Ghostcrawler Watch: 3-13/09

Time for another edition of Ghostcrawler Watch!  This time, I’m going to look at one of Ghostcrawler’s posts about his job.  Then I’m going to look at some commentary from him regarding Titan’s Grip…which I think will take so much time I’ll just leave it there.

First, a player asks “whos in charge”(sp):

I am the lead systems designer. We have three lead designers. The other two are in charge of world design and content design. We all work together pretty closely.

The class and item designers are part of my team. However, our decision-making process is very, very collaborative and consensus-driven. We don’t make any major changes unless the whole team is on board. Our decisions are also informed by input and collaboration with other designers and the rest of the WoW team. My job is not to force anyone to make certain decisions. I just try and keep us organized and on schedule and help maintain the overall vision for the game. Blizzard just doesn’t operate with a great deal of hierarchy. We’re a team and our folks are empowered to make decisions.

What I see described there is the spitting image of a description for a Producer.  Lead Designers architect the meta-system.  They design the rules which will govern the various smaller systems going in to the game.  Once they have defined those things, they shepherd their designer flock through the foggy vales of detailed design development, making sure that their team members are getting things done in ways that work for the whole game, as they’ve architected it.  They’re the big picture person, but in a very detailed way.  In this sense, they’re not the top of a pyramid so much as the hub from which the wheels spokes radiate.

The person who, in my experience, keeps things organized and on schedule and keeps them aware of the broader “vision” is the Producer.  The Producer is a communication hub primarily, and a decision-maker secondarily.  Producers do make design decisions and they do force decisions to occur…because they’re the keeper of the Holy Schedule and they’re usually the people who have to talk to Marketing, Executive Management, and other and sundry.  Because Producers fit the role of communication hub, that also seems to put them in the role of getting community management working.  They’re a likely candidate for talking to players and funneling that to devs.  Perhaps Blizzard just positions things differently.
Anyway, next up I want to look at GC’s most recent talks on Titan’s Grip.  Blizzard has been all over the place with this talent.  I was actually shocked it had made it in at all, but that’s because I think it’s fundamentally flawed.  Let me go ahead and explain that before I go on to gleefully discussing GC’s continued travails with this talent.

When I played LoTRO, I played a Loremaster.  One of the Legendary Traits you could slot as a Loremaster was titled Sword and Staff.  You could dual-wield a sword and staff…just like Gandalf!  Sweet!  And as far as I knew, every max level Loremaster slotted that trait.  But not just because it looked cool: it was cool.  In-game cool.  Why?  Because not only did you get a suite of melee bonuses, you also got a stat increase.  Near as I could tell, a 2-h weapon, like a staff, got twice the stats as a 1-h weapon.  Ability designers look to an assumed total stat level for characters when doing balancing for abilities, and when they set abilities to scale off stats, they attempt to balance around this assumed constant.  Sword and Staff broke that: it was as if Loremasters gained 50% bonus to all stats from staves!

So when I saw Titan’s Grip, that was the first thing I thought of.  Every item in WoW is assigned an item level and quality level.  Along with what slot it fits in, these determine the stat allotment item designers have available to distribute to that item.  Knowing that, class designers can assume characters will have set amounts of stats for a given gear level.  They are then able to balance character scaling around that.

Adding in additional item points obviously upsets that assumption.  It implies that other abilities will need looked at in order to insure that they’re still scaling as expected.  Further, it throw a wrench in scaling expectations for anyone using Titan’s Grip over the life of the game.  Let’s assume a 2-H weapon provides twice the stats of a 1-H weapon.  That provides parity between dual-wielders and 2-handers.  Let’s further assume that we have 10 slots and each slot contributes stats equally.  So each weapon slot contributes 10% of total item stats.  Since a 1-h weapon is one slot and will provide 10% of total stats, a 2-h weapon will provide 20%.  If we can equip 2 2-h weapons, we gain 20% on our total stats from items.  Even if items only account for 50% of our character’s total stats, that would be a 10% increase in all our stats.

That’s on top of the damage increase using two 2-h weapons provides.

That breaks everything.  It breaks that spec.  At some point down the line, it will have surpassed all other options in stats alone.

To go back to GC and TG, I want to talk history.  Initially, Titan’s Grip wasn’t talked about much.  Beta tester warriors actually disliked the talent, as it introduced spiky rage generation.  This is a viable complaint, but it overwhelmed any possibility of handling the scaling issue.  In the meantime, the class designers kept focusing on the damage portion of this talent.  Specifically, the pure damage gain from moving from 1-h to 2-h weapons is about 30%.  Rage issues mitigate that, but the stat bonus may offset the rage issue.  That pushes it to a 30% increase in damage from a single talent point.  Blizz attempted to mitigate this by first adding a hit penalty.  That pushed off rage even more, throwing off cooldown usage.  It may actually have addressed the damage…but warriors weren’t having fun with it.  So Blizz moved it over to a hit penalty only on special attacks.  Well, that left rage generation alright…but now the penalty was worthless.  Then they reduced the penalty, and finally removed it (!!).

You’ll note that they still haven’t touched the stat issue.  It has never been spoken of that I know of.  Not once.

Now, when they removed the penalty completely, Ghostcrawler came through the forums and said that they were now going to try and balance the entire tree around Titan’s Grip.  Which would imply, I suppose, that if TG added too much, they’d just nerf every other talent.  Here’s to you, all you people levelling warrior who haven’t gotten TG!

Apparently it was decided they weren’t going to pursue this route (probably because it involved gutting most of the rest of the tree).  They’ve now added a 10% damage penalty to TG.  Here’s GC’s most recent discussion on TG:

No matter how you slice it, the Titan’s Grip talent provides too much dps for one talent point. The only other way we could reasonably see to structure the talent would be for you to pay 5 points (though it would probably be more like 10) to earn the ability. But with binary abilities it’s hard to structure the talents like that; you can’t equip one fifth of a two-handed weapon. We’d have to make the first few ranks literally do nothing.

Whoops!  Well, here’s a 10% damage decrease…that should do it!

No, no it doesn’t do it.  It still fails.  He doesn’t get it.  Let me show you what the problem is:

Here is a 2-h sword from ulduar, and here is a 1-h sword from ulduar.  While not perfectly apples to apples, they’re damned close.  The 2-h has almost precisely 30% more straight damage than the 2-h sword.  Given that weapon damage scales perfectly with every single warrior ability, that gives us damn near a 30% damage increase.  That’s awesome enough.  However, it ALSO has 130% of the agility and 130% of the stamina.  The other stats show similar differences.  Armor penetration is a very cheap stat, so I think the item designers shoved some of the stat points from ArPen into AP, etc.

But look: that’s 130% more stamina.  By taking one talent, not only did the warrior see a 30% damage gain (plus stat increases), he’s gaining stamina.  Lots of stamina.  By taking this talent, and ulduar level warrior gained 188 stamina.  That’s worth more than equipping a third sword of that type.  In addition to 30% more damage.

GC doesn’t get it.  This talent is a failure.  It’s a horrible, horrible idea.  Just stop.

Also, GC: Stop arguing with the player-base.  Stop defending yourself in convoluted ways.  Step back and think about what you are saying when you say it.  You don’t say “Now, please don’t try to lawyer those words into saying your feedback is irrelevant to our decisions.”, you say “Please don’t take that to mean we don’t listen to and consider your feedback”.  Stop insulting the players.  Just stop.