This was prompted by two recent conversations I had–first, the one surrounding this tweet, and second, someone telling me about a guildmate of theirs complaining about a different guildmate who was using bad gems for their class.

So, the odd thing about someone using completely wrong gems (or some comparable character setup choice) is that it doesn’t matter, on its face.  Gems (especially now) are such a tiny fraction of your overall character strength, and the difference between two secondary stats is such a small fraction of that, that you’re pretty hard-pressed to conclude that someone using the wrong gems has any effect on anything whatsoever.  Maybe in some unusually strong cases, that 1 person out of the 20 in your raid will have a 1% shortfall in their output?  Even that much is probably rather rare.

Basically, if you imagine that you couldn’t inspect people’s character sheets or stats directly, I’d posit that there’s no experiment you could conduct that would reveal to you whether the people in the raid had optimal gems or slightly suboptimal gems.

So why do they matter?  I’ve always only thought there was one reason, and this is including all the way back when I was in a very serious high-level guild and would review applicants.  It’s a way of showing that you’ve researched your class.  That is something you want to know about an applicant or raid member, and is kind of hard to find out directly.

It’s a little tricky because they don’t necessarily need to be able to know the theorycraft rationale for why that stat is preferred.  Just like the gems themselves aren’t the actual point of interest, being able to do/understand a lot of math isn’t the right criterion either.  It’s entirely possible for someone to understand the spellcasting decisions, which is the actual important issue, without articulating the theory.  But I think what it comes down is, there’s really no way to develop an good practical understanding of the class that won’t, somewhere along the way, involve the information about what stats are best.

Practically speaking, the only way to get solid information on the best play of a class is by reading resources written by others who used some kind of mathematical tool.  And those always include information on stats (conceivably they might not include that topic, but that would be rather odd).  The only exception is if you’re the person making the tool, in which case you of course can work out the stats for yourself as well.  If you’ve gotten all of your class understanding from sources (including “play experience alone”) that don’t contain stat information, then you must not have looked at things which are rigorous.  And that actually is something worth selecting for in applicants and guildmates.

So gems turn out to be good signal.  It’s not very discriminating, sure.  Someone might be using the right ones just by some whim, or by following their Attunement (which is often right), or from seeing other players do it.  But I’m of course not saying you should conclude that anyone with the right gems will be a great person to play with (wouldn’t be nice if that worked).  I am saying that using wrong ones all but rules out that the person has used any meaningful resources in learning to play their class.  And that is very likely to have more than a 1% effect on their performance.

Today is the Grubbles/Scrags/Stings daily at the Menagerie.  It’s one of the ones that’s suitable for farming rapidly for XP (although not quite as well-known for this as the Jahan daily).  I figured I’d use the chance to mention a few thoughts on Pet Battles.

I captured a short video to make clear what I’m talking about.  This is two repetitions of the fight, with a carry pet, in 2.5 minutes.  It gets the carry pet (Frostwolf Pup) from level 1-12, although it would go considerably faster if I had both levels of Pet Treat on in addition to the Safari Hat.  With those it’s 4 battles to level up to around 22 (at which point it’s easier to get the last few with Training Stones).  So you can grind this as much as you want on the appropriate days, powerleveling as much as 1 pet every 5 minutes.

The basic question is whether or not this should be prevented, but that question brings up a few interesting points about how the Pet Battle system as changed since its introduction.

Levels, Rarities, and Breeds

I see Pet Battles as possibly exceeding anyone’s expectations as far as how rich they wound up being.  As of now, the gameplay inherent in the massive number of pets alone (and their complex combat interactions) would be a great game, even if there were no levels, rarities, or breeds.  I know why those things are needed to some extent (rarities give some excitement to wild pets, levels so that initial progression exists).  But it’s worth pointing out that most pet battling among enthusiasts is all max level and among rares (both PvP and PvE), so these mechanics don’t play much part, and it has no shortage of good complexity.

So the solution taken in Warlords has been the right one–don’t cut out these concepts, but make it so that once someone is experienced and capable of doing difficult fights, they can skip past them.  Once someone is good enough at Pet Battles to do the difficult Draenor and Menagerie dailies repeatably, they can buy both rarity and level stones cheaply.  That removes most of the hassle of worrying about those concepts and lets pet enthusiasts do what they care about–try an interesting variety of pets in different situations.

And I emphasize again, this is largely the case because the Pet Battle system is good, and so rich and complex, that it doesn’t need any filler material.  Leveling or grinding or whatever, as a gating mechanism to getting to use more pets, has very little place once someone has moved beyond the basics.  I’m sure that when they were starting to put this minigame together, the fear was in the opposite direction, that it was imperative to ensure was sufficient complexity and variation.  Like when you’re working on a writing assignment for school, and at some point you transition from the initial terror of the blank page to the realization that you’re gone over the required length and now it’s even more work to remove the parts you don’t actually need.

As an aside: the one pet “variation” mechanic that is still not circumventable by purchasable upgrades, breeds, continues to be a thorn in the side of players.  This one the game would have been fine without.  I do imagine that it was put in with the idea of anticipating a future system of (oddly enough) breeding, and that of course could be interesting.  I’m generally guessing this from the way that each pet’s breed is made up of two “genes” (leading to the typical nomenclature players use for breeds: B/B, H/S, etc.).  But right now it’s not needed, and breeds existing on their own haven’t helped anything.

Powerleveling

In more detail, here’s how pet leveling looks in the absence of farming XP at Menagerie:
–Every day, do Menagerie daily for 8 tokens (with 3 pets, like you currently do on most days when it’s not a fast farmable one like Jahan or Scrags).
–Do a round of Draenor 2-petting a handful of trainers, maybe 4 out of the 6 that are easy (Cymre is a pain to 2-pet, and Tarr’s out of the way).

That actually works out really conveniently to almost exactly one pet leveled 1-25 per day–1-19 or so from dumping 4 trainers’ worth of XP into the carry pet, and you can buy the last few levels since you got around 24 tokens from doing all that, and buy a Battle-Stone if needed.

That’s how it looks without any unusual grinding, and indeed how I did everything in Draenor since I didn’t discover Menagerie grinding until later, and the pace was okay.  As with anything, the longer you do it the more you’d prefer to speed it up.  But overall, this scenario was fine.  If Menagerie grinding was removed, my ability to do pet stuff wouldn’t be overly hampered.

So between that, and the fact that, from what I hear, people some who get tipped off to Menagerie grinding early might never do any other Draenor Pet content, it should probably be nerfed.  However, I do think that its effect, of increasing the pace at which you can level pets, is on balance a good thing, so I’ll be a little sad.  One other thought is that having to visit all the Draenor trainers every day, more than many other things, will make the case to get flying back sooner rather than later.

Conclusion

Mixed feelings on this overall.  Yes, it’s slightly more aggressive powerleveling than is allowed otherwise.  I just want to keep in mind that there were powerleveling methods before this, and they were good and honestly even necessary for fun pet gameplay.  So in short, yeah, this breaks the rules a little more than previous methods–and it’s a way of grinding one thing repeatedly, always a red flag.  But, giving players easier ways to improve level/rarity of pets more efficiently has only been improving Pet Battles.  So it’s hard to get worked up about this one.  Overall, I’d say Blizzard realizes this–not only were the easy methods of gaining levels and rarity added in Warlords probably just for this purpose, but in 6.1 they are giving each character one free L25 pet upgrade, further shortening the barriers to get to the good part.

Is it right to nerf the farming of these few easy Menagerie dailies that can be 2-petted? Probably, since ultimately it’s a good principle to not encourage endlessly farming one thing.  But it’s not in the least bit because the ability to quickly powerlevel pets is some kind of problem.  It’s actually one of the best improvements to the system in Warlords.

P.S.: One intermediate solution might simply be to buff the Jahan fight. This is really only coming up so widely because that one is so easy to farm that even comparative beginners can get a team to do it.  3 pets with the same elemental weakness, plus a huge damage buff (plus they use Arcane Storm with plays right into their own weakness), means it’s really easy to make a team that blows them up in a few rounds.  Some others are farmable like Scrags, but 1) it’s slower, and 2) it tends to require rare pets like Xu-fu that you don’t have unless you’ve already put your time in.

Just copying some comments I’d made on this in case it’s handy to people in figuring out what’s going on with trinkets.  Trying to remember to do this more where the info might be generally handy and the post is clear without context.

————–

I liked the Mists model that generally had a primary stat and a secondary stat on each trinket, in equal amounts, with either one or the other replaced by a proc. Made it easy to conceptualize and evaluate trinkets at a glance. So for example, at equal ilvl, you might have:

X pimary + X secondary (passive)
X primary + [proc for 6x secondary lasting 20s, 115s ICD]
X primary + [Use: for 5x secondary lasting 10s, 60s CD]
X secondary + [proc for 6x primary lasting 10s, 0.92 RPPM]
X primary + [unique proc tuned to equal X secondary]
[unique passive tuned to equal X secondary] + [proc for 6x primary lasting 10s, 0.92 RPPM]

And so on (the above actually decribes most Mists trinkets). Technically yes, it’s all consistent with itemization where Int is valued at 2x a secondary. But you’re not even getting to the point of having to worry about that; you just stick with a basic framework where a trinket has two “halves”.

————

Warlords started very similar to that, with two caveats:
1) Spirit and Bonus Armor take up the “primary” half where they appear. I’m just going to flag that and leave it alone for now.
2) Some trinkets were off at release, with a proc that was too high or too low, and they’ve been adjusted by changing the passive rather than the proc, leading to some confusion.

Continue reading →