Archives for September 2016

I was going to write a post today about what it’s like to lose a close friend and partner.

I find myself repeatedly at a loss for words when I try.  So instead, I am going to post a letter I wrote to his family, with the names trimmed out.

In a nutshell, it’s hard, its weird, its intense then its never really over. A part of you, the part of you that they knew, is gone. The dreams you’d once had and plans you crafted together dissolved in the wind.

I feel incredibly insecure sharing this, but that tells me its only even more important that I share it now. Anyhow…

To R—-, A—- & extended family,

There were two messages that John sent to me just after midnight on Saturday morning. The first involves his scandalous personal approval of the features of my female travel companion and deserves no further mention.

The second was a message to the team to prep a list of what we were going to do this week and post it up for Monday instead of having a meeting. We’d just made plans to hire on another artist to support our art director, Simone, and John told me he was preparing to pull out a keyboard and start composing, saying ’someone who shows no passion has no place in any company you run.’

Those words echoed with me in the following days – but one other message from him rang even louder.

When I was having trouble at Blizzard, John was the one who listened and didn’t judge. When I was eventually fired from Blizzard, John was the second person I called, this time asking him for advice on how I needed to change.

When my girlfriend poisoned herself in my bathroom after drinking too much vodka because she was heartbroken our relationship was falling apart, he told me I did the right thing by flying her back home to be with her mother instead of trying to help fix her myself.

When I started my new career at Riot Games, he taught me how to think in terms of working myself out of the job by looking for replacement.

When I finally decided to take a stab at making a little game and came to him for business advice, he asked me for creative advice, encouraged me and asked if he could be more involved.

When I had to fire a friend, he walked me through the best way to do it, leading my friend to realize for himself that he didn’t really want to be involved and allowed us to remain on good terms.

When my father left me behind after 13 miles of hiking through the desert in the grand canyon and my brother-in-law had to come back from camp and stayed with me till I could walk, he listened to me vent.

When my abusive roommate started threatening me, he offered me a place to stay at his home. When faced with the choice between moving to San Francisco or NYC for an easy, stable job or working a riskier, but remote contract that would let me explore Europe and work on our game, he offered me a place to stay.

Once at his home, he took the time to walk through all of my career troubles and unwind the giant ball of string that made up my history. When I confessed that I was afraid I was autistic, unemotional or perhaps a horrible sociopath, he assured me it wasn’t the case and he even asked his friend Diane, a therapist to talk to me for her opinion.

In the end, he said:

“Alex, the only thing that’s wrong with you is that you think something is wrong with you.”

“I’ve spent my whole life and much time in my guild around the kind of people you are afraid of being. You’re nothing like them – and I’ll be here to remind you of that every week from now till the day I die if you need it.”

With a renewed sense of peace, I felt it was time to explore Europe. At every stop, John lit up, blowing up my phone with places to visit, ideas on where to go and an unsolicited itinerary that I promptly ignored at every stop.

I never wanted to read them when he sent them and now I’m here on the flight to NYC, weeping and wishing that I could have just a few more hours to talk about nonsense or just listen to him berate me for not shacking it up with the pretty girls I met on my travels.

This feels like a horrible insult to say to you two, who have lost someone who’s been there your whole lives, but while he was my business partner and mentor at times, he became the emotional replacement for the father I didn’t know I needed.

I can only hope that someday someone thinks of me half as strongly when I pass. That maybe, just maybe, the work I do will touch someone as profoundly or personally.

Once upon an eve, John mentioned he wanted to ask Alexia to help with composition and asked me how I felt about the matter. After a quick joke about realizing his nepotistic dream island empire, I told him: “I’ve met both your daughters and you do them a disservice if you worry for a minute I think they aren’t qualified to help out without you suggesting it.”

A—, R—, I don’t know what you want to do next. I don’t expect anything of you; but strangely enough, I have an unexpected opening for a producer, a music lover, a play-tester and a friend.  If either of you would like to join with me and continue this journey and learn what little bits I know, I’d be overjoyed to have you.

If not, know that I expect nothing and genuinely treasure our relationships. Whether it was talking for hours on the phone with Alexia about games – or usually absolutely nothing – or eating with Rayna as she felt conflicted about whether to take the risk to tell a certain boy she wanted to be more than friends. I have greatly enjoyed all of these memories that you’ve brought into my world.

Alex asked me for the financial details of our project. I gave him the rough outline in Facebook, it was a lot of promises and not enough paperwork for future plans. There’s no replacement for good friends. I’ll tell you what I told John at the beginning. Games are risky, games are crazy, games are a lot of hard work, full of uncertainty and they don’t always succeed.

We both decided to get involved in this because it would be fun to do. John figured out the point where were we could make it work and believed wholeheartedly that with his expertise we could make it far, far bigger in scope than anything I’d imagined.

Now, that might be impossible without him, but I’m going to take it as far as I can without regrets. I’ve chosen this crazy life and don’t expect anyone else to understand 🙂

I hope all is well with you guys and I hope you guys choose to get back in touch again someday, whatever the reason.

-Alex

Things had smoothed out in the later patches of the Burning Crusade. Ember storm improved the cast time of Incinerate to push it above Shadow Bolt for Destruction, a number of bug fixes and range increases made life better for drain spells and preparation began for Wrath of the Lich King.

With the conclusion of Sunwell, the WoW team began promoting internally and bringing on new faces to take on the ambitious challenges that awaited us in Northrend.

A Change of Path

Things were not going as well in my own career. After having spent an expansion working on exterior content for the most part, I had started working with the WoW Tools team on dramatically rebuilding the tools that were used to create the game world. The first project, the Spell Editor, had been a fairly solid success, so Scott Mercer took a step back and asked me to take point on the new spawn editor, with Alex Afrasiabi periodically supervising.

Unfortunately, I handled some sensitive situations poorly with the engineer involved. We would later toast each other for setting our personal careers back by about three years when we finally made up during the Cataclysm launch. Either way, I was reassigned back to wildlife spawning for the remainder of the launch.

Shoveltusk. Lots and lots of Shoveltusk

Unlike the spawning of quest POI (points of interest), Wildlife spawning is an act of mass production. Back then, it wasn’t possible to even copy and paste monsters into the world, let alone link-up common behaviours quickly. Each point had to be placed by hand.

I don’t know how much you know about me, but for a person who relishes self-expression and creativity, there was no personal hell greater than massive and laborious spawning projects, full of regular maintenance work, with very few opportunities for self-expression – not because they don’t exist, but because the sheer scale of the world and the clunkiness of the tools makes it very, very difficult.

I think Jeff wanted to motivate me to be clever and dramatically improve the tools; but after having damaged that relationship, it was much harder to get changes made. Likewise, the engineers were already heavily trapped under the weight of the previously agreed-upon requests.

Insecurities and Inquiries

So it was a huge surge of anxiety and fear that coursed through my veins when I was asked to come to the office of Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton for a private meeting. While I’d interacted with both of them regularly, it was never behind closed doors. Convinced my career was over, I walked in and sat down, hands trembling and shaking as I immediately blurted out apologies for whatever it was I had done, but that I had no idea why I was there *today*.

They both stared blankly at me. Tom put on goofy smile.

TC: “Uhm… this isn’t a disciplinary meeting…”

Me: “It’s… not?”

Jeff: “No.”

TC: “We are calling in all of the designers. We want your feedback on an important decision for the game.”

Jeff: “Specifically, we have three options for the Hero class we want to add to the game.”

TC: “Because everyone’s gotta get behind this decision, we wanted everyone’s opinion.”

Me: “Oh…. oh! What are the choices?”

TC: “Death Knight, Rune Master and Necromancer.”

They went briefly into the pitches for each.  The Death Knight would basically be Arthas, but with a focus on tanking magical damage.  The Rune Master would be a leather wearer who has a unique power source where different runes could activate different abilities and empower martial arts moves.  The Necromancer would raise the undead and send them at enemies like waves.

Me: “Wow, those are some pretty significant choices.”

Jeff: “Yeah… so what’s your choice.”

TC: “And more importantly, why?”

Me: “Well, while at first the feeling of saying Necromancer and DK really match the theme of the expansion… I feel like the most important aspect of class design is mechanical diversity. The rune system sounds significantly different and would change how people think about their abilities.”

Me: “Necromancer… well, it seems like it would be a good class, but it’s already been done and stomps HARD on the same gameplay space as the Warlock.”

Jeff: “But the Necromancer could have many pets – or guardians at once instead.”

Me: “True. But in the same vein, we could also just create a version of Warlock with multiple pets and maybe a lot of little summons. It would hit the same notes and clash hard with their design space.”

TC: “What about Death Knight? It seems a clear fit for this expansion. In fact, I can’t imagine another expansion where Death Knight fits better.”

Me: “Fair. However, they have always been aligned pretty damn evil – how you get them into the Alliance is a pretty tough question. But again, still a cool class. Also, I question if we need another plate tank right now.”

TC: “Well, Tank is the most underserved role right now. There aren’t enough of them.”

Me: “The path I would take would be to encourage more classes to be tanking and handling monsters, but yeah, that makes sense. Tanking is a hard job and it puts a lot of pressure and spotlight on one person. It’s hard.”

Jeff: “Well, thanks for your thoughts.”

Me: “Sure. I think DK and Necromancer fit the expansion, but I wouldn’t let the potential for an awesome game mechanic get passed up. Put my vote down as Rune Master.”

A few weeks later, they called the team together for a few announcements.  First off, the new class was going to be “Death Knight” – it would be using a Rune-Based power system, raised ghouls as minions – and that new promoted Cory Stockton would be taking point on the new class.

Foundations

Spawning was still rough work, though things got more interesting when Alex Afrasiabi came in and asked me to bring some specific POIs to life – a great topic for another blog post – but much of the work was still pretty mundane.

So it was a huge breath of fresh air when Cory Stockton came in to my office one morning to ask me for help.

Cory: “Blizzcon is coming up soon and I really want to Dazzle the players with some awesome abilities.”

Me: “Whoa!! That’s awesome.”

Cory: “Yeah! Anyways, I barely know the spell system and scripting is not my forte. I’ve been playing around with stuff for a while, but I just can’t figure some stuff out.  Can you help me?”

Me: “Of course!!”

Cory: “Great. I already have some slashes and stuff. I just need you to make two abilities for me. “

Me: “Just… two?”

Cory: “Yeah! See there isn’t a lot of time to show off abilities in the reveal video, so I just want a couple done. I already made a spell that spawns ghouls, so that’s done.”

Me: “Okay, that makes sense. What do you need?”

Cory: “Well, first off, we know we want the DK to be a caster tank. However, taunting a caster sucks. They just stand there. You can’t reposition them. So I want you to make a spell that teleports them to the Death Knight.”

Me: “Just… teleports them in front of you.”

Cory: “Yeah. If you have a problem with that, go talk to CK, he is working on a spell like that for Warlocks.”

Me: “Okay… what else?”

Cory: “Did you play Warcraft 3?”

Me: “I loved it.”

Cory: “I feel like we need Army of the Dead.”

Me: “Whoa! That’s awesome. Have you figured out what i will do yet?”

Cory: “Nah. For this I just want it to be nostalgic and super flashy. Can you handle that?”

Me: “You got it.”

Sidebar: Death Knights and Warlocks

At this point, you might be wondering why I’m spending a whole post devoted to how Death Knights came to be. The answer is because it was an important turning point in WoW class design. As an AoE casting, pet summoning, ally resurrecting, evil class, Death Knight was a huge risk of making Warlock gameplay obsolete.

The Grip of Fear

Using the Dwarf Death Knight – the only model finished at the time – I set out to create a flashy, epic intro for Army of the Dead. Using  the generally forgotten “SpellCastOmni” animations, I made the DK hold his arms up in the air.  Then using some techniques I’d learned while creating Nightbane, I made invisible missiles fire at the ground, each one summoning a skeleton.

This didn’t feel like enough; using the beam technology created by Dan Reed, one of my favorite programmers in this industry, I created arcs of lighting that struck the ground. This was getting somewhere. I called in Cory.

Me: “Cory, I really like where this is going, but to do much more, it’s going to need some art.”

Cory: “Art? Don’t worry, I got you covered.”

Cory only said this to me three times in our career. The result was the DK VFX, Destructible Buildings for Wintegrasp and the support needed to finish the visuals and quests for the Pet Battles feature of the game in MoP.

Needless to say, the result was great. Terrie Denman, a talented prop artist stepped up, made some new beam textures to match the undead purple eruptions. The animation team upgrade all of the ghoul models into the game to dig themselves out of the ground when spawned and the programming team fixed a number of de-sync issues that causes ghouls to appear above ground for a for a frame on the client.

The result was fantastic.  Chilton came by while we were looking at it.

TC: “This is great…. but what does it DO?”

Me: “uhm….”

TC: “Cory?”

Cory: “Uh, well, it sends in a lot of minions. Maybe you can tank for them. Your own private army.”

TC: “…”

Cory: “…”

Me: “Maybe we just flip that one around backwards. What if we gave them 1 hp each – and then they taunt any monsters nearby. Kind of a Death Knight AoE taunt.”

TC: “Huh. That’s kind of crazy, but give it a try.”

Me: “Alright.”

TC: “… by the way, we *are* giving them Death Coil, right?”

Cory: “Of course!”

Me: “Wait, what?”

This had its own set of problems, which we resolved by renaming the Warlock spell, but that’s a story for another time. I set my attention on figuring out the problem of the caster-taunt. But first, I had to understand the nature of the new Warlock spells and why they were being made.

Burning Crusade crunch had finally wound down… and those of us that composed the quiet little Blizzard guild decided we would take on the challenge of defeating Illidan together. Jeremy, our raid leader during Molten Core and BWL, decided that he wanted to relax a bit more and asked for volunteers to help run raiding teams for Karazhan and beyond.

Joe and I, both raid designers who missed our former raiding guilds (back in those days, if you were part of the raid dev team, it was considered inappropriate to remain part of a competitive raiding guild – so we’d both quit when we started at Blizzard) volunteered to run 10-man groups.

There’d been a fair share of bumps along the way this expansion – there’d been overcrowding in Hellfire, server performance issues in Shattrath due to the lack of Line of Sight blockers, but overall, the expansion had gone pretty well.  Players were happy and the experience of seeing the content we’d created enjoyed by millions was a huge thrill.

After weeks of running our individual groups, Jeremy declared it was time to forge our groups back together to take on Gruul, Serpentshrine Caverns, Tempest Keep and beyond. It had been a long time since I’d had a chance to organize the warlocks (which had been the role I held in my previous AQ raiding guild). So with a relish I started planning out curse macros, ability and specialization plans based on the team we would field and figuring out exactly which spec we each should play. My inner control freak was having a blast – we’d be ready to kick ass in no time.

Selecting the best geared Warlocks from our guild, it was decided Mather, Kandroth (my orc lock, as opposed to Kanrethad, my Alliance Warlock) and Garlock would be attending.  Mather loved Affliction, so she was assigned the uber shadow curse, while Garlock was assigned Destruction and curse of elements, leaving me with the despicable, yet my favored spec – Demonology and the final curse slot to assign based on the individual fight.

It came as a bit of a shock when after a few nights of raiding, when Nathan, the Shadow priest assigned to the Warlock DPS group, whispered me and said… “I think you are playing demonology all wrong.”

Defensively, I replied: “What do you mean? I am keeping up my dots and using Doom only where appropriate.”

Nathan: “Yeah… but why are you pushing anything besides shadow bolt?”

The One-Button Warlock

Needless to say I was at first arrogantly derisive towards the suggestion, but after being challenged to a DPS test, sure enough, Nathan was right. by specing deeply into destruction and always sacrificing my Succubus, I was able to achieve consistent, high and visually satisfying damage by just spamming Shadowbolt.

I went in the next day to Kris, the numbers Guru, to figure out what was going on.

Kris: “Bah! I TOLD someone this would happen eventually.”

Me: “Can you explain it?”

Kris: “Of course! What do you know about scaling?”

Me: “Uh, just that you want things to be about the same power.”

Kris: “There’s a lot more to it than that.”

Stepping over to the whiteboard, Kris, a former middle school teacher, flipped into education mode.

Kris: “Scaling is the rate at which power grows. Let’s take a look at how damage increased in Classic wow.”

He pulled up a chart of Shadowbolt’s min and max damage for levels 1 through 60. He created a series of dots on the rough chart, one of each max damage and spell rank.

Kris: “As you can see, the damage of Shadowbolt increased at a rate of 10-20 damage per spell rank from rank 1 at level 1 to rank 11 at level 60. This is very flat, linear growth.”

Kris drew a flat diagonal line going from 40 to 220.

Kris: “It’s very controlled. No problem. However, raiding gear changes things.”

Kris: “Dungeon and Raid content at level 60 demanded that the offensive power of casters increase. As you may have noticed back then, Rogues, Warriors and Hunters were incredibly strong, because their gear allowed for their damage to continue to increase with the Strength and Agility stats.”

Kris: “Casters had +Fire, +Shadow, +Arcane and similar gear leveling up, but then +Magic damage was added to reduce the amount of gear that needed to be made for dungeons.”

Me: “I follow you so far, but okay, the power of the gear increases your spell power by some amount. So what?”

Kris: “Well, it wasn’t enough for the gear to just increase in power. We did some research and realized that just increasing spell power by 10 doesn’t feel very good each tier of raid gear. Going from 10 to 20 feels great… and going from 100 to 110 feels okay… but going from 320 to 330 feels insignificant.”

Kris: “After some experiments and trying out variations with different groups of QA testers and friends, we came to the conclusion that people don’t notice or appreciate increased in power if they are lower than 12.5% – let’s call it 13% to make it easier.”

Me: “This makes sense…”

Kris: “So… during the original level-up phase, gear was based upon the level at which you acquire it.  Level 10 white gear is generally what you would have from a vendor at that level. Green, Blue and Purple (Magic, Rare or Epic) gear tends to have a flat bump up from that level. So an rare at level 30 might be equivalent to gear you’d find from a level 50 vendor.”

Me: “With you so far… this is really starting to drag on, how does it connect back to Warlocks?”

Kris: “Hang with me just a bit longer. In dungeons at level 60, we could award blue gear.  Then in Molten Core, we release epic. Naturally those are item level 70 and 80 respectively.  But what happens when BWL comes out?”

Me: “You start giving out Legendary gear?”

Kris: “Right, but then we would have to create legendary gear for everyone and suddenly, Sulfuron, Thunderfury and Atiesh become far less special and memorable.”

Me: “I see. So instead, you just cranked up the item levels instead.”

Kris: “Right! Due to the way Bob (a programmer from Starcraft who’d worked on WoW back in the day) setup the initial data tables for WoW, 1 item level is roughly equal to 1% more powerful.”

Me: “So this is why gear goes up by 13 item levels between raid tiers.”

Kris: “Bingo. Likewise, spell power increases by 13% per tier of gear.”

Me: “Soo…..”

Kris: *sigh* “Alright. Let’s sit down and look at the breakdown of Warlock talents in the Sacrifice, Shadowbolt spec. “

Talents

Warlock Talents

Minimum Required Level: 70

Required Talent Points: 61

Demonology Talents –  21 point(s)

Improved Healthstone – rank 2/2

Improved Imp – rank 3/3

Demonic Embrace – rank 5/5

Improved Health Funnel – rank 1/2

Fel Domination – rank 1/1

Fel Stamina – rank 3/3

Demonic Aegis – rank 3/3

Master Summoner – rank 2/2

Demonic Sacrifice – rank 1/1

Destruction Talents –  40 point(s)

Improved Shadow Bolt – rank 5/5

Cataclysm – rank 2/5

Bane – rank 5/5

Devastation – rank 5/5

Shadowburn – rank 1/1

Destructive Reach – rank 2/2

Improved Immolate – rank 5/5

Ruin – rank 1/1

Emberstorm – rank 5/5

Backlash – rank 3/3

Soul Leech – rank 1/3

Shadow and Flame – rank 5/5

Analysis

Me: “So the big one is Demonic Sacrifice.”

Kris: “Is it really though?”

Me: “Hrm…. well, it’s one point that provides 15% of damage. That HAS to be the broken one.”

Kris: “Sure, it looks like that, but you need to factor in more than just the talent. What did it cost you to get there…”

Me: “Well, let’s see… there’s improved armor, which is good, improved health at the cost of spirit, then about… 10 points in talents that are used to improve your pets.”

Kris: “10 points which now no longer do anything. Add in the extra 5 points of value you should be getting from ‘gold medal’ talents and suddenly you’ll see that you’re getting 15% of Shadow damage at 20 points worth of talent cost.”

Me: “Strange… it seems like it’s worth it though.”

Kris: “Kevin was going for versatility when he put together the demonology talents. Letting you have the better pet talents and also be able to kill-off a pet for raw damage, was an idea to let Warlocks still be able to be Demonology and go raiding.”

Me: “That’s also why the demon pets all got AoE damage reduction, right?”

Kris: “Yeah. No one’s going to take the time to heal a pet.”

Me: “Okay, so where’s the problem.”

Kris: “If the problem isn’t in column A…”

Me: “… yes?”

Kris: “… never mind. Take a closer look at Destruction’s talents.”

Me: “Alright:“

• ISB – increases direct shadow damage by 20% from 4 sources, triggers on brits.
• Ruin – increases critical strike damage bonus to 100%.
• Backlash – increases critical strike chance by 3%.
• Shadow and Flame – increases the bonus spell damage for Shadow Bolt and Incinerate by 20%.

Me: “A lot of direct damage increases and crit boosters.”

Kris: “Do you remember what I was saying about scaling factors? Spells grow from two sources – base rank-up (leveling) and gear (spell power).”

Me: “Ah, it has to be Shadow and Flame, right? That increases the growth rate of Shadow Bolt and Incinerate”

Kris: “Shadow and flame is a definitely a big factor. But it alone isn’t the big issue. Otherwise, you’d at least be putting up Immolates, Incinerating then throwing up Conflagrate at the end of the spell.”

Me: “So what’s left?”

Kris: “You forgot something – Bane.”

Me: “Bane…? That just makes Shadow Bolt not take a long time to cast, which means you get more per time, but it doesn’t change the amount of max mana you have. It just means you have to start life-tapping sooner.”

Kris: “Well, yes, but look at it this way. What’s the spell power coefficient (multiplier) on Shadow Bolt?”

Me: “Well…. huh, it’s 0.877.. roughly 6/7. ”

Kris: “Yeah. Back in the day, Warlock Shadow Bolts and Mage Fireballs were 3.5 second cast time spells. This was picked as the “Baseline” for spell damage.

Me: “So spells with a damage coefficient less than one have a cast-time less than 3.5 seconds.”

Kris: “Right. At some point the cast time of Shadow Bolt was reduced down to 3.0 seconds… but the damage coefficient wasn’t slightly too high. This information isn’t shown in the tooltips, so it went unnoticed for a while now – spell power didn’t get up to huge levels, so the difference was hidden by the overall randomness of the spell’s damage.”

Me: “Until it was increased by 20%.”

Kris: “You got it.  Suddenly, a spell with a 2.5 second cast time has a 1.02 spell damage coefficient. Let’s compare some alternative spells and rotations.”

• Immolate:  X damage + 0.2 coeff  + 0.13 coif per dot tick (5)
• Incinerate: X damage + 0.57 coeff
• Corruption: X damage + 1/6 coeff * 6 ticks
• Curse of Agony: X damage + 1.0f coeff
• Curse of Doom: X2 damage + 1.0 coeff

Me: “Huh…. nothing has a coefficient higher than 1, not even Curse of Doom.”

Kris: “Yeah… Curse of Doom should probably have a much higher coefficient… I’ll make a note to fix that. But for now, do you see what’s going on?”

Me: “Yeah. Because there’s no other button with a better coefficient, there’s nothing better to cast.  I mean, technically, keeping up corruption would be a good idea, but since you can’t pick up all of the talents to make it instant and get the uber Shadowbolt, it kind of washes out.”

Kris: “Yeah, it’s a marginal increase instead of a significant one. Furthermore, Corruption doesn’t benefit from Improved Shadow Bolt… so suddenly a 1.02 becomes a 1.14 coefficient spell.”

Me: “My head hurts. I just realized that as crit chance increases, not only do you get more critical strike damage – but you also boost the power of the other warlock’s shadow bolts even more frequently.”

Kris: “Yeah. It’s kind of broken. But we aren’t making any big changes until we can patch, so good luck and go have fun with your shadow bolt spamming.”

Me: “Heh.”

Kris: “We’ll take a look at how to go about fixing this sometime in the future.”

Segue – interesting and strange talent choices

If you take a close look at Demonology in Burning Crusade – you’ll notice a number of talented related to defensiveness. Including a 3% anti-crit talent that also reduced pet damage taken by 15%.  Demonic resilience was created with the idea that like in AQ, Warlocks might be called upon again to be temporary or caster tanks.

In the end, this ended up being a mostly PvP talent, with marginal benefit.

Serpent shrine and Beyond

I went back to the Warlock guild channel thrilled to let them know we could just focus on one-button spamming for the remainder of the patch.  The reaction was not as I expected.

Garloc: “Whoo hoo! Easy mode!”

Mather: “Oh…. really?”

Me: “What’s wrong?”

Mather: “Well, I was really enjoying affliction. I liked the DoT cycling and always felt like I was getting better at not wasting time and mana. Life tap makes me feel kind of unsafe, so Dark Pact was a perfect fit for me. “

Me: “Huh… yeah, you know, I really miss having Soul Link and being able to live longer from an in-a-pinch Voidwalker to save me from a wild trash mob.”

Garloc: “Yeah, that happens when Born isn’t tanking.”

Me: “Mather, you know, we’ll still want the 2% extra shadow damage for us locks and the three shadow priests. So if you stay affliction, I think it will be alright.”

Mather: “Oh good, because I was going to do that anyways.”

Me: “lol, nice.”

Garloc: “But yeah, it kind of sucks – we’re down all of the way in destruction, but we aren’t even getting to use the super cool AoE stun ability. Like… its kind of lame.”

Me: “I hadn’t really considered that.”

Takeaways

• Talents are tiny, but potent.
  • Especially multiplicative talents. 2% more doesn’t mean much. 2% stacked multiplicatively 30 times is 80% stronger.
• When building a spell rotation, you need to look at base damage and coefficient contribution.
  • At a baseline, if there’s a better button to push (better coefficient per cast time), you should push that instead.
• All together, if you attach too many bonuses to the same thing, they’ll get out of control.
• Balance and rewards are important
  • Warlocks who aren’t into that style of play will give up on mastering the play style they enjoy
  • Bonus effects brought by a spec or talent tree, if big enough, can give those players an excuse to stay in their play style even when its lower in damage.
• A fixation on damage throughput degrades the play experience and denies the player of interesting and thought provoking tools.