We are the Champions

Weeeee aaaaaaare the Chaaaaaampionnssssss.....
(you have to sing it like the Queen song)

A few days ago while killing time waiting for 3.0 or a non-ZA raid or something, a few of us decided to go ahead and try to knock off the questline for the "Champion of the Naaru" title. It's getting removed in the next big patch before the expansion and while I never really cared too much about it before, why not get it before it's gone.

The SMW quests were easy enough, but then you have to run all the "hard" 5-person instances in Heroic mode (Shattered Halls, Shadow Labyrinth, Steamvaults, Arcatraz). Ok, fine. I think we wiped in each of them, but we have the places mostly outgeared, even given the fact that several of the people working through the questline were alts without tons of gear >T4. Then we had to defeat Magtheridon in his lair, which we also wiped on twice (once due to just silly misclicking to start the encounter before anybody was ready). I remember when that fight was considered so hard, we skipped it before going to the T5 instances. We're better geared now and it's been nerfed to hell, so it's pretty trivial.

I do remember when those "hard" instances were hard for us in Regular mode. Back before we mastered KZ and our knowledge and gear was much worse. Heroic mode is supposed to make them harder but not really. Working meticulously through the instances has given me time to think more about encounter and game design. I may write something longer about that later on.

But now I'll just mention the issue of AoE tanking. There are basically 4 common elements to any encounter in WoW: tanking, healing, dps and crowd control (CC). Dungeon design seems to have a lot of CC built in, but curiously, most raid encounters don't although the trash often does. The CC concept is that you have too many mobs to cope with, so you sheep/trap/sap/shackle/seduce one or more of them to make the fight manageable. In contrast, raid encounters build around multiple tanking targets -- you can't CC, but you have OTs to hold/control or kite the extra mobs around. One of the things Blizz did originally with Heroic mode was reduce the types of CC that could be used. I think this was supposed to make you figure out how to cope with loose mobs in other ways -- unusual OTs, kiting strategies, etc. But in reality, it just meant everybody brought a mage because sheep always worked.

However, AoE tanking breaks that model. If your tank/healer combo can out-heal the dmg coming in, then you can just fight all of the mobs at once. Especially if you are a paladin and can keep threat on them all ez-mode. This makes tankadins very popular for dungeon running (one of the reasons I'm exalted with everything). And it means the dungeon strategy is reduced to: where is the patrol? which ones fear? where do I LoS pull back to? And really, it's not that strategically interesting. Nothing really hits that hard or is that hard to kill. To be wipe-free, you need to memorize the placement, patrol path and fear/disorient/MC abilities of every mob in the instance. Boring but effective, I guess.

I think the strategic issue is because AoE tanking is relatively new. There was no AoE tanking pre-BC and it certainly seemed to get emphasized in BC as things evolved -- I'm guessing as soon as they had a design idea for Mount Hyjal, they realized it was an interesting element to use.

So I've been "the AoE tank" for a couple of years now but Blizzard is basically getting rid of those class-specific niches. This is a good thing because it's been a big challenge for casual or ad hoc groups to deal with filling each of the niches. So now all the tanks can AoE tank, which I also think will push them to more interesting dungeon design. In Raid encounters, you deal with a lot less CC and a lot more learning to react to events -- don't stand in the fire, click this box when you see the emote, get away from people when you have the debuff, etc.

Of course, one of the big ongoing challenges in our raiding is that the 25 people who come on any given ad hoc night don't all have experience in learning to react. We found it very hard to get all 25 people to stop dps on cue, move out of the flame patch, throw the spine on cue, run when you get the doom on you, etc. Especially if the basic efficiency demands of your primary job are pushing you to max the precision you press the buttons of your basic skill sequence.

I think Blizzard has figured this out, too. I'm sure they're well aware that in their first 2 big content sets for the game, in order to create content that challenged the best teams, the ended up creating content that average/casual players simply couldn't get through. In addition to removing some of these class balance niches, I'm encouraged that they've been describing their approach to dungeon design as training or ramping up. As in, Naxx-10 is supposed to be easy for experienced raiders, it's meant to get newer players a chance to learn the basics before things get hard.