Is it time for PI to die?

Community General Discussion
643

I suppose it’s a good thing I never claimed that then.

My claim is that PI boosting someone else’s damage is only a problem if you care about the integrity of the log climbing game. I don’t. If there are people on the team who want to have fun playing log climbers, then it should be easy to get the entire raid team to play along as well. If the entire team is playing log climbers then there’s no issue because the Priests are PI-ing themselves.

The issue only arises when half of the team is playing log climbers and the other half isn’t. For people who aren’t playing log climbers… it does not matter who shows up at the top of the damage meter. If you think someone in your group is cheating because they’re getting PI buffs and you’re not, work it out with your group. So long as you have different goals you’re going to run into problems. Since log climbers is not a game that exists inside of WoW I don’t think that Blizzard should be designing their abilities around it.

I pretend nothing. You simply haven’t convinced me that it’s unfair. I don’t think that PI boosting an external player matters. Is your issue that Warlocks scale too well with haste and therefor benefit from PI more than other classes?

644

So if someone casts 1 BL-sized buff on a class every 2 minutes, you don’t call that as boosting?
That class having that kind of buff every 2 minutes versus the rest of the DPS, doesn’t create a disparity? An unfair advantage? Uneven playing field?

See… if you can’t see how it creates an uneven playing field for the DPS, then that means:
a) you aren’t being truthful and don’t want to admit that it does that
b) you’re not capable of comprehending

It’s either a or b and i don’t really care to find out.
That’s why it’s pointless to continue this back and forth.

645

Ok, so you choose to just ignore those players? How do you also account for the fact that what they are using is just making the far too fast scrolling built in combat log into a readable format and then trying to play with each other there. You don’t think such groups will constantly encounter comments like, “Well ya but you got PI” and how such things ruin their fun as well?

I’ve identified another common group of people but you ignored them to attack your straw man. Please address the concerns of these hypothetical people as well.

646

No I don’t. Like I said earlier, classes do more damage with buffs than without them. That should not be shocking. Since I’m not competing with them for damage, it doesn’t matter to me. It all contributes to downing the boss. The Priest could just as easily have PI’d me or themselves or anyone else. If the raid decides that Johnny Warlock should get the PI because of how well he synergizes with haste and how well his cooldowns line up then that’s just fine by me. Heck I participate in the most of the discussions in my own guild where we strategize and plan who the best PI recipients are in a fight. I view that as a team discussion that’s part of planning and progressing a fight, just like talking about when Lust will happen is.

I can see that people do more damage when PI’d than when not PI’d. There’s no misunderstanding on that point. I just don’t know why it matters.

I hope not since I’m one of them.

If the group is having a problem where they think it’s unfair that the Priest is PI-ing someone else then they have a different priority other than the in-game goal Blizzard sets in PvE content (a team killing a boss). There’s nothing wrong with that on its face because people are allowed to make their own fun in the game. However this is a purely social problem that demands a purely social solution.

-If the integrity of the damage competition is important to the group then the group should ask the Priests to only cast PI on themselves, then the problem is solved.

-If the integrity of the damage competition is not important to the group then there is no problem because PI being cast on others is only a problem if you care about the damage competition.

-If the integrity of the damage competition is important to some of the players in the group but not to others then the group that is in the minority should leave and find another group that is more in-line with their gameplay goals.

Does that answer your question?

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647

This isn’t about you.

If i say the ground is wet, it isn’t about you.

I’m saying PI creates a disparity. You ignoring that means you’re just pretending to not understand.

Which creates an uneven playing field, a disparity, an unfairness.
You not caring about that unfairness doesn’t remove it.

PI should be made self-cast to remove the unfairness.
And yes, i won’t bother responding to anything else you say in this thread, feel free to continue pretending it doesn’t matter, it still does to any player that wants fairness in this game.

648

Read this entire thread, the arguments just don’t see strong for its removal.

Social Reasons*

I know people who have complained about Others getting PI, it’s just petty BS. There are legitimate reasons PI should go to different targets but most of the time it’s jealousy.

It’s a really funny flow chart to look at:

-Someone else gets PI? They only won because of PI
-You get PI? You did the most DPS and say you always deserve PI
-Nobody gets PI? You lose to someone else but complain you would have won with PI.

The social implications shouldn’t exist, and if they do you or your team has petty people, address the problem but don’t blame PI. Give PI to whoever gains (not does) the most damage with it.

Performance and Logs

PI does make you do better. If you want to do the absolute best you need PI. The premise that PI makes you do more is 100% true.

The problem is how people compare. If you compare yourself to someone getting an external buff and you aren’t then of course you are going to do worse. You compare yourself to similarly geared players, with similar kill times, and the same talent/legendary choices. If your build is doing worse than a different then try that popular/performing one and judge again. If you get PI compare to that, if you don’t then don’t.

As for log competition I don’t see the relevance to PI existing. Logs should be a tool to sharpen your blade, so to speak, by analyzing what you can do better and what appears to be performing better on a fight.

If Blizzard is buffing or nerfing anyone based on PI then that’s a developer issue. I have heard some of the high end raiders say nerds happen because of PI, I disagree but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had an influence (which it shouldn’t anyway). The nerfs happening to classes seem less to do with PI and more to do with a particular spec being too good in a particular patch, Tier sets being a big influence in this patch.

Play your parse game if you want, just know that unless you have the same resources as these other people you won’t parse that the absolute best. Judge yourself based off of what you do/will have not what don’t/can’t .

Cooldown Management

I know this is an essay but this one is more to the point. If you raid high end and have to manage CDs to get by something… well that is just how it works.

Is it a pain? Yes. Is it required to kill certain bosses? Yes.

If it’s required then I don’t know what else to tell you. Figuring out CDs and managing when certain things happens is part of the game, especially at high end. It doesn’t all fall on the RL/GM but you have to be the final voice.

Raiding and dungeons are a group activity and regardless if it’s prog or farm you should work together and figure out the best way to get through it.

——-

Little long but that’s just the way I see it. Support the group and do what gains the most from relevant buffs. Like anything in the World, it’s not the tool that is the problem so much as the user behind it.

You are being very dense. You have no point with those statement because the person you are presenting it to has repeatedly said they want to do what’s best for the group.

Fairness doesn’t come into the equation when considering the most optimal person to get it, which is what a Mythic guild should consider.

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649

And you pointing it out doesn’t make it matter.

There is no prize for the top damage-dealer of the group. You win nothing. Class balance is built around what each group contributes to the fight, not how much damage they bring. A Warlock doing tons of damage with PI is not just the Warlock’s contribution, it was a team effort between the Warlock and the Priest. Team gameplay is all about players working together to become more than the sum of their parts. So more than being okay with this interaction, I encourage it.

Such interactions are not new to RPGs. Blizzard designed PI with full intent that it would be used as a support spell. So we shouldn’t be surprised when people use it to support their teammates.

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650

Haha. Sure and if I could raid the hardest content with my 6 friends who think similarly to me that is realistic. But heroic doesn’t even start till 10 players, Mythic requires 20 players. At some point in filling our rosters we have to make concessions to people who may not play for the exact same reason we do. So none of your proposed solutions are even remotely viable in the real world with real people. Could you say with a straight face to your guild, “Well guys we recruited a player who is interested in the dps competition on our damage meter, so to accomodate him priests do not cast PI on any dps target.” Or alternatively, if you only have 9 people and someone tells you that are you going to tell him that his philosophy doesn’t fit in with your group so he can’t join? (If you say this I will say you’ve never had to recruit for a guild like I have because that would also be unrealistic).

So if your paper mache utopian dreams have no viability in even small group interactions can you really with a straight face claim they resolve our legitimate concerns? Or is this more of your tongue in cheek reasoning.

651

That doesn’t remove my fairness argument, it means it doesn’t matter to him.

It matters to every player that seeks out an even playing field.
To have a fair race.
It matters to every player that asks for nerfs to top dps specs in PVE.

So it’s you who is being dense here.
Either that or you don’t have an ounce of logic to understand that.

If you don’t have any logic, you’re not worth responding to either.
I don’t want to waste any more time on limited people.

652

Sounds like a you problem.

You cannot force the rest of your guild to play the way you demand them to and asking Blizzard to force them to do so does not sound like a healthy way to resolve the issue. For what it’s worth, my guild makes it very clear what kind of guild we strive to be with new recruits. We don’t mind when raiders compete with each other in the logs but the moment that competition becomes more important to them than the group’s ability to clear the content we tell them to suck it up.

If someone in my raid group started complaining that another raider did more damage than them because of PI then I would tell them to check their problems at the door because we’re not adjusting the raid strategy to suit their pettiness and if they can’t manage to deal with that issue on their own like an adult then they do not have a place on the raid team.

It’s not my problem that you can’t find more than 6 people who have the same gameplay priorities that you do. Perhaps try using some online community tools to find more like-minded players that you can raid with?

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653

As I said in another thread -

Make Power Infusion self-cast only. Make the class talent for Dragonflight that currently gives you PI if you cast it on someone else instead give a small amount of haste (5-10%) to your PARTY (not raid). Turning it into a small dps cooldown for a small group, akin to Windfury Totem.

That way classes don’t get tuned/nerfed/etc. around having it or not, but still being a decent enough cooldown it’s worth pressing, even if you’re a healer priest that doesn’t benefit from it very much.

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654

In your opinion I guess it is. But to a reasonable person the issue is with an overpowered outlier of a spell that creates drama through inequity. You telling us this is merely a social problem and we need social solutions is disingenuous at best. If your goal is to make raiding environments worse and make recruiting harder, and reduce raiders fun, then sure be in favor of PI as it is. If you want to make raiding more fun for more people increase recruiting, and increase the fun of raiders then lets make PI personal only, or change it to something else.

655

If I actually thought that PI was overpowered and needed a nerf I would say so. As I’ve said multiple times, I actually do care about class balance in the sense that I want every class to be able to contribute similar amounts to a raid group. If one class is severely overperforming in that regard, I’d call for a nerf.

The way I see it is like this… say that you have a Priest and a Warlock in a group. Before considering PI for anyone, the Priest is doing 5 DPS and the Warlock is doing 10 DPS. If the Priest PI’s the Warlock he starts doing 15 DPS. I view this as balanced because if you kick the Warlock, the group loses 10 DPS and if you kick the Priest the group loses the same 10 DPS.

That’s an oversimplification obviously but it demonstrates the point that I don’t care who is at the top of the logs so long as the contributions are roughly equal.

If you prove to me that someone needs to be nerfed then I’ll be right next to you shouting at Blizzard to do so. I don’t see that though. All I see is a social problem and so I ask that you find a social solution. Somehow this is not a problem in my raiding guild and I suspect it’s because my GM, and I along with the other officers have put a lot of careful effort into cultivating the community that we wanted to play with. Everyone on our raid team has similar goals going into raid. Personally, I find PI as it is to be more fun because I like the team-play synergy it creates and I love watching a team become more than the sum of its parts.

We all have to make compromises when we play with other people and joining a guild is a bit of a social contract to play by the rules that the guild sets in order to ensure everyone can get along. If those rules aren’t to your liking then your options are to either compromise and take the good with the bad, or to find/form your own community that’s more to your liking. If you can’t find enough like-minded people because your gameplay goals aren’t that popular… then yes I’ll call it a you problem. If it’s as wide-spread an issue as all that then it shouldn’t be that hard.

The reality is that you’re trying to enforce fairness in a game that Blizzard did not create. It was never a goal that every single raider should do exactly the same amount of damage in all situations of PvE content and it was never the design goal that every class provide value to the raid in the exact same ways. So when this goal of yours fails to be met, should we be surprised since it was never a design goal in the first place?

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656

Counter 1: Blizzard did in fact make this game.

Counter 2: We’ve never asked that everyone perform exactly the same, that is a straw man argument, we are pointing out how is it possible to balance the soon to be 13 classes when something like PI exists, do you balance them around potentially getting it, or never getting it, or sometimes getting it? And if you don’t there seems to be some strong correlation about top targets for PI getting “balanced” after the fact. Can we PROVE causation? No, Blizz isn’t exactly forthright with their reasoning but if you look at Venthry Boomkins from S2 to S3 it looks like they got overnerfed because of the PI interference and the class has largely been abandoned for dps and only exists for utility in certain fights.

Counter 3: Its easy to knock down a straw man argument because you set it up, my argument is PI is too strong, makes a mess of balance, has implication on boss design and is making my life and my experience in game worse as I have the pleasure of working through the who gets the PI and when stuff as the raid leader of a mythic raid. There are also people who enjoy the competition on logs and its utterly obliterated their fun. There are also people who enjoy the competition on their damage meters and its greatly affected those people as well.

657

True but they never made parsing highly on warcraftlogs or on dps meters a goal in the game. The players did that on their own.

I would say the way you balance it is by considering how much damage the Priest contributes to the group. When you add the Priest’s individual damage with the surplus damage that they give to someone else by PI-ing them, it should be roughly even to what another individual of another class can do on their own. Obviously there will be some amount of play here since not every class benefits evenly from PI and in general I do think that two players working together should create a stronger result than two players working individually. But that’s the general idea. I don’t credit the Warlock with the extra damage they do with PI, I credit the Priest for that damage and I balance from that angle. But in all honesty this is actually way I’m in favor of making external damage support skills more common among the classes rather than relegated to a single Priest spell. I’d say that all of the more support-oriented classes (ie: Druid, Paladin, Shaman…) should have similar tools in their kit.

That doesn’t shock me too much. Yes I know that that every class scales differently with haste but broadly speaking classes that do more damage gain more raw damage from buffs than classes that do less damage. So there are some similar conditions that make a class a good PI target as make them candidates for nerfing. That doesn’t mean that PI caused the nerfs, but it does mean I’m not surprised to see them travel in the same circles. As the one making the claim, the burden of proof would be on those claiming that PI causes nerfs. I’m not willing to take action on that front until the burden of proof is met.

This is not one argument, but five. I have different thoughts on each of them so I’ll respond to them individually.

I’ll confess I have no strong stake either way on this one. If it is then it should be nerfed. If it’s not then it shouldn’t. Either way, you’d need to actually prove that it’s too strong and even if you do I’d be more in favor of reducing its potency than I would be with changing the design concept. I can see where 25% haste is a lot though so I wouldn’t be super broken up by reducing it.

This remains to be seen. Like I said I view it from a raid contribution angle, not a raw damage angle. I haven’t seen any evidence yet that PI makes Priests too strong compared to their peers. If they were, I’d expect more world-first raiders to be stacking more Priests. But I haven’t seen that so I remain skeptical.

I don’t see how. When you’re designing boss encounters, individual raider contributions is not relevant. Only group damage matters. You don’t need to balance around the fact that individual players do more damage with PI so long as the group damage as a whole is relatively consistent. If it’s not, then similar to the first point I’d look at which classes are overrepresented in groups with above average group damage and see about nerfing them.

So do I. That’s the main burden we raid leads carry - strategizing for the team and figuring out what our big picture game plan will look like fight to fight. Granted in my guild we tend to distribute that burden somewhat. We have three raid leads and we do all our theory-crafting in an open Discord channel that all of our raiders are allowed to pitch in on. Anyone can propose strategies, the raid leads just get the final say on what we actually implement. (That’s why we have an odd number of raid leads, to break ties.) Ultimately though, I just call this “playing the game.” I don’t find it fundamentally different from planning any other aspect of fight strategy for a raid boss.

These people are not playing the game that Blizzard created. As I said in my previous post they should either suck it up or find a community that’s more in-line with their gameplay goals.

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658

Are there enough of those players to justify making some reasonable accommodation for their enjoyment? I think the answer to that is yes. You apparently disagree.

PI varies wildly by target but adds about 1800 dps per cast to fire mages and a bit less to demo warlocks, though I’ve been hearing you can PI the warlock and the warlocks tyrant, and the 2nd PI gives even more damage to a already buffed tyrant than it does to another player. I’ve yet to test this myself. Adding more externals makes unpredictable abusable stupid stacking systems that sounds so unfun to me I can’t even envision why you think that would be fun. I guess from your assumption that they balance it by class - except they clearly don’t and its not done that way - Priests do way more dps than the other healers if you do some mental magic to give them the PI credit.

You are asking us to prove blizzards internal thinking. You know we can’t do this since they won’t share it with us, all we can do is point out correlation and ask you to make reasonable assumptions. If you require hard proof we will never be able to do that, so how about we play a mind game and justify PI being single target lust that is castable on the same target multiple times a fight and after 3 casts is more effective than bloodlust.

The question becomes how much damage can PI increase a raids dps by. The biggest problem is its hard to track because its a haste buff, you can see the effect by simply looking at a damage meter, but how do you subtract out 25% haste rolling during cooldowns. That is a consequence of the design that it is hard to calculate if they just made it 10% damage increase, we could understand it, but by hiding it in haste, and having different classes and specializations scale wildly different with haste from patch to patch (Hence my makes balance a mess comment) they just start playing whack-a-mole.

As for raid leading, every other aspect of planning for an encounter is generally raid wide. PI targets are picking 1-2-3 different people and is in no way raid wide. Won’t someone please think of the trials who never get PI (Sarcasm).

The biggest problem with telling them to suck it up is you are telling them to quit wow. No group can have enough priests to PI everyone that is part of the issue with it, its a single target buff that should be only castable on the priest but they can donate it to someone else, lets just imagine a world where arcane mages can give warlocks their arcane power, and hunters can donate their bestial wrath and see that is not a world we want to play in. So the fact that you’d rather have those people quit than change a spell is remarkable to me.

659

That’s not how I would approach it. I’d approach it be looking at the damage that groups with a lot of Priests do vs. the damage groups with no or few Priests do. With a large enough sample size you should be able to control for how much damage Priests do specifically. Obviously that would be very difficult for us to do with warcraftlogs (though I don’t think impossible - I do think that the sample size is large enough) but Blizzard’s analytics should be able to give them that info and in fact I’d be surprised if it isn’t set up to do something like that automatically considering class balance is a frequent question they’d want their analytics to answer.

I’m not but if that’s their prerogative I won’t lose any sleep over it. You can’t please everyone with any game. There’s plenty of aspects of WoW that were I lead game designer I would change to suit my own tastes. But I compromise because barring creating my own game, I will never be able to play a game perfectly crafted for me. If the log parsing game is an uncompromisable position for someone then yes, my advice would be to find another game because the game you want to play is not the game that WoW is. WoW PvE is a team sport that was not designed to be a competitive race between teammates. Personally I would actually love it if WoW created more solo content that people could race and compete with each other in, but I don’t want that to come at the expense of raiding.

It’s not that unusual honestly. If I can be perfectly frank, the only people who I care whether or not they continue to play the game are those on my friends list and on my guild roster. I’m not in danger of losing any of them due to PI any time soon. As I said before, I like the team gameplay that PI encourages because I like it when multiple classes can work together to become more than the sum of their parts. Contrary to what you were saying, I would absolutely love to have more external support abilities distributed among the various classes. (Though I don’t think I’d make them all haste just to vary who the most beneficial recipient of them are.)

I value that gameplay more than I value whether or not some strangers that I’ll never play with are happy playing the game. So selfish though it may be, that is a trade I am absolutely willing to make. I don’t think it’s such a big deal that every game isn’t for everyone or that people quit games they don’t like in order to play games that they do.

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660

Or easily make the PI have a longer CD or something like that to make it balance and that the players do not have complaints with said power

661

With your logic, should we take raid mechanics out of the game too? Every boss should be patchwerk…for the sake of fairness of course.

662

I am sorry… what is wrong with 3.14159265359?