I just got through watching a video on the Gunship Battle encounter in the upcoming Icecrown Citadel, and I have to say I'm incredibly impressed with how it looks so far. It has some very innovative mechanics involved, and similar to the Twins fight in ToC, feels a lot like a fight that's there mainly to play around. The inclusion of jetpacks, the requirement to split focus between many different (but not instagib) damage sources, to prioritize targets and who's doing what...
This is the precise sort of fight that was missing in Ulduar and ToC, requiring everyone to be paying attention and looking out for themselves, but not to the point where they get instagibbed if they make a mistake (but if they make several in quick succession, they likely will die). Beyond that, the fight has motivation behind it, fighting off the intrusion of enemy faction as you battle for control of the citadel's access rampart, instead of just gibbing these random monsters, demons, undead, or PMSing gladiators that the Argent Crusader brought in to try to kill off as much of their army as possible. It's a fight I can get involved in and have fun with in addition to the challenge.
Sindragosa's fight looks similarly interesting, a true evolution of the Sapphiron fight. Instead of a stack Frost Breath that kills anything it touches, now it moves around (and there's a lot more of them), doesn't hit as hard, but still needs to be avoided. On top of that, the raid chooses when the iceblocks are removed (as they have to kill them). Lastly, the Unstable Magic mechanic sounds like a very interesting way for a caster to go out in a streak of glory before getting instagibbed by a 40k+ arcane bomb. Mages, of course, can simply Ice Block out of it, though >.>
Then on the other side there's the Lord Marrowgar encounter. Of the 5 fights I've seen in ICC to date, this one looks by far to be the most dull, basically a tank and spank with ridiculously slow lines of fire to avoid (they don't even follow you like Archi's did), spears of ice to kill, and the same annoying whirlwind of death kite that Skadi in Utgarde Pinnacle has, and that's pretty much the entire fight. Not terribly innovative or engaging.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
On Boss Design and Mechanics
I read an interesting post on the WoW forums called Lets Talk About Modern Boss Design, the first of a 3-part series focused on encounter design and how WotLK has performed in that area thus far. I was planning on writing a post about this anyway, but last night's heroic Anub'Arak really amplified my feelings on it.
For those unfamiliar with the Anub'Arak fight on heroic, it's a 3-phase fight, with the first two running almost identically to the regular version, excepting that you are limited to 6 of the frost orbs (thus giving the fight an effective soft enrage for those first 2 phases). The only really important difference in the first two phases is that pairs of adds spawn instead of lone ones, and the adds gain a new ability called Shadow Strike, which is essentially a 4-second-cast (hasted to 2-seconds if there are two of them close together) random target shadowstep which must either be interrupted or the raid member targeted will be instagibbed. This isn't terrible unruly to deal with, as the adds are still stunnable (and are undead, so our prot paladin offtank can keep them shut down with Holy Wrath), there are never more than two up at a time, and they always cast Shadow Strike in unison.
Phase 3 is where my irritate begins. Anub'Arak casts an aura called Leeching Swarm that drains 20% of each raid member's current health per second (healing Anub for 50% of the damage done) for the remainder of the fight. This isn't so bad, as once people get down around 5k HP or so, the swarm doesn't hit hard and Anub doesn't heal much. Anub continues to cast Penetrating Cold (which ticks for 6k on heroic), but it's not terribly difficult to heal through. What is a problem is that the burrower adds continue to spawn. This leaves the raid with two choices: continue tanking and killing the adds, or tank them off the ice until they borrow.
If we choose the former, we lose a minimum of 2 of our dpsers, usually 3, to keep the adds under control. This more than doubles the amount of time necessary to kill Anub, and often results in a wipe purely because the healers just flat can't keep up the necessary output for that long.
If we choose the latter (and this is where my peeve is), the major worry is keeping up to 4 adds at a time interrupted on Shadow Strikes. This means that the off tank needs to watch for new adds and adds unburrowing, maintain aggro on all the current ones against the massive output by the healers and splash damage by the dps, and still manage to get a Holy Wrath off within a very short cast time every time one of them tries to gib a raid member.
This falls back to the point made in the post above: unmanageable precision. Yogg-Saron was another example of this, with 3-6 mobs up, each of which casting an AoE spell that needs to be interrupted, and unlike Anub'Arak's adds, Yogg's aren't undead for an easy Holy Wrath stun.
Blizzard has gotten far to fixed on the idea of RNG difficulty. There's a massive different between a fight that is complex and requires precision and focus to succeed and a fight in which you simply have to get lucky to win.
In the category of the former, Vashj, Archimonde (excluding his fear), Gorefiend, Val'kyr Twins, and Mimiron are awesome examples. They require precision and focus, demanding the highest of all or random members of the raid, but the potential for an RNG wipe is very very low.
Fights such as Faction Champions, Gormok, Freya, Anub'Arak, Yogg-Saron, and Steelbreaker are poster childs of the second category, though. These fights either require raid members to be watching 4+ mobs simultaneously for a split-second reaction or to be able to react to incoming damage in literally the twitch level of response times. These fights are difficult, but for all of the wrong reasons. They are difficult because they push past the actual limit of human attention or reaction time, and thus rely as much on luck as skill. A fight in which a raid that has had the boss on farm for months can still wipe up just because they got a bad string of RNG is a terrible fight at it's core.
This brings me to another peeve: PvP in PvE. The Faction Champions fight makes perfect sense in ToC from a lore standpoint, and the entire instance is effectively a giant arena (don't get me started on the 'OMG the Lich King! Let's ignore him and hold a gladiatorial arena on his doorstep instead!' lore failure). However, I'd estimate that around 80% of PvE raiders, especially progression raiders, are among the crowd that would rather leave the PvPing to the arena folk and stick with their boss fights. Blizz, twice in two expansions, has gotten the brilliant idea to force these PvEers to PvP in their instances, though. Back in BC, Dalrissa was one of the least popular fights of the entire expansion, and Faction Champs likely would be for WotLK if Occulus wasn't such a nightmare.
Beyond that, the fight seems to be a hybrid of the worst parts of PvP and PvE. The mobs have PvP crowd-control limitations and have many of the abilities and effects that PvPers of those class regularly use, but they also a damage output roughly equal to a geared PvPers against a zero resilience target, the base 115% move speed of normal NPCs (actually, I believe their speed is closer to 130%), a gang mentality on dps (often resulting in instagibs of raid members, the shaman and mage being primary culprits of this), and roughly 10 times the HP of a normal player.
What this leads to is that you need more healers than normal, and those healers have to have a ridiculously quick reaction time to saving people, and they need to maintain that reaction time for the entire fight. The shaman can walk up to someone and nuke them for 30k damage in under 1.5 seconds, the mage can do the same thing in less than a second from 30 yards away, the warrior can do a similar level of damage in AoE with Bladestorm, and the rogue can instagib a clothie through a Shadowstep before anyone even notices he moved. These are pure RNG deaths. We'll have weeks in which we get a nearly perfect composition for the fight and down it without any problem, and then we'll have weeks with a terrible composition that make us feel like we're slamming our face into a brick wall.
Blizzard needs to move back to the complex and precise but manageable fights, instead of making success based on RNG (especially in an instance that gives rewards for less wipes). They also need to get rid of PvP fights in PvE. As a dpser, if I wanted to tank, I'd have spec'd for it. Facing a fight that I, as a dpser, need to output my maximum as well as blow every cooldown I have to stay alive if I get focused...well, it's just plain not fun, and our healers like it even less. Challenging the raid by making them need to look out for their own survival: ok. Challenging the raid by putting random invisible guillotines peppered about the area: not ok.
Anyway, enough ranting for me.
For those unfamiliar with the Anub'Arak fight on heroic, it's a 3-phase fight, with the first two running almost identically to the regular version, excepting that you are limited to 6 of the frost orbs (thus giving the fight an effective soft enrage for those first 2 phases). The only really important difference in the first two phases is that pairs of adds spawn instead of lone ones, and the adds gain a new ability called Shadow Strike, which is essentially a 4-second-cast (hasted to 2-seconds if there are two of them close together) random target shadowstep which must either be interrupted or the raid member targeted will be instagibbed. This isn't terrible unruly to deal with, as the adds are still stunnable (and are undead, so our prot paladin offtank can keep them shut down with Holy Wrath), there are never more than two up at a time, and they always cast Shadow Strike in unison.
Phase 3 is where my irritate begins. Anub'Arak casts an aura called Leeching Swarm that drains 20% of each raid member's current health per second (healing Anub for 50% of the damage done) for the remainder of the fight. This isn't so bad, as once people get down around 5k HP or so, the swarm doesn't hit hard and Anub doesn't heal much. Anub continues to cast Penetrating Cold (which ticks for 6k on heroic), but it's not terribly difficult to heal through. What is a problem is that the burrower adds continue to spawn. This leaves the raid with two choices: continue tanking and killing the adds, or tank them off the ice until they borrow.
If we choose the former, we lose a minimum of 2 of our dpsers, usually 3, to keep the adds under control. This more than doubles the amount of time necessary to kill Anub, and often results in a wipe purely because the healers just flat can't keep up the necessary output for that long.
If we choose the latter (and this is where my peeve is), the major worry is keeping up to 4 adds at a time interrupted on Shadow Strikes. This means that the off tank needs to watch for new adds and adds unburrowing, maintain aggro on all the current ones against the massive output by the healers and splash damage by the dps, and still manage to get a Holy Wrath off within a very short cast time every time one of them tries to gib a raid member.
This falls back to the point made in the post above: unmanageable precision. Yogg-Saron was another example of this, with 3-6 mobs up, each of which casting an AoE spell that needs to be interrupted, and unlike Anub'Arak's adds, Yogg's aren't undead for an easy Holy Wrath stun.
Blizzard has gotten far to fixed on the idea of RNG difficulty. There's a massive different between a fight that is complex and requires precision and focus to succeed and a fight in which you simply have to get lucky to win.
In the category of the former, Vashj, Archimonde (excluding his fear), Gorefiend, Val'kyr Twins, and Mimiron are awesome examples. They require precision and focus, demanding the highest of all or random members of the raid, but the potential for an RNG wipe is very very low.
Fights such as Faction Champions, Gormok, Freya, Anub'Arak, Yogg-Saron, and Steelbreaker are poster childs of the second category, though. These fights either require raid members to be watching 4+ mobs simultaneously for a split-second reaction or to be able to react to incoming damage in literally the twitch level of response times. These fights are difficult, but for all of the wrong reasons. They are difficult because they push past the actual limit of human attention or reaction time, and thus rely as much on luck as skill. A fight in which a raid that has had the boss on farm for months can still wipe up just because they got a bad string of RNG is a terrible fight at it's core.
This brings me to another peeve: PvP in PvE. The Faction Champions fight makes perfect sense in ToC from a lore standpoint, and the entire instance is effectively a giant arena (don't get me started on the 'OMG the Lich King! Let's ignore him and hold a gladiatorial arena on his doorstep instead!' lore failure). However, I'd estimate that around 80% of PvE raiders, especially progression raiders, are among the crowd that would rather leave the PvPing to the arena folk and stick with their boss fights. Blizz, twice in two expansions, has gotten the brilliant idea to force these PvEers to PvP in their instances, though. Back in BC, Dalrissa was one of the least popular fights of the entire expansion, and Faction Champs likely would be for WotLK if Occulus wasn't such a nightmare.
Beyond that, the fight seems to be a hybrid of the worst parts of PvP and PvE. The mobs have PvP crowd-control limitations and have many of the abilities and effects that PvPers of those class regularly use, but they also a damage output roughly equal to a geared PvPers against a zero resilience target, the base 115% move speed of normal NPCs (actually, I believe their speed is closer to 130%), a gang mentality on dps (often resulting in instagibs of raid members, the shaman and mage being primary culprits of this), and roughly 10 times the HP of a normal player.
What this leads to is that you need more healers than normal, and those healers have to have a ridiculously quick reaction time to saving people, and they need to maintain that reaction time for the entire fight. The shaman can walk up to someone and nuke them for 30k damage in under 1.5 seconds, the mage can do the same thing in less than a second from 30 yards away, the warrior can do a similar level of damage in AoE with Bladestorm, and the rogue can instagib a clothie through a Shadowstep before anyone even notices he moved. These are pure RNG deaths. We'll have weeks in which we get a nearly perfect composition for the fight and down it without any problem, and then we'll have weeks with a terrible composition that make us feel like we're slamming our face into a brick wall.
Blizzard needs to move back to the complex and precise but manageable fights, instead of making success based on RNG (especially in an instance that gives rewards for less wipes). They also need to get rid of PvP fights in PvE. As a dpser, if I wanted to tank, I'd have spec'd for it. Facing a fight that I, as a dpser, need to output my maximum as well as blow every cooldown I have to stay alive if I get focused...well, it's just plain not fun, and our healers like it even less. Challenging the raid by making them need to look out for their own survival: ok. Challenging the raid by putting random invisible guillotines peppered about the area: not ok.
Anyway, enough ranting for me.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Hello World! (and Raid Difficulty)
Ah, blogging. That wonderful combination of private contemplation and public espousement.
The most recent article on the Blessing of Kings blog entitled On Difficulty and Guilds happens to be the driving influence for me to create this blog and vent my opinions somewhere other than the cesspool of the WoW forums. That post (and the post on Larisa's The Pink Pigtail Inn, Why I Don't Want to Hear Another 'WoW is Too Easy' Statement, that spawned it) have caught my eye for possessing an uncommon alacrity of vision into the issues facing WoW in the current day.
In particular, the idea that guilds can be broken down into different 'tiers', if you will, or castes, and the health of the game judged based on the size and activity of those castes. I've pasted in a portion of Coriel's post on BoK below to illustrate what is meant by this (my apologies in advance to Coriel if I've overstepped):
Now, his particular point in the post can be summed up with the following quote:
This in particular is the point that drove me to start blogging my opinions on the WoW world and it's social climate. I believe that in part this is a bit misguided. In reality what is causing the issue is not the size of the step between normal and heroic (that step is meant to be a deterrent against 'casual' raiders), but the slope before it. The difference in difficulty over the course of an instance has become to shallow in slope.
For example, in Ulduar, Flame Leviathan is one of the easiest boss fights I've ever seen. Ignis, XT, Razorscale, Kologarn, Auriaya, and arguably Iron Council (And Vezax, come to think of it), though, are all roughly the same level of difficulty. There's no scaling, no slope. Ulduar is subdivided into roughly 4 'zones' of difficulty:
Free Loot - Flame Leviathan (and arguably Ignis)
Mild - Ignis, Razorscale, XT, Kologarn, Auriaya, Iron Council, Vezax
Moderate - Hodir, Freya, Thorim, Mimiron
Hard - Yogg
Mimiron slightly bridges the gap between Moderate and Hard, and Vezax and IC slightly bridge the gap between Mild and Moderate, but for the most part, there's no scaling of difficulty. The instance is roughly the same level of difficulty until you reach the Keepers, where it increases a bit but is relatively the same between each, then increases again noticeably for Yogg.
In contrast, Naxx, while overall a remarkably easy instance, has the scaling desired (as well as increasing gear quality to match). The first boss of each wing is easy to the point of a brand new group with only moderate knowledge of the mechanics can likely defeat the encounter with not more than 1-2 wipes, if any (Patchwerk being the exception here). The middle bosses often are more tests of coordination than anything else and are somewhat more difficult, but still easily defeatable. The final boss, though, often has mechanics that the group must be watching carefully for to avoid wipes, increasing the overall difficulty. In other words, the final bosses of each wing felt 'final'. Once a raid got beyond all 4 of the wings, though, they entered the Frostwing Lair, where the difficult took another jump in Sapphiron, and yet another in KT.
This is the instance design I think is lacking in the latest tiers. Ulduar I've already explained, but it's even more apparent in ToC. On normal mode, Northrend Beasts is a remarkeably easy fight, Jaraxxus is a mildly easy fight, Faction Champs (until the recent nerf) was quite difficult, and now is still moderate in difficulty, Twins are a flat playplace, and Anub is mild to moderate.
In ToGC, Northrend Beasts are extremely difficult, arguably the second or third most difficult of the five encounters in the instance, serving as a gear check. Jaraxxus serves as a dps responsiveness check, but once the dps can respond quickly enough to zerg the portals and volcanoes down in time, is barely more difficult than normal mode. Faction Champs butts heads with Northrend Beasts for the second place difficulty spot, along with having an amazing amount of RNG difficulty. Twins, just as in normal mode, are merely a playplace, with hardly any difficulty involved. Anub is a straight and sudden cliff in difficulty, requiring a great deal more focus and performance from the guild. In essence, ToC is a rollercoaster of difficulty where Ulduar is a very shallow staircase.
They should instead be ramps. T6 was a remarkable example of this, especially Black Temple. In both T6 instances, the first boss, while relatively difficult, was still fairly mild. From there, though, the instance increased in difficulty in an almost linear pattern, with each boss being noticeably but not unreasonably more difficult than the prior boss. It wasn't unexpected for a raid to get lodged at a boss part-way through the instance for weeks or even months on end as their gear and skill grew to finally be able to overcome a boss, much like an incoming tide slowly overtaking a beach.
WotLK raids have lacked this very important quality. In ToGC (and especially ToC), if you can get past Beasts, you can get to Anub without much issue. In Ulduar, if you can get past Ignis or XT, you can get all the way to the Keepers (and likely even Yogg). Blizzard has reverted to a mindset wherein the intermediate bosses in an instance should be interchangeable in difficulty, with only the final boss being an increase, and I believe that this specifically has resulted in a large amount of the 'WoW is too easy' cries of late.
However, I agree wholeheartedly with Larisa's point in the above linked post: if you've not cleared hardmodes, you've no business even thinking that WoW is too easy, much less spamming the forums with it. I've done Anub'Arak in ToGC, and I can say quite honestly that while it's certainly doable, it's not a walk in the park by a long shot.
I'd also like to point out two posts that caught my (and many others') attention on the Dungeons and Raids forums. I'll be discussing the points brought up in them in my next post:
Lets Talk About Modern Boss Design
The Price of Accessibility in Raiding
The most recent article on the Blessing of Kings blog entitled On Difficulty and Guilds happens to be the driving influence for me to create this blog and vent my opinions somewhere other than the cesspool of the WoW forums. That post (and the post on Larisa's The Pink Pigtail Inn, Why I Don't Want to Hear Another 'WoW is Too Easy' Statement, that spawned it) have caught my eye for possessing an uncommon alacrity of vision into the issues facing WoW in the current day.
In particular, the idea that guilds can be broken down into different 'tiers', if you will, or castes, and the health of the game judged based on the size and activity of those castes. I've pasted in a portion of Coriel's post on BoK below to illustrate what is meant by this (my apologies in advance to Coriel if I've overstepped):
In Wrath, I think PvE guilds can be categorized as follows (for raiding purposes). All numbers are approximate:
Royalty - The two hundred guilds which can clear everything, including Trial of the Grand Crusader.
The Aristocracy - The three thousand guilds which can defeat at least one boss in TotGC--or some Ulduar Keeper hard modes--and thus are working their way through hard modes.
The Gentry - The ten thousand guilds which can defeat regular Trial of the Crusader, but haven't been able to advance into the hard modes.
The Bourgeoisie - The next ten thousand guilds which are working their way through Trial of the Crusader. Also includes those guilds working on Naxxramas and Ulduar. Basically any guild that is still working on normal difficulty content.
The Proletariat - Our beloved casuals. All the other guilds which are levelling or making alts or doing 5-mans, and haven't really gotten into raiding yet.
Now, his particular point in the post can be summed up with the following quote:
The real problem is that the Gentry is currently too large. Too many guilds are in that gap between hard modes and regular modes. It needs to be shrunk from both ends. The difficulty of the first two bosses in TotGC should be reduced a little bit, and the difficulty of the last two bosses in TotC should be increased a little bit. That should create a more gradual path.
This in particular is the point that drove me to start blogging my opinions on the WoW world and it's social climate. I believe that in part this is a bit misguided. In reality what is causing the issue is not the size of the step between normal and heroic (that step is meant to be a deterrent against 'casual' raiders), but the slope before it. The difference in difficulty over the course of an instance has become to shallow in slope.
For example, in Ulduar, Flame Leviathan is one of the easiest boss fights I've ever seen. Ignis, XT, Razorscale, Kologarn, Auriaya, and arguably Iron Council (And Vezax, come to think of it), though, are all roughly the same level of difficulty. There's no scaling, no slope. Ulduar is subdivided into roughly 4 'zones' of difficulty:
Free Loot - Flame Leviathan (and arguably Ignis)
Mild - Ignis, Razorscale, XT, Kologarn, Auriaya, Iron Council, Vezax
Moderate - Hodir, Freya, Thorim, Mimiron
Hard - Yogg
Mimiron slightly bridges the gap between Moderate and Hard, and Vezax and IC slightly bridge the gap between Mild and Moderate, but for the most part, there's no scaling of difficulty. The instance is roughly the same level of difficulty until you reach the Keepers, where it increases a bit but is relatively the same between each, then increases again noticeably for Yogg.
In contrast, Naxx, while overall a remarkably easy instance, has the scaling desired (as well as increasing gear quality to match). The first boss of each wing is easy to the point of a brand new group with only moderate knowledge of the mechanics can likely defeat the encounter with not more than 1-2 wipes, if any (Patchwerk being the exception here). The middle bosses often are more tests of coordination than anything else and are somewhat more difficult, but still easily defeatable. The final boss, though, often has mechanics that the group must be watching carefully for to avoid wipes, increasing the overall difficulty. In other words, the final bosses of each wing felt 'final'. Once a raid got beyond all 4 of the wings, though, they entered the Frostwing Lair, where the difficult took another jump in Sapphiron, and yet another in KT.
This is the instance design I think is lacking in the latest tiers. Ulduar I've already explained, but it's even more apparent in ToC. On normal mode, Northrend Beasts is a remarkeably easy fight, Jaraxxus is a mildly easy fight, Faction Champs (until the recent nerf) was quite difficult, and now is still moderate in difficulty, Twins are a flat playplace, and Anub is mild to moderate.
In ToGC, Northrend Beasts are extremely difficult, arguably the second or third most difficult of the five encounters in the instance, serving as a gear check. Jaraxxus serves as a dps responsiveness check, but once the dps can respond quickly enough to zerg the portals and volcanoes down in time, is barely more difficult than normal mode. Faction Champs butts heads with Northrend Beasts for the second place difficulty spot, along with having an amazing amount of RNG difficulty. Twins, just as in normal mode, are merely a playplace, with hardly any difficulty involved. Anub is a straight and sudden cliff in difficulty, requiring a great deal more focus and performance from the guild. In essence, ToC is a rollercoaster of difficulty where Ulduar is a very shallow staircase.
They should instead be ramps. T6 was a remarkable example of this, especially Black Temple. In both T6 instances, the first boss, while relatively difficult, was still fairly mild. From there, though, the instance increased in difficulty in an almost linear pattern, with each boss being noticeably but not unreasonably more difficult than the prior boss. It wasn't unexpected for a raid to get lodged at a boss part-way through the instance for weeks or even months on end as their gear and skill grew to finally be able to overcome a boss, much like an incoming tide slowly overtaking a beach.
WotLK raids have lacked this very important quality. In ToGC (and especially ToC), if you can get past Beasts, you can get to Anub without much issue. In Ulduar, if you can get past Ignis or XT, you can get all the way to the Keepers (and likely even Yogg). Blizzard has reverted to a mindset wherein the intermediate bosses in an instance should be interchangeable in difficulty, with only the final boss being an increase, and I believe that this specifically has resulted in a large amount of the 'WoW is too easy' cries of late.
However, I agree wholeheartedly with Larisa's point in the above linked post: if you've not cleared hardmodes, you've no business even thinking that WoW is too easy, much less spamming the forums with it. I've done Anub'Arak in ToGC, and I can say quite honestly that while it's certainly doable, it's not a walk in the park by a long shot.
I'd also like to point out two posts that caught my (and many others') attention on the Dungeons and Raids forums. I'll be discussing the points brought up in them in my next post:
Lets Talk About Modern Boss Design
The Price of Accessibility in Raiding
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