I’ll start with the good, because it’s going to be very short.
The Twisted Fate “Pick a Card” mechanic of how you choose what Premonition to use is neat, and it conveniently shows that Blizzard is aware of League of Legends so I can use it for examples later.
The 3 “base” buffs all being easily attributable in logs (assuming they just work across the board instead of some convoluted whitelist/blacklist) is great, that’s directionally correct.
And now for all the many bad things.
Attribution
Blizzard can pretend there’s a “game 1” and “game 2” all they want, but in practice there is only the actual game being played by players. Being able to use logs for analysis during progress is incredibly important, and unattributable buffs make this much less reliable and more difficult. It sucks not being able to tell how much of your damage was actually you, it sucks not being able to tell how much damage your external buff actually provided. Holy paladins on live right now have Blessing of Summer, which lets them easily check “hey, was it a good choice to buff the person I buffed?” on in-game damage meters (and by extension logs too). That’s good and how it should be. Immediate feedback is immensely useful as a player, and being able to trust the tools we use is important. On the other hand there’s Power Infusion, which there’s no way of determining the value of outside of simulations. You can’t just check “hey did this guy actually gain a lot of damage from the PI? Should I buff somebody else instead?”
On farm, chasing ranks is fun to a lot of players, and unattributed externals make this significantly less fun because they add an external factor. This sucks when playing a spec that rarely gets externals, because the couple of people who do get them will just stomp everybody else, and it also sucks for specs that often get them, because now if you don’t get them, you will never ever compete. This also includes buffs like Power Infusion, Blessing of the Seasons, Innervate, Wildfire, the Amidrassil healer head enchant, the Everbloom Leaf, Broodkeeper’s Promise etc, not just Premonition.
The 3 base buffs from Premonition should be easily attributable, which is nice, but then you get to the other 2 effects (mana and haste) and it all falls apart. Those cannot be attributed. They’re much too complex because they change decisions on what spells to cast and the number of spells you can fit into other windows.
Externals as a puzzle
The one good argument for externals being interesting is that on progress you can assign them in different spots and on different people to get past specific checks, depending on who has CDs available at the time. For example on Raszageth, I’d give PI to 3 different people over the course of the fight. Well, planning requires predictability right? Enter Clairvoyance, where you’ll randomly titanforge a megabuff that goes on twice as many people (2 of which are randomly selected). Just… what? You can now no longer plan around the external, because sometimes it’ll just end up many times as powerful (2x as many targets and 5x as many buffs per target), meaning you absolutely annihilate the check you were trying to beat and now wasted other resources. Big RNG swings are not fun, regardless of whether it’s on progress or on farm.
The other side to the puzzle coin however is what we’ve seen with Augmentation in raids. It becomes a spreadsheet + reminder Weakaura game. It may be difficult to optimize, but nearly all of it happens outside of actual gameplay. “Well, your first buff should be haste on the mage during CDs, then you give the druid mana, then the warrior gets physical damage, next the mage again, now you wait a bit longer and give the warlock magic damage, mana for the druid again”. This is taking the puzzling too far.
Good players will optimize it and get a lot of value, while weaker players will grossly misuse the spell and be a burden. Neither group has fun, and it can’t ever be balanced for both at once, as we’ve seen with Augmentation. Either it’s balanced around the high end, and weaker players should just never play it, or it’s balanced around some level of weaker player/worse usage and it’s the most broken thing imaginable at the high end where it gets used optimally.
Multiplication
Again, just like Augmentation, the buffs are multiplicative with other effects. This encourages stacking the entire pile of externals (Augmentation, Oracle, regular Power Infusion, Windfury, Blessing of Summer etc) on the smallest number of people possible to leverage multiplication. It specifically encourages stacking them on the most overtuned and burstiest spec available, with bursty specs already being the most powerful archetype in the game.
Healers don’t matter
This tree being as focused on external power as it is means that it’s going to be very difficult to justify pick either of the other trees (depending on spec). That’s because generally healing checks are not very tough to meet, meaning it’s incredibly valuable for healers to be able to give up a bit of their own power in order to power up DPS instead. That’s not fun for the healers who want to actually spend their power budget on their own healing.
Back to League of Legends
So the “Pick a Card” thing is… borrowed from Twisted Fate in League of Legends. That same game can also provide solutions for many of the earlier points, because it turns out that game actually has a wide variety of supports, and those supports have a lot of examples of abilities that:
- Can be attributed
- Are not multiplicative
- Have decisions to be made while playing
Let’s try some examples:
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Old old Mordekaiser W. This placed a buff on your target and yourself, dealing damage around them and healing based on a portion of that damage. So you want to put it on somebody who’s going to be in range of enemies, and ideally somebody who needs healing. So usually melee or tanks, but sometimes there’ll be ranged stacked near some mobs too (think roots on Tindral)
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Nami E. You buff an ally, causing their next 3 attacks to deal some extra magic damage (a flat amount, not multiplicative) and slow the enemy. Nami also has a passive that gives movement speed to any ally she hits with a spell. So here you have 3 “modes”, with the primary one being the damage, but sometimes you’ll want the slow on a specific target or help your friend move a bit faster.
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Milio W. A circle on the ground that (slowly) follows a friendly target. Allies in the circle get healed over time and gain extra range. Milio also has a passive that causes each tick of healing to cause the ally’s next attack to put a minor DoT on the target of the attack. Again you have 3 “modes”: attack range (incredibly powerful in both LoL and WoW), healing and the DoT.
In every case these buffs scale based on the caster’s stats, not the victim’s. This solves the Augmentation issue of “mastery and intellect are the only stats that do anything”. The buffs can also be trivially attributed because they’re their own damage events. This could even be done in a way where you still sabotage in-game meters (for the people who want to “make their friend’s DPS number bigger” as part of their support fantasy), but logs can attribute correctly. You don’t need to sabotage logs in order to have external buffs.
TL;DR:
Delete externals, they’re an unbalanceable, unfun mess that obscures information players have relied on for analysis for decades. If they have to exist, make them attributable rather than things like haste, mana or CDR.