chance to resist when removing harmful effects from a player is beyond retarded. It rarely becomes noticeable with a 99% success rate, but for abilities like Necrotic Plague (or Fusion Punch), where a 1% dispel resist chance can mean a death or even a wipe, it becomes extremely aggravating. There is nothing fun about that shit.

That out of the way, as a new mechanic, Necrotic Plague really is one of the coolest new abilities seen during WotLK raiding. In virtually all prior cases, debuffs/DoTs that can jump between targets will inevitably be able to jump between players only, thereby causing the raid to find a way to deal with that jump appropriately (usually by spreading out). However, by allowing Necrotic Plague to jump to AND damage enemies, it causes some very cool situations and tactics to become immediately apparent. Add on to that the stacking mechanic when it full-duration jumps or kills a target, or removal on dispel, and the entire first phase of the most difficult fight ever seen in the game becomes completely revolved around this one ability. Very well developed and built around.

Defile

Probably one of the most well known new mechanics this expansion due to the severity of failure, Defile took a very common mechanic (that of a void zone basically) and tweaked it in a very minor but powerful way by punishing the entire raid for an individual's failure of getting hit, rather than the normal void zone mechanic of only punishing the player through damage until they move. Instead, as most probably are aware by now, if a player is hit with Defile, he not only takes damage, but causes the Defile pool itself to expand outward in size, filling a larger radius and thereby potentially causing other players, or even the original culprit, to trigger the effect and damage again. This can, and does, quickly turn into a maniacally dangerous, wipe-inducing mechanic, and has made for some of the most amusing failures I've seen throughout all of WotLK.

Good: Dual Talent Specialization

It's a rare thing for Blizzard to introduce an across the board home run that pleases the entirety of the demographics within the WoW Community, but Dual Talent Specialization was certainly one such system.

Not only does it allow players to easily change between and experience multiple roles across a variety of formats (questing/soloing, 5-mans, battlegrounds, arenas, etc.), but for raiding, the introduction of the Dual Talent Specialization single-handedly transformed the raid environment into a dynamic, living beast that can act and react on a dime to the needs of the situation. Many a hardcore raider, for the sake of argument, may insist that prior to Dual Talent Specialization, high-end raiders frequently utilized re-specs to cover multiple roles, and while that is true to a very minor degree and for a small minority of raid members (at most, a tank or healer might have re-specced for a single fight), the vast majority of raiders simply arrived to the raid in his chosen spec and stuck to it the entire raid, even at a slight loss to the raid progress as a whole. The inconvenience and time investment for actually leaving mid-raid to visit a trainer was far greater than many people will admit and hence, most raids avoided it entirely. A player who wished to PVP or otherwise would then visit a trainer after the raid and spend a number of days in his alternate spec, only changing back prior to the next raid.

Now with Dual Talent Specialization, it is not uncommon to have one or even multiple raid members changing specs for every single encounter in zones like Icecrown Citadel, which dramatically increases the opportunity and raid-role dynamic available for any given challenge. It's a fantastic system that, for all players from casual to hardcore, has really opened up the possibilities and experiences for new capacities and play styles.

That said, Dual Talent Specialization is not without fault, and hopefully Blizzard can alter or fix the issues before Cataclysm is released. The primary issue is the loss of buffs. I understand why the system was designed that way (from a technical standpoint, it's pretty simple to run a script such as "SELECT Buffs CAST BY Player; DELETE Buffs;", but it becomes very annoying when a couple people have to recast their buffs before and sometimes after every single boss fight.

There are two preferred solutions, one of which is certainly easier to implement, so I'll start with that.

1. Keep buffs that are not talent-based. In other words, if a Paladin re-specs, instead of removing Kings from everyone, since all Paladin specs have access to Kings, the script should check if the new spec of the player can cast each instance of the buff, which in this case is Kings, and if so, allow the buff to remain active. A buff like Sanctuary (if that even remains come Cataclysm; I doubt it will) that is spec-specific, could be cleared by re-speccing since the new spec won't have access to it.
2. The same as above, but in cases where a more powerful version of a buff is available via particular talents, replace the existing version of the buff with the version that would be cast with the new talent spec selected. For example, if a Disc Priest with Improved Fort has everyone buffed and re-specs to a Shadow spec without Improved Fort, the script should realize the Priest would still want Fortitude, but the lesser, untalented version, and therefore the script should replace Improved Fort on everyone with the regular version (again, assuming such talents remain come Cataclysm).

Either scenario would be a great improvement to the Dual Talent Specialization system and streamline the experience a great deal.

Good: Ulduar

For a number of years, Karazhan held a firm place in my heart as the best raid zone introduced in WoW. Certainly I have a nostalgic sentiment towards some of the older, epic zones such as Blackwing Lair and Ahn'Qiraj, but Karazhan was really the first raid zone that required every raid member to contribute beyond a marginal role. Further, the size of the zone was huge (even if slightly too large considering the trash quantity), the encounters were almost all unique, interesting, and challenging, and of course as the first real introduction to 10-man raiding, it was a great success from a community standpoint as well. For about two years, Karazhan held that special slot as the best, most unique raid zone, until along came patch 3.1 and the introduction of what would then become the most enjoyable and well-rounded raid in WoW history: Ulduar.

Ulduar stands out above everything else both past and present primarily due to the polish it clearly received during development.

Moderate Trash

One of the first great design decisions that illustrates the refinement of Ulduar's creation is that of the trash packs. Considering the sheer size of Ulduar as a whole, it would've been very easy for developers to decide to add tons of trash to Ulduar, AQ40-style, and call it a day. This would've obviously extended the lifespan of the zone as average raids would not progress through bosses quite as quickly and therefore might require another few weeks or months to "finish" things up.

Instead, and much to the delight of many raiders, Ulduar trash was designed in a very reasonable manner. No particular boss had extreme amounts of trash preceding it, but there was enough to offer that "pacing" mechanic Blizzard has mentioned they desire to keep in raid environments, which makes sense. Further, in many cases pre-boss trash packs were really "linked" across multiple bosses, at least in practical senses. For the first four bosses, Flame Leviathan and Ignis were really the only bosses with "full trash" preceding them, whereas Razorscale obviously had none and XT, for all intents and purposes, virtually had no trash as well. Therefore, the trash we'd normally see for 2 bosses was divided among 4 bosses in total.

Then, going into the Antechamber before Iron Council, Kologarn, and Algalon, the trash there was so minor as to again be virtually unnoticeable -- just as you're about to feel like you're clearing trash, it's all dead and you have three bosses wide open and available.

Even trash prior to each Keeper was fairly minor, and even the hardest trash in the zone by far, leading to General Vezax, was again mitigated slightly because it was really the trash for both Vezax and Yogg-Saron.

Now, this isn't meant to be a love letter to long lost trash packs of yore. I'm not exactly a fan of trash and while I understand the need for such mechanics to pace content, I find very little enjoyment in the process of clearing trash in almost all cases. So, I'm not suggesting I enjoyed Ulduar trash whereas these days or in old school raids, I despised it -- in fact, every week doing Ulduar, I would vocally groan to myself when coming up to do Hodir or Vezax trash, as I actively disliked those clears. However, compared to what could've been done with Ulduar's trash packs, I found the actual design to be very forgiving and lenient, and conducive to an overall enjoyable raiding experience throughout the zone.

Multitude of Achievements

On a personal level, and as part of a Guild which really enjoys the extra challenges Raid Achievements can provide, Ulduar presented an extremely broad array of achievements that spanned every encounter in the zone many times over. In fact, numerous fights had half a dozen or more various achievements associated with them, and in many cases the achievements were varied enough as to require completely different strategies for each! In fact, Ulduar had some 71 achievements in total for a 10-man raid, which completely obliterates the measly offering from the other two big WotLK Raid zones of Icecrown Citadel and Naxxramas, which offered only 25 and 19 achievements, respectively.

While there were certainly a few Ulduar achievements that were on the terrible or annoying side (e.g. Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare, Getting Cold in Here, Who Needs Bloodlust?, I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare), the vast majority provided a great variety of challenges for each fight in the zone and in many cases, gave a real sense of accomplishment beyond the initial conquering of a particular Hard Mode.

Wide Range of Difficulty

As I discuss in the Normal+1 Toggle section, Ulduar was really the first major zone to offer a wide range of player-controlled difficulties via the Hard Mode mechanic, which was another fantastic design decision by the development team to greatly increase the longevity and lifespan of Ulduar as a whole.

What made the Ulduar-style of Hard Modes (now Heroics) so exceptional was the variety they offered and the sheer differentiation the Hard Mode often forced upon a previously simple and well understood fight. Taking a fight like Vezax and completely changing the way to succeed by removing all forms of mana regen really forced healers, and even DPS to a degree, to find extremely new ways to do their jobs. Even a relatively simple fight like Normal Flame Leviathan and introducing adds, flames, lighting bolts, frost blocks, and a ton of additional incoming/outgoing damage dramatically changed the requirements of the fight. Of course Mimiron doesn't change mechanically a great deal going from Normal to Hard Mode, but the simple addition of doom fire requires such a drastic change of strategy that, for all intents and purposes, it becomes an entirely new fight. Similarly of course is Yogg-Saron, where even the loss of a single keeper distinctively alters the entirety of the fight and how each individual raid member must perform.

As I discuss in great detail in the Normal+1 Toggle section, this design decision for Ulduar's Hard Modes shines a bright contrast against the very, even overtly simplistic design of the Heroic Difficulties found in Trial of the Crusade and Icecrown Citadel. Instead, Ulduar was clearly a labor of love for the developers involved, and it shows very clearly that a great deal of time and effort went into designing nearly every Hard Mode encounter (we'll ignore Hodir Hard Mode for now).

Good: Halion & The Ruby Sanctum

I must admit that I was quite skeptical when The Ruby Sanctum was first announced, as I expected a very underwhelming zone and encounter. However, after seeing the zone in action, I must admit I was very pleasantly surprised at the polish and simplicity from The Ruby Sanctum.

The trash is minimal but offers a few interesting mechanics (Blast Wave, Commanders, etc) while not feeling overwhelming. The mini-bosses are also decent little fights, whereas they could've been complete joke fights ala Sartharion drakes. Instead, they were given enough HP to last a couple minutes even to well-geared raids and have a few interesting abilities each to make a raid stop and notice they are fighting a boss and not just another trash pack.

Halion himself has a ton of cool mechanics and even though Nefarion will always have a special nostalgic place in my heart, Halion is easily the most interesting dragon fight in WoW to date. The normal difficulty is forgiving enough as to allow a PuG, once accustomed to the rotation mechanic, to drop him, while the Heroic version alterations actually combine to make some very interesting strategic requirements. The Consumption snare with 4 beams in the Twilight Realm force precise placement and control, while the Combustion DoT stack requires focused healing or self-cooldowns.

Perhaps the most interesting mechanical change in Heroic Halion is the "seep-through" of the Combustion and Consumption ground effects between Realms, which really forces the raid to keep each effect on the outer edges of the room and can create some dangerous (without being too RNG) situations where simultaneous Combustion and Consumption pools can land in the same area unbeknownst to the debuffed players involved. Very cool mechanic without being overtly uncontrollable or punishing.

The only downside to Halion is the loot table, which continues to perpetuate the "no good 10-man trinkets" rule that has permeated the entirety of the expansion thus far. Still, with Lich King-quality iLevel drops and as the last boss of the expansion, and since the shitty-loot-in-10-man rule goes away come Cataclysm, it isn't all bad news to be sure.

Bad: Previous-Tier Obsolescense

Ulduar was largely ignored by a huge portion of the raiding population because ToC allowed much better rewards to be obtained both more easily and quickly than Ulduar. Unfortunately, Ulduar was one of the best designed raid zones in WoW's history in terms of size, scope, artwork/style, encounter mechanics, difficulty, and lore. Yet with the release of ToC (and 5-man obtainable Conquest emblems as well), much better equipment overshadowed Ulduar's drops entirely, making the zone as a whole useless to those not interested in experiencing the challenges just for the sake of the fight. Even if they did, the much better gear greatly reduced the challenge built-in by design.

One solution that would help this issue immensely is simple: Greatly reduce the iLevel gap between Tiers. I know Blizzard stated they were unhappy/unprepared for the vast iLevel gaps created by having three subsets of loot (normal 10 > heroic 10/normal 25 > heroic 25), and certainly lowering this to only two subsets come Cataclysm (normal 10/25 > heroic 10/25) will help a bit, but there is very little reason the iLevel gap needs to be so huge. Going from ToC Heroic of 245 to ICC Heroic of 264 is of course a 19 point increase, and as far as I can tell, that jump serves no purpose other than to drastically increase mudflation far too quickly.

Instead, the jump between tiers should be brought way, way down. Ideally for Cata, I'd like to see something like:

Tier 1 Normal: 300
Tier 1 Heroic: 306
Tier 2 Normal: 310
Tier 2 Heroic: 316
Tier 3 Normal: 320
Tier 3 Heroic: 326

In other words, a simple formula could be derived where:

V = Value of iLevel
B = Base tier 1 iLevel
T = Tier number
I = per-tier Increase
H = percentage of per-tier increase for Heroic

So Normal Mode formula would be:

V = B + TI - I

Heroic Mode formula would be:

V = B + TI - I + (I * H)

To get the above table as an example, we'd use numbers like:

B = 300
I = 10
H = 60%

Which gives, for Normal Tier 2:

V = 300 + (2 - 1) * 10
V = 310

Or for Heroic Tier 3:

V = 300 + (3 - 1) * 10 + (10 * 0.6)
V = 300 + 20 + 6
V = 326

Obviously a basic example and the numbers could be tweaked, but the point is to keep the major components ("I" as the per-tier Increase) very low. Perhaps 10 is even too high and could be dropped to 5 with a 60% Heroic boost, which would give us a table of:

Tier 1 Normal: 300
Tier 1 Heroic: 303
Tier 2 Normal: 305
Tier 2 Heroic: 308
Tier 3 Normal: 310
Tier 3 Heroic: 313

Now it may seem like gaining 13 ilevels across two tiers is useless and raiders may be disinclined to bother for such little gain, but one thing shines through in MMOs historically: better is better. In a very Field of Dreams-esque similarity, if you build it, they will come. It really doesn't matter how much "better" the gear is, if it is even remotely an upgrade, people will try to acquire it. It could also be argued that even if loot was equivalent, people would still flock to the new raid or dungeon to see the new content and monsters, but I digress.

The point is, WotLK took the concept of "newer raids need better rewards" to such an extreme it completely diluted the gearing landscape and negated the vast majority of previous content overnight as soon as the next major content patch was released. Yet in a system similar to the above, previous content for 2+ tiers would remain relevant in terms of equipment, which would give major incentive for those that never experienced it to go back and try it out. It's a pretty strong guarantee that if Ulduar 25 dropped iLevel 255 gear (compared to ICC 25's iLevel 264), many people that never experienced Ulduar would find it hard to resist going back to see what it was like. Moreover, since Ulduar would have been tuned around ~250 iLevel gear, while a mix of 255/264 gear raiders would have a slight advantage, it wouldn't be so overpowered that the fights would instantly lose their challenge.

How to Solve It

Simply utilize a much smaller iLevel increase between tiers. Rely on the fact that players will try obtain better loot if it is available, even if it is only slightly better. Otherwise, we're left with a dire situation that we've seen so often in the past, where drastic iLevel shifts ruin the longevity of the game between expansions for no discernible reason.

Bad: Deterrence to Personal Learning

Going on six years now of WoW and there is still no tutorial system to speak of to help new players learn the basic mechanics of how to play. Sure, there are "newbie tips" about moving, targeting, attacking, stuff like that, and those are certainly required, but those are geared toward the complete beginner and only illustrate the basic controls and mechanics of the game (what is a quest, how do I interact with an NPC, etc.). What WoW desperately needs, is a system that encourages public learning and knowledge throughout the playerbase.

Think of a tutorial from most modern single-player games, such as Civilization or Warcraft 3. There would be text- and/or voice-based instruction about how to perform a very specific task, and that task would lead to another task, and another, and so on. Eventually, you'd have the skills to put it all together and create your own town or base or army. In WoW, there is no equivalent, and it leaves a huge gap in what can be considered "general knowledge".

The player base of WoW today is very divided, with the "elites" or "hardcore" on one end and the "newbs" or "mouth breathers" on the other, and never the twain shall meet. And in general, the divide between these groups is not about playtime or level or even equipment (though some would argue those factors play a role) -- in truth, the divisor is knowledge. A long-time WoW player may know the best threat-generating moves for a Warrior Tank, or the strongest DPS rotation for an Arcane Mage, or the immunity duration of a Rogue's Vanish; yet a new player of course has no idea of these things unless they are explicitly told, either by another player or through a third-party source, such as a website.

Now, I'm not suggesting that new players need access to every little factoid about WoW that could at any time in their future ever conceivably play a role in their game play, but certainly some things would be useful to teach to new players. For example, since I know it well, lets take a Warrior.

If I start a Warrior today, I get no information about my class specifically, outside of the initial character creation screen. It would be hugely beneficial to offer a short tutorial that explains how the Rage system works to a new Warrior; that illustrates that Rage is capped and drains slowly, is gained from dealing white damage (and of course, explain the difference between white damage and special attacks), and is used to cast special abilities. Such a tutorial should only take 2 or 3 minutes, and of course can be optionally skipped, but could introduce the player to a non-threatening enemy (test dummy equivalent) they can practice on. Instructions or voice could illustrate they are gaining rage from attacking and being hit, and deal extra damage by using some Rage to cast Slam or Heroic Strike.

Of course, in the later stages of the game, a tutorial could explain the basic DPS rotation for the player, say when they hit a particular level and/or acquire specific skills (Bloodthirst, for example). The tutorial would instruct them along to practice the basic Fury rotation, and explain that they should prioritize Bloodthirst then Slam then Heroic Strike. It might continue to put them in an arena with 3 dummies and have them practice the rotation a few times and display the results (damage done, DPS, whatever), then have the player repeat the process, but try using Whirlwind before Bloodthirst and Cleave instead of Heroic Strike, and of course now it's noted their results are better because they replaced single-target abilities with AE abilities when there were 3 targets available, and so on. Perhaps an advanced tutorial could then show the difference between using Heroic Strike and Execute on a sub-20% dummy to illustrate the differences.

The point is these sorts of tutorials could be easy to implement and have a profound positive effect on the collective knowledge of the WoW player base. Players feel empowered when they know what is going on and do not have to feel ashamed or embarrassed to ask questions (or worse perhaps, not even know what questions to ask or that they are doing anything wrong). There is tons of room for useful solo, single-player, phased, self-taught tutorials in WoW today, and they have been absent for far too long.

How to Solve It

Start brainstorming all the possibilities for tutorial subjects and where and how to implement them. The best place to start is obviously class-specific tutorials, as illustrated above. If such tutorials were introduced as quests, with exceptional rewards, players would be encouraged to try and in most cases, succeed. Taken a step further, advanced tutorials (such as DPS rotation best-practices as outlined above) should have multiple stages of performance-based rewards: If the player does a poor rotation, they get the base reward, but as the rotation gets more complicated or their performance increases (again, any metric that is appropriate can be used here), the reward increases, rewarding appropriately with whatever is compelling (a blue or epic low level item, a mount, a special pet, a class-skill, a talent point, etc.)

The possibilities are near-endless if one even remotely begins brainstorming and with the success of WoW thus far, clearly there is a need for such in-game assistance to the new and upcoming player.

Bad: Time-Limited Bosses

While I admit from a lore perspective, the idea that once activated, within an hour the metaphysical shit would hit the fan, we aren't playing a Counter-Strike or Modern Warfare style game where we can instantly respawn for another round after dying. In fact, I'd argue that the entire purpose of MMO gameplay revolves around the ability to be slow, strategic, and methodical in terms of making decisions in raid environments -- we try something, we fail, we review and plan to make adjustments for the next time.

It's not lost on me entirely that part of the point of Algalon's time limit was in fact to induce that sense of urgency, but that only works when there are no outside factors that limit your control. Random computer issues, disconnects, roster swaps, phone calls, bio breaks, emergencies, really anything can and would hinder the progress and it made for some frustration.

Further, the time limit greatly encouraged a brute-force style of gameplay, which we almost never see elsewhere in WoW's raid environment. That is, we are encouraged only to make alterations or review previous attempts within the time span it takes to run back/res up after a wipe. Again, this is very counter-intuitive to the gameplay of WoW as a whole and was far from interesting after perhaps the first raid night against Algalon where you got to say, "Cool concept, I love me some time trial challenges!" All subsequent nights were closer to, "Stay alive somehow and win, we don't have time to plan how to do that!"

How to Solve It

Nothing tricky here, two simple options:

1. Refrain from using time-limited mechanics at all. As outlined above, they can be extremely frustrating when uncontrollable occurrences force another week of waiting to try again.
2. If a time-limited mechanic is necessary, tie it to "in-battle" time only. Therefore, as soon as the boss is engaged, the timer begins counting down, and as soon as a wipe occurs and the boss resets, the timer stops. This would allow time for strategic alterations, breaks, disconnects, and the like without completely removing that sense of urgency.

Ugly: Community Degradation

WoW is becoming more and more a SPORPG, or Single-Player Online RPG. WotLK introduced a few new features that, while on the surface seem positive, truly discourage players from forming any real social bonds or community with the people around them.

LFR/LFD/LFBG/LFCommunity

LFR: There is no doubt that Blizzard will introduce the Looking For Raid feature once Cataclysm hits, allowing players the same ease of finding a 5-man to also get into a raid. Since Raid IDs and lockouts will be solely a per-boss nature, the system will easily be able to find people to fill in slots. The algorithm to create an initial raid force may be slightly trickier, but of course at computer-speeds, filtering for the right composition will only take moments. Find: 2x Tanks, 3x Healers, 5xDPS, make sure +attack, +spell power, Replenishment, +STA buffs are available from selected classes & specs, then branch out slightly more to include more buffs/debuffs. Again, since the Raid IDs can be easily matched up, and players are informed/warned before saving to a pre-cleared raid, there is no downside. With multi-server populations feeding the system, creating cross-realm LFR raids will be a simple task.

LFD: I talked a lot about the issues with LFD in a previous blog post, but LFD encourages players to be completely self-serving. Gone are the days of even the (minor) sanity-check of a player having to deal with the social networks of his or her own server, and therefore be slightly more likely to try harder, not be a douche, etc. Now the system basically encourages douche-baggery, because there is no downside. If you try hard, you complete the zone and get your loot, and if you don't try hard, usually you still complete the zone because most content isn't challenging enough to require 100% play from all players involved.

From a community standpoint, Blizzard CMs continue the PR patter that everything is fine and dandy, and in no way has the community degraded since the early days of WoW, but the fact of the matter is the very nature of the systems that have been implemented force that degradation. The important point here is there currently exists a severe lack of consequences. If I, as a random max-level player, decide to farm Emblems in LFD all day or join a PuG raid and contribute as little effort as possible, no truly negative outcome can occur due to my negligence that will dramatically affect my future WoW experience or that of my character. In LFD (or LFBG or even the future-LFR), the vast majority of the people I'm interacting with are not even from my own server. Moreover, even if they are from my server, due to the huge number of players and characters, there is very little chance anyone will know me. Even if I'm deemed too useless to be in the group/raid/battleground, the worst scenario is I'm kicked out and have a 30 minute cooldown timer to try again. Never mind that most groups won't take this action if performance is the only issue, that it usually takes outright vocalization of being an asshole, such as calling people names or what not, to get kicked from a LFD or raid.

How has my behavior negatively affected my future play experiences? In such a minor way, it's completely negligible. Now the LFD vote system won't count my votes as often as people that never leave early or get kicked? Big effin deal, I'm not trying to kick other people, I'm trying to slack off as much as possible and let others carry me, so I wouldn't be voting to kick anyway.

Or in a raid, even a pre-LFR one that is home-server only players, at worst I get kicked from the raid and am saved for that week. Never mind I probably got some emblems or maybe even some loot by the time this kick occurred. Moreover, chances are, as mentioned before, since the content doesn't require my 100% effort, let alone the rest of the raid members, no one will really notice and thus I'll slide along under the radar. Once I do get kicked, maybe that raid leader writes my name down so as not to invite me, but that still leaves 784 other random players shouting in trade to form a raid every weekend that I can join, and again, chances are no one will care to write it down -- they have no incentive really, because in that player's mind, they solved the problem (kicked me out and replaced me) and are still getting what they want (the raid continues). Most people won't bother to plan ahead that much to track random slackers, so the consequences to me are very minimal.

Even worst case scenario, the raid leader remembers me AND complains about me in a public area (trade chat, forums, whatever). It all goes away in a matter of hours if not minutes. That player isn't going to shout in trade every weekend forever about one shitty player in a PuG, nor keep bumping a forum post or similar (especially now that to bump said post, they have to do it with their real name). The vast majority of the server population will never hear about it nor even care if they did, so come next week, I'm back in another raid trying to contribute nothing.

Now, in a self-contained bubble, comparing the evils of LFD/LFR/LFBG with the relative benefits might seem a futile point to make -- after all, LFD-type systems have many benefits in allowing very easy grouping/raiding/PVPing at one's own schedule. However, my point here is to examine the effects on WoW's social community as a whole.

Back in WoW Classic and even TBC, WoW really had two divergent scenarios that a player could choose in order to do high-level content: A) He could shout for a group in trade chat (for dungeons such as Strath, Scholo, Dire Maul, and sometimes UBRS) or B) Join a Guild to also do dungeons and have the chance to raid.

Nowadays, scenario B, revolving around a Guild, has been nearly eliminated from WoW as common practice. That's not to suggest Guilds are not popular (in fact, many people seem to think not having a Guild tag is a sin for whatever reason), but I contend that insofar as the social- and raid-structure provided by the institution of a Guild in Classic/TBC WoW, current-generation WoW has devolved such that most players have no NEED for a Guild in terms of game play, and can rely almost exclusively on the aforementioned self-serving LFD-style systems.

This shift in community-dynamic has had dramatic effects on WoW at present. Only the very hardcore raiders tend to have true need for a Guild, but even then, the necessity of a Guild for those people has become almost solely as a structure for communication, rather than for any communal ties. A Guild, in present-WoW, has virtually no affect on one's ability to participate in high-level game play, which is absurdly backwards from the Classic-WoW community dynamic.

Once again, this issues pushes the community as a whole toward that single-player, self-serving mentality where everything can be accomplished in tiny morsel-sized bites and the game never forces the player to make any sort of commitment -- a current WoW player never has to stand up and say, "God dammit, I am going to do XYZ, no matter what it takes!" because the game allows and almost encourages him to play as if the other 4 or 9 or 24 people around him are just NPCs that somehow occasionally pass the Turing Test, and are otherwise assisting the player in getting this loot or that achievement or this mount or that title.

Guild Levels

WoW needs to make a dramatic shift back to encouraging a sense of community amongst players, especially now that everything is being pushed toward a LFD, random-style system where you can be matched up with any number of other random people to complete a common goal. The upcoming Guild enhancements in Cataclysm were slightly interesting when first introduced, but the recent announcement of removing the "talent tree" aspect and going to a straight per-level system further illustrates that in reality, the system was never designed as a social-strengthening structure, and instead just another reason for the random player to be even more fearful of not having a Guild Tag below her name.

Since we already can assume with certainty that the Guild Perks system will allow a Guild to reach max-level through any means available to gain experience, then there truly exists no form of Guild Perks setup that actively requires a Guild to come together to level up. Since a Guild can reach max level by having everyone go off alone to group with random people in LFD, LFBG, complete achievements, or do quests, the system is fatally flawed as an in-Guild social incentive.

A simple fix, in this particular case, would be to stop giving Guild experience past, say, level 10 or 15, unless everything that would normally give Guild Experience was then tied to group activities only that can be tracked as Guild Members. Blizzard has stated already that to get Guild Experience from Raids will require Guild majority, but the system should require communal Guild efforts to fully level up. Achievements would only count if they were Guild achievements or Party/BG/Raid achievements with Guild majority present. Similarly, Quests could only count if they were group quests with all Guild members helping. Blizzard could even get creative and create new "types" of quests -- Guild Challenges, if you will -- that encourage Guild members to work together at a common goal to level up the Guild Experience. Some examples:

"Guild Challenge: Speak to Bornak Bijornak in Vas'jir, then collect at least 100 herbs across three or more Guild members within 15 minutes. Awards: 2,000 Guild Experience"

"Guild Challenge: Speak to Bundar Glopper in Mount Hyjal, then destroy at least 25 unique types of monster across five or more Guild members within 5 minutes. Awards: 3,500 Guild Experience -- Bonus: Destroy 40 unique types for an extra 1,500 Guild Experience"

"Guild Challenge: Speak to Innkeeper Gromgar in Orgimmar, then visit 50 unique zones across four or more Guild members within 15 minutes. Awards: 1,500 Guild Experience"

The point is, the Guild Perks system has the potential to truly encourage Guilds to come together, on a very frequent basis, and work together for these common goals of reaching a max level. However, as indicated by the information available thus far and the recent changes to the system, it seems any Guild that exists for a minimal length of time will be max level and thus be no different from any other Guild, nor will the members have reason to work together if they can do solo daily quests and earn experience the same as working together.

Paid Name Changes/Server Transfer

Another major impact on the quality of the WoW Community is actually that of Paid Name Changes & Server Transfers. Similar to having no downsides to being a douchebag in groups, raids, or BGs, even in the worst case scenario where a player has somehow become the bane of his server community, he can simply pay a small sum of money and instantly shed himself of that identity. By the way, anyone else notice the fucking severe irony that players can pay to change character names to remain anonymous in-game, but due to RealID, we cannot remain anonymous out-of-game? Well played Blizzard... but I digress.

I'm not suggesting that Server Transfers are the issue, since that is a certain requirement for any realm-based MMO, but Paid Name Changes are the real issue. If you are a retard over and over and have created a poor reputation for yourself, you should not be able to remove that at the drop of a hat. If players are forced to deal with the consequences of their actions, the community becomes better and more sound as a whole.

Lack of Social Persistence

The overarching theme behind all these communal issues within WoW is the simple lack of social persistence across the community. That is, things like LFD, LFR, LFBG, shorter zones/raids, solo daily-quests & content, puggable Normal difficulty content -- none of these systems encourage players to form lasting social bonds or relationships. As the game becomes more and more of a Single-Player Online game with only tiny content morsels, players increasingly find no active reason to try to meet or talk to players or find new friends or guilds.

Back in original WoW and even in TBC, I used to have a fairly active Friend's list of 15-20 people, as did most people I knew. These were people not in my Guild that I knew already or met in-game and with which I'd frequently get together to form a group or raid. Now in WotLK, I have literally had no need to add (or remove, for that matter) anyone from my Friend's list for ages, because it's almost pointless to try to set something up with those people, when I can just join the LFD queue and be done with my daily within 15 minutes, rather than wait for said friend(s) to be online or even finished with the LFD they're currently doing.

The LFD is just the easiest, most basic example, but this issue spans the entirety of the "social game" in WoW these days. The benefits of actively finding and meeting new people has been so dramatically overshadowed by the encouragement of using simpler, PuG-/LFD-style systems that the vast majority of players avoid doing so, outside of perhaps asking in Guild chat before queueing up.

How to Solve It

This is such an overwhelming and broad issue that there are no simple solutions, but I'd offer a few things that would push the community back in the right direction and encourage relationships and lasting bonds:

Guild Levels

As mentioned above, truly require Guild Members to work together to earn Guild Experience. If the system allows solo-activity to earn Guild Experience, then by definition, it really isn't a Guild activity or Guild system.

LFD/LFR/LFBG

Provide benefits that are baked-in to these systems that encourage players to play together with non-random people. For example, when grouped with players from your Guild or Friend's List, killing the final boss of a 5-man gives an extra Heroic/Valor Points and doubles the gold reward from the Daily. Or a stacking buff for each player in the group from Guild/Friend's List that gives 2.5% more Gold, Experience, and Reputation. Similar systems could be implemented into Raids or BGs as well.

Nothing that simplifies the content in anyway or alters character performance, but some sort of benefit or perk to playing with friends and Guildmates rather than random people.

Likewise, similar to the PuG with 100 people in LFD achievement, create achievements and rewards for doing the same with Guild/Friend's List people.

Paid Name Changes

As mentioned, remove Paid Name Change service -- it encourages players not to take responsibility for their actions by always having "an out" when needed.

Ugly: The "Normal+1" Toggle

First, let me define a term I'll be using a great deal in this article, which is the "Difficulty Toggle". As most of you know, the Difficulty Toggle is a UI option implemented for raids during the Trial of the Crusade patch that allows a raid leader to toggle between Normal and Heroic difficulties. This system simply toggled which raid ID the raid would zone into in ToC, but was then expanded upon in Icecrown Citadel to allow the raid to change difficulty on a per-boss basis. Conceptually and even in practice, as a raid leader I love the ability to swap easily, though usually it only happens once a week or night when we first zone in, so our Guild is probably not the intended audience for that particular facet of this feature.

That said, the reason I've included the Difficulty Toggle in the list of poor ideas for WotLK is not because of the workings of the toggle itself, but because the very existence of the Difficulty Toggle has drastically shaped encounter design for current generation raids, and in most cases for the worst.

Now, it is important to define what a Heroic Difficulty actually is. To qualify as a Heroic Difficulty, an encounter must:

• Be optional.
• Be noticeably more difficult than the Normal counterpart.
• Provide better rewards than Normal...
• ...and therefore be intentionally designed by Blizzard.

Having established the definition, let us step back and look at the first implementations of Heroic difficulties, which were back then known as Hard Modes. Many would say Sartharion 3D, but actually the first implementation of a Hard Mode was the Bug Trio in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj. For those that don't recall, the loot received after killing all three bugs was partially based on which bug was killed last. In the case of the AQ40 bug trio, killing Lord Kri last gave (relatively) better loot, of iLevel 78 compared to iLevel 76 for Princess Yauj last, and iLevel 75 for Vem last. Those differences may seem silly, but at the time it was worth doing it if the raid was capable, and I recall even Vox raids finally being able to do Kri last and getting those better items (though really it wasn't the iLevel, but just the different slots/item types). A drop from Kri was around 4% more powerful than a drop from Vem, which is nothing to scoff at.

After the AQ40 Bug Trio, it was a very long time until any additional Heroic Difficulty encounters were implemented, all the way up to Zul'Aman and the mount run, which while technically the bosses fought are no harder, it certainly does become more difficult since the factor of a time limit was introduced, however this discussion is more focused on the single-encounter Heroic Difficulty. After that, we have Sartharion 3D which, in very similar vein to the Bug Trio, rewarded better loot for taking a more difficult route and killing Sartharion along with any number of miniboss Drakes simultaneously. This encounter, of course, was certainly the first to be widely accepted as the first Heroic Difficulty and defeating it, at the time of appropriate equipment, was extremely difficult.

Shortly after Sartharion 3D we got Ulduar, which truly expanded upon the Hard Mode idea of course by adding Hard Mode versions to a whopping 9 out of 14 bosses. Also note that for the definition we're using of Heroic Difficulty, Algalon doesn't qualify since he has no Normal Difficulty, and while he requires Heroic Difficulty victories elsewhere to access, that would only make him a part of the "better reward" of the leading Heroic Difficulty bosses necessary to access him.

Still, 9 out of 14 bosses with Heroic Difficulties is a huge leap, and in some cases, there were multiple difficulty levels within those 9, such as Yogg-Saron, Iron Council, and Flame Leviathan (Remember that Freya did not offer additional reward for killing her with 1 or 2 Keepers, only with 3, as emblems were earned from solo Keeper kills anyway). If we count the variations that offer additional rewards, we get a total of 18 unique Heroic Difficulties. Add that to the 14 Normal Difficulty encounters, and we're talking about well over 30 unique difficulties, each with varying rewards, all from one zone!

Now that we've looked closely at what Ulduar, as the first big introduction to the Heroic Difficulty concept brought us, I want to discuss how the introduction of the Difficulty Toggle going into ToC has turned the system on its head. The general consensus from the raiding community is that Ulduar was far and away the best overall raid zone in all of WotLK. The encounter design was unique, the zone was large and impactful, the bosses varied and challenging, and the risk vs reward worthwhile.

By contrast, ToC is generally considered the worst (though I personally liked it a lot since I love bosses and hate trash, but I'm talking overall opinion), and a large part of that was because the Difficulty Toggle forced raids to run the zone two or even four times per week. Luckily, Blizzard has already publicly stated they didn't like the outcome of that ToC system and won't use it again, which is why we saw the introduction of the per-encounter Difficulty Toggle in ICC.

That said, ToC is really where the decline began and was continued in ICC, and for one very simple reason: A Difficulty Toggle does not promote enough SIGNIFICANT VARIANCE in encounter design between difficulties. With very few exceptions, when I am in ToC or ICC and my raid swaps the Difficulty Toggle to Heroic, we can almost always count on the fight being mechanically identical to Normal Difficulty, except with one additional ability. Therefore, Heroic Difficulty can really be defined as "Normal+1".

This entire notion of Normal+1 is not only an insult to the raiding community that enjoys Heroic Difficulty and challenging encounters, but it's a disgraceful cop out from the encounter designers. It says the the high-end raiding community, "We have the ability to create very unique Heroic Difficulty encounters, such as Ulduar or Sartharion 3D, but instead we are choosing the easy route to save on development and balance time."

That is an over-simplification of the thought process to be sure, but it illustrates the major issue I have with the post-Difficulty Toggle raid encounter design we've seen: Heroic Difficulty no longer feels like a huge leap in difficulty due to well thought out checks and balanced or a variety of new abilities or mechanics, but instead a copy-paste of Normal plus some extra tacked-on ability and the numbers tweaked up slightly. In many cases, the previous statement isn't even hyperbole, as looking at the additions of Heroic are very minor:

• Marrowgar: +Spikes while Bone Storming
• Gunship: No new abilities.
• Saurfang: +Beasts AE slow/damage boost (irrelevant since no one gets meleed by them anyway).
• Festergut: +Malleable Goo
• Rotface: +Vile Gas
• Princes: +Shadow Prison
• Queen: Basically nothing new (she does 5% more damage per bite, which is cancelled by bite targets healing themselves).
• Valithria: +Frostbolt Volley mana drain & Valithria healers DoT
• Sindragosa: +Instability

This isn't to imply some of these Heroic Difficulties are not, in fact, difficult, but simply that the aspects or changes to all the above fights that do make them difficult in Heroic are, in fact, boring! The only fights that truly feel significantly different on Heroic from their Normal counterpart, in my opinion, are Lady Deathwhisper, Professor Putricide, and The Lich King. Even then, Deathwhisper really only adds a few minor things (an add spawns during Phase 2 which is almost irrelevant, she mind controls which is the only somewhat dangerous addition, and she isn't tauntable, which is irrelevant).

Now some people may read this and break out the nerdpads to retort the above claims about how this boss only has one new thing or that boss is much different from Normal, but in truth I know all the minor changes -- the point is they do not significantly matter to an extent that makes the Heroic Difficulty feel fresh and interesting. I know that Princes Empowered Fireballs can one-shot if not soaked and Kinetics fall faster and fire dot ticks harder and melee damage is bumped up and yadda yadda yadda. I know that Valithria adds spawn faster and Berserk is tighter and her health is higher and she takes damage over time and so on. I know Gunship adds rank up faster and captain hits harder and rockets knockback and such. Again, that isn't the point, the point is none of these changes are significant alterations from the Normal Difficulty iterations, and that makes for boring encounter design and thus boring encounter experiences.

Also do not mistake my disgust at the lazy additions to Heroic Difficulties with any sort of arrogance at the ease of defeating the encounter. I am not suggesting these Normal+1-designed encounters cannot be difficult (see Heroic Saurfang, Sindragosa, or Lich King), however, I am definitely stating that Normal+1 Heroics, in general, are no where near as challenging to defeat as Ulduar-style Hard Modes, and by now I hope you are understanding why this is the case.

Players are not asked to relearn or adapt, virtually at all, to learn a Normal+1 Heroic encounter. Instead, we go into the fight with virtually hours of practice, having done the fight, anywhere from 3-10+ times already on Normal, sometimes doubling that for 10- & 25-man raiders, and are consequently left underwhelmed when it proves nearly identical to what we had practiced save for a few minor differences.

By contrast, lets look at some of the Ulduar-style Hard Modes, and we really see how things were different:

• Flame Leviathan: Increased FL's Physical Damage, increased his Fire Damage, reduced incoming damage, added two types of adds to the fight, spawned chase beams that froze players and could be broken by friendlies, added lightning ball impacts that did AE damage relative to distance, and added fire orbs/trails.
• XT-002: Removed trash adds during fight, healed boss to full, required killing of heart (a significant DPS check of it's own right at the time), added gravity zones, and added life spark adds.
• Iron Council: Added a combination of 4-11 new abilities, depending which order killed it -- I won't list them all but the fight changed dramatically depending on the order, especially which was killed last.
• Freya: +magic damage, +physical damage, +solar flare, +ground tremor, +iron roots, and +add damage.
• Thorim: Much higher HP which caused incoming tank damage to reach crazy high levels, +sif's abilities (volley, bolt, blizzard, and nova).
• Mimiron: Doomfire, flame suppressant, emergency bots, frost bomb, etc.
• Vezax: One of the best examples of a vastly different fight between difficulties; +no mana regen, +animus, and shadow darkness.
• Yogg-Saron: Too many possible variations and changes to list, but obviously -40% damage, less a bunch of health and healing and sanity wells and death-res, plus actual immortal guardians and no destabilization all added up to insanely different fights between Normal and Heroic Difficulty.

Seriously, it's almost painful to scan through the two lists above and compare between Icecrown Citadel and Ulduar -- the difference is blatantly clear, that a great deal more effort and time went into Heroic Difficulty encounter design in Ulduar compared to ToC and ICC that came after, and it shows when doing said fights. On average, Vox spent 3-4 times as many wipes per boss to learn Ulduar Hard Modes than we did the equivalent ICC Heroic Difficulties, and that was almost entirely due to this "Normal+1" trend -- we knew virtually everything already going into ICC Heroics, and therefore had to only spend a requisite chunk of time getting used to the changes compared to the Normal. For Ulduar Hard Modes, there was no "getting used to it" -- it was, in almost every case save Hodir, an entirely new fight more often than not!

Ultimately, it comes down to a lost sense of mystery and excitement. The trends indicate that Heroic Difficulty is no longer about making fairly unique and truly challenging versions of existing encounters, using the Normal design as a "baseline", but instead Heroic Difficulty has become simply a delivery method to take every knob and turn it up 20% so Blizzard can offer the "hardcores" a way to get the better epics.

Unfortunately, such a system it is NOT FUN. Raiders are basically asked to farm a particular boss on Normal over and over, learning everything there is to know, only to finally unlock Heroic and... have almost nothing new or interesting be asked of them.

How to Solve It

Fairly simple -- keep the Difficulty Toggle in-place since Blizzard didn't like the mid-encounter activation style of doing Heroic Difficulties, but go back to the Ulduar-style of making Heroic Difficulties truly unique experiences. A good litmus test for developers or testers should be: "When attempting this boss on Heroic, are at least 40-60% of my actions different than they would be in the Normal version of this fight?" If the answer is no, change more stuff until it becomes a yes. Heroic Marrowgar or Gunship or Blood Queen or Princes or Festergut... obviously the answer is no; whereas we'd certainly get a yes from Vezax or Yogg or Mimiron or Flame Leviathan.

Heroic Difficulties were one of the better concepts to really emerge from WotLK raiding, but the design direction has taken them off course into a boring, monotone doppelganger of Normal design -- players want new and interesting, and per Ulduar, giving it to us is clearly within Blizzard's power and ability.

Ugly: Daily Heroics

Partially in the same vein as the issue of Previous-Tier Obsolescence, allowing current-tier minus 1 (hereby referred to as CurrentTier-1) gear to be acquired without any limiting mechanic, greatly reduces the accomplishment inherent in raiding/conquering content at the time it was "current", and gives everyone the chance to acquire, during a weekend of 5-man farming, what a player previously spent 5 months raiding for.

As a "catch-up" mechanic or "gear your alt" mechanic it works to allow you to run a ton of LFG Heroics, but what purpose does this actually serve? I'd argue it would serve the game better if Heroic Points (today's equivalent of Triumph Emblems) allowed purchase of CurrentTier-2 gear, rather than CurrentTier-1. That is, if CurrentTier is ICC 251/264 gear from Frost Emblems (Valor Points), CurrentTier-1 would be ToC 232/245 and CurrentTier-2 would be Ulduar 219/226.

This small change would have two huge benefits for the game:

First, it would vastly extend the shelf-life of raid content, which is (or should be) a large concern for Blizzard. It might encourage upcoming raiding Guilds to step foot in previous zones to supplement their gear intake from similar tier zones, if they so desired, but certainly wouldn't be required. For example, if my new Raiding Guild, , got together ten solid people that were all fresh players or characters and wanted to start raiding ICC, we couldn't really step into it with fresh level 80 quest gear, so we'd farm 5-mans for a few weekends to get a ton of Heroic Points. If this gave us CurrentTier-1, as in the current system, we'd be in 232/245 gear and could either raid ToC a few times to boost our loot income, or stick entirely with farming Heroic Points and step right into Normal ICC to move up to 251 gear.

Conversely, if Heroic Points gave us CurrentTier-2, we'd be in 219/226. Now it is possible, as an individual, to raid Normal ICC with CurrentTier-2, which I'll get into later, but as a full raid, it would be near impossible to succeed. However, this is a good thing, as are encouraged to experience the previous zone to obtain a bit of CurrentTier-1 drops before they can start being so successful in ICC that they can completely ignore LFG Heroics/ToC. Now this may bring out a little crying or whining from those who want the best gear possible as quickly as possible, but after a short time in the system those people will quiet down and it would be a better game for it, encouraging players to spend more time in a wider variety of raid content as a whole.

The other argument for the CurrentTier-1 system we have now, is that it allows people to quickly gear up alts and immediately begin raiding with their Guild, friends, or PuGs. That is certainly true and a nice benefit, but again there is absolutely no reason, at the current difficulty levels designed in Normal Mode raid content, that 1 out of 10 (10-man) or 2-3 out of 25 (25-man) players in a raid cannot be geared in CurrentTier-2 equipment and still be part of a successful raid. I've been a part of a few successful Normal ICC runs on two different characters (one had an average iLevel of 228, the other of 217), and while I was by far the least geared player in the raid, I had no trouble performing just as well if not better than those in similar roles.

That anecdote is not to say look how awesome I am, but simply as an example that moving to a Heroic Points CurrentTier-2 system would still allow alts, fresh guildies, or friends to jump into Normal raids without much issue, at which point gearing up is of course almost exponentially fast.

How to Solve It

As outlined above, simply force Heroic Points to only purchase CurrentTier-2 equipment. Valor Points, since they are limited to only a couple a day or via raiding and thus are very much limit-capped, can purchase CurrentTier equipment, but allowing unlimited CurrentTier-1 gear to be obtained as a solo player is a ridiculous strain on the lifespan of previous tier raid content.

Ugly: Zone-Wide % Buffs

As most of us are all too aware, Icecrown Citadel introduced the first zone-wide, passive raid buff in the form of Hellscream's Warsong & Strength of Wrynn, which like so many well-intentioned raid mechanic ideas of late, seemed solid on paper, but has turned out to be the absolute worst new mechanic introduced in the entirety of WotLK! Before I get into why I think the zone-wide buff system is so flawed, it's worth going over the intentions were from Blizzard's perspective when originally introducing the concept. Any zone-wide buff system:

1. Provides a simple method by which nearly every level 80 player that wishes to see the final raid content of the expansion can do so, regardless of skill or equipment.
2. Artificially prolongs the relevant life span of the instance by way of stretching out "pockets" of time during which any given raid group will begin and/or will end utilizing the zone.
3. Eases the restrictions on tuning for encounter developers and designers, making the task slightly more forgiving if the numbers aren't exactly on the money.

As a fairly reasonable player, I totally understand the desire for #1 from Blizzard's standpoint, in that the majority of the player base that bought the expansion and enjoys raiding in the slightest really wants to see the Lich King. I also recognize the idea that the longer a particular content patch remains relevant to the individual, the longer that individual, and thus overall a greater percentage of the subscription base, will remain around for the next content patch. Finally, simplifying the need for fine-tuning encounter design makes perfect sense from a logical standpoint, as it allows a reasonable margin of error when the next % zone-wide buff comes out.

Unfortunately, just because I, or any other WoW player, can understand the reasons for introducing a zone-wide buff, that in no way indicates an agreement that the system does more good than harm -- in fact, it has caused a huge amount of harm, and anecdotally, been one of the worst aspects of the WotLK raiding experience for my own Guild.

The primary reason a zone-wide buff system is destined to be a failure is because its very existence makes two very bold and damning statements to the WoW population as a whole:

1. Any raid content you, as a raider, are struggling with right now, is meant to be enjoyed X months from now.
2. You, as a raider, are incapable of dealing with a challenge on your own terms and therefore we have artificially created a challenge for you.

When ICC was introduced, it was clear even from the early days that the "challenge" of the raid for any halfway decent raid group, outside of Lich King, was solely meant to come from Heroic Modes, as 11/12 Normal Modes were a virtual joke to learn and defeat. That issue has been discussed ad nauseam, so I won't get into it, but suffice to say in relation to the % buff, for most decent raid groups for Normal ICC, it had no bearing. In fact, our not-even-cutting-edge Guild was able to clear the entirety of Normal ICC over three weeks prior to the first 5% buff going in, and even the first four Heroics as well.

Once into the Heroics, it was also clear that, with slight exception, the concept of "linear difficulty" was pretty much out the window. Marrowgar, which was harder than Deathwhisper and Gunship. Saurfang, which was much harder than everything before and after it until Sindragosa. Rotface, which was easier than Normal Sindragosa or Normal Putricide. Blood Queen, which was easier than almost everything save Gunship and Lady D, and certainly miles easier than the other 'end-wing' bosses.

The examples go on and on, and while certainly every raid group has differing experiences, it is very clear the intended difficulty for most Heroic ICC bosses was not planned out in terms of the dungeon as a whole...

...until you get to Heroic Lich King, which is where the real issues with the zone-wide buff begin.

Take a moment, if you will, and imagine you are given a brand new car, free of charge, taxes paid and everything. Fantastic! You grab the jingling keys out of the poor chumps hands and rev 'er up. As you begin to peel out of the parking lot, you notice the steering is extremely difficult to handle and the windows don't roll up. Also the AC is broken, the brakes are shoddy at best, and you can't change out of second gear.

Slightly perturbed, you call up the gifter and ask what the hell is up, and he kindly admits, "Yes, there are a few issues, and we can get those fixed soon enough. The brakes can be repaired next week (again no charge to you!), and the AC in a month, and the rest when I've saved up for a while after that."

Well, you can't look a gift horse in the mouth, after all everything works in a crude manner, so you get what little use you can out of it, but as days turn into weeks, and weeks into months, by the time everything that was originally wrong with the car is fixed and it drives just as the manufacturer originally intended, it's too late, as you're sick of the bullshit you put up with just to get to this point of square one.

That is, in essence, exactly how the zone-wide buff works -- or in this case, fails to work. Any given raid group starts out with 0% like the rest of us and conquers as much of the zone as they are capable. As time passes and the buff increases, the raid group clears a bit more until eventually they hit a wall -- a particular encounter that just gives them trouble. So, they continue on week after week, clearing the (now easy) stuff prior to the wall, and spending time trying to bypass said wall. Eventually, the % buff increases again and again, and finally, after however many weeks or months pressed up against the wall, they are able to defeat it and move on.

Did the raid group magically improve? Did all their hard work and practice pay off and give them the satisfaction of a properly strategized and executed kill? Of course not! After a finite length of time practicing, which is different for every player and raid group, but certainly quantifiable, the part of the process in which learning occurs tapers off, after which only repetition and luck can improve performance. However, and here's the real kicker -- unbeknownst to the raid, for their particular situation (players, raid makeup, gear, experience, schedule, etc), the wall they had been up against for X weeks in a row was not possible for them to defeat prior to a certain zone-wide %! Now, the raid has defeated said wall, but can feel no sense of accomplishment because a third, artificial entity, completely outside of their control, deemed it the appropriate time for them to win. They did nothing new to rise to the challenge, and now that they have hindsight, at best they feel angry and disappointed at all the energy wasted bashing up against this wall, not knowing victory was impossible.

This is the exact scenario the zone-wide buff introduced for my own Guild with Heroic Lich King.

Before I get into more specifics, let me quickly dispel the oh-so-clever retort many people will have to these complaints: "No one is forcing you to use the buff, you can turn it off if you want a tougher challenge, lol!" First: Go fuck yourself. Second: That is a retarded solution and we both know it. No one in their right mind is going to disable the buff, because there is no point. When was the last time you saw a front-page post by Paragon or Premonition of, "World First HLK, 0% Raid Wide Buff"? That's right, never, because ignoring something that inherently makes the raid stronger goes against the purpose of the game -- if there is a better weapon, you'll use it. If there is a better strategy, you'll use it. And, if there is a better buff, you'll take it. The buff should not exist -- otherwise, if it is available, everyone will use it. Period.

Now, without any sense of arrogance, I want to acknowledge that I think Vox Immortalis is a fairly high-end Guild in terms of our raiding prowess, strategic sense, and guild mentality. We're not the best of the best, but certainly within the upper percentiles I'd wager. With some guilds and raids still struggling with many Normal modes nowadays, even with 25%+ buffs, it should be clear, I hope, that when I talk about the relative difficulty of Heroic Lich King, I have the knowledge and experience to back it up.

Anyway, for Vox, we first reached HLK when the zone-wide buff was at 10%. Like any raid-oriented Guild, we pushed hard, hour after hour, wipe after wipe, refining our strategies over and over, trying to work out this problem or that issue into the necessary orchestral balance seemingly required for this assrape of a fight. A couple more weeks passed and we got 15%, and still no reasonable progress. We'd catch short glimpses of the later stages of the fight, but nothing substantial, and as I said, certainly not for lack of trying or execution.

Four more weeks after, we saw 20% hit, and made a drastic move that went against all our knowledge, experience, and research about the requirements for the fight, and tried using three healers instead of two. Low and behold, almost immediately we got solidly into the final phase... only to wipe to Berserk some 45 seconds later. Fuck, seriously?! We've spent hundreds of wipes at 10, 15, and now 20% buffs, only to find out that, even if we use a two healer setup as we'd been doing all along, it willstill be virtually impossible to beat the Berserk timer prior to at 25% raid buff? Wow Blizzard, sure glad we spent all that time doing fuck all progressively, not knowing we were only practicing at buff percentages where a win was impossible.

Knowing what I know now, I would've in an instant stopped all progress attempts on HLK until well into the 20% buff, such that all actual learning and practice would be done in an environment that actually resembles one where victory is possible and remotely intended! Instead, we're spending months slamming our cocks in the door jam because we have no way of knowing victory is mathematically impossible at those buff percentages. Fun! Real fucking fun...

Ultimately, the problem boils down to this: In an environment where a raid-wide buff exists, for the vast majority of raid groups, there will be that "brick wall" encounter where the challenge is beyond the capability of the group for any number of reasons. In our case, a 10-Strict raid simply cannot get the equipment capable of putting out the required DPS to beat HLK's Berserk timer prior to about 20%, and even then, I'd wager 20% would require a fairly stacked raid makeup. The point is, there is no sign on the floor when you enter LK's throne that says, "By the way, if you're in 264 gear at best, don't even bother fighting me until late May or early June at the earliest, or you're wasting your time. kthxbai" The system inherently creates artificial challenge by way of almost exponentially increasing relative player power, since 5% DPS increase isn't just 5%, but actually more since it allows this val'kyr to die faster or that abomination to go down sooner or this flight phase to be skipped or what have you.

Unfortunately, as illustrated in this lovely and scientific graph, this increase in power from the raid-buff, when faced with said brick wall element, also causes a severe drop in overall enjoyment -- precisely the opposite of what should be occurring:

Until the time in which the raid-wide buff reaches the critical mass point, any given raid group that isn't capable of clearing the entirety of the content (which is the vast majority), is likely to only continue to enjoy themselves for a short while, after which the brick wall effect comes into play and the are stuck until they are suddenly 5% more powerful.

Now, this is not meant to imply that HLK (or any other fight that may be another raid's brick wall) is inherently too difficult; as I said before, most of the fights in ICC were far too easy in my opinion (primarily due to the Normal+1 issue). Instead, the complaint is that the zone-wide buff mechanic does not encourage players to be successful on their own, to rise up to a specific challenge, with the knowledge that the challenge is doable, and to eventually win or die trying.

It's fairly common knowledge by now I think that very quickly after HLK was first accessed by the top Guilds, Blizzard hot fixed his health pool by adding ~23% more health than his original incarnation. If that doesn't scream "artificial prolonging" of the content life span, I don't know what does. Clearly, especially in the case of HLK, it was decided that the "intended" time to kill 10-man HLK was around the 25-30% mark, though even then it's difficult to assume that much planning went into it. Blizzard stated at the 2010 BlizzCon that they have never had an in-house QA raid group capable of killing the most challenging bosses of the era. Therefore, it should come to no surprise that the draw of an "easy out" solution to balance was to tune up and throw in an artificial percentage increase to level the playing field to the point where the encounter was originally intended, SIX GODDAMN MONTHS AFTER IT WAS AVAILABLE!

I know some will read this and think of whiny drivel, that surely everything is "doable" when it is available, no matter the percentage buff, but as I said, I assure you no 264-raid in the world would see a 10-man HLK kill prior to 15% and I'd wager probably not one before 20% without stacking. The numbers just don't add up. And if you think I'm off, the numbers of the community as a whole tend to agree -- as of this writing, with the 25% buff available, only 203 Guilds have killed HLK 25, or 0.35%. Hell, even 10-man HLK has only been killed by 1.6% of 25-man Guilds. I think it is clear this encounter was "designed" for the 30% mark, as previously mentioned.

Given that pretty strong conclusion then, what does it say about the flaws in the raid-wide buff mechanic? It's a fraud -- it gives the ILLUSION of progress, of learning, of power, without any of the inherent benefit. It's just a way to let any given raid eventually reach a brick wall that, had the buff not existed and the encounters been tuned properly in the first place, the same raid would've reached anyway and very likely passed already (since presumably the encounter was intended for a higher % than when they brick walled).

The point is it's not about HLK, that is just the best example and the one I'm familiar with -- it's about this extremely fucked out system that needs to disappear entirely in order to bring back true challenge in raids and to allow players to feel accomplished. If a raid-wide buff is seen in any future Cataclysm raids, the first thing that will pop into everyone's head is, "Are we wasting our time right now?" That is a sad mindset to be in during the normally enjoyable time that is WoW raiding.

Breaking a Golden Rule

For over 13 years now, since the release of Ultima Online and even prior through MUDs, MMOs have maintained a set of particular tenets: rules and laws by which both the game and the players must abide. Much like sports, war, or law, MMOs have always held onto these rules, in one form or another. Even if a particular rule is bent or broken circumstantially, the MMO community as a whole recognizes their existence.

One such fundamental canon that spans the paradigm of the MMO genre, is so fundamental as to be virtually forgotten by most involved, and it consists of a simple formula:

Character Development + Iteration + Circumstance = Success

In other words, throughout any MMO, in a PvE environment, victory by the player can be accomplished once the above three fundamental components are combined. Character development umbrellas over things such as character level, equipment, skills, and talents. Iteration includes things like devising a strategy, practicing said strategy, learning from said practice, and revising, iteratively, the perfect strategy. Finally, circumstance includes environment, party composition, and available effects such as buffs, abilities, and the like.

In order to defeat any challenge, the sum of all three aggregate measures must meet or exceed the equivalent values required to succeed at that particular challenge. Of course, for every game and every situation within that game, these aggregations differ as do the required totals for success. If we take an example from WoW, such as Ragnaros, we might get a formula such as:

All Characters Max Level & All Skills/Spell Ranks Max Level & 90% of Equipment Epic Quality [Character Development]
+
10 Hours of Practice & Arced Tank/Knockback into Lava Setup & Sons Bunch and AE Strategy [Iteration]
+
2 Fire Resist Tanks & 8 Healers & ~50% Melee/50% Ranged DPS [Circumstance]
=
$Profit!

Obviously these are fairly broad statements, but certainly when developing an encounter, the decisions about what is required can't be too specific for a variety of reasons. Moreover, as mentioned, while the value required to meet the level of "success" remains the same, there are certainly many possible combinations between the three aggregate values to get there. For our Ragnaros example, perhaps we could do it with only 7 hours of practice if we added 2 more healers, or maybe we have only a raid with 80% Melee DPS, so we have to bump the practice component up to 15 or 20 hours.

The point is, this rule exists for every encounter in WoW, as it has for Evequest and Ultima Online and all the rest, whether you noticed it or not. This is a rule that players have come to rely on to remain true and thus far, developers have withheld that tenet -- until along came the zone-wide % buff which threw this golden rule right out the window.

The reason this rule has worked so well for so long and through so many great games up until now, should be no great mystery. MMOs, especially ones like WoW that tack on the -RPG part as well, revolve heavily around the simple idea that: as a player plays more and invests more energy, her character, and by extension her own prowess as a player as well, will improve. Therefore, the next logical step is that if a challenge is found such as a raid mob, if a player meets all the necessary requirements (gear, practice, composition, strategy, buffs, etc), that player can rest assured knowing that victory is possible and even probable in the near future. In other words -- once all requirements are met, only random luck will prevent a player from succeeding.

However, with a raid-wide buff system, this entire formula gets thrown out and it turns the entire experience to shit. Before, a raid would know that if they built the right raid (circumstance) and put in the right amount of practice (iteration) and had their shit together (char. development), that they could in fact defeat Alone in the Darkness, or Kael'thas, or Nefarion, or Avatar of War, or Nagefen, or any other MMO PvE encounter! Now, as soon as a raid is presented with a raid-wide buff, they know that, no matter if they meet what would normally be all the required components for success, it is entirely possible, and in some cases even probable, that success will be out of their reach.

Now, some might argue that all it takes to prevent such a situation is to tune all raid encounters where a raid-wide buff exists to a much lower than max percentage. For example, if all Normal ICC bosses were tuned to be defeated at 10% and all Heroic ICC bosses at 15%, while the maximum buff will eventually still reach 30%.

Unfortunately, this solution is only a messy bandaid and still leaves the oozing wound underneath. The only way such a solution would have any benefit on the current situation we see with ICC raid-wide buffs, is if Blizzard made it publicly known that all encounters where raid-wide buffs exist, are designed to be defeated at the 0%, no buff stage (similar to all previous raid content). This may alleviate feelings in raiders that, in the previous ICC-style system, knew the content was tuned for an unattainable level from that which they currently resided in (e.g. tuned for 25% while being at the 10% level). However, the mere existence of the raid-wide buff still creates a problem in that it allows lazy encounter development and tuning, and consciously or subconsciously, the player base will latch onto that. Even if it is stated that the content was designed for 0%, for all the players know, numbers were tweaked higher so it is next to impossible until 10 or 15% anyway, but for Blizzard it keeps the content fresh longer which is a winning situation.

Ultimately, the issue with a raid-wide buff system of any kind, is the same problem Blizzard fixed when preventing all world-wide buffs from working in raid zones: it took away control of the situation from one side of the pendulum. In the case of removing Ony Head/ZG-style World Buffs from raids, players were using them to gain advantages in raids, which makes sense, but since Blizzard designed encounters for a specific level of tuning (see the golden rule formula above), these buffs were causing Blizzard to lose their half of the control of the situation (the difficulty/tuning). In the case of raid-wide buffs, that same control is being lost, except this time the losing party is the player base. Raid-wide buffs remove the control from the player to determine her own fate in terms of success or failure, and give it to an autonomous, third-party entity.

While many players will praise the raid-wide buff for allowing them to see content they would not have normally been given access to, in truth all it does is lower the bar for communal learning. Already Normal difficulty raids are becoming ridiculously easy compared to many previous "normal" difficulties (BWL, BT, Sunwell, Ulduar, etc). With the exception of the Lich King, which even in normal is tuned quite high relative to the rest of the zone, any half decent raid group would, given enough time to finish character development and iteration, be capable of clearing Normal ICC. Yet it seems the trend from Blizzard is not to encourage the player base to learn or work on self-improvement (a fucking cornerstone of the MMO genre, mind you), but instead to hand victory to the player base on a silver platter -- and no surprise some people eat it up.

Moreover, if the goal for Blizzard is to allow all the players to see the content, then all that is required is to set the bar low for that content -- tune all Normal ICC encounters such that they are equivalent in difficulty for a raid with 30% buff, except of course don't have the buff exist at all.

At some point, a line in the sand must be drawn about what minimum level of skill or time or commitment or other measurement must be met by any given player in order to be successful at the very high-end of the game. And if raiding is to have any kind of meaningful or fun future, that line must exclude all forms of raid-wide buffs.

How to Solve It

Two options here and for the record, for the sake of the community as a whole and to continue to promote some semblance of self-accountability and self-improvement, I strongly prefer option #1:

1. Never use a raid-wide % buff again. Balance difficulty properly in the first place (you've done it time and again before, even in WotLK: see Ulduar or Anub'arak). Normal modes should be as advertised -- the easy way to allow the masses to see all the content. Heroic should be for the upper echelon to have a challenge.
2. If you (Blizzard) insist on them as a mechanic worth keeping, then use raid-wide % buffs for Normal Difficulty only. That means, no matter the percentage or time passed, as soon as a Raid enters a boss chamber with the Heroic Flag set, the buff goes away entirely. It can remain on for trash if necessary, but high-end raiders (the type that enjoy Heroics), do it for the challenge and therefore want a challenge designed for them now, not something that is impossible now and a challenge 3 months from now.