This is my first post here, so dont shoot me please ;)


I have seen this proposed many times before. Many thinks the current system with spell enhancement is flawed.

One major thing a new % based system could do is introduce a joint stat for dmg & healing.

As suggested on the eu priest forum, one could call this "Spell power rating".

It would be percentage based, so as healing spells have a higher base value than damage spells, they would recieve a larger + healed for the same value, just as it is with +heal costing less of an items budget than +damage now.

Do also take into account that even though healers then would recieve the same bonus to their spells through gear as damage specs, their talents do not support these spells enough to make them as efficient as damage dealers, thus not having an extreme impact on game balance.

One would have to fine tune the basic damage/heal value of all spells with an implementation of such a system.




Example of how this would work

Spell A deals 400 damage, spell B deals 500 damage.

A / B = dmg ratio = 400 / 500 = 0.8.



Adding spell power rating values.

lets say each 10 spell power rating is 1% increased spell damage at lvl 60, and the spells are used with a level 60 character.


+600 spell power rating.

600 / 10 = 60

So, its 60% increased spell power by +600 spell power rating. Wich means to find the damage dealt with spell A & B one has to find 160% of their base damage by multiplying their base damage by 1.6.

Now checking numbers on spell A and spell B.



A
400 * 1.6 = 640

B
500 * 1.6 = 800

We got some numbers here yeah, but look at this.

640 / 800 = 0.8


All spells would maintain the same damage ratio when compared no matter how much spell damage rating one would get before talents. Talents however, like imp frostbolt, dmg % and such would still ofcourse make some spells better than others, but the system would still work better when it comes to spells scaling ratio.


With this system, one could to rework the basic values of ranks so that if the devs want for example a shadowpriest with its talent tree, spells & abilitys to always have 85% of the damage capabilities of a Fire Mage they could easily do so.

It would ensure that the balance they intend to have will always be there.

Scaling penalties

New scaling penalty values has to be set for AE spells (mainly reducing the penalty i guess according to the low base damage).

Much would pretty much stay the same as far as scaling penalties go, no problems i can see there really. Life Drain could still only recieve 50% effect on damage with this system.


Solution to salvage downranking

I wrote 10 rating at level 60 for each dmg % as a number. But, there is one way to make this system work with downranking.

It is simply to make the amount of spell power rating needed for each % be dependant on the level of the rank. Not the level of the player. This would create a much higher percentage gained to benefit a lvl 40 spell than a level 70 spell. The overall extra heal/damage added to the spell could be worked to be the same by choosing the correct value change for each level, or one could make it intentionally deteriorate as your ranks goes lower if one wants, whatever blizzard finds suitable :-)


This system would benefit the develpers in make their job easier (after the major rework of items & spells basic values that is), it would benefit the players in an easier and less flawed system. And yeah... healers would rejoice.


What do you think? Would a change of system make things worse? Is there any big flaws to this proposed system? Any ideas of exploitation of this system?

Discuss!

EDIT: changed the Subject, didn't find it completely fitting with the content.

Well, I'm having issues seeing how this system would not be horribly, horribly flawed with, say, Earthshock.

You really don't want that spell doing 2x damage base. On the other hand, if Frostbolt -isn't- doing 2x damage that is a phenominally gimped mage.

I don't mean offense, but in some cases the scaling factor is what keeps a spell balanced. IN addition, time reduction effects (which are a -major- factor in current live) end up being very blah.

Realized i didn't mention clearly that a rework of spells basic damage values would have to be done. I will write it more clearly :)

Also in terms of DPS, the spells we currently used would still be superior because our talent trees enhances them greatly.

Time reduction effects does not conflict with this system. Imp frost bolt would still make frost bolt deal 20% more dps.

Realize that, exactly like what we have right now, an increase in the "damage" stat linearly improves the damage of a spell.

In your system, the scaling coefficient for a spell is constrained to be directly proportional to the spell's base damage.

In the current system, the designers started with a scheme in which the coefficient for a spell was direct proportional to casting time, and then adjusted by hand as necessary.

Since, in theory, the optimal system is one in which designers take the time to tune the scaling of every spell as they see fit, a "mechanic" which only serves to constrain what they can already do is not worth very much.

Good point. The system wouldn't be very flexible for additions and changes.

I never got why they just didn't do

1 int = +1.5 spell dmg/healing
1 Spi = +1 healing, and 5 spi=1/Mp5/Hp5 and remove the per tick regen/5 sec rule regen.

Removes 2 stats so casters don't have to worry about them anymore, and gives healers the +dmg they want without gimping their healing.

(Numbers are probably off from what would be more "balanced")

Renaming "damage and healing" to "spell power" doesn't really affect anything.

The current system allows for an extremely high amount of precision on the part of the developers. They can let certain spells scale better based on the needs of the individual spell.

While the system isn't perfect, tweaks should be made to individual spells, not to the entire system.

Attack power isn't really a better mechanic so I'm not sure why it's often praised as such. It's caused just as many problems due to the mechanics on special abilities that they've had to make many adjustments to it.

Many people think the current system is flawed because they don't UNDERSTAND the current system.

+3.5 spell damage = 1 DPS no matter what spell it is you're casting. This relates to the system that attack power is based on.

The simple way of thinking about it is every 3.5 seconds you will get your full +damage gear in bonus damage on your bolt spam because its all normalised around a 3.5s cast time.

Talents such as Bane, Imp Fireball, Imp Frostbolt etc. give you a fair bonus to each of the spells they effect, because you get the same +damage bonus, but in a shorter duration. As a result Bane gives your Shadow Bolt spam a 17% DPS regardless of +damage.

A % based system will make instant attacks scale WELL beyond timed-cast spells and make them completely obsolete.

I know exactly how the current system is supposed to work, and it sort of makes sense most of the time. That said the revisions of the system have been a mess.

Renaming it spell power might not actually achieve much, but it would at least help divorce the 3.5 second base time from the system, and actually illustrate what it does better. Virtually no spells get inherently more that 100% of the effect, yet there are quite a few spells with a long cast time that 3.5 seconds, which thus become largely useless. (One of the reason they changed greater heal to a 3 second cast) No-one these days for instance, will fail to get the cast time reduction from their main nuke, purely because that's the best way of getting a dps increase (and incidentally is why lightning bolt scales so well).

When the mechanic was introduced, I doubt they imagined that healers would down rank spells to save mana, although TBC may well help address that. but being able to say that rank 1 heal will heal for 400+ 20% of your healing power seems much easier to get a handle on, and so balance. I imagine this is the reason that the healing talents only apply to the base healing, or else there would be even more incentive to down rank.

A percentage system could be implemented along the lines of the rating systems they already have in game, but I think a spell power system is more tweakable.

One has to remember that the implementation of such a system would call for tweaking on base damage of spells. So the current values on spells being overpowered with the new system isn't relevant ;)

So powerfull instant AE or coned spells would most likely be reduced in basic damage.


What would be taken into consideration highly when it comes to instants is Cooldown and mana cost, and also what other instants the spec has.


As for changing it to "spell power rating" would mean non-class specific caster drops especially cloth) could be made in a bigger variation to replace the non-class specific healer drops. For example pieces with spirit, +spellpower and perhaps mp5 on them in addition to the normal +hit and +dmg, +crit and +dmg and the mp5 & +dmg.

The healers would still wear some of their tier gear for healing due to set bonuses ofcourse, and those would have spell power rating aswell.

The benefit would surely be that healers wouldn't feel so severely gimped and had to grab 2 different sets of items to play all aspects of the game. And it wouldn't oveprowered them either, as their talent spec wouldn't enhance their damage talents so much that it mattered.

It works well for single-target spells with cast times. It kind of falls down for AoE (no AoE really scales well and my Arcane Explosions and Cones of Cold are doing roughly 75 more damage per burst now than they were at 60) and it really, really falls down for channeled spells (which don't get any real special boosts from spells or talents.) and DoTs (because there is no normalized time for DoTs, a 15 second DoT will get as much benefit from +dmg as a 24 second DoT... and Siphon Life... phew, +dmg damage really sucks for Siphon Life.

Of course, you could sorta hack away at the problem by introducing various "Empowered x" talents for AoEs and channels, but so far, they haven't been impressive. For example one can consider Empowered Arcane Missiles...

Yes--attack power is a mess. The way attack power affects special attacks is handled in such a constrained way that, as you said, they just wind up working around it.

The whole point of having something called "Attack Power" which is directly derived from already existing stats would be that provides a reference for a normalized DPS comparison between classes. Since it does not do that at all, they'd be better off defining damage abilities w.r.t. base stats and tuning them by hand.

Actually it isn't really attack power that's the problem, it's weapon speeds. In the context of providing a damage boost to base melee attacks it works rather well. With cast spells you don't have the same variety in cast times that you do in weapon speeds, so that part of the issue isn't such a problem.

Melee special abilities have a cooldown or work off energy (which basically implies a cooldown), so those that just work off straight AP like bloodthirst are pretty simple to balance. It's when you start to have extra attacks that do base weapon damage and an AP contribution that you have to start looking at ways of balancing fast vs slow weapons and AP causes issues. It's pretty easy to calculate the damage boost you get from spamming kitty abilities for instance, because you have a single attack speed to consider.

Of course, there are a whole lot of prics and other buffs or debuffs that don't really consider the casting/swing time into them.

I don't see how this is different from any other class that needs 2 seperate gears to function properly. For me this just seems like you both want to eat and keep the cookie at the same time. Oh, and talk about you priests shafting the meleeadins, enhancement shamans and feral druids with your proposed Spell Power Rating.


So basically, let's also change Defense to something like Physical Power Rating and give us +attack power, +melee crit and +melee hit with it aswell so us tankwarriors don't need a separate set of dps-gear. (And no, I do NOT want this. It's a silly example and a bad one at that. However it illustrates my point. ><)

But hey.... that's just my opinion.

Personally, I think spell scaling is one of the worst designed portions of the game. While a caster is less gear dependent than a warrior or rogue, the WAY a caster scales up with gear is very different as it pertains to all their skills.

The problem I see is how spells scale depending on cast times. While spells that are instant cast will always be highly valued, at least as PvP goes, those spells that have cast times of 2.5 or greater will grow exponentially more powerful as compared to spells with cast times of 2.0 or less.



I never understood why they didn't add some kind of Attack Power equivalent for spellcasters. At the very least they could provide +% spell damage on gear instead of flat +spell damage. Making a change at this point would really throw things off though :(

Probably just a hold over from when the game was released. It took them a while to re-itemize endgame loot to provide more +spell damage and less focus on +spell crit.

As far as itemisation goes, it's interesting to look at how the stats and mods can all stack.

Firstly, agility increases crit rate, dodge rate, armour, ranged attack power and for some classes melee attack power.
Strength increases melee attack power, and some (weak) shield block stuff.
+defense itself increases (weakly) parry, dodge, and causes opponents to miss more often.

In comparison, barring some talents in the existing priest holy tree, and serveral new caster TBC trees, where int or spirit can increase your +damage.

spirit increases your mana regen.
int increases your mana pool, and very weakly your spell crit chance.

With caster stats it's also very rare that you'll see +healing and +damage/healing on an item. Although, every item with healing on it could be itemised with a +healing component and a +damage/healing one for the same item budget, and the same total +healing that would give them a little bit of +damage. Similarly, there are few items with spirit and mana/5 on them, and conversely there are many items which double up agi and one of the things it boosts.

In this game there are basically too groups of classes. Damage dealers and hybrids, and the itemsation for damage dealers is fine. That of hybrids is rather problematic, especially for caster hybrids. (Warriors and Feral druids are lucky that there are so many drops that are basically solely for them). As a healing priest trying to get dps gear so I can solo it's very hard, because there's always another applicant to gear up.

edit: What panny said

Another (rather large) issue with spells and +damage interaction is that not only are they heavily centered around cast-time reduction talents but they are extremely lag sensitive. Fastcast sure helps but it doesn't make the issue go away. I'd simply love to see a simple one second spell queue (breaks on movement) to level out this little gem. It really wouldn't be all that hard to implement but I doubt they ever will do so.

The spellcasting system in WoW is a funny beast and certainly not without flaws. I don't think it's worth throwing away though and starting from a very different perspective.

Oh that would be a god send.

There is a school of thought that you should never used % based modifiers at all unless you allow player stats in the form of defence against spells/melee to scale in a similar way. Reasoning being that it all works fine for the first few player levels, but quickly gets out of hand if (when) you raise the level cap. The safer way is to design a linear scale for spell ranks. WoW does this, but then ignores the rule in talents and in itemisation :rolleyes:


There have been many MMORPG that have found out far too late that using % modifiers on attack capabilities scales far faster than player health pools.

To be fair of course, this is equally true of the percentage modifiers that exist implicitly or explicitly in melee talents and itemization as well. We'll see how it all works out but it does at least seem that the devs are aware of some of these issues and are trying to make amends. The +xx% health to players bit is probably not the way I would have gotten at it but we shall see how it works out.

Well, the fact they are changing Crit and Hit to ratings mean's they've thought about how %'s play in late game.

I think having talent's as %'s are OK, because they are just that, just talents. You aren't going to go getting some insane increases, because they are limited to only what amount of Talent's the dev's bring out.