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.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
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.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Those Who Did Not Learn From History
In Patch 3.2, Blizzard decided to remove Seal of Blood and Seal of the Martyr from the game. They decided that doing a lot of damage to yourself was not a good way to balance out doing a lot of damage to your opponent. In 3.1 they had already reduced the judgement damage and increased the seal damage to try to make the self-damage aspect of the seal less spiky. Paladins were knocking off a third of their life every eight seconds and it seemed pretty excessive and dangerous.
Strangely, though, the mechanic of damaging yourself to maximize your damage rotation has made a comeback in patch 4. By reintroducing Shadow Word: Death into the shadow priest rotation - that is, by making Shadow Word: Death hit like a truck - blizzard has put Shadow Priests in the position of giving themselves a good punch every 12 seconds. Given that Shadow Priest mana return is dependent on taking damage from Shadow Word: Death, there will be no escaping the self-damage.
Shadow Word: Death hits for somewhere in the mid- to high-six thousand range completely unbuffed. With raid buffs that could rise to somewhere in the neighborhood of 7500. A critical would be 15k. Shadow priests take 60% of this damage and immediate heal themselves for 25% of the damage dealt, so they effectively take 35% of this assuming they live to get the Vampiric Embrace tick. That comes out to around just over 15% of their health pool every 12 seconds. This is nowhere near former Retribution paladin self-damage levels, especially considering the constant, substantial self-healing that Shadow priests get.
The real problem is that when the enemy is below 25% health, the cooldown is removed from Shadow Word: Death and it does 30% more damage. Instead of 15% of their health pool every 12 seconds, it becomes 20% of their health pool every two or three seconds. That level of self-damage is completely astronomical, and not killing yourself becomes one of the major limiting factors for damage. If you get a big crit, you may have to worry about not getting that Vampiric Embrace tick because you are already dead.
Blizzard just nerfed Shadow Word: Death because Shadow priest damage was too high anyway, and Shadow priests were doing way too much damage to themselves on low health enemies. This change, however, reminds me a bit of the patch 3.1 paladin changes. After Wrath launched it took them quite a while to figure out that doing damage to yourself is not a good way to balance a dps class. Ultimately, I think they may have to learn this lesson again in Cataclysm.
Strangely, though, the mechanic of damaging yourself to maximize your damage rotation has made a comeback in patch 4. By reintroducing Shadow Word: Death into the shadow priest rotation - that is, by making Shadow Word: Death hit like a truck - blizzard has put Shadow Priests in the position of giving themselves a good punch every 12 seconds. Given that Shadow Priest mana return is dependent on taking damage from Shadow Word: Death, there will be no escaping the self-damage.
Shadow Word: Death hits for somewhere in the mid- to high-six thousand range completely unbuffed. With raid buffs that could rise to somewhere in the neighborhood of 7500. A critical would be 15k. Shadow priests take 60% of this damage and immediate heal themselves for 25% of the damage dealt, so they effectively take 35% of this assuming they live to get the Vampiric Embrace tick. That comes out to around just over 15% of their health pool every 12 seconds. This is nowhere near former Retribution paladin self-damage levels, especially considering the constant, substantial self-healing that Shadow priests get.
The real problem is that when the enemy is below 25% health, the cooldown is removed from Shadow Word: Death and it does 30% more damage. Instead of 15% of their health pool every 12 seconds, it becomes 20% of their health pool every two or three seconds. That level of self-damage is completely astronomical, and not killing yourself becomes one of the major limiting factors for damage. If you get a big crit, you may have to worry about not getting that Vampiric Embrace tick because you are already dead.
Blizzard just nerfed Shadow Word: Death because Shadow priest damage was too high anyway, and Shadow priests were doing way too much damage to themselves on low health enemies. This change, however, reminds me a bit of the patch 3.1 paladin changes. After Wrath launched it took them quite a while to figure out that doing damage to yourself is not a good way to balance a dps class. Ultimately, I think they may have to learn this lesson again in Cataclysm.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
The Problem with Atonement
Recently I made a big post talking about how a Smite build compared to a Heal build for discipline priests. I tried it out last night and it turns out it doesn't work nearly as well as I'd hoped. This, of course, is mostly owing to the fact that on the live servers rather than healing a nearby friend for 100% of the damage that Smite deals, Atonement does nothing at all. I hope they figure out how to fix this one sooner than they fixed Surge of Light in Burning Crusade.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Patch 4.0.1 Testing - Druids and General Observations
Just in time before the PTR was taken down and the extended maintenance to implement the new patch started up, I finished my druid testing. I ran into some early problems because of the Thunder Bluff death bug1 and set aside the druid for a long time after getting some initial impressions. I felt like I could write a review but I felt like I owed it to the druid to try Feral after my bad experience with Balance, so yesterday I made a Night Elf and went to it.
Druid (Tauren and Night Elf)
Druids don't play quite as well as Mages or Warlocks at low level. Wrath is more like Smite than it is like Fireball for some reason. When you get moonfire it doesn't really do enough damage to be worth casting, though larger enemy health bars make it just barely worth it by around level 7. It usually ends up doing less damage than a Wrath would have, but with a shorter casting time, and since enemies don't have health that is evenly divisible by your Wrath damage it ends up being as good as another Wrath anyway. At level eight you get to learn six new abilities, and pay the same price to learn each as other classes pay to learn their one level 7 ability. The consequence of this is that you can't afford them. Of course it looks like you can only learn three, since Rake, Claw and Ferocious Bite all all grayed out given that you don't have Cat Form. But once you click to learn Cat Form they all appear, sorted in alphabetical order and your second Learn click learns Claw when you thought it was going to learn Entangling Roots. Could I have avoided this problem by slowing down a moment? Sure. Should first time players be deciding between whether to learn Rake or Ferocious Bite? Probably not.
At level eight Balance druid damage was just terrible. It took me around 4 starfires to kill things, so 14 seconds per kill. I don't know if I played another class that took more than 10 seconds to kill an enemy at level 8. Of course there is Thorns, which ticks for about as much damage as Starfire does, so you can use Moonfire to gather up enemies and then just Thorns them to death while healing yourself and kill things much more efficiently. At level 10 you get your eclipse meter and your Starsurge spell. Starsurge was hitting enemies for around 90% of their health on a fifteen second cooldown. Given that it took me nearly 15 seconds to kill an enemy without Starsurge, I'd just wait out the cooldown for each enemy before engaging this. It was pretty terrible.
Feral played much better. I was killing enemies with Rake + Claw + Bite, followed by waiting for a second Rake tick and a couple of auto-attacks. At level 10 I got Mangle and was very worried that it was going to heavily skew things. I really expected that it would completely obsolete both Rake and Bite, but much to my surprise Mangle only did about 50% more damage than Claw (for 10 less energy, of course). A two point Bite still exceeded a Mangle for damage. The rapid expansion of enemy health between level 10 and 12 meant that I still felt like I was fighting enemies rather than just hitting a button that defeated them. The absurd strength of Regrowth and Rejuv and the fact that I didn't use mana to kill things made me pretty much unstoppable, which, while convenient, isn't something I like in design. Plus there was the fact that even when Feral spec the most efficient way to kill enemies was surely Thorns, which was hitting for 69 at level 12, compared to a mid-40's Mangle.
Overall Grade: C (though I'd give it a D in a heartbeat if I hadn't gone back to play Feral)
Overall Impressions
Quite a few details of low level play have been screwed up inadvertently by the 4.0.1 changes. Most notably, there are quite a few monsters that use player spells on themselves at low level that have become significantly overpowered. Level 6 mobs with around 120 health have Rejuvenation spells that tick for 45. A level 11 mob had a Thorns that did 49. Having to stop attacking and wait for these spells to end is pretty annoying.
Some classes have pretty exciting talents to take at levels 10 and 11, but the excitement around those initial talent points is not going to be there for all classes. Many classes clearly had little thought put into the pre-level 10 experience.
The transition to dual-wielding is a very difficult one. As a Warrior I just happened to complete a quest with no two-handed weapon option shortly before level 10, then saw another quest with a one-handed weapon option. As a shaman when I picked Enhancement my bonus ability was Lava Lash, but I had to go to town and buy a white weapon for my off-hand to be able to dual-wield. This transition was very problematic. Perhaps, given there is no spec that actually supports them anymore, they should simply remove the ability of Shamans to wield two-handed weapons to smooth this out a bit.
Maybe I make too much of this because the first 9 levels are pretty easy anyway, but I do feel like depending on the class and starting area they choose, a new player could end up with very different starting experiences ranging from the polished feeling of a very evolved game to the choppy feeling of a new game that doesn't know what it wants you to do. We all know that a big problem for established MMORPGs is growing the player base when the "real" game is focusing on an end game that gets increasingly farther away for new players each expansion. After playing a Mage I thought the 4.0.1 redesign was a very dramatic step to make the game more friendly to new players while at the same time evolving the end-game experience. After playing the other classes, I'm no longer convinced that this redesign was a huge step forward for new players. It's a step forward for everyone for sure, but maybe not for new players in particular.
Of course, the starting areas themselves will be redesigned when Cataclysm actually launches, so there are more improvements coming. The revamped leveling experience is probably more dependent on those world changes than it is on the mechanical ones being introduced today.
1. You died when you zoned out of Thunder Bluff and your corpse appeared in the graveyard at Thunder Bluff so you couldn't corpse run back and resurrect outside the zone. I assume they've fixed this one.
Druid (Tauren and Night Elf)
Druids don't play quite as well as Mages or Warlocks at low level. Wrath is more like Smite than it is like Fireball for some reason. When you get moonfire it doesn't really do enough damage to be worth casting, though larger enemy health bars make it just barely worth it by around level 7. It usually ends up doing less damage than a Wrath would have, but with a shorter casting time, and since enemies don't have health that is evenly divisible by your Wrath damage it ends up being as good as another Wrath anyway. At level eight you get to learn six new abilities, and pay the same price to learn each as other classes pay to learn their one level 7 ability. The consequence of this is that you can't afford them. Of course it looks like you can only learn three, since Rake, Claw and Ferocious Bite all all grayed out given that you don't have Cat Form. But once you click to learn Cat Form they all appear, sorted in alphabetical order and your second Learn click learns Claw when you thought it was going to learn Entangling Roots. Could I have avoided this problem by slowing down a moment? Sure. Should first time players be deciding between whether to learn Rake or Ferocious Bite? Probably not.
At level eight Balance druid damage was just terrible. It took me around 4 starfires to kill things, so 14 seconds per kill. I don't know if I played another class that took more than 10 seconds to kill an enemy at level 8. Of course there is Thorns, which ticks for about as much damage as Starfire does, so you can use Moonfire to gather up enemies and then just Thorns them to death while healing yourself and kill things much more efficiently. At level 10 you get your eclipse meter and your Starsurge spell. Starsurge was hitting enemies for around 90% of their health on a fifteen second cooldown. Given that it took me nearly 15 seconds to kill an enemy without Starsurge, I'd just wait out the cooldown for each enemy before engaging this. It was pretty terrible.
Feral played much better. I was killing enemies with Rake + Claw + Bite, followed by waiting for a second Rake tick and a couple of auto-attacks. At level 10 I got Mangle and was very worried that it was going to heavily skew things. I really expected that it would completely obsolete both Rake and Bite, but much to my surprise Mangle only did about 50% more damage than Claw (for 10 less energy, of course). A two point Bite still exceeded a Mangle for damage. The rapid expansion of enemy health between level 10 and 12 meant that I still felt like I was fighting enemies rather than just hitting a button that defeated them. The absurd strength of Regrowth and Rejuv and the fact that I didn't use mana to kill things made me pretty much unstoppable, which, while convenient, isn't something I like in design. Plus there was the fact that even when Feral spec the most efficient way to kill enemies was surely Thorns, which was hitting for 69 at level 12, compared to a mid-40's Mangle.
Overall Grade: C (though I'd give it a D in a heartbeat if I hadn't gone back to play Feral)
Overall Impressions
Quite a few details of low level play have been screwed up inadvertently by the 4.0.1 changes. Most notably, there are quite a few monsters that use player spells on themselves at low level that have become significantly overpowered. Level 6 mobs with around 120 health have Rejuvenation spells that tick for 45. A level 11 mob had a Thorns that did 49. Having to stop attacking and wait for these spells to end is pretty annoying.
Some classes have pretty exciting talents to take at levels 10 and 11, but the excitement around those initial talent points is not going to be there for all classes. Many classes clearly had little thought put into the pre-level 10 experience.
The transition to dual-wielding is a very difficult one. As a Warrior I just happened to complete a quest with no two-handed weapon option shortly before level 10, then saw another quest with a one-handed weapon option. As a shaman when I picked Enhancement my bonus ability was Lava Lash, but I had to go to town and buy a white weapon for my off-hand to be able to dual-wield. This transition was very problematic. Perhaps, given there is no spec that actually supports them anymore, they should simply remove the ability of Shamans to wield two-handed weapons to smooth this out a bit.
Maybe I make too much of this because the first 9 levels are pretty easy anyway, but I do feel like depending on the class and starting area they choose, a new player could end up with very different starting experiences ranging from the polished feeling of a very evolved game to the choppy feeling of a new game that doesn't know what it wants you to do. We all know that a big problem for established MMORPGs is growing the player base when the "real" game is focusing on an end game that gets increasingly farther away for new players each expansion. After playing a Mage I thought the 4.0.1 redesign was a very dramatic step to make the game more friendly to new players while at the same time evolving the end-game experience. After playing the other classes, I'm no longer convinced that this redesign was a huge step forward for new players. It's a step forward for everyone for sure, but maybe not for new players in particular.
Of course, the starting areas themselves will be redesigned when Cataclysm actually launches, so there are more improvements coming. The revamped leveling experience is probably more dependent on those world changes than it is on the mechanical ones being introduced today.
1. You died when you zoned out of Thunder Bluff and your corpse appeared in the graveyard at Thunder Bluff so you couldn't corpse run back and resurrect outside the zone. I assume they've fixed this one.
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