Breaking World of Warcraft: Class Writers Chat About External Buffs, Logs, Mage Tower, and More

Live Pubblicato 18/01/2022 alle 04:02 da Paryah

MO CastWorld of WarcraftBreaking World of Warcraft

In round two of Breaking World of Warcraft we’re sitting down once again with Mandl, Panthea, Wordup and Guiltyas and dig deep into glaring issues of the game while trying to find solutions because fixing World of Warcraft is our ultimate goal here as we still very much love this game. This episode of our wow podcast, gets in deep with the latest forum post regarding external buffs and cooldowns, the impact of wow class guides as well as the truth behind logs and the data provided by them so sit back, relax and if you enjoy this type of format, drop a like to MO Cast as much more is to come!

External buffs

Power Infusion (PI)

Master Loot

Logs, GOOD or BAD?

Guides are BAD

The Dev Perspective

Cadence of Systems

External Power Solutions

The Carrot on a Stick

Mage Tower Rant

External buffs:

The argument in the blue post is centered around whether the players enjoy this, but it fundamentally skirts the issue and never addresses it with facts or logic, merely hypothetical perspective.
Most of the community enjoys when it is given to them, but not when they have to give it. The social interactions of Infusione di Potere vs. Spiriti Affini, giving them vs. trading them, the spreadsheets, the effort to defend something that has led to so much toxicity really baffles the user.
"Social interaction" in the blue post is touted as a positive, but the only interaction is a boomkin whispering a priest going "PI me". Worse still when they're the group leader - they will demand it, or they will kick you. It is not an interaction that is pleasant or positive, it is purely transactional rather than fun.
Infusione di Potere specifically is a complete loss for the caster. As a healer, you can justify it - you signed up to help others. As a shadow priest, this is a net negative for you, and feeling forced to do it feels awful - your fun vs. potentially the team's outcome. The people that dislike Infusione di Potere the most are the people not going through to check the value of it into logs.
If you uninstalled Details and do not log, you have no idea what happens if you Infusione di Potere somebody else, and you would very likely not Infusione di Potere others without a strong request. They glow, and you lose pocket heroism on yourself - sacrificing your own fun in the process. It's antithetical to a RPG where a DPS' button comes at a total cost to themselves. This could be fixed by Gemelli delle Sacerdotesse del Sole, but then you sacrifice a legendary, and shadow has plenty of other fun, enjoyable, deep legendaries they could choose instead of this.
The idea of buffing others is not innately bad. It's a really healthy design space if done properly (Fulmine Sferzante and Skull Banner were great examples - you wanted the button by yourself, and it synergized with what you wanted). The issue creeps in when you ruin your own fun to help others, or worse, when somebody coerces you to ruin your own fun.
"Fun calculus": Infusione di Potere gives either you or somebody else 100 fun units. It should be closer to 50/50, or 100+50, where somebody gets a bit, and you get the full value no matter what. This would greatly alleviate the social pressure and allow shadow priests to finally feel good about PIing somebody else.
Spiriti Affini with Affinità tra Simili and Stendardo del Conquistatore are mostly done properly in vacuo. The issue is that it works as a net amplifier on somebody else, which forces people to pick this covenant (Kyrian hunters, Kyrian druids next tier). They end up having to opt out of their fun, by picking another covenant, to not feel bad about not buffing the team.
Spiriti Affini has a specific tuning issue where the mastery value is half of the other buffs. This means you're never going to bind to a Kyrian.
The core problem is that the role of the specs bringing these buffs was never like this. The closest we had to a buffing/enhancing class is Paladin, and yet these buffs got sprung onto specs through an expansion with very little logic.
Tuning tends to assume optimal use. See: enhancement shaman being the lowest DPS in the raid by a noticeable margin. They should instead be tuned around near-zero additional benefit, otherwise, even though you want to press it, you feel like you got lugged along and justify your existence by somebody else existing. The damage and resource gains are attributed to the recipient of Furia del Vento, and as a result, no-fun ensues.
Everybody wants Infusione di Potere, to the point that they'll copy and edit spreadsheets to bully others, where the real victims at the end of it are priests. This bullying will spread to boomkins and hunters next tier ("Hey go play kyrian - whoa whoa hold on, that's not MY job"). To take a parallel, how many paladins do you know that would like to be able to use Ira Vendicatrice on somebody else, were it possible to use it on others?
Greater Blessing of Might was very similar to Infusione di Potere, and was decreed a degenerate design. Yet, for some reason, this has been copy-pasted 7 times over for 9.2. Paladin was tuned to assume that Greater Blessing would be attributed to them, and as a result, the warrior was unhappy because the paladin is leeching on them, and the paladin was unhappy because their damage is dependent on somebody else. Both are unhappy, and yet, Furia del Vento, Infusione di Potere, night fae paladin with Benedizione dell'Estate, and a few others fit this scenario perfectly.
There is no way to quantify the effect directly out of Infusione di Potere, Affinità tra Simili, Stendardo del Conquistatore, or Patto degli Inseguitori d'Anime in-game. The caster has no idea how much help they provided - and as a result the buff feels empty for anybody not analytically minded or without access to logs. There's very little feedback and no real kickback for the caster, it shows up, then it's gone. All you have is an animation and maybe some indication on DPS meters (Wasn't the entire point of this that parse culture made this bad? Seems to salvage it). This is a problem rampant in the game - where so much of it is hidden and requires extreme analysis to figure out what is going on.
Other MMOs have buff classes, but they gain directly from buffing others. They don't have to set up a DPS meter to get feedback that they helped. They also gain much more from pressing the buff button that it felt good to press for the caster as well. Wildstar did this fantastically well. A spec like this would be fantastic on its own rather than shoehorning random DPS specs to do so.
You fix every social problem with Infusione di Potere for the priest by baselining Gemelli delle Sacerdotesse del Sole. Suddenly, you have an incentive to pressInfusione di Potere, because you get to use it yourself along with giving it to somebody else. It's not true reactive in-game feedback, but it's as close as it gets without a major rework.

Generic system opacity:

Lots and lots of things hidden to the user, either in spelldata, in opaque effects or through really deceptive tooltips. Very few people go through, analyze or parse all this, and it is made harder and harder every patch.
Frost DK's mastery increases "all frost damage" on the tooltip, but in reality it's only certain abilities and not third-party effects. On the other hand, Infernal Cascade is just flat fire damage up, which sets a really nasty precedent in terms of consistency, where two tooltips use the exact same wording but have completely different effects.

Logs:

Logs are not just for "parse culture". They're very often the only way to improve - with 13 class discords having volunteers helping others get better, having a way to record what has been done is a direct source of truth on what happened in an encounter and what button was pressed is a real godsend. The overwhelming majority of people do not log to parse, they log to record and have somebody go over it; whether it is them, their raid leader or a discord volunteer on Acherus or Earthshrine is something else. Marcelian had Whispyr look at his logs for feedback, for example. It's the clearest way to improve
Even if you go for the competition aspect, there's always a reason to size yourself up to the rest. It's what you do in real life as well - think Strava for cycling, you compare yourself with others, and you improve as a result. It's probably the most positive social interaction in World of Warcraft. Self-improvement and seeking to be better is a natural human tendency, and it requires data or observations to do so.
The delta between pressing random buttons and pressing the right buttons is difficult to see without logs. Particularly for tanks, where you need a comparison point to figure out what's going on. It gets even worse by the fact that most tanks themselves never see a point of comparison in the game, and when healers and tanks compete on the same scale (reversing damage taken).
Rather than blaming the parse culture bogeyman, they could disable logs and kill them outright. Would solve the issue and sort out the bogeyman in the process.
It's "parse culture" but you have 5 bosses this tier where you need to stop DPS. Eonar back in Antorus required 17 people in your raid to AFK to parse, and sure, some people did it, but they were a minority.
The really good analogy to all these logging problems is the Rubik's cube. You have two extremes: people new to it and attempting to brute-force it, and on the other end of the scale people solving Rubik's cubes in 7-8s, with leaderboards for this. You don't see rubik's cube makers optimizing around these rubik's gods, though.
Devs themselves use logs for class balance, and it is very visible. Demonizing the method that's actively helping them do their job is very weird.

Guides:

Class trials would be a good resource to teach players the game, but they're severely lacking. Moonkin teaches moonfire, starfire, starsurge and that's it. Even eclipse is not mentioned. As a result, you're in for a long set of hours trying to figure out 30+ spellbook buttons with no real direct feedback (and in some cases no place to playtest properly)
Guides are opt-in (and free!). The self-discovery player would only go to guides when they hit a wall and they can't fix it themselves; the player wanting to just get going will go to the guide first. Both options are fine.
One of the reasons the guides become more and more popular is the cadence of systems. Each patch brings new systems upon new systems faster and faster, and the processing power required becomes just too much. As a result, most people just default to guides and stop experimenting. For instance, even though covenant swapping is free, the effort to re-learn, re-grind and re-experiment is too much for most casual people.
It's a bit of a scam that guides get demonized when even the GMs point you to them at the same time ;-)

Systems:

The choices available to the players has gotten more and more over time. You went from just talents to talents, covenants, soulbinds, conduits, dom sockets, ... making players have to juggle everything. And on balance, this means there will be wrong choice combinations.
Some dead talents have been dead for a while. Odore del Sangue for feral has been basically dead on arrival since inception, and there are negative throughput talents. These should be fixed.

Timegating & new players:

Being forced to log in every day just because of a chore sucks. Should be a carrot, not a stick, with clear catch-ups and respecting the time the user has put in. A lot of people don't have the option to commit so much time daily. Gacha 5-min log-in isn't really an option either.
The new player experience in Shadowlands right now is horrible. A new player gets to 60, and has to do the full campaign to unlock Korthia, then Korthia, while also going to Torghast for soul ash and cinders for their legendary, pony up 100k for a legendary base piece, grind conduits, grind gear, grind M+ score, raid, etc etc etc. It's so much to learn and new players just quit.
Most of the catch-ups put in place have targeted existing players, not new ones.
8.3 was fantastic. You had the weekly and bi-weekly assault, and that's it. You had to carve out a bit of time twice a week, no matter when, to just do it. The dailies contributed something extra, but they were a much lower amount, as opposed to the current system. Covenant assaults in the maw, on the opposite, reward virtually nothing.

Masterloot:

Personal loot has a problem of loot pollution. Because PL rolls individually, you're 5-6x more likely to get rings, necks and cloaks, since everybody can loot them. We did not have this problem in BfA because Azerite took 3 slots, necks did not exist, cloaks did not exist in 8.3 and as a result, you're left with just one shared slot.
glhf if you are the only rogue in your raid and you're after Sylvanas daggers (they are a 10% absolute DPS gain). Why is the approach taken when something this strong causes this much friction, and you feel the need to diagnose the issue in depth rather than just clearing it up?

Mage tower:

RIP timewalking community. You sometimes saw somebody with a full timewalking set in random timewalking dungeons and they'd destroy the dungeon. Suddenly, all this knowledge got used for the mage tower, because of the tuning being out of range of a lot of players. A fun pasttime for some has been damaged because of a random challenge that likely should have been templated.
The mage tower is the ideal example of casual content done right, where "casual" means "you can do it whenever you want with very little buy-in". Bicepspump has done it on class trials, for instance. It really should have been permanent, so that anybody can go and try their hand at it whenever they like. It's effectively free, evergreen content - why gate it behind such a rare event?
Weird problem leading from lack of templates, where people felt forced to go farm better gear rather than getting better at it. Templates would have solved this problem, the balance issues, and allowed everybody to go at an equal footing.
A prot paladin from HoW took 599 attempts, and learned so much from attempting, learning, and attempting again. Come talk to the people doing the guides, we'll happily review your attempts and help you beat it next time it rolls around!
Why not open up the "wrong" challenge for specs? Mandl would watch a prot paladin attempt the holy paladin challenge for instance. There's a lot of community growth you can make people gather around it. Have people build a community around beating the challenges in a way that's unintended (see Biceps, Braindwen etc. Season of Mastery is a great example of the speedrunning community going wild). Go wild, it costs nothing to add a dialog option!
If the "wrong challenge" is enabled, you don't even have to guarantee that it's doable. Go "This isn't intended, are you sure you want to try" in a dialog box. Proving grounds did this really well with the Lo stai facendo davvero male (Liv 90) achievement.
More challenges please!

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