Over the weekend I managed to get my hands on an open beta key for Star Trek Online by Cryptic. As an avid fan of Star Trek, I was expecting truly great things from this game. I was sadly, horribly disappointed.
The graphics are fairly good for a space-based game, with quality lighting, engine trails, and explosion effects. The ground effects, on the other hands, are reminiscent of Elite Force (the first one) without as much polish. Character animations are jerky and disconnected, NPC pathing is asinine, and everything looks like it's made out of plastic.
To make matters worse, the game has some of the most extreme instancing I've ever encountered. To move between systems, you first have to warp to 'sector space', which is somehow supposed to represent warp travel, but really just looks like a semi-3d map that you can only navigate at about 1/4th maximum movement speed. In fact, you don't even have to know where anything is or explore it, they have a convenient list of every system in the sector, and doubleclicking on any system auto-pilots you to it without effort. There are no random encounters or world mobs, only mission-oriented ones. Now, once you warp to Sector Space (load screen), you find your system, auto-pilot to it, enter it (load screen), get the mission brief, kill some enemy ships, then either have to beam somewhere or warp somewhere for the next piece (load screen), then warp back out to Sector Space (load screen). To make matters even worse, every single zone, including both missons and the 'public' areas (ie. the non-mission areas, Sector Space, Earth station and surrounding space, etc.) are all instanced by themselves, with dozens of instances that often cap at 10-20, or possibly up to 50 in certain high-density areas like Earth station.
Lastly, the missions actually get more difficult when you group, as the number of enemies increase, and they tend to focus-fire one ship at a time, make survival a great deal more of an issue, and the rewards only barely increase (no extra skill points, only extra loot, and that's shared among the party on a round-robin). All these combine to make the game nothing but a solo game that you have to log in to play.
It's also an astoundingly grindy game. The levels are broken down into 5 teirs: 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50. When you start the game, after the initial tutorial missions (which you have to do on every character you start, there's no "Ya, I've done this, skip please" option), you are given command of a Nebula-class starship, a light ship with 3 weapon hardpoints (2 forward, 1 rear), and 3 bridge officer positions. You are stuck in that ship until you reach level 11. I've put in about 6 hours play time combined in the beta thus far, and while I'm certainly not power-leveling, I haven't really been slacking either, and I'm about halfway through level 5. That's right...the first 10-15 hours of play offer zero ship upgrades.
Next there's the methods of leveling. First, you can PvP. Second, you can complete missions. However, the missions are astoundingly repetitive and shallow, all being variations of 'kill all enemy ships', with maybe some 'collect x of y', 'use x', 'escort x to y', or 'beam down and kill all enemies' thrown in. The larger of the first missions are the patrol missions, which require a patrol of 4 specified star systems, each of which can take up to an hour, and the reward is usually just access to 1-3 more patrol missions and possibly a new minor upgrade or bridge officer candidate.
Leveling is also rather complex and tough to understand at first. STO doesn't have experience in a traditional sense. Instead, the player gains skill points for completing missions, which can then be spent on poorly detailed skills with no explanation of the specific benefits gained. Each 'level' simply requires a certain number of skill points be spent.
The currency system is another hideously overcomplicated system. Instead of any normal currency system, STO uses several types of tokens. First up is Energy Credit, which can only be gotten by selling or melting down items received as loot or quest rewards (the quests themselves only award skill points and merit points). Selling items grants 50% of vendor sell price, melting them down with the replicator grants 40% (but can be done without returning to Earth station). Energy Credit is used to most basic items and services. The next currency item is Merit points. These are used exclusively and only to purchase bridge officers and train them (think of BO's as a weird hybrid of talent trees and minions), and are received from quests.
STO also has a stack of Exploration tokens, which can be used to purchase higher-level ground and space upgrades, and a bit more than a half dozen salvageable items from spacial anomalies in each system and ground mission, which are used to craft certain rare upgrades or consumables.
Just to accentuate this, STO entered Open Beta a week ago. The devs are still working on major bug fixes and implement much of the content intended for release. The game releases in two weeks. That's right, open 'beta', which is supposed to absolute last phase of testing, running a stress test (which they failed miserably), and squashing last minute bugs, has turned into late alpha testing, and the game is due in just two weeks.
Ultimately STO feels like a rushed, half-assed Star Trek clone of Champions Online (in fact, the UI still has most of the same look, and even the same cartoony font). It's grindy, unfinished, boring, unrewarding, socially truncated, and only barely has the Star Trek feel that was the entire point of making a Trek MMO. Add to this that Cryptic seems to be running a rather desperate cashcow scheme by offering the ability to play Liberated Borg characters for the small price of just under $300 for a lifetime subscription (also included 2 extra character spots, which btw, they only give you 2 to start with and sell you ones beyond that), and the entire game just seems like a last-ditch effort to cash out on the Trek fan community to save Cryptic's failing finances after the debacle of Champions Online.
My advice: avoid until Cryptic is bought out by someone that can actually produce a successful game (Activision or Bioware come to mind).
Showing posts with label Game Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Game Design. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Worgen
I just saw the new Worgen gameplay videos posted on MMO-Champion, and I have to say, I'm far from impressed. While I understand that Gilneas is a human kingdom, the design and texturing are so blatantly similar to the ones currently in-game that one would almost think themselves in Darkshire if they didn't know better. The castle in the distance is somewhat interesting, but otherwise the land is rather dull.
The model animations are the worst part, though. The animation for transforming into a worgen was revealed at Blizzcon earlier this year, and it hasn't changed a bit, it's still over-the-top in terms of graphics and yet somehow still astoundingly so basic and crude. The walking animation for the worgen is my largest complaint, though. They look awkward and uncoordinated, something wolves and especially the werewolves of legend are most certainly not known for. Despite having arms that hang down past their knees, they only go down on all fours as a random idle animation (and sadly this is really the only time they look cool). Even when their racial sprint is popped, the only change in animation is a trailing white flag identical to the animation present on a rogue's Sprint.
The worgen present in Grizzly Hills have one of the single coolest-looking run animations in the game right now. They get down on all fours and literally claw their way over the ground. They seriously look neigh-unstoppable while barreling after you, and that's precisely the animation that the worgen player race should have had. Standing bipedally is a fairly common piece of werewolf lore, but running on all fours is almost universal, and looks far better than a gorilla-proportioned creature swinging its strung-out forelimbs back and forth in a crude attempt to maintain balance.
On the whole, I can honestly say that at this point I'm frighteningly disappointed with the feature that I was most looking forward to out of Cataclysm.
The model animations are the worst part, though. The animation for transforming into a worgen was revealed at Blizzcon earlier this year, and it hasn't changed a bit, it's still over-the-top in terms of graphics and yet somehow still astoundingly so basic and crude. The walking animation for the worgen is my largest complaint, though. They look awkward and uncoordinated, something wolves and especially the werewolves of legend are most certainly not known for. Despite having arms that hang down past their knees, they only go down on all fours as a random idle animation (and sadly this is really the only time they look cool). Even when their racial sprint is popped, the only change in animation is a trailing white flag identical to the animation present on a rogue's Sprint.
The worgen present in Grizzly Hills have one of the single coolest-looking run animations in the game right now. They get down on all fours and literally claw their way over the ground. They seriously look neigh-unstoppable while barreling after you, and that's precisely the animation that the worgen player race should have had. Standing bipedally is a fairly common piece of werewolf lore, but running on all fours is almost universal, and looks far better than a gorilla-proportioned creature swinging its strung-out forelimbs back and forth in a crude attempt to maintain balance.
On the whole, I can honestly say that at this point I'm frighteningly disappointed with the feature that I was most looking forward to out of Cataclysm.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Pet Peeve of the Day: Gear Scaling
Something I've been thinking about a great deal lately is how Blizzard decided to have gear scale with raid difficulty and size, and I believe they've designed the system entirely incorrectly. Currently, 10-man Heroic instances have little to no incentive behind them other than progression, as 25-man Normal drops the same itemlevel gear and can be PuGed, and is a virtually guaranteed clear. 10H has an advantage of having slightly better itemized 245 gear, a higher loot to raider ratio, and only requires keeping 10 people focused rather than 25 (but actually requires said focus, unlike 25N), but otherwise has no true advantages over simply PuGing 25N each week.
Nothing burns quite as much as knowing I'm on one of the best progression teams on the server, yet looking around and seeing people within a couple hundred gear-score of me (or even almost equal to me) that are in some little-known guild that never raids, yet that player PuGs 25N each week and therefore has nearly the same or higher average itemlevel as me. Thus I propose the system which Blizzard should have used for the ilevel progression:
10 Normal
The easiest of the easy, 10N will have the lowest itemlevel items: 232 for ToC and 251 for IC.
25 Normal
Given it's PuGable nature and lack of true difficulty (other than keeping 25 people focused and doing what they need to), 25N will have an IL half a teir above 10N: 239 for ToC and 258 for IC.
10 Heroic
Befitting it's significant jump in difficulty over 25N, yet it's smaller group size, 10H will have an IL a full tier above 25N: 251 for ToC and 271 for IC.
25 Heroic
As difficult as it gets, 25H will have the highest IL available, half a tier above 10N: 258 for ToC and 277 for IC.
The blatant advantage of this design is that it immediately separates heroic (ie. 'hardcore') raiders from casual ones, while still allowing casual raiders to experience the content and get gear that, while not bleeding-edge good, it still quite solid. It does, however, also allow the hardcore raiders to retain the gear advantage that was the trademark of hardcore raiding for the first 4 years of the game.
Another distinct advantage of this system is that it puts 10-man Heroic forward as a viable gear progression option, as it has a noticeable gear advantage over 25N, and is only half a tier below 25H. This would serve to inspire 25H guilds to run 10H as their auxiliary raid rather than 25N, cutting down on some of their boredom (and likely complaints of the game's lack of difficulty).
The last advantage evolved from this new system is that gear progression would be a relatively smoother curve, with 4 distinct IL gear sets rather than 3, yet it would still only take up 2 tiers worth of IL. Assuming the 10N IL was placed equal to the 10H IL of the prior raiding tier, gear would show precisely a 1.5 tier upgrade per raiding tier, the exact jump currently displayed between ToC and IC. In addition, it would show a full 1.5 tier upgrade between difficulties (befitting the significant increase in the difficulty of the encounters), and only a half-tier between raiding sizes (since handing 2.5 times as many people, while definitely something worth rewarding, isn't nearly as impressive as the Heroic modes).
As a raid leader that regularly runs 10H and partially PuGs what I can't guild-fill in my 25N each week, I can honestly say that the implication that 10H requires the same effort as PuGing a 25N is a fairly potent insult to 10H teams. Given the fact that Blizzard seems a lot more interested in making sure both raid sizes are valid options for raiding then they do making sure PuG raids are as rewarding as possible, this change would alleviate much of the frustration and complaining by the more hardcore raiders (who strongly dislike seeing the visible marks of their progress become next to meaningless to the casual observer), yet still allow the more casual raiders access to the upper-end content.
Nothing burns quite as much as knowing I'm on one of the best progression teams on the server, yet looking around and seeing people within a couple hundred gear-score of me (or even almost equal to me) that are in some little-known guild that never raids, yet that player PuGs 25N each week and therefore has nearly the same or higher average itemlevel as me. Thus I propose the system which Blizzard should have used for the ilevel progression:
10 Normal
The easiest of the easy, 10N will have the lowest itemlevel items: 232 for ToC and 251 for IC.
25 Normal
Given it's PuGable nature and lack of true difficulty (other than keeping 25 people focused and doing what they need to), 25N will have an IL half a teir above 10N: 239 for ToC and 258 for IC.
10 Heroic
Befitting it's significant jump in difficulty over 25N, yet it's smaller group size, 10H will have an IL a full tier above 25N: 251 for ToC and 271 for IC.
25 Heroic
As difficult as it gets, 25H will have the highest IL available, half a tier above 10N: 258 for ToC and 277 for IC.
The blatant advantage of this design is that it immediately separates heroic (ie. 'hardcore') raiders from casual ones, while still allowing casual raiders to experience the content and get gear that, while not bleeding-edge good, it still quite solid. It does, however, also allow the hardcore raiders to retain the gear advantage that was the trademark of hardcore raiding for the first 4 years of the game.
Another distinct advantage of this system is that it puts 10-man Heroic forward as a viable gear progression option, as it has a noticeable gear advantage over 25N, and is only half a tier below 25H. This would serve to inspire 25H guilds to run 10H as their auxiliary raid rather than 25N, cutting down on some of their boredom (and likely complaints of the game's lack of difficulty).
The last advantage evolved from this new system is that gear progression would be a relatively smoother curve, with 4 distinct IL gear sets rather than 3, yet it would still only take up 2 tiers worth of IL. Assuming the 10N IL was placed equal to the 10H IL of the prior raiding tier, gear would show precisely a 1.5 tier upgrade per raiding tier, the exact jump currently displayed between ToC and IC. In addition, it would show a full 1.5 tier upgrade between difficulties (befitting the significant increase in the difficulty of the encounters), and only a half-tier between raiding sizes (since handing 2.5 times as many people, while definitely something worth rewarding, isn't nearly as impressive as the Heroic modes).
As a raid leader that regularly runs 10H and partially PuGs what I can't guild-fill in my 25N each week, I can honestly say that the implication that 10H requires the same effort as PuGing a 25N is a fairly potent insult to 10H teams. Given the fact that Blizzard seems a lot more interested in making sure both raid sizes are valid options for raiding then they do making sure PuG raids are as rewarding as possible, this change would alleviate much of the frustration and complaining by the more hardcore raiders (who strongly dislike seeing the visible marks of their progress become next to meaningless to the casual observer), yet still allow the more casual raiders access to the upper-end content.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Blizzard Pet Store
So I was surfing MMO-Champion and up on the front page pops a message about a Blizzard Pet Store. My first thought was that the current in-game pet store run by Breanni, the NPC avatar dedicated to the creator and administrator of WarcraftPets.com, would be expanded to include new purchasable pets, perhaps with a new token system.
Instead what I found was the most blatant and pitiable attempt to wrest more money from their customers that I've ever seen. It's bad enough that they are effectively charging us (and charging us exorbitantly!) for services like name, faction, server, or race changes, but now they want us to dump the equivalent of 2/3rds of a month's subscription fee for some of the more desirable pet models they've ever implemented, after taunting us with them for a month via MMO-C's data mining.
Honestly, this is a whole new level of disrespect to customers. I can see charging minor amounts for certain services to cover the expense of performing them, but charging for an in-game item, especially one with a purely aesthetic purpose? This seems remarkably hypocritical after their efforts to eradicate gold-selling. Is purchasing in-game items with real-world currency somehow suddenly acceptable so long as it's Blizz that gets to sleep on the bed stuffed with bills?
Instead what I found was the most blatant and pitiable attempt to wrest more money from their customers that I've ever seen. It's bad enough that they are effectively charging us (and charging us exorbitantly!) for services like name, faction, server, or race changes, but now they want us to dump the equivalent of 2/3rds of a month's subscription fee for some of the more desirable pet models they've ever implemented, after taunting us with them for a month via MMO-C's data mining.
Honestly, this is a whole new level of disrespect to customers. I can see charging minor amounts for certain services to cover the expense of performing them, but charging for an in-game item, especially one with a purely aesthetic purpose? This seems remarkably hypocritical after their efforts to eradicate gold-selling. Is purchasing in-game items with real-world currency somehow suddenly acceptable so long as it's Blizz that gets to sleep on the bed stuffed with bills?
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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