#0 - Feb. 24, 2007, 7:31 a.m.
Tigole recently made a post regarding tuning of a specific raid encounter:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=77556707&sid=1&pageNo=1
He quickly received a lot of response from particularly high end raid guilds and a lot of comments about the consumable use and gearing they must have used in tuning to make such an encounter possible. Within the first 10 posts, the thread took this old turn:
Q u o t e:
to be fair, if everything were tested in non-consumeable conditions, we'd walk in fully consumeabled and destroy the content. and that would be unchallenging and stupid.
And that brings me to the debate of whether consumables really ought to belong in raiding.
Consumables have long since gone from being optional to being required, simply because they would otherwise be overpowered. The raid designers have had no choice but to oblige the profession team and balance encounters around the use of consumables. This brings several massive balance issues which others have already done a great job explaining in this thread (particularly first post):
http://elitistjerks.com/showthread.php?t=9383
The quick summary is that consumables are so awesomely powerful that they make way more of a difference than you can ever reasonably expect gear upgrades to do. This in turn makes them required and thus adds some rather heavy timesinks to raiding, which used to drive many Naxx raiders to the eventual choice of buying gold or quitting, if they couldn't manage 3 hours of farming for every 5 hours of playing. This is not a thing of the past, with Gruul by most accounts having consumable demands which put Loatheb to shame.
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I propose a complete redesign and that consumables in their current form are removed from raiding!
The first argument which springs to mind is "But that would kill alchemy!". I have considered that and don't think that is the case:
Consider where you use consumables. They are too expensive to truly use outside raiding, because of supply and demand. Suppose you were to ban them from raiding and have them not require materials too expensive to use casually; you would have morphed the profession into one which provides provides a general boost and some utility in farming, questing and non-arena PvP.
I propose that all outside consumables and world buffs are left out of raiding and raid consumables are instead left entirely in the hands of the raid designers (same would apply to other bleeding edge content). I do believe that they add to the experience of playing and that the problem is rather the timesink-effect and that they don't force the players to prioritize but just let them get everything at the same time. My suggestion would then be that they were available for free or very cheap from vendors at the instance and that the "pile it on"-mentality (particularly stacking of elixirs) would be replaced with one where you have to make meaningful tactical choices. Suppose instances have between 2 and 5 groups of consumables and you can only have one from each in a battle. Here are some examples of what such a series of choices could be:
- - Do you want +dodge, element protection (shield), element resistance +health, +resilience, regeneration, +threat, +armor, healing potion, last stand potion, dispel potion or invul potion?
- Do you want +damage, +healing, regeneration, mana potion, thistle tea, rage potion, health/mana/energy/rage leech, +crit, +hit, +skill, +pet stats, grenades?
- Do you want clearcasting, chance of instant cast, chance of causing vulnerabilities, cleaving attack, a summoned ally, immunity to a specific skill, a taunt-potion or an AoE threatbomb-potion?
These are obviously just arbitrary examples. The opportunities would really be limitless, which could expand significantly on the potential complexity of encounters and encourage more unique guild- and player strategies, since there are so many more choices and all encounters would be balanced from the assumption that a player would have a buff from each group.
It could be a way to add way better PvE scaling since you could require those potions to be unlocked through rep, bosskills, quests etc. The ideal would be to earn alternate and equally good options - not superior options.
If designers are concerned about the removal of a heavy timesink, just balance the rewards we receive. The important thing is to let us spend our time playing and enjoying the game instead of having to work for hours in order to play the game. This will go a very long way towards making raid content accessible for the average player, which the developers have been striving for with the new content.
I see great potential from letting raid consumables be handled 100% by the raid designers. Particularly removing a boring timesink and opening many new tactical avenues. Even with many different possibilities, I still think it will be easier to balance than the current consumables system, which is nearly without limits for stacking.
I'm curious what you think of these suggestions and would love to see some feedback.
