Classic vs. Modern

I see a lot of posts about this subject; close to every day in fact and decided it was time to write about it. If you are even remotely familiar with what goes on in the official World of Warcraft forums, or have even a passing interest at various different boards, such as mmo-c, then you shouldn’t be a stranger to posts that pine for the return of vanilla WoW, or similarly TBC. An innumerable number of posts have asked Blizzard to establish vanilla and TBC servers, just for those who liked those times of the game.

First of all, to get out of the system, Blizzard has so far refused and I completely agree with their reasoning. The simple fact is that the game has evolved, for the better in many cases (no matter what the critics say) and they prefer to keep the game going forward, instead of maintaining versions of the game that are outdated and outright flawed from their perspective.

Secondly, and this is the part that I feel people should remember, is that when people post stuff like “ohh but things so much better back then, there was an actual challenge to the game…” they are not really being perfectly honest with themselves. It is not actually just a World of Warcraft phenomenon, but human nature to often pine for the return of the old, by the assumption that it was somehow better. I remember when I, once upon a time, did a summer job as a janitor, I got all these old people coming to me (and my boss) to complain how I was doing it wrong and the old guy was much better than I was. I talked with the actual janitors there about it and who simply laughed and told me not to worry about it, that the old guy got the exact same flack I got. Apparently he had not been any better than I was, nor doing anything a whole lot differently. It is simply the human nature to endlessly complain and even make up logic to support their ridiculous argument.

Now I am not saying that, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the old expansions had their moments and many people rightfully enjoyed it but lets try to take some of the more valid arguments and consider them from a logical perspective.

#1 The Game was more challenging, as a whole.

I really doubt it actually was. Many things are a bit easier to accomplish in the modern game, like grind the necessary reputation to buy items from faction vendors. Back in vanilla it could possibly take months to just get one item, but that isn’t really challenging and it is the main pitfall of these arguments; that they assume grinding is difficult. It isn’t. It simply takes a lot of time which is just outright boring. The game has lost a lot of the grindiness (probably not a word but I’ll use it anyway) and that is a good thing. It can still take anything from 2-4 weeks to grind a single faction to exalted. I know Baradin Wardens took me a long time and so did the original Sons of Hodir faction in Wrath of the Lich King. Lets remember, a month of doing dailies every day is a long time and, at least in my opinion, anything beyond that is just excessive, particularly when that only pertains to one faction, out of half a dozen in current content.

#2 40-man raids were much more epic

Were they really? The reason why Blizzard changed the raid format down to 10- and 25-man was the simple fact that in most cases, it was not actually 40 people raiding. It was more like 20-25 who were raiding and the rest were just sitting on their hands, and getting carried. Not to mention the whole organizational nightmare of actually getting 40 people to show up on time for regular raids, to gear them up and have them perform optimally. How many guilds nowadays, have a problem with putting together and maintaining 25 skilled players? Most average guilds have to work in 10-man and even then, many still have problems. Now build that up to 40 people and you have a raid leader’s nightmare.

#3 Raid encounters are just a joke these days

No they are not. If you actually look at most of the encounters in vanilla for example, they are not very complex. By comparison, modern raid encounters have a lot more things going on simultaneously; where as vanilla encounters have relatively few. For example, the heroic lich king encounter in Icecrown Citadel has been described (by many world top guilds) as the most complex and difficult encounter thus far, a statement I personally agree. Much of the so called “challenge” actually came from the fact that you were most like utterly under geared for the encounter and that itemization was not ideal, by any stretch, back then. Some mechanics were also just outright broken; like healers down ranking their spells, tanks not truly having much in terms of aoe abilities, etc. Not to mention variety and game balance issues between classes.

#4 No more class specialization

When I heard this, I was just bewildered. The fact that in vanilla you might have had the need to, specifically, bring something like a dwarf priest just to get fear ward and some specs were not viable for raiding at all. So if you wanted to raid, e.g. as a paladin tank in TBC you had just an enormous world of hurt ahead of you because, at the time, and especially during vanilla, you only one viable option. Same goes for the healers. Now, we have four viable tanking specs and five viable healing specs. To me, this is awesome and lets people play the class that truly interests them. Many other things were actually simply broken in the game at the time. Just consider pvp in vanilla, where some classes were just useless and others were close to gods. Warlocks for instance could use detect invisibility to see through stealth. Some go the distance and say that literally half the game was broken, in one way or another.

Really, the whole nostalgia for old content seems to play more to the selfish need of importance to me. Too many are too proud of themselves for the sheer fact that "they started the game back in the day” as if that somehow made them better than others. The comedy of it all becomes obvious when you realize that, while many did started back then, they did not actually clear that much content. But still… they were there so it has to for something right?

Last but not least, by Blizzard’s own words, we know that this is not what the game was suppose to be in the first place. There are countless blues on the forums, trying desperately to make sink into peoples’ consciousness that the game was not supposes to be an effort in pain management. It was not supposed to be masochistic and all the changes the game has had ever since have been working towards the goal of getting away from that. Lets remember that a lot of the Blizzard designers came from old games like Everquest and the whole point of World of Warcraft was to step away from that style of gaming.

Tanking Primer: Combat Table

This article will be targeted primarily towards warrior and paladin tanks, because out of the four classes, these two sport shields and thus use the block stat. DKs and druids have their own unique mechanics in dealing with damage reduction, in the form of blood shield and savage defense. To them, knowledge of the combat table is less important but still good to know, if you want to continue reading.

In its simplicity, combat table is a mechanic within the World of Warcraft game engine, used to determine if a mob scores a successful hit or not. Every time you attack, or are being attacked, the game rolls a random number between 0 and 100 and checks it against the combat table. As a tank, it is important that you are aware of what your combat table looks like. Put into a cohesive list, it looks like this:

• Miss
• Dodge
• Parry
• Block
• Hit

There are additional entries on the combat table as well, such as Glancing Blow, Critical Hit, and Crushing Blows. However, as a tank you will have specced into talents such as Bastion of Defense (every tanking tree has its own version of this talent and picking it up is the first prerequisite to becoming a tank), which removes critical hits from the table and the chance for Crushing Blows was removed with the TBC expansion. Glancing blows only occur with white attacks (term used for autoattacks) and are not relevant in the context of this article.

If you look at your character sheet’s defensive stats, you will see four of the five stats listed there. The first, miss chance is always 5% and does not normally change, unless you are a night elf and receive the Quickness racial ability. Once you fill the combat table with the values of your character sheet, you should have a good idea what kind of hits you will be suffering. As an example, I will fill in my own current stats and the end result looks like this:

• 0% – 5% to miss
• 5.01% – 16.6% to dodge
• 16.61% – 31.94% to parry
• 31.95% – 93.29% to block
• 93.30% – 100% to hit

Notice how as our stats increase, the chance for normal hits (at the bottom) grows smaller and smaller? Since those are the hits that deal the most damage to us, our goal is to minimize, and ultimately remove, their chances of occurring. Eventually block will completely replace the chance for normal hits and since mastery has no diminishing returns, it is by far our very best stat. However, before you get all excited, there is a final snag to the combat table; the numbers you see above, only apply against mobs that are the same level as I am (alas level 85). Heroic dungeon bosses are ranked level 87 and raid bosses are ranked a step higher, level 88. This introduces a 0.2% less chance, for every level the mob is above you, for the mob’s attack to miss, get dodged, parried, and blocked, thus skewing the table by 0.6% on each stat (a total of 2.4%).

Taking this into account, against a raid boss, in truth my combat table looks like this:

• 0% – 4.4% to miss
• 4.41% – 15.4% to dodge
• 15.41% – 30.14% to parry
• 30.15% – 90.89% to block
• 90.9% – 100% to hit

It is something of an oversight in my opinion, as to why the character sheet does not take this into account. Blizzard could very easily include this feature, the same way they included a similar element on the hit rating (breaking it down to show different chances of hitting different level mobs). The easiest way for us to implement this last factor is to simply move the finishing line and instead of using 100% as the roof, use 102.4%. That means there is still a 9.1% chance for a raid boss to land normal hits on me. This is not bad by any means, but more work still remains to reach unhittable (a term used when normal hits can no longer occur). For a warrior tank, it is currently not a position that is possible to reach, even with the BiS hard mode gear. Paladins however, receive more block from mastery and have been able to reach the cap for months now. Warriors should not be far behind, once the patch 4.2 is released and we move onto the next tier of content. Some applications also take the additional chance to hit into account, such as Rawr. So if you use one, do not be alarmed if you cannot get the stats between your World of Warcraft client and the program to match up.

When spoken generally, on discussion boards, combat table coverage is often simply described as a figure that is the total chance for a hit to be avoided or block, thus; 5% miss + dodge-% + parry-% + block-%. In my case, that would be 93.3%. This is the most common way total avoidance and mitigation is described and is the value we are most interested in. Of course, understanding of the combat table is also important for other variety of reasons; e.g. gimmick fights like Chimaeron encounter of Blackwing Descent, which favors pure avoidance over block and mastery.

Tanking Primes: Intro

Those who follow the mmo-c forums regularly, know I post there quite a lot, and most notably on subject of tanking mechanics. The problem is that, unlike some other sites, mmo-c doesn’t really have a good method in place to filter out repeated topics and we end up writing a lot of material over and over, and that’s quite draining. So I decided to start a tanking primer on my blog, to try cover some of the more common tanking mechanics.

Now before you mail about how the stuff I’ll be covering is basic and obvious, spare me. I am not trying to educate the educated, but teach the ignorant. It might make me sound a bit like a douche, but I do not use the word in a degratory manner. The simple fact is that a lot of tanks, even those who clear a lot of content, do not fully understand how their stats and mechanics work. E.g. if I had a penny every time the combat table is explained on the mmo-c forums, I could retire to the Bahamas.

In a way, this is not complicated stuff but then again, most of the tank theorycrafting isn’t overly complex, unless you get to the math of it all; e.g. how to figure the optimal benefits of parry and dodge, without suffering from DR and still taking Hold the Line into account. I might get to that as well, but I will start by covering the simpler mechanics and just see where it takes me. After all, lets face it, you don’t need to understand that stuff to be a good tank and unless you are really into that sort of thing, you will most likely only waste your time.

That brings us to the actual target audience of these articles; they will mainly be targeted at tanks of all flavors, but obviously less for others, due to diversity between the classes. Also, I play a warrior tank, so my main focus will be around mechanics that affect me personally. But like I said, there will be something for everyone.

So, stay tuned.