Difficulty Curve Edition
I’m not a big forum guy. I was once, back in the wild days of my virtual youth, but now I mostly visit via external link for some amusement. Because honestly all online forums can be distilled into the following essence: John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Theory and overreaction to the inconsequential. If you view them as comical, they have some entertainment value inherent but if you take them seriously for even one microsecond, you will find yourself either being a jerk because you are largely anonymous and have an audience or you will begin to care deeply and be emotionally impacted by something that doesn’t mean diddly to your life at any level you care to examine it. So it goes with WoW forums.
However, the current inconsequential that is being overreacted to is worthy of at least a little side discussion is the notion of difficulty in Cataclysm heroics. I had a discussion late last week over Ventrilo with a guildmate about a lot of the people crying over how difficult heroic dungeons are now and clearly he fell on the side of “Why would you play a game that was so easy anyone could do it?” But as we talked and as I reflected on it afterward, I realized there was a not-necessarily-clear-cut discussion happening behind he scenes of his rhetorical question.
The interesting thing is that within the community there are basically two standpoints: One is that Cata heroics are punishing to the point of removing the fun from the game and people are liable to quit playing if Blizzard doesn’t tone down their stance that heroic instances ought to be a challenge. The other is that these are supposed to be tough: They’re called “heroics” for a reason and should require something akin to heroism to complete; if the toughest challenge in the game was no challenge at all, players would get bored and be liable to quit playing. Now obviously the sticking point is where the line on challenge blurs into frustration, but what occurred to me was that if you step back you can see where this issue of achievable versus accessible has been plaguing video game designers for years.
Consider for a moment the games from earlier eras: Defender, Donkey Kong, Super Ghouls N’ Ghosts, Punch-Out, Nethack, Myst, etc. Many games in the industry’s halcyon days were not just challenging, in some cases they were brutally punishing. Some of that came from the arcade mindset where, for profitability reasons, games needed to be attractive and addictive but also practically sadistic so as to elicit the continual feeding of coins into the receptacle. But even early home games often had very little concern for allowing players to “experience” the entirety of the game if their skill did not permit it (as an historical aside, check out this developer standards document I found for the Atari 2600 while doing some research). Now contrast that with today’s games and ask yourself how often successful games are un-conquerable for even the most moderate player in some fashion or another. The evidence seems to suggest that games have gotten easier and easier as designers have begun not to program challenging diversionary obstacles but rather interactive spectacles that they don’t want to go to waste. If you expect a million kids to come back and buy your sequel in a couple of years, you’d better find some way to make sure they reach the end of the first game.
And for the most part, this is fine with the vast majority of players because by definition most players fall into the middling area in terms of skill. Often the potential detraction is sidestepped by providing selectable difficulty settings which allows the unwashed masses to play “dumbed-down” versions of the game while those who consider themselves elite can still access a greater challenge at their leisure. But note that this doesn’t really apply in the MMO space where World of Warcraft makes its home because for balance reasons it would be impractical (though not impossible) to have several versions of the game, each tuned to a specific type of player.
Except, when you think about it, that’s exactly what heroic dungeons are in WoW: The selectable difficulty switch. If you think about it, you can access all the gameplay content that heroic dungeons contain by simply running them on normal mode. No one that I’ve heard is complaining that normal Cataclysm dungeons are too difficult, so in essence what it seems to me is that the backlash is coming from people who might—as an example—play Call of Duty on Veteran difficulty and cry in the forums that the game is impossible.
I had an opportunity over the weekend to play through my first heroic dungeon and I can confidently report that yes, they are in fact very challenging. I did Lost City of the Tol’Vir with three guildmates and a guy who used to be in the guild (but left to start his own) until about halfway through the third boss when the ex-guildie left and we replaced him with a random LFM guy who turned out to be very cool and also very good so it was a really pleasant run all told. But even with partial ventrilo communication and a positive, “we-can-do-this” vibe from the de facto party leader, we wiped a lot. I think the trick was that we were all patient and relaxed because we were doing it as a guild and didn’t worry about it too much if someone’s DPS was below 3,000 or if the healer ran out of mana. As long as we were doing a little better each try or at least that we could identify where we had made the mistake we didn’t get too frustrated and no one was tempted to ragequit.
I don’t think I’d have any interest in doing the PUG random queue for heroics at this point because I know the issues that we avoided by having friendly guildmembers running would be rampant otherwise, but I do know that I had an incredible amount of fun. And most pertinently, the sense of satisfaction when we finally dropped Siamat was pronounced as an effect of the whole run being pretty difficult. I think all this means that Blizzard has the heroic dungeons pretty much exactly where they need to be: I barely qualified gear-wise to enter a heroic dungeon and even with the sqeaky wheel that was me and my comical efforts at melee DPS we managed to make it through with some perseverance.
So far Blizzard seems to be reacting with some level of surprise at the outcry and I’m intrigued that they haven’t seemed to yet reply with “It’s hard mode. It’s supposed to be hard. Last time out hard mode was a little on the flimsy side, sorry if you thought that was going to be the norm.” Instead they’ve over-explained with treatise on game design and balancing theory which frankly sounds kind of condescending to my ears, moreso than just saying they intend for heroics to kick your butt and pointing out that if you don’t like getting your butt kicked, they are, in fact, entirely optional.
Dungeoneering
Aside from heroic Lost City of the Tol’Vir, I actually ran a lot of dungeons over the last week, primarily because I spent the vast majority of my WoW time on my Mage and I’ve gotten to the level where the available dungeons are ones that I never did at-level with my Warrior because I was in questing exclusivity mode during those levels. I’m talking about Dire Maul, Stratholme, Scholomance, the latter sections of Scarlet Monastery, etc. I can say with a little more confidence now that Scholomance is one of my favorite dungeons in the game (that I’ve tried) and certainly my favorite from vanilla WoW. Maybe it’s the sort of Harry Potter vibe or whatever but the whole evil magic school thing is very cool to me and I like that it’s not ridiculously confusing just to navigate (I’m looking at you, Maraudon) plus it’s packed with bosses (13 of them I believe) so it’s straightforward without being dull (cough new Sunken Temple cough).
And how can I say it’s my favorite in vanilla WoW, you ask? Well, you’re looking at the owner of the achievement Classic Dungeonmaster, as I finally took the time to solo Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire with my Warrior. I really wasn’t much of a fan of either: BRS has a lot of the twisty navigation issues that drive me kind of nutty about WoW instances (and the 2D maps don’t help enough) while BRD was just long considering it required farming in-instance trash mobs for relatively rare drops to complete some of the progression and I just felt it was blah as a solo endeavor. I will say that going through some dungeons at-level with the Mage changed my opinion on them (Dire Maul, for example, isn’t as bad as I thought—especially when the Dungeon Finder tool takes out the annoyance of navigating the poorly mapped Feralas outdoor area). Maybe I’ll appreciate them more if I hit them up with the Mage in a group, I dunno.
The interesting thing about running dungeons with the Mage is that so far I have yet to meet a deliberate tank in these classic instances. Every single one has been a real cowboy, barely stopping to loot corpses before pulling the next three groups of mobs and just expecting the healer to keep them alive and the DPS to be on his or her hip at all times. I assume a lot of it is that for experienced players they’ve been through all these dungeons a zillion and a half times so it’s either a farming run or they just want to knock it out, take the loot and XP and keep grinding; the motivation to stop and read the quest text or get a sense of the area lore just isn’t there. And in a way that’s fine since I know that I’ve been taking a lot of shortcuts with this alt in terms of power leveling. By and large I leave my measured pace, lore-examining play for the Warrior since he’s got nothing but time up there at level 85. But from a play perspective I know that some of these cowboy tanks can get a little overzealous to the extent that our tank in Scholomance wiped the party in the room with all the zombies because he pulled too many for us to AoE down and overwhelmed the healer. There was a momentary heated exchange in which the healer, a DPS and the tank debated the merits of aggressive pulling but it proved to be academic since that room is the last one that’s really crowded and the rest of the instance is pretty much boss rooms with minimal trash mobs/adds.
Mage Love
At the end of the week I finished in the high 40s with my Mage, which is significant over last week because other than one night running BRS and BRD with the Warrior (actually the whole thing started by finishing up the Lunar Festival quests/achievements since a couple of the Elders are down in those dungeons and I ran them while getting the Elders because I figured I was already there) and another which included the heroic Tol’Vir run it was all Mage all the time this week. Most of the questing was limited to the Eastern and Western Plaguelands with, as I said, a lot of Dungeon queuing in between.
For a while I wondered what the point of questing even was since you can control the rep gains through tabards in instances, you get much better equipment and even the non-usable gear you collect tends to be BoE that can lead to some nice auction house scores for better cash flow. But I did a little rough comparison and realized quickly that the XP gains in dungeons are okay, but nothing compared to the blistering leveling pace you can sustain through even an hour of concentrated questing. Some of it depends on the quest hub and the types of quests you’re doing but I was averaging 1.75 (or so) levels per hour through the Eastern Plaguelands with my heirloom cloak, plus the guild XP boost and the zone-specific buff from the caravan.
Have I mentioned how much I love playing this character? There is an element of sadness to the preference I’ve been giving this guy over my main because I invested so much time and energy into maxing out that Warrior both in the leveling portion as well as ancillary aspects like achievement hunting, profession grinding, reputation gains and on and on. But then I spend some time playing as the Mage and I get ridiculously excited reading lunatic theorycrafting stuff like this breakdown of how to maximize Fire DPS and it softens the blow. I doubt some of the more esoteric achievements will ever really be a priority for me with this semi-alt (things like world event achievements are probably going to remain exclusive to the Warrior) but I really want to hurry the Mage along to level 85 because it sticks in my craw every time I have call to DPS for the guild in high level instances: I know I need to commit to gearing the Warrior for tanking but right now I need to work on the skill behind it and frankly there isn’t always a demand for a tank within the guild since there are several good ones already who are online far more often than I am. Typically guild groups are looking for healers first, DPS second and tanks last. With each passing level on the Mage I become more fully convinced that this is my primary DPS destiny which in turn strengthens my resolve to leave the Warrior’s primary function as a tank but until I get the practice in there and have a viable high-level DPS alternative, I’m stuck splitting the difference on the Warrior to the detriment of the groups I join.
If there was one complaint I had about leveling the Mage it would be that I don’t feel as though I necessarily chose the right professions for this toon. I’m an Herbalist/Alchemist which is okay I guess but I feel in a lot of ways that, having done the search-gathering/crafting combo of Mining and Blacksmithing on my Warrior this is exactly the same with all the good and substantial bad that comes along with it. The problem is I don’t want anything to slow me down in my relentless pursuit of level advancement. At this point I’ve gotten both professions up to around 250 so switching professions would mean going back to low-level zones and re-doing a lot of work I’ve already done to get up to speed. I suppose if I were to decide to try to do the Loremaster achievements at any point I could engage a do-over at that point without much risk of wasting time, I just know that these sorts of distractions and side sojourns were what crippled my leveling rate with the Warrior and made it ultimately hard to max out at all.
I know what I would do if I could do it over again: Tailoring and Enchanting. Neither requires a specific gathering profession to feed it and while I originally thought Tailoring would be dull, it turns out that it’s always nice to be able to make your own armor. The question is whether I’m better off riding out the quasi-painful gather/craft grind so at least I have a top level herbalist in my stable and someone who can transmute (which will be great for the Blacksmith eventually) or if I should take the time out to reset and let some other alt be the shmuck to grind teh herbs (as they say). I mean, for reals: Goldthorn. Am I right? Impossible to find and sells for 200+ gold per stack. It would be better if someone just punched me in the mouth.
WoW Bits
- So the heroic dungeon wasn’t my only first this week, I also had my first shot at raiding with a guild run on Baradin Hold. Let me back up a bit and explain that Baradin Hold is kind of unique in that it’s a raid that becomes available to whichever faction currently holds Tol Barad. It’s a really small instance right now with only a few mobs and one boss. It looks really cool but there isn’t much to it which is why the guild master wanted to start there. Of course, you do have to hold TB to access it and by the time we had most of a raid team together it was almost time for the PvP battle to start. So a ton of us from the guild queued for the battle to make sure we could actually do the raid without getting locked out. I will say this: PvP with a lot of people on both sides is vastly more enjoyable than low-population PvP battles. I actually had an incredibly good time (and did pretty well for once): The frenzy of spell effects and the pseudo-controlled chaos of the bigger clashes was quite epic and while I’m sure it was a massive fluke I actually got a number of performance-based achievements during the fight including 100 Honorable Kills, Towers of Power and Tol Barad All-Star. The best news was that we did in fact hold onto Tol Barad and after the fight we assembled our raid group and tried our hand at Argaloth.
Well, we didn’t do very well which is ultimately why we split the raid into two five-man dungeon groups and went into heroic mode because the guild master decided the reason we were dying with Argaloth at maybe 75% health was we weren’t doing enough DPS because we were undergeared. I’m not sure I completely agreed with his assessment: I will grant that we probably could have been doing a lot more damage output but we really only tried the fight three or four times before giving in and we were still improving with each attempt so I didn’t see any reason to call it quits right then. Somehow or other he got into his head that all six DPSers needed to be doing about 10K in order to have a shot at it whereas I was thinking the problem was it took us at least two fights just to figure out how to have the healers deal with Consuming Darkness. Anyway, decision made and we broke off which worked out because ultimately it lead to the very enjoyable heroic run that I talked about before. - The other thing I did with the Warrior was finally max out Blacksmithing, although I confess that after all those farming runs last week I sat at 523 and just couldn’t bear to go out and try to find 20 more Volatile Fires so I broke down and bought the 24 Elementium Bars and 10 VFs necessary and just took a net loss of 150 or so gold on the sale of two Bloodied Pyrium Shoulders so I could say I did it. Of course now I theoretically have the ability to craft some really great stuff for myself, except the mats are beastly to obtain and even just getting the plans from that ponce Kuldar requires more farming. The one bright spot is that I came out of the heroic dungeon with a Chaos Orb so in theory the hardest mats to get fro crafted epics is at least 1/3 of the way finished.
- I came out of my Scarlet Monastery with the semi-famous Whitemane’s Chapeau (“I lewt teh hat“) and promptly had to toggle the “show helm” option because while it may be best in slot for my level, it is so dog ugly compared to the rest of my fairly cool-looking gear I just couldn’t stand it. It occurred to me that it would be a nice feature if they allowed players to toggle visibility on all their secondary gear slots, including tabards. I’m rocking the Silvermoon City tabard right now, which is a fairly decent looking tabard, but it’s kind of gaudy against the rich purple of my Robes of the Lich. As with any WoW-fashion conscious player, I tolerate it for the sake of the game mechanics, but I’ll be happy to finish the Exalted on that faction and turn to something with a more complimentary color palate.
Oh my gosh. WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME? - I should update a little on the status of the control scheme adjustment experiment: It turns out I’m getting much more used to mouselooking although I think the thing that really helped me the most was a sort of training wheels approach I used with my Mage. Since I didn’t really have enough ability slots to justify mapping interrupts to Q and E (at the time), I moved the left and right turn to those keys (instead of the usual A and D) and mapped A and D to left and right strafe, respectively. Then I turned on mouselook so I could theoretically still keyboard turn but I was equipped for mouselooking. It had the intended effect in that I found myself relying less and less on the keys to turn and now for the most part I forget that’s an option. I contribute a small portion of my accidental Tol Barad success to my improved control scheme and I think by and large it’s been a positive adjustment. I do still struggle with the Command-Click when I’m on the laptop controls, but I’ve gotten into the habit of playing at a desk with a connected mouse whenever I’m going to be doing anything significant like running a dungeon or doing some power leveling. It’s gotten to where I tend to play with a connected mouse anytime I’m doing anything more intense than wandering from bank to auction house, profession leveling or doing Orgrimmar dailies. And it works out because usually those are the later evening sessions after the family has gone to bed.