There’s been a lot of discussion around PI, so I wanted to make a post from the perspective of a casual-gone-semi-hardcore player and a designer.
I want to start by outlining the problem space, before discussing how I would approach this mechanic in WoW. Feel free to just skip all the way down to where I discuss a potential solution
TLDR: PI should give its target a debuff that reduces the effectiveness of future PIs by X% for 6 minutes. This debuff should not apply to PIs cast on a priest by themselves.
The Cons
Primarily, Power Infusion has been seen as problematic in what Blizzard refers to as “Game 2.” For context, Game 2 refers to the game players have invented around dps meters, parsing, and Warcraft Logs rankings.
A very large portion of the players that play WoW are invested in Game 2. It has become a massive part of the game, sometimes even more important than Game 1 - as in sometimes people care more about parsing than actually killing a boss.
If you look at it from a Game 2 perspective, PI is a cheat code. Imagine you’re playing a Warlock, you go to the logs and everyone at the top has multiple PIs. If you don’t also get a PI, you have no hope of competing. Furthermore, if you want to improve and check out rotations, well people without PI are now starting on page 10. Are page 10 logs going to help you improve? Hard to say.
Another aspect of this is that there is always one spec that is best with PI, so you PI them (at least this is the case for most play. In very high levels of play you will see PI being planned out for certain mechanics). No one else is allowed to get PI, and that spec gets it on cooldown. This is a massive inflation in the power level of this spec, as well as an oversimplification of a mechanic that could have been very interesting. PI becomes effectively an additional cooldown for that spec.
Of course this is not always the case. There are fights where it is best to allocate PI to certain classes as it lines up best with mechanics. My guild likes to discuss this kind of stuff, but I have also seen people just toss PI on themselves, random DPS, or a specific single player at lower levels of play simply because they don’t care to think about it.
Additionally, since PI gives haste and therefore increases the speed at which players play their rotation, it has a major impact on their experience of the game. It is noticeably more fun to play the game with PI than without it. As such, people can become quite attached to receiving it on cooldown. This creates friction when determining who will get PI.
The Pros
Firstly, we have the fantasy of empowering one’s allies. As this is a fairly underexplored side of WoW, I think there’s inherent value in this unique interaction between players. Giving your allies a buff that significantly empowers them generally feels good.
Furthermore, thinking through how you want to utilize external buffs adds a level of puzzle solving to fights. How do we want to use this external? Where do we need the power? Is it best used trying to beat a dps check, or do we need it for healing through a mechanic?
Receiving an external is a massive boost for the player. Getting that haste is a rush - you know your teammate just empowered you and you are going to put that to good use. Haste changes have you feel and how your rotation functions, which makes this a more interesting interaction than just gaining dps throughput.
Finally, PI is just cool in terms of fantasy and thematics.
Tangent on Supportive Builds
Feel free to skip this.
In general, supportive gameplay is a fairly underexplored aspect of WoW. We see a lot more supportive mechanics coming in for Dragonflight, ranging from Evoker utility to new experiments with party buffs (hello Restless Crew). We also saw things like Blessing of Summer and Fae Guardians - which have not been as polarizing as PI.
Since WoW’s release, the concept of “Supports” have become way more widespread in games. In terms of fantasy, helping your allies in a fight and providing them with unique benefits feels natural. This adds an additional level of complexity to the game - something to think about and experiment with for those who care to do so.
Another aspect of this is that the Healer role, especially in raids, can behave a little weird. Sometimes you want 4 healers in a fight, but you only really needed 3.5 healers, or you need some additional cooldowns but not more downtime healing. In these cases, in higher levels of play healers will default to doing damage when healing isn’t needed, but some people just prefer to only heal.
Some supportive gameplay options, especially in the form of talents, could make healers’ gameplay more interesting. You don’t need to absolutely pump healing? Why don’t you talent into some support options instead and increase your raid’s damage output?
We’ve seen more damage focused healers before, such as “Battle Shaman,” a more dps oriented Resto Shaman build (kind of incentivized by a lack of decent healing legendaries) . The issue is that a lot of healer specializations might not have interesting non-healing mechanics. I imagine filling the time between healing cooldowns with Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst can get quite dull.
I was actually quite disappointed to see that the Shaman class tree was lacking in raid utility and more interesting “Battle Shaman” build options. At the very least, I would have expected to see a nerfed version of Skyfury totem.
There are also classes that do not benefit from PI - or even Bloodlust - nearly as much as others. The good news is they do not experience the PI problem in Game 2 nearly as much, but it also feels bad if there is no external buff you can receive like others can.
I think new buffs with designs that make them more suitable for a variety of targets can be quite interesting, while providing opportunities for other classes. Furthermore, saturating the space with more external buffs should also reduce the individual impact of these buffs.
Approaching a Solution
I would like to see more supportive talent builds available to healer specs - give them the option to choose between healing throughput or raid utility/damage increase. This can come in a massive variety of ways, but I’m going to mostly return to PI.
Blizzard has expressed that they aren’t even sure if they should care to balance PI around Game 2, as it is a game invented and managed by players instead of Blizzard. My personal goal with a solution is to limit PI’s impact on Game 2, while maintaining/amplifying the fantasy of empowering your allies.
A quick list of things to accomplish:
- Make it so PI does not turn into yet another cooldown for a narrow list of specs.
- Allow more players to experience an external buff and feel empowered.
- By incentivizing a larger distribution of benefactors, reduce the impact of PI on logs/dps meters.
- Create a mechanic that makes it so PI is a blessing you can receive a limited amount, so that friction around one person receiving it over another is reduced.
- For people who don’t care to think about PI, it should remain somethings they can just toss on someone/themselves and forget about
- Make sure PI remains at a good power level when Priests use it on themselves.
- Increase the visibility of “funneling” for Game 2
With that in mind, the solution I would consider is fairly basic:
PI applies a Exhaustion to your target, reducing the effectiveness of further PI’s cast on them by others by X% (let’s say 20%) for 6 minutes.
I have considered a debuff more similar to Weakened Soul or Forbearance, but I think this is too detrimental for those who do not want to think about PI. This forces complexity onto players, so I think a small debuff is preferred.
If PI becomes weaker on a target when cast twice in a row, you are now incentivized to cast it on someone else who will be able to use it better. There should still be classes that do not benefit from PI nearly as much, so I expect there will be cases where you will want to PI someone multiple times in a row. For this use case, my suggestion is a nerf. But I think that is okay - we want to avoid PI becoming an additional cooldown for some specs, so if it does, it is better nerfed (rather than the spec itself getting nerfed because their throughput is so inflated by PI, which feels bad for the players of this spec.)
The 6 minute suggested debuff duration is for dungeons, where if you alternate between 3 DPS you will never have to worry about the debuff. This maintains the power of PI at a decent level: even though you would likely be PI’ing worse targets, hopefully the performance of those targets are not that much lower than your preferred target. And in the worst case, you can always PI yourself, the tank, or someone with a debuff for a slightly weaker PI. The debuff should not in any case be a brutal nerf.
As players will understand that receiving PI back to back reduces its impact, it should create a general atmosphere that PI is something that should be shared.
In terms of Game 2, this makes it so that it is easier to highlight people who received PI while debuffed. This might not always be suboptimal, but the proposed change should disincentivize it when it is, and increase its visibility in either case. Game 2 is designed by the players, and this provides additional tools to balance Game 2 for everyone.
Finally, this should incentivize discussion around who should get their PI when, and create interesting decision points. Maybe you want to PI your Demonology Warlock during Bloodlust, so you PI someone else on pull. Or maybe someone needs PI to improve their rotation at a certain timing - now this will not cost you a PI on your best target because they would have the debuff anyway.
Cutting the frequency at which a single player receives PI by a 3rd should drastically reduce it’s impact on logs, while tripling the number of players who get to experience PI in a fight. I think that is more than impactful enough to be worth considering.
I think a similar structure can be applied to any single target buff to come in the future (and I do hope we receive more supportive abilities that incentivize thought and planning). Especially for buffs that impact one’s playstyle - whose damage benefits cannot easily be isolated and attributed to the caster - there should be incentives to cast them on a variety of people throughout an encounter.
Looking at the Data
Disclaimer: I do not believe the relationship between haste and dps gained from that haste is linear. Therefore, 20% reduced haste likely does not equate to 20% reduced dps gain. I’m going to instead look at it assuming that we are reducing the dps gained from PI by 20%, not the haste for ease of analysis.
These are also patchwerk 5 minute sims, and the varying value of PI for different target counts and fight durations already incentivizes target variety by some amount. I think the proposed changes can further build on this.
In patch 9.2.5, the DPS gains from PI for each spec is decently close in the middle, with major outliers at the ends. At the top, Fire Mage and Demonology Warlock are far above the rest of the pack, where even with a 20% reduced benefit would not make other classes viable PI targets.
Outside of these two outliers, reducing the next best spec’s (Unholy DK) benefit by 20% makes 3 other specs viable PI targets instead (Destro, Ret, Aff). If the benefit is reduced by 30% instead, 4 more specs are now viable (Marksman, Assassination, Balance, Enhancement, Frost DK).
In raid, this should be decent enough to provide some diversity in PI targets, especially if future tiers aren’t as polarizing as this one (DPS Benefit Values: Median ~810, Mean ~900, Venthyr Fire Mage Benefit ~1800).
Especially in mid-high tiers of gameplay where raid comps are not ideal (where you might not have a Fire Mage or Demonology Warlock), or in future tiers if values do not have such massive outliers at the top end, I believe a small to moderate debuff of 20-30% should be more than enough to increase diversity such that people who want PI will likely become a good enough target to receive PI.
Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1inZGAyrPiNTjN0ni9jWTxsYuojDIkCDFBPtE7-Wd2rw/edit?usp=sharing
Bonus
It would also be cool to see further interactions for these buffs with their casters that make them even more collaborative. What if Discipline Priests could take a talent that makes Atonement benefit from your ally’s damage at a reduced rate when you PI them? One can imagine other interactions like this that allow healers to specialize in supportive builds if they so choose.
