Mastery Design Intent - Blue Tracker

#0 - May 31, 2010, 9:59 a.m.

Just as a preface, I'm going to sort of take a moment discussing something I've discussed before at random - glyphs. A lot of this is going to be opinion.

Glyphs started off being like things that would for the most part offer interesting gameplay choices, and even flavour choices - things like the Penguin Polymorph and stuff like that. However, as it turned out, they sort of blanded out over time into a mix of those and things like the Incinerate glyph - 5% damage to Incinerate, etc. Granted, for the most part, it was realistically going to boil down to "These are the 3 best glyphs, use them", but the actual glyphs themselves ended up being somewhat "boring", even with things like Shield Wall. You get the idea of what the rest of the discussion is going to be like.

Now, on to Masteries. I'm also going to go back to a post made on the 13th of April, in an Enhance Shaman thread
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24262388737&pageNo=2&sid=1#27
On the broader topic of whether more creative or more passive mastery benefits are more fun, we just need to get players in there in beta and trying them out. The risk of more passive bonuses (like the current Enhancement one) is that it's just a little dry. Since your spell damage tends to scale roughly (roughly) with your gear, it risks just feeling like more damage. On the other hand, bonuses like Shadow and Balance affect gameplay an awful lot and may end up being just one too many things to monitor. We wanted to split the difference for now and see what feels the best. It could be that we spice up some of the passive ones or it could be we tone down some of the crazier ones, or we continue to offer a mix and let players gravitate towards what they like. I can see how the more creative ones might just sound more exciting, but then again getting 12 new abilities might sound exciting too until you're struggling with how to learn the nuance of when to use each one (if that lousy analogy makes sense).

So basically, the way masteries can manifest over the course of alpha/beta is still in question. They could be "cool and interesting gameplay decision altering awesomeness" like Shadow Orbs, or they could be more like "X% damage to this spell". That's not set in stone quite yet, and has a lot of time to undergo revision.

I would however, like to take a moment to discuss one aspect of this. This isn't unique to tanks, but anyway, here are some things that may or may not be debatable (you can assume I agree with the statements):
- Masteries that basically involve a repackage of an old, existing ability or mechanic are more likely to be seen as boring?
- Masteries that are entirely passive are more likely to be seen as boring?

Consider the range of tanking masteries. The specs are Protection Paladins, Protection Warriors, Feral Druids and Blood Death Knights. The corresponding masteries are Block, Critical Block, Savage Defense, and Self Heal Absorption Shields. Savage Defense and Critical Block are already existing mechanics bundled into a mastery, three of the masteries look to be completely passive, and all of the masteries are related to a somewhat similar mechanic.

Now, as I mentioned, these aren't somehow unique to tanks. A lot of classes are previewed with passive or similar masteries masteries (extra magic damage, extra bleed damage etc.), or involve old mechanics (Elemental Overload comes to mind rather quickly). The dangers of such as noted are that they can feel like <just another stat>, where the mastery stat itself would either be avoided or stacked based on how it ranks with other stats and so on.

I'm just wondering where exactly Mastery, as a mechanic and a stat, is expected to fit in for tanks, or for classes in general, and whether it'll be better (if they can make it so) as a dynamic thing overall.

For example, you take the Holy Pally one - extra crit heals. Well, that's not REALLY that far of a thing from "crit" as a stat. Or say, the Prot Pally one being "block". Disc Shields - spellpower? etc. It gets even worse potentially when it's something like Crit Block, where the nature of the mechanic is either "it can be good" or "it will suck". Of course, these were previews and are subject to change, and the possiblity for the concern has been acknowledged (the Holy Pally one was specifically acknowledged if I remember right).

For example, I think the Blood DK absorb shields have potential. It's another mechanic, it's a tool that can be used by the Death Knight, and so on. By contrast, Savage Defense already exists, is purely random and so on. The caveat of course is that talents/abilities can interact with the mastery mechanics and we don't know about those. If Bears had something that allowed them to control crits/SD or Warriors with Shield Block or Paladins with Holy Shield and stuff like that interact with the mastery, it shifts the mastery's impact on the tank a bit.

My personal opinion is that I think it'd be better if the intent of Mastery was that the class played WITH the Mastery, as looks to be the case for (speculatively) Blood DK's, and can potentially be the case for the other tanks, as opposed to the Mastery just being there, randomly proccing and pretty much being ignored for the most part, as can potentially be the case for all tanks, and several damage dealing and healing classes.

Ghostcrawler

#45 - June 1, 2010, 5:28 a.m.

The passive talent tree bonuses are intended to let you get better at your intended spec just by spending points in the tree. We felt like talents had gotten to a place where they had lost some of their original goal for allowing player customization. So many talent points were considered mandatory just to make your character functional that there were very few actual choices you could make.

(We call the passive talent tree bonuses "passive talent tree bonuses" to differentiate them from the mastery stat on gear, which affects only the third talent tree bonus. We came to that distinction late and are honestly a little sloppy about the nomenclature to this day, so "mastery" sometimes gets used interchangeably as the talent tree passives themselves and as the stat on gear that affects the third of those passives.)

In Cataclysm we have an opportunity to get a lot of those passive talents out of the talent trees. At the same time, we do need to allow for a distinction between say the higher damage and lower survivability of a Fury warrior compared to a Protection warrior. If individual talents shoulder too much of that burden, then the talents aren't much of a choice. Instead, we give you passive bonuses just for spending points in the tree. Protection warriors care most about reducing damage and maintaining threat, so those are the first two passive talent bonuses. The third one we wanted to feel specific to the Prot warrior tree, so that one is going to relate to blocking with a shield.

Another way to think about it is that each talent in the Protection tree also says "and reduces incoming damage by X, increases damage done by Y when tanking, and increases block effectiveness by Z."

I wouldn't say that we intended for all of these passives to be super sexy. It's more accurate to say that we use them to allow the talents themselves to be more exciting and ideally game-changing and a little less "kitchen sinky."

Ghostcrawler

#70 - June 1, 2010, 5:43 p.m.

There will still be mandatory talents. We're not really trying to make a talent like Sword and Board optional. We expect most Prot warriors of appropriate level will grab it. Related, we doubt we'll see an end to cookie-cutter specs. As long as the recommended Prot tree says "You must get Sword and Board" then that's essentially a cookie-cutter.

We would like to accomplish a couple of goals though.

1) For more casual players (i.e. the ones not posting in this forum), we want there to be less difference in power between an optimal and sub-optimal spec. It's okay if the optimal one is still better, but not so much better. Casual players should feel fine just spending points with a small amount of consideration and not feeling like step one is to go to the Internet to find the right build. The passive bonuses help with that.

2) For those players that do take optimization very seriously (and I'm assuming most of you are in that category), we just want to see more cookie-cutter builds that say things like "spend the last 5-10 points wherever you want." If those points would give you survivability or a massive threat bonus or even utility that's hard to live without (say Warbringer for a Prot warrior), then you're not really spending the points where you want. But we think there is room to have some of those choices that don't really exist now.

Ghostcrawler

#113 - June 2, 2010, 3:51 a.m.

Q u o t e:
If I'm 51/20/0, and someone else is 51/0/20, we both get the same talent bonuses from blood, but do I get frost passives while he gets unholy passives?

In your example, both DKs would get the maximum passive bonus possible from Blood and nothing else. You are only ever one tree. The points you spend in another tree will help out because those talents accomplish something, but you don't get bonuses for them. You are either a Blood, Frost or Unholy DK.

Ghostcrawler

#115 - June 2, 2010, 3:54 a.m.

Q u o t e:
I'm curious GC why some of the talent masterys seem passive while others have a more active role. Case in point the arms tree gets a bunch of passive dps while fury's mastery will make dps cd's more powerful among other things. Is it intended for some specs to be able to control their mastery more then other specs? Is this being done for pvp reasons? (that was my first thought when i saw the rng nature of the arms one)

It's not really PvP related. We are trying a couple of things. First, we just need to get a feel for what kind of mastery bonuses are the most fun. Very active ones might be fun (because you're doing something) or very passive ones might be fun (because then the bonus is never wasted). Likewise, Arms already has a lot going on in the way of procs to manage, so having yet another thing to pay attention to may be overwhelming. Fury on the other hand falls into a little more predictable rotation so having the Enrages be a bigger deal may not be an undue burden.

Ghostcrawler

#163 - June 2, 2010, 5:57 p.m.

Q u o t e:
A somewhat silly edge case, but what if you put 20/20/0 or even 20/20/20? How will the system resolve selecting a bonus in that case? I doubt there are any end-game builds people would try with that setup, but while leveling I think an evenly split build would be relatively common.

It is an edge case, but we still need to solve it for when it does happen even if it's as silly as asking "Yo, what type of DK are you trying to be?"

Ghostcrawler

#167 - June 2, 2010, 6:03 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I really don't understand how Blizzard is going to be able to pull this off. If the intention is to remove a lot of the bland or boring flat % increase talents and roll those into the Passive Talent Tree Bonuses, how are they ever going to balance it.

Take Improved Overpower for example.

1. Will that talent go away and be rolled into the Passive Talent Tree Bonus?
2. If so, how do you deal with going from 50% crit to whatever number the Passive Talent Tree Bonus ends up being?
3. Will it stay in place, and just go from 50% crit to 50% crit + Passive Talent Tree Bonus crit?
4. Will it stay in place, and just for from 50% crit to 50% crit - Passive Talent Tree Bonus crit?
5. If it does stay in place, doesn't that go against the idea of removing boring or bland talents?

Every player is going to have a different definition of "boring or bland talents" so that's not going to be a great litmus test. We're probably keeping Improved Overpower. It's the kind of talent that makes Overpower more powerful for an Arms warrior or just makes the ability more powerful in general. Because the talent affects one ability it can have a greater magnitude which is more noticeable than say a 5% damage buff.

Cruelty is the kind of talent we'll replace (probably by making it affect only a handful of abilities) and tanking talents like Anticipation (if we can get away with it).