To Summarize , a combination of dangerous and rewarding enemies, non-damaging spells that are useful and important mid-fight, and a damage rotation which allows choices and rewards smart decision making are all somewhat lacking in the current game, and are sorely needed to bring back compelling combat gameplay.
–
BFA has passed more then half of its lifespan and with only one patch left in it’s arsenal of updates, there is time for reflection. While the expansion had its good moments, this article will deal with one of its failures, in the hopes of changing course in Shadowlands or in later expansions.
The problem I’m discussing is the variety of decision making during combat. Over wow’s considerable lifetime, there was always some level of thought that a player could input into how to most efficiently defeat his enemies, computer AI or real players. The mechanics supplementing these choices changed over time, but it was always there. In recent expansions, Legion and especially BFA, it was diluted to a point where an experienced player does not have many opportunities to excel by making the best decisions in combat, and any player does not have much choice when facing enemies beside “do the most dmg possible”. Even doing this damage is mostly done by a preset, unchanging “rotation” with no need to respect surprises or special abilities in enemies.
Easy to Learn, Hard to Master
Blizzard titles have prided themselves for years for being fun and compelling from the get go, but offering a lot of depth to anyone willing to take the dive. Diehard fans might agree with this statement from titles as early as sc1 and Warcraft 3, but it was true in WoW combat as well. As early as the vanilla version of the game, combat was easy to understand, but the relative difficulty of more than one mob, and the limitations of mana and health, encouraged a thoughtful and careful approach to each enemy, and forced quick thinking when you bit more then you could comfortably chew.
Over time, in attempts to build and enhance the design of classes, players grew more powerful in comparison to the enemies found in solo content. Considerations of mana and health regeneration became less stressful because classes could more easily heal themselves, mana costs became less prohibitive, and synergetic abilities rose to form well defined “rotations” which maximized damage output. This could have spelt the end of complexity in solo adventures, but blizzard rose to the challenge, and it didn’t. Around the time of Mist of Pandaria, where many classes’ tools and relative strength where at a peak of power, mobs also became more complex. Isle of Thunder and The Timeless Isle were a notable case of locations where common non elite enemies could have abilities previously reserved only to group bosses, and elites with uncommonly high health became, well, common, despite these areas encouraging solo exploration.
There was more. Instead of relying on the enemies themselves to provide interesting challenge, the expanded toolkit of classes became a source for fun decisions. While you could defeat even multiple enemies without an in-depth understanding of your class’s toolkit, mastery and experience allowed you to make judgment calls that yielded far better results. A player felt rewarded for understanding his class, and there was a lot of room to improve, both in solo and group play.
The Focus on Damage
This toolkit, unfortunately, was diluted. Blizzard’s somewhat justified concern that there are simply too many abilities being added lead to a pruning of several. The first wave came in Warlords and Draenor, and a much bigger pass followed in Legion. The new, pruned toolkit put near total focus on dealing damage in a rotation. There was still synergy and a proper sequence to execute, but a lot of nuance was lost. You do the same rotation, and the only challenge is continuing to do it while under stress from the enemies you encounter. There is very little moments in which you think “I should have clicked this button rather then that”. This isn’t to say the highest level of play became too easy, evident by the continued exclusivity of mythic raiding, mythic+ dungeons, and the highest rated pvp brackets. But the difficulty is more centered around doing whats right at all times, rather than combining that with judgement calls about what is right in the first place.
How to Bring Choices Back
In order for players to feel like they have room to display better judgement, and feel rewarded in doing so, a staple of every strategic role playing game, we must embrace choice. The way to do that are many, but I will focus on three major options which have proven themselves effective in previous successful iterations of this idea in WoW.
- Put more options in the “rotation”: If a rotation is completely set in stone, there is no choice. You click this button when there is a single target, followed by this, and if there’s aoe you click a different button. Adding many more buttons to this equation doesn’t change the lack of choice, it merely makes it harder to focus on the preset path in stressful situations, which is as mentioned the main difficulty factor of WoW right now.
We can do better. What if a strong ability can be saved for a significant time with little or no penalty, to be used at the moments most suited for it? This is very common in healing, where cooldowns are only used to respond to emergencies that suit them, but for damage dealers, sitting on cooldowns for too long results in “wasted” damage. Which is why I’m referring not to cooldowns, but to things like pooling resources (for example a warlock’s Chaos Bolt, which in Mists of Pandaria could be saved with up to four charges, with no penalty, to be used against whatever the warlock saw fit). Bam, a choice. What if the class’s resources allow him to do several things that serve a similar purpose with slight difference? For example, you could spend power on a hard hitting DoT, or you could instead spend it on a strong burst of damage, but one that still does less damage then the DoT. Obviously, when monsters live long enough, the DoT is superior, but they don’t always will, or sometimes if they live that long they become too dangerous and you wanna deal with them ASAP. But if they are not especially threatening, you are best saving your resources for the more long lived enemies while your friends, who maybe excel better in burst damage, do their work. Tadam, a choice, and one that can’t be easily described in a “rotation”. You need to make a judgement call. Once we understand this is our purpose, many more options for choices “inside the rotation” become available, which I will explore in a future article.
The other method I want to focus on is
2) Choices that aren’t strictly damage. Since WoW’s beginning, classes’ toolkit included abilities which helped them and hampered their enemies, but did so without directly damaging the opponent. Slows, rooting effects, stunning effects and stat-deliberating debuffs were a staple of the game from early on, but the recent tunnelvision on combat through damage greatly reduced their relevancy. I found myself once not bothering to use an AoE stunning totem on my enhancement shaman when playing BFA, despite facing 4 mobs and being at serious risk of dying, because I knew if I didn’t waste the single “global cooldown” the ability required, I would just kill them that much faster and be much safer. This is a flaw in design. “Utility” skills such as this should shine in moments like the one described above, and you should feel rewarded for using your entire toolkit, otherwise there is no point in using them at all, and combat becomes much duller.
The solution is to make those abilities relevant again. While in raid-style encounters this isn’t always feasible because of boss mobs ussualy (and logically) being immune to such abilities, there is a ton of room for these kind of abilities in solo play, small scale dungeons and pvp. Make it so that if you face more then one or two mobs, and you simply try to brute force them through damage, you’re gonna have a hard time. But if you intelligently use tools to stun the mobs while maybe casting a neutralizing spell on one of them (say Polymorph for mages), slow the rest (say with Earthbinding Totem for shamans) and focus on killing only one or two of them at a time, you’re gonna feel much safer and much healthier after the fight ended. The distinction of what such ability tools (aoe debuffing Shaman totems/Warlock curses and pets/Mages freezes and slows/Priest mind control, etc etc) adds character and uniqueness to a class’s combat portofolio, and adds interesting choices in the ways each of them handle the varied dangers of Azeroth. The tools mostly still exist even in BFA incarnation of classes, but to matter we need enemies to be threatening. Which leads us to the final piece of the puzzle.
- Make monsters dangerous. This is an extremely recent issue. While classes became exponentially stronger and self-sustaining in expansions leading up to WoD, the outdoors remained challenging. This was mostly achieved by adding dangerous abilities which required a player response (be it simply moving away or stopping a spell), most notably in Mist of Pandaria’s two “patch islands”, the Isle of Thunder and the Timeless Isle, alongside enough added health that the player will have to witness and respond to these abilities before the enemy dies.
But even outside of those endgame solo zones, mobs weren’t as trivial as they are in BFA. Worse, BFA has virtually no incentive to face what few challenging solo mobs it does have (Legion was slightly better with the Argus patch and Mage Tower solo bosses, but fairly boring everywhere else). Mechagon’s solo zone is virtually devoid of non-named elites, and the named elites greatly encourage a zergfest of 10+ people that makes them trivial. Nazjatar is a bit better in this department, actually having zones with complex elite nagas and hydras, some of them with interesting abilities requiring attention and counterplay, but there is perhaps a single daily sending you to a single one of those non trivial elites per day, and they offer no reward the rest of the time. A proper reward structure to incentivize actually tackling more dangerous mobs to those interested is outside the scope of this write-up, but to briefly touch on it, a zone-wide currency which drops in greater quantities from more challenging non-unique elites is a tried and true model that worked in Timeless Isle.
At the very least, it seems blizz has become more aware of the lack of outdoors solo challenge and is moving to rectify it somewhat with the new Maw zone in Shadowlands, as well as the Tower of Tor’ghast. Time will tell if it was the proper solution.