Ion:
In terms of community feedback, one of the hot topics recently has been the return of the controversial ability, Power Infusion, on the priest talent tree. Are there any changes being planned to address some of the issues the community has with the ability, such how it impacts class balance?
I understand it’s controversial, but at the same time, some of this gets back to the earlier discussion of party and raid buffs, and our philosophy there with adding new ones. It is a cooperative MMO, where in the design space of “I can make my comrades, my allies stronger!” it seems like a viable support type role that should exist in an RPG setting. Internally, it’s interesting, the team has coined this problem. There are two games being played in a raid group. There is game 1, which is the game that we built, which is beat the raid boss, clear the dungeon in the time limit. Then there’s game 2, which players have largely created for themselves, which is win DPS meters, beat my performance from last week, get a purple parse, get a gold parse, whatever else. We don’t create that game. But many people are playing it, and it is almost the primary motivation for them. A question is, how sensitive should we be to that? How much should we be designing around that?
Because yes, certainly, if we were making a game, and the point of the game was maximize your score, maximize this number, it would be problematic to introduce elements into the game that are very random or skew outcomes one way or another. But that’s also not the game that we have made. We have created a cooperative game that presents these challenges to be overcome. And so something in that environment like Power Infusion is a really interesting decision in a range of raid settings. Maybe on farm you sell it to the person with the best burst window, but when you’re learning an encounter for the first time, it’s more “what are the moments in the fight that are most challenging for us? Do we need to burst down this wave of adds before this next thing happens and who should we PI? Should we PI a healer because we need a throughput burst to make it through this thing? DPS isn’t an issue, we’re just trying to survive but we don’t want to add a healer?” It’s those sorts of decisions that are interesting group dynamics that we would hate to take away.
And game 2, so to speak, is also one where the rules in other places are shaped by the community. Like everyone at this point thinks nothing of the fact that log sites completely ignore padding. You can maximize your number by just damaging a bunch of extraneous adds in a fight that don’t really serve the interest of the group. And doing that will make you have the biggest number and win meters, and the community has collectively decided this is unhealthy, we’re not going to count or reward that behavior, just because you’re multi-dotting all these adds that will die on their own…we’re not going to count this damage at all. And that shapes player behavior there. To some extent, we want to focus on designing for the so-called game 1, and making that the best experience possible, and leave to the community and log sites and others to figure out the rules for how they want to determine who the best hunter is, who the best mage is etc. on this fight.
Warcraft Logs:
They are giving their users a poll to vote on how the community would like to proceed with Power Infusions inclusion into Dragonflight. So if you care about this (or even if you don’t) let them know your thoughts.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/
You have to have an account to proceed.
