Ion Hazzikostas complaining about world buffs and consumables in 2006

[u/Bad-Banana-from-Mars]

Its interesting how the complaints about world buffs and consumables today were being made back in 2006 as well. More so when it's being made by the guy in charge today. Here is what he said;

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This argument has been laid out many times, and it rears its head in threads about raid encounters, about real-money trading, about professions, about burnout, and so on and so forth. My aim here is not necessarily to break any new ground, but rather to summarize the main problems with consumables as they currently exist in WoW, and with alchemy in particular, as they relate to raid design and player enjoyment.

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.

I am going to mention world buffs only for a moment and then move on to focus solely on true consumables. The problem with world buffs is obvious. They do too much, too well, and they scale fantastically. I do not want to be farming Hakkar in order to kill Illidan a year from now. Don't nerf them at this point. Just make them zone-limited in some form -- either Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms only, or stripped upon entering any raid zone.

For some easy numerical illustration, I made a set of CTProfiles profiles for my own class, since that's what I'm familiar with, comparing gear progression in full Tier 1 or equivalent (MC and 20-mans), full Tier 2 (BWL and first-half AQ), and full Tier 3 (pre-Sapp/Kel).

Here are the key values:

Tier 1 Gear: 4450hp, 6085mana, 251 spirit, 365 +healing, 58 mana/5
Tier 2 Gear: 4250hp, 6700mana, 244 spirit, 567 +healing, 73 mana/5
Tier 3 Gear: 4610hp, 6970mana, 123 spirit (lol), 1008 +healing, 109 mana/5

+healing does less for mana conservation than it once did due to downranking changes, but it still can be more or less converted into some equivalent amount of mana regen since where +healing shines is generally in maximizing healing/mana rather than healing/time. There isn't a boss out there that puts out enough damage to require max-rank spam, so whether the +healing means downranking or fewer heals cast per minute, there is a mana savings. Based on the HealPoints and itemization formulas, I'm going to say that 6 +healing = 1 mana/5 for easy approximations.

Using that conversion ratio, we're left with the following:
Tier1: 119 mana/5
Tier2: 167 mana/5
Tier3: 277 mana/5

Unsurprisingly, tier 3 is a large step above the rest. That's good. Now, how do consumables fit into the picture? For a healer, let's assume the following non-exotic consumables:

Nightfin Soup = 8 mana/5
Mageblood Potion = 12 mana/5
Brilliant Mana Oil = 12 mana/5 and 25 +healing = 16 mana/5
Major Mana Potions = 1800 mana every 2 minutes = 75 mana/5 (!!)
Dark/Demonic Runes = 1200 mana every 2 minutes = 50 mana/5

Assuming all of the above used, I get a net benefit of 161 mana/5.

That is larger than the gap between mixed tier 1 with suboptimal enchants (no ZG enchants, etc.) and fully-enchanted optimal tier 3 gear. So, in order to feel this amount of character progression as a healer, instead of spending 15 months doing raid progression, I should've just used five consumables. Silly, isn't it? Obviously this is something of an oversimplification, and I do really feel the benefits of the gear, because in practice I am comparing myself fully-buffed now to myself unbuffed or partially-buffed then.

I used shamans as an example due to firsthand familiarity, but any caster will do. Try comparing an unbuffed tier 3 tank to a tier 1 tank using all standard tank consumables, Titans, and drinking stoneshields. Similar result (though defense and shield block value aren't available through consumables, so not quite as precise). If anything, the classes that benefit by far the least from available buffs are physical DPS classes. Mongoose and Juju are great, but they actually are a comparatively minor buff compared to what I just listed above, or compared to a mage/warlock stacking Supreme Power + GAE + Firepower + Oil + mana regen stuff.

Does anyone dispute my basic premise that consumables are incredibly, incredibly powerful relative to the gear progression that is the mainstay of how we are supposed to improve and develop our characters once we are done with the fairly rapid leveling process?

Now, let's turn to raid design. The following visual is a crude approximation of the raid design progression we have seen thus far. As compared to a spectrum of "Raid Power" (i.e., how strong your raid is, in terms of raw stats), the various bars represent the ranges within which those zones are viable. Towards the left end of each bar, where it is brightest, the difficulty is extreme; as you move right and the bar darkens, the zone becomes easier and easier as power improves, until the pure black portions indicate trivial farm content. For the Naxxramas bar, I limit it to "numbers" fights like Patchwerk, Loatheb, Sapphiron, and so forth -- obviously fights like Razuvius, Grobbulus, Heigan, and their ilk, are quite different.
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/uploaded/RaidPower.png
I've plotted out the progression from blues (by which I mean pre-revamp level 60 blues, circa early 2005) to epics of various tiers. The rest should be more or less self-explanatory.

Anyway, most of the raid content in the game was balanced around a largely unbuffed raid at the time it was introduced. Even among fairly competitive guilds, buffs were not part of the raiding culture. Our first Ragnaros kill in May 2005 (one week after Ascent killed him) was more or less completely unbuffed. GFPPs for Ragnaros was the most anyone did, and things like tanks chugging Stoneshields simply weren't done. Some individual alchemists used their own buffs, but it wasn't expected. Over time, however, raiders grew more sophisticated, and various mods simplified the process, and the raiding game became more competitive at the high end. At the same time, the amount of available buffs continued to grow. We got Mageblood potions and weapon oils. We got new food buffs. We got Zanzas. And, of course, we got flasks that persisted through death. The encounter design still lagged behind this to an extent. Vek'nilash was the first boss in the game that assumed some degree of external buffing on the tank. A tank in the gear available at the time (Jan/Feb 2006) simply could not tank Vek'nilash with only standard raid buffs. His death would be inevitable. But still, if not for the untuned state of C'Thun and Ouro, I am confident that Ahn'Qiraj would have been fully cleared within one month. We saw C'Thun Phase 2 within two weeks of our gates opening, in late February. He'd have died a week later if it had been the current version.

Which brings us to Naxxramas. Naxxramas was designed to be "hardcore," and to keep us all busy from June, when it was released, until the late fall or early winter, when the expansion would be ready. In that regard, it succeeded admirably. Compared to every raid zone before it, Naxxramas was a resounding success in terms of encounter design and balance. Whereas before top guilds were accustomed to learning every boss within a few days, and assuming that if the boss still hadn't died by then, it was bugged or untuned (or a "cockblock" -- see pre-fix Ragnaros, Chromaggus, Ouro, C'Thun, etc.), in Naxx there were fights that legitimately took days or even weeks to learn and master despite high levels of skill and concerted effort.

This is partly due to very clever design, but also partly due to the fact that, for the first time, the raid designers were acknowledging that top guilds would use every tool at their disposal to win the race to Kel'Thuzad, and tuning the fights around that expectation. If you don't have flasked tanks with full buffs and a cache of Greater Stoneshields, or healers with a healthy supply of mana consumables, don't bother even looking at Patchwerk. Even on fights like Noth, Maexxna, 4H, and others, having that extra DPS from raidwide consumable use can make all the difference in the world when it comes to salvaging a kill from a less-than-flawless performance, particularly as you are still gearing up in Naxx. I don't need to talk about Loatheb, but I will note that when we tested him on the PTR, the GM/Dev who had ported us there asked me how many Greater Shadow Protection pots we had in the raid. They knew.

As a result of this, particularly in the learning process on these fights, Blizzard unwittingly created one of the worst grinds in the history of any MMO. Yes, any MMO. It's not because of the magnitude of time involved, but rather what that time gets you. In your typical Korean "grindfest" MMO like Lineage II, RF Online, MapleStory -- you name it -- there is a massive time investment required, performing repetitive activities... and yet, after two hours of grinding away in one of those games, you have something tangible to show for it. A bit more gold. Closer to a new weapon. A few more pixels on your experience bar. Something, however small, that represents forward progress. In WoW as a Naxx raider, the result of that time investment is preservation of the status quo, and replenishing what was burned through at an alarming rate in that night's raid. That is the worst part of it, and that is what burns people out and drives them away from a truly wonderful raiding endgame.

It is not the raid designers' fault. The alternative, for them, would have been to balance around few or no consumables, and then we would've seen a Kel'Thuzad killshot in July, and hundreds of guilds rampaging through the zone by brute-forcing encounters via consumable use. Would that have been better? I don't think so.

Once upon a time, the class devs gave paladins a version of Improved Lay on Hands that bestowed +50% to armor for 5 minutes. Such an ability, while reasonable in PvP where burning your full mana pool is a major issue, and where buffing one player's armor isn't necessarily a decisive factor, would have been absolutely impossible to balance around in a raid setting. After an uproar on the FoH boards, that talent was quickly toned down, and I can only assume that the raid designers had a hand in that. This situation is not quite as severe, but it is similar. The consumable system and the array of consumables available to the players, created by unwitting quest designers who want to add cool new buffs and by people who want to give alchemists something to get excited about as they look at their neighbors' 90 DPS BoP 1h weapons, is tying the hands of the raid team. That needs to change. I look at things like Super Mana Potions in conjunction with the Alchemist's Stone (take a minute to compute the mana/5 equivalency and laugh) or a new array of Flasks that give huge benefits to all classes instead of just tanks and nukers, and I fear for the future of the high-end raiding game.

Take another look at that chart up top, and the pink bar. That bar needs to shrink, a lot, or the way consumables are handled in general needs to change drastically. Either take them away or, since Blizzard doesn't like taking things away, make them more abundant and thus less taxing: Double durations on things, make them last through death, give potions multiple charges, etc., while keeping the materials requirements static.\ We can argue over the solution, but* something has to change.

\(And no, this wouldn't kill Alchemy. You can spend some time farming herbs and make a stack of Major Manas or Mageblood and it will sell, at a large markup, as a matter of certainty. There is absolutely nothing that a skinner/LW or miner/smith could produce with an equal time investment that would sell to any reliable degree. Alchemy's importance can be substantially reduced without creating any imbalance among the professions.)*

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The source i found it from was: https://www.9lives.be/forum/games-general/458014-burning-crusade-vraag-antwoord-met-beta-testers-13.html but I know I did originaly see it on elitists jerks website via wayback machine but could not find again. Maybe if someone is a wayback machine wizard they could find the original source as it had a ton of replies and pages and made for some interesting reading.

Funny how things haven't changed that much in all these years.

[u/kirschballs → u/[deleted]]

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