Does all my math make WoW suck?

Probably.  I’m going to encourage you to read the first post of this thread.  It does receive a Ghostcrawler response, and I know I normally link these from mmo-champion’s blue tracker, but I thought this time that the thread itself was worth linking, as it gets to a central point about the basic tenets of the player package of World of Warcraft.

I’d like to say that theorycrafting of the sort applicable in WoW feels an awful lot like risk analysis in finance.  Much of what is done is statistical modelling of some set of variables in order to forecast an unknown.  What is odd, I suppose, is that on the whole the models tend to match up predictably to reality.  What this implies is not so much that the models are readily able to handle the complexities of WoW, but that WoW isn’t terribly complex.  Consider that, for all the buttons a player needs to push these days, there still exists a set pattern.  It could be boiled down into a single macro, really…and I know one DK that has done precisely that with their rotation.

In essence, the choice of class in spec in WoW establishes a pattern of button presses.  This is particularly true for DPS classes, and you’ll note that they have the most extensive and reliable theorycrafting available.  On the whole, the choices, and thus the variation from optimum, available from DPS are so limited that they are easily maximizable.  Consider talent choices: in general, talents are either completely relevant, or utterly irrelevant.  The cost-benefit analysis is laughably simple.  There is no talent choice once one chooses a spec.  Really, the cookie cutter FotM specs aren’t difficult to figure out.

The problem for DPS in WoW is that they have only one purpose: to deal damage to a target.  Their utility is secondary, and generally entirely class based rather than spec based.  Any hunter, for instance, profers freezing trap and misdirect.  Even the spec specific buffs are now overlapped by other classes.  Therefore, for DPS, if there exists a maximizable damage rotation (and there always does) which is situation inspecific – that is, there exists, for any given spec, a precise set of rules for maximum damage in the majority of situations – then they should do that to their assigned DPS target.  They should strive to perfect that rotation and make it adhere to the model as closely as possible because that is all they offer to a group.  Adding additional button presses merely extends the pattern, it does not offer meaningful choice.  Adding reactive procs also does not offer meaningful choice…it merely alters the algorithm with a minor conditional.  A good DPS, therefore, is not good because they are a cunning tactical thinker or more able to take advantage of a given situation; they aren’t a player more able to seize the moment and see weakness to exploit an opportunity.  Rather, they are able to insure their maximal button series is in play as often and as long as possible.

Contrast this with a healer.  A healing class has potential choices: they can heal, in general, one target at a time.  They may have the option to heal more than one, but that stops them from healing one target: a tradeoff.  Beyond that, they have different choices among healing spells: do they choose the large heal, the small heal, the fast heal, the slow, the instant on a CD, or what?  while their do exist maximal healing rotations, often they are unnecessary.  Primary targets do not take sufficient damage to require sustained healing of that sort.  Some maintainable subhealing rotation is sufficient.  Instead, healers must balance the raid healing vs. tank healing, understand where damage will be incoming and constantly triage potential targets.

How does this bear on the question of whether Elitist Jerks (and my theorycrafting) makes WoW suck?  Theorycrafting to the level of my own math or EJ’s math, particularly regarding damage rotations is only viable in a game that supports it.  If a damage dealer had 3 viable damage chocies, each of which had some aspect in addition to damage that made it interesting, and each of them on say a long cooldown, then running the math to model out rotations would be substantially harder.  The best that could be done would be to explore how to maximize each ability separately.  It would be left to the player to decide the optimal ability, depending on the situation.  In that sense, it is actually WoW that makes WoW suck.

That said, EJ and WoW theorycrafting evolved by examining a particular portion of the game of WoW very early in its history.  Due to the effort of guilds to min-max their raids, in desperate bids to increase their speed, buffer themselves against failure, limit their need to farm consumables, etc., a fairly substantial body of theorycrafting developed to fixate on what best helped high-level raids.  This occured congruently with the development of DPS monitoring addons, raid addons, HPS monitoring, and eventually WWS parses and such.  As this developed, Blizzard responded to the concerns raised by the community with regards to their theorycrafting.  That, in turn, focused design perception on this sort of ability analysis, rather than on some other means for developing character packages.

If WoW’s high level game can be said to be worse because of the low choice, highly modellable systems, then I would suggest that the evolution of early theorycrafting indeed helped prompt that.  As EJ is the central place for major theorycrafting, it in turn is the major community reason for this evolution.

All of which is to say, yes, Theorycrafting probably does help make WoW suck.

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