An Instant Approach To Healing

Meet Keriak, my Warhammer retrial Chaos Zealot. I've never played a healing class as my main in an MMORPG, but the Zealot (and its Runepriest counterpart) was really the class that stood out amongst Warhammer's archetypes when I auditioned classes during the game's launch.

I didn't stick to my guns the first time around for two reasons - I felt like I needed more DPS for solo'ing and I didn't enjoy being singled out for a quick and painful death. With soloing deliberately off the table and a limited time to revisit the game, I decided to give healing another shot.

Warhammer's pace is a big part of why I am able to enjoy the class. As Rohan illustrates, players in WoW die so quickly that a fraction of a second on the healer's part spells disaster. By contrast, Warhammer players are designed to stay up for longer.

On top of that, the Zealot's spells are all extremely fast casting - the slowest of my healing spells takes 2.5 seconds to cast, and he has several impressive instant-cast tools to work with. Also, Warhammer characters have a constantly-regenerating power bar (like a WoW Rogue's energy bar), rather than a fixed "use it and it's gone" mana bar.

The bottom line is that I don't feel nearly the pressure that I have the few times I've been responsible for healing or debuff removal in WoW. If the target I'm healing dies, it might be because I messed up, but it's more likely that they were simply taking unsustainable damage. Either way, Mythic has managed to make a pure healing class that made me WANT to be a healer, which is a pretty major accomplishment in a genre where it seems that healing is always in short supply.

The Effect of the Gradual Icecrown Rollout on Difficulty

With WoW's patch 3.3 presumptively slated for release next month, Blizzard has announced its delayed access plans. As Larisa colorfully puts it, they are once again "treating the gamers like children, only handling out a few of the candies at one time so the chocolate box will last longer". Still, there are some interesting tweaks this time around.

How much gear will players have BEFORE Arthas?
Blizzard isn't announcing how quickly each new wing of the dungeon will be released, other than to state that it will be "several weeks" before the second wing opens. That's several weeks with access to four bosses, each of whom drops loot of their own, along with current tier emblems. (These emblems will also be available two per day for random 5-mans, plus an extra 5 per week for the weekly raid quest.) As more wings unlock, players will have access to even more loot.

The end result is that players will have unprecedented access to current tier raid loot BEFORE the final boss becomes available. This means that Arthas may well be tuned assuming that the raid is already fully geared in Icecrown raid drops.

The raid that nerfs itself
The other kind of new feature is that, as weeks progress, players will be allowed additional attempts at the bosses and an increasing buff to their stats. In other words, the content will actually make itself easier (technically players will be allowed to decline the bonuses, but I doubt that many will).

This point may be a logical progression from the first one. Normally, server-first guilds have to kill the final boss clad mostly in gear from previous dungeons, while less elite guilds can expect to slowly accumulate gear upgrades as they move forward over time. If Arthas is tuned assuming that players ALREADY have current top-end gear, that option goes away.

Reflecting on Wrath Era Tuning
Overall, the major news story of the Wrath Era is Blizzard's attempt to fine tune their new system for multiple raid difficulties. Naxx provided much needed accessibility but too little challenge. Ulduar added challenge but did so with occasionally gimmicky hard mode requirements. TOC was somewhat of a filler dungeon, with a weird two-saves per group size per week hard mode option, and came with the first of two mid expansion gear resets needed to offset the improved loot being generated by all these hard modes. Now, finally, Icecrown will apparently make players wait for possibly months for the chance to fight Arthas, before even allowing anyone to take on the optional hard modes.

If nothing else, I hope that Blizzard is able to finish refining the model for allowing all raiders the ability to participate in the expansion's marquis fight. Changing courses with every patch of the Wrath era blew the entire incentive structure for the expansion out of the water. Perhaps carefully rationed, self-nerfing raid content will find the balance that Blizzard's group game has been struggling to achieve for the last year.

Group Logistics And The Perception Of The Grind

Over the year since its launch, Warhammer seems to have perfected no-hassle, instant access group content. On the map above, the glowing treasure chests are group public quests with at least two players present, and the crossed swords indicate where RVR battles are in progress. All you have to do is sign in, head for one of those spots, and pitch in.

Having a guild or a group are purely optional, as anyone can see where the action is and everyone who helps gets the appropriate share of the public quest rewards. You show up when you want, stay for however long you want, and get rewarded proportionally for your efforts. It's easy enough that I've spent about 75% of my time during the free retrial on group content, even though I'm gaming with limited time and have been known to spend the vast majority of my time solo (e.g. soloing from 1-73 in EQ2 without ever joining a group for any reason).

By contrast, World of Warcraft focuses on instanced PVE content with fixed parties (tank, healer, 3xDPS), so this sort of map wouldn't be effective. Instead, they're simply automating the process of group formation, so that players can click the "find group" button and instantly be transported to a dungeon with a (hopefully viable) full party to clear it out. It's less immersive but it may or may not be more effective in the long run, especially since the system works across multiple servers.



Is there a catch to instant access?
The issue with the Warhammer open RVR and public quests is that the options, though fun, are limited. At any given level/zone, you have maybe 3 public quests (one of which probably requires 9+ players and therefore can't be done with the available numbers) to choose from. Those three red shields on the Warhammer map represent the only three open RVR battlefield objectives in the zone, so players can expect to be battling over those for a dozen levels. You'll also have the same instanced scenario choices for that dozen level bracket.

(There are technically three zones per level bracket, each with its own PQ's and battlefield objectives, but there really isn't the population to support that number. Mythic made the decision to start all new characters in the human vs chaos zone as of the most recent patch, in the hopes of getting enough player in the same place to actually fight.)

All of this is a necessary feature of easy access to groups. The more choices a game offers, the more the population will spread out. (As I've discussed before, WoW will have sixteen 5-man instances in 3.3, but you can bet that half of them will be much more popular due to superior quality loot or ease of completion. The catch is that it starts to feel very grindy, very quickly. You finish a public quest and your choices for what to do next are one of the same 2-3 quests (if anyone else is doing them) or battling over the same small corner of the zone in RVR.

Losing the illusion of variety
In terms of actual gameplay experience, the solo PVE quest grind is no less repetitive; go somewhere, kill and loot the local mobs, repeat. The difference is that the frequent change in location creates the illusion that you are going to new places and doing new things. That illusion is gone when your only option is to turn around and do the same quest that you just did, or perhaps the quest before, depending on what you can find a group for.

When the dust settles on WoW's new automated system, I wonder if its five-man content will feel largely the same way. To a certain extent, the time it takes to actually assemble a group creates an impression of scarcity - the reaction when a group finally forms is "now I finally get to snag some emblems" and not "sigh, time to run one of the same old dungeons again". When finding a group is as easy as clicking a button, that anticipation may go along with it. (In much the same way, the 3-hour timer on Wintergrasp may be a blessing in that it physically prevents players from fighting again until the next match.)

Blizzard doesn't really have a choice in this matter - the 30+ minutes it takes to look for a group and travel to the instance the old fashioned way are 30 minutes that I don't really have these days. Even so, I can't help but wonder whether having increased access will increase the recognition that the dungeon grind is, in fact, grindy.

Are Daily Quests Keeping Us From Fun?

Like many of us, Tobold's MMORPG day begins with a round through the alts to deal with the daily chores of gaming - tradeskill cooldowns and daily quests.

Blizzard claims that they originally described the daily quest as a way to allow better rewards for solo content without having them immediately snapped up by group players. Whether or not that intent was sincere, daily quest rewards were set to make players want to make sure that they collect them on a daily basis, and players were quick to adjust their behavior accordingly.

Daily Quest Bribes In Action
My current personal dilemma is with LOTRO's overpowered item experience daily bounty quests. I don't especially enjoy doing these quests, which require large amounts of time spent on AFK travel and do not offer any significant challenge (I completed my first bounty quests five levels below its stated level). Unfortunately, Turbine's "legendary" items are designed to be replaced on a regular basis, and doing so becomes very tedious if you do not stockpile several days of experience runes in your bank for speed leveling your next weapon.

I'd be happy to run the thing half a dozen times back to back when I actually have a new weapon to level, but running the quest loop, which takes over 30 minutes and uses all of my hour-long teleport cooldowns, just to stock up feels like it is keeping me from something I would rather be doing. Unfortunately, the only alternative is to wait a few days after obtaining a new weapon before getting enough runes to begin using it.

Disproportion Effects on the Busy Gamer
Describing how all his efforts have slowed up his progress on a new Pally alt, Tobold writes:
"As long as your activities are in line with your personal goals, you are playing it right."
Tobold, hopefully, is happy in the aggregate with the amount of time he spends on his daily chores as a proportion of his total gaming time. Indeed, if you're online for multiple hours each day, half an hour here or there aren't that much of a big deal. For the majority of Tobold's gaming session, he has already done the daily activities that he is interested in, and he is free to do whatever he wants.

If, on the other hand, you are trying to game on an hour a day or less, that half an hour suddenly represents a huge chunk of your time, and you will spend a greater proportion of your time with available daily rewards that you have yet to claim.

Of course, you can choose to ignore the daily chores in favor of activities you actually want to do. The reality, though, is that this means making an intentionally suboptimal choice in ignoring the superior time/rewards offered by the daily quests. The time reward curve says that the dailies are the "right" choice, your long term goals say that the dailies are "right", but the end result leaves you feeling like the game has gotten grindy and trivial. That's not the best long-term plan for developers who are in the business of trying to retain subscriptions.

Is The Server Killing The Group?

One of the things I'm learning in my foray into Warhammer is that the non-instanced group portions of the game are much more fun than the solo-PVE or the instanced PVP scenarios. I'm sure these all work fine at the endgame, but they create a huge problem for the middle levels.

I did a /who survey of my first server selection, Badlands, to see what the population looked like at my peak gaming hours. Of Warhammer's 40 levels, only rank 40 returned "too many results to display". For any other number, there were more like 2-5 hits. In other words, at any given level, you might be able to form a SINGLE group of players within a level of yourself if you could get EVERYONE logged in to join up.

Basically, Warhammer may have enough level 40 players for its seven servers (only Iron Rock and Gorfang, the free trial servers, ever display above "low" population), but it only has enough players in the newbie zones to support 2-4 servers and only enough players in the middle half of the game for maybe a single server or two. Unfortunately, you cannot simply merge all the servers due to performance issues at the top level, which is where most of the players have ended up. Therefore, you have to leave the population in the middle levels unacceptably low and hope that players will take some other path - soloing and boring instances, if they ever happen - to the level cap.

This problem isn't unique to Warhammer, though it does hit that game harder due to its RVR focus. Both WoW and EQ2's group games really suffer from current model of soloing to the cap and then trying to figure out how to group. Again, though, there simply aren't enough players in the middle levels to support a full-time grouping requirement, so there HAS to be a soloing level path, which can't be onerous and tacked on since that is what the majority of players will be using.

The only solution that comes to mind is to go to Guild Wars style of instancing whole zones. Basically, everyone is logged into one server for the purposes of forming groups and whatnot, but the server would spawn as many copies of the actual content as are needed to support players in that level range (i.e. Warhammer really could have 4 T1 zones up, a single zone in T2-3, and 5-7 copies of T4). In some ways, Mythic has already taken the game in that direction, removing the non-instanced Fortresses from the endgame path and shift players towards instanced city sieges in their place.

The downside to this approach is that it kills the community aspect of small, closed servers. Then again, it would also wipe out the need to worry about what server you choose to play on, and it might just mean that pre-dominantly group-based games could become viable once again. Between servers, vertical progression, and grouping, something has to give. If we want to have a game like Warhammer, which thrives on groups, that really shouldn't be the aspect that gets kicked off.

Warhammer Retrial Day 0 - Return of the EUALA

I expected to have less-than-kind things to write about the process of reactivating a Warhammer account for the re-trial, but the experience actually went pretty smoothly. My account has been dormant since the included month with the box from the game's launch ran out, and the "activate" button on the account page immediately recognized that I was entitled to the 10-day retrial. I was also offered the option to transfer any or all of my characters, since their servers no longer exist.

On the downside, the retrial does still require billing information, but I don't think that Blizzard will physically intervene if you try to resubscribe an account that is eligible for a free retrial. (EDIT TO CLARIFY: Last I checked, Blizzard doesn't require billing info for the WoW free retrial but does allow you to accidentally skip it and go directly to paid time. Mythic does require billing info, but does NOT allow you to miss the retrial you're entitled to.) Anyway, as with the first time around, the first thing I did after activating my account was to re-cancel.

My computer's DVD drive has been acting up, so I was somewhat dreading the installation process, but it turned out to be pretty straight-forward. You download the installer, which weighs in at 50 MB or so, and it downloads the 10 GB worth of game. This took pretty much all evening, but I'd actually planned for that by deliberately re-activating on a night when I wasn't going to have time to play anyway.

Where has the EUALA gone?
The one thing I did check when the download finished, 4-5 hours later, was the dreaded EUALA. This may seem like a little thing, but Warhammer took a fair amount of flak at its launch for making players sit through three "look at our logo" movies and then click through both a license agreement and a terms of service, repeating all of this EVERY time you logged in.

Mythic stubbornly maintained that having people click a box that said they had read the agreement that everyone knows that no one actually reads somehow gave them a stronger case of breach of contract in going after gold sellers etc. Legally, they might have been correct, but all of the logos and click-throughs managed to be tedious and irritating to players, without doing much to deter the actual gold spammers.

Anyway, in the modern client, the three logos displayed in one rapid-fire display the first time I launched the client and then went away for good. I agreed to the EUALA and the TOS once each and they went away too. A small change, perhaps, but a welcome one; at least the first re-impression wasn't a bad one.

LF Warhammer Guild, PST

With recent events, I've decided that re-visiting Warhammer is a now-or-never proposition. Next month will feature LOTRO's expansion, EQ2's Frostfell Holiday, and probably WoW's 3.3 patch. The EQ2 expansion arrives in February. With Warhammer down to a mere seven servers and possibly a skeleton staff, it may not be around in April.

Most likely, this little experiment will last no more than a week. As a blogger, I have the advantage that the game can be a fail of Mythic proportions and I can still get some entertainment out of writing about it, so that's a bit of a hedge against the cost in time if I don't enjoy the experience.

Having made the mistake of trying to play the game as a solo PVE adventure with instanced scenarios on the side, I'm certain that it will fail miserably a second time if I don't find a guild. Therefore, I'm looking for a guild willing to put up with an embedded blogger for a week or so. Any realm, any ruleset will do; I'm usually not a fan of ganking-enabled rulesets, but in this case, if I'm running around trying to do solo quests and end up getting ganked, I'm already doing it wrong.

Ideally, it would be good to find somewhere that isn't too sparsely populated so that the sheer lack of population beyond the free trial zones (tier one) isn't what does me in, but I'm setting realistic expectations on that front. (Judging from the leaderboards, it looks like Badlands, Gorfang, and Iron Rock may be the most populous - the "most scenarios won this week" numbers are highest for those three.) It would also be nice not to have totally lopsided realm populations, though I realize that this too is a tall order.

Any help from my readers would be most welcome.