What is a PvPer?

The everlasting conflict between PVErs and PVPers is that the second group is quite happy to gank the first but there's no vice versa. - Syl on Twitter

 Pshaw, I say.

PvP and PvE are not separate groups. I usually do PvE. Sometimes I do PvP. The latter has about 95% of my gaming-related profanity. Strangely, in PvP my profanity is usually aimed at developers, while in PvP it is aimed at other players. As they say, "don't hate the player; hate the game developer who created such an unbalanced piece of total bullshit." Maybe that's relevant.

When I am in a PvP mood I do not gank. Just yesterday I was on my way to a mote cloud when I saw a level 80 fly toward it. He'd have beaten me to it, but he flew away. I was sad that I'd scared him off. Granted, I might have stunned him and taken the cloud for myself, but I wasn't going to press the entire extra button needed to kill him. Gear inflation is insane.

I take that back. I have ganked. Once upon a time that was a way to draw out the 60s. Swoop in and kill a quest giver or two, kill a few lowbies, and you've got yourself a battleground. Sadly, that no longer works.

In PvP I am often looking for a reasonably fair fight, or a fight that has a reasonable expectation of being fair. Those aren't the same, as anyone can tell from your average random BG that, despite being based essentially on random draws from both factions, has one failing in an almost impressive manner. I'd even claim that ganking and PvP are different activities, despite falling under the same mechanical umbrella.

Getting back to my pshaw, I suggest that Syl has drawn the lines all wrong. Since PvP and PvE are not separate categories of players, then what is the division? I propose decent human beings and bad people.

PvP has an obvious appeal for the bad people. They can directly inflict harm upon others.

Yet, is PvE immune? Is the loot ninja not a harmful jerk as well? How about the person who wipes the raid? What about the person who abuses the limits of vote-kicking to act as a parasite on a group, contributing nothing yet getting all the rewards for success? And surely the people who make glyphs are a universally awful group.

The problem is not PvPers vs. PvPers, but of horrible people vs. decent people. Maybe PvP has a higher percentage of horrible people. Fine. But do not stereotype an entire group because of that, or else you, Syl, will be in that group.

I'm saying you're a horrible person.

Difficulty is only half the story

Tobold asks if Rift proves that Cataclysm is too hard? He eventually comes to this claim: "Most players prefer a game in which they don't have to constantly justify their performance."

That sounds about right. I'd even go so far as to say that most players prefer a game in which they never have to justify their performance. Please don't take this as a "they have lives" argument, but when people have serious jobs full of their own challenges, family and social arenas to navigate, and at this moment, a whole lot of economic uncertainty, who the fuck wants a 'challenge' when they start a game?

Challenge is great and all, but when there's too much of it (a subjective measure) and when it's "not my job", it morphs into frustration. Top it off with an obnoxiously realistic preparation cost, gems, enchants, glyphs, pre-learning fights, and the raiding game in WoW could very quickly resemble a job, except unpaid and without even being able to pretend to contribute to society. Not that I am saying there is anything wrong with raiding, just that it's not a productive activity. Again: recreation is fine, good in fact, essential, but it is not and should not take on too much similarity to work.

But I don't think this is the entire situation. There is another aspect: consistency. Historically, WoW has been on a trend of anonymity and speed, even before LK, though that is when it mushroomed into the awful pile of awful that it is now (I mean the trend, not WoW; I'm not going to be a WoW-basher just because I left). Leveling got faster, grouping got faster, gear got faster, everything got faster, we overgeared faster, we zerged and rushed and zergrushed and merged adjectives into nouns into verbs with some adverbs generously scattered on top to complete the recipe, as if we were making German words.

Raiding went in the exact opposite direction. Fights became more complex. Smaller raids gave less room for error, and for carrying lower-performing players. We went from basic concepts like "stand here and kill that, but watch your aggro, run away if you're the bomb" to "kill the boss but when the slimes come you switch to them and you have to stay close to them unless it's the orange and it's chasing you, then you need to stay away from it, and now that you're back on the boss you need to watch out for the ooze puddles and also there are the orange vials that you cannot stand in, and now we're going to be in phase three where you're moving constantly so I hope you don't have a predisposition toward muscle craps because you're going to be twisting your hand a bit to keep up your rotation since this is a burn phase but keep moving and if you stand i the orange stuff we wipe because that will wreck your DPS and fucking fuck you god damn noob you killed us how hard is it to keep track of A, B, C, D, E, and F while also maintaining your rotation?"

And then we go back to dailies, facerolling a half-dozen mobs at once while we contemplate our next angry forum post about how X fight is too lag-dependent and how my class is so underpowered.

WoW used to be harder or less convenient and fast or some mix of the three. I'm not saying leveling wasn't always easy. It was. That was one of the selling points. But your average world elite wasn't a total joke. Your average instance wasn't going to be rolled over in your sleep. I'm not suggesting it was "hard", if theoretically there was an objective, quantifiable measure of it, but that the average play experience was a little bit more normalized. We waited around more, so when we found ourselves waiting around, that was normal, as opposed to an outrageous outrage. We wiped, so when it happened, well that's what happens.

WoW used to be more consistent. The loss of consistency, I believe, is part of what made hard heroics so undesirable, even if they aren't all that much harder than past hard 5-mans.

Replacing the Holy Trinity with One God

And I am his prophet.

What is it that keeps the idea of a tank alive? Yes, exactly the same thing that keeps the tank alive: healers. Without a healer, even a tank will die. And when the tank can die, is he really a tank or just awful DPS who survive a few more seconds but do a lot less damage? Yes.

So I introduce to you a magical world in which queues are instant, no one heals, and no one tanks. In this magical world everything hits a lot softer but has a lot more health. Rather than healing or tanking, we just take turns casting Taunt Everything and then bandaging.

Does this sound skilless and boring? Of course it does! I bet some players might even enjoy it. So of course we have to fix that.

Step one: Add a few mobs with AoE. These will interrupt bandaging, ruining the taunting rotation since the next guy in line will still be half-dead. So we need to focus on them, possibly with death or possibly with CC.

Step two: Uh.

Okay I give up, I hate this idea. We're all doomed. If we separate out roles, we're going to have shortages which vary wildly with the content. Heroics: not enough tanks or healers. Raids: too many tanks, not enough healers. Great system! If we remove the trinity then it turns into a muddled pointless mess of taunt rotations or even worse, we have to all play dynamically with cooldown usage, kiting, and CC to prevent death.

It's not the size that matters, it's also the relative size, color scheme, decorations...

Syl wants to know what makes a boss fight memorable.

I was the only person to have anything close to a scientific answer based on my extensive research in the growing field of "things I sort of remember". In other words, I am an expert Moltencoreologist.

So the answer: Tall bosses. Big rooms.

These are both essential. Short bosses in very big rooms don't work. Those are called gnomes and they are utterly unmemorable except if you kill thousands at a time.

Conversely, big bosses in small rooms don't work. Note that this is relative. While Magtheridon's room is big and he is big, he is too big for the room.

A cluttered room can simulate the effects of a small room. For example, Kel'Thuzad's room is filled up with a giant throne and the walls are filled with hostile undead, reducing the effective space. Furthermore, his small footprint means that melee are packed up, reducing the apparent size for them. That other KT, Kael'thas, has rooms scattered with banners, statues, and strange glowing boxes, which also reduce the perceived size. This is in addition to him ultimately dying in what appeared to be a large storage closet.

We've seen all the negative examples. What about fights that worked?

Raganaros tops the list. He is very tall. And wide. The room he's in is gigantic. The size of the room has the benefit of allowing players to stand far enough back to see his head.

By this point you may be wondering, is this just another silly post? Yes. No. Sort of. I'm trying to find something universal here. Something applicable. Challenging fights are dependent on the skill of the players, their gear, and not getting nerfed two months later. And they can't be replicated. Once you know a fight, you know a fight. Challenge tends to be a brick wall which is suddenly gone, without the slightest hint that it was ever there. It cannot instill feelings if "you weren't there then". Silly fights, such as the pygmy in Lost City, don't retain their value. The joke gets old. But maybe a tall boss in a big room has some lasting power. It is not a brilliant design or a substitute for a fun, challenging fight, but as a general rule, the last boss should be tall and in a big room. A well-decorated room.

How carebears have ruined WoW

This post will contain nothing but facts, so if you disagree, it's because you hate facts and American and are therefore a Communist. Europeans, you can just move along right now, along with anyone not from real America.

Rogues thrive on world PvP. By world PvP I mean people who are either afk or at half health while fighting ten mobs. With the addition of guards and sanctuary cities, rogue PvP became harder, but thanks to vanish could still be done. Then came flying mounts. By the time Blizzard added teleports to instances, rogues were all switching to sword specialization in order to get the highest possible DPS. While commuting seppuku.

This lack of world PvP also hurts everyone else. With a safe, carefree, or should I say, carebear, world, no one has to pay any damn attention. Situational awareness has plummeted. When players fall out of the habit of spinning their camera and character in circles to watch for rogues, or on some days, warlocks who will fear you into even more mobs, it's not a surprise that they also lose track of things like adds, fire, and adds on fire.

But how does world PvP come back? Simple: make it.

The fact is that world PvP cannot be based on any sort of encouragement or positive effect. Small rewards didn't make sand, I mean Silithyst, any more fun. Significant rewards will only work for a short time, until we outgear them and no longer care. There is only one way to cause world PvP: give us no other choice. Put summoning stones in vulnerable locations, such as anywhere, and make it impossible to summon from outside to inside an instance. Remove teleporting to dungeons. While you're at it, put a bunch of instances all in the same area so that inevitably players will run into each other. Or at least so rogues will run into them.

Getting chain-ganked by rogues also hardens players, giving them the strength to deal with wiping continuously for hours on end. After all, I've killed some bosses in less time than it takes to run from Thorium Point to Blackrock Depths while a raid is gathering for Blackwing Lair.

Carebears have also ruined gathering. It used to be that a mineral node was a serious deal. People might fight for days over a regular thorium node, until finally someone won Alterac Valley. Gathering used to be hardcore. Dismounting to mine or pick herbs meant you were vulnerable to someone else coming along to kill you. Now everyone is spread out and not flagged. The greatest happiness came when I switched back to PvP and got into the habit of killing anyone who even dared to glance at my ore.

Carebears encourage bots, leaving them free to bot away at bot activities such as botting. If instead they were killed on sight... Let me put it this way: I started this post talking about hating America and Communism and here's where it ties in: bots. The economic growth in China is not due to stealing jobs. It's due to stealing spawns. That's right, bots and gold sellers in WoW account for over 75% of China's increase in GDP over the past five years. Kill the bots and we'll stop those damn Communists right in their tracks as they attempt to sell us gold at market prices.

One Free Bullet

I decided to take a crack at a hardmode, not in WoW, but in Half Life 2: Episode One. The title name comes from the achievement, One Free Bullet, to complete the game firing only one bullet. Rockets, grenades, and stuff fired from my gravity gun is acceptable, and of course my crowbar. The one bullet is to break a lock, not even to kill something. This creates a very strange way of playing a FPS.

My best friends were radiators and explosive barrels. Radiators are great for launching with the gravity gun, a device which can pick up and fire stuff very quickly. Radiators are big, heavy, and have convenient spaces so I can actually see where I am going. Explosive barrels explode. Concrete blocks are also great because they are fairly heavy, but small enough to be easy to aim.

Most of the game wasn't much harder. Generally the hardest fights involve either flying things to shoot with rockets or tripods to shoot with rockets, and neither are affected. The cannon fodder was easily dispatched with thrown objects or the gun of my increasingly clingy companion, Alyx (short version: they saved each other many times, she keeps dropping hints).

Except for the antlion guardian. Think big thing that can throw cars, run fast, and likes to charge into you doing tons of damage. It's hard to kill with bullets. It's harder to kill without. Instead I have to kite it as best I can, keeping sufficient range so that the barrels don't kill me as well. Meanwhile much smaller antlions are flying around trying to attack me. By smaller I mean about half the size of a car. Speaking of which, cars are great for crushing the small ones, while the big one just shoves them right back, harder.

As I've played Half Life I've noticed that it tends to hold the player's hand in terms of learning. It rarely just tosses you into a fight with no clue. Instead you might see someone else use a particular method to kill something. Sometimes they even giver direct advice "shoot for the head" (zombies) or "throw a grenade in the window" (snipers). It sounds more useful in the game, in case that sounded dumb. There's even a training session before one of the boss events, to practice launching and blowing up a bomb.

Why doesn't WoW do this? Why are so many raid boss mechanics new and unexpected, throwing us for a curve when we see them, and requiring retraining of everything? Oh, but it does. It does! We just rarely notice. Next time you run your randoms, watch the boss abilities. Many of them are exactly like raid bosses. The difference is that the heroic does so much less damage that we tend to just ignore it, out-heal it, out-damage it, out-tank it. Then when we hit a raid and our gear can't carry us, suddenly it's a problem.

I can't entirely blame players for failing to learn raid boss mechanics from heroics. For one, there's a time difference. In Half Life I might see an example and then use it a minute later. In WoW you might have weeks between a heroic fight and the similar raid.

But getting back to the heroics, they might also be teaching us bad lessons. How quickly will the poison puddles in AN kill you? It is often healed through. The incentive to move is weakened. Why move out of this puddle when the others don't hurt much? There's no rush. In Half Life you might be shown one enemy, kill it easily, and figure out generally how its done. Then there are five of them, ten of them, and now you can apply those same skills. In WoW it often seems that we're instead shown a trivially weak version of an ability, learn to ignore it, and then get flattened when the 5x stronger version shows up.

Comparisons across genres don't always work. They're not the same game and aren't supposed to be. Still, it's worth thinking about, the different ways to teach a player.

Epics are Undergeared

I'm now recruiting epic-geared players for level 80 heroics. My recruitment thread has gone up on the Zu'jin forums as well.

Heroics these days are boring. More importantly, unstylish. It's time to fix that.

I need four level 80 players in pre-BC gear to run heroics with. Pick whichever tier you think looks best.

I'll also be running raids on Fridays at 8pm to help gear people down. We'll do whichever raid best fits our numbers, so if we don't have enough for AQ40, we'll do 20; if we don't have enough for BWL, we'll do MC. These will not be undergeared since we're likely to be undermanned. As a rough estimate, AQ needs 20, BWL 15, MC, AQ20, and ZG just need someone else to show up to give me an excuse to run them.

3k GS maximum. Send a letter to Kelpsacovic to apply.

P.S. DKs are welcome, but will have to scavenge since there are no sets for them.
P.P.S. This is a silly serious project, meaning that it is intended to be silly, but it's serious enough to happen. Let's do this.

There's still next to no non-raid progression

Level up
Do some regulars
Do some heroics
Max out with heroic Halls of Reflection.

Then do randoms endlessly for gear.

Is this 'alternative' progression? I see very little progression. I see loot. There's certainly loot. But that's not progression, or at least I'd not call it that.

I could just as well run random regulars and collect gear from those. The content is so low that whether I'm wearing triumph gear or frost gear, or 200 level blues, or lower, it's not going to be very hard. Sure, the ICC heroics require some gear and HoR isn't a mindless AoE-fest, but they're hardly comparable to even the challenge of Naxx.

10 man raiding will finally get somewhere. Can 5-mans get somewhere too?

Should groups be smaller?

Now and then I've advocated for adding a 6th person to the standard group. This would free up more space for DPS. But then a gnome got me thinking. No, not about trajectories and "can I punt her past that?" Instead, about those rare-these-days sub-5 groups in which people actually try and struggle and fight and play. They know there are better ways to get rewards, so it's all about the experience, and I don't mean the experience that makes our characters ding, but perhaps that makes us players ding, as we level up our patience and tactics. I've run into this myself, and also enjoyed it.

Maybe this can become normal.

What if Blizzard dropped groups down to 4 people? It would hurt the DPS, but let's remember: DPS hate us, by us I mean tanks and healers. Why else would they play the way they do? Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by malice. But that's beside the point.

With one less DPS, even with the tank being one of those who matches the DPS, that's still a 25% loss overall. That's going to make it trickier to just AoE everything down or burn through mechanics such as needing to kite or switch targets or whatever else. We'd each have to play a bit smarter.

It would be slower. Is that really so bad? I hate to think that we've all being running miserable randoms just for emblems. Would it be an improvement to run them slower but actually enjoy them?

Instances would still be tuned for bad 5-man groups, so the change wouldn't just be "one less person, easier instance".

'PvP' fights

Could this explain why so many people dislike arenas?

I'll start off with some facts.
1) People tend to dislike those activities at which they are terrible.
2) I am terrible at arenas. Like, really really bad. If I still did them, I'd be the reason you'd be sitting there wondering how such terrible people got into your bracket. They would be lower, but they're standing on my hunched-over shoulders as I shake in fear/am chain-feared.
3) I don't like arenas much.
4) The champions fight in the ToC raid has been described as a "PvP fight."

What can we get from this?

First off, people apparently think that PvP means a massive zerg rush against an enemy with no clear target. This means that they might potentially attack healers rather than the guy with plate and more health than you can count on thirty thousand fingers. With this in mind, I better understand some of the teams I ran into in arenas or BGs which would go after the absolute wrong person: they learned PvP from NPCs.

Taking this all together we can see a clear conclusion: Many people hate arenas because they are terrible at them.

Part two: The one where I don't launch half-joking attacks on PvErs.
I deceived you. I'm still going to attack PvErs, but I'm very serious this time. Read through some of the comments at Larisa's post.

"In TotGC, I honestly hate limited attempts. Why? I don't like PvP. Nearly no one in my guild is heavily interested in PvP or Arena. In short: We absolutely suck at Faction Champions Heroic. It's a drag every week and I just don't like being punished for not caring about PvP."

"Of course we know how the threat works and we all drag our PvP abilities in our action bar. We send people to get new specs just for this encounter.

BUT, on 25 heroic you will get destroyed if your fellow raiders aren't great at controlling their assigned targets."

"But I absolutely dislike fights, where PvP veterans have a big advantage and many PvP talents will make your life easier... PVE players often don't have those abilities keybound, if they use them only very very rarely."

There's some misguided belief that playing one's full class is a PvP skill. Maybe it is. Maybe only PvP actually draws out the full class. If so, that indicates that PvE is horribly designed and that 'PvP' fights are a step towards fixing that.

However I'm not going to accept this argument. It's giving up and giving it. It is accepting lack of skill and blaming the raid rather than the player.

The fact here is that whether something is a 'PvP' skill or a 'PvE' skill, having or not having this or that aptitude is part of what differentiates good from bad players. It goes beyond just having skills hotkeyed and being used to casting them. It taps into situational awareness. Good PvPers have to know what's gong on everywhere at all times. They watch their backs.

I've been described as a good tank partly due to my fast reactions to adds and other bad situations. How do I do this? Well first off it's just what a good tank does. But I didn't learn that adaptation and awareness from tanking. I learned it from learned paranoia on a PvP server. I learned to judge a pull before I did it: "Can I kill these mobs if I get jumped? Can I somehow kill that guy without aggroing the mobs near him?" I learned to always be aware because other players don't care about whether you're busy, they want you distracted and will take advantage.

PvP and PvE aren't using radically different skill sets. The problem is that in PvE we tend to focus on dumbing things down, on eliminating skill as much as possible. On regular Anub we used to try interrupting the adds so they wouldn't burrow; but that required rogues to keep an energy reserve and to pay attention, for the DKs to do the same, for people in general to do something other than a DPS rotation. We opted to drag them onto the ice instead and let the healers heal a bit more. Can you imagine how stupid it would look to see an arena team trying to fight the other team in a specific spot because they suck at interrupting? I don't mean a place where they can use LoS to screw with damage and heals by moving in and out of cover, but just someplace that they stand and suddenly enemy spells are automatically interrupted.

It's fundamentally a problem of attitude. People don't approach these more open fights as challenges. Instead they're PvP fights and omg we're not PvPers! They decide that a certain set of skills are not the right ones to use in raids and any fight that requires them is bad. This is a ridiculous mindset.

Until the mobs are controlled by a GM, it's not a PvP fight, it's only a more interesting PvE fight.

Finally soloed Moroes

It took a few tries, but he died. It was pretty close and I ended up popping LoH for the last 10% or so. I might have been able to kill him without it, but I figured it was worth it, just to be safe. The adds were shadow priest, ret paladin, prot warrior, holy paladin. If not for the stun reduction in ret I probably would have died. Nerf HoJ, except on my paladin. :) Gear-wise, I feel like I'm right at the edge of what is practical, not relying on procs too much or needing to pop potions. The last time I attempted this my gear was about the same except for a worse neck and I had H VH legs instead of T7.

Keeping with the theme of the past two years, the watch did not drop. The two times I have seen it, it's been a much bigger upgrade for others.

Attumen was close due to a bad choice when resealing.

Maiden was a slow death that I didn't feel like I could do much to prevent. So much damage is holy, so my armor does nothing and BoS isn't giving much regen. This would probably be a lot easier as ret so I could actually hurt her and heal more with instant FoL.

Time for ZG...


Oh right, Happy New Year.

Blessings

This is copied from a post of mine on the paladin forums. I do this sometimes when I'm either afraid that my brilliance will drown in the forums so I want to save it here or just posting here will hide my brilliance from the masses, so I post there as well. Brilliance is fun to say. It's like a light bulb from the lungs.

Kings is causing a lot of trouble these days. Few people want to take it and few people think they have teh points for it. So what's the real problem and what can we do about it?

Let's start off with the issue of having four blessings, but a balanced raid would have at most three paladins. Something gets left out. It sounds bad, but is it really a problem?

There are two blessings that prot definitely wants: kings and sanctuary. Might would give an aggro/damage boost. Wisdom might give more aggro, if the tankadin is having mana problems. If push comes to shove, they can go without wisdom or might and I don't see any significant problems. There is a weakness here, but it's not as big as it would seem at first.

Ret would definitely want kings and might. Wisdom is useful when the paladin is going all out, especially against demons and/or mobs under 35% when there are so many attacks that mana is drained faster than JotW can regen. However ret has no DPS need for sanctuary. The damage reduction would be nice to have on everyone for AoE damage, but like with prot and wisdom, not a huge loss.

This may be one of those situations where we are supposed to make tradeoffs. We can't get every blessing we want, but we can at least get three 2-3 most valuable ones.

Still, there remains the issue of two blessings in one tree. Even worse, both are the critical blessings for prot. So what's to be done? Someone else has to get kings. From what I've seen, holy can't really spare the points, however ret can. But this would mean ret is getting imp BoM and kings, both of which are DPS blessings, so people want both. It's a repeat of the two blessings in one tree, except spec instead of tree.

Solution: ret doesn't get imp BoM, holy does. But holy also gets imp wisdom! Fortunately, there's not a huge overlap between mana and physical damage. Hunters, shamans, and paladins are the only classes that would want both, in addition to felguards. However in these cases, what's the loss? They don't have huge mana problems, so they wouldn't be hurt too much by getting wisdom from a prot paladin, kings from ret, and might from holy. I know, it's a strange system where no one is giving the blessing from their tree, but it would work.

But let's say we don't want to make these tradeoffs and Blizzard doesn't want us to either, then what? I've seen several solutions. One is to make kings into a talent that buffs blessings, something like "in addition to their current effects, your blessings also increase player stats by 2/4/6/8/10%" Another idea was to put kings onto devo aura. The most basic solution was to just remove kings and rebalance the game without it, though this could end up being the most work to implement.

TL;DR
We have more blessings than we have paladins. We can minimize weaknesses by choosing the three most useful blessings. Ret would pick up kings, holy would get imp wisdom and imp might. Prot would get sanctuary. Each spec would do that blessing, with the exception of prot which would be putting wisdom on physical DPS that use mana: enhancement shamans, retribution paladins, hunters, and felguards.

Utility summarized

I realized the previous post ended up being really long. I'll try to summarize it. With how I write, I'll end up adding more thought, though still in fewer words.

Ret paladins sacrifice personal damage for abilities which increase party and raid damage. I like this idea. My worry is that it does not actually hold up. Other classes have buffs and debuffs which multiply damage. Paladins do not hold a monopoly on this, so if they are weaker in personal damage, they should be stronger in utility.

Looking at enhancement shamans it is easy to see a huge party damage increase. Unleashed rage is around 5% more damage for melee classes, much closer to 10% for druids. WF totem is a huge damage increase, especially for two-handed specs like arms which themselves give 4% more physical damage. JoW, possibly the strongest judgement, can be maintained by a tanking paladin.

What ret lacks in personal damage, it should make up for with multipliers to raid and party damage. Diversity in raids should be encouraged and create stronger raids. four rogues and a hybrid should be stronger than five rogues. Switching another and another should be even better and better.

But maybe all my thinking is for nothing. Others with more knowledge and motivation can run the numbers and show what utility ret brings, how that increases damage,and therefore how much damage ret needs to be equal to another DPS. Besides, ret paladins are in raids and are wanted. Can a spec really be underpowered if people want to play it and play with it? Isn't this a game, shouldn't it be driven by what we want to do rather than a set of equations?

Utility is enough, but only If there is enough

The theory goes that retribution will do less damage than other classes because it brings greater utility, increasing raid and party damage to offset the lower personal DPS. Does this hold up? I believe that raids should be diverse, with all specs and classes fitting together to create far higher DPS than would be possible with a less diverse raid. I don't think this should be required, fights shouldn't be designed for perfect diversity, but some amount should be required and encouraged. All specs should bring something, either their own damage (or healing or tanking, but I'm more interested in DPS right now), or multipliers for their group.

Five rogues should be inferior to four rogues and an enhancement shaman. That should be inferior to three rogues, the shaman, and a feral druid. They should be inferior to two rogues, the shaman, the druid, and a fury warrior. Arms fits in somewhere, as does ret. Right? Let's look at ret utility.

I'm a big fan of JoW. I love it. I've had it on my paladin and it lets me sustain much higher damage. I've sometimes had it on my shaman. Combined with my pitiful crit chance, water shield, and blessing of wisdom, I did not run out of mana, literally, while chain-casting lightning bolts. According to the ret DPS theorycraft on Elitist Jerks it gives an average of 130 mana/5. Mana spring totem restores 50 mana/5, to one group, but it works for non-DPS as well. For resto this will be 60-some mana/5. I suppose I strayed from my DPS focus. I have to admit ignorance of whether this mana regen from JoW is truly needed for raid DPS or if it only saves mana potions. But it's worth thinking about, and remembering that a tanking paladin could do the same.

JoL is more mixed. I know even less if it is useful since it comes in small amounts and is uncertain. I'm sure it helps, but I don't know that it helps enough to justify a spot.

JotC, improved, gives 3% more crit. Now that is nice. But how nice? For casters that use nukes, it's nice. For physical it is nice. But it doesn't do so much for shadow priests or affliction warlocks. Arms warriors bring 4% more physical damage. JotC isn't the only multiplier to raid DPS.

Sanctity aura, improved, is 2% more damage to the group. That's good. But does it stack up well to others? It varies by the player, but weapons account for around 50% of a melee class' damage output. That leaves 50% coming from gear, specifically AP. An enhancement shaman can increase that by 10%, giving 5% (give or take some fractions) damage to a melee group. I don't know how that multiplier interacts with WF totem which gives additional AP on the extra attack.

But that leads to my next party DPS boost: WF totem. This totem gives a 20% chance for an extra attack on any auto-attack or "on next hit" attack (like cleave). For a 2h user like an arms warrior that is a huge damage increase. It's great for ret as well. It's not as good for a DW class, but it will still be huge. How does this compare to a ret paladin's buffs?

I won't make any claim about whether ret brings enough utility. I think a ret paladin is worth bringing, but I have to admit a bias, since I've played a paladin for a long time and for years have been sympathetic to paladin DPS. I want people to start reconsidering the idea of trading personal DPS for raid utility. It's not that I dislike the idea, I actually like it a lot, I like being group-oriented. My concern is about whether the trade was done properly.

Ret isn't the only DPS that brings damage buffs to others. Feral druids have 5% crit, a heal proc, and mangle isn't totally useless to warriors and rogues (maybe rogues, I don't know if they use bleeds in raids). Moonkin have 5% spell crit. Hunters (these are spread across specs) have ferocious inspiration, improved hunter's mark, trueshot aura, and expose weakness. The list goes on. Warlocks bring some major debuffs, mostly for casters, but they can help melee at a cost. Mages help each other and warlocks sometimes. Rogues, priests, warriors... I can only guess at the damage boost from sunder armor.

Ret does not have a monopoly on party and raid buffs and it certainly has a deficit in personal damage. The utility should be enough to offset the personal shortage, if not, ret needs buffing. I suppose my whole argument can be cleared up, perhaps thrown out, by some theorycraft. Even more importantly though, player experience can invalidate it. If ret paladins are in raids, consistently, and are not considered a drain, do they need changes? Game balance is just about numbers, it's about what we want to do. If we want ret, doesn't that mean it is fine? Or are we just blind to the reality of their utility and damage?

Why Shouldn't Old Gear Be Useful?

I hear this now and then from Blues, usually in response to complaints about old-world gear getting nerfed. I think they've taken it a bit too far. But I should clarify before I start: I completely understand and am happy about the rating stat system. It prevents what would have otherwise been terrible inflation of stats with each increase in the level cap.

However I see no reason why all cool items should be nerfed.

The first that I remember were grenades, they got various caps at which they became unreliable. The most immediate effect was to make engineering much more expensive in PvP, changing the grenades from iron to thorium, and now adamantite. Obviously Blizzard wants us to use the newer mats. It's part of a normal economy. But why should the past ones be totally useless? Add a tiered system where each time you go down a tier you lose a percentage of the stun time. Adamantite does 3 seconds, thorium 2, iron 1. This means that the most expensive grenades remain clearly the best (damage doesn't count, if we wanted just damage we'd use dynamite) but cheaper grenades are still usable. This helps leveling players since trade goods they gather are much more valuable than they would be otherwise.

Hand of Justice is another nerfed item. The proc rate on it used to be a fixed 2%. It was changed to be variable with level, dropping past 60 to only 1.33% at 70. Why do this? A trinket with a scaling 2% damage would be very useful. You'd have to have the gear so that the low AP would be offset by the multiplier, but I imagine this would be a highly desired DPS trinket.

Blizzard says they don't want people farming old instances for gear. Why not? Does a good item in an old instance discourage doing new instances? Why should we be pressed into new content anyway? We should move on because we want to, not because gear is hanging in front of our noses. If gear is such a major motivator, Blizzard should rethink how they make their content. Gear should be a requirement to see content, a pacing mechanism (in other words, slow us down long enough for them to have time to make more instances). Raids and instances shouldn't just exist to give gear. I'm getting sleepy and having trouble forming coherent thoughts now.

I'm reminded of old forums posts requesting that pre-BC raids be updated or have heroic modes so people would still do them at 70. The idea was rejected. Why? I don't understand why Blizzard would want to discourage any content in the game. It makes no sense to restrict options, to shuffle us into a few raids. Imagine if BWL gave gear equal to level 70 regular instances. It would remain useful for gear, but there wouldn't be a need to do it for gear, since there would be other instances to get the gear. Think of it as the parallel 10-25 raid lines.

To jump back to an old topic, Naxxramas should remain in EPL and instead be duplicated in Northrend. Removing content and charging people to get it back, in modified form, is a ridiculous concept. It sounds far too much like the stories friends would tell of greedy tricks Sony would pull with their games. I already complained about the lore problem in an earlier post.

Save Naxx.

Well that was Underwhelming

I tanked and killed Kael'thas today. Overall Magister's Terrace was rather underwhelming.

The early pulls were just annoying. Lots of casters, and worse, mobs which stun, causing the casters to run all over. With the number of mobs I feel uncomfortable not using CC, which is exactly what I like about my paladin, not needing CC. Forcing CC into groups is a terrible design choice. This isn't my usual complaint about the slowing-down of runs, but that it restricts group possibilities. It hurts shamans, paladins, druids, priests, and warriors. Who wants a class that can't CC in an instance where CC seems almost necessary and you can't even cheat a bit by using a tankadin?

The first boss was easier than the trash. He was a total joke. That was a terrible way to start an instance. Perhaps we were overgeared, but then why was the trash so much more of a challenge? He certainly needs a buff, maybe the trash needs to toning down as well, but the boss is definitely too easy.

The second boss wasn't too tough either. We did manage to get an enhancement shaman killed, but I think that was due to me lagging horribly and Omen being unable to read the new combat logs.

The third was almost interesting, but with so many adds it felt tedious. Making the actual boss so squishy felt silly. We've killed the boss, so why do we have to deal with all this other crap? We actually wiped because our healer was being a moron; he backed up too far and got feared into a group that we'd passed. But the boss encounter was completed, so I used DI to save the repair bill and run back.

Finally we got to Kael'thas. This isn't a good game for fully three-dimensional encounters. It's disorienting and the bubbles were a complete pain in the ass. It felt like Blizzard was trying to design a fun and challenging encounter with an epic feel to it, but instead it felt like we'd just killed an obnoxious boss and gotten decent loot.

The turn-in only increased the feeling that we'd done nothing important. This is Kael'thas we're talking about here. Ruler of the Blood Elves, the man who we wanted to hunt down because he was tearing apart Netherstorm. He was a member of the Legion, high-ranking and powerful. But he dies so pitifully, in the middle of a small room, alone, without even a decent speech. Turning in his head gives a bit of text about our accomplishment, a gem, a heroic key... and a feeling of total unimportance. I wanted to grab the NPC and chake him, scream at him "do you realize what we have done!? This is history, this is the world changing!"

The passages are too narrow. They give an almost claustrophobic feeling like Scholomance, but without the darkness which makes it fit together. Blizzard could make the instance much better just by taking everything and making it 1.5-2x larger and further apart. I felt cramped in there. This was supposed to be a place made by Blood elves, in the same style as Silvermoon City which is a very open and airy place. It makes us feel like we're all crushed into a tiny space, tiny people in a tiny place killing tiny, unimportant enemies. Despite the pattern of linear, narrowly-pathed instances, MT still managed to feel exceptionally small. I don't know who would have thought it was an appropriate size. I could understand this for a house (like Scholomance) or underground area (Stockades), but for an outdoor area it feels strange.

I only hope that the Sunwell is better.