Time to clean out the trash!

Trash, what a funny name to give packs of mobs inside a raid. Just the fact that the World of Warcraft community decided to give it that kind of a nickname indicates how most people feel towards it. I on the other hand am quite interested in the concept of trash in a dungeon, and how important it actually is.

Having raided since vanilla, I’ve seen a lot of different trash, good and bad. For a time there was a lot of people complaining that trash shouldn’t exists, that was until Blizzard released Trial of the Crusader, and the players were reminded of how terribly boring a raid can be without any trash between the bosses.

Trash servers a very important role. Trash can in many ways act as a “break” between intense boss fights. It doesn’t necessarily have to provide anything in terms of gameplay, but I’ve often found that social activities on ventrillo/teamspeak often occur when the raid is clearing trash. I look back to trash-heavy dungeons such as Karazhan and I realize that one of the reasons why I look back at those raids so fondly was not just because I enjoyed them, but because my guild bantered a lot during the trash, and I bonded with my guildies greatly during that time.

Trash can also be used as a psychological preparation for a boss fight to come. Blizzard has been favoring adding trash that follows the gimmick of the boss they are “guarding”, and I quite enjoy that. A good example is the elementals before the Ascended Council boss in Bastion of the Twilight, which follows the gimmick of using the elements against each other to counter their abilities, psychologically preparing the raiders for what they have in store.

Now, what makes trash bad, and what makes it good? You may ask. Well, let me start off with what’s bad; too much of it!

You never want too much trash in a dungeon, and if you’re going to cram a whole dungeon full of it, make sure you can avoid most of it. Make it dangerous however, and make sure the raid must be very sneaky in order to avoid most of it, and add lots of patrolling packs that also needs to be carefully avoided. If you put a narrow corridor full of unavoidable packs that takes ages to kill however, congratulations, you’ve created boring trash!

Another thing that makes trash bad is by not making it difficult enough to keep the raiders on their toes. This is where the majority of Wrath of the Lich King went wrong. If you have easy trash, it just becomes boring and makes the raiders fall asleep. The trash must always be challenging in some form or another, and even when heavily out geared it should still have abilities that make it a threat to the raid if they don’t use proper crowd control or follow other important steps.

Good trash is difficult, yet there shouldn’t be much of it. In my opinion there should be a good 10-15 minutes of clearing trash between each boss, give or take. Also, why not include more traps in raids? Or even some platforming action? Make players jump between pillars above molten lava while rocks fall from the ceiling and fire erupt from the walls. It can certainly be done with the engine, but for some reason the raiding team simply doesn’t seem to value such challenges in raids. I think it’s a great shame, and I feel the raiders would find such things refreshing, but what do I know, I’m just a retarded, gay priest.

(I did that one for you, stupid guildies).

Difficulty levels, choice or progression?

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog, and most of all it was on time that I removed my old self and updated it with a newer, cataclysmic me. For those of you who don’t know, I transferred my undead priest over to a new realm and had to race change into human because the guild I wanted to join was Alliance. This was a tough decision, as after five years of playing the same character you really get attached to it. The new guild turned out to be a great success though, so I’m not regretting the decision one bit, and I still think human males have some of the coolest animations and poses in the game, so I’m pretty happy overall.

Today I want to write about hard modes and how different games utilize them. I’ve written about a similar topic before where I complained about the lack of quality when it came to the hard modes in Icecrown Citadel, but that was solely a complaint about Blizzard being lazy and not utilizing their tools properly to make high quality content for their subscribers. That was back in Wrath though, and we all know it was a lackluster expansion from the start. Cataclysm is yet to be a Wrath 2.0, and I’m pretty happy about that, but sadly we can never know what the future will bring.

One thing that bothers me about hard modes in their current state is not their difficulty level, but the way Blizzard is using them to make them a higher level of raid-progression, instead of offering an actual choice to the player-base.

We’ve all played those good old games with the easy, medium, hard and possibly expert difficulty levels. These levels in their various shapes and forms, allowed players to challenge themselves depending on their current skill level. For new players, beating the game on easy would probably be tough, while for the experienced veterans; the game could only become truly challenging on the hardest difficulty available.

It is quite normal for players, when they are new to games, to start on the easiest difficulty level and then work their way up to the top. This is the most normal form of progression, since it’s like climbing stairs of sorts. This is fine, as long as the players have a choice to actually skip some of the difficulty levels and climb straight to the top.

A good, personal example would be when I first bought Dragon Age 2, which comes with four difficulty-levels, casual, normal, hard and nightmare. Since I played the crap out of the first game (probably somewhere around 200+ hours of gameplay), I was so familiar with the Dragon Age play-style that I started my first play-through on hard, even though I was completely new to the game. It was tough, but I made it. This was a choice I made for myself, and the game did not hinder me from doing so, although it did severely punish me by killing me over and over again until I got better and finally beat it.

According to Blizzard, their hard modes are an “alternate progression path”, which is a statmenet made out of festering piles of filthy garbage. There is no alternation about the current hard modes, because they require gear from the normal modes to even be beatable. Even if they had removed the requirement to actually kill the final bosses in each of the raid-dungeons to unlock the hard modes, your raid would be completely slaughtered if they walked straight into the heroic raids without acquiring any gear from the normal ones. Because of this, Blizzards idea of hard modes is simply for the raiders to have something to do once they’ve beaten the content, it doesn’t actually provide the players with any kind of choice, unless they are already farming normal modes and are getting bored of it.

My idea of proper hard modes would be first of all to add multiple difficulty levels. This is nothing new to World of Warcraft; they did it in Ulduar, plenty of times in fact. Remember Flame Leviathan? You could either leave all four towers up, or none of them, that’s a total of five difficulty levels. The fun thing about that encounter is that it wasn’t even all that gear dependant, meaning a fresh raid could actually have a go at the hardest difficulty from the get-go, now that’s giving your players a choice!

While I do enjoy the hard modes in Cataclysm quite much, there is no excuse for the current use of the mechanic other than Blizzard being lazy. Hard modes are simply an excuse to provide the players with more content without having to spend all that much development time doing so, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want them there, I just wished it would have been done differently, like in Ulduar.

Come to think of it, it wouldn’t really be that much effort for Blizzard to give a boss multiple difficulty-levels. Simply give a boss a ton of abilities, and remove one of them for each difficulty level below the hardest one. On the easiest difficulty, the boss could perhaps only have one to two abilities, while on the hardest one; the boss could have five to six. It wouldn't even be needed to increase boss health and damage output (which becomes a gear issue), the fight would just need to be more complex. This would make it less gear-dependant, and I actually think it would make raiders happier overall.

Mangs wall of text crits you for 258926824181

I’ll stop now

Disc is OP, nerf!

So I decided to start up this blog again after a long hiatus, reason being Wrath of the Lich King gave me nothing to really write about. I’ve been playing Cataclysm since its release however and I’m pretty happy about it so I’m resurrecting this at least for the time being.

My topic for today is Blizzard’s constant nerfing of the Discipline tree and how they are just stomping the problem into the ground rather than actually trying to fix it.

Throughout the entire Wrath expansion, the Discipline tree was absurdly overpowered, but the play-style was very simple. Spam shields, spam more shields and keep spamming more shields, as much as your mana would allow (and remember, this was Wrath, your mana was allowed to do whatever it pleased).

In Cataclysm, Blizzard stated they wanted to make Discipline “more fun”. They wanted to move away from the model of spamming shields left and right, while still maintaining Disc as a viable healing tree. Blizzard’s idea of fun however, is to nerf the crap out of Power Word: Shield every patch so that priests don’t use it as much. They state that “they don’t want it to be the only spell Disc priests use” as a justification for these changes.

The problem is however, that the reason why Disc priests prefer to spam shields is not because they are so powerful, but because it is their only form of utility that makes them unique compared to their holy brethren. Absorption is the only thing the Discipline tree is good at; it falls flat on everything else versus Holy.

Just start comparing the two trees, and see how much you miss by not going Holy. Circle of Healing, one of the most potent AoE heal in the game. Lightwell, the most unique and mana-effective healing spell in the game. Guardian Spirit, the best life-saver spell in the game (besides combat ress). Chakra, the most diversifying, unique healing-mechanic in the game that allows you to swap between single-target healing and AoE healing with the click of a button. And on top of this you have a mastery that affects your every single healing spell, compared to Disciplines mastery, which affects two spells, one of them being a passive ability that you have no control over.

Blizzard stats they want Disc to use their other tools as well and not just spamming shields. I am very curious as to what these tools might be because I’m not finding them, unless the tools they are talking about are cooldowns like Pain Surpression, Power Word: Barrier and Power Infusion, because they are nowhere close to the utility of the Holy tools. On its own the Disc tree may look pretty strong, but once you compare it to the utility of the Holy tree it falls flat on every area except for the shields, which Blizzard are now nerfing the crap out of patch after patch because they think the play style is boring.

In reality, Blizzard designed a flawed tree the moment they made Discipline viable in raids because it was always based solely on shields, but the fact is that despite its flaws in terms of fun game play, it was so good that many priests chose to play as it anyway because they took joy in playing a strong specc that could do what no other healers could, prevent incoming damage instead of just healing it.

Until Blizzard gives Disc priests some tools other than Penance and a 3 minute cooldown Barrier, Disc priests will either spam shields or specc holy. These tools they want us to use after nerfing our shields time after time are non-existent compared to the Holy tree, and unless they do something about the specc it will in my eyes always be broken. I am just waiting for the next patch notes that will probably say “Power Word: Shield has been removed from the game.”