The WotLK profession thread - Page 19

Ethelber · 08/05/08, 8:19 PM

I agree about the fact that the emphasis on raiding should be inside the raid instance, rather than outside. The change regarding "potion sickness" will basically mean that farming outside, and the sheer amount of materials required will be vastly reduced. It'll be interesting to see the economic hit that this will take on Alchemy.

Will it be more viable to shove all those herbs into Inscription? Rather than the ever-popular Alchemy. I'm curious to know what is in store for Alchemy; the Alchemist's Stones won't be half as attractive as they were, now we can't chain chug. I'm aware of the increased buff to potions/elixirs/(flasks?) you know, but what about those Haste/Destro Pots-type recipes that many alchemist's didn't know the recipe to, but still used.

I'm debating whether to lose Alchemy for Inscription, more information is needed from the beta servers before the decision is made, as I suspect many people will be thinking the same.

As to the question about the debuff working outside combat, it basically says something along the lines of "Cannot use another potion/elixir until you leave combat" so, no you can't get it out of combat.

Haphnet · 08/05/08, 8:21 PM

Originally Posted by Denogran

I guess I do find the debuff to be a weird fix, why not just extend the cooldown even further?

Perhaps we may see more "wave" mechanics a la Hyjal trash so the option would be there to take a potion during one wave and subsequently be able to drop combat and reset the debuff whereas a longer cooldown would still lock you out for X minutes.

Katria · 08/05/08, 8:46 PM

Originally Posted by Smurrf

Then why even have potions in raids to begin with? This is the question I'm asking myself.

This is the crux of the matter. Why have them? What purpose do they serve? Well, what purpose do any raid buffs serve? Elixirs/flasks, buff food, buff scrolls, weapon buffs, all of these are crap raiders farm mats and/or money for to buy. All of them give you more dps or survivability or improve your healing or otherwise give you an edge.

Pots do the same thing, just on a much shorter timeframe. They are essentially a short buff you can refresh every 2 minutes. And since raiders will use all available buffs to get an edge (see gathering world buffs and such insanity), raider will use them and encounters must be designed around them. So much like elixir stacking was nerfed, now chain-chugging is.

So now we get less of the potion buffs. And this, I think, is what Blizzard sees as the purpose of pots. And it makes some sense, actually. Raiders should have an assortment of pots, health, mana, dps, armor, etc. Then use the right pot for the right fight at the right time. Think the buff is too small/not worth it? Yay, you've just saved on farming time. Hopefully with the 1/fight mechanic, pots will be re-tuned to be made worthwhile. But then they become mandatory you say? You mean like any other temporary buff?

Since chain-chugging mana pots is out, Blizzard is free to play with the mana metagame without considering extra 100mp5, meaning casters can decide what pot to use instead of mindlessly chugging mana pots since the game design will work around the loss of chain-potting.

Pots, like any other consumable, are just another buff. Want to get rid of pots? Why not get rid of weapon oils/sharpening stones/elixirs/flasks/food buffs/etc. Blizzard could wipe all of those away and just design encounters without them, and you would only have to farm gold for repairs. They have decided that we should have the opportunity to pay for increased performance, and thus we have these temporary buffs.

Smurrf · 08/05/08, 9:27 PM

Originally Posted by Shakes

People complained about the old PvP system being all about time and not enough about skill. Blizzard changed that with BC. Would it really be so bad if they did the same thing in WotLK for raiding, where you really did only have to log on to raid and nothing else? There are top arena players who say they only play 15 hours a week, I'd love for top raiders to be able to say the same.

Originally Posted by Denogran

I won't churn through the content any faster if I don't have to farm potions.

Oh, really? Are you honestly telling me that if you didn't have to spend 1 hour farming for every 4 hours raiding, that you wouldn't raid 5 hours instead? And even if this (edit) doesn't hold true for you, does it hold true for everyone else?

PvP is different, in that the challenges you face ramp up and up as time goes on. One can still log on, get into some form of PvP, and expect a challenge at some point in time.

If raiders didn't have anything to do BUT raid, encounters would be beaten in even shorter order than they already are. What happens when a game is beaten? You put it down, and walk away. PvP, in contrast, is never 'beaten.' It's the reason why people might only play 40 hours or so of Halo in story mode, but will play the multiplayer for years. Again, not apples to apples here.

As far as the Netflix-like argument, wrong track. Timesinks in games, especially games like WoW, are designed to keep you paying for your account over a long period of time. Beating the game earlier than more content can be created leads to more people not paying for accounts. Hence, timesinks.

__

A longer cooldown on potions I could get around. Allows for one-time use in short fights, allows more flexibility in longer fights.

Varying cooldowns depending on potion types I could also get around - if the mats for potions were easy enough to obtain required quantities of. This is questionable though.

Tinctures is an interesting concept. Perhaps Tinctures could be created out of Potions? 1 Potion = 10 Tinctures, that do a very weak version of the Pot? (say, give 1k MP instead of 5k?)

And lastly, to Rhea - yes, it would be stupid...but then I view the current use of pots as stupid anyways, so it's pretty much a wash to begin with.

Maax · 08/05/08, 9:29 PM

What if the changed mana potions so that instead of giving mana back they reduced the mana cost of abilities for a short period of time (20 seconds or whatever), like the Lower City Prayer Book. Would that solve the chain chugging issue without needing to add the potion sickness mechanic?

YaoiNeko · 08/05/08, 9:36 PM

Originally Posted by Maax

What if the changed mana potions so that instead of giving mana back they reduced the mana cost of abilities for a short period of time (20 seconds or whatever), like the Lower City Prayer Book. Would that solve the chain chugging issue without needing to add the potion sickness mechanic?

No, you'd still use them on every cooldown.

Nisu · 08/05/08, 9:38 PM

I don't think there's any real question that Potion Sickness is too broad right now; it should be on potions that extend your DPS or healing output - Mana, Haste, etc. Likewise, include any and all "alternative" consumables except class or profession-specific perks. "Survivability" stuff should not be on any cooldown beyond it's own - so no Potion Sickness on Healing Potions, Protection Potions, or Healthstones, as well as Mana Gems and the Herbalism thingies. Ironshields are in a category of their own here - double or triple their armor bonus, reduce duration to 15s or so, and bam, they're now excellent tools for burst damage without being chain-chuggable.

Anedris · 08/05/08, 10:00 PM

Anyone arguing that resistance potions and health potions should be exempt from potion sickness had better hope they changed Loetheb...

As long as they did change Loetheb, though, I would be quite happy to have the reactive potions (health potions, resistance potions, free and living action potions, sprint potions) keep their current status. Potion sickness seems the ideal solution for the "spam" potions - mana pots, destro and haste pots, and the current incarnation of stone/ironshield potions. I don't really see any value in allowing a second such potion in a 10 minute fight - the point of such a long encounter is precisely that it challenges players' mana management.

I'm sure potion sickness won't affect healthstones or mana gems. They're not potions.

bv728 · 08/05/08, 10:16 PM

Originally Posted by Anedris

Anyone arguing that resistance potions and health potions should be exempt from potion sickness had better hope they changed Loetheb...

Fungal Bloom gains a HoT component. Forces you to rotate it around the raid to keep up, and your healers focus on the main tank. Judgement of Light/Shadow Priest/Healing Pots can help fill in for the later Dooms. Rotating healers through Fungal Bloom means they may be able to toss raid heals, especially if you can get it timed so, say, a paladin gets bloom and tosses a crit HL on the tank topping him off for a little while.

EDIT: This is a theory, by the way. I'm not even in the beta right now.

Nisu · 08/05/08, 10:29 PM

Originally Posted by Anedris

Anyone arguing that resistance potions and health potions should be exempt from potion sickness had better hope they changed Loetheb...

Between the severely reduced duration of protection potions (from 60 minutes to two), and assuming there's a WotLK version of Cauldrons, that's not as big an issue. Loatheb should change anyways due to being kind of dumb in its current form.

IcedTeaIsGood · 08/05/08, 11:12 PM

Originally Posted by Smurrf

Oh, really? Are you honestly telling me that if you didn't have to spend 1 hour farming for every 4 hours raiding, that you wouldn't raid 5 hours instead?

I obviously can't speak for everyone, but yeah, this totally applies to me, and I'm sure it applies to lots of other people. If I raid 6 PM to 10 PM, I don't necessarily farm for that raid from 5 PM to 6 PM. I farm when I have expendable time - usually all in one go on a weekend. Making it so that I don't have to spend several hours of my weekend farming isn't going to make my guild change its raiding schedule. It isn't even going to make me want to raid later or get home from school/work/whatever earlier. It is just going to make it so that I spend less time doing things I do not enjoy doing.

Denogran · 08/05/08, 11:30 PM

Originally Posted by Smurrf

Oh, really? Are you honestly telling me that if you didn't have to spend 1 hour farming for every 4 hours raiding, that you wouldn't raid 5 hours instead? And even if this (edit) doesn't hold true for you, does it hold true for everyone else?

As IcedTeaIsGood said, no I wouldn't raid 5 hours instead. Again, you're confusing group activities with the solo game. I already farm 8 hours a week with my guild, that's called BT and Hyjal. Were there no potions (and I didn't use many potions in BT or Hyjal), I'd still only be raiding 4 hours a day. In fact, if my guild started to raid 5 hours a day instead of 4, I'd probably have to quit raiding, as my farming is only sometimes contiguous to my raiding.

Shakes · 08/05/08, 11:36 PM

Originally Posted by Smurrf

Oh, really? Are you honestly telling me that if you didn't have to spend 1 hour farming for every 4 hours raiding, that you wouldn't raid 5 hours instead? And even if this (edit) doesn't hold true for you, does it hold true for everyone else?

Obviously nothing holds true for everyone, but I think my guild is fairly typical. We nominally have invites at 7:30, start at 8, but in reality it's usually 8 before we even have 25 on. We certainly aren't starting any earlier. We raid until 12, at which point a significant number of people want to go to bed, so I really doubt we'd extend to 1 either (usually by 1am there's only 10 people online). I think that's fairly typical of most guilds: they already raid as often as they can for as long as they can manage to get 25 people to commit to.

PvP is different, in that the challenges you face ramp up and up as time goes on. One can still log on, get into some form of PvP, and expect a challenge at some point in time.

If raiders didn't have anything to do BUT raid, encounters would be beaten in even shorter order than they already are. What happens when a game is beaten? You put it down, and walk away. PvP, in contrast, is never 'beaten.' It's the reason why people might only play 40 hours or so of Halo in story mode, but will play the multiplayer for years. Again, not apples to apples here.

Well, raiding IS multiplayer. It's a co-op game, and you can certainly play through co-op games multiple times. Look at Diablo II, people still play that co-op, despite that fact its graphics are eye-bleedingly bad now days.

Besides, if I spent less time preparing to raid, I could spend more time PvPing, or completing achievements, or levelling an alt, or any number of things I might like to do. I can assure you, I'd much rather spend an hour doing that than an hour doing dailies or farming or fishing to raise some cash. There is so much to do in WoW there's not enough time, even if you play 24/7, to do it all. You can never really "beat" this game.

All I'm saying is that if you want to tackle one aspect of this game (raiding) you shouldn't be forced into doing another aspect of the game (gold farming). I really don't see it as fundamentally different from not forcing people who want to PvP to raid.

Jebraltar · 08/06/08, 12:04 AM

You're still intended to go out and do stuff so you have one of several of the following: Lots of blues/greens to shard for DE mats, lots of cloth to either sell or send to a tailor to make B's/G's, lots of herbs, minerals, and leather to sell for profit (at least, what you don't use), lots of some other commodity to sell for profit (again, whatever you don't use), or just plain lots of money to buy stuff you need to go out and raid

To some extent, all of these materials are provided by raiding. The actual cost spent on enchants, etc, is fairly low compared to the amount of time spent raiding, and it comes closer and closer to being covered by raiding itself. (Most noticeably, I actually made money on every single raiding week when 2.4 came out, selling badges and other items that weren't valuable to me.) I'd never been so happy playing the game. It was around then that I quit, but that had more to do with the fact that I need to switch to free-time activities that aren't on a schedule.

Are you honestly telling me that you would raid five hours a week? I spend my hour of farming per four hours raiding at completely random times, by myself. Getting the guild together for a 25-man group four times a week for 3-4 hours is a pain for most guilds, they're not going to take advantage of reduced farming requirements increasing people's free time to demand more raiding.

If raiders didn't have anything to do BUT raid, encounters would be beaten in even shorter order than they already are.

Fallacy, for a few reasons.
1) Reducing solo farming time does not itself increase raiding time. In casual guilds, this time can't be easily re-distributed into more scheduled raiding time. In the professional guilds that blow through content, they farm consumables between content pushes. For the hardcore guilds that go through content at a reasonable pace, it's a little from column A and a little from column B.
2) The majority of guilds don't exhaust the current content, and I've seen more than a few that had strict consumable requirements, spec requirements, etc. It takes people time to learn the bosses, no matter what. Making them waste time they're not spending raiding makes them think of raiding as a sixteen-hour-a-week job where they have to put in overtime.

The Diablo II community has proven that a PvE game can have longevity. Not to mention a number of other single-player games: My dad does vs-computer matches in Command and Conquer games, despite the fact that he's beaten the AI hundreds of times on those maps. Repetition itself leads quickly to content devaluation, but it does not itself kill games.

World of Warcraft uses fair-sized loot lists to make sure that it takes quite a while to get everybody their ideal gear, combined with a gradual content-release mechanic that ensures that although yes, people will have the game beaten for a while, they'll have something new within a few months and their characters will continue to progress while they wait. (The BT/Hyjal->Sunwell debacle aside.) Blizzard doesn't need to try and slow down people's ability to go through content by adding farming requirements - most guilds are stopped more by player skill than by anything, and the ones that aren't will be preparing for this every second that they're not done with content.

Even assuming that for some reason, they were desperate to slow progression, intentionally ignoring what players enjoy, they could just make it take time for bosses to respawn, shorten trash respawn timers, add more trash, etc - take the grind from outside and put it directly into the raid instance.

A longer cooldown on potions I could get around. Allows for one-time use in short fights, allows more flexibility in longer fights.

The ability to use something repeatedly is not "flexibility." It is "using it more often." Especially when we're talking about a 10-15 minute cooldown between uses. It also makes potion cooldowns incredibly irritating when soloing. (Potion sickness means that you have a relatively short time between potions, if needed, while soloing, while also making it not a repeated-use item during encounters. Longer cooldowns mean you have to wait longer between difficult fights.)

• dragon12 · 08/06/08, 3:53 AM

This is the WotLK profession thread, not a philosophical debate about whether or not raiders should farm for potions in preparation for a raid. Obviously there's a link between potion sickness and alchemy, but there has been very little mention of alchemy in the last two pages.