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.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Power Word: Barrier
We were promised Power Word: Barrier some time ago1 but it ended up being cut. I believe this was because they just weren't getting it to work the way they wanted to. At the time I remember thinking it was a very difficult spell to implement. Obviously one way to implement an AoE shield is just to dump an individual shield on each person in an area, but that doesn't really have the right feel to it.
The implementation they came up with fits the idea of standing under a big shield that you share with your friends. The shield has a certain amount of damage it can absorb in total, but also a limit per hit so that if one person takes a massive hit they don't hog the whole shield.
The problem with this implementation is what happens when you cast it just one person. I'll use level 80 examples because they are more in our familiar range of understanding at this point. If you have around 4000 spell power then the shield can take about 51.6k, with 10.3k being the maximum per hit. If you cast that in front of the boss where the tank is standing then the tank gets 10.3k off every hit for the next five hits before the shield collapses. If a boss is swinging for 25k damage, this is basically Pain Suppression. If a boss is swinging for 35k then it's only 28% damage reduction, but that's an awful lot. What's important, though, is that it is a 52k instant cast heal on a single target in 10.3k installments. Think of it as a stupidly overpowered Renew.
Compare this to its AoE use. Suppose you are fighting the 10 player Sindragosa encounter. Her frost aura does 3750 damage every three seconds - and will be reduced by almost exactly 20% by resists. If non-tanks have an average of three stacks of mystic buffet, and they are gathered up under a shield, that means the shield will be block two ticks of the aura. This is not really that impressive. In fact, considering the positional requirements, it is arguable that Prayer of Mending is equally powerful or more powerful for this application, and that has a 10 second cooldown instead of a 2 minute cooldown.
For single massive AoE blasts there is a good chance that Power Word: Barrier will be inordinately effective. This is because, most likely, each person under the barrier will benefit from the full reduction of the barrier from a single hit even if that total overwhelms the total absorb of the barrier. That is, if your entire 25-player raid is standing under the barrier when the Lich King casts infest, it probably blocks 10.3k from each person, despite the fact that this means it absorbed over four times its maximum amount. This would be consistent with the behaviour of Anti-Magic Field, the spell that Power Word: Barrier was clearly based on. If the code does not have this mistake then it would basically be a 2-minute cooldown double strength Prayer of Healing.
Power Word: Barrier is good for two things: 1) For use as an external damage reduction cooldown on an individual who is standing in an isolated location or who is not standing near anyone else who will be taking damage; and 2) To take the edge off a powerful AoE attack that hits the entire raid when the raid can afford to stand together in preparation for the attack assuming that the way the coding works allows it to absorb far more than is intended.
When they announced Power Word: Barrier I really wasn't sure what kind of mechanics they could use to make it work. Clearly, they want it to have the thematic idea of sharing the shield between the people under it rather than giving each person their own shield. That requires a very large shield to be useful, but they certainly don't want it to be a super single-target shield.
These are some very significant problems to overcome. Unfortunately the design they settled on does not overcome them. The most likely outcome of Power Word: Barrier is that discipline priests will be seen as the external tanking cooldown healer - and will quite possibly be overpowered for this reason.
1. I believe they first announced it for patch 3.1, but it might have been 3.2
The implementation they came up with fits the idea of standing under a big shield that you share with your friends. The shield has a certain amount of damage it can absorb in total, but also a limit per hit so that if one person takes a massive hit they don't hog the whole shield.
The problem with this implementation is what happens when you cast it just one person. I'll use level 80 examples because they are more in our familiar range of understanding at this point. If you have around 4000 spell power then the shield can take about 51.6k, with 10.3k being the maximum per hit. If you cast that in front of the boss where the tank is standing then the tank gets 10.3k off every hit for the next five hits before the shield collapses. If a boss is swinging for 25k damage, this is basically Pain Suppression. If a boss is swinging for 35k then it's only 28% damage reduction, but that's an awful lot. What's important, though, is that it is a 52k instant cast heal on a single target in 10.3k installments. Think of it as a stupidly overpowered Renew.
Compare this to its AoE use. Suppose you are fighting the 10 player Sindragosa encounter. Her frost aura does 3750 damage every three seconds - and will be reduced by almost exactly 20% by resists. If non-tanks have an average of three stacks of mystic buffet, and they are gathered up under a shield, that means the shield will be block two ticks of the aura. This is not really that impressive. In fact, considering the positional requirements, it is arguable that Prayer of Mending is equally powerful or more powerful for this application, and that has a 10 second cooldown instead of a 2 minute cooldown.
For single massive AoE blasts there is a good chance that Power Word: Barrier will be inordinately effective. This is because, most likely, each person under the barrier will benefit from the full reduction of the barrier from a single hit even if that total overwhelms the total absorb of the barrier. That is, if your entire 25-player raid is standing under the barrier when the Lich King casts infest, it probably blocks 10.3k from each person, despite the fact that this means it absorbed over four times its maximum amount. This would be consistent with the behaviour of Anti-Magic Field, the spell that Power Word: Barrier was clearly based on. If the code does not have this mistake then it would basically be a 2-minute cooldown double strength Prayer of Healing.
Power Word: Barrier is good for two things: 1) For use as an external damage reduction cooldown on an individual who is standing in an isolated location or who is not standing near anyone else who will be taking damage; and 2) To take the edge off a powerful AoE attack that hits the entire raid when the raid can afford to stand together in preparation for the attack assuming that the way the coding works allows it to absorb far more than is intended.
When they announced Power Word: Barrier I really wasn't sure what kind of mechanics they could use to make it work. Clearly, they want it to have the thematic idea of sharing the shield between the people under it rather than giving each person their own shield. That requires a very large shield to be useful, but they certainly don't want it to be a super single-target shield.
These are some very significant problems to overcome. Unfortunately the design they settled on does not overcome them. The most likely outcome of Power Word: Barrier is that discipline priests will be seen as the external tanking cooldown healer - and will quite possibly be overpowered for this reason.
1. I believe they first announced it for patch 3.1, but it might have been 3.2
Monday, November 1, 2010
Resilience
The 4.0.1 problems with PvP and the attempt to solve them really highlighted some of the problems with Resilience. When 4.0.1 came out there was a big problem with people getting one-shotted or nearly one-shotted in battlegrounds. I forgot to put on my PvP gear in one Arathi Basin battle and took an Arcane Blast critical for around 28k. Apparently some ret paladins were doing single hits of up to 20k.
Obviously people being able to strip off half your health with a single attack in PvP is a big problem. On the other hand, people being totally unable to do any damage is a problem as well. Their initial reaction to the problem was to increase the effect of Resilience by 50%, so my 40%-ish damage reduction increased to 60%-ish damage reduction. Now that 28k Arcane Blast crit would only be 11k. Without the critical it would be a measly 5.5k.
In fact, I was usually pretty much invincible. I would heal myself through three people attacking me, despite stuns, silences and fears. Of course Blizzard noticed that this resilience chance was too much, so they lowered the effect of Resilience it by 25%1.
But when I go into battlegrounds, I'm still ridiculously tough. Other people on my team still get one-shotted. Why is this happening? It's because PvP balance comes from a single stat that starts at zero and gets better the more points you have of it.
Blizzard has put a lot of formulae in the game - some more complex than others - to try to prevent stats from getting better the more you have. For armor, the damage reduction formula means that armor expands your effective health linearly. For dodge and parry the diminishing returns formula does not quite come up with a linear result, but it was put into place to avoid these stats from becoming too powerful when you stack too much of them. Resilience has no such diminishing returns, it's power is just left to expand unchecked.
The math behind this is really simple. If you get a certain amount of resilience you take 1% less damage from your enemies. So if you started with zero, then you would now be taking 99% damage instead of 100%. But if you started with enough for a 40% reduction, you'd now be taking 59% instead of 60%. The thing is that while in one sense 59% is 1% less than 60%, the actual amount of damage you are taking with the extra resilience is not 1% less than what you were taking before. 59 divided by 60 is 0.983, so you are taking about 1.7% less damage then you were before you added that resilience. Resilience is 70% better when you already have enough for a 40% reduction than it was when you had none at all in terms of helping you live longer.
Making matters worse is that, as shown above, they like to fix PvP problems by adjusting the amount of damage reduction resilience gives. When they increased the value of resilience by 50%, the moved me from 40% to 60% resilience. I now took 40% instead of 60% of the damage my opponent's did. I was taking two-thirds of the damage, and my time to die from the same pressure by 50%.
A very well geared PvPer can get closer to 50% resilience. Increased that by 50% makes it 75%. So they take 25% instead of 50% of the damage they would have without it. They take half damage, and their time to die is doubled. Buffing resilience may make PvP more survivable on the whole, but it also drastically increases the disparity in power levels between the best and worst geared PvPers.
On top of this, so much PvP balance being dependent on resilience really messes up early expansion PvP. There were a lot of complaints about the first arena season in Wrath because people died so fast there was no time to have a good fight. The response from Blizzard was that we should wait until people get some resilience. There was a little more to it than that - people had easy access to relatively high level PvE gear via Naxxramas and much more limited access to PvP gear - but the increasing returns nature of resilience will always mean that PvP works without a certain range of resilience values and breaks down outside that range.
The incredibly high coefficient on resilience in Cataclysm will probably end up keeping resilience damage reduction values very low - unless they decide to improve them, damage reduction from resilience shouldn't get to even 20%, let alone 50%. Because of this, the problems with resilience will be much less pronounced in Cataclysm than they were in Wrath. But bad math continues to be bad math even when numbers close to zero make it not matter much.
The resilience formula should look just like the armor formula so that effective health in PvP expands linearly - rather than asymptotically - with resilience.
1. That is, they lowered it by 25% of the new value, which was 150% of the old value, so it was now 112.5% of the old value. Despite the fact that they gave an example of what they meant, I had to read their post a couple of times to figure out what they had done. Changing current values by percentages is quite uninformative.
Obviously people being able to strip off half your health with a single attack in PvP is a big problem. On the other hand, people being totally unable to do any damage is a problem as well. Their initial reaction to the problem was to increase the effect of Resilience by 50%, so my 40%-ish damage reduction increased to 60%-ish damage reduction. Now that 28k Arcane Blast crit would only be 11k. Without the critical it would be a measly 5.5k.
In fact, I was usually pretty much invincible. I would heal myself through three people attacking me, despite stuns, silences and fears. Of course Blizzard noticed that this resilience chance was too much, so they lowered the effect of Resilience it by 25%1.
But when I go into battlegrounds, I'm still ridiculously tough. Other people on my team still get one-shotted. Why is this happening? It's because PvP balance comes from a single stat that starts at zero and gets better the more points you have of it.
Blizzard has put a lot of formulae in the game - some more complex than others - to try to prevent stats from getting better the more you have. For armor, the damage reduction formula means that armor expands your effective health linearly. For dodge and parry the diminishing returns formula does not quite come up with a linear result, but it was put into place to avoid these stats from becoming too powerful when you stack too much of them. Resilience has no such diminishing returns, it's power is just left to expand unchecked.
The math behind this is really simple. If you get a certain amount of resilience you take 1% less damage from your enemies. So if you started with zero, then you would now be taking 99% damage instead of 100%. But if you started with enough for a 40% reduction, you'd now be taking 59% instead of 60%. The thing is that while in one sense 59% is 1% less than 60%, the actual amount of damage you are taking with the extra resilience is not 1% less than what you were taking before. 59 divided by 60 is 0.983, so you are taking about 1.7% less damage then you were before you added that resilience. Resilience is 70% better when you already have enough for a 40% reduction than it was when you had none at all in terms of helping you live longer.
Making matters worse is that, as shown above, they like to fix PvP problems by adjusting the amount of damage reduction resilience gives. When they increased the value of resilience by 50%, the moved me from 40% to 60% resilience. I now took 40% instead of 60% of the damage my opponent's did. I was taking two-thirds of the damage, and my time to die from the same pressure by 50%.
A very well geared PvPer can get closer to 50% resilience. Increased that by 50% makes it 75%. So they take 25% instead of 50% of the damage they would have without it. They take half damage, and their time to die is doubled. Buffing resilience may make PvP more survivable on the whole, but it also drastically increases the disparity in power levels between the best and worst geared PvPers.
On top of this, so much PvP balance being dependent on resilience really messes up early expansion PvP. There were a lot of complaints about the first arena season in Wrath because people died so fast there was no time to have a good fight. The response from Blizzard was that we should wait until people get some resilience. There was a little more to it than that - people had easy access to relatively high level PvE gear via Naxxramas and much more limited access to PvP gear - but the increasing returns nature of resilience will always mean that PvP works without a certain range of resilience values and breaks down outside that range.
The incredibly high coefficient on resilience in Cataclysm will probably end up keeping resilience damage reduction values very low - unless they decide to improve them, damage reduction from resilience shouldn't get to even 20%, let alone 50%. Because of this, the problems with resilience will be much less pronounced in Cataclysm than they were in Wrath. But bad math continues to be bad math even when numbers close to zero make it not matter much.
The resilience formula should look just like the armor formula so that effective health in PvP expands linearly - rather than asymptotically - with resilience.
1. That is, they lowered it by 25% of the new value, which was 150% of the old value, so it was now 112.5% of the old value. Despite the fact that they gave an example of what they meant, I had to read their post a couple of times to figure out what they had done. Changing current values by percentages is quite uninformative.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Percentage Changes
There was a patch to the beta today where they adjusted the strength of a variety of spells, mostly modifying only the base value, not the scaling. I'm not exactly going to complain about that. After all, they understand quite well that base values and scaling are two very different things and what it means to adjust them.
On the other hand, some the specific wording of their notes was a little weird:
Divine Light base healing has been increased by 30%. From 8538-9512 to 11100-12366
This is actually an improvement from how it used to be. They used to just list the percentage damage and not the damage numbers.
The thing is, that a percentage change in base healing or damage of an ability conveys basically no information. If a base amount increases 20%, that could mean anything from a 0% to an 20% increase in the actual output of the spell.
I'm not as much worried about the information I get, because I can go look things up if I don't know all the facts. What I'm more worried about is what this says about how they think about these things. When paladins aren't healing enough, do they think to themselves, "We'd better increase their base healing numbers by 30%"? Given they increased the base of the other direct heals by 30% that certainly appears to be exactly what they think. But I really don't understand how this train of thought works.
Each paladin healing spell gets a different proportion of its healing from the base amount compared to the spell coefficient, so they increased the power of some of these spells relative to one another. They also changed the relative value of critical strike, haste and mastery rating relative to intellect.
Obviously the concern was they wanted paladins to do more healing without increasing their scaling with spell power. This makes sense in a way, given that apparently paladins didn't heal for enough despite the fact that at a glance it looks like they have the highest scaling with intellect on direct heals. It just strikes me as very odd that they would choose a certain percentage and increase all the base amounts by that much. It looks a lot like a stab in the dark rather than the results of an actual analysis of how much more healing paladins should be doing.
On the other hand, some the specific wording of their notes was a little weird:
Divine Light base healing has been increased by 30%. From 8538-9512 to 11100-12366
This is actually an improvement from how it used to be. They used to just list the percentage damage and not the damage numbers.
The thing is, that a percentage change in base healing or damage of an ability conveys basically no information. If a base amount increases 20%, that could mean anything from a 0% to an 20% increase in the actual output of the spell.
I'm not as much worried about the information I get, because I can go look things up if I don't know all the facts. What I'm more worried about is what this says about how they think about these things. When paladins aren't healing enough, do they think to themselves, "We'd better increase their base healing numbers by 30%"? Given they increased the base of the other direct heals by 30% that certainly appears to be exactly what they think. But I really don't understand how this train of thought works.
Each paladin healing spell gets a different proportion of its healing from the base amount compared to the spell coefficient, so they increased the power of some of these spells relative to one another. They also changed the relative value of critical strike, haste and mastery rating relative to intellect.
Obviously the concern was they wanted paladins to do more healing without increasing their scaling with spell power. This makes sense in a way, given that apparently paladins didn't heal for enough despite the fact that at a glance it looks like they have the highest scaling with intellect on direct heals. It just strikes me as very odd that they would choose a certain percentage and increase all the base amounts by that much. It looks a lot like a stab in the dark rather than the results of an actual analysis of how much more healing paladins should be doing.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Lucifron
Alright, so this isn't at the top of anyone's list of bugs to fix, but my blog is called "What's Wrong with WoW" and this is something that's wrong with WoW. It's also rather amusing.
What happens when a Death Knight gets Lucifron's Curse? In part, exactly what you'd expect. Your ability cost double runes or runic power. And then a few things you wouldn't expect. For one, you don't generate runic power anymore. I've tried to think out the logic on this and my best guess is that when it tries to give you runic power it notices it's giving you 20 and then things that that means the ability costs 20 so it makes it cost 20 more, subtracting 20 from the 20 you were supposed to get and giving you zero. Just speculation, but it makes some sense.
More sense than the next bit anyway: If all your non-blood runes are death runes, and you use an ability that uses both your blood runes, your death runes immediately refresh. Then, after you use them the first time, instead of refilling two at a time as they should, all four refill at the same time. The result is that you get to alternate two death strikes per Heart Strike. This behaviour is just plan bizarre, and doesn't seem to have any reason behind it.
On to paladins. What happens when you use an ability that costs holy power? Well, it uses two of your three holy power, presumably because with costs doubled it can't use three. It tries to use one, uses two, then can't use another one. But the ability you use hits as though three holy power were used. Apparently when you use a holy power ability, it checks how much holy power you have first to see how powerful the ability should be, then it spends the holy power - apparently one at a time. How much you spend doesn't matter, how much you had matters.
I should really bring a balance druid down to Lucifron and see if something crazy happens with eclipse.
What happens when a Death Knight gets Lucifron's Curse? In part, exactly what you'd expect. Your ability cost double runes or runic power. And then a few things you wouldn't expect. For one, you don't generate runic power anymore. I've tried to think out the logic on this and my best guess is that when it tries to give you runic power it notices it's giving you 20 and then things that that means the ability costs 20 so it makes it cost 20 more, subtracting 20 from the 20 you were supposed to get and giving you zero. Just speculation, but it makes some sense.
More sense than the next bit anyway: If all your non-blood runes are death runes, and you use an ability that uses both your blood runes, your death runes immediately refresh. Then, after you use them the first time, instead of refilling two at a time as they should, all four refill at the same time. The result is that you get to alternate two death strikes per Heart Strike. This behaviour is just plan bizarre, and doesn't seem to have any reason behind it.
On to paladins. What happens when you use an ability that costs holy power? Well, it uses two of your three holy power, presumably because with costs doubled it can't use three. It tries to use one, uses two, then can't use another one. But the ability you use hits as though three holy power were used. Apparently when you use a holy power ability, it checks how much holy power you have first to see how powerful the ability should be, then it spends the holy power - apparently one at a time. How much you spend doesn't matter, how much you had matters.
I should really bring a balance druid down to Lucifron and see if something crazy happens with eclipse.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Shadow Word: Death
I should complain more about non-priest issues, but with all these changes it's hard to take my focus on things that affect Sthenno directly.
Shadow Word: Death was doing too much damage, and too much damage to the priests casting it, as I mentioned in a recent post. They decided to divide the damage it was doing by four and multiply the damage on low health targets by three to solve this problem.
I wonder if they considered amounts other than 75% to reduce the damage by. There are, after all, lots of numbers between 0 and 75%. They could have, for example, reduced the damage by 20%, or 25%, or even 40%, rather than reducing it so low that the damage per execute time is lower than Mind Flay.
If the damage of a spell, when cast on targets above 25% health, is so terribly low that it's always a dps loss to cast it, then why not only make it castable on targets below 25% health? There are lots of other spells that have that restriction, and it seems to work fine for them. Making it good sub 25% and castable but terrible at 25.01% might not be the best way to handle the spell.
But of course we may end up having to cast it above 25% anyway. Since a talent makes taking damage from it restore 10% of our total mana, it's kind of like Life Tap. It differs from Life Tap in a couple of key ways, of course. For example, has the upside that it does a little bit of damage but the downside that you can't use it between fights or during downtime when there is nothing to shoot. Another difference from Life Tap is that the damage you do to yourself can be prevented to cancel the effect, so if a Discipline priest gets so much as a critical Renew tick then our Life Tap fails. It also has a 12 second cooldown to make sure we can't spend too much of our time doing extremely low damage to the enemies. The cooldown goes away when the enemy is under 25% - that is, there is no cooldown when the spell actually does a ton of damage.
It seems like a number of different people all thought of changes to this spell and all implemented them without thinking about how they actually interacted with one another.
If they want it to be an Execute, they should make it an Execute. If they want it to restore mana, they should make it restore mana. If they want Shadow Priests to do several thousand dps to themselves once the boss gets under 25% health then they should probably just go ahead and rethink what they want. Right now this spell has too many conditions and add-ons, and it needs to be sorted out.
Shadow Word: Death was doing too much damage, and too much damage to the priests casting it, as I mentioned in a recent post. They decided to divide the damage it was doing by four and multiply the damage on low health targets by three to solve this problem.
I wonder if they considered amounts other than 75% to reduce the damage by. There are, after all, lots of numbers between 0 and 75%. They could have, for example, reduced the damage by 20%, or 25%, or even 40%, rather than reducing it so low that the damage per execute time is lower than Mind Flay.
If the damage of a spell, when cast on targets above 25% health, is so terribly low that it's always a dps loss to cast it, then why not only make it castable on targets below 25% health? There are lots of other spells that have that restriction, and it seems to work fine for them. Making it good sub 25% and castable but terrible at 25.01% might not be the best way to handle the spell.
But of course we may end up having to cast it above 25% anyway. Since a talent makes taking damage from it restore 10% of our total mana, it's kind of like Life Tap. It differs from Life Tap in a couple of key ways, of course. For example, has the upside that it does a little bit of damage but the downside that you can't use it between fights or during downtime when there is nothing to shoot. Another difference from Life Tap is that the damage you do to yourself can be prevented to cancel the effect, so if a Discipline priest gets so much as a critical Renew tick then our Life Tap fails. It also has a 12 second cooldown to make sure we can't spend too much of our time doing extremely low damage to the enemies. The cooldown goes away when the enemy is under 25% - that is, there is no cooldown when the spell actually does a ton of damage.
It seems like a number of different people all thought of changes to this spell and all implemented them without thinking about how they actually interacted with one another.
If they want it to be an Execute, they should make it an Execute. If they want it to restore mana, they should make it restore mana. If they want Shadow Priests to do several thousand dps to themselves once the boss gets under 25% health then they should probably just go ahead and rethink what they want. Right now this spell has too many conditions and add-ons, and it needs to be sorted out.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Self-Healing
When I was looking to make a tank to support my priest in taking down old raid content for reputation and rare mounts, my goal was to find the tank that could do the most damage while being basically invincible. Block tanking was extremely powerful for old content, but focusing gear on maximizing block rating meant doing less damage. A Death Knight could do lots of damage while healing herself for 15% of her health between 4 and 5 times every 20 seconds with Death Strike. That meant every point of stamina on the Death Knight was 0.3 healing per second, which meant that with a couple thousand stamina I wouldn't have to worry about much of anything being able to kill me.
Before Death Knights, bears were the masters of self healing with Improved Leader of the Pack giving them a mere 6% health at most every 6 seconds. A far cry from the 3% per second given by death strike.
I've been analyzing self-healing done by various tanks to figure out which class to level as my old content raiding partner for my priest, and I've come up with the following.
A Blood Death Knight gets 23.6% more stamina from talents and abilities. It would be 29.7% in a raiding situation, but for two-boxing they won't get the blessing of kings/mark of the wild buff. The Death Knight should get about 0.141 Death Strikes per second1. Against low level content they will heal for 10% of the Death Knight's maximum health plus a shield for half of that. In addition, from experimentation, each point of stamina gives approximately 0.032 extra health per second from blood worms. This totals to 0.294 health per second per stamina on gear.
A Warrior has self-healing in the form of Blood Craze and Enraged Regeneration. Warriors get 20.75% extra stamina without blessing of kings/mark of the wild. Blood Craze should have an uptime of around 29.5%2 and will heal for 1.91% of the warrior's health per second thanks to Field Dressing. That gives around 0.56% of health per second or 0.068 healing per stamina of gear. Every three minutes a warrior can activate Enraged Regeneration3 to regain 38.16% of total health. That translates to an additional 0.026 healing per stamina on gear for a total of 0.14 health per second per stamina on gear.
Bears get mark of the wild and have a total of 51.6% extra stamina from buffs and abilities. Frenzied Regeneration is very similar to Enraged Regeneration. Bears don't get Field Dressing, but they do get a huge amount more stamina, so it comes out to 0.0252 healing per second per stamina on gear. Assuming bears are using abilities on the GCD, they should get a Leader of the Pack trigger every 9.89 seconds4 for 8% maximum health. In total, bears heal for 0.147 per second per stamina on gear.
Lastly paladins. Paladins don't get any healing based on their total health or stamina, Ardent Defender excepted. Their self healing is instead based on strength. Word of Glory gets around 11.5% of attack power and 19.5% of spell power to its healing effect per holy power used. Since paladins will have 5% extra strength from Blessing of Kings and get 60% of their strength to spell power, this means Word of Glory has a coefficient of around 36% on strength on gear per holy power. Talented this in increased by 79.8%. Since you generate one holy power every 3 seconds and retain it 30% of the time that you use Word of Glory, Word of Glory heals for 0.312 per second per strength on gear. If you choose to use Seal of Insight, that accounts for another 0.13 healing per second per strength on gear5 for a total of 0.442. Since strength is 1.5 times as expensive as stamina from an item point perspective, we'll divide this by 1.5 for comparison purposes and get 0.295.
Of course there are more factors to consider. A druids and warriors do not give up any damage to self-heal while paladins give up a lot of damage and death knights give up a little. For low level content the paladin's damage penalty from self-healing will likely be made up for by the fact that the self-healing is very controllable - that is, you'll only use it when you need it - and because a lower-level content paladin tank will be geared for damage rather than tanking because their self-healing relies on strength rather than stamina. Also, paladins are the only tank class that have base numbers attached to their self healing. With Protector of the Innocent, even a one point Word of Glory will have a base heal of around 7.5k, which even in top end gear should push paladin self-healing way above other classes.
In raiding content, a paladin tank will presumably not be able to heal themselves as much if they want to hold threat. Death Knights, however, give up very little to Death Strike as often as they can. Keeping up diseases will cost a death strike every 33 seconds, reducing Death knight self healing per stamina on gear to 0.238, but I doubt that it will be necessary to use the Blood Runes generated through Death Strikes for Heart Strikes in order to maintain aggro.
There are clearly two tiers of self-healing. Paladins and Death Knights occupy the upper tier while warriors and druids are on the lower tier. Of course in raids paladins probably can't self-heal as much and Death Knights don't have blocking or Savage Defense, so these things may even out in some ways.
But there are circumstances in raiding where this self-healing capacity may end up being dramatically overpowered. Most importantly, self-healing creates an extremely different dynamic in 10 and 25 player raids.
To look at self-healing in perspective, a Flash Heal has a healing coefficient of around 64.3%. For a Holy priest talents and specialization would increase this to 85%. With a 1.5 second cast time, this means Flash Heal heals for 0.625 per itemized point of intellect. Dividing by 1.5 to normalize with stamina, that's 0.458 accounting for criticals. And that's spamming Flash Heal, not using a sensible rotation. Using the atonement spreadsheet I already made to get an estimate of the benefit of one intellect on gear for a Discipline priest healing, it came out 0.388 per intellect on gear, or 0.259 when normalized with stamina.
If a tank is off-tanking an add that is supposed to be tanked rather than killed and uses a full self-healing rotation, then the difference between using a Death Knight versus a Warrior scales with stamina at about 60% of the rate that a healer scales with Intellect. Since healers get more of their base effect from spells than Death Knights do from base health and stamina, the difference would probably be in the 40%-50% of a healer actually healing. In 25 player, that would mean getting to bring 6.4 or 7.4 healers instead of 6 or 7; essentially a 6-7% bonus to your raid's healing. In 10 player it would instead be a 13% to 20% bonus to raid healing, since the number of healer shrinks but the number of tanks tanking the add stays the same. And this is assuming the Death Strikes always heal for 10% of the Death Knight's health. With the new rune system, the Death Strike can be timed to coincide with a fire breath or other similar attack. If the dragon breaths for 40% of the Death Knight's health - less scary than you think and plausible for an add - then a Death Strike after such a breath weapon would heal for at between 17.5% and 25% of the Death Knight's health, depending on whether other attacks landed near the same time. This could increase overall Death Knight healing per stamina on gear against dragon type bosses or other bosses that do a large hit every 12-ish seconds, to 0.392 even if only half the Death Strikes can come after breath weapons. Compared with warriors that scales as though there were a full extra healer in the raid.
I'm not convinced that Death Knights are the best tanks on account of their self healing. Without blocking they are going to take more damage, and normally they won't be able to realize their full self-healing abilities. But self-healing is a tricky thing to watch for in terms of tank balance. For certain fight mechanics, it can become extremely overpowered and make one kind of tank much, much better than the others. While I have lots of confidence in the play ability of my guild members, I doubt we would have ended up in the top 100 in the world for kills on a hard mode if Blood Death Knights had not been so overpowered on Vezax. If this particular feature of Death Knights does not make them overpowered all of the time, it almost certainly will some of the time, and I think guilds that have a Death Knight in their stable of tanks are going to have a noticeable advantage in working towards first kills over guilds that don't.
1. Thanks to Improved Blood Presence rune regeneration is increased by 20% which gives 0.12 Death Strikes per second from runes. With 30 runic power generated from rune based abilities every eight and a third seconds the Death Knight is generating 3.6 runic power per second. At one boss attack every 2 seconds and a 3.5 weapon speed the Death Knight would generate about 1.95 runic power per second from Scent of Blood. That gives one Death Coil every 7.1 seconds. 45% of Death Coils generate an extra rune and one extra Death Strike results from every 3 extra runes on average. That's one extra Death Strike per 48.1 seconds or 0.021 extra Death Strikes per second.
2. Since this is on taking damage rather than getting hit I use the more liberal estimate of one hit every 1.5 seconds. Blood Craze has a 10% chance to proc and lasts 5 seconds, so the chance to proc will be 1 - (1-10%) ^ FLOOR(5/1.5) * [1 - 10% * (5/1.5 - FLOOR(5/1.5))].
3. We simply ignore the need to be enraged since the warrior can just time enrage abilities properly.
4. Bear attack speed is 2.0. An extra attack every GCD means one attack every 1.167 seconds. Assuming a roughly 30% chance to crit that will give a proc every 3.89 seconds, plus the 6 second cooldown.
5. The coefficient on Seal of Insight is 15% for both attack power and spell power and it is increased by 6% twice for Divinity. It procs 15 times a minute, but this should be increased by around 13.3% from Reckoning based on an incoming attack every 2 seconds. It will probably be difficult to avoid having some haste, which will increase this further.
Note: Edited to correct the 1.41 Death Strikes per second error Ziggyny pointed out in comments.
Before Death Knights, bears were the masters of self healing with Improved Leader of the Pack giving them a mere 6% health at most every 6 seconds. A far cry from the 3% per second given by death strike.
I've been analyzing self-healing done by various tanks to figure out which class to level as my old content raiding partner for my priest, and I've come up with the following.
A Blood Death Knight gets 23.6% more stamina from talents and abilities. It would be 29.7% in a raiding situation, but for two-boxing they won't get the blessing of kings/mark of the wild buff. The Death Knight should get about 0.141 Death Strikes per second1. Against low level content they will heal for 10% of the Death Knight's maximum health plus a shield for half of that. In addition, from experimentation, each point of stamina gives approximately 0.032 extra health per second from blood worms. This totals to 0.294 health per second per stamina on gear.
A Warrior has self-healing in the form of Blood Craze and Enraged Regeneration. Warriors get 20.75% extra stamina without blessing of kings/mark of the wild. Blood Craze should have an uptime of around 29.5%2 and will heal for 1.91% of the warrior's health per second thanks to Field Dressing. That gives around 0.56% of health per second or 0.068 healing per stamina of gear. Every three minutes a warrior can activate Enraged Regeneration3 to regain 38.16% of total health. That translates to an additional 0.026 healing per stamina on gear for a total of 0.14 health per second per stamina on gear.
Bears get mark of the wild and have a total of 51.6% extra stamina from buffs and abilities. Frenzied Regeneration is very similar to Enraged Regeneration. Bears don't get Field Dressing, but they do get a huge amount more stamina, so it comes out to 0.0252 healing per second per stamina on gear. Assuming bears are using abilities on the GCD, they should get a Leader of the Pack trigger every 9.89 seconds4 for 8% maximum health. In total, bears heal for 0.147 per second per stamina on gear.
Lastly paladins. Paladins don't get any healing based on their total health or stamina, Ardent Defender excepted. Their self healing is instead based on strength. Word of Glory gets around 11.5% of attack power and 19.5% of spell power to its healing effect per holy power used. Since paladins will have 5% extra strength from Blessing of Kings and get 60% of their strength to spell power, this means Word of Glory has a coefficient of around 36% on strength on gear per holy power. Talented this in increased by 79.8%. Since you generate one holy power every 3 seconds and retain it 30% of the time that you use Word of Glory, Word of Glory heals for 0.312 per second per strength on gear. If you choose to use Seal of Insight, that accounts for another 0.13 healing per second per strength on gear5 for a total of 0.442. Since strength is 1.5 times as expensive as stamina from an item point perspective, we'll divide this by 1.5 for comparison purposes and get 0.295.
Of course there are more factors to consider. A druids and warriors do not give up any damage to self-heal while paladins give up a lot of damage and death knights give up a little. For low level content the paladin's damage penalty from self-healing will likely be made up for by the fact that the self-healing is very controllable - that is, you'll only use it when you need it - and because a lower-level content paladin tank will be geared for damage rather than tanking because their self-healing relies on strength rather than stamina. Also, paladins are the only tank class that have base numbers attached to their self healing. With Protector of the Innocent, even a one point Word of Glory will have a base heal of around 7.5k, which even in top end gear should push paladin self-healing way above other classes.
In raiding content, a paladin tank will presumably not be able to heal themselves as much if they want to hold threat. Death Knights, however, give up very little to Death Strike as often as they can. Keeping up diseases will cost a death strike every 33 seconds, reducing Death knight self healing per stamina on gear to 0.238, but I doubt that it will be necessary to use the Blood Runes generated through Death Strikes for Heart Strikes in order to maintain aggro.
There are clearly two tiers of self-healing. Paladins and Death Knights occupy the upper tier while warriors and druids are on the lower tier. Of course in raids paladins probably can't self-heal as much and Death Knights don't have blocking or Savage Defense, so these things may even out in some ways.
But there are circumstances in raiding where this self-healing capacity may end up being dramatically overpowered. Most importantly, self-healing creates an extremely different dynamic in 10 and 25 player raids.
To look at self-healing in perspective, a Flash Heal has a healing coefficient of around 64.3%. For a Holy priest talents and specialization would increase this to 85%. With a 1.5 second cast time, this means Flash Heal heals for 0.625 per itemized point of intellect. Dividing by 1.5 to normalize with stamina, that's 0.458 accounting for criticals. And that's spamming Flash Heal, not using a sensible rotation. Using the atonement spreadsheet I already made to get an estimate of the benefit of one intellect on gear for a Discipline priest healing, it came out 0.388 per intellect on gear, or 0.259 when normalized with stamina.
If a tank is off-tanking an add that is supposed to be tanked rather than killed and uses a full self-healing rotation, then the difference between using a Death Knight versus a Warrior scales with stamina at about 60% of the rate that a healer scales with Intellect. Since healers get more of their base effect from spells than Death Knights do from base health and stamina, the difference would probably be in the 40%-50% of a healer actually healing. In 25 player, that would mean getting to bring 6.4 or 7.4 healers instead of 6 or 7; essentially a 6-7% bonus to your raid's healing. In 10 player it would instead be a 13% to 20% bonus to raid healing, since the number of healer shrinks but the number of tanks tanking the add stays the same. And this is assuming the Death Strikes always heal for 10% of the Death Knight's health. With the new rune system, the Death Strike can be timed to coincide with a fire breath or other similar attack. If the dragon breaths for 40% of the Death Knight's health - less scary than you think and plausible for an add - then a Death Strike after such a breath weapon would heal for at between 17.5% and 25% of the Death Knight's health, depending on whether other attacks landed near the same time. This could increase overall Death Knight healing per stamina on gear against dragon type bosses or other bosses that do a large hit every 12-ish seconds, to 0.392 even if only half the Death Strikes can come after breath weapons. Compared with warriors that scales as though there were a full extra healer in the raid.
I'm not convinced that Death Knights are the best tanks on account of their self healing. Without blocking they are going to take more damage, and normally they won't be able to realize their full self-healing abilities. But self-healing is a tricky thing to watch for in terms of tank balance. For certain fight mechanics, it can become extremely overpowered and make one kind of tank much, much better than the others. While I have lots of confidence in the play ability of my guild members, I doubt we would have ended up in the top 100 in the world for kills on a hard mode if Blood Death Knights had not been so overpowered on Vezax. If this particular feature of Death Knights does not make them overpowered all of the time, it almost certainly will some of the time, and I think guilds that have a Death Knight in their stable of tanks are going to have a noticeable advantage in working towards first kills over guilds that don't.
1. Thanks to Improved Blood Presence rune regeneration is increased by 20% which gives 0.12 Death Strikes per second from runes. With 30 runic power generated from rune based abilities every eight and a third seconds the Death Knight is generating 3.6 runic power per second. At one boss attack every 2 seconds and a 3.5 weapon speed the Death Knight would generate about 1.95 runic power per second from Scent of Blood. That gives one Death Coil every 7.1 seconds. 45% of Death Coils generate an extra rune and one extra Death Strike results from every 3 extra runes on average. That's one extra Death Strike per 48.1 seconds or 0.021 extra Death Strikes per second.
2. Since this is on taking damage rather than getting hit I use the more liberal estimate of one hit every 1.5 seconds. Blood Craze has a 10% chance to proc and lasts 5 seconds, so the chance to proc will be 1 - (1-10%) ^ FLOOR(5/1.5) * [1 - 10% * (5/1.5 - FLOOR(5/1.5))].
3. We simply ignore the need to be enraged since the warrior can just time enrage abilities properly.
4. Bear attack speed is 2.0. An extra attack every GCD means one attack every 1.167 seconds. Assuming a roughly 30% chance to crit that will give a proc every 3.89 seconds, plus the 6 second cooldown.
5. The coefficient on Seal of Insight is 15% for both attack power and spell power and it is increased by 6% twice for Divinity. It procs 15 times a minute, but this should be increased by around 13.3% from Reckoning based on an incoming attack every 2 seconds. It will probably be difficult to avoid having some haste, which will increase this further.
Note: Edited to correct the 1.41 Death Strikes per second error Ziggyny pointed out in comments.
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