Couldn't socketing work to resolve homogenized gear? When socketing was first made public, my thought was that we would have generic gear and differentiate it with socketing. Instead, the reverse became true; what you put in a socket is entirely predictable.
Consider instead if items were more generic - say, int, stam, spellpower, haste, crit, and sockets, stuff that both healers and dps can make some use of (nitpicks with that list aside, if you will). The sockets would then fill out the other needs. In other words, instead of taking your statistically flavoured item, and socketing in a generic way, you take the generic item and socket based on your class needs.
Two things that crossed my mind which could make socketing more interesting:
1) Sockets which have no associated colour, but if you insert a *red* gem use bonus A, a *blue* gem give bonus B... with the bonusses in question being more significant than the current bonusses, offering a significant chunk of itemisation towards a given spec.
2) Highly rare (in the commonality sense, not just meaning 'blue') unique-equipped BoP gems (from, for instance, JC perks or heroic instances) which offer the same bonusses as an existing gem but in a different colour, or even colourless.
Certainly socket bonusses aren't much of an incentive to be creative with socketing currently.
Correct. It's much easier, straightforward, and fair to just increase the size of the ticks in some way.
Well, I think it's more intuitive to make the ticks come more frequently (it's haste!), which can be done without reducing the duration (by increasing the number of ticks per cast).
Know how resilience effects crits one way and DOTs another way? That's what gave me this idea. Imagine if the same amount of haste rating gave 10% haste for spells with a casting time, reduced the GCD by 10%, made HOTs and DOTs tick 5% faster without reducing their duration, and increased the mana cost of HOTs and DOTs by 10%.
The result is, for spells with real casting time, the raw throughput goes up by 10%, and the raw mana cost goes up by 10%, and you cast 10% as often, which is usually not a disadvantage for these kinds of spells. For HOTs and DOTs, the raw mana cost goes up by 10%, but your raw throughput only goes up by 5%, but you're not casting the spells any more often, since for many of these kinds of spells, more frequent casting would be a disadvantage. The percentages could be tweaked all around, I just picked these numbers as a starting point.
If implemented in a simple manner, there'd be a quantization effect, where a certain amount of haste would be a disadvantage until there was "room" for an extra tick. You could either add an additional fractional phantom tick at the end, or you could ignore it -- I'd be content to ignore it, but that might just be because my main HOT is Lifebloom...
If resilience can reduce the damage per tick on a DoT, haste could increase the damage per tick on a DoT. (or healing done from a HoT)
If there has to be some logical backing to why haste adds damage and not quicken the rate at which DoTs tick, let me see what I can pull out of my RP BS Bag
"The effects on haste for poisons, disease, curses, and other malignant effects does reduce the total time afflicted but instead hastens the debilitating effect of the contigen which in turn, increases the damage done to the victim at the regular intervals."
If resilience can reduce the damage per tick on a DoT, haste could increase the damage per tick on a DoT. (or healing done from a HoT)
If there has to be some logical backing to why haste adds damage and not quicken the rate at which DoTs tick, let me see what I can pull out of my RP BS Bag
"The effects on haste for poisons, disease, curses, and other malignant effects does reduce the total time afflicted but instead hastens the debilitating effect of the contigen which in turn, increases the damage done to the victim at the regular intervals."
Why does it have to be haste? Resilience is the anti-crit of PvP. It would stand to reason, then, that perhaps DoT damage would scale with crit. I know haste is the new "in stat" with Sunwell, but that doesn't mean it'll always be that way.
a lack of windfury might not be as big of an issue in WotLK as it has been in the past.
Unless these other weapon imbues also scale with gear, even the post-nerf white damage only windfury totem will continue to be the best enchant past a gear threshold. I'm a big proponent of everything scaling with gear, so hopefully they do address this to some extent.
We're talking design here, and it's bad design for any applicable stat to be useless to any spec within a gear set. Mages wear cloth and scale well with haste; affliction warlocks wear cloth so they should scale too-- maybe not quite as well, the specs aren't identical, but it should be a useful stat and not largely a waste of item budget. The alternative is to itemize separately which is what the devs are supposedly trying to avoid. And rightfully so.
Why does it have to be haste? Resilience is the anti-crit of PvP. It would stand to reason, then, that perhaps DoT damage would scale with crit. I know haste is the new "in stat" with Sunwell, but that doesn't mean it'll always be that way.
I'd like to see both, personally. Make the same crit rating that raises crit chance by 2% also increase HOT/DOT damage by 1%, and do the thing with haste rating that I proposed above, and juggling stats for HOT/DOT classes will become much more interesting than it is today.
I'd much rather both than either one individually, because for DD/DH spells, each helps and does something different. Crit increases output without increasing mana cost and without impacting spell rotations (ignoring procs), and haste increases output at an increased mana cost, and can impact spell rotations. So there's actual choices.
Really, I'd like every casting stat to have some impact for all casting. Different impacts, so different gear is optimal for different classes and specs, but it will be nice if no caster stat is wasted for anyone at all.
I'm not quite sure what to do with hit rating for heals, but I'd like to see it do something. Hit rating for damage prevents/mitigates wasted castings. Maybe hit rating for heals should do the same... perhaps it could refund a percentage of mana on overheals?
How could hit rating be worked into a healing benefit?
Mana recovery?
a) Recover %hit mana when a heal results in > X% over healing.
b) Healing spells cost %hit less mana to cast.
Preventative Healing?
a) Targets healed also receive a absorption bubble of %hit of the healed amount.
b) Heals will delay up to %hit/10 seconds if the target is at full health when the heal lands.
There are lots of ways to shoe horn in various stats into classes/specs to make sure every class wants every stat, but is that something that should the goal of an MMO?
Too much stress of making items that work for any user regardless of class, would remove a lot of choice. Granted people make bad choices all the time, but that's part of the game.
Those solutions are unintuitive, and I personally place a great deal of value on clearly understandable intuitive mechanics. I would avoid the problem by only placing hit rating on caster-oriented jewelry/trinkets/librams/etc rather than armor and itemizing these pieces separately for casters and healers. Same deal with spell penetration, but that's a PvP stat at the moment. You'll need to create separate caster and healer rings, but that's a far cry better than where we are now, with seven or eight different specs wanting different things.
Alternatively you could make heals resistable, as that would certainly be an intuitive mechanic. Call it "fizzling" or something. But... I think people would be upset.
It's trivial to think of ways for healing to scale with hit. It's not so easy to think of an intuitive way to do so. Adding misses (resists) to heals would be intuitive, but that's a pretty big change, even for this crazy thread.
I personally always assumed the reason why crit didn't work with HoT and DoT was technical.
If I remember right, each individual tick of SWP can be resisted or partially resisted (I don't remember if this STILL happens or if this was something from the past), so why couldn't each individual tick crit?
Wouldn't the correct solution for DoTs and Haste be to reduce the duration of the DoT while keeping the same number of ticks (thus increasing the frequency of ticks)?
If you think of a DoT as a direct damage spell with a cooldown, haste effectively increases the cooldown of the spell, if you measure time in GCDs. Thus, to keep the spell equal, you'd want to reduce the cooldown such that it takes the same number of GCDs with haste and without haste.
This increases DPS from your DoTs, because you cast them for full effect more often, while also increasing the mana-per-second spent on them, which is the second characteristic of spell haste.
No, it wouldn't be quite the correct solution, because DoTs are debuffs in addition to damage and shortening the duration of a debuff is undesirable. For most of the more interesting DoTs the debuff portion is non-trivial. For example, I would be pissed that haste starting making my UA give strictly inferior dispel protection because, situationally, it's way more important than the damage, and conversely other warlocks would hate it if their CoT made my UA give dispel protection for 30 seconds instead of 18.
The one instance where you want the DoT to run as long as you can (UA), is not worth limiting scaling of DoTs.
That said, I think haste not affecting DoTs is more for PvP than PvE (many people complained when 3 DoTs would kill anyone without heals or dispels in WoW 2.0).
No, it wouldn't be quite the correct solution, because DoTs are debuffs in addition to damage and shortening the duration of a debuff is undesirable. For most of the more interesting DoTs the debuff portion is non-trivial. For example, I would be pissed that haste starting making my UA give strictly inferior dispel protection because, situationally, it's way more important than the damage, and conversely other warlocks would hate it if their CoT made my UA give dispel protection for 30 seconds instead of 18.
Hmm. You're right about that. It would work if you split UA into two parts: a damage component (who's duration decreased with haste), and a debuff component (who's duration was static). But that causes its own issues, especially as UA is designed to guard against dispel.
There are two separate things people seem to be suggesting that we are trying to do here. Are we:
- Aiming for gear homogenization? If so, we can throw out that anything needs to be "intuitive" - obviously it's easy to justify it. If this is our goal, do we want complete homogenization (all stats benefit all classes equally - the best healer gear is the best DoTer gear is the best nuker gear) or do we merely want all stats to be useful in some fashion (so healer gear can be used as DoTer gear which can be used as nuker gear, but each class/role/spec gets more out of certain stats and so will have a different "best" item). If the objective is the latter, I don't see any reason to change haste - it's already a good stat for DoT classes. The far bigger outlier is crit, which is near-useless for the DoT classes (and will still be marginal even with the shadow priest changes).
- Aiming for intuitiveness? If so, we should not be talking about what can be explained, but rather about what explanation most resembles common sense.
The one instance where you want the DoT to run as long as you can (UA), is not worth limiting scaling of DoTs.
It isn't simply one instance though. There are a fairly large host of DoT's that would lose from compression (Insect Swarm, Deep Wounds for keeping up Blood Frenzy, etc).
I'm not saying its a bad idea, but it is something to weigh.
You cannot have DOT's damage increase via haste. You will break pvp in horrible ways. I'm sure someone else can explain why far better than I could, but it has to do with making CC chains on healers that much more effective. The faster a DOT does its damage, the less time a healer has to get off a heal......and thus the CC chain on them gains in power.
I can see how in PVE it would be better for them to scale in the manner being discussed however. Maybe they can set up so that it only scales in such a manner for PVE.
. The faster a DOT does its damage, the less time a healer has to get off a heal......and thus the CC chain on them gains in power.
Possibly I'm missing something here but how is this any different to the way haste effects direct damage spells? I'm not of the camp that feels DOTs neccessarily need to scale as well as other abilities with haste but given the whole point of haste is to do more in less time any argument about amount done during CC time surely applies to the haste stat itself not how it affects a subset of skills?
You cannot have DOT's damage increase via haste. You will break pvp in horrible ways. I'm sure someone else can explain why far better than I could, but it has to do with making CC chains on healers that much more effective. The faster a DOT does its damage, the less time a healer has to get off a heal......and thus the CC chain on them gains in power.
Wouldn't the same argument be equally true for any form of damage increasing effects? Haste isn't that great in most PvP situations, especially not when it comes to damage spells because haste does not grant mana efficiency. Haste is great for utility spells because those gain nothing from +damage and +crit (and only in very limited numbers from +hit) but arguably not good enough to warrant investing given other options.
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Generally speaking the problem with scaling is that the damage formula is multiplicative. You've got hit/crit, +spell power and haste. Each point of hit/crit makes spell power and haste valuable, each point of spell power makes hit/crit and haste more valuable. If one spec scales (properly) with only a limited subset of those stats, then that class will fall behind (even if they start higher). Such has been the case of shadow priests who at Gruul level could lead DPS and are now almost invariably at the bottom. Due to the way spell hit/crit works, those two don't multiply each other generally.
Dot-heavy classes need some method to scale with a stat other than spell power. It doesn't mean the scaling has to be implemented directly on the dots though or that existing hit/crit/haste mechanics need any signficant overhaul. You could change Amplify Curse to Amplify Affliction (affects any curse or affliction dot) and have the cooldown reset upon a critical hit.
1% crit = .5% increase to DoT tick damage. That's all that really needs to happen for the scaling to be fixed and to make all caster gear at least moderately useful.
I personally always assumed the reason why crit didn't work with HoT and DoT was technical.
The Nelf Priest racial DoT already gains benefit from Haste. There's no technical reason why they can't make the others do it. That being said, is that what *need* to happen? The larger problem lies with crit.
06/16/08, 2:32 PM
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