The state of Wow’s design
May 18, 2009 by Patrick
Filed under .Articles, Featured, Patrick's plog
It’s been roughly six months since the last expansion came out, so I thought it would be a good time to give my thoughts about how the game has evolved and where it is today.
Short disclaimer: this is, as usual, a very long article that I’m pretty sure a lot of people won’t have the time to read. I’m ok with it; my short little fun blurbs have a much better home on my twitter page, and I aim my blog articles at some slightly more in depth analysis. My aim here isn’t to just state what I like or dislike, but rather to take a longer look at the hows and whys of the choices that were made, and try to understand the philosophy of this type of game design. I would recommend this article to any Wow fan, but also any MMO enthusiast who doesn’t have the time to get to level 80 in Wow and explore the intricacies of Blizzard’s designs.
So anyway, if you have a little bit of time to waste I hope you enjoy it and it brings something to your day! 
Ok, here we go:
There are a few very obvious good sides and bad sides to the game today compared to what it was in Burning Crusade, or even Classic Wow. I think most people will agree on these:
The good includes the leveling process from 70 to 80. I think everyone agrees it strike an almost perfect balance between innovative quests and the usual “kill ten rats” ones. To the point that I don’t know how they could make it a lot better without completely changing the MMORPG paradigm. They involve you in interesting story lines, they don’t draw out the leveling as you get closer to 80, and each zone has epic events and characters that you will remember throughout… I really think you’ll be hard pressed finding people who dislike the experience.
The bad includes the horrible horrible lag in some zones (Dalaran at peak hours, Wintergrasp and the whole continent when battles end, some raid instances when they are particularly populated…). Some of those have been / are being addressed, but it’s still a very clear shortcoming of this version of the game.
I could also talk about the fact that group dynamics have been murdered by the revamping of some gameplay mechanics: crowd control is a distant memory, tanking is a semi-mindless AOE fest, mana regeneration has become so overinflated that you basically never hear any healer saying he’s out of mana anymore… The flip side being that when you start an instance, you can be pretty certain that you’re going to be able to complete it, and in a reasonable amount of time at that (painful memories of The Shadow Labyrinth from The Burning Crusade come to mind). There should be a middle ground somewhere, or maybe some optional way to challenge players a bit more. I for one hope they find it at some point.
Lastly, the game has become more “arcady” and “easy” than it ever was. Some people dislike this and I certainly can understand why. I do however think this has more upsides than downsides, but that’s another story.
So all this is true and has been discussed at length in many forums. What I would like to point out here is the incredible mechanics and designs that Blizzard has managed to implement into this expansion and that are going slightly unnoticed, or at least undiscussed.
Fun specs
Not so long ago, a large part of the talent trees were uninteresting and / or inefficient in many situations. Yet you you HAD to spec into them for certain purposes. No more! Every single spec has some awesomeness to them. You might dislike one or the other because it doesn’t fit your play style, but all the specs now include the “concentrated coolness” principle that Blizzard is fond of. I would even go as far as to say that talent builds have become more difficult to create because 90% of the talents are appealing, which is quite an achievement in itself. Note that I’m not talking about optimizing and minmaxing your spec to be the best possible tank or raid DPS or PVP murderer, but just about the innate cool factor of each talent. They almost all seem cool and useful, and you want them all when you’re building your tree. It makes for hard choices when some of them were very clearly fillers previously. If you don’t believe me, just go take a look at the talent trees pre-3.0.
Gameplay improvement through procs
This mostly applies to DPS classes, which had very regular spell rotations they could repeat ad nauseum in almost every encounter in the game. Some had the fun of crowd controlling to spice things up (which has now disappeared as I said) but apart from that you could pretty much sleep through your raid nights or even leveling sessions.
One of the features that is being used a lot more today is the idea of one of your action or spell effect “allowing” you to use another one.
For example, an arms warrior will sometimes be allowed to use the Overpower ability when his Rend does damage, even if the primary condition for their overpower ability isn’t met. A mage will get an instant Pyroblast if two of his spells critically hit in a row. This is true throughout the classes and talent trees in the game. the benefit for the player is that it forces them to pay attention to what’s happening and gets them out of the incredibly monotonous process that DPS used to be. Great great improvement, makes the DPS role a lot more involved and a lot more fun. Now if we could just get a smidge of crowd control back also, it would be heaven.
Class Balance
I don’t think class balance has ever been as good as it is today, both in PVE and PVP. Some might disagree with me, but you need to understand what I’m saying: I’m not saying class balance is perfect, I’m just saying it’s very acceptable in most cases, and that it’s certainly the best it’s ever been.
In PVE, a tank is now a tank, no matter the class. It wasn’t always like that, and some groups would often misgidedly reject this or that class out of hand because “they’re not good enough for this instance”. I can also remember a time where groups would require a priest as a healer, and there were severe disparities in DPS capabilities. No more! ™ Sure, you can find some classes that will do better than others if you’re picky, but all in all they are mostly equivalent while staying different in play style.
PVP is a touchy subject. I certainly don’t mean to imply that classes are balanced against any other here either, because they are not. But all classes (and even most specs) are viable in PVP. Sure, some classes or specs are hopelessly underpowered in some situations (hunters in 2v2 arenas are at the bottom of the barrel) and some classes are still painfully powerful (no one can withstand the DPS and stun fest that a couple of rogues can instill with a well set up opener, and it’s some healers will survive for hours, even against two opponents). But overall, the situation has become largely acceptable and mostly very satisfactory in all PVP situations. Unless you want to be the absolute best you can be in a specific situation, you can pretty much go with the class or spec you like and have fun in most PVP situations. Again, pre-3.0, it really really really wasn’t the case.
Different avenues to get gear
We’re leaving the realm of gameplay mechanics here and entering “game design land”. Giving you options to get gear is a designer’s way to not force you to do something you don’t want to, which is absolutely brilliant. In Burning Crusade, getting the best pre-raiding gear required you to go through hours and hours of farming, repeating the same instance to either get the piece of armor off this one boss that dropped it, or to get your reputation up with the specific faction that would sell it to you. Here’s a list of how you can get great pre-raiding items in Wrath of the Lich King:
- Running a dungeon in the hopes of getting that one item you want from that one boss you need to kill. It usually won’t take more than three of four tries (keep in mind that an instance is takes only a fraction of the time it did in previous versions of the game, and it has become easy enough that you will complete it 99% of the time). At the same time you will get badges and reputation for the faction of your choice, so it never really feels like you’re wasting your time even if you don’t get the item you wanted. What’s more, you can run a variety of instances while still getting these benefits. This is a well known part of the puzzle, but bare with me.
- Running entry level raids with random people has become very possible, especially at this point in the game where people are geared and know the encounter strategies. It is very easy to keep an eye on the general or LFG channel and spot a “need one last <insert your role here> for Sartharion”, jump in, get your loot and leave. Same goes for Naxxramas, or even Ulduar in some cases.
- Buy from faction vendors. Even at lower reputation levels you’ll get some decent rare items, and getting to the higher levels that will allow you to purchase epics is way easier than it used to be.
- Buy from badge vendors. Again, you get these no matter what, and the equipment you can purchase with the badges is comparable to the epics you would get in entry level raids.
- Buy craftable epics. Each class / role has at least two pieces of armor they can use, plus one or two weapons, a neckless and a ring. With this alone, you’re already well on your way.
- Do your weekly Archavon / Emalon run. A pugable encounter (yes, even Emalon is largely pugable if you have a slight idea of what you’re doing, and it will become increasingly so as people get geared up). This is a simple process that requires no planning and that even the most casual players can benefit from. It will provide you with some of the best gear in the game, both for PVE and for PVP. By the way, I disagree with people who say that giving you good gear through this easy avenue was a mistake on Blizzard’s part: the weekly timer ensures that you won’t get geared to fast, but it still gives everyone the feeling that they are achieving something. And by the time you’ve actually gotten some nice drops, the next level of gear has been introduced in the game anyway.
So this is a summary of the ways you can get gear for PVE, and the list of improvements to the ways of getting PVP items is almost as long, so I won’t get into it here. The point is that while it is still a reasonably long process to get to where you want to be in terms of performance with your character, the trip has become a far less repetitive and monotonous one.
Some people think that giving casual players the same powerful gear that you give hard core players is a mistake because it devalues their achievements. While I certainly understand the concern, I have to say that after a few months of actually playing the game I find I’m having a lot more fun / motivation / satisfaction in the gearing process (which is a core component in the game) than I ever did. And I suspect that a lot of the large casual player base agrees with me. In the end, making the game more enjoyable for as many players as possible is what really matters. These concerns were very valid ones in theory and they were discussed at length before the game came out, but I would submit that in actuality you would be hard pressed finding people who enjoy Wrath of the Lich King *less*than they did Burning Crusade.
Hard work for little optimization
This might sound like a bad thing, but let me explain: in previous versions of the game, you had a linear path to optimisation with, let’s say 100 “time units” to get the first tier of enchantment. Then you’d need to spend 400 “time units” to get the second tier of enchantment, but it would be so much better than the first tier that you basicaly needed to do it if you wanted to be taken seriously. Today, the time structure is the same, but the benefit from going to tier one to tier two is minimal. This is true for reputation enchantments and regular enchantments alike: a very expensive weapon enchantment or an “exalted” reputation enchantment will only be slightly better than the trivial “cheap” or “honored” variety. The difference is not negligible, so people who want to be the best at what they do will still be motivated to go the extra mile, but it’s not so much better that people who didn’t invest this bigger amount of time aren’t able to compete.
Profession benefits
Last improvement that I was skeptical about but turned out to be very beneficial: the professions philosophy revamp. Before WotLK, professions provided you with pieces of equipment that only you could use, giving players the motivation (and sometimes feeling of obligation) to level up their craft. Today, you can sell almost any piece of equipment you can craft, which helps pretty much everyone gear up. The unique benefit that you will get for leveling your profession will come in the form of very powerful or very easily accessible enchantments: spellthreads, special gems, gem sockets, shoulder enchantments, armor kits, etc.
This is brilliant because, once again, it provides a very clear advantage to the people who invest the time and effort in their craft, yet it doesn’t give anyone the feeling that they need to do it in order to be competitive.
Well, I guess that’s it. If I’m forgetting a couple I’ll update the post, but what I take away from all this is that the designers at Blizzard have made a clear play for the “don’t force anyone into anything” path. Wrath of the Lich King could have been subtitled “do what you like”. Sure it has its problems, there’s no denying that. But in my opinion, the good far makes up for the bad. I can’t wait to see how they will manage to top themselves in the next expansion…
Hey Patrick, in regards to the change in casual-player interaction in the design decision for WotLK, I personally still find it an uncomfortable fit. I was never one of the ‘hardcore’ players (PVE or PVP), mostly due to me being in the UK and playing on US servers for so long, but I still felt the shift to an arcade-style set of gameplay mechanics.
I’m not sure if you’ll agree, but it’s almost like Blizzard are trying to encourage twitch gamers into a space which normally is reserved for the classic RPG gamer. You mention the triggered/proc abilities that have been introduced and expanded upon recently. These have existed in some form before (for ex. Nightfall as a Warlock) but not to the degree in which they are appearing now. I agree with your analysis that it encourages more interactive and interesting action during certain fights that before now would have been entirely monotonous, but are Blizzard encouraging faster reflexes over more experienced players?
As I already mentioned, I was never particularly hardcore, but even in my middle-of-the-road, upper-casual gear I felt like I’d achieved something. Now, to see people running around in full Heroes’/Valorous just a few months after the raid instances were opened saddens me. Not to mention the amount of attention Ulduar has received (on Laughing Skull-US people are already pugging the 10man and 25man versions) from the masses.
The Death Knight came out to sounds of applause, people enjoyed their fighter-game style mechanics and their varied abilities. Now we are seeing a move towards more reflex driven responses to in-game action. Is WoW becoming a MMOFG (Massively Multiplayer Online Fighting Game)?
Keep in mind that a lot of what you’re calling twitch mechanics aren’t — if you’re proccing a Pyroblast or a no-cast Flash of Light you have 10-15 seconds to cast that and make the most of it. That doesn’t seem to favor twitch reflex to me — I’ve got horrible twitch reflex and nasty vertigo issues, and I can still use the vast majority of my procs without panic.
As far as raid gear, a stated goal was to make raid content more accessible. Naxxramas is not a hard raid — you can walk in in upper-level casual gear and you can probably get through it. I like seeing more content earlier, myself.
Actually, twitch gaming is a well defined game play term where you activate an ability right when you click on a button as opposed to queuing that ability in advance and in sequence and then sitting back until you need to click the next one… So I guess you’re both right, yay!
That being said, Wow has always had a very twitch oriented approach, which was rather original at the time in the MMO world (the big guys had spell queuing for the most part). I think this latest development where they put more emphasis on spell procs has less to do with twitch gaming (which is built into the game) as it has to do with soliciting random player reaction. You could do that with a queuing system also…
The philosophy of it is more actionny / arcady though, so I see where you’re coming from Labdirector. I also agree with Cassie that you don’t need lightning fast reaction, you just need to do it at some point.
And the fighting game analogy is funny also; I’ve often thought that the different classes in the game were like different characters in a fighting game, and I think they present the same balancing challenges and issues (I might have mentioned it in a podcast at some point). But think it’s been true ever since the game came out, I don’t see it as something brought on by 3.1…
one way the game hasnt evolved is loyalty .. check out my loyalty god forbid you miss payment by one day they pull the plug you think they would give you some leway. unfotunatly i lost my walled damn u blizz 10 more days till wachovia sends my card.. Panic mode sets in and im out of snuff …help!!!! not even a free day or two from blizz thats cold!
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maybe it is because of all this that i have not even reached 80 on my main yet, and really don’t feel much like playing WoW anymore? EVE has become my obsession, and although I still pay for WoW, every time I decide I want to start playing again I get bored after a few minutes and just want to go back to EVE. Not that I want to bash WoW like so many EVE players out there, I guess it just is not my cup of tea anymore.
It’s always good to take a break at some point. Maybe you’ll stay in Eve, and maybe you’ll come back to Wow with a fresh mindset at some point; either way, no one should keep playing the game when it’s become a chore.
I think EVE has an advantage where they pool the players online and in a number that make it fun to player at any time. Of course the universe is huge so you can never run out of new things to explore.
WoW has the issue where if your server is low-pop/unbalanced or more/less populated by a certain timezone you lose the ability to do anything worthwhile if you play off-peak hours.
Not sure on your existing WoW situation; You may need a guild that continues to run instances with their pre-80′s and help them out. Sometimes it’s a needed change and if you don’t have that social group, the game dies very quickly.
I enjoyed EVE except for the times my connection would die and I’d be slaughtered by pirates and lose everything :’( That’s the one thing that puts me off when playing it again. A reliable ISP is a must with EVE.
… erm
“that make it fun to play..” rather
I agree with most of the things you said, but I still think there is room for improvements when it comes to DPSing. I’ve tried both healing and DPS-ing in raids, and I find that DPS-ing gets boring a lot faster than healing. Others may feel differently, but every raid as DPS felt like the same, while as a healer I always have to adapt to the situation at hand.
Proccs are definitely a step in the right direction, but I think Blizz should add even more stuff, preferably a bit random stuff, that makes each fight a tiny bit different from the other. Giving DPS certain tasks (like pressing cubes in Magtheridon’s) is another great way of making DPS feel less monotonous.
Just my 2 copper.
Definitely agree that DPS is still a lot less of an active process than healing or tanking. What you’re talking about is encounter design though, rather than class design, so it’s a different thing altogether.
That being said, while I think that a lot of the fights are designed to make you move around and pay attention to what’s happening around you, I also think there is still room for improvement. The question is, do we really want the DPS role to be as intense a process as taking or healing? I know that when I go back to my mage after a couple of weeks of healing or tanking on my druid, I am sure glad that the “real” stress is else’s problem… I just stand back and press a couple of buttons, it’s such a relief!
Hmm, how about Blizzard themselves, and how they’ve changed since WotLK?
Their attitude towards add ons, and removing the iPhone apps (even the free ones!)
I’m just interested as to see what you think about how they appear to be making things difficult for the Add On community with rules, yet they hit out with half assed add ons themselves (see: equipment manager of 3.1.2).
=]
Great blog post though.
Heh, that would be a completely different topic for a completely separate blog post…
While I agree with most said in this blog post, I have a comment on the profession benefits. Yes, they are awesome, and a cool incentive to level professions. However, I have one gripe with the whole system.
Let us first establish a few things. The average profession benefit is easily found by looking at ring enchants. +19 SP pr ring, times 2 = 38 SP. This applies to both the bonus on LW bracer enchant, scribe’s shoulder enchants, (in a perfect world) tailor’s cloak enchants and the JC-only gems (at least after the incoming nerf, making them no longer prismatic) and the added benefit of flasks (along with double duration, but that is merely a convenient, ala tailors getting BoP versions of best leg enchants for only 3).
While I respect Blizz’ design choice, that gathering professions MUST have lower benefits (32 crit rating, for most casters worth less than 38 SP, or 700 health, which is useful for all classes, esp tanks, but doesn’t compare).
Herbalism? Well, they have an extremely weak, self-only HoT on a semi-long CD, rarely worth the effort to use.
What irks me isn’t only that we have such a weak benefit, but also that we used a have a competitive benefit, in the form of this:
Fire Seed
Requires Herbalism (325)
Use: Makes you vulnerable to magic, but increases your spell power by 200 for 10 sec. (1 Min Cooldown)
Averages to 33 SP, which is better than the skinning bonus, with the drawback of +10% magic dmg taken, and having to farm for them, being consumable and all. A fair tradeoff.
Now, you may have never heard of this effect, and for a good reason. It never made it past Beta. A true pity, as with this effect, herbalism would be in line with other profession benefits. Too bad it didn’t, since now Herbalism is the black sheep profession, with an incredibly weak bonus.
Just wanted to provide (semi)-related commentary, and get it off my chest.
I love being self sufficient with herbs as an herbalist, I just wish blizz would take herbalists a bit more serious. I love it, and though I am a hardcore raider, I will likely never change my choice of profession.
You are forgetting one thing in your argument though: gathering professions will give you the benefit of being moneymakers, whereas gathering professions will be a terrible money hog (at least until you get to max level, which can take a lot of time and money to achieve). I know it has little to do with actual gameplay in the end, but it has to be taken into account.
That being said, I do agree that there is room for improvement for the gathering professions. And to be fair, they have improved a lot over time: in BC we got the “mining” of some mobs along with buffs for picking some flowers for example, and now we got the small bonuses to stats in WotLK. I agree that they are far from essential, but they denote of an intent to make these professions more attractive. Maybe something even better will come along in the next expansion?
So far, I’m sharing the arguments and thoughts of previous posters. To sum up my feelings about this expansion (“WotlK”), I would say that Blizzard injected more consistency into the game (background through quests and phasing, class balance, spec. consistency, procs., crafting, PvP, 5-man and up, etc.).
Whenever I’m logging in to play for a while, I’m really feeling that I have much more opportunities to enjoy myself (ex. Dual Spec.) or at least some stuff are more accessible than before. But still, hardcore players have always at some extend very nice challenges to balance with this Arcade/Action aspect of the game and make their experience a bit more “spicy”.
Balancing a game for as much playing style as individuals is quite a hard work, although, to me, Blizzard as until now managed to produce assets for everyone.
I’m confident for the next expansion that Blizzard is gonna bring our game experience up to an other level on every aspects of the game.