Outdoor mobs and me

The recent news and discussion about Blizzard buffing monster damage output in the beta got me thinking. I don't want mob-fighting in the open world to be completely trivial, but I don't want it to be too hard either. What do I want then?

To be honest, I don't think I actually want the average mob to be truly challenging, assuming it's of the same level as my character and on its own. I'm not saying that you couldn't make a good game where every single fight pushes you to your limits, but I don't think that WoW should be that game. It wasn't even that way back in Vanilla, back when many other things were generally harder.

Still, killing monsters should cost you some resources at least, so it shouldn't be a case of waltzing in and insta-gibbing things with two dagger stabs. I guess to me personally "a third" sounds like a completely unscientific but decent rule of thumb. If killing a mob takes off a third off your health bar (as a melee class) or costs you a third of your mana bar (as a caster), I'd consider that quite reasonable.

However, at the end of the day I think it's actually a mix of other factors that eventually decides whether I enjoy going out into the world to kill things. For me these factors are: variety of mob types, positioning and dangerousness. Let me illustrate what I mean by example of Redridge Mountains, a zone that I feel does all three of those things pretty well (or at least used to, before they removed all the outdoor elites).

As far as mob types go, Redridge offers a decent amount of variety. Leaving aside the human settlement, you'll encounter three kinds of humanoids: murlocs in and around the lake, gnolls in the hills and Blackrock orcs spilling forth from the Burning Steppes in the north. In addition there's a solid amount of wildlife: boars, black dragon whelps, condors, tarantulas and threshers in the lake. There are even some undead, demon hounds, a rare giant and a rare elemental spawn. The differences between these mobs aren't purely cosmetic either. Some of them cast spells, some frenzy, some poison, some stun and so on. This guarantees some variety as you quest your way through the zone, and different mobs encourage you to use different abilities based on what class you play.

It should be a bit of a no-brainer that this is something that makes the game more fun, but somehow this hasn't prevented Blizzard from making zones where a single type of mob dominates so strongly that it gets tedious rather quickly. For example silithid aren't strictly the only type of mob in Silithus, but considering how much of the map is taken up by their hives it often feels that way, and it makes the area a very boring place to quest in.

Then there's positioning. As a general rule, mobs in WoW are positioned in a very "gamey" way to make it convenient to pull them one by one, while leaving as little map space as possible completely empty. That's always pretty unrealistic of course, but to a certain extent willing suspension of disbelief works around it. To use the Redridge example again, gnolls tend to band together in camps, where groups of them sit close together around campfires, and others patrol around the edges of the camp. This makes at least some sense, and provides some interesting opportunities to practice proper pulling and crowd control. Can I get this patrolling guy without aggroing any other mobs? How can I get past this group of three without dying?

In other parts of the world however, especially in the more barren areas, you'll often look out across the land and the mobs will look very much artifically arranged to stand at a certain distance from each other, often not even moving much. Again, that makes for pretty boring gameplay regardless of how difficult the mobs are to beat on their own, as you can do little but simply pull one after the other.

And finally, there's the sense of dangerousness. This is the aspect where variety is more important than anywhere else. To use Redridge as an example again: when you're questing there (as Alliance), the town of Lakeshire is obviously the ultimate "safe space". But the world outside isn't equally dangerous everywhere, regardless of the mobs' levels. For example there are a lot of neutral boars in the immediate vicinity of the town and near the roads, mingling with the hostile mobs there and lowering the average danger per sqare mile so to speak. With neutral mobs among the hostile ones you're less likely to overpull by accident, and if you suddenly need to go AFK for a minute it's easier to find a reasonably safe spot to stand. One step up is the area around Alther's Mill, where all the mobs are hostile but still somewhat spread out. The densly populated gnoll and orc camps are a lot more dangerous already, but the ultimate danger used to lie in Stonewatch Keep, back when all the mobs inside it were elite. You just knew that this wasn't a place where you wanted to go alone.

Different areas threatening you with different degrees of danger keeps you on your toes and makes the game more intersting and immersive. The reason variety is so important here is that veering too far into either direction has a negative effect as well. If you make everything neutral and unthreatening, like Blizzard has done in the starting zones a few patches ago, the game leaves you bored and bewildered (because those "evil" quillboar not minding your presence makes no sense). If you make every monster really dangerous on the other hand, you discourage solo play, which isn't really what WoW is about either. I remember old Silithus being a nightmare before they removed the outdoor elites, simply because all the silithid were elite, and with a couple of additional elite monsters and elite Twilight cultists the whole zone just felt like a place where you couldn't do much on your own. I quested there with a friend for a few days and then never came back, not even on my alts. It was just too off-putting.

Assuming that a zone presents the player with different types of mobs; some grouped and some alone; some neutral, some hostile and some really hard; I don't think Blizzard needs to turn every individual mob into a hard hitter. As long as the mobs are not completely trivial, easy and challenging areas can be implemented simply by adjusting the aforementioned factors.

Elemental invasions

One thing I encountered during my Loremaster-ing and which I hadn't taken notice of in a while were the elemental invasions. Have you ever seen one? According to WoWWiki they are quite an old feature (added in patch 1.4) but personally I didn't actually take note of them until my fourth alt or so noticed an odd yell in Winterspring one day.

Basically what happens is that every couple of days or so, a named level 58-60 elite elemental spawns in one of four zones on Kalimdor (earth in Azshara, water in Winterspring, fire in Un'goro and air in Silithus), surrounded by a lot of non-elite mobs of the same type (called invaders), and then patrols the area while yelling the occasional taunt at the zone in general. They are pretty tough at level, but if you outlevel them by a significant margin they quickly become trivial, just like normal mobs.

Nonetheless I still love looking for them whenever I see the familiar signs: It's like finding an exceptionally rare spawn. The loot is pretty damn good as well, they all tend to drop five or six items at once, usually a bunch of crafting materials of their respective element (elemental/essence of earth/water/fire/air) and some BoE gear, which still adds up to a couple of gold. Talk about loot pinatas.

I've killed Princess Tempestria multiple times by now, Avalanchion and the Windreaver once each, but I don't recall ever catching Baron Charr even though I've seen his invaders around - I guess someone just beat me to the punch each time. There may not be an achievement for collecting elemental kills like this, but it still feels like one to me.

With the upcoming expansion paying more attention to the elemental plane, I wonder if these elemental lords will make a comeback as serious challengers at the level cap? It would certainly fit with the overall theme, and if they were hard enough so people would actually have to team up to kill them... ahh, the possibilities. I'll try not to get my hopes up though, as I wouldn't be surprised if even Blizzard themselves had kind of forgot about these guys at this point.

Scattered thoughts on Cataclysm beta news

I can't help but wonder: are there still people who are trying to avoid Cataclysm spoilers completely? I imagine that it must be quite hard by now, considering how omnipresent spoilers appear to be on the news sites and how casually people like to drop them into discussions of completely unrelated subjects as well.

Anyway, no story spoilers here, as I'm still trying to avoid those. I don't mind finding out about gameplay-related changes really, because I don't consider "being confused by my vastly changed talent trees" a fun feature of new content patches anyway. Better to be able to prepare yourself a little ahead of time.

Biggest gear reset ever

One thing that's pretty old news right now but that nonetheless hasn't ceased to amaze me is the absolutely massive gear reset that's coming in Cataclysm. To give an example, these are the leggings my main is currently wearing. They are the tier 10.25 legs for healing priests (or whatever you want to call them), acquired by running normal-mode ICC-25 or heroic ICC-10. Not the best item currently available in the game for that slot, but pretty close. This is what they look like in the Cataclysm beta, with the spell power mostly converted into stamina. And this is a green quest reward from Mount Hyjal, for a quest that you can do at level eighty. The stats are pretty damn close.

Now, this doesn't so much annoy me (though I will probably moan a little when I have to replace my epics acquired through raiding with quest greens), but it does confuse me. Remember the Burning Crusade with its also pretty considerable gear reset? If you don't, just compare this blue quest reward from Hellfire Peninsula with this robe from AQ40. Ouch.

The thing is, Blizzard agreed afterwards that this was a bad idea. This is why the gear replacement curve in Northrend was so much smoother. A green quest reward from Howling Fjord didn't really hold a candle to something from Zul'Aman for example (and not just because of the weird itemisation). And again, people mostly seemed to agree that this was a good thing.

And yet, here comes Cataclysm and they go back to the "massive gear reset" model and nobody seems to do as much as bat an eyelash about it. Or maybe they did and I've missed it; personally I haven't seen any discussion of the subject on blogs or read about any official Blizzard statements explaining this complete turnaround in attitude. It just seems strange.

Fear those normal world mobs

Larísa made a nice post last week about the fact that Blizzard has been ramping up the health and damage output of normal world mobs in the high level zones in the Cataclysm beta. Many seem to welcome this change, but I'm a bit undecided - which is ironic considering that I asked for a "healthy buff" for all outdoor mobs myself before.

I still think that it's a good idea in principle, but judging by some of the comments I've seen on the forums it could be that Blizzard has gone too far into the other direction right now. It's one thing to not want to be able to two-shot a mob of equal level and quite another to be two-shotted yourself by that same mob instead.

Plus, one has to consider that mob difficulty varies a lot depending on what class and spec you play. My holy priest still takes her sweet time killing normal level eighty mobs, even in ICC-25 gear. My hunter can kill the same mobs quickly, but can still get into situations where she'll have to feign and reset if she gets too many adds or tries to take on a powerful elite on her own. And my protection paladin could just run through any group of mobs, including elites, and tank them to death without even losing any health or mana. So I'm a bit worried that if Blizzard tunes things in such a way that they'll be challenging to even the most powerful characters, my weaker toons might just not be able to solo at all, which would obviously suck.

Also, you have to keep in mind that these characters are all at least in a mix of triumph and frost level gear, so that is a factor as well. If you tune things to push people in ilevel 264 gear to their limits, any alts that get levelled after the release of Cataclysm and try to progress into the level eighty-one zones in greens and blues a hundred ilevels lower will run into a massive brick wall all of a sudden, which doesn't exactly make for a smooth levelling curve either.

Personally I would only increase the difficulty of normal mobs a little, but bring elite areas back into the world and generally increase mob density in areas that are supposed to be "scary". Many mobs that give levelling players trouble in the old world don't actually hit particularly hard on their own either, but they come in packs and like to do things like run away and call for help, which keeps you on your toes.

Holy priest, Batman!

On a completely unrelated note, you might remember me ranting quite heavily about what holy priests looked like in the Cataclysm beta one and a half months ago. As such I'm quite happy to hear that Blizzard has finally got around to paying some attention to the spec, trying to make sure that the talents actually make some sense and just generally making holy sound interesting again.

Personally I'm not worried about the spec becoming too difficult to play, but I do sort of wonder about how much point there is in adding too many new healing spells for priests. After all, resto druids were denied any new additions to their healing arsenal with the argument that they already have enough, and while priests need a little more variety since their spellbook has to cover two healing specs focusing on different spells, there is still such a thing as overkill. Don't get me wrong, the huge variety of healing spells is one of the things that really attracts me to holy priest play, but there comes a point where spells start to look too similar and you just can't make them all equally viable. Don't introduce more spells just for the sake of having more, they are likely to just end up on the edge of people's action bars where they never get used because another spell pretty much already does the same thing anyway.