D&D 4E I wish WoW were like 4e

[katahn]

I agree that 4e's 'stickiness' approach to tanking would be more interesting and diverse than WoW's threat mechanic which, although it does its job grandly, is starting to seem long in the tooth (speaking as someone who has played a raiding tank for a very long time). However there comes a point in a real-time game where you're asking the player behind the character to do just too much, and the beauty of the aggro mechanic is that it is simple enough to free up the players' brains for other, exceptional tasks during more complex fights.

In a turn-based system, you can put many more demands on the player (marking, shifting, forward-looking strategy), which is what 4ed seems to do very nicely.

Eh, the stickiness approach doesn't have to be an activated ability. Certainly marking is in 4e, but simply adding a class feature to WoW's warriors that says "An enemy that attempts to move away from the warrior is subjected to an immediate attack from that warrior with [insert damage info here]" is not asking for more thought during combat. Similarly an ability that says "Mark an enemy [and up to X number of adjacent enemies] and any attempt to move away from the warrior by said enemy(ies) provokes an immediate automatic attack doing [damage information] and rooting the enemy in place for [duration]" doesn't ask for a whole lot more from a warrior than hitting Thunderclap.

What it would do though is make picking terrain meaningful. Groups would naturally want to stage a fight in a place where enemies would fall into the area of influence of their tank. They'd want to stage fights where the healer could keep LOS with the tank and most of the DPS but not have LOS with ranged enemies. It would also make having multiple tanks actually useful in even a 5-man, or having more than "Main tank, second tank, offtank" in a 25-man raid. In order for an enemy to break a defensive line set up by the tanks, they'd have to bypass every tank's "you will not pass" ability which would be difficult/infrequent. Tanking would be relevant in PvP, and it would actually allow a game to model something like "300" where phalanxes of multiple "tanks" held a line against wave after wave of enemies.

 

[Mirtek]

You don't need collision for a tank to be able to block enemy movement without needing threat/aggro mechanics. What you need are class abilities that give tanks the ability to temporarily block enemies from being able to move past them, abilities that give them instant bonus attacks against enemies moving out of melee (in any direction), and potentially abilities that debuff enemies that ignore them in favor of non-tanks.

Well, a 4 feet gnome maintank blocking the 80 tons Onyixa from moving isn't anyway less stupid than a genius dragon ignoring the important targets because the tank has more aggro.

As a raidboss designed to take a couple of minutes for a dozen DPS guys to wear of her million hp, she couldn't care less if the MT gets 1, 2 or even 50 free extra attacks because she moves past him to eat the healers.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

At Blizzcon 2005, they actually addressed this. Someone asked Metzen why Onyxia wasn't smarter about aggro.

"OK, what would that be like? Your raid comes in her cavern. She one-shots your priests, then your druids, then your shamans and paladins. Then she wipes your raid. Are you having more fun yet?"

Threat, in general, serves to make NPCs "smarter" -- that guy in the back dropping the giant heals on everyone else clearly needs to be removed before the guys with the pointy sticks can be taken out -- but not too smart, because it's really, really easy for the game to beat players every time.

No, this is essentially nonsensical. What Chris is apparently saying is "My designers are total retards who couldn't design an encounter that both worked and didn't rely on simple threat!".

Chris, your designers are not that dumb.

I mean, if you wanted an encounter that didn't feature threat like that, but which was still challenging, you'd lower the HP on the dragon a lot, have it go after it's targets, and those targets would try to stay alive whilst other people killed it. This would work perfectly well, indeed, I'd be surprised if there aren't already encounters in WoW that work more or less this way. Doesn't one of the MgT encounters work that way? I know the old 60 "upgrade your dungeon armour" BRD arena quest encounter with the gladiators was threatless and worked just great. Indeed it was much MORE exciting than most fights!

Sure, if ALL you did to Onyxia was give her some AI instead of just a threat table, then she'd be a menace 2 society, but why in god's holy name would you do something that stupid? Chris' entire argument there is predicated on purified stupidity, which is not really an ideal basis for an argument, to be honest.

As for threat making monsters smarter. Hahahahahahaha. No. When my Warrior doing his sad little Prot damage is able to hold on to four monsters at once, who could be rampaging around trying to kill the party, there's just no way you can claim that. I am not the biggest threat, I just have most of an artificial value called "threat". It's silly.

So basically, Chris Metzen, love his work, talking total and utter smack here, and either insulting the intelligence of his listeners, or of his designers (or being a bit thick himself - seems unlikely).

Edit - Just to mention the real two reasons threat exists:

1) Vastly to design and balance an online, unmoderated game that way.

2) No costly "AI" processing overhead, as your monsters don't have any AI, they have a threat table, a list of targets for "secondary target abilities" - in WoW this is usually "Whoever is nearest", and possibly a progression where they change abilities startegies at certain HP or time values.

3) Most important: Even the extremely novice/weak/bad at games can handle threat-based encounters. This massively broadens your potential audience. If you go for AI, then your game will simply be too hard for a lot of extant MMORPG players, so you get less $$$. I suspect this is real main reason.

 

[wedgeski]

No, this is essentially nonsensical. What Chris is apparently saying is "My designers are total retards who couldn't design an encounter that both worked and didn't rely on simple threat!".

During that panel, the question actually asked was, IIRC, "Why doesn't Onyxia just kill the healers first?" His answer was totally valid: would you have more, or less fun if we did that? The answer was obvious, and renders most of your response moot.

In fact there are 'aggro-less' encounters all over WoW, and they are messy, uncontrolled affairs that tend to require specialised crowd-control classes. The threat mechanic does more than just simplify dumb the game down for the 'extant' masses (could you *be* any more insulting?), it sets the stage for cohesive teamwork and is the basis for challenging all of the players in a 25-man raid. The fact that this design is still so prevalent in the MMO genre suggests there are good technical limitations requiring it as well.

This is germaine to D&D because the 'tanks' in 3ed, at least by the Core Rules, do *not* have many options for keeping the bad guys away from the squishies. Large fights where the bad guys act intelligently and target wizards/rogues/etc. first remind me very much of the very worst of the aggro-free encounters in WoW... and in hindsight I often feel the same level of frustration from around the table as I hear on TeamSpeak from the DPS classes during a Heroic Magister's Terrace.

 

[katahn]

Defenders (in whatever game) need tools that let them fill their role. In WoW they use the threat mechanic and it works just fine for PvE. The problem is that the threat mechanic has two significant flaws.

1.) It doesn't work in PvP at all, player enemies will go after those who are the most threatening to them, not who has the most abstract threat.

2.) It drastically undermines the stackability of defenders in an encounter. The defender piles on threat and nothing else, and if they have aggro then anyone else with less threat is simply irrelevant. Groups/raids are better off bringing another striker than another defender.

A mechanic like the one the 4e fighter has, which roots enemies who try to move away from the fighter, don't depend on threat. This means they immediately work regardless of what the enemy wants to do, which means they would work in PvP. Secondly such a mechanic gives a degree of stackability to defenders: if the first defender's rooting attack misses, the second defender's (or third, or fourth) might still hit.

Heck, even the "you take damage if you attack anyone but me" mechanic a 4e paladin has is preferable. The paladin-defender can place this debuff/mark on an enemy and then if the enemy ignores them and goes for others they take damage and free the paladin up to use his limited healing abilities to aid his side's survivability in a different way.

Either way, and these are only the tip of the iceberg, you'd have a game that rewarded better tactics and would allow someone with a defender character to be effective in that role in all aspects of gameplay. Now of course these are only ultra-high-level overviews, the devil is always in the details as they say, but if I were still playing WoW today (haven't played it in almost 5 months now) I would wish its "defenders" worked like 4e did.

 

[Westwind]

I wish WoW were like 4e....

* Every class would have a defined role in a party and no amount of talent selection would change that. Every warrior and paladin would be able to effectively tank at all levels of the game, every priest, druid, or shaman would be able to effectively heal at all levels of the game.

One of the things I like about hybrid classes is you can respec and enjoy an totally different aspect of the game. Tired of healing with your Shaman? Try out melee or caster dps for a day. Obviously, if you're raiding this isn't always an option, but it explains all the variation in the talent trees.

* Healers would be able to routinely do non-healbot things in a group if desired without completely sacrificing their ability to heal.

Good in principle, but there are only so many roles out there. Anyone who remember running MC with a Paladin back in the day will remember 5-minute buffs. Spending the entire fight decursing and rebuffing is a lot less fun than healing/tanking/crusader striking.

* Threat and aggro would vanish and tanks would get powers that prevent enemies from moving past/away from them instead. Tanking wouldn't just be a PvE concept and would be a PvP one too.

EQ alpha (or maybe it was beta?) had collision for about 1 day and it was a disaster. Also, tanking then becomes an issue of reflexes and not strategy/gear/talents. As many posters have pointed out, making mobs "smart" will kill the fun (and the healers). Blizz has done a lot with the aggro mechanic to keep things interesting. As a hunter, I'm all for raid bosses with aggro resets--the more Misdirections needed, the better.

* DPS classes wouldn't be defined by DPS but by the ability to do damage while being harder for their enemies to target and hit. This way all classes can still have enough DPS to manage life while soloing.

Aggro dumps make DPS classes harder to it, in effect. Healers/tanks soloing is an issue, I'll agree there. Although, I've seen some Prot Pallys solo amazingly well.

* Gear wouldn't be the be-all and end-all of character power. It would instead be more of an enhancement.

What's the carrot to continue to play and pay your subscription fee then? If new content didn't offer new rewards, I'd spend all my time in Winterspring since I love that zone's theme. I think the axiom of skill>gear>class>race is essentially correct (arena aside). Gear is important, and I can see how that's frustrating to some, but improving gear is a major incentive to keep playing the game.

And a quick word to all the Retadins who have posted: I lobbied hard to get a Retadin added to our raiding core and it's been fantastic. Keeping Judgement of Wisdom (and Light and Imp. Crusader) up on the boss has made a huge difference in my dps. I can skip Fel Mana Pots in favor of Haste Pots, never have to switch to Aspect of the Viper, I crit more often, etc. And I will find some way to build a retadin in 4e.

 

[wedgeski]

2.) It drastically undermines the stackability of defenders in an encounter. The defender piles on threat and nothing else, and if they have aggro then anyone else with less threat is simply irrelevant. Groups/raids are better off bringing another striker than another defender.

This is only true for the most straightforward tank'n'spank encounters. These days, most multi-mob fights include aggro-dumps, or several mobs which must all be tanked individually because they cannot be crowd-controlled, or any number of other effects which rely on high-aggro-dealing characters with lots of hit points.

What I *really* don't like about the aggro mechanic is the fact that it has been almost completely deconstructed by legitimate WoW add-ons to the point where it literally is a number on a table. You can now monitor, almost to the decimal degree, how likely your next attack or heal is to pull aggro. I really hate that, not only because it takes even more skill out of the game, but because Blizzard then have to start designing encounters which aren't trivialised by these add-ons. The effect? The encounter is way too hard *without* the add-on, and it becomes essentially mandatory.

How does this relate to D&D I hear you ask? Um... I'll get back to you...

 

[Nahat Anoj]

As they might say on the WoW boards: SRSLY

Yeah, though, fine points all. I note that the upcoming Warhammer: Age of Reckoning MMORPG (which started development before 4E was announced) has a similar "Four roles" structure (tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS and healer in it's case - ranged DPS tend to have controller-ish elements interestingly), and you can never spec to the point where you can't perform your basic role well.

It looks like they're doing some interesting things there. I like the grudge mechanic of the Dwarf Ironbreaker class.

 

[jedrious]

Sure. I'll post my build on June 6th =P

Rogue
1st Soldier of the Faith
2nd <Feat that lets you use bigger weapons with Rogue abilities>
4th Novicw Power
6th <open feat>
8th Acolyte Power
10th Adept Power
11th Shadow Assassin PP
12th Danger Sense
14th Sieze the Moment

 

[katahn]

This is only true for the most straightforward tank'n'spank encounters. These days, most multi-mob fights include aggro-dumps, or several mobs which must all be tanked individually because they cannot be crowd-controlled, or any number of other effects which rely on high-aggro-dealing characters with lots of hit points.

What I *really* don't like about the aggro mechanic is the fact that it has been almost completely deconstructed by legitimate WoW add-ons to the point where it literally is a number on a table. You can now monitor, almost to the decimal degree, how likely your next attack or heal is to pull aggro. I really hate that, not only because it takes even more skill out of the game, but because Blizzard then have to start designing encounters which aren't trivialised by these add-ons. The effect? The encounter is way too hard *without* the add-on, and it becomes essentially mandatory.

How does this relate to D&D I hear you ask? Um... I'll get back to you...

First off I absolutely agree with you on the effect of aggro mechanic you describe in your second paragraph. So much of WoW has gone from "online pseudo-RPG" to a sort of "multiplayer action game with a thin RPG veneer" and this is a case and point.

I am aware of encounters like you describe in your first paragraph. For the longest time my main in WoW was a feral druid tank and I got to deal with all kinds of wonky situations as a result. The thing about those fights is they are gimmicked to try and make multiple tanks interesting given the core mechanic they have in place for tanking. I'd prefer to see interesting fights that don't rely on gimmicks to make multiple tanks relevant and allow tanks to be relevant in situations where enemies don't follow the threat rules (ie. players).

Of course I am absolutely aware of the fact that it would require a massive rework of the tanking classes (and the melee DPS classes at least) as well as the game a whole. Because of this fact we'll never see it happen in WoW. I am encouraged to see newer MMOs coming out that seem to be looking for alternatives to the threat mechanic, so who knows. But in the end I like the fact that 4e "tanks" don't use a threat mechanic to do their job and I stand by my original joking jab at the "4e = WoW" crowd by saying "you know, I really wish that were true... it might make WoW a funner game."