Very good read. Its a giant shame that blizzard had to put these requirements on naxxramas, the amount of people I know that have bought gold just to stay raiding is enormous.
Very good read. Its a giant shame that blizzard had to put these requirements on naxxramas, the amount of people I know that have bought gold just to stay raiding is enormous.
It isn't about something being required or not being required. If consumables weren't required, encounters would be trivial with them. The very existence and availability of powerful consumables for use on raiding is the problem in itself.
The problems with alchemy and buffing is two-fold. You have raid designers being forced to design with consumables in mind and you have players who have to farm or buy these consumables because the raid encounters assume that you have them.
Alchemy and buffing in general is too powerful at the moment when compared to armor and weapons as demonstrated by Gurgthock in the opening post. Increased spawns of herb nodes and lower reagent requirements doesn't make the consumables less powerful, which means the raid designers still have to balance around them. It just makes it easier for you to acquire them, which raises the question of what is an acceptable level of farming required to participate in the raid game?
There's has been many proposed solutions, but they fail to address the major issue. How do you balance a profession based on giving you a temporary edge without it being either required or worthless? If the buff is not noticeable, you might as well not bother with it - ruining the whole foundation of alchemy. Increased cooldowns and a limit of one elixir and potion buff being active at a time (like flasks and food) is probably the best suggestion I've seen so far. Yes, this will make alchemy less desirable, but it will also make the game less of a grind just to participate.
So far from what I've seen from beta it's only getting worse. Yes, they may have increased the herb nodes and lowered reagents, but now we have to farm for leather working drums and jewel crafting items with limited use effects as well. Then there's the new jewelry and enchants which have to be farmed for new gear every time you upgrade. Sometimes the upgrade is not worth it unless it's fully enchanted and socketed, which means we have to farm even more items just to keep up.
And from what we've seen of Tier 4&5, I've gotten the impression that the amount of upgrade between the various 'Tier' levels is much less than the step from Tier 2 -> Tier 3. Which only makes that pink bar bigger, not even looking at the increasing power of consumables (as has already been pointed out).
While I agree that the future of raiding is definitely the biggest issue here, it should be noted that consumables are going to be pretty important for some heroic mode 5 man instances too. And since that stuff is theoretically more accessible, there may very well be far more users of consumables post-expack than there were before which could easily offset these changes Blizzard has made to reagent counts... and the perceived increased world spawns although personally, while I see alot of nodes "up", I haven't noticed them being any more prevelant than in the old world...
(Read: how many of you have killed loatheb with sunder falling, curses not up more than half the time, and people missing spore buffs - all because you were so overbuffed it didn't matter that you made those mistakes? How many of you went from a 70% nonbuffed sapph to a kill with just a tower/rocket buff? I think you get the point...)
I hear you, I hear you!
We had every buff, both world buffs and 40 flasks up in preparation for KT, Loatheb was the last wing boss up and we just wanted to make sure he dies so we have more time for KT .... and we wiped at 1% because three consecutive healers had disconnects.
That was the day we killed KT for the first time though :)
I think the easiest way for Blizzard to fix this problem is to have less buff slots on players, make world buffs come off upon entering an instance and make mana pots/runes on a much longer cooldown so much so that you have to save them for the last boss, or risk not finishing the instance that day.
Alchemy/Herby simply earns way too much gold in current state. The entire world economy can be attributed to alchemy prices. What other profession makes this much gold?
Another solution is to simply make other professions earn more gold to compensate for the prices of consumables. For instance, make things like EZ throw dynamite more desirable for the average player, or Leatherworking gear cheap to make and hard to replace. Unfortunately that's an inflation based solution. *see dkp inflation problems*
The other thing that Eej fails to recognize is the consequences of skimping on consumables. Your DPS dropping below the point where another Rogue would be preferable to you (because you didn't slam mana pots) is a far cry from the reality of being a healer, where OOM = fucked. It's not that your performance goes down when you run low on mana, it's that once you cross that threshold you're dead in the water and somebody's gonna die. Similarly for tanks, a single tank death on any fight where they're actively tanking is a fairly catastrophic occurrence. So the consumables become most important for tanks and healers...who, hilariously enough, are the least-equipped players to get those consumables.
The reality of "jogging in place" in Naxxramas was the sole catalyst for me to level my 40 Mage to 60, grind her to Rank 10 and run 20-mans for gear (so I could kill things for drops/gold), and level her Herbalism to 300. That took a lot of time, the kind of time that I was fortunate to have (unemployment FTW) but can't see myself having again any time soon (employment FTL). I did this because without buying gold there was simply no way for me to handle the consumable load if my only character was my Resto Shaman. Our MT did the same thing...levelled a Mage so he could farm the consumables he needed. So not only is the burden a problem in itself, and not only does it seem to be getting WORSE...it falls heaviest on those least equipped to bear it. The Rogues crying about repair bills, the Hunters flipping out because their FD failed on that wipe...drives me up the freaking wall.
It should be noted that it's not every fight in Naxx that is this way. Patchwerk was a huge consumable sink to learn...but these days I can make do with Combat Mana Potions and no Runes in my full Tier 3. Only the tanks use consumables, and those are substantial but ultimately not that bad. 4 guys slamming consumables out of 40 isn't out of the question for a farm-status boss. Loatheb though....fuck that kid. Same with Sapphiron.
Elixirs should absolutely last through death. I think that's one of the most important changes to be made. They are, really, miniature flasks.
Potions should probably be made in stacks of five. The market for these is and will continue to be out of hand unless you make them produced in reasonable quantities. As outlined, they simply make a tremendous difference for Healers, and you can easily use 5 an hour, so this would make them more in line with Elixirs (that last through death).
I'm confident that there is no 'good' nerf to Alchemy. It's a cool tradeskill, farming for it can be fun, the results can be fun, especially outside of the raid game. Making it more user friendly and less tedious is the way to go.
Well, there is a really simple solution. Arena play is being balanced around 0 consumables. Consumables and buffs are stripped when you zone in and they are unusable inside the arena. Raid instances should adopt this ruleset.
There's also a question of parity and fairness. They've decided that arena play should give rewards on par with pve. If Bob the pvper doesn't need to farm consumables for his play, neither should Joe the raider.
Well, there is a really simple solution. Arena play is being balanced around 0 consumables. Consumables and buffs are stripped when you zone in and they are unusable inside the arena. Raid instances should adopt this ruleset.
There's also a question of parity and fairness. They've decided that arena play should give rewards on par with pve. If Bob the pvper doesn't need to farm consumables for his play, neither should Joe the raider.
Then what would the point of alchemy be? No one's gonna flask up to do outdoor quests faster.
It's a horrible piece of encounter design and philosophy by Blizzard - a zero-sum grindfest that is entirely unavoidable if you want to compete against the hardest of Naxx encounters.
It's obviously a design philosophy that Blizz seems happy with however, if the array of new potions available in BC is any guide. Personally, it's one I disagree with and I quickly lost my will to raid once I started having to spend significant additional hours farming just to turn up. Having to "work" for hours to just buff myself to a level where I am able to play the game is not something I'm willing to do.
IMO the best solution would be to either totally remove alchemy or render it useless inside a raid zone and tune encounters entirely without it. Otherwise it simply becomes a case of he with the most buffs wins.
I get the feeling with Naxx that Blizzard have painted themselves into a corner, and they will not easily move away from the buffed to the eyeballs model. BC could have been the perfect time to alter it, but a whole new tier of Alchemy recipes is just going to mean a whole new tier of pain and boredom in the level 70 raid game :(
Problem is, if they completely remove consumables from pvp and raiding, they might just as well remove consumables from the game.
Which would be kinda sad.
Think its better to reward the raiders enough to compensate for the gold wasted on consumables. You spend gold on pots, but when you do your job you get the gold back (from the boss). If you don't kill the boss.. well, that was a shame for you, you lost your gold.
We cant get compensation for our time spent grinding herbs though, so thats where it should be reduced (by giving more pots per herb, pots lasting longer etc. etc.).
Sure, you could just remove consumables from the game, but that would have been like removing paladins/shamans from the game because of balance-issues, removing items from the game etc.
If its possible to keep consumables in-game, in a somewhat "nerfed" form for raiding, its preferable.
Today, consumables have three main effects:
- Performance boosters. Usually buffs, but also chainchuggable ones like Mana Potions and Stoneshield.
- Emergency buttons. Health potions, Lesser Invul Potions. If you mess up, one of these will either save you or at least buy you time.
- Utility consumables. Swiftness potions, FAPs, Lesser Invul, Invisibility Potion. These allow you to do unique things in unique situations.
There's also the unique Loatheb scenario where you have to eat a certain number of potion x, or die 100% of the time, but that's hopefully not something we will see again (at least not with that exact design).
Effects 2 and 3 work just fine in current raiding, and add depth to the raiding game. They increase your available options, which allows for more skillful play. Their usage is either avoidable by improved performance, or is rare due to the limited usefulness, yet they can have a large impact when used skillfully. In addition, they are generally cheap. They do not, however, significantly increase your power level.
It is, as mentioned by Gurg, the performance boosting consumables that are the problem. The obvious problem seen in Naxx is the cost of using those consumables. Required time outside of the raid instance to be able to keep up has increased massively with Naxx, with the result that a lot of people either stop raiding, or break the EULA. Naxx encounters are, as they should be, balanced around maximum consumables, so unless the content is purely technical (Heigan) or you have it on farm, you need those potions. This could, as Elendril said, be fixed by lowering the cost of these consumables, by massively increasing supply through world spawns/drops or vendor supply.
Another problem with these consumables though, is that they have no reason to exist in the raid game. They don't add any depth whatsoever. Buffing takes no skill. Clicking your mana potion button every two minutes takes no skill. If every encounter takes these buffs into consideration, their only purpose is to make you click 5 more buttons before the encounter starts, and act as a money sink. Thus, if the money sink isn't intended, dropping the costs of these consumables will have no discernible advantage over removing them from the game altogether.
In short:
Reactive and situational consumables are cool. Depth is good, we want that. Proactive, general purpose consumables add nothing to the game as a whole. If players want the thrill of seeing bigger than average numbers at times, effects like Loatheb spores, Thaddius polarity and WSG Berserker buffs are more interactive and interesting anyhow.
Currently, the only major effect of proactive consumables is to increase the cost of raiding, making the raid game accessible to fewer players. I see no advantage with that, for players and Blizzard alike.
I however don't agree with those saying there basically is no solution to this. Clearly the best would have been to completely rework the whole consumable system and the time to do that would have been now for the expansion, unfortunately they seem to have missed that. But there are still lots of not overly drastic ways to significantly help the situation that I hope it still wouldn't be too late for. Mainly change stacking, cooldownsharing and duration/charges.
Imagine if say a manapot had 5 charges and a 10min cooldown it shared with all other hp/mana consumables in the game. Similarly you could significantly reduce the stacking of the consumable buffs which as someone else mentioned would rather make the use of them more interesting if there were more of a tactical choice. Do you chose to use a manaregen, hp, resist or dps consumable for a certain fight?
I maintained some shadow specs from MC to the first Nef kill and never had any problems for one reason alone: AD Major Mana Potions. Back in the day when they were 36s each from 3 different shops at any point in time (limited 4). I had so many I had to sell them for about 50s each. I think the most I had at one time was at least 200. Because of it, mana really wasn't an issue, especially since during that time spamming fheal was the only way to heal. They easily made up for having poor heals and poor gear as I popped them like candy. Now-a-days they're a delicacy...
I maintained some shadow specs from MC to the first Nef kill and never had any problems for one reason alone: AD Major Mana Potions. Back in the day when they were 36s each from 3 different shops at any point in time (limited 4). I had so many I had to sell them for about 50s each. I think the most I had at one time was at least 200. Because of it, mana really wasn't an issue, especially since during that time spamming fheal was the only way to heal. They easily accounted for having poor heals and poor gear as I popped them like candy. Now-a-days they're a delicacy...
Heh, slightly offtopic but the AD vendor has a respawn time of less than one minute, so we used to repeatedly kill it with an alt who didn't need AD rep and buy the potions for dirt cheap. Ah the times, made BWL easier :P
Imagine if say a manapot had 5 charges and a 10min cooldown it shared with all other hp/mana consumables in the game. Similarly you could significantly reduce the stacking of the consumable buffs which as someone else mentioned would rather make the use of them more interesting if there were more of a tactical choice. Do you chose to use a manaregen, hp, resist or dps consumable for a certain fight?
The problem is I suppose that with the current consumables it would most of the time probably be a very obvious choice. My line of thinking was that I actually enjoy it when I can click on something midfight and receive something from it, such as using a healing pot after getting hit by a fissure on Heigan(not that I ever do of course!), and that part of consumables I like. To make it an actual tactical choice I think there would need to be more creative potion effects, but I don't really know what, since if the effects are too straightforward, you'll always pick the best boost choice for your respective class, and if they're too situational, you'll always pick the one that's the best for the encounter. Regardless, this is a bit meaningless since I can't offer any concrete solution.
My own ideal vision for consumable use within a dungeon would have the earlier bosses beatable without consumables (or minimal), and the later bosses beatable with consumables OR with the gear you farm from the earlier bosses. You could either farm the ones you can beat until you can beat the hard ones, or pot up and be capable of clearing the instance from the get-go (not necessarily trivially, though). When consumable use TRIPLES the mana available to a healer, this is impossible. The difference between a tier of gear and the next is not triple the effectiveness.
The effect consumables have is too powerful, this has almost nothing to do with how easy/hard they are to farm up. They're just too good. Summary: I agree with the orc.
I agree with alot with what has been eloquently stated (as a restatement of this argument). As I've said on the FoH forum, we all pay to play the game. Double taxation of raiders through potion, mat, and resist gear farming in order for us to simply see the content we paid (and expected to see) is trivial, and economically stupid.
Farming does not show, or highlight the skill of a guild. It only highlights the 'hardcore' nature of the raiders, which leads to burnout, as soon as they realize this is a treadmill, not a rewarding accomplishment.
Potions and other gear, that people are expected to have inorder to enter an instance I can see holding merit. Likewise I can see the intent of a developer wishing to challenge and seperate the 'best players' from the rest of the playerbase, but there has to be other methods. Farming and time sinks in general should not be needed for raiding.
As I was saying to a few players last weekend, if we were to roleplay our adventures according to the current state of WoW: 'our fiercest warriors, dragon and god slayers are also some of Azeroth's finest horticulturalists. Someone spot the logic bomb'.
If I had a say, engineering or the use of engineering gadgets should be a generalist skill. This could open the door to plot writers and scripters to have more gimick gadgets (such as the UBRS ring), which could eliminate the need for buffing. Lighting a fuse on a bomb is not hard if your hunter can already use a magazine fed rifle. Likewise, gimicks should be plot devices or one shot items for certain bosses, not expected for every encounter or trash mob.
An example of this would be upgrades of the egons blaster could have been used to 'weaken' patchwerk (Ray! throw the TRAP), rather then create a math puzzle for frontier raiders of trying to maximize your top three tanks hit points and heals per second.
A good analogy for blizzard would be to look at the problems facing Comic book writers.
Every year your hero (in order to keep reader numbers up) must face an increasing number of challenges. Each challenge must show some sort of growth, else your wasting retail space. You have two choices: One, you can power your hero into godly challenges and power levels, or Two, you can show challenges that focus on the man or team's character and unsurpassed abilities.
Think Batman.
In general Batman fights the same roster and power level of villians each year, for the past 60 years. Thugs, gangsters, and wackos. How it's been kept interesting is the situations which Bruce Wayne must overcome his villian of the month (or bi-weekly). As crazy as it is (as batman begins has proven), the same story can be retold with infinite iterations if nothing except the level of skill is taken to be given.
I think this is the best (and the proper evolution of Raiding) path Blizzard should take from here on out. Limit the buffs, or marginalize the buffs to a point where content needs to be a contest of player skill and intelligence, not our ability to sit for 19 hours in your video game world. We're all (or at least mentally) adults, and time sinks belittle us.
The collary however is what is best for blizzard. Sadly, time spent in their game. If raiders are the top 5% of the player base (by skill they have beaten all other content), how do you keep them interested in the game....
One-sentence summary: Consumables are too powerful, such that Blizzard's raid designers are forced into the untenable position of balancing around unbuffed groups and having their content steamrolled, or balancing around buffed groups and forcing players into a cycle of unpleasant farming in order to even have a chance.
Spot on.
What would be really helpful is for Blizzard to at least communicate their intended design here. Do they think raiding consumables are a problem, or don't they? And if they do, then what are they planning to do about it? I just don't understand the wall of silence around the WoW developers, in this specific instance and also more generally. The people in the know almost never comment and the PR staff is clueless.
It's silly that we have to divine developer intentions like this. The designers are hardly stupid, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary it's hard not to draw the conclusion that they like the way consumables affect the game at the raid level, and apparently want to increase their significance. Which is mystifying. This is a matter of some concern to the playerbase, so if Blizzard has a good explanation, then they should tell us what it is. If they don't have a good explanation, well... that means something too, doesn't it?
The collary however is what is best for blizzard. Sadly, time spent in their game. If raiders are the top 5% of the player base (by skill they have beaten all other content), how do you keep them interested in the game....
Farming.
If potions and world buffs didn't exist, and some Naxx fights were tweaked accordingly, the zone would've taken just as long to clear, if not longer. Better balance would be possible, and brute force would no longer exist as a substitute for skill. The only difference would be less time spent farming (or buying gold online) after the raids ended each night.
Remember, Blizzard doesn't charge by the hour. They charge by the month. On the other hand, I know people who cancelled their subscriptions because they didn't have time to keep farming in order to raid, so they opted to do neither.
Edit: I would also like to say that I think Elerion's post is spot on. Everyone enjoys consumables like Invuln pots and Swiftness pots where you use them reactively in special situations, and you can come up with clever applications of them, and they open up new tactical options without necessarily making you more "powerful." The same cannot be said about drinking a Mageblood Potion before you pull a boss, sadly.
Remember, Blizzard doesn't charge by the hour. They charge by the month. On the other hand, I know people who cancelled their subscriptions because they didn't have time to keep farming in order to raid, so they opted to do neither.
Blizzard's dream customer would be someone who doesn't play, but keeps their account active anyway. No server load, same monthly bill. Maybe their next project will involve getting their customers girlfriends, so they have less time to play.
The collary however is what is best for blizzard. Sadly, time spent in their game. If raiders are the top 5% of the player base (by skill they have beaten all other content), how do you keep them interested in the game....
Farming.
If potions and world buffs didn't exist, and some Naxx fights were tweaked accordingly, the zone would've taken just as long to clear, if not longer. Better balance would be possible, and brute force would no longer exist as a substitute for skill. The only difference would be less time spent farming (or buying gold online) after the raids ended each night.
Remember, Blizzard doesn't charge by the hour. They charge by the month. On the other hand, I know people who cancelled their subscriptions because they didn't have time to keep farming in order to raid, so they opted to do neither.
Correct.
I'm implying that the content at the moment (and in blizzard's view) is trying to take raiding in the expectation that a raider will use every buff in the game. Therefore they make all raid content tuned towards this assumption.
Blizzard does not charge us by the hour, but on our end, as raiders our value of time is a scarce commodity. As you stated, a lot of players have now retired from raiding until TBC (and most guilds imploded in AQ40 and Naxx when the raiders went bankrupt) when they realized the payoff to the Raiding time sink was just not worth it, for their personal value of time.
I am agreeing however, gold farming is stupid as shit. I mentioned my personal solution to this.
The choice of gold sinks however is the same reason casino’s put in one armed bandits by the exit doors. Maximizing all money they can acquire from the consumer surplus. In blizzard’s eyes, they want to maximize your exposure to the addictive and fun activities of Azeroth. Raiding, community, pvp etc.
If they feel players are only in the game to get the best loot (we are), then dungeons would be packed, and very few would play in the other zones and activites that require our time in Azeroth. This was seen in the empty battlegrounds when pvp gear was the worst upgrades per class. This has also been proven again in the lack of Naxx active guilds close to TBC. If the average dungeon only takes 3 hours to clear, this to Blizzard is the maximum amount of time (3 hours) they have in which to pack every addictive activity into the game, and assure players come back for another time investment.
Now, if you were to link another time investment to the first activity, you will now create a bundled commodity. People are forced to either play more of the game, to get to the stuff they like, or nothing at all. Those that play nothing cancel their accounts, concentrating the player base into only players that will accept your market bundling. Thus, you can increase farm times (as we saw with Naxx vs. BWL), with minimal complaints.
12/16/06, 9:41 PM
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