The problem of subjectivity in dungeon finder policing

Heroics haven't been a completely pleasant experience as of late, since not all players have been willing to adjust to the demands of the new design of heroics. As discontented people are wont to do, many people have been trying to think of ways to improve the heroic experience. Some of the ideas for ways to make the dungeon finder "suck less" have included systems for rating players; systems where you can "friend" players, i.e. mark them as good players and be more likely to be grouped with them in the future; and other ideas, most of which are based on the idea of players policing themselves.

The intentions behind these ideas are good, and in theory, they could work, but they all share the problem of having the potential to be abused by players. Some people will always look for a way to game the system if they can, and some people are just jerks, so no matter what Blizzard might do to try to prevent the system from being used as it wasn't intended to be used, someone will either benefit unfairly or be unfairly penalized. It's tempting to think the system could be designed to avoid that, but no design is foolproof. As an example, someone in the comments section of the WoW Insider post above had the idea to make it so that you can only mark players as bad players, which will increase their queue time. There would be no consequences for new players under this system because they would not be locked out of fast queues by a lack of up-ratings, which would be one of the worst consequences if players could be rated as good players, in addition to bad players. After all, up-rated players would be given shorter queue times (or else why up-rate players?), and if the up-rated players are being grouped together, that would give the newer players no one to group with.

But as another commenter pointed out, some players would just down-vote everyone they group with just because they can. Even worse, since down-votes would move the down-voted player farther down the queue, any down-rate you give another player would theoretically move you up the queue, assuming the down-rate isn't reciprocated. This would give players real, tangible motivation to down-rate people who don't deserve it; in other words, it wouldn't be just the jerkass players who down-rate everyone. In an attempt to moderate this kind of abuse, I had the idea of changing the system so you can still mark players as bad players based on their performance, but the more negative votes you give players, the less your negative votes will count against other players. This would discourage players from trying to game the system because the more they try to do so, the less of an effect they will have. Of course, players could abuse this system as well by just abstaining from down-rating players, which would give their votes more weight, and then using that weight to grief players they personally don't like by voting them down. Did another player win the roll for an item you wanted? If they're the only person you've ever down-rated, that could really increase their queue times. Isn't vengeance sweet?

Now, sure, Blizzard could tweak the formulas to prevent this kind of abuse, too, but the issues of players always looking for a way to game the system aside, this kind of system would still suffer from the issue of being a subjective system. A down-ranking system like the one described above depends on players down-ranking other players based on criteria shared by every other player, but people are subjective, and this might not be the case. Some players would down-rank players based on lack of skill, others would down-rank players for their attitudes, and some would probably only down-rank good players just to be ironic. Rather than a unified system for judging players, we would get players using their own standards to rate other players, standards which are not universal, and thus won't improve the dungeon finder for everyone.

What is needed is an objective system to help weed out the bad players (or at least increase their queue times). Some players have suggested that certain statistics be used to rank players, rather than a rating system. These statistics could include whether or not they use crowd control, whether they were healing efficiently, average healer mana when the tank pulled, etc. These are nice ideas, but they also have their own issues. What stats will we choose to use to judge a player? What if the player runs with a guild that chooses to run heroics in an unconventional way, a way that is successful but won't reflect well on their statistics? Or what if they consistently run with bad players and thus can't use crowd control, because their crowd control ends up being broken anyways? The fact is that it's very difficult to objectively measure player skill, no matter what statistics you use.

Another possibility is an idea I had a while ago, inspired by the achievement Ready for Raiding. What if a series of quests was set up to help players learn the skills they need to run heroics? These quests would be phased quests in which players would have simulated party members, and they would run through various typical heroic situations and train players in the skills they need to be successful in heroics. Tanks could learn to wait for the healer to regain his mana, how to hold threat against multiple targets, how to position targets, etc. DPS could learn how to crowd control, how to move out of the fire, how to prioritize kill order, etc. Healers could learn how to heal efficiently, how to best use their cooldowns, etc. All this could be done in a phased environment where the player would really be tested on whether or not they had the skills needed to run heroics. Now, players would probably feel uncomfortably forced if these quests were mandatory to run heroics, so perhaps they could be option and could reward some valor points to sweeten the deal, as well as an achievement--perhaps called "Ready for Heroics".

Or we could all just wait a few months until everyone out-gears heroics and they don't require skill to run anymore. It'll happen, it just needs time.

To the dungeons with you!

Over a year ago, during the era of Wrath of the Lich King, I wrote a post about how to get exalted with every faction in the expansion (minus the Ashen Verdict, of course) without championing. In other words, this was a post about how to hit exalted on every faction by yourself, without needing to enter an instance. I was pretty proud of it, if only for the idea, and was looking forward to writing a similar post for Cataclysm's factions. Then Cataclysm came out, and as I plodded my way through the new zones' quests, I was hit by a sad realization: there would be no Cataclysm version of that post, because some factions are impossible to reach exalted with without donning their tabard and entering a 5-man instance. As such, if I should desire to obtain the Wrap of the Great Turtle to tank 5-mans, or if I want the Signet of the Elder Council to boost my stats while I'm out solo-ing, I can't get them by solely by solo-ing. And this doesn't sit right with me. Why, after letting us get exalted with every faction in Wrath of the Lich King by solo-ing, would Blizzard regress in its accommodation of us solo players?

Now, this is nothing new. Many of the factions in Burning Crusade required players to enter dungeons in order to earn reputation with them beyond a certain point (Honor Hold/Thrallmar come to mind), as did many of the factions in vanilla WoW. Wrath of the Lich King, however, moved away from this model by giving every one of its factions (minus one that was clearly designed around a specific raid) a way for players to earn reputation with that faction on their own. This was a good move on their part, in my opinion, for though those ways of earning reputation on one's own were often slower than championing, they gave solo players something to work for, as well as something to do, and they gave players a way to earn faction reputation that wasn't dependent on the competence of other players.

But there is one other major difference between the two expansion packs, one which may explain Blizzard's shift in design philosophy. In Wrath of the Lich King, the gear earned through reputation was the same ilevel as the gear earned through heroics, the primary source of reputation. The gear dropped by the last boss in all of the pre-3.2 heroics and the gear awarded at exalted status with Wrath-era factions were both ilevel-200 epics, and the gear dropped by all other heroic bosses and awarded at revered with the factions were ilevel-200 rare gear. In other words, factions awarded gear that was on par with what was awarded by heroics at the time, so by running heroics to earn reputation with various factions, players would be getting gear that was just as good as the gear they were trying to earn. What this meant was that it was quite possible for players, in the process of trying to earn one specific piece of gear, to earn another piece of gear that would render the reputation-awarded piece unneeded.

This has changed between Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, and in my mind, that change justifies some factions requiring dungeon runs if we wish to reach exalted with them. It is this one change that prevents this post from being one in which I merely complain about how this change to the faction design philosophy is unfair to those who don't wish to run dungeons. You see, heroics no longer drop epics. Heroics in Cataclysm drop ilevel 346 rare gear, while reaching exalted with a Cataclysm faction gives you access to ilevel 359 epics. This means that running heroics doesn't give you better gear than the gear you are trying to earn by hitting exalted with whatever faction you are trying to get exalted with. In fact, outside of crafted epics, the epics awarded by reaching exalted with a faction are currently the best gear one can get outside of raids. (With the exception of the epics that you can get if you save up enough valor points doing your daily random heroic, but it takes a couple of weeks of running a random heroic each day in order to earn enough points for just one piece of gear, so that's by no means a practical way to deck yourself out in epics.)

What this all means is that in order to obtain the best gear you can obtain outside of a raid, you will have to do the hardest thing you can do outside of a raid, i.e. running dungeons. This wasn't the case in Wrath of the Lich King, where gear awarded by factions wasn't the best gear available outside of a raid: you had the drops from the last bosses of each heroic, the emblem of heroism gear, and the crafted gear. But those first two sources of epics outside of a raid no longer award epics, so we players are left with factions and professions as avenues to earn epics without raiding. And since ilevel 359 epics are the best gear one can earn outside of a raid, it makes sense that to earn them, you should need to do the hardest thing you can do outside of a raid: running dungeons. (And the fact that crafted epics require Chaos Orbs, which are bind-on-pick-up and are dropped by the last bosses in heroics, further fits this trend.) To me, that seems like a fair trade.

Failure to adjust: whose fault is it?

Being that I am still level 84, I have not yet had the "pleasure" of stepping into Cataclysm's heroics, but if Allison Robert's look at the unbearable suckhood of pugging is anything to go on, I'm not missing much. I can't say I'm all that surprised that in the wake of Blizzard making some pretty significant changes to heroics in Cataclysm--crowd control is necessary, DPS can't be healed through avoidable damage, triage is more important that fast healing, kill order and interrupts are important again--it seems the playerbase has been less than willing to adapt to these changes. Now, we are still in the first few weeks of the expansion's life time, and given time, players might learn and change their ways (especially when their current ways deny them their epic loot). But if Allison's post and other horror stories I have heard from other players and other bloggers are anything to go on, people really aren't do well in adapting to the changes made to heroics in Cataclysm. But does the fault really lie with those who "refuse" to adapt to the times and the demands of a new era? Or might the fault lie elsewhere?

When heroics were introduced in Burning Crusade, they were difficult, and wiping was common. When Wrath of the Lich King came out, that changed. Heroics were not all that difficult, especially as the expansion wore on, and the fact that we kept running heroics long after we outgeared them lead to players developing some pretty bad habits for running them. It was bad enough when Wrath heroics allowed us to ignore kill orders, not interrupt spells, and AoE down trash at the beginning of the expansion; once the emblem system allowed us to get amazing gear without leaving heroics, it was all downhill from there. Runing heroics took the same amount of skill as doing old-world quests for Loremaster; that is to say, it took none, but people still did it, and as a result, they developed some pretty low expectations for how difficult heroics should be. Players who try to run heroics now using the strategies that they used in latter Lich King era heroics are like level-80 players who try doing Cataclysm quest content using the strategies they use to do low-level quests for Loremaster (which, if you've ever killed low level enemies for any reason, you know would end in disaster). I don't know for a fact that those players exist, but if they did, they'd be comparable to today's heroic runners.

But let's look at Wrath's heroic dungeons more closely. You had heroics, which took almost zero effort and a minimal investment of time and awarded great gear, and raiding, which took a great deal of time and effort and award superb gear. Considering that heroics took infinitely less ability and commitment to run and awarded gear that wasn't much worse than what raids awarded, it's no wonder players flocked to them, even those without the skills that are usually necessary to succeed in group content. And when they went there, they obtained gear that trivialized the very content that awarded it, but they kept playing because they liked these shiny epics they could earn. Because of this design, players associated heroics with zero-effort rewards and started playing under the assumption if their zero-effort approach did not yield victory, it meant someone was playing badly, an assumption which hampers their ability to adapt to today's heroics. The expectation of reward for zero effort also keeps players in heroics who have no business expecting to succeed in a cooperative environment, further hindering our efforts. And whose decision was it to design Wrath's heroics to start out easy, become even easier when the gear they awarded trivialized them, and thus create this mess in the first place? Blizzard.

Now let's fast forward to the development stages of Cataclysm. Wrath of the Lich King is coming to a close, and many non-raiders (a category which includes a startlingly large players, if a poll I ran a while ago on my blog is anything to go by) continue running heroics because that is the only thing they have left to entertain themselves, thus further cementing the bad habits they have developed over the course of the expansion pack. Meanwhile, in all of their interviews and press releases, Blizzard makes clear their intention to make heroics challenging again, to make them require crowd control, kill order, interrupts, strategy, etc. They make this clear at BlizzCon, in miscellaneous interviews, and as a result, us players who keep up with WoW news online are well aware going into Cataclysm that things are going to be different, that the strategies we used for old heroics won't work in this new expansion, and that we're going to have to change the way we do things. We knew this, but the players who don't follow WoW news online didn't.

I don't know exactly when I started following WoW news online, but if I had to put a guess to it, the earliest I would be willing to guess is November of 2008. Now, I started playing WoW in September of 2005. That's sixty three months I have been playing, and I have only been following WoW news online for, at the most, twenty five of them. That's less than half of my time spent playing WoW, and it means it took me more than three years to realize that WoW had an online community. Now, I'm sure the community has grown more robust as the game's popularity has grown, meaning someone who started playing after I did would probably have an easier time discovering WoW's online community than I did. But I bring up the duration of the time during which I was oblivious of WoW's online community to illustrate that not every player is privy to the information we often take for granted. For anyone who did not keep track of news about Cataclysm, the sudden rise of difficulty in heroics is something they had no way of anticipating.

So, we have Blizzard creating a situation that leads to players developing really bad habits in heroics, and then doing nothing to convey to players who don't follow news about WoW online that they are increasing the difficulty of heroics come Cataclysm. It's beginning to look like the fault for these players who didn't adjust to Cataclysm's heroics is resting on Blizzard's shoulders. The question is, was it Blizzard's responsibility to prepare players for this change?

Blizzard hasn't exactly been transparent when it comes to information about their game. When they expanded the armory to include a wowhead-like database of items, it was a big break from convention, to say the least. They have put other detailed information, like boss strategies or walkthroughs, on the official website, the kind of thing you would get on other sites. Sure, they'll release general information about the game, like overall descriptions of the classes and zones, but they've never been one for revealing specifics. This is especially the case in-game, where we go into most situations blind without any of the information we take for granted because we know so much information about the game that we acquire online. We may pick up on general patterns that can help us in entirely new situations (such as, one should generally not stand in the fire), but those assumptions are formed in response to general patterns of game design; they do not influence the game design itself. In other words, we know not to stand in the fire because developers usually make fire harmful; they don't make fire harmful because we usually don't stand in it.

What this means for heroics is that just because we players grow accustomed to certain facts in game (fire is bad, heroics don't require strategy) doesn't mean Blizzard owes it to us to keep those facts consistent or to warn us when they change. They can design the game however they like--within reason, of course, or else they'll lose subscribers--and its our responsibility to adapt. Part of that adaptation process is assembling information in online databases with boss strategies, item statistics, etc., which results in websites like wowhead and WoWWiki, as well as blogs that detail changes to the game, like heroics being made more difficult) This is all part of the process of adapting to changes made to the game, and knowing heroics were going to become more difficult by following Cataclysm news was part of that adaptation process. By taking that knowledge for granted, we took our adaptive abilities for granted, but some players haven't learned the process of adaptation as well as others. Those are the players who struggle in heroics now, and while it might not seem fair that we have to suffer for their inability to adapt, that's just the nature of group content.

How linear is Cataclysm, really?

Larisa has a post over on her blog in which she remarks on how linear Cataclysm's quest design is. Rather than allowing movement between the various parts of the zones, we are restricted to a set path by which we can progress through the quests. She compares it to "the moving walkway in the room where they keep the royal jewels at The Tower of London. The only way you can see them is by standing on that walkway, and it passes those jewels at set, nonnegotiable pace." And though I have only just completed the quests in Mount Hyjal and am thus ill-equipped to judge the expansion as a whole, I have to agree that the quest design in that zone was indeed very linear. It could have been worse, though; there were sometimes two quest hubs one could choose to go to, and you could choose which order you did the quests in each "round" of quests at each hub. Yes, it could have been a lot more linear, but for an MMO, a genre supposedly defined by an open world, it was indeed pretty straightforward.

Why did it take me so long to get through one zone, you might ask? As I mentioned in Friday's post, questing is not the only thing I have been doing since Cataclysm came out. I have done the fishing and cooking dailies every day, fished in Hyjal's lakes and rivers, searched the world for archeological fragments, and even taken some time just to fly around the old world (oh the flying, oh how I love it) and see the changes wrought by Deathwing's return. After all, questing isn't the only thing that has been changed or added in this expansion, and it would be a pretty poor way to experience it to focus solely on that aspect of this new Azeroth. But what's this? Choice in what I play when I play WoW? But I thought this game was supposed to be linear? (That's not a personal jab at you, Larisa; just a jab at the idea of WoW being linear.)

This is where I take issue with the idea that WoW has become "too linear", an idea I have heard elsewhere, aside from Larisa's blog. Yes, the questing has become more linear, but as the commenters on Larisa's post that I linked to earlier have pointed out, that's a necessity for phasing to be as prevalent as it is, and phasing is a necessity for us to think that our changes are having any effect on the world around us. But questing isn't all there is to World of Warcraft. There's PvP, dungeons, professions, secondary professions, and even just exploring the world to see what can be found. And even if some of these things themselves are pretty linear (professions especially; gone are the days of searching the AH for recipes or the world for vendors who sell them in a limited stock; we get our recipes from a pretty limited selection of sources these days), we are completely free to choose which ones we engage in and when. There's no "negligence punishment" mechanic put in to keep you in one part of the game when you'd rather be doing something else, outside of the fear of falling behind your guild.

Now, this does mean that in order to experience the true non-linearity of WoW, you need to take the initiative to do something other than what the game will direct you to do; the quests won't tell you to take a break and go try out archeology or PvP or fishing. The best you'll get is an occasional quest that will direct you to a dungeon of the appropriate level. I bring up this little detail because, in the past, I talked about the decline of Wrath of the Lich King heroics and the players' reacting to this decline by being more creative about how they ran heroics. In that post, I concluded that the player's running the heroics in unconventional ways was indeed a sign that the heroics had gone into decline, because players were running them in ways they weren't intended to be run. The implication of the conclusions I came to in that post was that if the game doesn't tell you specifically to do something, and you have to do that something to make the game interesting, then the game is a failure. If we apply this logic to Cataclysm's design, then that would mean that the fact that game can only be non-linear if players do something of their own accord to make it so--rather than because the game told them to--then the game fails at being nonlinear.

But the reason I concluded that players doing things in Wrath's heroics to spice up their heroic runs was a sign that heroics had declined was that the heroics weren't designed for that kind of play. Wrath's heroics were designed to be run in particular ways, and that fact that players weren't running them in those ways meant that they had failed. Cataclysm, however, is designed to support players doing things other than questing. If it weren't designed that way, archeology and all of the other things we can do aside from questing wouldn't be in the game. Cataclysm-era WoW is designed so that it can be played in a non-linear way, if the player chooses to do so. And therein lies the crux of the problem: WoW's linearity is inversely proportional to how much initiative you take to seek out other things to do within the game. Someone without that initiative will probably limit themselves to questing and the occasional dungeon run, and in doing so, they'll find WoW to be a very straight-forward game.

But in a way, I don't mind WoW being designed this way. It reminds me of the way that the story was told in the GameCube game Metroid Prime. In that game, you collected bits of the story (similar to the way we collect bits of lore through archeology) with your scan visor, including logs by space pirates and stories told by those who inhabited the planet where the game takes place before they were wiped out. You can also find vanity text aplenty by scanning various things in the environment, which adds even more to the atmosphere of the game. The beauty of this system was that it allowed players to experience exactly as much of the story as they wanted to. If they wanted a straight shoot-em-up, they could eschew the scan visor completely and just go in with gun ablazing. If they just wanted the background story but didn't want to hear all of the little details about the world itself, they could keep an eye out for the red scan nodes which would indicate a lore entry that would reveal the background of the world, while ignoring the other ones that just added to the atmosphere of the present situation. And if they wanted as many details as they could sink their teeth into, they could scan everything, which would tell them a lot about the story and about the world itself.

In a way, the non-linearity of WoW's design is like the depth of the story in Metroid Prime; both are at the control of the player. Just as players of Metroid Prime chose how much of the story they cared to experience, players of WoW choose how linear they want their experience to be. Are you looking for a game with a wide variety of things to do? Go out and find them; they're there for you. Are you just looking for a straightforward quest-based adventure? Fine, just follow the quests and do what they tell you. You'll miss out on a lot, but if that's how you want to play, who are we to say no? And if you don't want a linear experience, but you haven't taken the initiative to check out the other things there are to do in WoW? If that's the case, then who's really to blame?

A decline of heroics, or a rise of player creativity?

It's been ages since I ran a heroic dungeon. I'm not sure exactly when I swore them off, but it couldn't have been long after patch 3.3 was released, because the dungeon finder made heroic groups so easy to form that I chain ran them like nobody's business. With those badges rolling in like Draenei alts rolling into Azuremyst Isle after Burning Crusade was released, I ran those heroics non-stop until I got all the gear I wanted. It was then that I realized, why am I going through these heroics? Because aside from the Frozen Halls, they just weren't interesting. Kill order wasn't important anymore, the bosses didn't provide a challenge, and victory was practically guaranteed. They were just plain not fun, so I stopped, and with Wrath's solo content exhausted and raiding out of the realm of possibility, I went back to leveling alts, leaving the world of heroics behind to evolve as it would.

And evolve it did, as I have become quite aware over the past few weeks. I first became aware of this evolution when I read a WoW.com Breakfast Topic asking players how they spice up their heroic runs. My comment could be summarized, as Skarn so eloquently put it, thusly: "...while there ARE things you can do to make an instance more interesting, once you reach the point that you have to come up with these crazy things, is the place really worth running any more? Hasn't the activity worn itself out?" However, what got me thinking about this whole situation in a different way was a response to my commend that said the following: "what he's saying is that running the heroics itself should be fun all by itself, and the fact that he has to change a normal routine a bit to keep his interest is not what he's paying for. " That latter part got me thinking: what if I really am just sticking too closely to my normal way of doing things? What if finding ways to spice up boring content isn't a sign that the content has run its course, but an expression of creativity on the part of the players, and I'm just showing a lack of creativity by not doing that?

The second thing that got me thinking about this possibility was a post by Larisa of the Pink Pigtail Inn about people trying to take short-cuts in instances and how doing so is a waste of time, since taking shortcuts usually makes the run take longer (since they usually don't work) than it would have taken to just kill the enemies being skipped. My comment on that post remarked that taking those short-cuts probably wasn't about saving time; it was probably about trying to make those boring old heroics interesting, and adding the possibility of failure back into heroics definitely makes them interesting again, since that possibility has long been absent from them. In other words, these shortcuts are another way to add dimension to easy content, and a rather impressive way at that, for finding and pulling off these shortcuts is no easy task.

So I was forced to ask myself, am I just too used to the fun in this game being handed to me to see that fun can still be had in heroics? Or is the fact that players are resorting to these measures to make heroics interesting a sign that they really have run their course? Really, what the question comes down to is, should this game be fun on its own without players needing to make their own fun, or is it ok for the game to exist in a way where players do need to make their own fun?

It's not an impossibility, after all. Rare as they may be, games and mini-games where you largely have to make your own fun have been successful. The best example I can think of is Nintendo's series Animal Crossing, a life sim lite where there really aren't many true "goals", and the few goals there are take so long to get that you need to make your own fun along the way. However, the game provides so many outlets for you to do so that it's easy to make your own fun. There is a huge variety of goals in the game: paying off the loan on your house, as well as successive loans on your house's expansion; trying to catch every fish in the game, trying to catch every bug in the game, trying to complete the exhibits at your museum, trying to improve the layout of your house to appease the Happy Room Academy (who judges your house for what you put in it), etc. There are also a number of creative outlets within the game, including a tailor shop where you can make designs for all sorts of uses (t-shirts, laying on the ground, etc.), you can change the layout of the town itself by planting trees and flowers, you can buy furniture to make your house look the way you want it to, etc. All that is to say that a game where you have to make your own fun isn't that out-there of an idea.

But could that idea be applied to WoW? Unlike WoW, Animal Crossing was designed from the group up to support this kind of play, which exactly why it's the main form of play in that game. WoW, on the other hand, has a much more straightforward design where it's much clearer what you're supposed to do for fun: level up, do quests, go into raids, go into battlegrounds, make money for the money sinks, etc. Really, the most creative aspect of the game is making money, since there are more ways to do that than any other activity in the game. Not only that, but for the longest time, it was also the part of the game that inspired the most creativity on the part of the players, mostly through people who found ways to fight in so-called "auction house PvP", or players who found unorthodox markets to try to corner.

Thing is, like most games with this kind of design, the game stops being fun once the content is exhausted. Animal Crossing could keep being fun even after you completed everything there was to do in the game (and I doubt anyone actually did that) because of all of its creative outlets, but as we have seen with heroics, when a game is designed to be fun in a straight-forward way, it loses its appeal much faster once we have exhausted that fun. The Wrath heroics have been around for long enough that that very well could have happened ages ago, and the lack of challenge in heroics now just makes it harder to ignore. Players trying to find ways to spice up their heroic runs and taking short-cuts to put some challenge back into heroics are really just doing the only thing they can do to make heroics fun again: putting some creativity into a part of the game that wasn't designed to support a creative playstyle.

So, where does that leave us with our original question? Are these alternative ways of running heroics signs of heroics being on the decline or signs of players playing more creatively? Well, I think it's both, and the second is simply an instinctual reaction to the first.

Why I'm excited for the difficulty spike in Cataclysm

One of the biggest consistencies thus far in Cataclysm's development is that parts of the game that are currently simplistic are going to become more complex and difficult. We won't be able to AoE our way through heroics, where crowd control will be necessary again, and it looks like solo questing is going to become more difficult, as well. Raid healing is going to become more about using the right spell at the right time, rather than using our strongest heals on everyone because we have the mana to do so. Things are going to require more thought and strategy when Cataclysm comes out, rather than being the way they are now, where the game design allows us to brute-force our way through content. Rather than using strategy and kill orders on trash in heroics, we AoE it down because the tank won't take unhealable damage if the group does so, and the healers have the mana to heal through that damage. Rather than healers using many different heals for each situation, they use their strongest spells because they have the mana to do so. Come Cataclysm, this will be different, and as you could probably tell from the title of this post, I am looking forward to that fact, and here's why.

As it is now, in the age of Wrath of the Lich King, the game starts out easy. 5-mans may have been more difficult back in the beginning of Wrath than they are now, but let's be honest, they were still pretty easy back then compared to Burning Crusade's heroics. Anyone who did heroics back in the days of Burning Crusade remembers that we used normal dungeons and faction rewards to gear up for heroics. You Wrath of the Lich King babies (I don't use that term derisively, mind you; I, for example, and a Burning Crusade baby) might need to read that again. We didn't just jump right into heroics to gear up for raids; we first geared up for heroics, then we used the gear we got there to gear up for raids. I'm not saying this as any sort of "back in my day... you kids have it too easy" speech; I bring that up only to prove how difficult heroics were back then. And, of course, we used crowd control. Extensively. A group without any viable crowd control probably couldn't complete a heroic, and victory was far from guaranteed, like it is now. (Has anyone been unable to complete a heroic since patch 3.3? And, before patch 3.3, did you ever go longer than a few days in a row without being able to complete the daily heroic? Didn't think so.)

And as for soloing? Judging by the fact that my level 69 shaman, decked out in nothing but green-quality quest rewards, was able to take down, on his own, a level 72 elite, soloing is pretty easy now, too. In fact, I've always been disappointed by just how easily my priest and shaman have been able to decimate anything in their path as they go through Outland and Northrend. Now, truth be told, I don't remember what it was like to level through Outland back when it was the final continent, and I'm not going to pretend I remember, so let's just say that leveling now is a very easy activity in which you must engage two mobs at once to make it at all interesting or challenging.

But the ways we play through solo content, dungeon trash, and raid healing now all have one thing in common; they are the kind of play-styles that, in expansions past, were only possible by over-gearing the content in question. When yo look at it, there's a certain natural flow to the way things are going to work in Cataclysm. Soloing will start out difficult, but as we get heirlooms to put on our alts, and as we get better gear at the level cap, it will become easier, and we'll be able to take on more than one mob at once. Heroics will require kill orders and crowd control at first, but once we out-gear them, we'll be able to use AoE instead. Raid healing will require strategy at first, but once we out-gear the read, we'll be able to just use our strongest spells. In other words, what is now the default behavior will become a reward for out-gearing the content you are doing. Rather than brute-force being the main way we play, it will only be the way we play through content we have long surpassed.

In addition to the natural flow it creates, I like the fact that brute-force will become the privilege of those with better gear because the progression of complex/difficult to simple/easy allows the simplistic ways of tackling content to act as a sort of consolation prize for players who want to run content they outgear. If someone decked out in raid gear needs to do some dailies for gold for the repair bills, the fact that the enemies are now easier to kill makes the experience different from how it was as he was leveling up. The enemies are dying faster, and he can take on a few at once, so it becomes more fun. If a cutting-edge progression raider wants to run a heroic for extra valor points, the fact that he out-gears the dungeon will allow him to AoE his way through it, providing a nice contrast and a nice break from the progression content he is used to, where he has to use crowd control and kill order. Healers will see a similar benefit; if they decided to run content they outgear, either for the valor points or to help out a less geared guildmate or friend, they'll be able to just spam their most efficient heal since they'll have enough mana regeneration and healing output to do so.

This will be especially nice in contrast to the current way the game progresses as we get better gear. As it is now, all three of the areas of gameplay that I mentioned start out simple yet intense (except with leveling, which is just simple), and then get simple and boring when we outgear the content. Heroics started out as an AoE spam fest, and became a faster AoE spam fest when everyone got better gear. Raid healing started with us using our strongest spells to maximize our healing output, then devolves to us continuing to use those spells--but using the less often--when we get better gear. In other words, the way we play when we out-gear content and the way we play when we don't are very similar, but the former is less interesting, so your reward for getting better gear is that old content becomes more boring. With Cataclysm, this will not be a problem, for the playstyle difference between content we out-gear and content we don't will make doing content we out-gear a change of pace, and thus make it enjoyable.

Lessons to learn from Wrath's heroics, Part 2

Now that the Real ID fiasco is over, we can all breath a collective sigh of relief, and I can get this post out on time, rather than needing to delay it while I write another post about whether I will continue to play the game after the news of the Real ID change (the answer now is a resounding yes). A week ago, I went over lessons to learn from the various heroic dungeons of Wrath of the Lich King, and two things became clear to me: I noticed that everything I had written was negative and critical, and my commenters pointed out that the post was mostly me complaining about elements of heroics that I didn't like. Well, this week, I hope to change at least one of those, as I'll be going over more positive lessons to learn from Wrath's heroic dungeons, elements that Blizzard should emulate when they design Cataclysm's heroics. Whether this will be constructive positive criticism or just me gushing about game elements I like, you be the judge. (I would put a smiley face here if I didn't have the integrity to not use smiley faces in the main body of my posts.)

Pit of Saron, Forge of Souls, and Utgarde Keep

As much as I criticized about the amount of trash in Pit of Saron, it contains what are without a doubt my favorite boss fights in Wrath of the Lich; a shorter version would have been my favorite heroic of the expansion, bar none. As I said in my post "My Warcraft Year in Review", I love the boss fights in Pit of Saron (and Forge of Souls, to a lesser extent) because they require proactive movement. I was pretty disappointed by the encounters in Trial of the Champion because they were just damage and healing races. In fact, they were pretty much tank-and-spanks. I enjoyed fighting Eardic the Pure the most out of all of the bosses in Trial of the Champion because you actually need to move in that fight. The FoS and PoS fights all involve movement, and if you move correctly, the fights are not all that difficult. Sure, they do require a pretty high level of gear, but then again, The Frozen halls is like the Ulduar of the 5-man world, in terms of skill and gear required.

Still, you may say, other fights in other heroics also require movement, so what makes Pit of Saron and Forge of Souls special? What makes them special is that the movement involved is proactive, not reactive. There's little satisfaction in moving out of an area spell when a boss casts it out of nowhere, such as the Maiden of Grief's Storm of Grief; it's more of a nuisance than anything, especially since those spells don't do much damage (they can't, since you need time to move out of them without dying instantly), and thus moving out of them doesn't seem so urgent. However, when a boss is about to cast a spell or use an ability, and you move to avoid it, or you just move to avoid something before it happens, rather than because of something that just happened, you avoided that damage outright. Your skill and foreknowledge just made the fight easier, and that makes it much more satisfying.

In a similar vein to the fights in Pit of Saron, Ingvar the Plunderer is probably one of my favorite bosses from the first ten heroics of Wrath because the fight necessitated hiding behind the columns when he used his Smash or Dark Smash ability (granted, few people seem to do that these days, but I still do it, if only for nostalgia's sake). This was fun for me for the same reasons the fights in Pit of Saron are fun; it was proactive movement that was satisfying, rather than reactive movement that was annoyance.

Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning

Remember when I said that grandiosity in 5-man design was to be avoided? I would like to clarify that when I said that, I only meant that grandiosity is to be avoided in the layout of the instance, in terms of the ground we need to walk on. When it comes to the art design, I love grandiosity, and the Halls of Ulduar are a great example of that grandiosity in action. I don't think any instances wowed me as much when I first stepped through their doors as these two. In fact, my first foray into the Halls of Stone was lamentably short because the tank was a speed runner, and while I did appreciate the fast emblems, I ended up walking through the now-cleared instance on my own, just to admire the artwork inside (I didn't do the same for Halls of Lightning because the my first run though that instance was slower and more methodical, giving me time to admire the artwork.) It's hard to say what made me like those two dungeons as much as I did, but the lines of un-animated earthen below your feet when you first enter Halls of Lightning and the paintings in Halls of Stone stand out in my memory.

The Violet Hold

I know we can't give The Violet Hold credit for this particular element which I am about to discuss--that credit goes to Black Morass was back in Burning Crusade--but we can give The Violet Hold credit for keeping the tradition of the gauntlet-type dungeon going. I enjoy the rush of needing to run from portal to portal as new enemies appear, of needing to know when to use Dash and when to save it, and of knowing where I'll have to go if I can't get there on time so I don't lose control of the mobs. I especially like the fact that even as our gear gets better, this particular element of the instance does not change or get any easier, keeping Violet Hold interesting.

Now, with all that said, I think it would have been a wise design choice for Blizzard to make the amount of time between when a portal appears and when the enemies spawn from it vary based on how far apart the last portal and the current portal are. When a portal spawns on the far right, I know that if another portal spawns on the upper left side, on the second level, I'll need to use Dash to get there in time without the monsters parting ways and mayhem ensuing. And if Dash is on its cooldown, then I have to hope I can get close enough before they spawn to use Feral Charge. Meanwhile, when two portals spawn close to each other, we rush to the second portal and twiddle our thumbs waiting for the monsters to come out. This inconsistency is a relatively minor flaw, but if it disappears in Cataclysm's equivalent to Violet Hold (which I hope they add), then I'll be a happy Druid.

What elements would you have added to this list? Were any of the elements I mentioned things you didn't like about Wrath's heroics.

Lessons to learn from Wrath's heroics, Part 1

Warning: This post contains two instances of PG-13 language (for those outside of the US, that means vulgar language that is fine for most teens, but may be inappropriate for younger children). Hide your infants and tweens.

With the Cataclysm beta starting and the Ruby Sanctum finally released, it's safe to say that Wrath of the Lich King is coming to a close as an expansion. Thus it's a good time to look back and reflect, to reflect on both mistakes and good decisions made. It is with that lens that I look at heroics today. Heroics will probably play a big roll in Cataclysm, as they did in Wrath of the Lich King, and though Blizzard seems to be designing their expansion to get more of those people who spend most of their time running heroics into raids, heroics are not to be ignored. They will be the first foray into group content for quite a few players, and they deserve a good amount of design attention for that reason. So, let's look back at what Wrath's heroics can teach us:

Forge of Souls/Pit of Saron/Nexus

Now, everyone loves a little bit of grandiosity from time to time, but these heroics show that in high doses, it isn't a good thing. Each of these heroics has its own unique issue with grandiosity. Forge of Souls is too big for the number of enemies it has. The long walks between packs of trash kills the suspense for me while I'm in there. Pit of Saron simply has an absurdly large amount of trash, especially between the Krick and Ick encounter and Scourgelord Tyrannus. Nexus suffers from a similar problem, although the instance itself is really just huge for a heroic. Sure, it gives five emblems, but I'd rather work harder for more emblems per instance than work longer. Put simply, heroics are not raids, and do not need to match them in scale and size.

Trial of the Champion

I don't really enjoy the bosses in Trial of the Champion all that much. With the exception of Eadric the Pure, who is the one boss in that instance whom I enjoy fighting, all of the other bosses have abilities that cause high damage, but can't be mitigated in any way. That instance simply expects you to heal through that damage, with no way for skilled players to avoid it (again, with the exception of Eadric). Not only is that lazy instance design, but it also makes the heroic unengaging and annoying when players don't out-gear it and simply boring when they do.

Oculus

Oh Oculus; how I love thee, and yet how the playerbase does not. If any instance is rife with lessons to be learned about the design of heroics, it is this poor sap.

Let's start with the good points... er, point. Flying in an instance has been one of my dreams since I first bought Flight Form. I longed for an instance where flying was an integral part of its execution, where you would fly from platform to platform on your own flying mounts. I guess you can see that Oculus didn't fit this vision very well. Not only were we unable to fly around on our own mounts, but the instance was so unintuitive designed that trying to get anywhere was a nightmare. Flying in an instance can work, but the instances need to be designed so that the path you take through them is more intuitive than it was in Oculus.

And about those mounts. Let's get one thing straight; I enjoy vehicular combat, but only during quests (where the vehicle in question is simple to operate and often grossly overpowered) and PvP (where there is plenty of room for trial and error to get used to the vehicle). In Oculus, none of these luxuries were given to us players: the drakes were hardly overpowered, complex to maneuver and fight with, and mistakes lead to death, which is par for the course in PvP, but a huge inconvenience in PvE. Vehicles in an instance can be a good thing, but they need to either be simple, or there needs to be a way for players to get used to them, something like the daily Aces High! and how it related to the Malygos encounter.

Forge of Souls

I have one gripe specific to the Forge of Souls, a gripe relating to those packs of casters who don't like to move when they are aggro-ed. They are far apart from each other, too far apart for a tank's AoE attacks to hit them all, and there is no way to set up an LoS pull to bring them closer together. This creates a very difficult situation for us tanks, and I implore Blizzard, when they design trash packs with casters, that they add one of the following elements to those packs: the casters actually move, they are placed close together, or there be a way to LoS pull them.

Halls of Reflection

While I'm discussing specific gripes with specific trash enemies in specific instances, allow me to discuss the gauntlet in the beginning of Halls of Reflection. Now, I have no problem with trash that is actually difficult; it makes what is normally a boring part of the instance more interesting. And I have no problem with trash that required crown control; it's my understanding that we'll be seeing more of that in Cataclysm, so we may as well just accept it. And I have no problem with gauntlet type events where enemies spawn automatically; Violet Hold and Black Morass were two of my favorite heroics back when they were a challenge. Each of these distinct elements, I have no problem with individually, or even in pairs. However, put all three together, and you have a clusterfuck of epic proportions.

"Clusterfuck" really is the best was to describe the trash in Halls of Reflection. When I looked up the definition of that word to make sure I was using it correctly, I found this: "Its more precise usage describes a particular kind of Catch-22, in which multiple complicated problems mutually interfere with each other's solution." That describes the trash in Halls of Reflection perfectly: the enemies do a lot of damage and have many abilities that make fighting them a royal pain, so crowd control is necessary. However, crowd control is difficult to pull off because the enemies spawn sporadically thanks to their gauntlet-style setup, so pulls and the crowd control used to make them manageable can't be planned out beforehand. In short, it's a mess, a huge mess.

So, for future reference: difficult trash that requires crowd control? Fine, just give us the time we need to mark the enemies and set up the pull. Difficult trash in a gauntlet-style event? Fine, just don't require us to use crowd control. Trash that requires crowd control in a gauntlet-style event? We'll begrudgingly accept it; just don't give it insanely high damage, so we actually have time to get it under control

I know that most of the things on this list were things that I felt Wrath's heroics did wrong, so next week, I'll be going over what certain heroics did right and what is worthy of being copied by Cataclysm's heroics. Until then, what heroics will you be happy to leave behind when Cataclysm launches, and why?

Comparing the three WoW's, Part 2: Raiding and Leveling

I have already compared the parallel structures of cooperative PvE and PvP, so today I shall compare the parallel structures of leveling and cooperative PvE and see what conclusions can be drawn from them. If you haven't read part one of this post, please do, for I will be writing with the assumption that you already have, so I don't have to repeat myself.

One thing that makes the two parts of leveling different from the two parts of cooperative PvE and PvP is that there is no objective line between pre-level-cap content and level-cap content. Sure, by the time you reach the Storm Peaks, you'll probably be level 80, or at least very close, so that zone and Icecrown could perhaps be objectively considered level-cap content, but even that is a difficult call to make. After all, you are eligible for all of the quests in Storm Peaks at level 77, and ditto for the vast majority of quests in Icecrown (excluding the Quel'Delar quest chain and a few Argent Tournament quests, exactly three to be exact). And even though you are very likely to be level 80 by the time you enter Icecrown, the fact that nothing in either of those zones requires you to be level 80 means the distinction is blurred, to say the least.

Another interesting point of note is that, aside from the chestpieces awarded by the Icecrown quest Battle at Valhalas: Final Challenge, the best gear you will get from quests that don't require you to enter an instance is ilevel 174 (and the quest above only rewards gear that is ilevel 183). For comparison, gear dropped by the normal version of the original level 80 5-mans (Culling of Stratholme, The Oculus, Halls of Lightning, and Utgarde Pinnacle) is ilevel 187, while the rare-quality gear that drops from the original heroics is ilevel 200. That's 13 ilevels of difference between those three areas of the game, a steady increase. Thus we can see these three areas of the game as pre-raiding tiers, with out-of-instance quests being tier 1, normal mode 5-mans being tier 2, and heroics being tier 3.

Of course, with the inclusion of craftable epic gear and reputation rewards, it is possible to skip normal mode dungeons, and even heroics if you know what you were doing, and go right into Naxxramas. I suppose those craftable epics and reputation rewards could be seen as similar to the current system by which heroics drop the second best emblem in the game, while the daily heroic awards the first; they allow you to skip to the interesting stuff, the stuff that everyone else is doing, without needing to go through old content to get there. They allow you to get to the cutting edge without people needing to drag you through old content to gear you up.

But wait! This is the start of the expansion pack that we are talking about. This is when nothing was "old content", not the normals, the heroics, nor the raids. And yet, these measures (craftable epics and reputation rewards) were put in place from the beginning to allow people to skip normal modes and go right into heroics or into raids, just like how the current emblem system allows people to skip all of the previous tiers of raiding and go right into the most current tier of content. Something isn't right here; similar measures were implemented in both cases, yet the circumstances that necessitated them in the second case didn't exist in the first case. What I mean by that is that the new emblem system was implemented so that people could enter the raiding scene if they got in a bit late and missed the chance to gear up while everyone else was running the lower-tier content, but craftable epics and reputation rewards allowed people to skip new content that everyone would have been running if Blizzard hadn't implemented those epics or those reputation rewards. What gives?

I suppose one explanation is that Blizzard didn't want to force people to run 5-mans if they really didn't want to, but even this explanation is difficult to accept. After all, the amount of time it would take to fully gear a character up for Naxxramas without entering any 5-mans would probably be similar to the amount of time it would take to gear up that character using normal modes and eventually heroic modes. The only difference is that the player could move at their own pace and play at their own convenience while using the former method, while gearing up in five mans would force the player to play not only for themselves but also for those they group up with, and they wouldn't be able to just drop out whenever they feel like it, like they could when they are out solo-ing. But the thing is, those differences are also exactly what differentiate raiding from solo-ing, and those differences only get more pronounced in the raiding scene. 5-mans are like a mini preparation for the demands of raiding, so to want to skip them to get into raiding is like skipping learning how to walk because you want to start running. As such, a player who would chose to gear up for Naxx through solo ventures rather than 5-mans would likely be doing so for reasons that would show that he, as a player, isn't ready for raiding, no matter how good his gear may be.

So who were these craftable epics and reputation reward made for? It looks like they were made for the mysterious brand of player that enjoys solo-ing more than 5-mans but still ultimately enjoys raiding more than either. Or perhaps they were made for those players who have the necessary grouping skills to raid and want to get into raids without bothering with that 5-man nonsense. This is certainly a feasible possibility, but heroics in those days weren't like heroics now. In the days before the Dungeon Finder, it was common for guild members to run heroics together for gear and badges, which would negate the one aspect of heroics that could make them less enjoyable than raids: the fact that they were usually PUG'ed. I suppose these craftable epics and reputation rewards could also provide a source of back-up gear, like that provided by emblems, gear that you could use to gear up if the RNG gods decided to deny you a certain drop over and over again.

But could these craftable epics and reputation rewards also have been made for us, the soloists? We players may say that gear is just a nice consolation prize for the grander experience of playing the game, and we may look down upon those who openly admit to playing for the gear, but gear is still an important factor in all parts of this game. As I have said before, gear doesn't only serve as a gatekeeper to keep us from steamrolling through content; it also serves as a representation of our achievements, of the effort we put in to obtain that gear. Crafted gear represents the time we put in to farm the mats and/or earn the money to buy them off of the auction house, while reputation gear represents the time we put in to reach exalted with the faction that rewards it. So is this gear for us?

Honestly, I doubt it. Crafted gear and reputation rewards were integral to entering heroics and raiding back when Wrath first came out, meaning that obtaining them was simply another step on the path to raiding. After all, raiders had to obtain this gear first, then move on to raiding to obtain better gear, so I really couldn't see Blizzard putting this gear in the game to give us soloists something to work for. To say that those rewards were put in for soloists would be like saying that the first few levels in a single-player game were put in for the people who aren't skilled enough to beat the latter levels. It doesn't work that way; those first few levels (and the craftable epics and reputation rewards) are the stepping stones through which a player moves on to more difficult and more rewarding content, not something put in to stand on its own.

It's the fact that this gear serves as a stepping stone into cooperative PvE that convinces me that Blizzard didn't want Wrath's solo content to be viable, to be able to stand on its own as a unique part of the game; they only want it to facilitate players' entry into raids. Astute readers will notice that I have come to this conclusion before through very similar reasoning, but hey, at least I'm consistent, right? In the previously linked post, I concluded that in the same way PvP (and the entire game, really) was balanced around class performance in arenas, PvE has been balanced around raiding to make getting into raids easier. This fact, coupled with everything I have said up to now, leads me to only one conclusion: the three WoW's aren't solo-ing, cooperative PvE, and PvP, with content done before the level cap and content done at the level cap, heroics and raiding, and battlegrounds and arenas as their respective sub-areas. The three WoW's are, instead, leveling, level-cap PvE, and PvP, with level-cap PvE split into three areas: soloing, heroics, and raids.

So what does this mean in the grand scheme of things? It means I can take the conclusion of my previously linked post a step further: WoW's level-cap solo content isn't just a stepping stone into cooperative PvE content; it exists only to facilitate the transition from leveling to heroics and raiding. Wrath's solo content was, quite simply, not designed to be viable, to stand on its own, which explains all of the points I brought up in On the homogenization of Wrath of the Lich King solo content. And yes, I think that the lack of viability of WoW's solo content is a bad thing. So I wait for Cataclysm with bated breath, to see if the game will go further in this direction, or if it will reverse it. Only time will tell.

Comparing the three WoW's, Part 1: Raiding and PvP

One could say that there are three worlds (of warcraft?) in this amazing game we play: solo-ing, group PvE, and PvP. These three areas have an interesting parallel between them: they each have two categories of content, one of which is a gateway of sorts for the other, the other of which provides better loot. For group PvE, those two categories are heroics and raiding. For PvP, they're battlegrounds and arenas (though battlegrounds will provide gear as good as that provided in arenas once Cataclysm hits). For solo-ing, they're, quite simply, content done before the level cap and content done at the level cap. Considering the parallel structure between these three areas of the game, I think it's worth it to look at each area, examine their similarities and differences, and see what that says about the game itself.

It seems that my readership is comprised more of solo-ers than of raiders or PvP-ers, but I'll look at the group PvE scene first--I want to save soloing for last, for I suspect that is where the most interesting conclusions will come from. From the beginning of Burning Crusade, when heroics were first implemented, they were designed to be an entryway into the raiding scene: they gave loot that allowed one to enter the first tier of raiding, and they provided a challenge to those who had just reached the level cap, while still being less of a challenge than raids (and thus rewarding comparably worse loot).

It seems, however, that Blizzard has acknowledged the popularity of heroics (a full 14% of my readership seems to spend most of their time in heroics), for they have added four since Wrath was released, all of which were designed to be harder than regular heroics and to be comparable to raids in terms of their difficulty, and thus reward better gear. All heroics received another upgrade when Blizzard changed the emblem system so that the daily heroic would reward the best emblem in the game, while the bosses themselves would drop the second best emblems. While this meant that heroics did allow players to get better gear, they were still firmly in the position of a stepping stone into raids; if anything, the new heroics themselves were just added to give people who can't raid but can run heroics a place to use that new gear, and to give those looking to get into the newest tier of content another avenue to get raid-worthy gear. Thus heroics still seem to exist as little more than the step before raids; the change in the emblem system only improved that functionality, since people likely don't want to run old raids to help alts and new players gear up, so the emblem system makes it so they don't have to.

And as for battlegrounds and arena? Well, they share a similar structure; battlegrounds are available to players before arenas are, and they allow players to gear up in second-rate (compared to arenas) gear, gear which can allow them to move into arenas, where they will get the best gear. Thus the best gear is only available to those who participate in arena, while gear that was once exclusive to arena players becomes easier to get for players who only participate in battlegroung PvP.

The way gear is obtained in battlegrounds and arenas shows an interesting parallel to the way gear is obtained in heroics and raids: the latter provides better gear than the former, but gear that was once exclusive to players who participate in the latter becomes available to those who participate in the former as the expansion wears on. This can allow us to conclude that Blizzard wants players who decided to enter the arena scene a bit later than others to have a chance at getting geared up for it with relative ease. It certainly takes longer than it may have at the beginning of the expansion, but it is still easier for them to do so than if they had to use the same starter gear as people had to use during the first season of the expansion.

More disturbing, though, is the implication of this parallel that Blizzard sees arena as the PvP counterpart to raiding, and thus they see battlegrounds as the PvP counterpart to heroics, i.e., inferior content. Now, Blizzard has said that they want as many people who PvE to raid as possible, and they have certainly designed the game to make that happen. Can we thus conclude that Blizzard sees arena as the end-goal of all PvP, just as raiding is the end-goal of all PvE? It's an interesting prospect, but it might not be the case. After all, Rob Pardo, Blizzard's VP of game design, has gone on record as saying that arenas were the biggest mistake in WoW's history, and I doubt Blizzard would want to encourage players to participate in something they saw as a mistake. One could see rated battlegrounds as Blizzard's way of admitting that arena should not be the end-goal of PvP, since rated battlegrounds will allow people who play only in battlegrounds to get the same gear as people who play only in arenas. This means that battlegrounds and arenas will no longer relate to each other the way they do now, with the latter being awarding superior gear and thus being implied as being superior to the former.

Still, if Blizzard was so unhappy with the way arenas were implemented, why did they try so hard to promote them over battlegrounds? And why did they still try to do this when arena participation dropped dramatically after rating requirements were added to gear, showing that many players simply weren't interesting in arena for the experience of it? And most importantly, why did they stick with this dying part of the game in spite of the balancing nightmare it created for them? The best guess I have is that they simply didn't know what a nightmare arenas would create; Pardo himself said that if they did know what a nightmare it would be to balance the classes in arenas and PvE, they probably wouldn't have implemented the arena system. I guess their best excuse is the classic excuse: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I wanted to make sure I had enough time to explore this topic as much as needed, so I will have to postpone looking at the parallels between leveling and cooperative PvE for my next philosophy post, which may or may not be posted next Wednesday (considering the sporadic nature with which the ideas for these blog posts come to me, I can't make any promises). Stay tuned!

Edit: As I suspected might happen, the follow-up to this post will be posted on Friday.

What improvements might Blizzard make to the badge/emblem system?

Edit: Blizzard recently announced exactly what changes they will be making to the badge system, so we no longer need to wonder what they will do. Though I didn't anticipate them changing it to a point-based system, they will be implementing a system where there are two types of gear currency, and when a new tier of gear is released, the better type is converted to the lesser type. All I can say is, called it!

The addition of the Emblematic feat of strength in the last patch, sent people into a flurry of speculation about the fate of the emblem system in Cataclysm, but there's one thing we know: it's not likely that Blizzard will simply do away with the emblem system. Instead, they are probably going to change it; after all, we know they didn't like certain aspects of the Badge of Justice system, and we know they don't like certain aspects of the emblem system, so the question is, how can they change gear currency in the next expansion to address the issues that badges and emblems had?

One of the things Blizzard didn't like about the Badge of Justice system was that people could stock-pile badges and buy gear the day it was released. This was not their intention, so they put in emblems with the tiered system we know today. That way, people couldn't run heroics before a patch to stock up on emblems and buy gear the next day; they would have to run heroics after the patch, which was much closer to Blizzard's intentions. Problem is, with five tiers of emblems, things get confusing. Needing to trade down your emblems three or four times to buy heirloom gear is tedious, and it can be annoying to need to talk to multiple vendors just to see what gear you can buy with your emblems. Whatever changes Blizzards makes to the emblems system will need to address these issues.

I have seen suggestions before as to ways to improve the emblem system, but many of these have issues of their own. Some have suggested automatically upgrading emblems to the next tier when a patch hits, but this creates the same issue that Badges of Justice had in that you can stockpile emblems for the next patch. Some have also suggested making old gear be exchanged for the new emblems when a patch drops, but this would prevent your from using the emblems you had stockpiled to buy it. One simple solution is to allow higher-tier emblems to automatically downgrade when you buy something, but this would create issues of its own. People would probably accidentally spend emblems they didn't mean to spend, and imagine the horror of trying to refund them automatically.

Whatever new system is put in place, it would need to motivate people to run heroics all the way through Cataclysm's duration (like Wrath's system), rather than encouraging people to run heroics in bulk to save up emblems to buy gear immediately after the patch drops. One option is to use a system similar to Badges of Justice, but to inflate the cost of gear much more dramatically as the expansion goes on while also increasing the amount of emblems that drop from bosses. This would discourage people from running heroics in advance while still keeping things simple, but the cost of gear would probably reach absurd levels, and people would still farm heroics to get gear the minute it is released. It would also mean emblem achievements be worth less as the expansion wears on.

Perhaps emblems could be demoted as patches went on and be given better gear they can buy. Let me explain what I mean. Suppose that emblems are replaced with a currency we'll call seals. When Cataclysm launches, there would be two kinds of seals: Gleaming Seals of Justice, and Seals of Justice. Heroics (and ten-mans, if Blizzard wants 25-man raids to drop better gear currency) would drop Seals of Justice, while 25-mans and your first daily heroic would drop Gleaming Seals of Justice. GSoJs would be used to buy gear equivalent to 25-man drops, while SoJs would be used to buy gear equivalent to 10-man drops. Now, when a new patch with a new round of gear is released, all of your GSoJs would be demoted to regular SoJs (the idea being that time has made them lose their sheen), but all of the gear that had previously been bought with GSoJs will instead be bought with regular SoJs. Only the latest round of gear would be bought with GSoJs. And, of course, GSoJs could be traded down for regular SoJs.

This kind of system is not without its flaws. One could easily chain-run heroics early in the expansion to save up regular SoJs, then use those SoJs to buy the second best gear later in the expansion. However, the best gear would still only be available to those who continue to run heroics, and someone who is the kind of person to run heroics to save up seals for new gear is probably the kind of person who would want the best gear and would keep running heroics to get it. Players may also feel indignant about their "good" seals being transformed into "bad" seals, even though the "bad" seals would be capable of everything the "good" seals had been capable of before the patch was released. Players may also feel that it isn't worth it to spend their regular seals now when they can get better gear with them later, but if today's system didn't evoke feelings of, "Why run heroics now when running them later will give me better badges?" then I doubt seals will evoke a similar feeling.

Sadly, I cannot come up with some magic system that can solve all of the issues emblems have (if I could, I'd be writing up my resumé to submit to Blizzard, not writing up this blog post.). Considering that the Cataclysm press beta-invites have already gone out, perhaps we'll soon have some idea of just what Cataclysm has in store for us and our emblems. I am quite eager to see what Blizzard decides to do.

Druid healing in heroics, part II

I have already covered the basics of healing in heroics with this flowchart, but a flowchart cannot give the whole picture (see what I did there?), so this post will be a companion guide to that flowchart. For the record, the strategies herein are for druids who are still using heroics to gear up; if you already out-gear heroics, then just follow Jen's strategy:
1. Rejuv the tank
2. (Optional) WG the group
3. Afk until the Rejuv runs out
4. Collect emblems
What follows is advice for people who don't have good enough gear to follow this strategy. This advice is also meant to help healers build the habits they will need when they enter the raid scene.

1. Get some sort of HUD mod that puts your health bar in plain view.
One of the main issues new healers face is forgetting to heal themselves; they get so focused on keeping everyone else's health bars topped off that they forget about their own. That's why I recommend you get a mod like IceHUD (that's the one I use) that puts your health bar in the middle of the screen so it is right in your face. Here's a picture of it in action:














It may seem like it would just be in the way, but trust me, this bar is a life-saver. Having my health Bar right there is the only way I can remember to heal myself. You may want to man it out and try to watch your own bar along with everyone else's, but though your intentions may be good, they won't be worth anything when your carcass is on the ground not healing your party. Trust me; get the mod, or one similar to it. I use it all the time, so it's not a bad addition to your usual mod lineup.

2. Healing Priority: Tank, you, DPS
In heroics these days, you aren't likely to encounter situations where you will need to prioritize healing, but these situation do arise. Your tank may get overzealous with his pull, or you may get Moragg in Violet Hold, or you may be plopped in a Frozen Halls instance. Either way, remember this: the tank must survive. When you need to decide between dropping a heal on the tank and anyone else, the tank's survival comes first. Your survival comes next, for, without your healing, the party will drop like flies. Now, this does not mean that your should not heal your DPS; without them, the boss won't die. However, most DPS these days are in such good gear that they don't need to be healed immediately; still, clothies will be clothies, so if you and the tank are all set for healing, make sure the DPS gets their share.

3. Use Barkskin if you are attacked.
Nothing too complicated about that. Barkskin reduces the damage you take and allows you to heal without your spells being delayed by damage, so if enemies decide to head your way, toughen up a bit with this spell. I also recommend using it before using Tranquility so as not to lose ticks of that spell.

4. Use Innervate when your mana reaches 10,000 less than its maximum.
Innervate restores 7866 mana at level 80, or about 8,000. Since it is your main way to get back mana, you want to have it available frequently, especially when you move into raids, where boss fights will be long enough to allow you to use Innervate two or three times. As such, you want to use it early, but how early? If you use it when you are lacking exactly 8,000 mana, you may regenerate mana in the time that Innervate is active, causing you reach maximum mana and waste your innervate. If you wait until you are lacking 10,000 mana, you probably won't regenerate enough mana to cause you to waste the mana you gain from Innervate. So, if you have 30,000 mana, use Innervate when you have 20,000.

5. Rebirth the tank if the fight is salvageable; rebirth a person capable of resurrection if it is not.
Let's say your tank has died on a boss fight, but that Death Knight DPS went into Frost Presence and took control. He can tank it for now, but you know he won't last long (of course, in a heroic, he will, but we are building habbits for raids, here). In this case, the fight is salvagable, so use Rebirth on the tank and heal him as quickly as you can so he can get back in the game and start tanking again. Now, suppose the tank has died and none of your DPS can off-tank. In this case, the boss will probably rush through and massacre your party before you can resurrect the tank and get his health back up, and if no DPS survive, the fight will take forever. As such, if any of your DPS can resurrect, it's better to use Rebirth on them once they have died. They can then wait for the fight to end, then accept your rebirth and resurrect everyone else. That way, people don't need to run through the heroic again. Note that, in most heroics these days, you are unlikely to encounter a situation where using Rebirth on a DPS is better than using it on the tank, but again, you are building habits for raids here. In fact, you probably won't ever use Rebirth in a heroic, but still, if you encounter a situation where you do need to use it, it's important to know how.

I accidentally posted this early, so you get your advice early this week.

Druid healing in heroics in flowchart form

I have resigned myself to doing heroics so I can get a cloak for when I level from 80 to 85, and in order to save my sanity, I have decided to run them as a healer. I find healing to be a much more relaxing job than tanking, and with all of the gear everyone has, healing in heroics has become quite simple--so simple, in fact, that it can be reduced to a flow chart, which is exactly what I have done here. For the sake of ease of use, I have highlighted the starting point of the chart in a red box.

















Click for the full size.

When spells are put in pairs or triplets, use them in order from let to right. For the sake of space, I used icons rather than spell names. Here's a visual guide in case the spells aren't familiar to you.

= Healing Touch




= Lifebloom




= Nature's Swiftness




= Nourish




= Rejuvenation




= Regrowth




= Revive




= Swiftmend




= Tranquility




= Wild Growth




Note that this post is only meant to visually cover what spells to use for restoring health. For a more complete guide to druid healing, I highly recommend Lissanna's healing guide. I was going to write more on the other points of druid healing, but I am too busy to do so this week; expect more info on druid healing in heroics next week.

Advice for emblem-gear-fueled dungeon speed runs

I don't think it's a controversial statement to say that the new emblem system has changed the face of the five-man dungeon scene, making it near unrecognizable compared to what it once was. Heroics these days are more comparable to running Scarlet Monastery at level 60 than Blackrock Depths. It's safe to say that much of we thought we knew about five-man dungeons has changed, and new assumptions need to replace old ones if we are to evolve to face the new challenges (or lack thereof) that await us on the other side of those instance portals (now replaced by an interface). Many have made these changes subconsciously already, but some may have avoided heroics during this time of great change, and this guide is for them. Note: This guide only applies to heroics, and only to the original Wrath heroics. The advice bellow doesn't apply to raiding or The Frozen Halls.

Tanks:
-Focus on whatever the DPS is attacking.
When it comes to trash, kill order is mostly meaningless these days. As much as you may want your DPS to attack the healer first, you will encounter DPS that just won't want to do it. Rather than getting worked up over them, it's better to just go along with it and focus on causing threat to the enemies they are attacking. Why? Let's say you focus on causing threat to the target you think should die first. This makes it easier for the DPS to over-aggro, so you will lose control of the mobs, making the battle slower. If, however, you focus on what the DPS is focusing on, you stay in control on the situation and the mobs will die faster, making the run faster, and because the mobs won't be running around doing damage to everyone, the run will be more enjoyable in general.

-Focus on AoE threat while fighting trash.
Back when kill order mattered, you would try to cause the most threat to the enemy highest on the kill order while not causing too much AoE threat because your DPS would be focusing on the target of highest priority and not trying to cause massive AoE damage. These days, DPS just want to AoE everything down, meaning if you try to focus on causing most of your threat to one target, you'll end up only holding on to that one target. Though you should use your auto-attacks to cause extra threat to whatever your DPS is attacking (as per the previous piece of advice), you should focus on using your AoE abilities rather than your single-target abilities.

DPS:
-Try to attack what the tank is attacking.
The tank losing control of trash is bad. Sure, with the kind of gear you're wearing, you can probably afford to take a few hits, but if the tank can't keep control of enemies, he can't cause as much damage to them as he could otherwise. As such, the run will be slower. The tank will be causing the most damage to his target, so it helps to focus your attacks on whoever your tank is targeting. You can turn on target-of-target in the options menu to make this easier.

Healers:
-Do some damage if you don't need to focus all of your time on healing.
If you and the tank are in great gear, you probably don't need to spend all of your time healing him and the group. In the olden days, it was considered unthinkable for healers to do any damage to enemy targets. After all, they need to heal when people take damage, and healing causes threat. The DPS can stop doing damage if they cause too much threat, but healers don't have that luxury. Extra threat was just something healers didn't need; it was something they couldn't afford. These days, however, you'd be lucky to break 1% of the tank's threat in an average heroic run. As such, consider dropping some damage on your enemies to make the fights go faster. This will be easier for Priests and Shamans than for Druids and Paladins, of course, since Druids need to leave Tree of Life to do damage, loosing a healing boost in the process, and Paladins can't do much damage without entering melee range, but Priests and Shamans should definitely consider dropping the odd offensive spell when they have nothing better to do. If anything, it will make the run more fun for you while you wait for your tank to drop bellow 95% health.

-Forgo mana efficiency for spell potency.
If you out-gear heroics and are rocking tier-nine or ten gear, you don't need to worry about mana. You do, however, need to worry about wiping. Heroics have become so easy these days that players simply have no patience for wiping. Now, granted, wipes are a near impossibility these days, but you still don't want them to happen. An unexpected development (adds, runners, etc.) can cause a sudden influx of damage, even in these heroics that we have all run before, so you need to stay on top of your game. In fact, being so comfortable with heroics likely leads us to make mistakes we would not have made in the days when they were difficult, if only because of sloppiness. Anyways, your main goal is to avoid a wipe, and knowing that running out of mana is a near impossibility unless you are blatantly overhealing everyone, you should feel free to use your larger, more expensive heals to reduce the chance of a wipe to near zero. It may feel wasteful, but it's only wastefulness if you can run out of whatever you are using.