Here's how to max out your daily guild experience: Run heroic Shadowfang Keep with a full guild group. Why Shadowfang in particular? When Baron Silverlane dies, all his living adds despawn. Then you are awarded guild experience for him and for each add. I can't claim to understand what it is in the code for awarding guild experience that would cause this. If you kill the adds before he dies they do not award guild experience, not all bosses with adds give guild experience for adds that are alive when they die.
Anyway, if you manage to not kill any of his adds at all, which is not that easy to do since the wolves that come with Nandos have very low health then you get experience for eight bosses all at once. Heroic bosses are worth 37.8k. With the 25% bonus for having five people that's 47.3k. Eight bosses makes it 378k for each person in the group for a total of 1.89M guild xp for that one kill. Since you killed Ashbury on the way for another 236k, you end up earning 2.13M guild xp in probably 15 minutes. Do this with three groups and the cap has been reached.
Similar guild experience errors exist in other places. Omnitron rewards four times the guild experience that most raid bosses do. A single Omnitron kill in a 10-player raid gives over half the daily experience cap, though obviously you can do that only once a week.
I bet Halfus could be killed with his adds for bonus xp, though killing halfus while his adds are still alive would be a bit tricky.
But it's the SFK bug that bothers me the most. Here is the question: If my guildmates and I want to run a heroic to get some guild xp - since we don't really run heroics for any other reason at this point - should we queue up for SFK or not? Obviously the extra xp is a bug, and so by using it we are exploiting a bug. But what is our responsibility to avoid exploiting this bug? Should we queue up for the next best heroic for guild xp (probably Halls of Origination) instead? Should we queue up for random and secretly hope for SFK? If we get SFK should we kill Baron Silverlane's adds before we kill him to avoid earning the xp we know we aren't supposed to get?
But maybe underneath all of this is the real problem that we don't particularly like earning guild xp. The methods of earning guild xp are remarkably narrow, and running heroics is really the only way to get to the xp cap for the day for a smaller guilds. The fact that guild xp is capped daily means that raiding will never be a good source of guild xp, no matter how much the bosses are worth. Since many guilds are formed for the purpose of raiding this seems somewhat counterintuitive.
I know that the developers said that they didn't want to give guild experience for a lot of things like making flasks for or providing enchants to guild mates because they felt these things would be gamed. The developers have to worry about systems being gamed because the large number of well known information websites about WoW means that the optimal path to guild xp will spread through the community quickly. If making flasks was how you max your daily xp, then someone would be expected to log in each day and make the flasks.
The problem is that guild xp is primarily rewarded for something that guilds don't necessarily do. If having someone log in to make flasks to max experience seems bad, I don't see how having people queue up for SFK seems that much better. At least the flasks are actually helping the guild.
In an effort to create a system we couldn't "game", the developers have created a system that is far too restrictive and doesn't represent the purpose or values of a large variety of guilds. The broad base of players may have been better off with a system that could be cheated, if it also let them earn guild experience by doing the things that their guild does.
As it is this complaint may not end of mattering, since most guilds will hit maximum level in about a year and guild experience will become a thing of the past.
Showing posts with label restricted choices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label restricted choices. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Are Glyphs Better?
Nearly a year ago I wrote about Glyphs and how I thought they were a failed game element because they existed to offer choice but didn't offer any real choice and because they interacted very strangely with the skill that made them. Glyphs have been changed substantially since then, so I thought I'd take a look back and compare the state of glyphs then and now.
One complaint on my part was that inscription skill has nothing to do with glyph power. This has only gotten worse since there are no new glyphs at higher skill level in Cataclysm. Inscription is the profession that lets you make glyphs, but you cap out on your ability to do that at 450 skill. The glyphs still come in a seemingly random order and can still be learned well before or after they become useful.
The introduction of major glyphs, however, solved many of the other problems that I had. We no longer have a slew of useless glyphs sitting around that no one will ever use. There are meaningful choices to make between major glyphs that will be made on personal preference as well as on fight mechanics.
But while the major glyphs work well, the prime glyphs and minor glyphs are in the same sorry state they were. Prime glyphs basically offer no choice at all - they are determined entirely by your spec. Their purpose, apparently, is just that players would find it weird that they didn't have glyphs for their most important abilities. I could grudgingly suggest that if this were true there would be a glyph for Greater Heal. But why do I even want them to make a prime glyph for Greater Heal? It's because if it is better than what I'm using I'll use it, and if it's not then it's no skin of my back. Prime glyphs don't add anything to the game. Major glyphs that affected these abilities that didn't get them a percentage boost would be way more interesting.
There is also still remarkable homogeneity in the choice of minor glyphs, when these should be the place where there is the most flexibility. Some choices are just much more attractive than the others, and this should be fixed.
I don't understand the system of getting to choose three minor glyphs of out of five or six - it doesn't seem like much of a choice at all. I truly don't understand the system of having players choose three prime glyphs out of the three that affect their spec - this is definitely not a choice.
Was I right about Glyph of Feint? I don't know, I could actually imagine a rogue taking that for certain fights. Since you aren't GCD locked you could use that on cooldown to lower AoE damage. 50% less AoE damage 60% of the time is actually a very good glyph.
One complaint on my part was that inscription skill has nothing to do with glyph power. This has only gotten worse since there are no new glyphs at higher skill level in Cataclysm. Inscription is the profession that lets you make glyphs, but you cap out on your ability to do that at 450 skill. The glyphs still come in a seemingly random order and can still be learned well before or after they become useful.
The introduction of major glyphs, however, solved many of the other problems that I had. We no longer have a slew of useless glyphs sitting around that no one will ever use. There are meaningful choices to make between major glyphs that will be made on personal preference as well as on fight mechanics.
But while the major glyphs work well, the prime glyphs and minor glyphs are in the same sorry state they were. Prime glyphs basically offer no choice at all - they are determined entirely by your spec. Their purpose, apparently, is just that players would find it weird that they didn't have glyphs for their most important abilities. I could grudgingly suggest that if this were true there would be a glyph for Greater Heal. But why do I even want them to make a prime glyph for Greater Heal? It's because if it is better than what I'm using I'll use it, and if it's not then it's no skin of my back. Prime glyphs don't add anything to the game. Major glyphs that affected these abilities that didn't get them a percentage boost would be way more interesting.
There is also still remarkable homogeneity in the choice of minor glyphs, when these should be the place where there is the most flexibility. Some choices are just much more attractive than the others, and this should be fixed.
I don't understand the system of getting to choose three minor glyphs of out of five or six - it doesn't seem like much of a choice at all. I truly don't understand the system of having players choose three prime glyphs out of the three that affect their spec - this is definitely not a choice.
Was I right about Glyph of Feint? I don't know, I could actually imagine a rogue taking that for certain fights. Since you aren't GCD locked you could use that on cooldown to lower AoE damage. 50% less AoE damage 60% of the time is actually a very good glyph.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Improving Normal Dungeons
This week I've talked about a number of problems with dungeons, and suggested that many of the perceived problems with heroic dungeons are really caused by normal dungeons being marginalized. I've criticized the awarding of Justice Points of normal bosses as an ineffective solution to this problem because it only serves to further marginalize normal drops.
Now I am going to present some of my solutions to these problems. These are real solutions designed to create a space for normal dungeons. With each of these solutions, I present what I think is a realistic timeframe for when this could be implemented given the current state of the game. These changes are radical, but probably the best thing about WoW and about Blizzard is that radical changes are considered if they are good changes. I will be submitting all of these on the suggestion forum.1
Fully Separate Normal and Heroic Difficulties
I've talked about this before, but it really is part of the solution. The current model for progression is normal dungeon to heroic dungeon to normal raid to heroic raid. The ideal would be to have two separate streams, normal dungeon to normal raid and heroic dungeon to heroic raid, possibly with some heroic players running a few normal dungeons just after reaching maximum level to get some gear.
Whether you choose to approach normal or heroic difficulty should be a legitimate choice based on your preferred playstyle and time commitment. Normal difficulty should not be a stepping stone on the way of heroic. Currently every progression stage has to be two things: 1) challenging for those who will never reach beyond that stage and 2) a gear grind for those who don't think of that stage as an accomplishment. At the same time as many people are struggling with heroics, many other people are already bored of running them every day for their 70 Victory Points. Having these groups play together is a recipe for conflict.
In this model the gear from heroic dungeons should be equal level to the gear from normal raids and heroic dungeons should be harder than normal raids. Both normal dungeons and heroic dungeons should be beatable in quest gear with good play - good play being a relative term depending on the difficulty level. Raids would be tuned expecting players to be mostly geared in appropriate dungeon gear. Because normal raids and heroic dungeons would give the same gear, those who played normal dungeons would be ready to try heroic raids to see see if they wanted to switch streams. But this would be a function of practice leading to increased play skill, not a function of getting more gear.
Timeline: I thought it was important to bring this is as an ultimate goal, but it is completely unrealistic to implement this until the next expansion. Changes being made now should be seen, in part, as preparation for this new state.
Less Gear from Vendors
When the emblems system first premiered in Burning Crusade it seemed like a really great idea. We all know the frustration of waiting for those last one or two drops to complete our gear sets, so having a way that we acquire a few pieces of gear for certain with sufficient work seemed like a good remedy. But in Burning Crusade, gearing up for raids involved a lot of running heroics for drops. In Cataclysm faction vendors and Justice Points provide so much variety in gear that dungeon drops are becoming insignificant. Waiting for that one drop your need is even more frustrating because it was the only drop you needed in the first place. Sometimes I would wonder why dungeons even had cloth gloves in them at all.
The amount of slots that can be covered by reputation vendors should be reduced, and the rate at which points are earned should be reduced as well. Points should be a way to fill in for slots you just can't seem to get rather than the primary reason to run dungeons. Each difficulty setting should earn points only at their own difficulty. So heroic players earn Victory Points but not Justice Points. This would prevent the marginalization or normal difficulty gear.
Timeline: In Cataclysm this ship has already sailed at the gear cannot be taken back. It might be possible, though, to hybridize this concept in with the current one by not giving out Justice Points like candy in heroic dungeons as soon as the next major content patch.
Three Dungeon Difficulties
Normal difficulty dungeons are currently trying to fulfill two incompatible roles. First of all, they are the ends of the stories of each zone. The storylines presented through quests end in assaults on enemy stongholds that are the dungeons. For this reason, normal dungeons need to be extremely accessible to everyone, and they need to be accessible at the level appropriate to the zones. As a result, only a handful of those dungeons are appropriate for maximum level characters, and it creates the impression that normal difficulty is a throwaway to be played through once only.
I am proposing a third difficulty be added - Story mode - that is intended to be played through at a level appropriate to the zone the dungeon is in. This difficulty would replace the current normal difficulty (i.e. all current normal dungeons would instead be the "story" dungeons) and a new normal difficulty would be placed between heroic and story. Normal difficulty would be for maximum level characters, and would present many of the same challenges as heroic difficulty but be more forgiving in terms of damage outlay, dps checks and time to adapt to or avoid fatal attacks.
This would mean that those who want to play at a lower difficulty level would have a full range of dungeons to experience, including dungeons like Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep that have been updated for maximum level. Normal dungeons could be something that people choose to play with their play time, rather than being seen as just glorified group quests.
Timeline: I honestly think this should be implemented in 4.1 or 4.2. That may sound completely crazy because of the amount of work involved, but I think it's pretty easy to overestimate how much work it would really be. These new dungeons would be exactly the same as heroic dungeons, but with some numbers dialed down. Because they are being tuned to be easier, they do not need to be tuned as tightly, so applying a ratio across the board for damage and health would probably suffice as a first pass with a second added here or there to abilities that you have to react to to stay alive. With future dungeons more care could be put in to balance properly based on lessons learned from the first batch. The infrastructure already exists for difficulty levels, so it is hard to believe that adding another would be a more massive project than is normally taken on in major content patches.
Dungeon Fragment Finder
Limited play time is a definite hindrance to experiencing content, especially if normal dungeons were a little harder than they are now. With the current dungeon lockout system, however, it would be possible to implement a system where someone could essentially save their progress through a dungeon2 and then later look for a group to finish it. I necessary people who were not saved at the same point could be brought in, since people are generally pretty happy to join a dungeon run already in progress to reach the end boss faster. A good progress saving system would also be helpful for guilds running dungeons together who play for limited amounts of time.
Timeline: Patch 4.2 or 4.3. I'm sure there are some technical challenges to implementing this system, and it is a lower priority suggestion. It would be a valuable upgrade to the dungeon finder, though, to make dungeons more playable with limited play time.
Normal Difficulty Achievements
Achievements add a lot of replayability to heroic dungeons. When a boss has been mastered, there is something else to try for. Similar achievements should exist in normal to add the same amount of replayability.
Timeline: I think this could be added any time after the third difficulty, but if another difficulty is not added then achievements would need to wait for the next expansion. Unfortunately normal dungeons are just too easy to overgear to make these achievements even feel like achievements, and most of the normal difficulty dungeons are not for maximum level characters.
Less Loot Inflation
Reduce a "tier" of gear to only 7 or 8 item levels. This would help with scaling problems from the beginning to the end of the expansion and also reduce the role that overgearing plays in defeating content.
Timeline: I'd really like to see this change in 4.1, but I'm not holding my breath.
Better Information About What Went Wrong
This is actually something the developers have mentioned they would like to do and I wholeheartedly support it for normal difficulty. If you are killed by Rajh's Inferno Leap, getting a message telling you that that was what killed you, and that in order to survive it you have to get away from where he is landing, would be a great addition. I know that currently this is primarily intended for heroic difficulty, but in the long run if normal and heroic difficulty were separate then I don't think this would be necessary for heroic difficulty. Playing heroic would indicate a level of comfort with figuring things out on your own.
Timeline: I think we'll see something like this in patch 4.1 or 4.2.
Suppose all of these things had been done for Cataclysm, what state would we be in now? Imagine that by the time you completed all of your solo play you had access to one piece of 333 loot from a quest chain and two pieces from getting to revered with all the factions. The rest of your loot is 325 from quests. You choose, based on your own preference, whether you want to play normal or heroic difficulty and start looking for dungeons of that difficulty.
In terms of execution and play skill requirements - not in absolute terms - heroic bosses are close to the same challenge level as the easier normal raid bosses currently are. A heroic boss dungeon boss would put up nearly as much of a fight for a newly geared 85 as Halfus, Double Dragon, Magmaw or Omnitron would right now for a full 346 geared group. If you choose normal you find that those bosses are a little harder than current normal bosses, expecially in the sense of being less forgiving of mistakes, but that they have significant amounts of instruction in terms of raid warnings plus indications of what went wrong if you lose. By succeeding in these dungeons you would be able to gradually upgrade all your gear to 333 for normal or 341 for heroic, giving you in the neighborhood of a 10-12% increase in suvivability, healing and damage. Introductory raid bosses would be toned down in their difficulty from where they are now by a noticeable margin (remember that if you were playing heroic you would not do the bosses on normal first), and final bosses could be either a little easier or stay the same given appropriate adjustments for lower gear numbers.
Casual players would feel that they were accomplishing something by playing normal dungeons with their limited play time. "Hardcore Casual" players would get to approach heroic dungeons with like-minded players. Servers would have a small number of heroic guilds and a larger number of normal guilds. Raid accessibility would be increased - a goal of developers since Wrath - without watering down content for those who like the hardest challenges.
This would allow a wider array of players to access dungeon and raid content, generate less friction by putting players with very different play styles and goals together less frequently, and give players more space to set their own goals instead of being forced down the one progression path.
If you think these changes sound insane or counterproductive, I'd love to hear about it how terrible I am. If you think that they sound awesome, help to spread the word. Blizzard is very responsive to customer feedback, and the more a good idea gets echoed in the player base, the more likely the are to notice it.
1. So far I have quite a remarkable record of my suggestions being implemented, which probably means that I generally have made suggestions that the developers were already planning on doing anyway. I hope I'm behind the curve on this stuff too and they already have it in the works.
2. This is already essentially possible with the lockout system by just extending your last instance, but the interface is somewhat hidden and not user friendly.
Now I am going to present some of my solutions to these problems. These are real solutions designed to create a space for normal dungeons. With each of these solutions, I present what I think is a realistic timeframe for when this could be implemented given the current state of the game. These changes are radical, but probably the best thing about WoW and about Blizzard is that radical changes are considered if they are good changes. I will be submitting all of these on the suggestion forum.1
Fully Separate Normal and Heroic Difficulties
I've talked about this before, but it really is part of the solution. The current model for progression is normal dungeon to heroic dungeon to normal raid to heroic raid. The ideal would be to have two separate streams, normal dungeon to normal raid and heroic dungeon to heroic raid, possibly with some heroic players running a few normal dungeons just after reaching maximum level to get some gear.
Whether you choose to approach normal or heroic difficulty should be a legitimate choice based on your preferred playstyle and time commitment. Normal difficulty should not be a stepping stone on the way of heroic. Currently every progression stage has to be two things: 1) challenging for those who will never reach beyond that stage and 2) a gear grind for those who don't think of that stage as an accomplishment. At the same time as many people are struggling with heroics, many other people are already bored of running them every day for their 70 Victory Points. Having these groups play together is a recipe for conflict.
In this model the gear from heroic dungeons should be equal level to the gear from normal raids and heroic dungeons should be harder than normal raids. Both normal dungeons and heroic dungeons should be beatable in quest gear with good play - good play being a relative term depending on the difficulty level. Raids would be tuned expecting players to be mostly geared in appropriate dungeon gear. Because normal raids and heroic dungeons would give the same gear, those who played normal dungeons would be ready to try heroic raids to see see if they wanted to switch streams. But this would be a function of practice leading to increased play skill, not a function of getting more gear.
Timeline: I thought it was important to bring this is as an ultimate goal, but it is completely unrealistic to implement this until the next expansion. Changes being made now should be seen, in part, as preparation for this new state.
Less Gear from Vendors
When the emblems system first premiered in Burning Crusade it seemed like a really great idea. We all know the frustration of waiting for those last one or two drops to complete our gear sets, so having a way that we acquire a few pieces of gear for certain with sufficient work seemed like a good remedy. But in Burning Crusade, gearing up for raids involved a lot of running heroics for drops. In Cataclysm faction vendors and Justice Points provide so much variety in gear that dungeon drops are becoming insignificant. Waiting for that one drop your need is even more frustrating because it was the only drop you needed in the first place. Sometimes I would wonder why dungeons even had cloth gloves in them at all.
The amount of slots that can be covered by reputation vendors should be reduced, and the rate at which points are earned should be reduced as well. Points should be a way to fill in for slots you just can't seem to get rather than the primary reason to run dungeons. Each difficulty setting should earn points only at their own difficulty. So heroic players earn Victory Points but not Justice Points. This would prevent the marginalization or normal difficulty gear.
Timeline: In Cataclysm this ship has already sailed at the gear cannot be taken back. It might be possible, though, to hybridize this concept in with the current one by not giving out Justice Points like candy in heroic dungeons as soon as the next major content patch.
Three Dungeon Difficulties
Normal difficulty dungeons are currently trying to fulfill two incompatible roles. First of all, they are the ends of the stories of each zone. The storylines presented through quests end in assaults on enemy stongholds that are the dungeons. For this reason, normal dungeons need to be extremely accessible to everyone, and they need to be accessible at the level appropriate to the zones. As a result, only a handful of those dungeons are appropriate for maximum level characters, and it creates the impression that normal difficulty is a throwaway to be played through once only.
I am proposing a third difficulty be added - Story mode - that is intended to be played through at a level appropriate to the zone the dungeon is in. This difficulty would replace the current normal difficulty (i.e. all current normal dungeons would instead be the "story" dungeons) and a new normal difficulty would be placed between heroic and story. Normal difficulty would be for maximum level characters, and would present many of the same challenges as heroic difficulty but be more forgiving in terms of damage outlay, dps checks and time to adapt to or avoid fatal attacks.
This would mean that those who want to play at a lower difficulty level would have a full range of dungeons to experience, including dungeons like Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep that have been updated for maximum level. Normal dungeons could be something that people choose to play with their play time, rather than being seen as just glorified group quests.
Timeline: I honestly think this should be implemented in 4.1 or 4.2. That may sound completely crazy because of the amount of work involved, but I think it's pretty easy to overestimate how much work it would really be. These new dungeons would be exactly the same as heroic dungeons, but with some numbers dialed down. Because they are being tuned to be easier, they do not need to be tuned as tightly, so applying a ratio across the board for damage and health would probably suffice as a first pass with a second added here or there to abilities that you have to react to to stay alive. With future dungeons more care could be put in to balance properly based on lessons learned from the first batch. The infrastructure already exists for difficulty levels, so it is hard to believe that adding another would be a more massive project than is normally taken on in major content patches.
Dungeon Fragment Finder
Limited play time is a definite hindrance to experiencing content, especially if normal dungeons were a little harder than they are now. With the current dungeon lockout system, however, it would be possible to implement a system where someone could essentially save their progress through a dungeon2 and then later look for a group to finish it. I necessary people who were not saved at the same point could be brought in, since people are generally pretty happy to join a dungeon run already in progress to reach the end boss faster. A good progress saving system would also be helpful for guilds running dungeons together who play for limited amounts of time.
Timeline: Patch 4.2 or 4.3. I'm sure there are some technical challenges to implementing this system, and it is a lower priority suggestion. It would be a valuable upgrade to the dungeon finder, though, to make dungeons more playable with limited play time.
Normal Difficulty Achievements
Achievements add a lot of replayability to heroic dungeons. When a boss has been mastered, there is something else to try for. Similar achievements should exist in normal to add the same amount of replayability.
Timeline: I think this could be added any time after the third difficulty, but if another difficulty is not added then achievements would need to wait for the next expansion. Unfortunately normal dungeons are just too easy to overgear to make these achievements even feel like achievements, and most of the normal difficulty dungeons are not for maximum level characters.
Less Loot Inflation
Reduce a "tier" of gear to only 7 or 8 item levels. This would help with scaling problems from the beginning to the end of the expansion and also reduce the role that overgearing plays in defeating content.
Timeline: I'd really like to see this change in 4.1, but I'm not holding my breath.
Better Information About What Went Wrong
This is actually something the developers have mentioned they would like to do and I wholeheartedly support it for normal difficulty. If you are killed by Rajh's Inferno Leap, getting a message telling you that that was what killed you, and that in order to survive it you have to get away from where he is landing, would be a great addition. I know that currently this is primarily intended for heroic difficulty, but in the long run if normal and heroic difficulty were separate then I don't think this would be necessary for heroic difficulty. Playing heroic would indicate a level of comfort with figuring things out on your own.
Timeline: I think we'll see something like this in patch 4.1 or 4.2.
Suppose all of these things had been done for Cataclysm, what state would we be in now? Imagine that by the time you completed all of your solo play you had access to one piece of 333 loot from a quest chain and two pieces from getting to revered with all the factions. The rest of your loot is 325 from quests. You choose, based on your own preference, whether you want to play normal or heroic difficulty and start looking for dungeons of that difficulty.
In terms of execution and play skill requirements - not in absolute terms - heroic bosses are close to the same challenge level as the easier normal raid bosses currently are. A heroic boss dungeon boss would put up nearly as much of a fight for a newly geared 85 as Halfus, Double Dragon, Magmaw or Omnitron would right now for a full 346 geared group. If you choose normal you find that those bosses are a little harder than current normal bosses, expecially in the sense of being less forgiving of mistakes, but that they have significant amounts of instruction in terms of raid warnings plus indications of what went wrong if you lose. By succeeding in these dungeons you would be able to gradually upgrade all your gear to 333 for normal or 341 for heroic, giving you in the neighborhood of a 10-12% increase in suvivability, healing and damage. Introductory raid bosses would be toned down in their difficulty from where they are now by a noticeable margin (remember that if you were playing heroic you would not do the bosses on normal first), and final bosses could be either a little easier or stay the same given appropriate adjustments for lower gear numbers.
Casual players would feel that they were accomplishing something by playing normal dungeons with their limited play time. "Hardcore Casual" players would get to approach heroic dungeons with like-minded players. Servers would have a small number of heroic guilds and a larger number of normal guilds. Raid accessibility would be increased - a goal of developers since Wrath - without watering down content for those who like the hardest challenges.
This would allow a wider array of players to access dungeon and raid content, generate less friction by putting players with very different play styles and goals together less frequently, and give players more space to set their own goals instead of being forced down the one progression path.
If you think these changes sound insane or counterproductive, I'd love to hear about it how terrible I am. If you think that they sound awesome, help to spread the word. Blizzard is very responsive to customer feedback, and the more a good idea gets echoed in the player base, the more likely the are to notice it.
1. So far I have quite a remarkable record of my suggestions being implemented, which probably means that I generally have made suggestions that the developers were already planning on doing anyway. I hope I'm behind the curve on this stuff too and they already have it in the works.
2. This is already essentially possible with the lockout system by just extending your last instance, but the interface is somewhat hidden and not user friendly.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Archaeology
So I actually love archaeology. I really wanted to have some kind of profession that involved more than just clicking on something, and archaeology goes that for me. I think the items they added to the game for it are worthy of the time you put into getting them. It is not necessary for raiding but it provides you with cool or useful things.
I did have some constructive criticisms of archaeology, however. One of my first complaints was simply the predictability of dig sites - there were always three finds for three relic pieces each. They already fixed that one by putting in a random element, so I figure I'd better get on complaining before it is too late.
Another thing I'd like to see from Archaeology is some way of controlling what you are working towards. Basically right now you are completely at the mercy of the random numbers. If you want to work on a particular race's artifacts you can't choose to dig for them as opposed to digging for other things. This is very disempowering. If I am interested in the ancient history of the nerubians, why would I not be spending my time digging at their sites rather than at troll sites? There are a number of ways this could be accomplished:
I did have some constructive criticisms of archaeology, however. One of my first complaints was simply the predictability of dig sites - there were always three finds for three relic pieces each. They already fixed that one by putting in a random element, so I figure I'd better get on complaining before it is too late.
Another thing I'd like to see from Archaeology is some way of controlling what you are working towards. Basically right now you are completely at the mercy of the random numbers. If you want to work on a particular race's artifacts you can't choose to dig for them as opposed to digging for other things. This is very disempowering. If I am interested in the ancient history of the nerubians, why would I not be spending my time digging at their sites rather than at troll sites? There are a number of ways this could be accomplished:
- An ability on a medium cooldown (one hour is probably about right) that allows you to abandon a current dig site to spawn a new one
- An ability on a long cooldown (seems like one day) that allows you to abandon one of your current research projects to get the new one
- A way of trading in fragments from one race for fragments of another or of trading fragments with other players - I can understand if they don't want fragments to be a commodity on the AH, but there are ways to avoid that
- An ability or daily quest that allows players to pick a particular site or even a particular zone they want to dig an either activate it immediately or increase the chance they will get it
Of course that list is not exhaustive, nor are the things on it mutually exclusive.
I don't suggest any of these things as ways of speeding up the process of getting meaningful archaeological finds. Regardless of the amount of customization given the players, drop rates and frequencies of rares can be adjusted to give whatever progression rate the developers feel comfortable with. I would very much, though, like to see a little bit more interactivity with archaeology - something that goes beyond the process of digging for things and puts a little bit of the process of deciding where to dig or what to make in the hands of the player.
Monday, December 6, 2010
My Cataclysm Spec
First of all, The Spec, and then, the complaints.
I've written a lot about Atonement and its ups and downs. But all the number crunching in the world doesn't change the fact that it will only heal you if you are within 8 yards of the target of the Smite. For most raid bosses, that would mean standing well inside of them. For the most part, Atonement will simply do nothing against raid bosses, so I am opting out of the Smite spec completely.
Given that I won't be taking the Smite spec, there is actually very little choice about what I *will* be taking. There are 42 points in the three and I need to select at least 31 of them. Since I am not taking the five points dedicated to Smite, I have to choose 31 out of 37. Reflective Shield essentially doesn't do anything, so I'll rule that out right away, leaving me with a choice of four talent points I don't want.
Many of the talents are simply not candidates for cutting, so I'll focus on the ones that I think I could choose to do without:
Improved Power Word: Shield - Power Word: Shield without a Rapture tick is an exorbitantly expensive and underpowered spell. It is considerably worse than Renew, Penance and Greater Heal for both throughput and efficiency. While it is almost 10% more mana efficient than a Flash Heal, it only about 65% of the throughput. I know as well as anyone that instant casts matter, and that shields are better than heals some of the time, but ideally I want to avoid casting this spell more than once every 14-15 seconds. A talent point for a 5% increase to a spell I cast less than 10% of the time is not a very exciting point.
Mental Agility - I don't actually cast a whole lot of instant spells. If I am casting Power Word: Shield, Renew and Prayer of Mending each once every 15 seconds then it's about 91 mana per second, which is likely a decent investment of talent points, but it's certainly not obviously something you must take.
Inner Sanctum - I think I will mostly be using Inner Fire, not Inner Will, so this would be a 2% spell damage reduction per point. I think this is probably very bad. If I have occasion to need to run faster for a fight and switch to Inner Will then this talent is probably pretty good.
Soul Warding - If I don't want to cast Power Word: Shield more than once every 14-15 seconds, then I probably don't need to cast it more than once every three seconds.
Power Infusion - I have never seen Power Infusion as a terribly useful healing cooldown. I see it more as an external dps cooldown for the raid's casters. For that it is a great talent point. Since I am a healer, I would consider dropping this point if I am not using it for healing.
Rapture - It should be offensive that I am even listing this talent, but, as I say, Power Word: Shield is a bad spell that you don't want to be casting. If you are using it, then Rapture is over 160 mana per second for three points, which seems like it's definitely a good use. But when if I didn't take it and didn't cast Power Word: Shield at all? Right now I'm a fairly convinced that this would make me worse off, but it's hard to be sure without a lot of analysis. Of course, I probably won't do that analysis for reasons I'll explain soon.
Borrowed Time - Going back to not casting shield very often, Borrowed Time might not be doing much. Hasting one spell by 14% every 15 seconds is an average of 1% haste for two talent points, which isn't spectacular. That's not really how Borrowed Time works, though. The 14% haste can be applied to multiple instants - where Penance counts as an instant here - and then to a spell with a cast time. Also, the 14% haste on a Renew is likely a 25% or 20% increase in the effect as well as a 14% reduction in the cast time. Some simple simulations are showing me that this is more than 1% haste per talent point. Still not great.
Strength of Soul - Reducing the Weakened Soul debuff duration seemed like a pretty good idea when Rapture had been reduced to a 6 second cooldown. At a 12 second cooldown, this talent is near useless even if you are casting Heal on the tank.
Train of Thought - It's far from obvious that this talent is a good one to take. How much mana it actually saves you depends on how often you cast Greater Heal. If you are using Inner Focus for Greater Heals on the cooldown then Inner Focus is worth 141 mana per second, which is a really good deal for one talent point. Train of Thought increases this to 159 mana per second, a gain of 18 mana per second, or 9 per talent point. If, however, you are casting three Greater Heals per 30 seconds, then this would increase the mana gain from greater heal to 211. So the two talent points were worth 35 mana per second each. If you are casting five Greater Heals every 20 seconds then the mana gain is 318 per second, and the Train of Thought talent points are worth 177 mana per second, or 88.5 each. The trick is, that they are only worth that additional mana if you were going to cast the Greater Heals anyway. Of course it does make casting those Greater Heals more attractive, so even if you substituting them only because of the talent it will still give some advantages.
Focused Will - 10% of my total health is presumably going to be more in Cataclysm than it was in Wrath. For example, I don't expect bosses with damage auras that tick every 2 seconds to do 10% of my total health. I do, however, expect this to trigger from occasional raidwide AoEs or from having a fire spawn under me. However, it only helps if another hit comes within 8 seconds. Ultimately I find it hard to believe this is going to be good for raiding.
So why did I make the decisions I made? As I indicated above, I think that Strength of Soul is probably going to do nothing useful at all. In fact, Weakened Soul might be a handy timer for me to know when to recast my shield, and reducing it may mean having to pay attention to more information without getting any benefit. There are several talents here that require analysis to figure out how good they are, but my intuition tells me Focused Will is the worst of them. It will depend on the structure of boss fights, and it might easily turn out to be a better investment than Inner Sanctum. For now, I'm going to have to go with my gut and I'll do the calculations when I actually have fight data.
I just trash talked a huge amount of talents and then elected not to pick ones that I thought would have no or virtually no effect on raiding. More importantly, I trash talked every talent that affect Power Word: Shield. Basically, I think Power Word: Shield is a terrible spell that only becomes castable because of Rapture. Assuming Rapture still interacts the same way it did in Wrath with large AoEs that hit the whole raid at once, Soul Warding will probably edge out Focused Will for utility. If they have fixed that bug then I'll probably switch those.
The real reason I take Rapture, Improved Power Word: Shield and Borrowed Time is that I simply can't avoid it. If Atonement isn't going to work on bosses, and I don't want Power Word: Shield talents, then there are only 24 talent points left in the tree. I have to pick something.
So why am I even discipline in the first place? First of all, it's because Penance, Divine Aegis and Grace are all insanely good and Holy just doesn't have anything with that kind of oomph. Secondly, it's because I feel like external tanking cooldowns are too useful to pass up, and Discipline gets two of them.
I'm not going to be writing for probably at least a week, maybe two. When I do come back I hope to have a little bit of data so I can answer a few of the following questions:
I've written a lot about Atonement and its ups and downs. But all the number crunching in the world doesn't change the fact that it will only heal you if you are within 8 yards of the target of the Smite. For most raid bosses, that would mean standing well inside of them. For the most part, Atonement will simply do nothing against raid bosses, so I am opting out of the Smite spec completely.
Given that I won't be taking the Smite spec, there is actually very little choice about what I *will* be taking. There are 42 points in the three and I need to select at least 31 of them. Since I am not taking the five points dedicated to Smite, I have to choose 31 out of 37. Reflective Shield essentially doesn't do anything, so I'll rule that out right away, leaving me with a choice of four talent points I don't want.
Many of the talents are simply not candidates for cutting, so I'll focus on the ones that I think I could choose to do without:
Improved Power Word: Shield - Power Word: Shield without a Rapture tick is an exorbitantly expensive and underpowered spell. It is considerably worse than Renew, Penance and Greater Heal for both throughput and efficiency. While it is almost 10% more mana efficient than a Flash Heal, it only about 65% of the throughput. I know as well as anyone that instant casts matter, and that shields are better than heals some of the time, but ideally I want to avoid casting this spell more than once every 14-15 seconds. A talent point for a 5% increase to a spell I cast less than 10% of the time is not a very exciting point.
Mental Agility - I don't actually cast a whole lot of instant spells. If I am casting Power Word: Shield, Renew and Prayer of Mending each once every 15 seconds then it's about 91 mana per second, which is likely a decent investment of talent points, but it's certainly not obviously something you must take.
Inner Sanctum - I think I will mostly be using Inner Fire, not Inner Will, so this would be a 2% spell damage reduction per point. I think this is probably very bad. If I have occasion to need to run faster for a fight and switch to Inner Will then this talent is probably pretty good.
Soul Warding - If I don't want to cast Power Word: Shield more than once every 14-15 seconds, then I probably don't need to cast it more than once every three seconds.
Power Infusion - I have never seen Power Infusion as a terribly useful healing cooldown. I see it more as an external dps cooldown for the raid's casters. For that it is a great talent point. Since I am a healer, I would consider dropping this point if I am not using it for healing.
Rapture - It should be offensive that I am even listing this talent, but, as I say, Power Word: Shield is a bad spell that you don't want to be casting. If you are using it, then Rapture is over 160 mana per second for three points, which seems like it's definitely a good use. But when if I didn't take it and didn't cast Power Word: Shield at all? Right now I'm a fairly convinced that this would make me worse off, but it's hard to be sure without a lot of analysis. Of course, I probably won't do that analysis for reasons I'll explain soon.
Borrowed Time - Going back to not casting shield very often, Borrowed Time might not be doing much. Hasting one spell by 14% every 15 seconds is an average of 1% haste for two talent points, which isn't spectacular. That's not really how Borrowed Time works, though. The 14% haste can be applied to multiple instants - where Penance counts as an instant here - and then to a spell with a cast time. Also, the 14% haste on a Renew is likely a 25% or 20% increase in the effect as well as a 14% reduction in the cast time. Some simple simulations are showing me that this is more than 1% haste per talent point. Still not great.
Strength of Soul - Reducing the Weakened Soul debuff duration seemed like a pretty good idea when Rapture had been reduced to a 6 second cooldown. At a 12 second cooldown, this talent is near useless even if you are casting Heal on the tank.
Train of Thought - It's far from obvious that this talent is a good one to take. How much mana it actually saves you depends on how often you cast Greater Heal. If you are using Inner Focus for Greater Heals on the cooldown then Inner Focus is worth 141 mana per second, which is a really good deal for one talent point. Train of Thought increases this to 159 mana per second, a gain of 18 mana per second, or 9 per talent point. If, however, you are casting three Greater Heals per 30 seconds, then this would increase the mana gain from greater heal to 211. So the two talent points were worth 35 mana per second each. If you are casting five Greater Heals every 20 seconds then the mana gain is 318 per second, and the Train of Thought talent points are worth 177 mana per second, or 88.5 each. The trick is, that they are only worth that additional mana if you were going to cast the Greater Heals anyway. Of course it does make casting those Greater Heals more attractive, so even if you substituting them only because of the talent it will still give some advantages.
Focused Will - 10% of my total health is presumably going to be more in Cataclysm than it was in Wrath. For example, I don't expect bosses with damage auras that tick every 2 seconds to do 10% of my total health. I do, however, expect this to trigger from occasional raidwide AoEs or from having a fire spawn under me. However, it only helps if another hit comes within 8 seconds. Ultimately I find it hard to believe this is going to be good for raiding.
So why did I make the decisions I made? As I indicated above, I think that Strength of Soul is probably going to do nothing useful at all. In fact, Weakened Soul might be a handy timer for me to know when to recast my shield, and reducing it may mean having to pay attention to more information without getting any benefit. There are several talents here that require analysis to figure out how good they are, but my intuition tells me Focused Will is the worst of them. It will depend on the structure of boss fights, and it might easily turn out to be a better investment than Inner Sanctum. For now, I'm going to have to go with my gut and I'll do the calculations when I actually have fight data.
I just trash talked a huge amount of talents and then elected not to pick ones that I thought would have no or virtually no effect on raiding. More importantly, I trash talked every talent that affect Power Word: Shield. Basically, I think Power Word: Shield is a terrible spell that only becomes castable because of Rapture. Assuming Rapture still interacts the same way it did in Wrath with large AoEs that hit the whole raid at once, Soul Warding will probably edge out Focused Will for utility. If they have fixed that bug then I'll probably switch those.
The real reason I take Rapture, Improved Power Word: Shield and Borrowed Time is that I simply can't avoid it. If Atonement isn't going to work on bosses, and I don't want Power Word: Shield talents, then there are only 24 talent points left in the tree. I have to pick something.
So why am I even discipline in the first place? First of all, it's because Penance, Divine Aegis and Grace are all insanely good and Holy just doesn't have anything with that kind of oomph. Secondly, it's because I feel like external tanking cooldowns are too useful to pass up, and Discipline gets two of them.
I'm not going to be writing for probably at least a week, maybe two. When I do come back I hope to have a little bit of data so I can answer a few of the following questions:
- How much better off am I using Rapture and casting shields than I would be if I simply didn't cast shields at all? (Even though this point is moot because you can't avoid taking PW:S talents)
- What is the real benefit of Train of Thought? Should you cast Greater Heals instead of Heals when you have it?
- How good is Mental Agility?
- How good is Focused Will?
- How many of my spells are hasted by Borrowed Time and how often is it boosting a Renew?
- How much damage is Inner Sanctum preventing?
Monday, November 8, 2010
Two Streams
There are two streams of dungeons and raids in WoW - normal and heroic. Unfortunately there aren't really two streams at all. There is one stream, and it cuts through both of the difficulties. The expected progression in cataclysm is to level to 85, then do normal dungeons to gear up for heroics, heroics to gear up for normal raids, normal raids to gear up for heroic raids and then heroic raids.
Being a novice RTS player, when I got Starcraft 2 I decided to play through the campaign on Normal difficulty. It turned out Normal was pretty easy and I bumped it up to Hard fairly quickly. Now that I'm better at playing the game I've done most of the missions on Brutal difficulty - mostly because I want the achievements. I didn't, however, play Normal to practice for Hard, or Hard to practice for Brutal. I played Normal because I thought it was the right difficulty level for me. Then I played Hard because I thought it was the right difficulty for me, and I had more fun doing it.
The idea of having more than one difficulty level is a good one because it lets different players play at their own paces. If you want to play on Casual, you can do that. If you want to play on Brutal, you can do that. If you want to use cheat codes to be invincible, those are conveniently built into the game. You play how you want to play. Imagine if in order to play Normal you had to play through Casual to unlock it. For experienced RTS players, especially those with a background in the original Starcraft, this would make the game needlessly tedious.
Unfortunately this is the path of progression in WoW. Bosses on normal difficulty don't offer the challenge that top-end players are looking for. Forcing top end players to play through on this difficulty creates lots of negative outcomes.
First, it increases the shared sense in the community that WoW is just easy. After all, you make the best players do things that are in fact easy for them.
Second, it puts people will greatly different expectations in terms of skill, gear and efficiency in groups together through the dungeon finder. Even top end players have to run heroics to maximize their ability to get top-tier gear. These players create a lot of friction in the dungeon finder by having expectations of speed and efficiency that the other players on their run don't necessarily want to live up to.
Third, and I think most importantly, it drastically reduces the excitement of defeating bosses. Part of the excitement of beating a boss is getting to move on to the next new thing. When you've already been forced to run the instance on an easier difficulty, there is no next new thing - you are just repeating what you've done before. When we beat Al'ar it was exciting to go on to Void Reaver. When we beat Opera, it was exciting to unlock the back door, climb the stairs and face Curator. When we beat heroic Marrowgar, we got to go fight Lady Deathwhisper, who we had already killed a dozen times.
The solution to these problems is simple. Segregate the difficulties and allow people to choose which one they want to play based on how they want to play the game. Normal instances gear you up for normal raids, heroic instances gear you up for heroic raids - as simple as that. Make the heroic raid precisely one tier more powerful than the normal raid gear so that people who run the heroic don't have to gear up for the next heroic tier in the next normal tier.
Having difficulty settings is a good way to let people choose how they play the game, but a bad way to build in progression. If your way of playing the game is my tedious stepping stone then instead of giving us different choices, the difficulties are forcing us to step on each other's toes.
Being a novice RTS player, when I got Starcraft 2 I decided to play through the campaign on Normal difficulty. It turned out Normal was pretty easy and I bumped it up to Hard fairly quickly. Now that I'm better at playing the game I've done most of the missions on Brutal difficulty - mostly because I want the achievements. I didn't, however, play Normal to practice for Hard, or Hard to practice for Brutal. I played Normal because I thought it was the right difficulty level for me. Then I played Hard because I thought it was the right difficulty for me, and I had more fun doing it.
The idea of having more than one difficulty level is a good one because it lets different players play at their own paces. If you want to play on Casual, you can do that. If you want to play on Brutal, you can do that. If you want to use cheat codes to be invincible, those are conveniently built into the game. You play how you want to play. Imagine if in order to play Normal you had to play through Casual to unlock it. For experienced RTS players, especially those with a background in the original Starcraft, this would make the game needlessly tedious.
Unfortunately this is the path of progression in WoW. Bosses on normal difficulty don't offer the challenge that top-end players are looking for. Forcing top end players to play through on this difficulty creates lots of negative outcomes.
First, it increases the shared sense in the community that WoW is just easy. After all, you make the best players do things that are in fact easy for them.
Second, it puts people will greatly different expectations in terms of skill, gear and efficiency in groups together through the dungeon finder. Even top end players have to run heroics to maximize their ability to get top-tier gear. These players create a lot of friction in the dungeon finder by having expectations of speed and efficiency that the other players on their run don't necessarily want to live up to.
Third, and I think most importantly, it drastically reduces the excitement of defeating bosses. Part of the excitement of beating a boss is getting to move on to the next new thing. When you've already been forced to run the instance on an easier difficulty, there is no next new thing - you are just repeating what you've done before. When we beat Al'ar it was exciting to go on to Void Reaver. When we beat Opera, it was exciting to unlock the back door, climb the stairs and face Curator. When we beat heroic Marrowgar, we got to go fight Lady Deathwhisper, who we had already killed a dozen times.
The solution to these problems is simple. Segregate the difficulties and allow people to choose which one they want to play based on how they want to play the game. Normal instances gear you up for normal raids, heroic instances gear you up for heroic raids - as simple as that. Make the heroic raid precisely one tier more powerful than the normal raid gear so that people who run the heroic don't have to gear up for the next heroic tier in the next normal tier.
Having difficulty settings is a good way to let people choose how they play the game, but a bad way to build in progression. If your way of playing the game is my tedious stepping stone then instead of giving us different choices, the difficulties are forcing us to step on each other's toes.
Friday, September 10, 2010
34.8%
That's the amount of talents in the new Discipline tree that literally affect nothing but Power Word: Shield. Tier 4 of the tree is all talents that affect Power Word: Shield. Eight points on one tier dedicated to one spell. Because of this layout, the minimum number of points you can devote to improving Power Word: Shield while going up the discipline tree is 4, and that's only if you spend 2 points in a dedicated PvP talent.
As a discipline priest, having to take talents that support Power Word: Shield doesn't seem like a harsh penalty. It's sort of like having to take talents that support fireball as a fire mage. Of course fire mages don't have talents that specifically support fireball in the new talent trees. Frost mages have 4 talent points devoted to propping up frostbolt, and 2 of those are extremely optional and only borderline useful. Prot warriors have 3 talent points exclusively dedicated to Devastate, one of those being Devastate itself. Retribution paladins have 2 talent points that only prop up Crusader Strike (though there are three more that do nearly nothing else. Holy Paladins have 6 points to prop up Holy Shock. There are 7 talents to prop up Rejuvenation.
So why don't these classes spend a third of their talent points propping up the spell or ability they cast more than any other. It's because those spells and abilities are actually good in the first place. You don't need to spend 13 talent points to make it worth casting the spell that defines your role. For a discipline priest, the spell that the developers are claiming will account for 50% of our healing requires 3 talent points just to get rid of a 4 second pointless cooldown. Flash Heal costs about 50% more mana and looks like it heals for about 50% than the shield absorbs. Plus I can cast it twice consecutively on the same target. Instants are good and shields are good, but having 2/3 the throughput seems like a sufficient penalty. Similarly, I'm going to spend 2 points on a very conditional talent to let me cast it more often on the same target. Again, if I just need the throughput then Flash Heal is better at that anyway. Flash Heal can also critical, by the way, and effectively does so for times two because of Divine Aegis. Shield, on the other hand, even if it lacks the cooldown and the weakened soul, would still not be spammable because it overwrites itself if cast twice on the same target.
Take a spell that you would very rarely want to use and devote 10-13 talent points to it (since the last 2 are actually very bad) and you get a spell you'll want to use a lot. But similarly, force a spec to devote 10 talent points to a spell when they are picking their talents and you have to make that spell bad to begin with.
When I look at the discipline tree now I feel like it still suffers from the same problem it had in Wrath. A great deal of the three is there just to play catch up leaving discipline priests as relatively weak healers any time they are not throwing out shields. In the end the tree worked (mostly because some of the talents were drastically overpowered), but half the time it just hurt that you actually had to spend your points on what you were spending them on. I'm not ready to pass judgement over whether the current tree works since that would be silly (and one of the drastically overpowered talents is still there) but it still has far too many points that are there to turn one spell that is probably the weakest in the priest healing repertoire into the strongest.
As a discipline priest, having to take talents that support Power Word: Shield doesn't seem like a harsh penalty. It's sort of like having to take talents that support fireball as a fire mage. Of course fire mages don't have talents that specifically support fireball in the new talent trees. Frost mages have 4 talent points devoted to propping up frostbolt, and 2 of those are extremely optional and only borderline useful. Prot warriors have 3 talent points exclusively dedicated to Devastate, one of those being Devastate itself. Retribution paladins have 2 talent points that only prop up Crusader Strike (though there are three more that do nearly nothing else. Holy Paladins have 6 points to prop up Holy Shock. There are 7 talents to prop up Rejuvenation.
So why don't these classes spend a third of their talent points propping up the spell or ability they cast more than any other. It's because those spells and abilities are actually good in the first place. You don't need to spend 13 talent points to make it worth casting the spell that defines your role. For a discipline priest, the spell that the developers are claiming will account for 50% of our healing requires 3 talent points just to get rid of a 4 second pointless cooldown. Flash Heal costs about 50% more mana and looks like it heals for about 50% than the shield absorbs. Plus I can cast it twice consecutively on the same target. Instants are good and shields are good, but having 2/3 the throughput seems like a sufficient penalty. Similarly, I'm going to spend 2 points on a very conditional talent to let me cast it more often on the same target. Again, if I just need the throughput then Flash Heal is better at that anyway. Flash Heal can also critical, by the way, and effectively does so for times two because of Divine Aegis. Shield, on the other hand, even if it lacks the cooldown and the weakened soul, would still not be spammable because it overwrites itself if cast twice on the same target.
Take a spell that you would very rarely want to use and devote 10-13 talent points to it (since the last 2 are actually very bad) and you get a spell you'll want to use a lot. But similarly, force a spec to devote 10 talent points to a spell when they are picking their talents and you have to make that spell bad to begin with.
When I look at the discipline tree now I feel like it still suffers from the same problem it had in Wrath. A great deal of the three is there just to play catch up leaving discipline priests as relatively weak healers any time they are not throwing out shields. In the end the tree worked (mostly because some of the talents were drastically overpowered), but half the time it just hurt that you actually had to spend your points on what you were spending them on. I'm not ready to pass judgement over whether the current tree works since that would be silly (and one of the drastically overpowered talents is still there) but it still has far too many points that are there to turn one spell that is probably the weakest in the priest healing repertoire into the strongest.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Three's a Crowd
Blue posts have talked a fair bit about the new healing environment they want to create. The basic idea is to give you different spells that you will choose between depending on how the fight is progressing, and to make mana a consideration. I agree with the central direction of this, but there is something about it that didn't make sense to me from day one: a normal heal, a big heal and a fast heal.
Heals vary on two easily quantifiable axes and also on a third, harder to pin down level. The first is healing per second, the second is healing per mana, and the third is the way in which the heal delivers healing. That third one encompasses the difference between direct heals with different cast times, HoTs, Shields, and bizarre things like Prayer of Mending. They are very different, and some are clearly better than others, and that betterness goes beyond and must be measured against HpS and HpM.
But when it comes down to two different heals that function in precisely the same way, there is really only one way they can be meaningfully different. One heal can have higher HpS and lower HpM than the other. Any other variance doesn't work. If Heal A has both higher HpS and higher HpM than Heal B then you don't really have two different heals, or at least things would be in all ways the same for you if you actually did have only Heal A.
And so the normal heal, big heal dynamic works. The big heal is presumably more expensive per point healed. They have the same cast time. You cast the normal heal most of the time and when you think it isn't going to be enough (either because you've been falling behind for a while, you know a big hit will land in a couple of seconds, or whatever) you cast the big heal instead.
But the way that heals deliver healing is a very important consideration. Imagine instead of casting a heal for a specified amount of time you could just channel a heal that continuously drained your mana and increased their health and you'd stop when you felt you'd done enough. This would be the ultimate in giving the ability to quickly react to damage as well as not overheal. I would basically be the limit of making heals faster. On the other end you have a heal that takes 10 seconds, is extremely cheap, and heals the target to full. This is a terrible spell because 10 seconds is too long to go without a heal1.
So a fast heal with the same mana efficiency and healing per second is better than a slow heal. Thus, a fast heal can afford to be a little weaker in terms of efficiency and throughput and still be useful. But how much cheaper can it be? And is the difference between 1.5 seconds and 2.5 seconds enough of a difference to justify a big disparity in effectiveness? Developers were talking about making it so you didn't have to worry about the tank going from full to dead in two swings. If that's really the case, then when am I going to pay more mana to get a heal that lands faster when the slower heal is fast enough?
I was having trouble getting my head around how the normal/fast/big heal system was going to work. They would make reference to the way healing used to work in BC, but we didn't really work on that model. We either worked on the shadow-priests-make-it-so-mana-is-a-joke-and-I-spam-CoH model or the six-ranks-of-heal-and-g.heal-on-my-bar model. We chose between multiple points on the efficiency vs. throughput spectrum much moreso than we chose between fast and slow. These days your tank does die in two hits so you don't dare cast spells that take 1.5 seconds, let alone 2.5 seconds.
Without the breakneck pace for healing, I was having trouble seeing how a fast heal would fit in. It seemed like it would make more sense to give us small/medium/large than fast/medium/large.
Now we've seen the costs and healing amounts of Flash Heal and Greater Heal and it doesn't seem like the developers had any better idea than I did about how to find space for these different heals. Bars show efficiency on the right axis and lines show throughput on the left axis:
There is never really much differentiation between the two heals in terms of efficiency or throughput. Since you will presumably spend a lot of time casting Heal, and switch to these more expensive heals only when you have to, it is hard to believe you will decide that doing 3% more healing is worth the trade-off of being slower. Doing more healing because you aren't keeping up doesn't seem like it will often coincide with wanted to go more slowly.
But I think finding space for both of these heals is much more than a numbers game. Imagine that instead Flash Heal did only about half the throughput of Greater Heal (which is around what I expect Heal to be) and was also less mana efficient. Then we wouldn't cast Flash Heal at all because there would basically never be a situation that warranted throwing your mana away on such a weak heal. You might say, then, that logic suggests there is a medium point where both spells are castable.
That is not necessarily the case. When you are actually healing, you don't get to sit around and look at graphs or run simulations to figure out which heal is the better one to use in the situation. You have to choose very quickly, and you have a limited amount of brain cycles to devote to making the decision. The closer two things are to even, the harder it is to choose between them. Having two different heals that basically do the same thing that are close enough together in effect that it is a subject of much debate which is better means you are probably best off only putting on of those heals on your bar. If you are really smart, you might switch which one depending on the nature of the fight. Choosing on the fly which one to use, however, is putting too much thought into a decision between two very similar spells. Casting either spell now is almost certainly better than casting the "right" one a couple of tenths of a second later.
Bar space is also an issue by itself. I currently have 37 keybinds that I use in combat while I'm healing (though some of them are very situational, I still use them). In the next expansion I'm getting Leap of Faith and Power Word: Barrier (and there is some chance I would have Inner Will on my bars). I don't know how to fit an extra heal-of-a-different-colour into the mix unless it is very noticeably useful. They still have a few months, but I really don't know how they are going to pull off the normal/big/fast trio.
1. In reality this could lead to full-heal rotation setups which would be bad for a completely different reason. But extend the cast time to 20 seconds and you couldn't even do that.
Heals vary on two easily quantifiable axes and also on a third, harder to pin down level. The first is healing per second, the second is healing per mana, and the third is the way in which the heal delivers healing. That third one encompasses the difference between direct heals with different cast times, HoTs, Shields, and bizarre things like Prayer of Mending. They are very different, and some are clearly better than others, and that betterness goes beyond and must be measured against HpS and HpM.
But when it comes down to two different heals that function in precisely the same way, there is really only one way they can be meaningfully different. One heal can have higher HpS and lower HpM than the other. Any other variance doesn't work. If Heal A has both higher HpS and higher HpM than Heal B then you don't really have two different heals, or at least things would be in all ways the same for you if you actually did have only Heal A.
And so the normal heal, big heal dynamic works. The big heal is presumably more expensive per point healed. They have the same cast time. You cast the normal heal most of the time and when you think it isn't going to be enough (either because you've been falling behind for a while, you know a big hit will land in a couple of seconds, or whatever) you cast the big heal instead.
But the way that heals deliver healing is a very important consideration. Imagine instead of casting a heal for a specified amount of time you could just channel a heal that continuously drained your mana and increased their health and you'd stop when you felt you'd done enough. This would be the ultimate in giving the ability to quickly react to damage as well as not overheal. I would basically be the limit of making heals faster. On the other end you have a heal that takes 10 seconds, is extremely cheap, and heals the target to full. This is a terrible spell because 10 seconds is too long to go without a heal1.
So a fast heal with the same mana efficiency and healing per second is better than a slow heal. Thus, a fast heal can afford to be a little weaker in terms of efficiency and throughput and still be useful. But how much cheaper can it be? And is the difference between 1.5 seconds and 2.5 seconds enough of a difference to justify a big disparity in effectiveness? Developers were talking about making it so you didn't have to worry about the tank going from full to dead in two swings. If that's really the case, then when am I going to pay more mana to get a heal that lands faster when the slower heal is fast enough?
I was having trouble getting my head around how the normal/fast/big heal system was going to work. They would make reference to the way healing used to work in BC, but we didn't really work on that model. We either worked on the shadow-priests-make-it-so-mana-is-a-joke-and-I-spam-CoH model or the six-ranks-of-heal-and-g.heal-on-my-bar model. We chose between multiple points on the efficiency vs. throughput spectrum much moreso than we chose between fast and slow. These days your tank does die in two hits so you don't dare cast spells that take 1.5 seconds, let alone 2.5 seconds.
Without the breakneck pace for healing, I was having trouble seeing how a fast heal would fit in. It seemed like it would make more sense to give us small/medium/large than fast/medium/large.
Now we've seen the costs and healing amounts of Flash Heal and Greater Heal and it doesn't seem like the developers had any better idea than I did about how to find space for these different heals. Bars show efficiency on the right axis and lines show throughput on the left axis:
There is never really much differentiation between the two heals in terms of efficiency or throughput. Since you will presumably spend a lot of time casting Heal, and switch to these more expensive heals only when you have to, it is hard to believe you will decide that doing 3% more healing is worth the trade-off of being slower. Doing more healing because you aren't keeping up doesn't seem like it will often coincide with wanted to go more slowly.
But I think finding space for both of these heals is much more than a numbers game. Imagine that instead Flash Heal did only about half the throughput of Greater Heal (which is around what I expect Heal to be) and was also less mana efficient. Then we wouldn't cast Flash Heal at all because there would basically never be a situation that warranted throwing your mana away on such a weak heal. You might say, then, that logic suggests there is a medium point where both spells are castable.
That is not necessarily the case. When you are actually healing, you don't get to sit around and look at graphs or run simulations to figure out which heal is the better one to use in the situation. You have to choose very quickly, and you have a limited amount of brain cycles to devote to making the decision. The closer two things are to even, the harder it is to choose between them. Having two different heals that basically do the same thing that are close enough together in effect that it is a subject of much debate which is better means you are probably best off only putting on of those heals on your bar. If you are really smart, you might switch which one depending on the nature of the fight. Choosing on the fly which one to use, however, is putting too much thought into a decision between two very similar spells. Casting either spell now is almost certainly better than casting the "right" one a couple of tenths of a second later.
Bar space is also an issue by itself. I currently have 37 keybinds that I use in combat while I'm healing (though some of them are very situational, I still use them). In the next expansion I'm getting Leap of Faith and Power Word: Barrier (and there is some chance I would have Inner Will on my bars). I don't know how to fit an extra heal-of-a-different-colour into the mix unless it is very noticeably useful. They still have a few months, but I really don't know how they are going to pull off the normal/big/fast trio.
1. In reality this could lead to full-heal rotation setups which would be bad for a completely different reason. But extend the cast time to 20 seconds and you couldn't even do that.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Enchants
I've made posts about gems and glyphs, now it's time to move on to enchants.
Just like gems and glyphs, enchants are great things to get. My main is an enchanter, and while my other profession moves around a bit, I can't ever imagine dropping enchanting. But enchanting really isn't what it could be, and much like gems and glyphs, this has a lot to do with the selection of enchants that are available.
Looking at enchants for various slots, there are generally three or four different "top level" enchants for each slot, that is, enchants that give the maximum possible number of stat points. In gloves the expansion brought both Expertise (15 expertise rating) and Precision (20 hit rating). While given that choice (and only that choice) some characters should take Expertise, the Hit rating is the more powerful enchant.
In gloves you get to choose between AP, Spell power, Agility, Hit and Armsman.
In cloaks you get to choose between Agility, Haste and Armor
In chests you get all stats or Health
In boots you get Tuskar's Vitality unless your class gets to run fast, in which case you can choose between Agility and AP
In bracers you get to choose between Stamina, AP and Spell Power
The question is, are there any interesting choices to make here? In reality, the closest any class comes to an interesting choice is knowing whether AP or Agility is better for your the spec you are in. Probably the only place where enchants are really interesting is where one stat is so brutally unbalanced or desperately needed that it actually makes sense to take a hit to your stat points in order to convert them to that stat. For example, if one strength is worth three or more AP, as it was for Unholy DKs for at least part of the expansion, then you should get the Major Strength enchant from BC on your gloves instead of getting Crusher.
In reality aside from the agility/AP classes, the choice of enchant is a transparent non-choice for even a novice player with no theorycrafting experience at all. If an arcane mage has to choose between Haste and Crit then there is a right answer and a wrong answer for maximizing damage, and so you can say that the choice can't really be all that interesting. But a novice player has the option of customizing; diminishing returns on one or the other stat might affect their relative weight as your gear changes (for example, Crit might proc an ability like Flurry and be less useful per point when you have 40% than when you have 20% because of the chance in how it affects your Flurry uptime); and at least in order to figure out which stat you want you need to know something about your class mechanics. Choosing between Spell Power, AP and Stamina on your bracers isn't a real choice for anyone.
Enchants that do more than simply add a stat make enchanting more interesting in a way, but often make choices less interesting. Armsman is the tanking glove enchant. It's hard to imagine a tank using another enchant (aside from tinkering armor on with engineering), and no non-tank would use it under an circumstances. Tuskar's Vitality fills the moving faster gap for specs that can't talent it, and I'm not even interested in arguments that a small number of stat points can be better than 8% faster movement. Those arguments have played themselves out already. Except in cloaks (where people don't use the "special" enchants) there is only one special option per slot, and that special option is either useless or overpowered depending on your spec.
I don't think that increasing the selection of enchants is really going to do the trick. Each class has nearly 30 major glyphs to choose from and there are about 50 epic gem cuts, but all that variety doesn't increase the breadth of rational choices very much at all.
Changing enchants so that we choose between stats that we might actually want to choose between would help, though. If I could choose hit, haste or crit to wrists then my choice would depend on my spec, my current gear, and to some extent the fights that I was facing, instead of depending only on my spec.
Adding more enchants with "special" effects that are useful in a wider variety of circumstances might also improve things. Engineering shows that they have the capacity to do enchants that give items use abilities. More enchants like this, where you get to choose between an on-demand boost and a constant passive boost, would give more leeway to choose enchants based on a style of play and on fight mechanics rather than simply choosing the one that is best for you on a spreadsheet.
Of course there are some major obstacles to overcome. If spell power is as out-of-whack with crit as I suggested it would be in my recent post of rating conversions then in order to make a glove enchant tempting for a mage, they might have to make it give 140 or more crit rating, since otherwise the WotLK spell power enchant would beat it out. I don't expect crit rating to be that far back from spell power in reality, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were no better than a third of Intellect for most caster classes when Cataclysm arrives. Old enchants would be taken over new ones because stats are so desperately out of scale with one another.
My prediction on this is that enchants will basically be the same as they are now when cataclysm comes out. All the casters will enchant Intellect and lament it when they can't. All the tanks will enchant Stamina and have similar complaints about that option not being available on every slot. I don't think enchanting is quite as degenerate as glyphing, and neither are even close to gemming, so I expect it to get the least attention. And all of these things have to compete with their ultimate goal for customization: making talents into real choices. If they can get that right then they can probably rest on those laurels of character customization for the entirety of cataclysm and not worry so much about the homogeneity of enchants, gems and glyphs until next expansion.
Just like gems and glyphs, enchants are great things to get. My main is an enchanter, and while my other profession moves around a bit, I can't ever imagine dropping enchanting. But enchanting really isn't what it could be, and much like gems and glyphs, this has a lot to do with the selection of enchants that are available.
Looking at enchants for various slots, there are generally three or four different "top level" enchants for each slot, that is, enchants that give the maximum possible number of stat points. In gloves the expansion brought both Expertise (15 expertise rating) and Precision (20 hit rating). While given that choice (and only that choice) some characters should take Expertise, the Hit rating is the more powerful enchant.
In gloves you get to choose between AP, Spell power, Agility, Hit and Armsman.
In cloaks you get to choose between Agility, Haste and Armor
In chests you get all stats or Health
In boots you get Tuskar's Vitality unless your class gets to run fast, in which case you can choose between Agility and AP
In bracers you get to choose between Stamina, AP and Spell Power
The question is, are there any interesting choices to make here? In reality, the closest any class comes to an interesting choice is knowing whether AP or Agility is better for your the spec you are in. Probably the only place where enchants are really interesting is where one stat is so brutally unbalanced or desperately needed that it actually makes sense to take a hit to your stat points in order to convert them to that stat. For example, if one strength is worth three or more AP, as it was for Unholy DKs for at least part of the expansion, then you should get the Major Strength enchant from BC on your gloves instead of getting Crusher.
In reality aside from the agility/AP classes, the choice of enchant is a transparent non-choice for even a novice player with no theorycrafting experience at all. If an arcane mage has to choose between Haste and Crit then there is a right answer and a wrong answer for maximizing damage, and so you can say that the choice can't really be all that interesting. But a novice player has the option of customizing; diminishing returns on one or the other stat might affect their relative weight as your gear changes (for example, Crit might proc an ability like Flurry and be less useful per point when you have 40% than when you have 20% because of the chance in how it affects your Flurry uptime); and at least in order to figure out which stat you want you need to know something about your class mechanics. Choosing between Spell Power, AP and Stamina on your bracers isn't a real choice for anyone.
Enchants that do more than simply add a stat make enchanting more interesting in a way, but often make choices less interesting. Armsman is the tanking glove enchant. It's hard to imagine a tank using another enchant (aside from tinkering armor on with engineering), and no non-tank would use it under an circumstances. Tuskar's Vitality fills the moving faster gap for specs that can't talent it, and I'm not even interested in arguments that a small number of stat points can be better than 8% faster movement. Those arguments have played themselves out already. Except in cloaks (where people don't use the "special" enchants) there is only one special option per slot, and that special option is either useless or overpowered depending on your spec.
I don't think that increasing the selection of enchants is really going to do the trick. Each class has nearly 30 major glyphs to choose from and there are about 50 epic gem cuts, but all that variety doesn't increase the breadth of rational choices very much at all.
Changing enchants so that we choose between stats that we might actually want to choose between would help, though. If I could choose hit, haste or crit to wrists then my choice would depend on my spec, my current gear, and to some extent the fights that I was facing, instead of depending only on my spec.
Adding more enchants with "special" effects that are useful in a wider variety of circumstances might also improve things. Engineering shows that they have the capacity to do enchants that give items use abilities. More enchants like this, where you get to choose between an on-demand boost and a constant passive boost, would give more leeway to choose enchants based on a style of play and on fight mechanics rather than simply choosing the one that is best for you on a spreadsheet.
Of course there are some major obstacles to overcome. If spell power is as out-of-whack with crit as I suggested it would be in my recent post of rating conversions then in order to make a glove enchant tempting for a mage, they might have to make it give 140 or more crit rating, since otherwise the WotLK spell power enchant would beat it out. I don't expect crit rating to be that far back from spell power in reality, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were no better than a third of Intellect for most caster classes when Cataclysm arrives. Old enchants would be taken over new ones because stats are so desperately out of scale with one another.
My prediction on this is that enchants will basically be the same as they are now when cataclysm comes out. All the casters will enchant Intellect and lament it when they can't. All the tanks will enchant Stamina and have similar complaints about that option not being available on every slot. I don't think enchanting is quite as degenerate as glyphing, and neither are even close to gemming, so I expect it to get the least attention. And all of these things have to compete with their ultimate goal for customization: making talents into real choices. If they can get that right then they can probably rest on those laurels of character customization for the entirety of cataclysm and not worry so much about the homogeneity of enchants, gems and glyphs until next expansion.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Glyphs
Glyphs are terrible.
First of all, just like in my gems post, I should point out that I am very aware of the fact that glyphs are fantastic, especially considering the alternative to glyphs is not having glyphs.
Glyphs were a cool idea that worked out pretty badly. I have at least four gripes about glyphs, which I may, of course, add to in the future as I think about more problems with glyphs. They are:
- The level of your inscription skill bares no relation to glyph power
- Glyphs are mostly uninteresting and trend towards being more uninteresting all the time
- Many glyphs seem to have been abandoned as useless
- There are *really* not enough minor glyphs
On the other hand, Glyph of Pestilence only requires 75 skill to make despite requiring level 55 to use (since there are no death knights below level 55). Glyph of Power Word: Shield, the most important glyph by far for discipline priests, required 80 skill to use, so there is no correlation between skill to make and usefulness either.
Basically glyphs are assorted randomly at different skill levels and herb requirements. They had to do this to make inscription fit their skilling up paradigm, but it makes no sense whatsoever. If I started playing this game today, made a mage, and decided that inscriptions sounded cool, I would hit level 15, get my skill to 75, and my profession would give me the incredible Glyphs of Fire Ward, Frost Ward and Arcane Blast. So two spells I never cast and one I won't learn for 49 levels. Inscription is designed entirely with the idea that you have max skill in it. Until then the profession doesn't make sense.
When glyphs first came out, the idea seemed to be that you could modify your spells to give yourself different options. A spell might be faster but cost more, or do less damage but more healing, or have some other kiss/curse type effect. There were also those glyphs aimed at changing the way you play. In practice, half of the glyphs just gave spells a percentage boost and had no trade-off. So, of course, people use the ones that make the things do they flat out better rather then using the ones that change things around. Also in practice these "interesting" glyphs often made the spells just plain bad. So many of the trade-off glyphs started to vanish to be replaced by simple percentage boost glyphs. Many glyphs could just ultimately be replaced by "+2% damage" and no one would notice. It's a lot of work and game mechanics to accomplish this.
But the fact that glyphs have that kind of effect makes many of the glyphs pretty close to useless. If there are glyphs that give you 2%+ damage then you aren't going to take glyphs that don't directly add to damage. If there are glyphs that give you 2% more healing, or 2% more damage mitigation, then you are going to skip utility glyphs in favour of these as well. As a result, many utility glyphs seem to have just been abandoned completely as useless. Glyph of Mass Dispel reduces the mana cost of Mass Dispel by 35%. According to Armory Data Mining no one uses this glyph at all. Even if they are just rounding down the very small number of people who use it, that would still mean that more discipline priests are using Glyph of Divine Spirit than Glyph of Mass Dispel.
And who can blame them. When I was running ToC and Ulduar my spreadsheet told me that Glyph of Mass Dispel would be worth about 4 Mp5. With my ICC logs it would be worth zero. I haven't cast Mass Dispel in a while. Even if they upped the 35% to 100% it would still see little use, though some people might swap to it for particular fights and it would probably see use in PvP. Glyph of Barbaric Insults is similar. So are Feint, Entangling Roots, Scorch, and several other glyphs from every class. These glyphs aren't good, it seems like they can't be good, so they've just been left to die. But some of these glyphs are really pretty easy to rehabilitate. Up the damage percentage on Glyph of Scorch so that a Scorch mage does almost as much damage as a Fireball mage and you'd see at least a few people using it. Up the effect of Glyph of Rapid Fire so that it's overall contribution to your damage is somewhat similar to other hunter glyphs and people would use that too. Others, like Mass Dispel, might be rehabilitated best by making them into minor glyphs.
Which would help a lot with the last problem I'll talk about today with glyphs. There aren't enough minor glyphs, and the homogenization in their use is rather incredible. About 95% of priests use Glyph of Levitate. A similar number of druids use Glyph of Unburdened Rebirth. For every class there are the minor glyphs people use and the minor glyphs people don't use. Some degree of homogenization is inevitable with only six glyphs to choose from and three slots to fill, but even in quality of life improvements there is room for balance. It if fairly obvious that people value getting rid of reagent costs far above duration increases for self-cast spells. Just like the unused major glyphs, I get the feeling that minor glyphs are just seen as unimportant, and that the ones people don't use have just been left to die. Minor glyphs aren't terribly important, but if there is anywhere in the game where it would be nice to see variability in behaviour, this would be it. They want to see options in talent builds, sure, but that is very hard to do when talents are tied to your performance in your raiding role. Variability in a part of the game that should be appealing to people's personal taste for quality of life improvements shouldn't be as hard as that.
So what to do about these problems? The first one seems absolutely impossible to solve without significant new tech that is unlikely to be implemented just for one profession. I assume that when Cataclysm comes out there will be a new Greater Heal glyph that you'll need to be level 80 to create while many glyphs that can be made at level 5 will continue to be useless to characters under level 60. The other option is to put in lots more glyphs and actually make the low level ones worse than the high level ones. I don't see this happening.
The solution to uninteresting glyphs is to just nix them all. If something simply says, "Increase the effect of something you'd cast anyway X by 5%" then replace it with something better. Things that increase the effect of spells by 20% are meaningful as they probably rearrange the priority of your casts, but small percentage to commonly used spells really take away the meaning and intent of glyphs. Of course this would be a ridiculous amount of design work, and they would probably rather introduce new glyphs than rework old ones, but if people are using "X does 5% more" type glyphs now than unless the new glyphs are "X does 6% more" I don't see that people will use them.
I already said that a big part of the solution to glyphs no one uses might be to make some of them minor glyphs. I don't think this is appropriate for all of them, but it would sure work for Mass Dispel and Barbaric Insults. But another part of that solution is rebalancing the minor glyphs that no one takes, reducing the attractiveness of reagent-replacement glyphs by selling Light Feathers and Fish Oil at reagent vendors, and making at least six more minor glyphs for each class. If you only get a quarter rather than a half of the glyphs then which ones you take will inevitably be less of a foregone conclusion.
Of these solutions I think that the last one, including more minor glyphs, will probably come with Cataclysm. I have little hope that any of the others would ever be done. Two years from now we will still most likely be able to look upon Glyph of Feint and weep.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Gems
Gems are terrible.
1. On an item point basis. For example, this would mean that if your best stat was Strength then either haste or crit would be two-thirds as good and a blue stat would be two-thirds as good. If your best stat was stamina then a red and a yellow stat would be as good as stamina point for point, since stamina only costs two-thirds of other stats in terms of item budget. Similarly, if your best stat is spell power than a yellow or blue stat would be more than two-thirds as good as spell power. You can see from these examples that this is an idealized situation that is making stats seem more balanced than they are. The reality of stat imbalance is much more extreme.
2. Valuing a stat at half a stamina item point wise would mean valuing it at three quarters of a stamina point for point wise.
We all know that gems are great. Not only should you socket up all the gear that has sockets, but you should normally choose gear with sockets over gear without sockets because it ends up being substantially more powerful. That's not what I'm talking about. I mean that the concept of gems, while it sounds cool, just isn't working, and I think this is just going to get worse in Cataclysm.
A recent blue post confirmed that the "cost" of sockets in an item's budget is taken out of the most attractive stat on that item. Thus, tanking gear with sockets should have less stamina than tanking gear without, plate damage gear with sockets less strength, leather with sockets less agility and so on. But of course they really have more of these things. They have more because that's what you socket them for. This is why we prefer gear with sockets to gear without, because we can maximize the one stat we want.
And so the problem is really that there is one stat we want. Almost every class and spec has a stat that is better than the other stats by a fairly significant margin. Even if they have two stats that are about equally good there is always the plateau of high stats followed by the drop off to stats that are worth two-thirds, half or even less than half as much towards their main function.
Suppose you have one stat that is good and every other stat is worth at most two-thirds of that stat1, and that you can get a stat that is two-thirds as good in both of the colours that don't have your main stat.
Aside from heads that have metas, the typical pattern for socket bonuses is that matching a single socket gives a +4 bonus, matching two gives a +6 and matching three gives a +8. Epic gems are worth 20 stat points. How extreme do circumstances have to be for you to gem outside your best stat?
A single socket item is only worth matching the socket if you get your best stat out of it. So if your best stat is strength, match a non-red socket only if the socket bonus is strength.
A two socket item you should match only if one of the sockets is the same colour of your main stat. So if your best stat is strength and the item has a yellow and blue socket, you should just gem strength even if the socket bonus is strength. If one socket is red to begin with then matching the other is good as long as the socket bonus is one of those two-thirds stats.
A three socket item should be matched only if either one of the sockets is the same colour of your main stat and the socket bonus is your main stat or two of the sockets are the same colour of your main stat. So match gems if two of the sockets are red and the socket bonus stat is useful or if one of the sockets is red and the socket bonus stat is strength.
In any other case just gem strength.
And this example is designed to be very favourable to socket bonuses and to variety. In reality most dps wouldn't value any blue stat at even close to half of their main stat and most tanks wouldn't value any stat at half of stamina2 let alone two-thirds. This means people gem all stamina, they gem all strength, they gem all armor penetration. They use other colours of gems to match sockets only to turn on their meta-gem.
Sockets on dps plate might as well just be replaced with twenty strength and we'll be done with it. Sockets are little more than a very complicated system to let people trade in small amounts of a stat they really want for small amounts of hit to get as close as possible to the hit cap without going under.
With a number of the changes in cataclysm - such as clearly defining and accepting the idea that each class/spec has a best stat and the coming rating changes - I think we have every reason to believe that the difference between your best and second best stat are going to get even more extreme (with the possible exception of tanks). This will mean more gemming for your best stat no matter what type behaviour.
In order to redeem gems stats need to have a relatively equal value. One stat will always be better, but it should not be half again as good as other stats. Without that, gems will slip more and more into just being passive stat bonuses by a different name. Gear with gems lets people trade gold for item points.
1. On an item point basis. For example, this would mean that if your best stat was Strength then either haste or crit would be two-thirds as good and a blue stat would be two-thirds as good. If your best stat was stamina then a red and a yellow stat would be as good as stamina point for point, since stamina only costs two-thirds of other stats in terms of item budget. Similarly, if your best stat is spell power than a yellow or blue stat would be more than two-thirds as good as spell power. You can see from these examples that this is an idealized situation that is making stats seem more balanced than they are. The reality of stat imbalance is much more extreme.
2. Valuing a stat at half a stamina item point wise would mean valuing it at three quarters of a stamina point for point wise.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Bring the Class
I don't want to get too much on Blizzard's back for their "bring the player, not the class" mantra. It has been quite successful in a number of ways. People who don't think it is successful need to take a look at raid composition at the end of BC, where you needed a shaman in every group and multiple shadow priests just to get things going, and where rogues did the most damage but needed so many other classes to enable them to do the most damage that there often simply wasn't space for them. It was a real mess.
Raid buffs are still a very tricky situation in 10-player raids. You want to try to make sure you have them, but having them all is pretty impossible. Blizzard has indicated that in 10-player raids they expect you will have some but not all raid buffs. And that's fine, of course. Raid buffs tend to give a little more than a 2% bonus to overall raid damage, and most of them apply multiplicatively. So they assume you have all 17 raid buffs for 25-player and some less number for 10-player when they set the health of the bosses.
Of course all raid buffs are not made equal, so I took one of my raids and did a little analysis. First, I know the percentage of the total damage each person did, so from there I figured out what portion of each person's damage was physical and what was magic (as well as what part was a "magic strike" which deals magic damage but hits and crits as a swing not a spell). I figured out what portion of each person's damage could benefit from haste rating and an approximate value for how much benefit to damage each person gets from crit. All of this allowed me to compile the following table:
While some buffs are barely a 1% bonus and others manage to get over 3%, the 13% spell damage buff is well over 8% bonus to overall raid damage. This is not a caster stacked raid either. The raid in question had 9 different dpsers swap in and out through the night. The number 1, 2 and 3 damage spots were a rogue, a hunter, and a shadow priest. But almost 17% of the rogue's damage is affected by +13% magic damage, it would be more for mutilate spec, I believe. Almost 50% of the hunter's damage and 40% of the death knight's damage was magic. The paladin was half and half as well. Basically 13% spell damage gives 13% damage to half your raid and half that to the other half, so it's more than twice as good as the next best buff.
And then there is the way it is handed out. Balance druids put it up on the main target you are attacking only. Any warlock can put it up, but they use a GCD to do so for each target and have to take a personal damage loss by not using other curses. Unholy death knights put it up on all enemies you are facing by doing their normal damage rotation. So if there are multiple adds being burned down, only one spec of one class provides a buff that is over twice as good as any other buff.
One of the most mind-boggling things about all of this is that there used to be a 10% spell crit debuff that mages put on the enemies and Blizzard toned it down to 5% because they thought it was too powerful. The 5% magic crit debuff on the enemy is worth around 1.75% damage, so doubling that would bring it to 3.5%, which is better than the next best buff, but still less than half of +13% spell damage. If instead of halving it they had doubled it, it would still not be as much of a problem as 13% spell damage. What's more, while it is limited to a number of classes and specs, all those classes and specs apply it in a relatively equal manner by putting it on targets only with single target spells.
They argued that because crit gives lots of other benefits, it was more important to drop the crit debuff than the bonus damage debuff, but in reality 1% spell crit is worth less raid damage than 1% magic damage. This is in large part because the 1% magic damage affects many things (like rogue poisons and explosive shot) that 1% spell crit does not. It is also because if things are only critting for double and you have 40% crit already, then 1% crit only increases your damage by .7%. Things crit for more than double in many cases, but also people have a lot more than 40% crit in many cases. Plus, not everything can crit, but everything does damage. Crits may proc buffs or other effects, but most of those work either as just bonus damage (ignite) which effectively increase your crit multiplier, or they have high uptime with existing crit values and upping crit by 5% might change uptime from 90% to 91%.
But 13% spell damage isn't even the biggest problem on the buff/debuff scene. I used an Anub'arak log to estimate the percentage damage value bonus of mortal strike on that fight for phase three.
The mortal strike debuff can be applied by a pretty wide range of classes and specs, since you can get it from any hunter, any rogue and two specs of warriors. But in the hard phase of the toughest encounter from the last tier of content, in order to make up for the healing it removed from the boss you would have had to do 20% more damage. Assuming you couldn't do 20% more damage, that would not mean the fight would go on a little longer. It would mean you'd have to kill another wave of adds that you would otherwise have just ignored while you finished him off. Of course in that time you are killing adds he is healing, which will give him time to summon another wave of adds. In fact, when we were fighting Anub in mostly 226 and 232 gear and we forgot to bring an MS effect to a fight we literally weren't doing any damage to him. The amount of damage we did to him between add summons was completely healed back by the time the adds were dead. We could not win without this debuff, even if he had no enrage timer we just weren't making progress.
Last night we were working on Lich King and talking about what we would do if we didn't have paladins to hammer of justice the Val'kyrs. Availability of long stuns is not something that I normally try to plan raids around, but this section of the fight would be hugely more difficult without paladins.
And I posted just recently about paladins and Valithria Dreamwalker. The challenge that fight presents without a holy paladin is astronomical compared to how hard it is with one. While I can forgive this one as a one time thing - especially since Beacon of Light is a problem in so many different ways - it is another example where the difficulty of a fight hinges hugely upon raid composition.1
Because raid buffs are still very powerful, Blizzard's "Bring the player, not the class" is only half honest. They do want you to think about raid buffs and bring a mix of people. It is not their intention that any raid will be good enough. You still need tanks, healers and damage dealers, after all. Runescrolls and drums are making previously necessary classes even more skipable.
But when a single debuff makes the difference between winning and losing - not because you had a 1% wipe - because the fight is just designed so that you can't win without it, things have swung back way to far into "Bring the class no matter who is playing it" territory. We would have a better chance against Anub with a hunter who went afk with one of those little birds tapping his aimed shot button than we would with a serious high dps class in that spot if we had no other source of healing reduction. Enemy heals are absolutely huge (they have to be to make them worth using) so that debuff is overpowered any time it is at all useful. We should not be so dependent on a single ability.
I think that healing reduction debuffs should just go away completely. Find a different way to make classes competitive in PvP and reduce healing on PvE enemies to account for the fact that it is gone. Or if the PvP problem can't be solved then just make bosses who heal immune to it. At the very least make the 10-player version immune. As lame as that is, requiring that debuff is even more lame.
1. Fun Fact: A group of 10 ilvl 245 geared holy paladins would beat the Dreamwalker encounter before the first blazing skeleton.
Raid buffs are still a very tricky situation in 10-player raids. You want to try to make sure you have them, but having them all is pretty impossible. Blizzard has indicated that in 10-player raids they expect you will have some but not all raid buffs. And that's fine, of course. Raid buffs tend to give a little more than a 2% bonus to overall raid damage, and most of them apply multiplicatively. So they assume you have all 17 raid buffs for 25-player and some less number for 10-player when they set the health of the bosses.
Of course all raid buffs are not made equal, so I took one of my raids and did a little analysis. First, I know the percentage of the total damage each person did, so from there I figured out what portion of each person's damage was physical and what was magic (as well as what part was a "magic strike" which deals magic damage but hits and crits as a swing not a spell). I figured out what portion of each person's damage could benefit from haste rating and an approximate value for how much benefit to damage each person gets from crit. All of this allowed me to compile the following table:
While some buffs are barely a 1% bonus and others manage to get over 3%, the 13% spell damage buff is well over 8% bonus to overall raid damage. This is not a caster stacked raid either. The raid in question had 9 different dpsers swap in and out through the night. The number 1, 2 and 3 damage spots were a rogue, a hunter, and a shadow priest. But almost 17% of the rogue's damage is affected by +13% magic damage, it would be more for mutilate spec, I believe. Almost 50% of the hunter's damage and 40% of the death knight's damage was magic. The paladin was half and half as well. Basically 13% spell damage gives 13% damage to half your raid and half that to the other half, so it's more than twice as good as the next best buff.
And then there is the way it is handed out. Balance druids put it up on the main target you are attacking only. Any warlock can put it up, but they use a GCD to do so for each target and have to take a personal damage loss by not using other curses. Unholy death knights put it up on all enemies you are facing by doing their normal damage rotation. So if there are multiple adds being burned down, only one spec of one class provides a buff that is over twice as good as any other buff.
One of the most mind-boggling things about all of this is that there used to be a 10% spell crit debuff that mages put on the enemies and Blizzard toned it down to 5% because they thought it was too powerful. The 5% magic crit debuff on the enemy is worth around 1.75% damage, so doubling that would bring it to 3.5%, which is better than the next best buff, but still less than half of +13% spell damage. If instead of halving it they had doubled it, it would still not be as much of a problem as 13% spell damage. What's more, while it is limited to a number of classes and specs, all those classes and specs apply it in a relatively equal manner by putting it on targets only with single target spells.
They argued that because crit gives lots of other benefits, it was more important to drop the crit debuff than the bonus damage debuff, but in reality 1% spell crit is worth less raid damage than 1% magic damage. This is in large part because the 1% magic damage affects many things (like rogue poisons and explosive shot) that 1% spell crit does not. It is also because if things are only critting for double and you have 40% crit already, then 1% crit only increases your damage by .7%. Things crit for more than double in many cases, but also people have a lot more than 40% crit in many cases. Plus, not everything can crit, but everything does damage. Crits may proc buffs or other effects, but most of those work either as just bonus damage (ignite) which effectively increase your crit multiplier, or they have high uptime with existing crit values and upping crit by 5% might change uptime from 90% to 91%.
But 13% spell damage isn't even the biggest problem on the buff/debuff scene. I used an Anub'arak log to estimate the percentage damage value bonus of mortal strike on that fight for phase three.
The mortal strike debuff can be applied by a pretty wide range of classes and specs, since you can get it from any hunter, any rogue and two specs of warriors. But in the hard phase of the toughest encounter from the last tier of content, in order to make up for the healing it removed from the boss you would have had to do 20% more damage. Assuming you couldn't do 20% more damage, that would not mean the fight would go on a little longer. It would mean you'd have to kill another wave of adds that you would otherwise have just ignored while you finished him off. Of course in that time you are killing adds he is healing, which will give him time to summon another wave of adds. In fact, when we were fighting Anub in mostly 226 and 232 gear and we forgot to bring an MS effect to a fight we literally weren't doing any damage to him. The amount of damage we did to him between add summons was completely healed back by the time the adds were dead. We could not win without this debuff, even if he had no enrage timer we just weren't making progress.
Last night we were working on Lich King and talking about what we would do if we didn't have paladins to hammer of justice the Val'kyrs. Availability of long stuns is not something that I normally try to plan raids around, but this section of the fight would be hugely more difficult without paladins.
And I posted just recently about paladins and Valithria Dreamwalker. The challenge that fight presents without a holy paladin is astronomical compared to how hard it is with one. While I can forgive this one as a one time thing - especially since Beacon of Light is a problem in so many different ways - it is another example where the difficulty of a fight hinges hugely upon raid composition.1
Because raid buffs are still very powerful, Blizzard's "Bring the player, not the class" is only half honest. They do want you to think about raid buffs and bring a mix of people. It is not their intention that any raid will be good enough. You still need tanks, healers and damage dealers, after all. Runescrolls and drums are making previously necessary classes even more skipable.
But when a single debuff makes the difference between winning and losing - not because you had a 1% wipe - because the fight is just designed so that you can't win without it, things have swung back way to far into "Bring the class no matter who is playing it" territory. We would have a better chance against Anub with a hunter who went afk with one of those little birds tapping his aimed shot button than we would with a serious high dps class in that spot if we had no other source of healing reduction. Enemy heals are absolutely huge (they have to be to make them worth using) so that debuff is overpowered any time it is at all useful. We should not be so dependent on a single ability.
I think that healing reduction debuffs should just go away completely. Find a different way to make classes competitive in PvP and reduce healing on PvE enemies to account for the fact that it is gone. Or if the PvP problem can't be solved then just make bosses who heal immune to it. At the very least make the 10-player version immune. As lame as that is, requiring that debuff is even more lame.
1. Fun Fact: A group of 10 ilvl 245 geared holy paladins would beat the Dreamwalker encounter before the first blazing skeleton.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Grace
At some point Blizzard let us in on a design goal of theirs, which is to have talents be worth about 1% each. 1% more damage, more healing, more whatever. Of course there would be exceptions. It would be pretty boring if every talent were the same. But that is the baseline: more than 1% means a good talent, less than 1% is a weaker talent. Often you need to take weaker talents on the way up to the good ones.
Now discipline priests, I feel, are particularly bad when it comes to having good and bad talents, or I suppose just when it comes to having bad talents. Discipline Talents do not improve overall throughput as much as perhaps they should. Or it might be that discipline talents are about where they want things to be and most other trees are overpowered (the average talent a discipline priest takes increases effect by just over 1%, the good ones being balanced by very bad ones).
Generally, I'd rather not be taking a talent that has less than half a percent effect on my output. Those seem like very weak talents that I should be looking for something else to put in place of. Unfortunately, that is not really an option. A lot of talents such as Improved Inner Fire are just stepping stones with no other options available (18 spell power per point!). But when it comes to the top of the discipline tree, there are lots of good options, and I shouldn't be left scooping up the filler.
And that's where Grace comes in. According to the stats provided by www.quickarmory.com 94% of discipline priests take this talent and 82% take both points in it. This puts it on about even representation with Divine Aegis.
My spreadsheet works with my actual casts. I wrote a crude log parser (I call it crude because it's an excel macro) to get data from my combat logs and that data feeds into the spreadsheet to give me my own actual healing per second, mana use, and how that would be affected by changing stats and talents, so I know how good these talents are relative to one another. Divine Aegis increases healing done (counting absorbs as healing) by about 2.7% per point, so it is a very strong talent indeed. That second point of Grace is worth a whopping 0.3%.
That's right, it is total garbage.
In order to understand how bad Grace is, you have to know a bit about how Grace works. Take a moment to read the description of it's effect and I'll go on. So the second point of grace gives you a 100% chance to stack the effect, while the first point gives you only a 50% chance to stack the effect.
Imagine I focus most of my heals on a single target. That target will have Grace stacked up on them a lot of the time. Regardless of whether I have one or two points, I'm pretty likely to maintain a three stack. After all, if I am focusing heals on someone, 15 seconds is a very long time to hit with enough heals that the chance it doesn't renew becomes awfully small. But what if I throw a Penance or Flash Heal at another target who needs it? If a lose my stack, it will take longer to rebuild with only 1 point than it will with 2. On the other hand, with only one point, there is only a 50% chance I lose it from my main target in the first place. If it doesn't get applied to the target of my heal, it doesn't drop from the target of my previous heal.
In addition to all the real things going on, my parser puts a "Fake Grace 1" and "Fake Grace 2" buff on people I heal. The numbers represent the number of points. So whenever I cast one of specified spells I put Fake Grace 2 on the target, increment the stack if they already have it, and remove the stack from anyone else. I also flip a coin to see whether I do the same with Fake Grace 1. Doing this allows me to get results for the average number of Grace stacks that I would have on my targets for each spell.
As you can see, the difference is not that great. For some spells it works out to be a lot more than others. It isn't surprising that Greater Heal ended up with the same stacks for 1 and 2 points because I only have 2 GH casts in the logs I am using for this and so a couple of coin flips would make it come out the same. As you can see, the difference in average number of stacks is not double when you put that second point in, in many cases it is increased by about half or less. Every stack is a 3% throughput on that spell. So for Penance, which goes from 0.77 to 1.19 stacks, that second point is about a 1.26% increase in the effect. For Flash Heal, whose average goes from 0.32 to 0.47 stacks, that's a 0.45% increase in effect.
Of course the first point in Grace is not that overwhelming either, the reality of that point's effect on my healing is about a 0.56% increase. Almost double the effect of the second point, but still a pretty bad talent. The thing is, the first point can be a 9% increase in healing when you need it most. If one person is taking really massive damage and you are chaining heals on them then Grace does what it is supposed to, and does it about as well whether you made the half or full investment in it. There is a situation in which the first point of Grace really performs. The second point of Grace, however, performs quite randomly. It is not particularly better in the situation that it is designed to work for, and when throwing heals around the raid they are almost the same.
What is so sad about all of this is that I have two points in Grace. When it comes to spending those last few talents points I'm just scraping the bottom of the barrel so badly that a 0.3% increase in my overall healing, doled out at random, is better than my other options1. Discipline priest throughput is really, really weak compared to other healers and I wish that this talent was doing what it looks like it was meant to do, but for now there is nothing I can do but take it anyway.
1. Spell Warding is the next best thing I could take from a raid healing perspective. Reducing the amount of magic damage I take by 2% is about 86% as good as that second point of Grace is for improving the total health of the raid.
Now discipline priests, I feel, are particularly bad when it comes to having good and bad talents, or I suppose just when it comes to having bad talents. Discipline Talents do not improve overall throughput as much as perhaps they should. Or it might be that discipline talents are about where they want things to be and most other trees are overpowered (the average talent a discipline priest takes increases effect by just over 1%, the good ones being balanced by very bad ones).
Generally, I'd rather not be taking a talent that has less than half a percent effect on my output. Those seem like very weak talents that I should be looking for something else to put in place of. Unfortunately, that is not really an option. A lot of talents such as Improved Inner Fire are just stepping stones with no other options available (18 spell power per point!). But when it comes to the top of the discipline tree, there are lots of good options, and I shouldn't be left scooping up the filler.
And that's where Grace comes in. According to the stats provided by www.quickarmory.com 94% of discipline priests take this talent and 82% take both points in it. This puts it on about even representation with Divine Aegis.
My spreadsheet works with my actual casts. I wrote a crude log parser (I call it crude because it's an excel macro) to get data from my combat logs and that data feeds into the spreadsheet to give me my own actual healing per second, mana use, and how that would be affected by changing stats and talents, so I know how good these talents are relative to one another. Divine Aegis increases healing done (counting absorbs as healing) by about 2.7% per point, so it is a very strong talent indeed. That second point of Grace is worth a whopping 0.3%.
That's right, it is total garbage.
In order to understand how bad Grace is, you have to know a bit about how Grace works. Take a moment to read the description of it's effect and I'll go on. So the second point of grace gives you a 100% chance to stack the effect, while the first point gives you only a 50% chance to stack the effect.
Imagine I focus most of my heals on a single target. That target will have Grace stacked up on them a lot of the time. Regardless of whether I have one or two points, I'm pretty likely to maintain a three stack. After all, if I am focusing heals on someone, 15 seconds is a very long time to hit with enough heals that the chance it doesn't renew becomes awfully small. But what if I throw a Penance or Flash Heal at another target who needs it? If a lose my stack, it will take longer to rebuild with only 1 point than it will with 2. On the other hand, with only one point, there is only a 50% chance I lose it from my main target in the first place. If it doesn't get applied to the target of my heal, it doesn't drop from the target of my previous heal.
In addition to all the real things going on, my parser puts a "Fake Grace 1" and "Fake Grace 2" buff on people I heal. The numbers represent the number of points. So whenever I cast one of specified spells I put Fake Grace 2 on the target, increment the stack if they already have it, and remove the stack from anyone else. I also flip a coin to see whether I do the same with Fake Grace 1. Doing this allows me to get results for the average number of Grace stacks that I would have on my targets for each spell.
As you can see, the difference is not that great. For some spells it works out to be a lot more than others. It isn't surprising that Greater Heal ended up with the same stacks for 1 and 2 points because I only have 2 GH casts in the logs I am using for this and so a couple of coin flips would make it come out the same. As you can see, the difference in average number of stacks is not double when you put that second point in, in many cases it is increased by about half or less. Every stack is a 3% throughput on that spell. So for Penance, which goes from 0.77 to 1.19 stacks, that second point is about a 1.26% increase in the effect. For Flash Heal, whose average goes from 0.32 to 0.47 stacks, that's a 0.45% increase in effect.
Of course the first point in Grace is not that overwhelming either, the reality of that point's effect on my healing is about a 0.56% increase. Almost double the effect of the second point, but still a pretty bad talent. The thing is, the first point can be a 9% increase in healing when you need it most. If one person is taking really massive damage and you are chaining heals on them then Grace does what it is supposed to, and does it about as well whether you made the half or full investment in it. There is a situation in which the first point of Grace really performs. The second point of Grace, however, performs quite randomly. It is not particularly better in the situation that it is designed to work for, and when throwing heals around the raid they are almost the same.
What is so sad about all of this is that I have two points in Grace. When it comes to spending those last few talents points I'm just scraping the bottom of the barrel so badly that a 0.3% increase in my overall healing, doled out at random, is better than my other options1. Discipline priest throughput is really, really weak compared to other healers and I wish that this talent was doing what it looks like it was meant to do, but for now there is nothing I can do but take it anyway.
1. Spell Warding is the next best thing I could take from a raid healing perspective. Reducing the amount of magic damage I take by 2% is about 86% as good as that second point of Grace is for improving the total health of the raid.
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