Taugrim's MMO Blog

Trion made a huge announcement today about changes coming to PVP gear. In particular, Valor will no longer scale as it currently does with Rank:

With this Hot Fix you will find that all 4 PvP sets will share the same amount of total valor. This means that the set earned in Ranks 1 & 2 has the same amount of valor as provided by the set earned over Ranks 7 & 8. How much? It works out to 751 Valor, or a 30.04% Damage Reduction.  Instead of being differentiated by survivability, they will be differentiated by their main stats.

This is an awesome and much-needed change in my opinion.

I’m a firm believer that player skill and coordination/communication should be the most significant factors in determining PVP outcomes, but with RIFT’s current PVP gear system, players of higher ranks enjoy two significant advantages:

1. significantly higher PVP mitigation via Valor
2. significantly better stats on their gear and weapons

As an example for point #1, an R6 player can reach ~1100 Valor for 45% mitigation whereas an R2 can reach ~580 Valor for ~23% mitigation. So an R6-R8 literally mitigates twice as much damage as an R2.

These two factors synergized to create strong imbalance issues in PVP – and frequent request by players for PVP brackets based on Rank – and it made fresh 50 PVP a frustrating experience for most players (not including me). I believe the 2nd bullet point alone is sufficient reward for ranking up and will provide a meaningful but not imbalancing competitive advantage – and Trion is moving in that direction.

As a point of reference, Blizzard finally figured this all out after 3.5 years of Arena with the launch of Cataclysm for World of Warcraft. In Cataclysm, epic PVP gear could be purchased by anyone who participates in Battlegrounds and Arena, with the sole exception of the 2200-ranked weapons. Thus, gear has been greatly reduced as a differentiating factor. This was a very positive change for WoW PVP in my experience in battlegrounds and in 2k 2v2 and 3v3 Arena, because combat was much more balanced and challenging. Gear still matters in Cataclysm, but PVP no longer felt like the old oft-quoted formula:

gear > spec > skill

Some RIFT players who grinded up to R7-R8 will be disappointed by the change to Valor, but I think it’s for the better of the game. And frankly, if I hit R7-R8 in the current system, I believe the degree of PVP challenge would be too low for me – I would simply faceroll lower-ranked players, and that would be boring.

I want to lose to better players not simply better-geared players, or the side which has the better class/spec mix. And it sounds like I’ll be getting my wish

Rock on Trion!

Trion shared their proposed class/spec balance update today, and they are planning to:

• Re-work (balance) Pyro Mage’s Ground of Strength. It its current incarnation GoS provides total CC immunity indefinitely for the Mage plus the ability for their spells to stun, and this is rather imbalanced in PVP
• Increase Rogue melee and Marksman damage

The timing of the balance update makes sense – there has been sufficient time since 1.1 went live for the community to get its arms around the changes and to identify problem areas.

To date, players have often framed their feedback quite negatively. E.g. some players have been equating Trion to “Failcom” (aka Funcom, the maker of Age of Conan) and to Electronic Arts / Mythic Entertainment (the maker of Warhammer Online).

Both are unfair comparisons, but players have been badly burned since 2008 by games that were over-hyped but under-delivered, and Trion is experiencing the backlash from players who are now understandably wary of game developers.

While I am not going to predict what degree of commercial success Trion will have or whether Rift is the fabled “WoW Killer” (and as I wrote elsewhere that’s the wrong question to ask), Trion’s actions with and after launch show me that they get it. I have high confidence based on what I’ve seen and heard that Rift will continue to improve and that Trion is listening to the community.

Hopefully over time the majority of Rift’s players will perceive that as well.

As I have stated previously, Rift has been by far and away the best MMORPG launch I’ve seen in over 2.5 years, including Warhammer Online, Aion, and Allods Online. What has made Trion’s launch of Rift successful? Multiple, synergistic actions:

1. Trion didn’t launch until the game was ready. As Exec Producer Scott Hartsman said to me at WonderCon 2011, they were not going to launch until the game was sufficiently stable and had sufficient content
2. Trion has been unusually communicative about upcoming changes with the community. Examples: the Dev Tracker forum functionality to track all posts by Trion employees, Trion’s participation in 3rd-party fan podcasts, and their honesty in answering my questions in person
3. Trion is willing to make the tough calls to bring classes and specs into balance, even if the decisions are unpopular in the short term. I’m not going to tell you the balance in 1.11 is perfect. It’s not. Balance is an iterative process, and considering that we are ~7 weeks from launch, balance is reasonably good, even better than what I experienced as a 2k Arena Protection Paladin in World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm expansion Patch 4.0.6

Class / spec changes for the sake of balance can be hard on the community, but they are absolutely essential for the long-term health of a game.

UPDATE (2011/04/22): OK, maybe I spoke too soon. On the Alpha 1.2, the CC immunity and 30% stun proc for Ground of Strength have not been touched. /sigh

UPDATE (2011/04/29): before I forget, the stun proc was removed from GoS in the first update to 1.2 notes published on 4/26. I think the indefinite full CC immunity is still an issue.

I’ve played Rift since Head Start to level 33, and in my opinion Rift is the best MMORPG launch I’ve experienced in the past 5 years, a span which includes the following titles:

• Warhammer Online
• Aion
• Allods Online
• Rift

Rift’s game developer, Trion, has been remarkably savvy in how they have handled the game thus far, in particular by:

1. Not over-hyping their game then under-delivering. My impression is that Rift has mostly spread by word-of-mouth; my gaming friend Nathan and real life friend Gaardarun both raved about Rift from Beta
2. Delivering a stable, polished game at launch, with a clear path for implementing frequent updates/fixes with minimal downtime. The game servers have been taken down for maintenance at times, but the longest I’ve seen so far is 30 minutes, and Trion has managed expectations on downtimes pretty well. I.e. there hasn’t been that 12-hour unplanned downtime that we all dislike
3. Borrowing innovations from other games. Rift has taken some of the best mechanics and design features from games such as Warhammer, including the PVP mechanics for “tanks” such as Guard, Taunt, Hold the Line, etc and Detaunt. And other game features such as Achievements, Guild Achievements, Guild Ranks, etc that originated in Warhammer (and which Blizzard also copied)
4. Designing the most flexible spec system ever, which is both fun-to-play and IMO shields Trion from the class/spec griping from the playerbase

That last point has huge implications. Consider the following example with WoW. You roll a Paladin to heal at endgame as Holy, but you are unhappy with nerfs or issues for your spec. What are your options?

• Continue to play the spec and hope for future buffs, or
• Re-spec to Protection or Retribution and re-gear, or
• Roll a different Healing class, re-level to endgame, and then re-gear

Those are all crappy options to me, given that I value my time and what I enjoy most is endgame not grinding to get back to endgame. I know some people have been conditioned to accept the current market standards and would say “suck it up and re-level, it’s what I did” but I think that is a lousy customer experience.

With Rift, you can simply change which 3 of the 9 talent trees you are playing as a Healer (Cleric). Rift’s flexible spec system protects players from making a steep time investment in a class that they are later unsatisfied with for whatever reason.

The other implication of the spec system is that there are fewer opportunities for (real or perceived) imbalance between specs for the same class. Everyone knows a spec change has a low switching cost. No need to re-roll, re-level, and re-gear from scratch.

Is Rift the next “WoW Killer”? I don’t know and frankly don’t care. It’s the wrong question to ask – the right question is whether a game supports a virtuous cycle:

Trion made the right decision as to when the game was ready to launch, thereby avoiding the irreparable damage that was done by launching too early, as we saw with Warhammer Online and Age of Conan.

Will Trion continue to re-invest in the game over time? It’s too early to tell, but my impression is that they have a sharp management team, a perception further reinforced by an interview with Trion’s Marketing head back in December that I read today, while trying to find paying subscriber numbers. I haven’t been able to find those numbers yet – if you see any good articles please link them.

From a bigger picture perspective, Trion gives me hope for the “traditional MMORPG” market. Just over a year ago, I expressed concern that game developers were moving away from traditional MMORPGs and instead investing in social gaming. Trion shows how to do traditional MMORPGs right.

Please keep in mind that this is my honest, objective opinion. Like many of you, I’ve been burned by bloggers who hype up new games which only end up disappointing.

As you may know, five months ago I wrote the first draft of my Prot Pally PVP Guide with the 4.0 changes. Four months ago, I created a thread for my Guide on the new WoW us.battle.net Paladin forum right after it went live.

The thread generated a lot of rich dialogue, and players reported the thread for sticky and the 1st post in the thread was “Highly rated.” However, for many months my Guide thread was not stickied.

I speculated that the lack of sticky might be due to:

1. Blizzard did not want to overtly support Prot Pally PVP and therefore not stickying the thread was aligned with that intent, and/or
2. Blizzard did not like that I had links to my blog here for the Guide, even thought it’s pretty clear that the main intention behind the Guide is helping players not advertising – and I’ve learned from past experience that I can’t trust forum moderators to not delete my content so I post all my Guides here

Last night, I received the following email:

If I had received this email anytime from November until early February, I would have been thrilled.

However, given that I already de-subbed from WoW due to interest in Rift, the post from Blue about not being too concerned with Prot Pally PVP, and the fact that my free time is very limited, I haven’t decided what to do.

Don’t get me wrong – I recognize that very few threads get stickied on a WoW class forum.

I just find the timing of all this rather ironic

EDIT (2011/03/13): I went ahead and updated / scrubbed my Guide thread on the WoW Paladin forum, and it’s now stickied:

Back in November, Ghostcrawler said:

We’re hoping that Rated BGs give Prot specs a useful role similar to tanking in defending towers, carrying flags, etc. A tank in an Arena needs to have a lot of control and damage just like everyone else to be competitive, which coupled with their inherent survivability and resistance to being controlled got us into trouble.

GC’s comments back then made sense – they wanted Prot specs to have a “useful role” in PVP, but they were concerned about balance. I can totally appreciate and respect that.

Last night, Daxxarri posted that Blizzard is not concerned with keeping Protection Paladin viable in PVP. Here are the sections related to PVP (bold emphasis mine) for Prot and Ret:

We’re not too concerned with keeping Protection viable in PvP. We know some players enjoy it, but the majority of Prot paladins are more concerned with their ability to tank, and that’s where we spend most of our Protection design effort. It’s a great goal to make all of a class’s specs viable in PvP, but it’s not always possible to do so and paladins have other options.

We think the 4.06 changes overall gave Retribution too great a buff for PvP. We realize that there are those that disagree, but we’re pretty firm on that point and we needed to make some adjustments. Given that Ret is primarily a dps spec, we thought it made more sense to reduce their off-healing capacity, which had become quite strong, rather than their damage.

That’s not to say that we mind a hybrid dps spec occasionally helping out with healing – that feels cool, and it’s appropriate. On the other hand, we want damage focused specs to be primarily focused on dps. It’s true that there were other ways we could have reduced Retribution healing. We could have changed Selfless Healer or even Word of Glory itself. As I mentioned earlier, after looking things over, we arrived at the conclusion that having a powerful heal you can use infrequently is more compelling than having a weak heal that you can use more often.

The things said by GC and Daxxarri are not aligned – Prots are either viable or not viable. If they are not viable, they are not useful.

Let me make a few points here:

1. Blizzard has not yet implemented “tanks” effectively in PVP in WoW compared to other games
2. The WoW community, which consists of a lot of players who have only played WoW, doesn’t have a lot of experience or perspective on what well-implemented tanks in PVP look like
3. Retribution in 4.1 is still screwed

Blizzard has not yet implemented “tanks” effectively in PVP in WoW compared to other games

WoW back in Vanilla was largely a PVE game, with limited PVP content. In TBC, Arenas were introduced. In WotLK, it got even easier to grind out PVP gear with Honor. In Cata, most of the Rating requirements were removed from PVP gear. So WoW has gradually been increasing its PVP content and accessibility. These are all good changes.

That being said, WoW is lacking mechanics for tanks in PVP, relative to rest of the market.

For example back in 2008 Warhammer implemented tanks with the following features:

• Against players, Taunt acted as an interrupt and buffed the tank’s damage on that target
• Tanks had a Guard mechanic, which was a buff they could put on a single player, to re-direct some of the incoming damage on the Guarded player to the tank. This was an awesome mechanic. A tank could put Guard on squishier DPS or Healer to help keep them alive under focus fire
• Tanks had Hold the Line, which was an avoidance buff that the tank could channel (while moving) that would affect players behind them. So you could do mass charges or defend against assaults

Mechanics like these made tanks highly relevant and fun in Warhammer PVP. Other modern games such as Rift are borrowing these mechanics.

The issue with WoW is that a lot of abilities either have only a PVE application (e.g. Taunt) or are imbalanced in PVP (e.g. CC effects). This will continue to be an issue until Blizzard sorts out how to balance PVE and PVP for a given spec – which is totally doable but needs to be supported by intention and good design.

It’s noteworthy that WoW has copied good non-PVP ideas from other games, such as Achievements and Guild Achievements/Rank, which were ideas innovated by Warhammer.

The WoW community doesn’t have a lot of experience or perspective on what well-implemented tanks in PVP look like

Most WoW players when you ask them about a tank spec only say that it’s relevant for PVE. This is a notion enforced by both the game mechanics and the fact that for many players, WoW is the only MMORPG they’ve played.

Therefore, you see a lot of backlash from players about tanks in PVP.

Retribution in 4.1 is still screwed

The reason why Ret is viable for BGs and competitive PVP (Arena, Rateds) is because it has good offhealing capability. This is necessary IMO because Ret does not have the amount of CC that most DPS classes possess.

To quote myself from a post on the WoW forum:

IMO Prot and Ret will be steeply nerfed PVP if the WoG nerf goes in with even a 5-sec cooldown let alone 20-sec, without some other strong compensating mechanics, e.g. increased CC.

Back-to-back WoG heals (via Eternal Glory for either spec, or Divine Purpose for Ret) or WoG heals cast within 2 GCDs of each other (e.g. WoG, Divine Plea, WoG) are a huge part of what make Prot and Ret viable in PVP.

Anyone who debates that point IMO is either ignorant about the mechanics of those specs in PVP or biased against Paladins.

I’m very perplexed by the reasoning for the nerf mentioned by Blizzard. Granted, Blue posters often get skewered / nitpicked by players for anything they say, but this is one case where I think the concerns of the playerbase are entirely warranted.

I have read some inane arguments that Prot and Ret shouldn’t be able to have offhealing capability in PVP, but what the people saying those things fail to take into account is that relative to other DPS classes, we lack CC. As such, we heal because that’s what is needed in some situations to help friendly players, because we can’t peel to the extent other classes do.

Anyway, it is what it is. I’m glad I’ve moved on to Rift, because based on what I’m reading, I don’t believe Blizzard understands how to design mechanics for non-Holy Paladins in PVP.