“There will not be any namby-pamby healer only classes.”
You have no idea how happy that made me.
Really, watch the video. If only to watch Paul Barnett talk. It’s mesmerizing. Hell, watch all the other Q&As. Q&A 4 is the one posted above.
Q&A 3 – What Qualities Had to Carry Over?
In a self-contained arena with two moderately sized teams, spike damage is the most effective way to drop an opponent.
By spike damage, I mean when DPS classes coordinate their attacks to hit all at the same time, creating a “spike” effect that drops the enemy’s life bar from 100% -> 0% in the span of one or two seconds.
Players who have experience in Guild vs Guild battles in Guild Wars understand this already. Entire team builds have been created around this idea. Ranger Spike and Blood Spike are two such builds. The level of coordination these teams have is a beautiful thing to see. Enemy players die in an eye blink.
Relying on everyone simply Focus Firing and expecting to get a kill through a string of lucky crits is simply a terrible idea. Any strategy that relies on luck, or certain conditions that are provided by your enemies before it has a chance of success, is not a good strategy. Against a good team with three characters that have healing abilities, any attack chain that lasts over six seconds is not going to have a wildly encouraging chance of success.
There are three guidelines for creating a solid Spike team:
1) The DPS should be ranged.
2) The Main DPSers should be of the same class.
3) Damage should not be reliant on stringent cooldowns.
In my mind, this is why “stacked teams” are achieving success. By stacked, I mean teams that have more then one of the same DPS class. It is easier to coordinate damage when everyone has the same cast times on their attacks. Furthermore, most of these stacked teams tend to run multiple casters.
Why is melee not ideal? One problem is that a melee character up in the face of someone is a good indication to the healer that someone is going to have a melted face soon. It’s easier to pull off the surprise of a solid Spike if the enemy has no idea who exactly its going to hit. Another problem with melee is that it has to be close to pull off its attacks. This puts a rather problematic constraint on the damage classes, as the team must wait longer for its members to get into position then with a team that relies on ranged.
Damage should not be reliant on cooldowns that take more then a minute to recharge. Sometimes a spike will fail due to various reasons. No plan survives first contact with the enemy and all that jazz. At that point, there must be a fallback plan, even if it just to set-up another spike.
In the end though, they are guidelines. A Spike damage team is not an IWIN team build, just one that is very effective.
The Daedalus Project – The Psychology of MMORPGs
Nick Yee, the creator of this website, looks at a variety of topics involving well, the psychology of MMOs. Article titles range from topics such as “The Trouble with Addiction”, “Identity Projection”, and “Are MMO Relationships Meaningless?” to name a few. More importantly however, unlike yours truly, Nick actually bases his articles off of data he acquires from self-selected surveys. I advise anyone interested in MMOs to check out his site.
But apparently some rogues think otherwise.
Quite frankly, they’re wrong. I would post this on the forums, but I’d rather do it here.
So let’s do a line by line on their reasoning shall we?
1) I rarely get focus fired in 5vs5
Any strategy that relies on the stupidity of your opponent is a terrible one. Despite the fact that a good percentage of the WoW population is not proficient in PvP and never will be, there is a sizable portion of the community that does in fact, have a brain stem.
It is not always the best strategy to kill the healer. In many cases, the healer is more durable then the DPS classes (ie: holy\disc priests and holy\prot paladins). Thus, it is sometimes highly effective to go after the DPS classes and squish them, crippling the other team’s damage and thus, rendering the match a mop-up. It is in your best interest to stay alive as long as possible should the enemy team decide to curbstomp you.
2) I’m an offensive class. My job is to do DPS. I’m not built to take damage.
You’re not doing any DPS if you’re eating dirt. Dead Rogues Do No Damage. However you need to say it, engrave this in your brain.
The fact that you can’t take damage well makes it even more important that you load out on stats that keep you alive.
3) Resilience doesn’t do me any good because I have lots of escape methods.
Yes, you have escape methods. . .
But at best, they provide half-decent coverage. Evasion only works against melee for 15 seconds and is on a five minute cooldown. CloS works for 5 seconds and is on a one minute cooldown. Vanish is not going to stop the damage from coming, especially if the warrior that is trailing you is smart enough to slam either of his pbaoe fear or snare.
Your escape methods as a rogue are on significant cooldowns, don’t last long enough to make a serious difference, or cover all the bases. To get anything resembling full coverage, you have to blow multiple cooldowns at once. In other words, you should not, and cannot rely on them to save you. And speccing prep is no solution either. I’m not going to fully explain why 30\o\31 is a sub-par 5vs5 team spec. Any build that relies heavily on positionals in this kind of situation is just asking for trouble.
4) Resilience sucks. It doesn’t do its job well. I’d rather have more stamina.
With the way crit and AP is scaling these days, an additional 400 hp or so is not going to save your life. Even another thousand isn’t going to do you that much good. Especially when you’re wearing leather. Not eating the crit is going to save your life. People who argue that the 5% crit debuff is so small to be useless are missing the point, and the fact that resilience also lowers how much damage a crit will inflict on you. It’s not going to be an IWIN stat, but its certainly better then nothing.
Furthermore, if you’re eating the MS from the warrior, more life isn’t going to do you much good anyways. Having an inbuilt damage mitigation is going to do you much more good in that situation. It’s seductive to believe that more life always equals a good thing, since you can see the effect it has on your character immediately, while resilience is more in the background. You can’t really point out a moment and say “HAH, resilience just saved me there!”.
5) I need more damage to do my job better. If I drop one person and die, I did a good thing.
WRONG.
You are not going to drop someone like some kind of anime ninja. Especially not as you start to fight better teams. People do have reflexes, and your damage output is not difficult to curtail, or even heal through.
Melee damage is weak in that the class that relies on said damage needs to get close to his target to do his magic. When there are so many snares\roots out there, its not hard to keep a melee class slowed down. Which means your defensive dispellers have to watch you extra carefully to get those off you.
Getting resilience is not nerfing your ability to do damage. Not staying alive long enough to do your job does. You didn’t do your team much good if you died period.
Edit: I encourage anyone who reads the following to take what I have written with a massive grain of salt. There are some formidable problems with the Warlock Heavy team that I proposed. The biggest has to be the lack of escape abilities that Warlocks have. While they have access to Fear\Howl of Terror\Death Coil, they have no ability that is a true panic button a la Ice Block or DS. Granted they do have alot of HP, but when you’re wearing cloth, that’s not going to mean that much to a Warrior who is about to melt your face.
Remember, in the end, good teamwork will really be the deciding factor. (Edited 3\9)
*WARNING: Massive Theorycraft Alert!*
My brother and I talk about WoW PvP quite a bit despite the fact I no longer play even half as seriously as I used to. We got to talking about arena team builds several days ago and what would make for a a strong PvP team build. After the conversation was over, I started mulling over this while leveling my mage.
(Yes, despite the fact I like talking about PvE most of the time, I have PvPed heavily and enjoyed it. My first MMO was DAoC, where I still have many fond memories of the PvP fights there. On WoW, the first server I rolled on was Frostwolf as the gnome rogue Cog.)
Most of the top PvP clans in WoW are running balanced teams. This makes sense, a versatile team should be able to handle most, if not all, situations. But the problem with WoW PvP is that these teams are chained to their healers. Should the healing support falter, the team will crumble before long. Previously, the solution has been to focus fire down the healers when possible, or just focus fire the DPSers and leave the healers for last.
I started thinking though, what if you simply overloaded the healers? Put out so much damage that it was simply not possible to handle it all?
I thought up a team first of a Warrior, Rogue, Priest, Affliction Warlock, and a healing hybrid. The team was built around the idea of stacking Wound Poison and Mortal Strike, while taking advantage of Unstable Affliction and the other Warlock DoTs. Of course after some fact-checking, I realized that Wound Poison and Mortal Strike do not stack, and it was likely that there just wasn’t enough damage occurring to do what I wanted. So I scrapped that team idea. But I still maintained that the strategy of overloading the healers was the right one.
It looks like I didn’t take the idea far enough.
There are reports of people running teams nearly full to the brim with Warlocks with one healer. The result? Teams are being utterly annihilated.
The problems are this:
DoTs Stack: Warlocks can layer as many DoTs as they please on enemy PCs. On top of that, there are fun DoTs such as Unstable Affliction which make it extremely dangerous to cleanse the DoT, or Seed of Corruption, which forces the healer to cleanse the DoT, or deal with a walking suicide bomber. This means not only are players taking enormous damage per second, but the healers have to be extremely cautious about dispelling or face losing the match with one misplaced cleanse.
CCs\Pets: Warlocks bring lots of CCs to the table. Fear, Death Coil and Howl of Terror. You can blow your trinket to handle the first fear, but even with diminishing cooldowns, there’s still another 4-6 second fear around the corner. That’s ignoring the utility of the pets as well. Seduce(Succubus) and the utility of the Felhunter should not be underestimated. Especially not when there are multiple ones out.
Massive HP Totals: Warlocks may wear cloth, but they still have an impressive amount of HP. This leads to issues, especially if they have a healer.
Direct Damage: Enough said.
By layering DoTs on the entire team, I can’t see how two healers could possibly keep up with the amount of damage flowing out, especially not with the amount of CCs and the Felhunters running around. Two paladins could cleanse the UA without fear by blowing their bubbles, but after that, what then? Once a DPSer goes down, there is going to be serious issues taking out the rest of the Warlock Crew.
This is not an very big issue right now, simply because a combination of a lack of realization and resources (getting enough players to build this kind of team). Ming claims that his balanced team will deal with oddball teams as they come. Quite frankly, I don’t see how any balanced team can deal with this. There is just too much damage flowing out onto the entire team. I really don’t see this becoming a huge deal until a month or so. Blizzard will probably have to institute a DoT cap on players to fix this.
It is possible I am wrong about how imbalanced this team is, but quite frankly with skill being even, I don’t see how that could be the case.
There are other problems with WoW PvP including the lackluster performance of rogues in 5vs5 PvP, which is somewhat ironic at first when one considers how strong rogues are in 1vs1 PvP (the converse is true for Warriors).
The following excerpt is from Sirlin.net a website run by a producer and game designer at Backbone Entertainment. The full post can be found here. I encourage readers to browse through his site and read what he has to say. Lot of good stuff to be found there.
“I also have to mention the excellent combat mechanics of the original God of War. These guys have a background in Street Fighter and other fighting games, and it shows. A 1p adventure game can steal all sorts of mechanics from fighting games, but rather than make those mechanics “fair and balanced,” it can make them overpowered and fun. The computer doesn’t mind being beaten, especially if the player is having fun. The secret to translating competitive fighting game mechanics to a 1p adventure: make everything cancellable. Attacks cancel to other attacks or a roll or a to magic or to a jump. You can cancel throw whiff recovery and just about everything else. This allows for freeform combos and makes everyone feel like a hero, even though all that stuff is way overpowered in a 2p competitive game.”
The contrast to the current orthodoxy in MMO PvE is nothing short of heresy. Players in the PvE setting are rarely able to take on more then one monster at a time, especially in group fights. Dungeons are populated with “Elite” monsters, that often cannot be taken on 1vs1 if the player is even level with the monster.
I can only think of two online RPGs that allow for this kind of “overpowered” PvE experience: Diablo 2 and City of Heroes. I think there is really something to this idea of making players truly feel powerful. Granted Sirlin is talking about a single player game, but I think the gameplay mechanic can be applied to an online game.
Ahhh, the glory days.
Day of the Tentacle, Kings Quest, Beneath a Steel Sky, Sam and Max Hit the Road, Full Throttle, Legend of Kyrandia, Monkey Island. And still many more.
When I think back to previous adventure games, I realize they were essentially a long string of puzzles tied into a linear narrative. Back in those days, it was pretty much a game of pixel hunter to pick up everything that wasn’t nailed down on one hand, and a game of “What have I stored in my pants that can be used to solve this puzzle in a PG way?”.
The problem with this gameplay mechanism I suspect, is that developers found out that most people don’t like being stuck on a puzzle. Quite frankly, most people do not have the time or inclination to be bothered to be “stuck” anymore. This is something the folks at Telltale also expressed at a recent IGDA meeting. Furthermore, the proliferation of strategy guides being released at the same time as the games they cover seems to prove this as well. The solution for them (and the few other adventure game developers) was to tone down the puzzles and make it easier for players to progress in order to attract more players.
This in my mind is a dead end path. Capping off the complexity of the puzzles in my opinion limits what the developer is able to throw at players in terms in ingenuity. After a certain point, developers are simply going to start running out of ideas. Furthermore, that was much of the appeal for gamers who played adventure games, they played for the wacky puzzles and situations their characters had to solve. I recently watched a friend play through the second episode of Sam and Max and we blew through it after an hour. His reaction was essentially: “That’s it?”.
But is the problem really with the puzzles or the entire gameplay mechanism of the adventure game? I believe that the current object intensive interaction methods that the player has to use (ie: interact this hat with this rack in order to get person y to move over here so you can move through the door), is stale. For a media type that proclaims the advantages of interactivity, its rather sparse in this genre. Players can only interact with certain objects, otherwise he would be swamped with choice and might never solve a puzzle if he had to resort to guess and check. This leads to a rather static feel within the game itself.
However, is the solution to create more ways to interact with objects? I would argue no. Why play an adventure game in the first place? I would argue that its the story. Adventure games on average compared to any other genre, had more compelling stories, plot lines, and characters compared to any other genre out there. What kept the player from uninstalling the game in the past was that he wanted to know what happened next.
So how to make adventure games more compelling then? I would say that the developers at Cing have gotten closer to the answer then other developers who publish adventure games. I am speaking of Hotel Dusk: Room 215 in particular.
What is fascinating about Hotel Dusk is that to progress in the game, the protagonist must discover what each of the guests of the hotel are hiding. There is still object interaction, but a large part of the game involves dialogue choices. When a dramatic scene emerges, the only way the player can continue is to get the NPC to spill his guts. To do so, the player must select the right choices when talking to the NPC. However, since the player does not have a history of the NPC’s life in front of him, he must make guesses based on his previous interactions with the NPC.
Therein lies the brilliance of Hotel Dusk in my opinion. Players must watch NPC reactions, pay attention to what they say, and then guess what the NPC had done and is thinking. In other words, players must treat the NPC like they would a real person. No more is the player dealing with an object that does not act back, the player is dealing with a “person” that seems to have a logical set of feelings, fears, prejudices, etc that make him feel lifelike.
This is where I think adventure games should go, focusing on the story and the characters, and creating puzzles and situations that revolve around a solid cast of NPCs. Focus less on solving abstract puzzles like how to get through a locked door, and focus more on creating believable NPCs and forcing the player to interact with said people. Make people feel like they are interacting with people. This will also help the overall story in my opinion and getting players immersed because stories are all about people in the end.
I really think that Chris Crawford is ahead of the industry on this with his Storytron system of interactive storytelling. More on this in the future.
It’s interesting to see how WoW has evolved from its initial release. As a player of the game since it began, tracking the evolution of the game excites me in a kind of academic way. What is most interesting however, is how the developers at Blizzard have adapted to the problems of balancing for the two worlds of an MMO, PvE and PvP.
Back about a year ago or so, someone posted a topic about how damage was scaling in WoW and how it affected PvP. His conclusion was that if Blizzard did not find out some way to scale back damage progression, PvP fights would become two shot crit fests.
His reasoning was this:
Stamina was not scaling enough. People were getting maybe an additional 500 or so hp from a new set, while damage numbers were increasing much faster through new armor gains. Not only that, people were getting access to trinkets that boosted damage significantly.
Armor caps off heavily after a point, and none of the new sets were giving enough of a bonus to raise the damage reduction by any significant amount.
The only real way to deal with damage ability-wise is through mitigation (aka healing). There are few if any abilities that can prevent or redirect damage in WoW and most of those are self targeted only.
Not everyone agreed with this, but I agreed firmly with what he was saying. Based on my own observations of the game, damage output was scaling fine for PvE, but PvP wise, it was getting out of hand. The new addition of resilience as a stat on items seems to confirm that the developers at Blizzard agreed as well.
What does resilience do? Well, here’s a blue post from forum CM Eyonix:
Resilience Rating: 39.4 rating grants 1% less chance of being struck by any type of critical strike, and 2% less damage taken from critical strikes.
The beauty of this solution by Blizzard is that it allows for item upgrades to be meaningful, without destroying the crit ability of players which are DPS classes. Furthermore, its only really important for PvP. While I’m sure it has its uses in PvE, health is God as far as it comes to PvP. Good PvPers realized a long time ago that a dead character produces no damage, and thus, staying alive was in many respects, more important then eking out that extra 100 damage. Resilience helps players stay alive in a meaningful way.
The other nice thing about this solution is that Blizzard doesn’t have to go about changing the abilities of classes drastically to incorporate damage prevention and redirection abilities as some players were arguing for. I don’t want to imagine the kind of headache that this would have created, not to mention the issues from a PvE standpoint.
The result of this is that WoW is now in a sense, splitting. Back in the day, PvP was not something that many people engaged in, or did seriously. With Blizzard’s new focus on creating a quality PvP experience, especially in the form of the upcoming Arena Tournament, a second viable world of play has emerged that is gaining a rabid focus that equals those of the PvE school. While this PvP community has always existed, Blizzard is in my opinion, trying to legitimize it, capitalizing on it in a fashion that few online RPGs attempt to do and succeed at. The only ones that really come to mind are DAoC and Guild Wars.
In any case, my only wish is that there was some way to watch arena matches. I doubt I will have time to ever compete seriously with the top players.
The more I play games, the more I am utterly convinced that the way one plays games is extremely revealing as to the true nature of a person.
I’m certainly not the first person to observe this. Plato said that ” You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
My first hint at the truth of this statement came from my experience with online first-person shooters. I noticed that after playing on the same server for over a year or so, some people just did not get any better. Instead, they seemed to stagnate, never getting any better. Other players would be good shots, but would be terrible at tactics. And many could never learn to utilize sound as a pseudo-wallhack.
But that was just looking at skill. Looking at how many players approached the game was even more revealing. Most players, even good ones, would be disinclined to rush. Most people prefer to camp rather then play an aggressive game. Many players never changed their loadouts, only using different weapons when necessity demanded it. They were unwilling to experiment when given the chance, most would opt for the typical standby guns such as the M4 or the AK-47. While the two weapons listed are certainly considered the “best” overall weapons in CS, it was curious to see that most were not willing to learn how to use a pump effectively or a TMP, guns that are much less popular.
I didn’t make much of this at first, these were just things that I noticed. I could speculate on what exactly these observations mean (and I certainly have), but I will save that for a later post. For now, I’m just putting it out there.
What really opened me up to this idea that games reveal a person’s character was my experience with MMOs.
This was mainly because I began to see analogous behavior in MMOs and real life. The petty infighting and politicking within high level WoW guilds mirroring the corporate politics in real life. The importance of knowing someone within a top-tier guild rather then having a stellar application, much like job-hunting in the real world. The obsession over epic gear, and the lengths people will go to obtain them. The personalities that inhabit the forums that expose the zeitgeist of the community.
While what I have said, and what I will discuss in the future may sound like nothing more then cheap pop-culture psychology, I still think my observations have merit. Much more on this at a later date.
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
-Heraclitus
I discovered Lugaru by visiting GameDevBlog, something I encourage anyone who is interested in the industry to do.
Lugaru is one of the many games that populate ManifestoGames.com a site dedicated to indie games. It has some incendiary things to say about the industry as well, but I won’t go into it here. I’ll just post an excerpt from their manifesto and then move on.
“An industry that was once the most innovative and exciting artistic field on the planet has become a morass of drudgery and imitation. A field that once prized creativity and novelty has become so risk averse that it will fund only franchise titles and licensed drivel; a medium that once spun off whole new genres practically every year has instead become one in which only games that slot into accepted marketing categories can be published.”
In any case, Lugaru is as the title states, an interesting indie game. Now while “interesting” can be used to describe things from intriguing, to a polite fashion of letting people know that something smells like horse manure, I assure you that Lugaru is more of the former then the latter. In fact, Lugaru is quite fun. Even as a demo.
Lugaru’s premise sounds like Watership Down in the sense that the player is trying to liberate his bunny friends. That is, it would if it wasn’t for the fact that we have a bipedal bunny in camo leggings going all Jet Li all over some wolves and traitorous bunnies. So throw some Once Upon a Time in China in there as well.
What makes Lugaru so interesting is its control scheme. Rather then using a series of button combinations that requires fifteen inputs, Lugaru uses a context based system. So while holding shift may make you crouch, holding shift and moving forward will cause you to sneak. Holding shift and clicking will also allow you sweep out the legs of your opponent, thus letting give him a vicious kicking. Hey, war is rough. And I haven’t even mentioned what you can do with weapons =D.
Best moment though? AI is reaching down to pick up the knife a dead comrade dropped. So I tried to do a spin kick to give him some second thoughts. Turns out I wasn’t close enough to hit him, just the body of his friend. Said body goes rising into the air and smashes said knife-grabbing-bunny in the face, sending him flying. Then I picked up the knife and threw it into his chest. Rock on.
The AI is no slouch though. This is not your mindless beat-em-up style game. Two opponents at once is bad news. It behooves the player to try to take out his enemies one at a time if at all possible. Or you could get a vicious beating from two bunnies at once, you choice. So when the AI runs, which it does quite a bit when it starts getting the short end of the stick, it’s a good idea to stop him from doing a runner.
While learning the controls takes some time at first, it really does not take much time to get handy with them. What I really liked about Lugaru was that it was never a dull moment. I always had to pay attention to what my opponent was doing, and where I was fighting to prevent additional enemies from joining in. After playing countless MMOs where all I had to do was press the same buttons in sequence over and over, this was a welcome change.
If I had to make one suggestion after what little I have seen of the game, it would be that the game needs more audio cues. Especially when it comes to fighting. Having the animations go a little slower might help as well. Oftentimes to reverse an attack, I just find myself mashing the shift key to anticipate it. Of course, that could just be a sign of my newbishness =P.
So the question is, would I recommend this game for someone to buy? Personally, I would not buy this game, but that is only because I’m just not looking for a game like this right now. I need me an RPG.
Time to browse some more games at Manifesto!
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