Comments on Druid (Resto/Balance) Preview
Restoration:
First, the topics I've seen get a lot of attention in the main preview thread.
1) Removal (essentially) of Tree form. This was a foregone conclusion, and is a good decision. The form currently serves no purpose whatsoever. There's not even anything more to say, actually. From a mechanics perspective, Tree form was irrelevant--even GC's claimed reason that it represented a large tradeoff was a bit of a stretch, since healers rarely DPS in any serious situation anyway. But since the other 3 Druid roles have their own forms, it's completely unnecessary to add a form for the healing role when the basic caster form is simply sitting there waiting to be used by someone. To be honest, my only question is why they're leaving the Moonkin form in the game.
2) No new healing spell. There are two issues here. On the one hand, we didn't need a new main-use healing spell--GC has again explained this nicely a few times. Healing Touch, Tranquility, and to a large extent Lifebloom have been sitting completely dormant for an entire expansion, and any new healing functionality they wish to add can be incorporated into any of them. We have a large number of spells, and if they're all given an interesting use, then we can be happy.
On the other hand, the preview says nothing about how our existing spells are changing to accomplish this. Other classes got to see the previews of their new spells. So while it's fine that our "new" spells are really our old spells, some discussion of what changes they believe will achieve this vision of how the class should work would have been nice.
Some other topics I want to add:
3) No qualitatively new cooldown or utility spell. Even though I agree we didn't need a new standard-use heal, the lack of any new button to press, even in the form of a cooldown or utility spell, is a bit sad. Nobody forced Blizzard to give each class exactly three new base spells in the expansion at levels 81, 83, and 85. Druids uniquely have four roles, and four new spells would have been entirely reasonable. It shouldn't be forgotten that "what new button will I get to press" is by far the most exciting thing that people are looking forward to in a preview like this--sound mechanical changes just don't get people abuzz in the same way. Surely all the Blizzard folks have taken to heart Rob Pardo's GDC speech re: "make everything overpowered." Everyone else is getting fun new stuff that makes them feel overpowered compared to what they have currently, and it's lame being left out.
That said, I shouldn't forget that a new cooldown was announced: Tree form. But similar to above comment on healing spells, the complete lack of information on what it might do somewhat undermines the payoff of the class preview. I think everyone's afraid that it's just going to be +X% healing for Y seconds, which would not be satisfying. That mechanic just isn't as compelling for healers as it is for DPS. If, on the other hand, it's something as solid as Spiritwalker's Grace for Shaman (which is possibly the best idea unveiled yet across all classes), then it will very nicely fill the major gap in what we've seen thus far. At the very least, a tank-saving cooldown of some variety is an easy solution, since it's a hole in the class's arsenal currently.
3) HoT's scaling with crit. This serves primarily to alleviate the persistent itemization difficulties that Resto and Balance had all through TBC. One of the main reasons that gear sharing never worked well was that crit was never at all desirable for Resto. This should make itemization a lot more convenient for everyone to deal with.
4) HoT's scaling with haste--there are a variety of potential scaling problems here, but I'll put the detailed discussion in the Moonkin section.
5) Deep Healing mastery--not bad at all. First things that jump at me are:
a) Given the new healing philosophy of "more time between 0% and 100%," HoT's were already looking to be very strong in Cataclysm (and more importantly, since the previews only contain high-level design ideas and not numerical balancing, they will feel very useful). This mastery will only help that.
b) Depending on how strong the effect is, the use of HoT's as a stabilizing force to prevent tank deaths will be more important again. This was a huge part of a Druid's importance in TBC, and was much less so in WLK due to the extremely weak Lifebloom. HoT ticks being very strong on low-HP tanks is unlikely to be unbalanced (since people are never going to intentionally let tanks reach low HP), and will allow HoT's to regain their prior use of letting tanks survive more damage until the next direct heal lands.
6) Efflorescence. The preview specifies that this will be part of Regrowth, so its success or failure depends entirely on how well Regrowth works out. But as I've complained about already, we don't know anything about what they're doing with our actual healing spells. It certainly has potential--random procs that simply cause more healing to appear somewhere in the raid fit very nicely with a HoT-based niche of healing (Trauma is a current good example). For a proactive healer, covering a raid in HoT's to help ameliorate future damage, passive, delayed heals work well with the style. Also, if it's something involving a new graphic effect, that will help alleviate the lack of "newness" for anything this spec is getting.
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Balance:
1) Wild Mushroom. Very hard to predict the impact of this. It's creative, which is a big plus for a preview like this (beta provides ample time for balancing later on). There are obvious PvP implications, but for PvE, its niche might be narrow. "No cooldown" is bit of a curiosity--it means the damage per cast cannot be very high. But I don't think the main value of the spell is intended to be the "trap" effect either, because the 4 second delay means that enemies can dodge it easily in PvP. Basically, it looks neat, but at the moment we can only speculate about what it's actually for.
2) Eclipse. The big one, obviously. The devil's in the mathematical details. Unlike the Resto stuff, here I wouldn't even have expected any more real detail until we can experiment firsthand in the beta. It has potential (I've been using that phrase a lot today), but there are many pitfalls. Depending on the exact mathematical behavior, the Eclipse system could wind up overly stable (optimal to alternate Wrath and Starfire and keep the meter as close as possible to a certain point) or overly unstable (optimal to swing all the way to one end). Neither of these options is overly disastrous, but they would miss out on the potential to add something truly interesting.
Specially, with this mechanic and some others (Mana Adept, notably) Blizzard is trying hard for actual decisionmaking in DPS play, which has been a rarity in WoW overall thus far. On a certain level, it's not actually possible--in a Patchwerk DPS situation, no matter what Blizzard throws at us, someone in the community will solve the math problem, and then everyone either 1) follows their guide, or 2) is a bad player. If the truth of the prior statement changes in Cataclysm for any class, I will eat my hat. But in situations that are not Patchwerk DPS, a class with more moving parts allows for more of a skill gap. No guide can cover every situation, and the continuous Eclipse slider could give players an opportunity to exercise better or worse judgment, based on their sense of how much damage various spells do, the current Eclipse state, and the upcoming events of the fight. The ability to trade present damage for future damage by pushing the slider around is especially interesting in this regard.
But mark my words, without a competent mathematician reviewing exactly how the Eclipse slider behaves, we're going to wind up alternating Starfire-Wrath-Starfire-Wrath-repeat as our only usage.
3) DoT's scaling with haste. Specifically, number of ticks scaling with haste. I want to emphasize this in my comments today because of the potential pitfalls.
a) Coarse scaling of haste will be quadratic. DoT's already benefit from haste through cast time (or GCD) reduction. So my first question when I see that haste will increase the number of ticks per cast is "what problem is this trying to solve?" If haste both reduces the cast time and increases the number of ticks, DoT's are going to double-dip. Damage per execution time will increase like the square of haste.
The poor (or nonexistent) scaling of DoT's with haste in WLK was only because we've been GCD-capped ever since the Nature's Grace change in the middle of the expansion. But there are so many reasons that allowing a class to hit the 1s GCD limit with easily-available gear is bad that I can only assume Blizzard is not designing it in intentionally for Cataclysm.
b) Fine scaling of haste will be stairstepped. Since the benefit of haste will affect DoT's only when they reach a new integral number of ticks, haste will have a number of annoying breakpoints. Now, there are some solutions to this, such as:
i) Add a partial tick at the end of the DoT duration which is proportional to the leftover time since the final normal tick, or
ii) Allow a DoT cast to extend the duration beyond the default duration. Meaning, say Moonfire is 15s and I refresh with 1s left, the duration will bump to 16s instead of 15s. Obviously this would need a limit to prevent extending it indefinitely, but that can be easily done.
But I'm not going to be comfortable with this until they mention exactly how it's going to work, since these subtle mathematical problems sometimes slip through the cracks for a long time, and I'd rather not have bad scaling behavior baked in from the start of the expansion if it can be avoided.
Just to ward off the people saying "Blizzard posted in the Warlock preview that DoT's will no longer clip," realize that that doesn't actually solve the problem. Say Moonfire is 15s, ticking every 3s. Two non-overlapping casts give 10 ticks. Two casts clipped under the current system give only 9 ticks. And two cast clipped in a refresh-based system will still only give 9 ticks (if you cast at 0, and refresh at 14, yes you still get a tick at 15, but then the DoT expires at 29 before the 10th tick). The total loss is the same.
Finally, I did notice that the Druid preview only specifies "HoT's" in regards to haste, which is odd since other classes' previews said "DoT's and HoT's." I thought maybe that was an oversight, but if not, everything I've said still applies to Resto HoT's, and perhaps more importantly, to other classes' DoT's.
First, the topics I've seen get a lot of attention in the main preview thread.
1) Removal (essentially) of Tree form. This was a foregone conclusion, and is a good decision. The form currently serves no purpose whatsoever. There's not even anything more to say, actually. From a mechanics perspective, Tree form was irrelevant--even GC's claimed reason that it represented a large tradeoff was a bit of a stretch, since healers rarely DPS in any serious situation anyway. But since the other 3 Druid roles have their own forms, it's completely unnecessary to add a form for the healing role when the basic caster form is simply sitting there waiting to be used by someone. To be honest, my only question is why they're leaving the Moonkin form in the game.
2) No new healing spell. There are two issues here. On the one hand, we didn't need a new main-use healing spell--GC has again explained this nicely a few times. Healing Touch, Tranquility, and to a large extent Lifebloom have been sitting completely dormant for an entire expansion, and any new healing functionality they wish to add can be incorporated into any of them. We have a large number of spells, and if they're all given an interesting use, then we can be happy.
On the other hand, the preview says nothing about how our existing spells are changing to accomplish this. Other classes got to see the previews of their new spells. So while it's fine that our "new" spells are really our old spells, some discussion of what changes they believe will achieve this vision of how the class should work would have been nice.
Some other topics I want to add:
3) No qualitatively new cooldown or utility spell. Even though I agree we didn't need a new standard-use heal, the lack of any new button to press, even in the form of a cooldown or utility spell, is a bit sad. Nobody forced Blizzard to give each class exactly three new base spells in the expansion at levels 81, 83, and 85. Druids uniquely have four roles, and four new spells would have been entirely reasonable. It shouldn't be forgotten that "what new button will I get to press" is by far the most exciting thing that people are looking forward to in a preview like this--sound mechanical changes just don't get people abuzz in the same way. Surely all the Blizzard folks have taken to heart Rob Pardo's GDC speech re: "make everything overpowered." Everyone else is getting fun new stuff that makes them feel overpowered compared to what they have currently, and it's lame being left out.
That said, I shouldn't forget that a new cooldown was announced: Tree form. But similar to above comment on healing spells, the complete lack of information on what it might do somewhat undermines the payoff of the class preview. I think everyone's afraid that it's just going to be +X% healing for Y seconds, which would not be satisfying. That mechanic just isn't as compelling for healers as it is for DPS. If, on the other hand, it's something as solid as Spiritwalker's Grace for Shaman (which is possibly the best idea unveiled yet across all classes), then it will very nicely fill the major gap in what we've seen thus far. At the very least, a tank-saving cooldown of some variety is an easy solution, since it's a hole in the class's arsenal currently.
3) HoT's scaling with crit. This serves primarily to alleviate the persistent itemization difficulties that Resto and Balance had all through TBC. One of the main reasons that gear sharing never worked well was that crit was never at all desirable for Resto. This should make itemization a lot more convenient for everyone to deal with.
4) HoT's scaling with haste--there are a variety of potential scaling problems here, but I'll put the detailed discussion in the Moonkin section.
5) Deep Healing mastery--not bad at all. First things that jump at me are:
a) Given the new healing philosophy of "more time between 0% and 100%," HoT's were already looking to be very strong in Cataclysm (and more importantly, since the previews only contain high-level design ideas and not numerical balancing, they will feel very useful). This mastery will only help that.
b) Depending on how strong the effect is, the use of HoT's as a stabilizing force to prevent tank deaths will be more important again. This was a huge part of a Druid's importance in TBC, and was much less so in WLK due to the extremely weak Lifebloom. HoT ticks being very strong on low-HP tanks is unlikely to be unbalanced (since people are never going to intentionally let tanks reach low HP), and will allow HoT's to regain their prior use of letting tanks survive more damage until the next direct heal lands.
6) Efflorescence. The preview specifies that this will be part of Regrowth, so its success or failure depends entirely on how well Regrowth works out. But as I've complained about already, we don't know anything about what they're doing with our actual healing spells. It certainly has potential--random procs that simply cause more healing to appear somewhere in the raid fit very nicely with a HoT-based niche of healing (Trauma is a current good example). For a proactive healer, covering a raid in HoT's to help ameliorate future damage, passive, delayed heals work well with the style. Also, if it's something involving a new graphic effect, that will help alleviate the lack of "newness" for anything this spec is getting.
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Balance:
1) Wild Mushroom. Very hard to predict the impact of this. It's creative, which is a big plus for a preview like this (beta provides ample time for balancing later on). There are obvious PvP implications, but for PvE, its niche might be narrow. "No cooldown" is bit of a curiosity--it means the damage per cast cannot be very high. But I don't think the main value of the spell is intended to be the "trap" effect either, because the 4 second delay means that enemies can dodge it easily in PvP. Basically, it looks neat, but at the moment we can only speculate about what it's actually for.
2) Eclipse. The big one, obviously. The devil's in the mathematical details. Unlike the Resto stuff, here I wouldn't even have expected any more real detail until we can experiment firsthand in the beta. It has potential (I've been using that phrase a lot today), but there are many pitfalls. Depending on the exact mathematical behavior, the Eclipse system could wind up overly stable (optimal to alternate Wrath and Starfire and keep the meter as close as possible to a certain point) or overly unstable (optimal to swing all the way to one end). Neither of these options is overly disastrous, but they would miss out on the potential to add something truly interesting.
Specially, with this mechanic and some others (Mana Adept, notably) Blizzard is trying hard for actual decisionmaking in DPS play, which has been a rarity in WoW overall thus far. On a certain level, it's not actually possible--in a Patchwerk DPS situation, no matter what Blizzard throws at us, someone in the community will solve the math problem, and then everyone either 1) follows their guide, or 2) is a bad player. If the truth of the prior statement changes in Cataclysm for any class, I will eat my hat. But in situations that are not Patchwerk DPS, a class with more moving parts allows for more of a skill gap. No guide can cover every situation, and the continuous Eclipse slider could give players an opportunity to exercise better or worse judgment, based on their sense of how much damage various spells do, the current Eclipse state, and the upcoming events of the fight. The ability to trade present damage for future damage by pushing the slider around is especially interesting in this regard.
But mark my words, without a competent mathematician reviewing exactly how the Eclipse slider behaves, we're going to wind up alternating Starfire-Wrath-Starfire-Wrath-repeat as our only usage.
3) DoT's scaling with haste. Specifically, number of ticks scaling with haste. I want to emphasize this in my comments today because of the potential pitfalls.
a) Coarse scaling of haste will be quadratic. DoT's already benefit from haste through cast time (or GCD) reduction. So my first question when I see that haste will increase the number of ticks per cast is "what problem is this trying to solve?" If haste both reduces the cast time and increases the number of ticks, DoT's are going to double-dip. Damage per execution time will increase like the square of haste.
The poor (or nonexistent) scaling of DoT's with haste in WLK was only because we've been GCD-capped ever since the Nature's Grace change in the middle of the expansion. But there are so many reasons that allowing a class to hit the 1s GCD limit with easily-available gear is bad that I can only assume Blizzard is not designing it in intentionally for Cataclysm.
b) Fine scaling of haste will be stairstepped. Since the benefit of haste will affect DoT's only when they reach a new integral number of ticks, haste will have a number of annoying breakpoints. Now, there are some solutions to this, such as:
i) Add a partial tick at the end of the DoT duration which is proportional to the leftover time since the final normal tick, or
ii) Allow a DoT cast to extend the duration beyond the default duration. Meaning, say Moonfire is 15s and I refresh with 1s left, the duration will bump to 16s instead of 15s. Obviously this would need a limit to prevent extending it indefinitely, but that can be easily done.
But I'm not going to be comfortable with this until they mention exactly how it's going to work, since these subtle mathematical problems sometimes slip through the cracks for a long time, and I'd rather not have bad scaling behavior baked in from the start of the expansion if it can be avoided.
Just to ward off the people saying "Blizzard posted in the Warlock preview that DoT's will no longer clip," realize that that doesn't actually solve the problem. Say Moonfire is 15s, ticking every 3s. Two non-overlapping casts give 10 ticks. Two casts clipped under the current system give only 9 ticks. And two cast clipped in a refresh-based system will still only give 9 ticks (if you cast at 0, and refresh at 14, yes you still get a tick at 15, but then the DoT expires at 29 before the 10th tick). The total loss is the same.
Finally, I did notice that the Druid preview only specifies "HoT's" in regards to haste, which is odd since other classes' previews said "DoT's and HoT's." I thought maybe that was an oversight, but if not, everything I've said still applies to Resto HoT's, and perhaps more importantly, to other classes' DoT's.
Total Comments 10
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If they add the finishing tick for D/HoT haste scaling, it will simply be a matter of mana-efficiency vs. throughput that would be our concern. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to make it wrong, but this seems like a fairly simple way of doing it right.
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Eclipse:
It may be that the meter can go to +50% Arcane, but as you do more casts (of either type) with the meter on the arcane side, that limit starts to shrink. You'll have to spend some time on the +Nature side to relax the +Arcane restriction. Code:
+Arcane XXAA|A0NNNNN +Nature X = place the meter can't go right now. | = current meter position. 0 = neutral meter position This is all just speculation. There are plenty of ways to make you want to chain nature for a while, and then arcane for a while. The current Eclipse is a "tell me what nuke to cast" indication. With an analog meter, the indication won't be quite so binary, but you'll still want to earn a big buff and then take advantage of it. |
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Quadratic DoT scaling:
Not OP for Balance. For a single-target fight, I can still only cast one IS every 14s. The damage it does goes up linearly with Haste. Sure its DPET will get better and better compared to Wrath. Imagine that tomorrow they changed IS so that it was off the GCD, but had a 1s CD. That would boost Moonkin DPS on Patchwerk by less than 10%. That means that for a PW fight, the impact of the quadratic scaling is fairly minor, as far as our overall rotation goes. Suppose they restore the SF glyph to its original behavior (MF stays up forever). That means a single MF cast can do a ton of damage in a five minute fight, but our overall DPS would still only go up by 5%. When there are lots of targets (this mainly means Resto 5x1) the quadratic scaling would really be felt. However blizzard claims that healers will usually be mana limited, rather than GCD limited. If they get that right, the quadratic effect is somewhat muted. However, getting that right will be extremely difficult. |
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A very good read.
Nature's Torrent seems like it could be a very interesting spell. I get the impression it'll be a Lava Blast like spell, cooldown based but a big burst of damage with the added effect that it'll also push our Eclipse more than other spells. I can see it being easily used to either consume a "fully charged" Eclipse (for lack of a better explanation) or to maximize our Eclipse slider. Also, I get the impression that the further you move toward one end of the spectrum, the higher the damage will go. For instance, I don't think the buffs will of the nature 5, 10, 15, 20, etc. I think it will have to be exponential, otherwise what's really the point of fully maximizing your Eclipse slider? Something more like 5, 10, 20, 40, etc. Maybe not quite that extreme, but it illustrates the idea at least. |
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Quote:
And two cast clipped in a refresh-based system will still only give 9 ticks (if you cast at 0, and refresh at 14, yes you still get a tick at 15, but then the DoT expires at 29 before the 10th tick). The total loss is the same.
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Quote:
Quote:
And two cast clipped in a refresh-based system will still only give 9 ticks (if you cast at 0, and refresh at 14, yes you still get a tick at 15, but then the DoT expires at 29 before the 10th tick). The total loss is the same.
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Sure you accumulate a bit of error based on how close you refresh to it expiring and eventually you'll give up a whole tick. But it's definitely not the same as clipping under the current system.
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DoT's: you're right, it's not as bad as present clipping, since you lose only a partial tick per clip instead of one tick each time. I was making a more qualitative point that you're still punished for recasting even slightly early. Maybe that bothers me too much? I think in the ideal world, DPS should not be reliant on very fine timing of your button presses--I've always been bothered by the way casters are sensitive to the timing with which you recast each subsequent spell all the way through a fight, for example. This is why I'm such a big fan of mechanics like Rogue Energy or the new DK Runes, which give a slight buffer so there's a short window to press each ability during which you suffer no loss. With DoT's, currently you're punished significantly if you refresh early and punished little if you refresh late. With the new system, you'll be punished slightly if you refresh early--you'll use more casts for the same damage over the course of the fight.
So I could definitely back down the complaint a little, although it's still imperfect. ------------ Quadratic scaling: The damage done by IS will increase linearly over the course of the fight, and some time will be freed up that lets you cast nukes more often (also linearly). I understand the complaint that maybe the latter effect wouldn't be strong enough by itself and would leave haste an underpowered stat. But there's no reason to assume that would happen--haste traditionally affects nukes very strongly, and even some minor scaling on DoT's could be quite balanced. And remember multi-target situations. The numbers can land where they may, of course, after everything is reworked for Cataclysm, but I'm generally skeptical of this explicitly nonlinear behavior since it threatens to significantly change the value of haste between earlier and later tiers, which makes balance more difficult overall. As you say, the problem is likely to be much more significant for Resto. ------------ Eclipse: There are definitely a variety of ways they could this, and I'm sure some would be very effective. I've not sat down with a bunch of various conjectures and theorycrafted them all out. I'm sure some designer is already doing that and I'll see where it's wound up when beta arrives. The danger with a strongly superlinear effect as you move the slider towards one end is that it will be optimal in every case to take it all the way to one end, because the benefit to one nuke will dominate the weakness of the other. This will simply result in the one Starfire-one Wrath alternation I described already, except that you'll do so at one extreme end of the scale. Basically, something has to be added which makes you do something besides hover at the "optimal" point on the meter as closely as possible at all times. We'll just have to see what they come up with. |
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For what it's worth, I totally agree that requiring precisely timed button presses isn't a great idea (particularly in a game where the can be a fair amount of latency). I'd much rather focus on proper in-the-moment decisionmaking. And yeah, doing (up to one tick's worth of?) dot extension seems like the optimal solution to me too.
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Deep healing mastery feels really weak to me, much more so than the same talent in the hands of shaman. Although more time between 100% and 0% will be very strong for hots, hots will tend to be focused on the 70-100% portion of that range since you won't let people sit very low on health to allow hots to tick but you will let them sit at 75%. It's not a baked in bonus, how useful it is determines how much use we can make of the mastery stat, so it has to be effective.
It's obviously not nearly as continuous as the deep healing talent will be, but glyph of rejuv basically does the same thing at a pretty good rate (50% more healing while missing 50% health) and it is underwhelming, even on a fight that favors rejuv heavily and people spend a lot of time between 100% and 0% like twins. |
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