There was a patch to the beta today where they adjusted the strength of a variety of spells, mostly modifying only the base value, not the scaling. I'm not exactly going to complain about that. After all, they understand quite well that base values and scaling are two very different things and what it means to adjust them.
On the other hand, some the specific wording of their notes was a little weird:
Divine Light base healing has been increased by 30%. From 8538-9512 to 11100-12366
This is actually an improvement from how it used to be. They used to just list the percentage damage and not the damage numbers.
The thing is, that a percentage change in base healing or damage of an ability conveys basically no information. If a base amount increases 20%, that could mean anything from a 0% to an 20% increase in the actual output of the spell.
I'm not as much worried about the information I get, because I can go look things up if I don't know all the facts. What I'm more worried about is what this says about how they think about these things. When paladins aren't healing enough, do they think to themselves, "We'd better increase their base healing numbers by 30%"? Given they increased the base of the other direct heals by 30% that certainly appears to be exactly what they think. But I really don't understand how this train of thought works.
Each paladin healing spell gets a different proportion of its healing from the base amount compared to the spell coefficient, so they increased the power of some of these spells relative to one another. They also changed the relative value of critical strike, haste and mastery rating relative to intellect.
Obviously the concern was they wanted paladins to do more healing without increasing their scaling with spell power. This makes sense in a way, given that apparently paladins didn't heal for enough despite the fact that at a glance it looks like they have the highest scaling with intellect on direct heals. It just strikes me as very odd that they would choose a certain percentage and increase all the base amounts by that much. It looks a lot like a stab in the dark rather than the results of an actual analysis of how much more healing paladins should be doing.
Showing posts with label worrisome blues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worrisome blues. Show all posts
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Monday, August 16, 2010
Push Nourish
As far as the history goes here, we thought at the time (and still think!) that the Resto druid wasn't going to be well served as a "I only care about hots and nothing else" healer. It's just too extreme a design. Any time when hots are good (by which I mean both individual encounters and periods in the game as a whole) the druid is going to dominate. Any time when hots are terrible, so will be druids. We probably, in retrospect, didn't push Nourish enough, because we still ended up in a raid healing situation where druids used Rejuv and Wild Growth and were loathe to use any other button.
I know there are a few topics that I go on and on about, and that I jump on every time they appear, but this really gets to me. The problem was most certainly not that they didn't push Nourish enough. The problem is that Wild Growth and Rejuvenation are too powerful, not that Nourish is too weak. Sure, if you'd made Nourish as good as Holy Light then druids might have cast it more, but how would that be a solution?
I know there are a few topics that I go on and on about, and that I jump on every time they appear, but this really gets to me. The problem was most certainly not that they didn't push Nourish enough. The problem is that Wild Growth and Rejuvenation are too powerful, not that Nourish is too weak. Sure, if you'd made Nourish as good as Holy Light then druids might have cast it more, but how would that be a solution?
Monday, August 9, 2010
I'm Still Going On About Titan's Grip
We really haven't ever supported the true hybrid builds where someone goes halfway down two trees. It would be one thing if someone really wanted to play say an Affliction warlock who also emphasized demons or the Ret paladin who also wanted to be a better healer. But almost without exception the hybrid builds that have ever existed involved sneaking down into a second tree to get an overpowered talent or two. The developers never really wanted the last talent in a tree to be a decision. They want you to get that talent. When players would make builds that didn't go to the bottom of their tree they would feel like something was wrong with the tree. Nobody wants that 31-point talent to be a hard choice.
So, yeah, go get that 31-point talent. You'll have some decisions to make on the way down and then you'll have 10 points that can get you 3 or 4 additional talents from a pool of 15 or so that are left over. Not all of those builds will make sense, but many of them will. That feels like plenty of choice to me and both you and we will know that you have the basics that make your spec work.
Any chance of someone mentioning this to the guy who is working on the Fury tree?
So, yeah, go get that 31-point talent. You'll have some decisions to make on the way down and then you'll have 10 points that can get you 3 or 4 additional talents from a pool of 15 or so that are left over. Not all of those builds will make sense, but many of them will. That feels like plenty of choice to me and both you and we will know that you have the basics that make your spec work.
Any chance of someone mentioning this to the guy who is working on the Fury tree?
Friday, August 6, 2010
Rating Changes
We are taking a look at the ratings decay as you gain levels. Now that the talent trees have lost so much crit, haste and hit, they may be too steep.
That is a quotation from a response to a question about rage generation. The rest of the response is about using rage generating abilities and such and really isn't what I am interested in here. What I am interested in is how the decision about how much rating you need to get 1% crit, hit, or haste is made.
I think we knew this already, but its a little distressing to see it spelled out like this. Apparently they decide things in this order: 1. figure out how big the numbers are going to be on gear; 2. decide how large they want people's crit and haste percentages to be; 3. choose rating conversions that give the desired crit and haste values from the number of rating points people will have.
Absent in that process, is the step where they consider whether crit and haste ratings are good enough to even both putting them on gear. The problem is that if you know how big the numbers on gear will be and you know how much crit you want people to have in the final tier of gear then it is a straight calculation to figure out how many rating points it takes to get 1% crit, there is no room for the value of the rating to come in.
As I've pointed out before, the current rating conversion numbers are going to make it pretty much impossible for crit or haste rating to be useful at all. With an imagined scenario using Arcane Blast I came up with a valuation that put crit at 20% of spell power. But lets look at a more realistic scenario.
From my estimates, a level 80 mage in first tier Cataclysm raid gear should have about 6421 spell power (nearly 1600 less than the Priest because of Inner Fire). A level 85 fireball does 671 to 855 damage, or an average of 763 damage. Now I'm not sure that spell coefficients will actually resemble what they are now in many cases, but fireball isn't a bad bet to still work on the cast time divided by 3.5 model. Since the new fireball is a 2.5 second cast, that would mean that the fireball would do around 5702 damage, about 86.6% of which comes from spell power. It will actually be higher from mastery and talents, but anything that multiplies the entire damage of the spell affects damage from spell power and crit equally, so we can ignore it.
The mage will also have about 5,099 points in ratings. It will take 2611 rating to be hit capped, so presumably the mage will be devoting as much rating to hit as possible. Being a fire mage with big fire mage crits we'll assume that crit is supposed to be an attractive stat. So lets hit cap the mage (a little unrealistic, but that's okay) and split the difference 2:1:2 between crit, haste and mastery. That gives 995 crit rating which is 3.71% crit. Assume a base crit near 5% and a 5% extra spell crit debuff on the enemy. That brings us up to 13.71%. Since the mage crits for 2.1 times normal damage (as far as we know at this point, but this could be as high as 2.8 given current information I have available) the average damage of fireball with crit is around 6561.
So what happens if we gain 100 spell power vs. 100 crit rating. 100 spell power would increase the damage of our fireball by 82.2. 100 crit rating would increase our crit chance by .37% or about 23.4 damage. That puts critical strike rating at about 28.4% of spell power for damage for a fire mage. This is not the vision of bringing stats closer together that they spoke of.
Reevaluating ratings to achieve some goal for critical strike chance might improve this situation a lot. Ratings will increase about 63% over the course of the expansion, but if you stay hit capped then that means a much more than 63% increase to critical strike rating. If we end up with 8311 rating, devote the same 2611 rating to getting hit capped and divide in the same ratio then we end up with 2280 rating, more than double the first tier amount, for a total of 8.51% crit from rating, giving 18.51% crit total. Also spell power increases to 9767.
100 more spell power gives 85.9 more damage with these stats, while 100 crit rating gives 28.9 damage. At top tier crit catch up a bit to be worth 33.6% of a spell power. If they decide that mages critting roughly 30% of the time is a good amount, they could drop the rating required for 1% crit to 114, less than half its current value. Then crit would be worth nearly 79% of a spell power to a fire mage. Not bad, really. If spells in general go to 100% bonus crit damage instead of 50%, crit could actually surpass spell power for fire mages in end of expansion contant.
Which is a pretty nice thing to luck into for the developers, but from the process that used to make the decisions about how much rating it takes to get 1% crit, haste or hit, we know that it is just luck if the numbers end up being close together. Rating values should be set to make stats balanced against one another, because stats that are close in value are the right thing for the game. If doing this would end up meaning that players will end up with 150% crit, and it might, depending on how you set the values, then there are other knobs you can turn to fix that problem, such as increasing the base damage of spells, giving more innate attack power based on level, or just having players' base stats account for more of their damage than they do. In classic your base stats from your race, class and level might have accounted for a third of your total stat value. In wrath they aren't even a tenth.
The desired relative value of stats should determine the rating conversions. Something so arbitrary as rating conversions should not determine the relative value of stats. It looks like, for at least some classes, we might end up with reasonably balanced stats after all. Ultimately, though, I wouldn't expect non-red gems to auction for much over their vendor value.
That is a quotation from a response to a question about rage generation. The rest of the response is about using rage generating abilities and such and really isn't what I am interested in here. What I am interested in is how the decision about how much rating you need to get 1% crit, hit, or haste is made.
I think we knew this already, but its a little distressing to see it spelled out like this. Apparently they decide things in this order: 1. figure out how big the numbers are going to be on gear; 2. decide how large they want people's crit and haste percentages to be; 3. choose rating conversions that give the desired crit and haste values from the number of rating points people will have.
Absent in that process, is the step where they consider whether crit and haste ratings are good enough to even both putting them on gear. The problem is that if you know how big the numbers on gear will be and you know how much crit you want people to have in the final tier of gear then it is a straight calculation to figure out how many rating points it takes to get 1% crit, there is no room for the value of the rating to come in.
As I've pointed out before, the current rating conversion numbers are going to make it pretty much impossible for crit or haste rating to be useful at all. With an imagined scenario using Arcane Blast I came up with a valuation that put crit at 20% of spell power. But lets look at a more realistic scenario.
From my estimates, a level 80 mage in first tier Cataclysm raid gear should have about 6421 spell power (nearly 1600 less than the Priest because of Inner Fire). A level 85 fireball does 671 to 855 damage, or an average of 763 damage. Now I'm not sure that spell coefficients will actually resemble what they are now in many cases, but fireball isn't a bad bet to still work on the cast time divided by 3.5 model. Since the new fireball is a 2.5 second cast, that would mean that the fireball would do around 5702 damage, about 86.6% of which comes from spell power. It will actually be higher from mastery and talents, but anything that multiplies the entire damage of the spell affects damage from spell power and crit equally, so we can ignore it.
The mage will also have about 5,099 points in ratings. It will take 2611 rating to be hit capped, so presumably the mage will be devoting as much rating to hit as possible. Being a fire mage with big fire mage crits we'll assume that crit is supposed to be an attractive stat. So lets hit cap the mage (a little unrealistic, but that's okay) and split the difference 2:1:2 between crit, haste and mastery. That gives 995 crit rating which is 3.71% crit. Assume a base crit near 5% and a 5% extra spell crit debuff on the enemy. That brings us up to 13.71%. Since the mage crits for 2.1 times normal damage (as far as we know at this point, but this could be as high as 2.8 given current information I have available) the average damage of fireball with crit is around 6561.
So what happens if we gain 100 spell power vs. 100 crit rating. 100 spell power would increase the damage of our fireball by 82.2. 100 crit rating would increase our crit chance by .37% or about 23.4 damage. That puts critical strike rating at about 28.4% of spell power for damage for a fire mage. This is not the vision of bringing stats closer together that they spoke of.
Reevaluating ratings to achieve some goal for critical strike chance might improve this situation a lot. Ratings will increase about 63% over the course of the expansion, but if you stay hit capped then that means a much more than 63% increase to critical strike rating. If we end up with 8311 rating, devote the same 2611 rating to getting hit capped and divide in the same ratio then we end up with 2280 rating, more than double the first tier amount, for a total of 8.51% crit from rating, giving 18.51% crit total. Also spell power increases to 9767.
100 more spell power gives 85.9 more damage with these stats, while 100 crit rating gives 28.9 damage. At top tier crit catch up a bit to be worth 33.6% of a spell power. If they decide that mages critting roughly 30% of the time is a good amount, they could drop the rating required for 1% crit to 114, less than half its current value. Then crit would be worth nearly 79% of a spell power to a fire mage. Not bad, really. If spells in general go to 100% bonus crit damage instead of 50%, crit could actually surpass spell power for fire mages in end of expansion contant.
Which is a pretty nice thing to luck into for the developers, but from the process that used to make the decisions about how much rating it takes to get 1% crit, haste or hit, we know that it is just luck if the numbers end up being close together. Rating values should be set to make stats balanced against one another, because stats that are close in value are the right thing for the game. If doing this would end up meaning that players will end up with 150% crit, and it might, depending on how you set the values, then there are other knobs you can turn to fix that problem, such as increasing the base damage of spells, giving more innate attack power based on level, or just having players' base stats account for more of their damage than they do. In classic your base stats from your race, class and level might have accounted for a third of your total stat value. In wrath they aren't even a tenth.
The desired relative value of stats should determine the rating conversions. Something so arbitrary as rating conversions should not determine the relative value of stats. It looks like, for at least some classes, we might end up with reasonably balanced stats after all. Ultimately, though, I wouldn't expect non-red gems to auction for much over their vendor value.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
50%? Really?
Pre-shielding when you know big damage is on the way for select targets is fine. Trying to keep shields up on the entire raid is a strategy that we think A) is too good, and B) isn't fun. I think a lot of the players who think it is fun feel that way because it's overpowered, not because it's a really engaging activity. When your decision making consists of cycling through targets and casting PW:S on any target without Weakened Soul, then you aren't really responding to the encounter -- you're acting like a glorified macro. Now maybe some of you will argue that you take a lot more into consideration before executing a pre-heal, but the fact is that Disc priests can be unbelievably effective without doing so.
...An Icecrown parse for a Disc priest might have PW: Shield (including its glyph) and Divine Aegis at 80% of healing done. Imagine that is more like 50 or 60% of healing done. That's still a lot of power for shields. The remainder would be filled in by spells like Penance, PoM, Heal and Greater Heal.
Now that I have some numbers I can complain about broadsides like this. Suppose you are trying to keep a tank alive and conserve mana, but that just spamming Heal is not enough.
If I am trying to be mana efficient with heals, then I am definitely going to cast Power Word: Shield about every 15 seconds. If I get a Rapture from each shield tick then shield is about 26 healing per mana, while Heal, my next best spell, is 16.2 (more on the efficiency of Heal later) in Tier 1 gear. At final tier shield is returning mana each cast. Renew is, next to Heal and ignoring Rapture, by far my most mana efficient heal and my best healing per cast time, so I would presumably keep that up on the tank if spamming Heal is not enough. I could fill in any additional healing with Penance. Lets assume that's enough and I'm not resorting to Flash Heal to further up my healing per second.
In this scenario tank healing would make my shields about 18% of my total healing (counting both Power Word: Shield, it's glyph heal, and Divine Aegis). Obviously that is making not a lot of us of shields, just one on the tank every 15 seconds. But with a spell as expensive as shield (the first one is free, but each additional one costs the mana equivalent of about 3 Heals), how often can I realistically be casting it? To get my shielding up to 50% I would need to go up to 5 shields per 15 seconds, filling the rest in with a single renew, a single penance and 2 heals.
That would mean spending about 1760 mana per second instead of 1024 mana per second. It would also increase my Raptures, probably from about 1 every 17 seconds to 1 every 14 seconds. So the after rapture expenditures would be 1581 vs. 877. Replenishment is 1k mana per five seconds, so that reduces it to 1381 vs. 677. If we can manage a good 500 mp5 in combat then that would be 1281 vs 577. We get a shadow fiend that gives us half our mana back, so we have about 150k mana to work with.
In other words, if we get about 18% of our "heals" from shield then we can heal for nearly 4 minutes without a break. If we get 50% then we can heal for 2 minutes without a break. The former sounds pretty sustainable, the latter not so much.
But what is really troubling about that particular blue comment is that it is very disconnected with reality. I went and checked some logs. My shields are about 30% of my healing (though I cast renew when I am discipline, which most priests seem to think is crazy). A lot of discipline priests run around 50%. In heroic Lich King, which is pretty much the shield spammiest fight ever conceived I found numbers as high as 70%. Regardless of what people would have you believe on the forums, Discipline priests (at least ones who get anything done) don't just stand there and spam shield and right now it is our both our most mana efficient and our highest hps single target heal even if you ignore Rapture. It would stand to reason that when it is significantly less efficient than penance and much, much less healing per second than renew we will cast it less, not more.
The reason this is very important is that we have a mastery bonus, and it is balanced around how much of our healing comes from shields. If we get 50% of our healing from shields then our 20% more absorbs mastery bonus is nearly 10% more healing, and any bonus we get to that from mastery rating will be about .5% more healing per 1% mastery bonus.
If we get 25% of our healing from shields (probably a more realistic number) then our mastery bonus is half as good as that. It is very important that the developers have a good idea of how much healing is actually going to come from shields.
I think we all agree that is it less than now. It would be nice if we could agree on the reality of what it is now so that new numbers could be based on that.
...An Icecrown parse for a Disc priest might have PW: Shield (including its glyph) and Divine Aegis at 80% of healing done. Imagine that is more like 50 or 60% of healing done. That's still a lot of power for shields. The remainder would be filled in by spells like Penance, PoM, Heal and Greater Heal.
Now that I have some numbers I can complain about broadsides like this. Suppose you are trying to keep a tank alive and conserve mana, but that just spamming Heal is not enough.
If I am trying to be mana efficient with heals, then I am definitely going to cast Power Word: Shield about every 15 seconds. If I get a Rapture from each shield tick then shield is about 26 healing per mana, while Heal, my next best spell, is 16.2 (more on the efficiency of Heal later) in Tier 1 gear. At final tier shield is returning mana each cast. Renew is, next to Heal and ignoring Rapture, by far my most mana efficient heal and my best healing per cast time, so I would presumably keep that up on the tank if spamming Heal is not enough. I could fill in any additional healing with Penance. Lets assume that's enough and I'm not resorting to Flash Heal to further up my healing per second.
In this scenario tank healing would make my shields about 18% of my total healing (counting both Power Word: Shield, it's glyph heal, and Divine Aegis). Obviously that is making not a lot of us of shields, just one on the tank every 15 seconds. But with a spell as expensive as shield (the first one is free, but each additional one costs the mana equivalent of about 3 Heals), how often can I realistically be casting it? To get my shielding up to 50% I would need to go up to 5 shields per 15 seconds, filling the rest in with a single renew, a single penance and 2 heals.
That would mean spending about 1760 mana per second instead of 1024 mana per second. It would also increase my Raptures, probably from about 1 every 17 seconds to 1 every 14 seconds. So the after rapture expenditures would be 1581 vs. 877. Replenishment is 1k mana per five seconds, so that reduces it to 1381 vs. 677. If we can manage a good 500 mp5 in combat then that would be 1281 vs 577. We get a shadow fiend that gives us half our mana back, so we have about 150k mana to work with.
In other words, if we get about 18% of our "heals" from shield then we can heal for nearly 4 minutes without a break. If we get 50% then we can heal for 2 minutes without a break. The former sounds pretty sustainable, the latter not so much.
But what is really troubling about that particular blue comment is that it is very disconnected with reality. I went and checked some logs. My shields are about 30% of my healing (though I cast renew when I am discipline, which most priests seem to think is crazy). A lot of discipline priests run around 50%. In heroic Lich King, which is pretty much the shield spammiest fight ever conceived I found numbers as high as 70%. Regardless of what people would have you believe on the forums, Discipline priests (at least ones who get anything done) don't just stand there and spam shield and right now it is our both our most mana efficient and our highest hps single target heal even if you ignore Rapture. It would stand to reason that when it is significantly less efficient than penance and much, much less healing per second than renew we will cast it less, not more.
The reason this is very important is that we have a mastery bonus, and it is balanced around how much of our healing comes from shields. If we get 50% of our healing from shields then our 20% more absorbs mastery bonus is nearly 10% more healing, and any bonus we get to that from mastery rating will be about .5% more healing per 1% mastery bonus.
If we get 25% of our healing from shields (probably a more realistic number) then our mastery bonus is half as good as that. It is very important that the developers have a good idea of how much healing is actually going to come from shields.
I think we all agree that is it less than now. It would be nice if we could agree on the reality of what it is now so that new numbers could be based on that.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Fast, Powerful Heals
You should be able to use your efficient spell virtually forever (or at least much longer than the average encounter length). That efficient heal may be fine for earlier dungeons or raids. Eventually though you're going to hit points where someone is going to die in between casts of the efficient heal. In those cases you should switch to an inefficient but fast or big heal. Yet, if you focus on the inefficient heals too much, you will run out of mana.
As players gain more and more regen in later tiers of content, they'll need to rely on their inefficient heals more, but will also have the stats to be able to do so.
Not every healer has enough spells to currently make the decisions between efficiency and other choices. In fact, we'll probably have to adjust the toolbox of everyone to some extent.
[...] Most healers spam one heal now. Druids for all of their spells can do very well with just Rejuv and Wild Growth. Disc priests spam PW:S and Holy priests spam CoH on cooldown. We want to carve off niches for other spells. Flash Heal can be awesome if it runs you out of mana to hit nothing but Flash Heal.
[...] Casting a couple of fast / expensive heals to save someone's life is exactly what you should be doing. Casting nothing but the fast / expensive heal because, hey why not, leads to pretty repetitive gameplay.
[...] We will have to change numbers for Cataclysm. It's probably a safe assumption that we'll adjust every number in the game in order to account for changes such as larger health pools, lower mana regen and all of the talent tree changes.
This sounds great... kind of. What I mean is that it sounds great provided that they realize that in many cases the fast, powerful spells we spam these days are *also* the most, or among the most, mana efficient spells in our arsenals. I've gone over PW:S before, but when they pull out the examples of Rejuvenation and Wild Growth it gives me a facial tick. I think they know - I really hope they know - that druids use these spells almost exclusively because they are better than other spells in nearly every conceivable way, not because they have too much mana.
As players gain more and more regen in later tiers of content, they'll need to rely on their inefficient heals more, but will also have the stats to be able to do so.
Not every healer has enough spells to currently make the decisions between efficiency and other choices. In fact, we'll probably have to adjust the toolbox of everyone to some extent.
[...] Most healers spam one heal now. Druids for all of their spells can do very well with just Rejuv and Wild Growth. Disc priests spam PW:S and Holy priests spam CoH on cooldown. We want to carve off niches for other spells. Flash Heal can be awesome if it runs you out of mana to hit nothing but Flash Heal.
[...] Casting a couple of fast / expensive heals to save someone's life is exactly what you should be doing. Casting nothing but the fast / expensive heal because, hey why not, leads to pretty repetitive gameplay.
[...] We will have to change numbers for Cataclysm. It's probably a safe assumption that we'll adjust every number in the game in order to account for changes such as larger health pools, lower mana regen and all of the talent tree changes.
This sounds great... kind of. What I mean is that it sounds great provided that they realize that in many cases the fast, powerful spells we spam these days are *also* the most, or among the most, mana efficient spells in our arsenals. I've gone over PW:S before, but when they pull out the examples of Rejuvenation and Wild Growth it gives me a facial tick. I think they know - I really hope they know - that druids use these spells almost exclusively because they are better than other spells in nearly every conceivable way, not because they have too much mana.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Brute Force
Q. How do you feel about the limited attempts mechanic that has been use in Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel?
A. We're not crazy about how they worked out. They were designed in essence to save players from themselves. In the past, some people would make 400+ attempts on new bosses. That's not healthy and at some point you're not measuring skill but tenacity. Yet, that's not what happened. Guilds just made alts to get around the limitations, and things like disconnects and accidents make losing an attempt really frustrating. We like gating because if nothing else it lets the community focus on more than just the final boss in the zone. If we do limited attempts again it would probably be limited to optional bosses like Algalon.
A. We're not crazy about how they worked out. They were designed in essence to save players from themselves. In the past, some people would make 400+ attempts on new bosses. That's not healthy and at some point you're not measuring skill but tenacity. Yet, that's not what happened. Guilds just made alts to get around the limitations, and things like disconnects and accidents make losing an attempt really frustrating. We like gating because if nothing else it lets the community focus on more than just the final boss in the zone. If we do limited attempts again it would probably be limited to optional bosses like Algalon.
This is a quote from a recent developer chat. I'm glad they don't like limited attempts because they are probably the worst idea that has ever been introduced in WoW. What I'm really not glad about is that they are denigrating practice with their comment, "At some point you're not measuring skill but tenacity."
I've seen this a lot recently on various forums and fan sites. Most people seem to have jumped on the anti-practice bandwagon. The words "brute force" are often used when people mean to say "practice." It gives it an ugly tone, but it doesn't change the underlying facts.
Yes, top guilds, in order to earn their world-first positions, put in a lot of hours in the form of long continuous play sessions. This seems rather extreme, and I'm sure that the developer is right that it isn't terribly healthy, but they do it because it is what makes them the best. But the key is that it actually does make them the best, it doesn't just mean they lucked into that position.
Practice actually makes you better at things. Malcolm Gladwell suggests that to be a real master at something you need 10,000 hours of practice. Do you have 10,000 hours of practice playing WoW? If you type /played that would be 416 days and 16 hours. The vast majority of players don't have nearly that many hours played, but I would wager heavily that the majority of the players in world-first competing guilds do. They practice and they get good.
And they practice new fights as well as practicing their characters. The Lich King is not roulette. If it takes 10 or 20 or 40 hours for a top guild to get through a fight it isn't because they had a 1 in 200 chance at winning each attempt and they finally hit it. They had basically no chance of winning their first attempt, and probably a pretty decent chance of winning on their winning attempt. They practiced and got better. This is how WoW works and it is also how everything else works.
There is tenacity in being the best at anything. Olympic athletes need a lot of tenacity to get to where they are, but should we insist that you can only compete in Olympic events if you promise not to spend more than 8 hours a week training for them? Eleven million people play WoW, I would bet that is significantly more than the number of people who have ever been in a four-man bobsled. If you have that many people doing something then some of them will have the tenacity to be the best and others won't.
There is no such thing as brute forcing your way through new content by putting in lots of hours. There is practicing and getting better at it until you can do it.
But for those who think that it is not a measure of skill but only a measure of their ability to dedicate the time when the boss come out, you are wrong about that too. Just like the top-tier athletes, you need to get in a lot of practice to be the best, but that doesn't mean that anyone who puts the practice in will be the best. There is natural talent and ability that factors in. Odds are if you practiced as much as the best in the world you would still not be the best.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Discipline Priest Mana Efficiency
Here is a blue post from a few months back that has been festering in the back of my mind:
Power Word: Shield is a really useful tool for Disc priests in particular. We want them using it. However, its utility is balanced by a high cost. If we get to the point where they are spamming it constantly to the exclusion of other spells and without it ever being a decision, that suggests mana regen is still too high.
Power Word: Shield is a really useful tool for Disc priests in particular. We want them using it. However, its utility is balanced by a high cost. If we get to the point where they are spamming it constantly to the exclusion of other spells and without it ever being a decision, that suggests mana regen is still too high.
If I remember correctly this was posted in a thread about how Discipline priests are boring to play because all they do is spam Power Word: Shield. It reads a bit like a "Stop complaining before we nerf you" type of response, but it really makes me wonder if this is what they actually think. In reality, Power Word: Shield does not have a high cost, it has a very low cost. Spamming Power Word: Shield is not something we do because we have too much mana regen and if mana regen were lowered considerably it would be all the more reason to cast Power Word: Shield.
Compare Power Word: Shield to Flash Heal. They have the same coefficient, similar base amounts, the base cost of Power Word: Shield is significantly higher. So from the base spells the comparison made in the blue post is valid. But taking a look at the discipline and early holy tree, we find there are 22 talents that prop up the effectiveness of Flash Heal while there are 27 that prop up Power Word: Shield. What's more, those talents that prop up Flash Heal are mostly in the 1-2% range, with a few being closer to 3% and a few being well under 1% while the talents that prop up Power Word: Shield max out at about 5% increased effect, with a large number of points in the 3% range and a one point 15% cost reduction. And then there's Rapture, which I'll talk about in a moment. The Discipline tree actually has 14 points that either do nothing but increase the effectiveness of Power Word: Shield or have no effect unless you've recently cast Power Word: Shield, there are 3 points devoted in a similar way to Flash Heal. As a point of comparison, Frost Mages have 7 talents that key off Frostbolt in this way. That's right, a class and spec that does nothing but spam one spell1 has less talents specifically designed to prop that spell up than discipline priests have for Power Word: Shield.
And these are our best talents. 5% effect per point for 3 points, 15% cost reduction, 8% spell power coefficient per point for 5 points, mana return that amounts to about 80 mp5 per point for three points as long as shields are cast regularly. With that much invested in this spell, it had better be good enough to spam.
Now I'm the first one to admit that if you want to make something look good, comparing it to Flash Heal will do that. If any other healing class had a spell that after all talents were considered healed for as little as Flash Heal, was as slow as Flash Heal and cost as much as Flash Heal it would not even be on their bars. But for priests Flash Heal is what we've got. I can't readily replace a Power Word: Shield that is meant to backstop health loss with any other spell whether because of cooldowns or because of the very specific application of those spells.
If we naively count the mana returns from Rapture as a cost reduction to Power Word: Shield then it cost me only 414 mana per cast on my last ICC run. This gave it a healing per mana of about 24, factoring in overheal and unused shielding. Flash Heal comes in at 10.4, Penance only got 19.4. Furthermore, it has better throughput than Penance (9714 vs. 9632 healing per second). In fact, the only reason Penance shows up so close is because 69.2% of my Penance casts were made under the effect of Borrowed Time. That means that the fact that I cast so many Shields accounted for about 15% of my Penance throughput. If you factor out the Borrowed Time haste, Power Word: Shield has more healing per cast time than any other spell except for Prayer of Mending. If Borrowed Time were not boosting my other spells, I would be better off spamming Power Word: Shield to deal with AoE damage than I would be casting Prayer of Healing. In reality my maximum output comes from alternating the two.
I subtly admitted, of course, that this is a weak evaluation of the efficiency of shielding. After all, you can only get a Rapture proc every 12 seconds, so casting more shields means more procs, but not in a linear fashion. Basically every shield is more expensive than the last one and spamming it might be costing me more than this analysis lets on.
One of the great things about writing your own log parser is being able to tell it to simulate stuff like this for you. I made some modifications so that it could substitute Flash Heals for Power Word: Shields. It did so at random, first with a 50% chance and then with a 90% chance of substituting so we could see what the effects on my throughput and mana would be. By substituting half my Power Word: Shields for Flash Heals the average cost of a shield went down to only 342 from 414, so shields did get relatively cheaper. On the other hand my net mana went down by about 8 mp5; not a whopping difference, but it went down not up. At the same time my throughput went down about 7%. In the scenario where I cast 90% less shields the average price of a shield was only 22 mana. My net mana went down even further, by another 15 mp5 from the 50% scenario (23 from the real number). And my throughput was about 11% lower than my real throughput. By casting less shields I got more Raptures per shield, but I spent more mana and did less healing. In reality these numbers would not look like that at all. After all, healing done is correlated to damage taken more than to anything else. If I did 11% less healing then either the other healers would be making up the difference or I would be; probably a combination of the two. This means my throughput would be pretty similar and my net mana would be much lower. If I had to cover the cost of that 11% throughput reduction in Flash Heals, then my net mana would be about 10 mp5 lower. These aren't huge differences, but the point is I would have less mana if I cast less shields to the tune of about 10k less mana to spend on a five minute fight.
In fact, it is excessive mana regen that allows us to choose not to cast Power Word: Shield. On Blood Queen Lana'thel I realized after a couple of learning pulls that I should not be using shields to prop up the raid from the persistent AoE damage. Sure, it's my most efficient way of dealing with that damage, but her predilection for shooting a Twilight Bloodbolt a second after casting Pact of the Darkfallen meant that health could drop precipitously and shields were best saved for backstopping that. So I began shielding only when there was a Pact or Swarming Shadows cast. This kept us all alive much better than my typical shield spamming mindset. This, however, left me casting a lot of Flash Heals which is extremely inefficient. The only reason I could afford to do this is because I do have too much mana regen. Lowering mana regen would force me into using more Shields, not fewer Shields, and put me in a position where I can't use Power Word: Shield on the task that I would most like to use Power Word: Shield for, because I am using Power Word: Shield on the tasks for which Power Word: Shield is the spell among my spells I would most like to use; that is, I am using it for everything.
Blue posts like that one scare me. A lot about World of Warcraft does in fact convince me that many of the developers working on it have the ability to do basic math (calculating the expected number of attempts for things like "Mask Task" aside) but that post showed a really shocking inability to multiply a few numbers and notice that Power Word: Shield is our best throughput and most mana efficient single target heal. That is why we cast it so often. Of course, the idea that there are priests out there literally doing nothing but applying shield after shield with no thought to casting any other spell is pretty fictional. Maybe on certain phases of certain fights, but if you want to look at certain phases of certain fights you will find all kinds of odd behaviours that don't reflect the overall state of healing.
1. In PvE where using instant fireballs and ice lances, I understand, is actually a dps loss at good gear levels.
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