Healing and fun, part 3

Today, the dramatic conclusion. Part 3 of the Healing and Fun series. Weep for the future. And check out part 1 and part 2 if you haven’t already.

Idea 3: Damage should be preventable

Discipline Priests are currently the only healing spec able to actively prevent damage. Given how quickly and how tenaciously the Priest player base has embraced the Discipline spec, it is clear that there’s something good there. Steal it.

Priests should still be the kings of countering damage. Those bubbles prevent all damage up to the strength of the shield. What I propose is that any healer should be able to apply temporary immunities to specific damage types. If I know that a strong fire-based attack is coming, like Sartharion’s Flame Breath, I can fling a fire-resist buff on the tank and buffer it, nullifying the attack.

In addition, I think that DPS players should have an active hand in mitigating their own incoming damage. A Rogue, for example, should be able to activate a short-cooldown dodge ability that forces an evade of the next attack. Perhaps a Hunter could activate an Aspect of the Twin that creates a phantom mirror image that will soak an incoming spell. A Warlock might, through force of will, redirect a boss’ Fel Lightning onto his Fel Hunter, grounding it.

All of these abilities should be active, a button you hit when you expect damage, that gives you a short but total resistance. Not only does this give players a new way of interacting with the world, it is one that is more situationally aware than healers and DPS often have. And it is a counter to the otherwise single-note jobs of “raise the green bars” or “press 3 when it is off cooldown.”

Idea 4: Let healers tank

There is a basic sensibility problem inherent in the threat system. Most mobs, if they had any intelligence at all, would make a beeline for the healers and tear them apart. As evidence, look at what happens in an arena fight. A healer might not be the first to die, but they’re a much higher priority than a so-called tank.

If Arthas wanted to win against whatever raids came after him in Ice Crown, he’d simply walk through any tanks in the group (there’s no body collision, after all) and cut down the healers. Healers — I promise you that Arthas can 1-shot you. That he doesn’t is a signal. He wants to lose. He feels terribly guilty about chopping up all those fine people in Stratholme.

Threat is one of the absurdities of the game that we swallow for the sake of solid gameplay systems. Like the impermanence of death, mob spawning, aggro radii, the ability to pass through the bodies of all living things, and the fact that 80% of the pigs you kill in Westfall have no intestines. These aspects of the game are jarring to our sense of simulated reality. They need to be explained. Or explained away, which as the Forteans will tell you, is a very different thing.

I wouldn’t mind mobs coming after me when I’m healing, as long as I had the tools to deal with it. I am a major threat, after all. I won’t kill you myself, but I prevent you from eliminating the people who will. I’d welcome a tussle, even. Provided the designers give me some survivability tools, that is.

Healing aggro was the single worst part of the game for me when I was Priesting. Because most players, “tanks” included, knew nothing about the invisible threat mechanic, any pull with multiple mobs quickly turned into a “Let’s kill the healer” wipe-fest. Having mobs on me led to this awful thought: “Healing myself will just generate more threat.” Then I would die. Being made of paper certainly didn’t help.

Imagine instead if I had the ability to knock mobs away from me. Imagine if the tank was the number one target because he was the most threatening player on the field. Imagine if I could stun mobs in place and run clear of them. Imagine that standing in a formation is strategically significant beyond how much AoE healing you’ll receive. Imagine if mobs had to fight through a swarm of Mages and Rogues to get to me.

If the designers gave survivability tools to more classes and made the raid’s formation matter, the game’s aggro mechanics could be made sensible. As long as I can stand a few seconds of being hit, long enough for the mobs to be literally peeled off me, I would welcome a return to the days of high healing threat.

So those are my ideas. The floor is open. What do you guys think? What would you do to the healing game to change it up? Your thoughts — I want them!

Death and Lore

I have never been invested in the game’s lore. I never played the real-time strategies; find myself impatiently clicking through quest text as quickly as I can. I will read Wowhead threads before consulting the quest log if I don’t know where to go. My favorite NPCs in the game are the Undead vendors because they sometimes say “Death to the living!” and that’s an idea I can get behind.

I never had a problem treating the game as the sum of its mechanics. The game’s dramatic highlights wash over me with little to no impact. I took control of Teron Gorefiend and helped him defeat his enemies, without knowing who he was. I watched the child king of Stormwind deposed by some bad anime knockoff, and to this day I don’t know what happened to him. At some point in the Death Knight starting experience your targets change to your former masters. I was never clear on why that happened. Jaina Proudmore can’t watch Arthas raze Stratholme. I can. If the game asked me to, I’d help him with it, as long as a quest dinged at the end.

I have never felt like I missed something by ignoring that aspect of the game. The mechanics intrude on the story within minutes of a character’s existence when you level up the first time. From that point forward, they will struggle to coexist. Consider these facts:

• A week ago any class could kill Onyxia single-handed. This week she requires the concerted effort of 10 to 25 people.
• A few years from now, pairs of level 90+ characters will slum through Ice Crown citadel on achievement runs and lay Arthas flat in seconds.
• A year ago, Shamans were able to drop a totem that would rebuff arrows. Suddenly every one of them lost that ability.
• Every enemy in the game is so shortsighted it cannot detect the presence of dozens of enemies beyond a 30 yard range.
• Regardless of how much you study, who you take as a teacher, if you have learned to enter Stealth, you will never be able to cast an Arcane Blast.
• No two people in the world have the same name.

The biggest mechanical strangeness in this world is that we are all immortal. Every one of us has a guardian spirit watching out for us. Hundreds of them, in fact, scattered about the world. Waiting to rescue us from true death and return us to our corporeal existences. And they never fail. Death is nothing more than a small financial obstacle.

No matter how fearsome your enemy, no matter how devastatingly a boss lays your group low, time will prove you the victor. You will learn more; some more gear will fall in your lap; perhaps you will level up. Death is no barrier. In the fullness of time, you will overpower your foes.

What struck me yesterday is that immunity from death applies to everyone, not just player characters. No matter how many times you kill Yogg Saron, he will spring back to cause more trouble in less than a week. Instance trash can work their way back from the graveyards in hours. World mobs can get back into position in minutes. And they do this pretty much exactly like you do — they go back to where their bodies were, press a button, and poof, they’re back.

It’s universal. The entire game world is immortal. In the near-constant state of war in this world, the NPCs could hardly have failed to notice their supposedly dead comrades springing back to life. Why fight when your every felled foe is replaced is replaced not by another but by the foe himself?

Somehow, despite all the strangeness I have accepted, this violation of the story (that I don’t care about) bothers me. If death is such a transitory state in this world, why does Jaina give a damn about what Arthas is about to do in Stratholme? Does no one in the world have the wisdom to recognize the futility of factional combat between implacable forces? Why do the bosses get so dramatic when adventurers show up asking (essentially), “Trick or treat!?”