Project Lore

Blue Stew is a new semi-daily column bringing you a delicious concoction of developer news, thoughts, and opinions straight from the boiling pot that is the official World of Warcraft forums. The highlights of each day include additional commentary by Project Lore staff. It's once again been a few days since the last update, but don't fret! After having some Chili from Wendy's for lunch, I was inspired to make this Stew extra chunky! Goodbye World of Warcraft You thought you had a bone to pick with Blizzard? Well, I bet 10 gold Pureheart's got you beat! Besides wanting to turn Azeroth into a communist state, he also manages to represent just about everything wrong with the worst of the game's players. Mindless whining? Check. Anti-social attitude while playing a social game? Check. Unfounded sense of entitlement? Check. Need to make his inane opinions known before allegedly "quitting" the game? Double check. Let's see precisely what he has to say about the nature of guilds, raiding, and the resulting rewards:

"First of all its not fun when other players have something you cant get, its bad enough having to put up with this in the real world in the form of rich celebrities who have everything like nice cars, money, etc... unfortunatley the game design doesnt allow for the majority of players to be successful at the game."

OK, let's be completely straight here. Even in a fantasy world, you've got to work for what you earn. The real treat is that instead of waiting years for that promotion or pay increase, you can obtain a new piece of gear or a few achievements in the matter of a few hours. The game needs to cater to various types of people willing to put different amounts of time or effort in. With tons of solo-friendly content in the game, I don't understand why someone like Pureheart can't be happy with what he is able to obtain.

"Also the game used to be fun, but now it just seems to be a gear competition, who has the best gear... this is not my idea of fun or cool. Like i said the game is very good, i love the raid boss fights but, the amount of stress and effort involved in getting there isnt worth it for me personally."

Yakov Smirnoff wants his schtick back! Gear envy is an interesting phenomenon to me to me, though. Pureheart seems to disply an innate resistance to the mechanics of the end-game, but the problem is that the gear he seems to want is rewarded to players so that they can progress farther within it. Rarely does Blizzard throw a new encounter into the game without taking into account the best currently available gear, ensuring that said progression functions much like a step-ladder. In other words, gear that drops from Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, and XT-002 in Ulduar should prepare you well enough for the fights later in the dungeon. We often forget that high item-level equipment serves a function beyond looking cool, and that's where Pureheart's contradictions kill me. He rails against the very kind of person he reveals himself to be: a loot whore. He hates that World of Warcraft has turned into a gear competition, and yet, he seems angry because he feels that he is unable to obtain the gear that he desires.

"To sum up, to many annoying people and factors in the game, i cant handle it anymore and i dont want to waste time and effort trying, and i cant play without joining a guild because its to annoying when other players have better gear/mounts than me, so all the fun is taken away from this once rich and beautifulk world i really used to enjoy being in."

So fun is taken away when the game tries to challenge you? Would it honestly be better if any piece of gear was handed to you anytime you want? I suppose it does for this player, who so desperately wants to "[escape] the capatlist society of real life." Moving on. Tank Balance And Encounter Design Speaking of raiding, how do we feel about the difficulty of the dungeons? Even though this is a surprisingly insightful thread, I don't bring up Lyesmith's post specifically to talk about tanking. Rather, to shed light on the ways in how players react to, and shape, new encounters designed by Blizzard. Lyesmith's beliefs can be summed up as such:

"TL;DR: Tank balance has two sides: the player and the boss. If the bosses favor a particular style, then it will show up player side."

Essentially, his argument is that despite what Blizzard reps might say about tank choice ("bring the player, not the class") that certain encounters overwhelmingly favor one type of tank over another. For instance, Mimiron has several abilities that can instantly kill the tank, making a class with more "oh shit buttons" more efficient at taking the brunt of the damage. However, Nilzen claims that encounters are designed the other way around:

"But the truth is, players act a specific way due to encounter mechanics. Encounter mechanics are designed a certain way because of what Blizzard sees that players can do. Avoidance levels were too high. Blizzard makes bosses hit for 80% of a tank's hp because they otherwise avoid too much. Tanks stack stamina. Blizzard makes Impale and other mechanics to counter stamina stacking."

So, instead of creating bosses intentionally designed to favor certain tank or class combinations, he asserts that they're designed due to the way the players have reacted and dealt with encounters in the past. Both posters are more or less correct, as game balance is a never-ending cycle created by this dynamic relationship between trend-setting players and the raid design team. So, is there a way to keep tanks on their toes without relying solely on stacking one stat or another? Lyesmith and Nilzen both offered up the idea of making certain boss abilities slightly more random. Therefore, skill and reaction time would be more important than what class currently seems to be leading the pack. Other fine thoughts included increasing raid damage in order to taxs the healers (so keeping the tank up would become even tougher) and tuning down player stats across the board This brings me to the second point that I wanted to touch on, and it more directly relates to difficulty. You can argue that raids have gotten fundamentally easier over time. You can also argue whether or not most players have simply gotten better at playing the game over time. But one thing I don't think anyone can deny is how extra-mechanical elements such as mods and strategy sites have made "figuring out" any given encounter a lot easier than it once was. It seems that Ghostcrawler feels this way, too:

"If it feels like you aren't struggling to learn these fights as much as you used to, then that's probably true: there are now many sources for videos and strategies that have become a lot more robust and user-friendly, as well as pretty sophisticated UI mods to help you track everything going on. The whole raiding community is just more well-connected than it was in the MC and BWL days. Many casual raiders could name a handful of cutting-edge guilds these days, which just didn't happen 4 years ago."

Just think for a second how much tougher certain encounters might be if you didn't have Deadly Boss Mods counting down the time to the next use of an ability or even if in-game warning didn't flash on the screen when the boss was about to use a raid-wiping mechanic. Sure, add-ons like GRID might be slightly more kosher, as they primarily improve play control, but even they offer quick access to data that you'd otherwise have to click on individual players to figure out. The reason for the popularity of these mods is because they fundamentally reduce the innate chaos of an encounter by giving you access to information in an way that is much easier to process. If information is power, then it becomes even stronger than the best gear in the game. The problem is when said information becomes too convenient and starts outstripping its basic ability to reduce the chaos. At that point, it just plain makes a fight easier. And I haven't even touched on top-level strategies that are quickly formed by the best players and then posted on the internet for everyone else to follow. Usually, unless an encounter is changed drastically on live servers, these tactics are learned on the PTR, so you end up with the sort of situation we encounter time and time again where new bosses are being downed the first night they're widely available. I feel like I'm sort of making up for a few days of Blue Stew absence, but the fact of the matter is that this post is already running longer than it probably should be. If you're interested in this subject, I'd go ahead and read the rest of the thread as it's linked above, and I'm always up for rapping with you guys and gals in the comments section if you'd like to explore things further! Until next time, ta-ta!

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Welcome back to my UI. I've got a number of addons I love to use, but since this week's episode has me in healing mode, I thought I would go over another one of the addons I use to make myself awesome. Whenever someone asks me which addons I would recommend for a healer, I say, "Grid and Clique." I went over Grid last week, so this week let's talk about clique. Clique will allow you to cast a spell, run a macro, use an item, or perform other actions on a target by clicking on its frame. When would you want to use this? Whenever you have multiple targets you need to quickly switch between, using different abilities on each. A great example of this is healing! Not convinced? Let's take a look at how I utilize the functionality as a shaman. While acting as a healer, the spells I use most are ranks 8 and 12 of Healing Wave, ranks 4 and 5 of Chain Heal, and rank 7 of Lesser Healing Wave. I also use Cure Poison and Cure Disease even while I'm just kicking ass in my enhancement spec. So, instead of wasting precious moments by pressing multiple keys to target and then cast (or vice versa), it's nice to combine them. Using Grid's range check, missing health, incoming heal, and debuff indicators, I can immediately know which spell to cast. After installing Clique into your interface folder, you will see an additional tab on the right side your spellbook. Clicking it will open up the setup menu, and you can then click on any non-passive ability in your spellbook with the desired modifiers and mouse button My settings are as follows: right click is rank 8 Healing wave, shift+right click is rank 12. Button 4 is rank 4 Chain Heal, shift+button 4 is rank 5, shift+left click is Lesser Healing Wave, alt+left click is Cure Poison, and alt+right click is Cure Disease. I keep left click as target, but that's just my personal preference. These settings keep everything at my fingertips, accessible quickly and accurately. The main project page on WoWInterface has some great notes about additional features, such as conditional function changes for harmful vs friendly targets, out of combat keybinds for buffing, or editing what frames are affected.

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This is the first of many features about addons I use in order to make Juggy the best shaman ever and Xenophontos a halfway decent warlock. Grid is an addon I used much more while I was resto and main healing, but it is still pretty useful even while I'm enhancement. An Ace addon, grid displays party and raid health bars in a compact form, and it gives loads of information using very little screen real estate. This means that at a glance, you can see how your raid is doing. By default, it displays each party member as a small square within a grid. I think that is where the name came from, but can we ever be sure? One of the great included features of grid are the inverted health bars, meaning it fills up a dim box with color as the player loses health, making it easier to spot who needs healing in a large raid. There is also a built in range check that can automatically dim all player's boxes who are out of range. This feature is invaluable, since trying to heal players who are out of range can waste a lot of time. It's also a great feature for battlegrounds, allowing you to become top healer and help your side win. Lastly, my favorite feature of Grid is its use of the incoming heal module, which shows a visual estimate of any incoming heals on any target in the raid from anyone using Grid (or any other ace addon that has the incoming heal feature). If all of the healers use this addon, you can avoid a lot of overhealing. There are also border colors, center icon, and other corner icons that are configurable to show tons of different statuses of each player in the raid. I do like to make a couple of tweaks to the defaults, though. I play on a relatively high resolution, and I find the default size of the squares too small. So, I scale it up in the options. As a shaman, I have two dispel options, poison and disease. The standard set up has all types of debuffs appear as a single mark in one corner of the player's box. I go in and change it so that magic debuffs and curses don't show up and poisons are in one corner while diseases are in another. That way I know which button to press or totem to drop in order to cure all of my party members. I also like to be able to see when Dorkins is going to run out of mana, so I've picked up GridManaBars. This takes a slice of the square and turns it into a mana bar. Imagine that! Most of the other options are fine for me on their default settings, but Grid is highly flexible, so play around and look at the documentation to find the settings that work best for you.

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