Random thoughts on the progression of complexity since vanilla wow.

It's always a bit interesting to take a long break from WoW. When you come back, you have a very different perspective on everything.

Until recently, I've played pretty consistently since release. So my understanding of the game grew as the game itself grew in complexity.



My first character was a priest, and playing in Vanilla, the game was very much about getting to level 60, affording an epic ground mount, maybe getting some cool crafted gear. I also wanted to finish all of those dungeon quests that were around there. Money was reasonably hard to come by, and repairs from my middling guild raiding and learning MC kept me reasonably poor.

I learned I could supplement my income by doing things like Live Strat for Righteous Orbs, or Dire Maul runs. Strat live was mostly done in 10-man groups, so it took some wrangling to find friends willing to do it in smaller, more profitable groups.

Healing itself was pretty basic. My spec hardly mattered, and I raided, quested, and did dungeons in Shadow spec, though as a priest I was always healing. My healing in Vanilla consisted of Flash Heal when someone took damage. Shields were to be avoided in general because they weren't incredible efficient, and denied rage generation. I did use renew to some extent, but in general, flash heal when bar goes down. When raiding it was exclusively flash heal.

I was in one of those "special" guilds whose raid leader linked healing meters (before overhealing was taken into account) every 15 minutes. So I used Emergency Monitor, Clique, and spammed the lowest health person in the raid until I could click my drink.

By the time blackwing lair was released and we started in there, the e-mon healing had stopped. The guild was terrible still, and had to do a kiting strat and had serious trouble with razorgore. I'm terribly surprised we ever managed to kill Vaelestrasz, but we did. We killed broodlord, and then the drakes gave us serious problems. Still though, as a priest, at that point, the mechanics I needed to know were: "Heal tank with flash heal. Get good gear (you didn't have a ton of choice, or mistakes to make with gear.) Drink quickly after battles."

I had an incident with the raid leader during the firemaw encounter because he was replacing, or yelling at people in the raid who didn't have their onyxia scale cloaks, as he said that flame buffet would put a dot on them and kill them if they didn't. I (had my cloak but) argued that only the tanks really needed them, as it was only the breath that triggered shadow flame. He started yelling at me one final time and I logged out in BWL, not to log back in to that character for a good 8 months.

Prior to that, I had been leveling an alliance paladin up on a server that my co-worker played on. Leveling the paladin was a matter of clicking seal of command and blessing of might every 5 minutes, autoattacking, and pushing judgment every 8 seconds. Upon getting to level 60, and joining his guild they were just starting BWL themselves, but were much less retarded. Razorgore went down using a suppression strat, Vael was a clean kill, drakes went down with ease, Chromaggus took a little while, but wasn't bad, and then we got Nefarian after a reasonably short time.

As a paladin, I was back to healing. This time however, it was different. Bless everyone every 5 minutes (more realistically before the bosses) and then flash heal on the tank. In fact, flash heal was really the only thing I could or had to do, unless I clicked decursive.

1.9 hit, Paladins got messed with a bit, but we got given 15 minute blessings, and our cleanse took a huge nerf. All in all though, except not having to bless so much, nothing changed there. AQ opened, and we started in on that. Prophet went down without much change in my play, I got to be a bit proactive in stunning MC targets, but otherwise flash healorama. We skipped the bugs, and went to Sartura, which was again pretty much flash heal time, however, this fight got me to judge light proactively and was the first fight that I had to be keenly aware of my positioning. Fankriss, I got to be an add tank for, so that was pretty simple as well, but even when the adds were covered by someone else, it was simply flash heal. Huhuran saw me as a soaker as I was one of the more proactive NR gatherers in my group, but again, simply FoL spam, except possibly during the enrage when I might have ranked up to HL. Twin Emperors was the first time my healing was actually challenged. The damage output on that fight, especially when you got some big hits with unbalancing strike, along with the duration made it tricky. There I learned to maximize my healing time while still being aware of my surroundings (like blizzards and bomb bugs). Unlike Sartura, where you could sacrifice healing to just stay alive and away, with twin emps, you had to stay alive, and as soon as you were safe, you needed to immediately focus again.

After Twin Emps, because of our short raid schedule, we were at sort of the end of the raid week by the time we got them down, and people were pretty tired by the time it was time to go do C'thun trash. Because of the severe annoyance of the c'thun trash, and the time it took to clear the content we were doing, people splintered into different camps. Some wanted to drop BWL and the occasional MC we ran for more time in AQ. Some people wanted to increase the raid schedule to do it all. Some people wanted to just do what we could, and some people were just burning out and wanted to stop doing anything. We started losing attendance and only just saw C'thun, though weren't able to make an attempt on him as we couldn't fill a raid. Naxx came, and we were able to get a raid cobbled together, but made no great progress there, beating Anub and I think we might have got Faerlina, but if we did, it was only once or twice.

Regardless, the entirety of Vanilla, in terms of healing, as a priest, I used flash heal, renew didn't stack and wasn't so great, so it was flash heal, or downranked greater heal which I used sometimes too during longer fights. As a paladin it was flash of light. Just Flash of Light. Being that it's the more efficient spell as well as the fastest and given the HP pools around, using a big heal just meant overhealing and wasting mana.

Burning Crusade hit and I wavered between all 3 specs occasionally, but typically Protection and Holy. In Vanilla I did actually tank 5-man dungeons and enjoyed it. The biggest change to Paladin healing style at that time was Illumination coupled with new itemization style. Now it was very easy for Paladins to get spell crit gear when before you only really got spell crit from Intellect. This, combined with the new Light's Grace talent, Divine Illumination, and ease of acquiring potions compared to vanilla meant ridiculous things for the paladin. Mostly that I could spam Holy Light for the entire duration of a fight, and I did.

So, eventually, in TBC, my healing style all the way through Sunwell was:

Put up Blessing of Light. Seal wisdom, judge wisdom, melee if possible. Chain cast Holy Light on my target, use Divine Illumination on cooldown, use Divine Favor on cooldown. Use mana potion on cooldown. Occasionally use Dark Rune on cooldown. Fights were trying to challenge my mana pool, but it was easier and safer to bruteforce them by using tools to go forever. However, that still meant a number of cooldowns to watch now that didn't exist previously. Also, there was an amount of downranking used on certain fights like Brutallus, because though you could keep up max rank HL spam for a long time, it wasn't infinite. Though, lower ranks could be.

Our guild changed dramatically at the end of TBC, the existing leaders stepped down, I was an officer during TBC but decided to leave the guild as I didn't want to end up raid leading.

In Wrath of the Lich King I spent a large portion of my time tanking, but eventually did end up Holy for all of the challenging content that I did. In Wrath the holy paradigm shifted again. While illumination was changed to a shadow of what it was in early TBC and potion cooldowns were stopped in combat, we were given Divine Plea which was really there for the non-healy specs, but was so broken that Holy got ridiculous use out of it.

Now, the general paladin healing system changed again to be more complex upon Wrath hitting.

- First there was Beacon, beacon required maintenance (reapplication every minute) and a decision on who to put it on. (Typically an easy decision, but sometimes it had to change. Pre-ToC it didn't count overheals, so if you are tank healing, you couldn't rely on it.) Also damage was high enough on hard modes that you had to choose a good time to spend the GCD to refresh it.

- Next there was Divine Plea. Generally you want to hit it every cooldown, however, the 50% healing penalty could cause problems if you used it during a period of high damage output, so you had to be cautious of that.

- Next there was Sacred Shield, again, this needed to be reapplied every 30 seconds. Post 3.2 it was occasionally useful to also keep the HoT up from FoL.

- Next, Seal of Wisdom was modified to proc when you judged. This combined with Judgements of the Pure, which increases spell haste meant you wanted to judge at every opportunity for mana.

- Next, while paladin mana could stretch pretty far, you couldn't always count on being able to spam HL exclusively for a long fight, and you didn't have the option of downranking like in TBC. So you had to include some Flash of Lights in the mix. However, for Light's Grace to work, you needed to remember to throw in a HL at least every 15 seconds, or risk waiting too long for your next HL.

- Next, Aura Mastery showed up and was very useful for a number of encounters as a mini tank cooldown. You needed to be aware of the situation and use it at an appropriate time, which also meant having the correct aura up before hand, which required some extra GCD wrangling and planning.

- Next, Divine Guardian showed up and was also extremely useful for damage mitigation as a mini cooldown for the tanks or the whole raid. Again, since you had to pre-shield, this had to be prepared for 3 seconds in advance, as well, it meant you had to save your shield and stay out of forebearance for the occasion. Due to the timing, you also kind of needed to make sure to have a quick way to cancel it in case lag hit as the duration of your shield is only half a second longer than the duration of the DG, accounting for the GCD.

- Next, Glyph of Holy light meant you wanted to focus as heavily as possible on HL, most of the time this was trivial as the melee clump up, take the most collateral damage, and are generally going to be your target, or around your target, however, to be effective, you need to be aware of the position of the player your'e healing in relation to the players around him.

There might be more than that that I'm forgetting, but that kind of proves my point.

I was able to keep up reasonably well because I wasn't just thrown into the game. These levels of complexity were sort of layered on over time.

Vanilla:

Basic: Heal using your healing spell.
Intermediate: Be aware of your position in the play area, and move out of bad things
Advanced: Be aware of your position, and move as little as possible to maximize healing throughput.

TBC:

Basic: Be aware of your position, move as little as possible and keep up healing.
Intermediate: Do all of the Basic things, but remember your mana cooldowns as often as you can.
Advanced: Do all of the intermediate things, but also use potions, keep up judgements and downrank when necessary.

Wrath:
Basic: Do all of the TBC intermediate things, and keep up judgements.
Intermediate: Do all of the Wrath Basic things, but also make sure to keep up Beacon, SS, JotP, LG, SS HoT, and melee when possible for mana.
Advanced. Do all of the Intermediate things, but also be keenly aware of how DP is going to affect you, plan your refreshes of SS, Beacon, Judgements as to not interrupt important healing events. Be aware of your allies' position in order to use HL glyph effectively.



So I stopped playing very much in February, which is about when I got my SC2 beta invite. But after a while I came back, and decided that since I didn't much feel like committing to raiding any more, I wouldn't mind playing my priest. So I leveled him up to the 70s and started trying to heal with him as holy. Having not bothered to read anything on priests, and not knowing much at all about their healing style, (except their raid healing style) I was a little behind. Likewise, a priest raid healing heals VERY differently than a priest in quest greens in a 5 man dungeon with an ADHD tank and drooling DPS. Looking at the talent tree, I think I was able to make some reasonably good decisions speccing him, considering I have played the damn game for 5 years of my life. After some testing and some groups where I was the point of failure, I actually became a reasonably good 5-man healer on the priest.

But the healing style of my WLK priest is so far removed from my Vanilla priest as well. If I were to try and get by with flash heal spam in my green gear, I'd OOM so fast it's ridiculous. The same would have happened if I just tried to use greater heal. I needed to quickly learn to make use of Surge of Light, take advantage of Inner Focus, keep up Serendipity, how to effectively use ProM, keep up Renew, and then otherwise avoid casting as much as possible to let mana regen.

While that is a more fun, and interactive way to play the priest than just hitting flash heal when the tank health goes down, it's also a lot more to learn. And if I were to tell people that's how I play my priest, they'd probably tell me it's not the right way. I'm sure it would be intuitive how to play if I'd been playing my priest the past 5 years.


My wife occasionally plays with me. When we play, I have to spec her talents for her. She's a very casual player, and to her, the talent system is more of a chore than anything else. Talents modify spells she doesn't have yet, the wording has been changed on a few of them that unless you know what they're talking about already, they don't make sense. The complexity of the default playstyle is far higher than it was when I was leveling up, which is great for people at the top of the game, but I don't expect my wife to necessarily use Elemental Mastery on cooldown while killing ogres, so it's difficult to explain to her why Elemental Oath could be useful.

She's got the basics that would have made her a great player in Vanilla. She shocks on cooldown, she otherwise lightning bolts, she will use chain lightning when there's 3 targets, but not so early as to steal aggro, she puts down totems, and keeps up water shield. She'll be fine probably when she gets Lava Burst, and the elemental rotation is, on the whole, pretty simple. But the complexity of doing things like tracking her flame shock debuff, managing her cooldowns, and choosing the right ability is going to get in the way of the basic skills like "moving out of bad things quickly, but then returning to dealing damage as soon as possible". For me, the moving out of bad things was all I had to worry about for an entire expansion raiding cycled, except for the one button I pressed.

And besides that, the spell book is full of shit. The shaman have a ton of totems still for instance. They range from completely worthless, to marginal, to essential. From their descriptions it's hard to know intuitively which is the best. Then there's a ton of irrelevant skills that are only useful for other specs. Then between that, there's the important skills, which may not necessarily be incredibly apparent amongst everything else.

I'm really happy about the changes that they're making to clean up the talent system and the spell book. I'm not in the cataclysm beta, so I'm not sure how it will end up, and I know lots of things are still up for changes. But I really think that a more directed system for new players is pretty necessary, or the game will have a hard time retaining new memberships. A game that focuses solely on it's existing player base is a game that's pretty doomed. TBC and Wrath really felt like they were simply additions to the game in that they were like "Ok, well, you continue to do what you were doing before, but now here's these new things." This rendered some old things irrelevant, and they just added to the confusion. While the Vanilla system wasn't necessary streamlined and optimized, it was at least straightforward. You're a mage? You are specced frost? To do damage you cast frost bolt. If there's a lot of guys, you use blizzard. If you want to get fancy, you can cast flame strike before you blizzard. That is simple and intuitive.

In other single player games, if you've got to do things in a certain order, you get some amount of training or warning for that. You might have a sort of tutorial period, where you go through a level with just lightning bolt. The next level you'll get Flame Shock and it's made strong enough that you want to use it over lightning bolt, but you can't always because of CDs. Next level there's a cutscene, and it introduces you to Lava Burst, and explains that it does great damage, but only after you flame shock. The next level introduces you to Chain Lightning, and then finally Thunderstorm. After that, the rest of the shit that the elemental shaman has to worry about could get cut completely, no other shocks, no shields, keep Hex, and Reincarnate and the Pet totems though. Totems, elemental mastery, trinkets etc. are annoying maintenance activities in my opinion, and add little value to gameplay. They reward attention to an extent, and that's good, but attention can be required and rewarded in other ways. Removing the necessity of minding those type of things could allow you to draw more attention to the game field. In-game queues are going to me intuitive anyways, and more fun to deal with.

MMO-champion posted today that the cataclysm beta client is starting to show power-auras. I'm not sure if I'm for or against that. On one hand, powerauras is a great way to keep you from staring at those little buffs. On the other, the fact that so much of your time as almost any class, is spent on buff/debuff maintenance, I think, is a problem. The fact that you're starting to layer graphics on top of the viewport in order to be able to play the game is a bad thing.

However, some of that is relevant. I mean, yes, it's more fun, as I stretch the elemental shaman example a little further, if you have a few things to be aware of. Keeping up a flame shock and Lava Bursting between lightning bolts is more interesting than plain lightning bolt. And yes, you want to be able to track your flame shock timer to do that. I think a better way to deal with that though, is to be more specific to the spec, instead of a general PA style system. They're already going this way with custom power types showing on the character frame. What I mean is something like this: Theoretical Elemental Shaman rotation goes Lava Burst if you Flame Shock is up and it's cooldown is up. Flame shock if flame shock is not up. Lightning bolt otherwise. Chain Lightning if there's multiple mobs.

Assuming that's how the rotation is going to stay for an expansion cycle, instead of showing a tiny debuff icon on the target frame, or popping up a persistent icon in the middle of the screen, how about modifying the target health bar and overhead health bar to suit this rotation for elemental shaman. For instance, when you flame shock, the bar turns red and is on fire. The fire in the bar shrinks to the left as the duration of the flame shock goes out. If flame shock is up and Lava Burst is off cooldown, perhaps the fire rages even harder or changes color. Now you've still got your tracking system, but the player can be watching the playfield, and the changes to the monsters health bar are noticeable enough that they don't have to be staring at it, or have a 3rd party timer to manage the cooldowns.

You could simplify the system still, but maintain some of that buffing, and even add different sort of strategic complexity. For instance, instead of placing totems, totems could be placed or strengthened by the spells you cast. Using the elemental shaman example, maybe every spell you cast slightly strengthens your totems, however, spells that are of their element strengthen them even more. If the totems are out of range, it will move them to you, maybe at a loss to power level. Assume a 1 second GCD for the time being. Assume each time you cast a spell it strengthens all of your totems by 10 points, and every second, your totem loses half it's points, to a minimum of 0 points. If you cast a spell corresponding to the element of the totem, it increases it by 30 points. If you are chain casting a spell, all of your totems will be at strength level 10 to 20. However, if you're chain casting Lightning bolt, maybe your air totem gets up to strength 30-60. A normal rotation will keep your fire totem and air totems levels higher. You could balance the effects of the empowered totems to fit the spec. You could likewise make it optimal for the totems to be at the level that they should be when you're using the optimal rotation. This would give the benefits of the totems, but remove the annoying part of placing them and moving. It would give you some control over them, like, I could super-power my air totem if the situation called for that, although that's typically not the best move. It would benefit the player who can avoid re-placing their totems, but barely punishes you when you absolutely have to, and it does so in such a way that it's unnoticeable. Plus it simply rewards you for having a strong, tight rotation instead of leaving blank space. A shaman with a good rotation is going to have more power from all of their totems.

I think that currently too much complexity is put into the game through abilities, timers and things that are only represented outside of the game. I hope that eventually more work is put into playing the game instead of the interface. I think I'm a fan of the healer who has to heal, and pay attention to the environment. I'm a fan of the healer whose "heal" job is not simply one button, but comes from a decision making process. However, I prefer if that decision making process is based on an engineered system, rather than quirks that are discovered in the system like downranking, and that the information that I need to make those informed decisions come from a game in such a way that I'm not forced to avoid looking at the environment to notice. And I'd really like to get rid of any button whose job is "push me every minute to every 5 minutes for a passive bonus".

I'm not aiming for a more simple or easy game. Just one that's more playable. It can often feel that you're not playing in the game, because you're so busy looking at addons monitoring your status. The complexity that adds is good, but the way it's presented means that you need to do research outside of the game to learn how to play it, and you need to watch things placed on top of the game world in order to know what to push at the right time. I think if you can modify the game so that those queues are available within the game-space instead of pasted on top, and your rotation is apparent, but not necessarily easy to master, I think the game would be in a better place.