# Healing Theory, Part 6: The Mana Economy

Previous posts in this series can be found here

Much of the focus on this series so far has been on Spirit and mana. Choices surrounding mana are some of the least obvious and most interesting character setup choices in WoW. They allow gear decisions to impact gameplay in a way that is somewhat unique. And, from our current perspective at the end of raiding in Mists, the story of how healing gameplay changed since launch is largely a story about mana. This is particularly interesting because I think, for reasons I discuss below, that the designers tried to avoid allowing healers to reach this point of having such ample mana at the end of Mists, after seeing it happen in Wrath and Catalysm.

This post continues the thoughts of earlier posts in the series, which focused on the difference between cooldown and non-cooldown heals and why that difference is important to an understanding of mana. Here I explore some of the theoretical foundation for that distinction and how it helps us make gear and play decisions.

## The Balance Sheet: Mana Assets

One obstacle to understanding mana is that information about your total mana income and expenditures is obscure; in typical play, your only information is how full your bar is at a given moment. But since you spend many bars’ worth of mana in even a short encounter, this look is actually not too informative. For a better understanding of where your mana comes from and where it goes, we want to instead look at an accounting that considers an encounter as a whole.

Let’s work through a example on paper and see how it looks. What we’re looking for here isn’t a set of detailed output numbers, which would be better served by a full-blown spreadsheet like my TreeCalcs, but the overall picture and what it can teach us about the way we think about mana.

The first question is how much total mana I have to spend over the course of an encounter. That depends on many variables, but I’ll illustrate a typical hypothetical example for a 6-minute fight. I might have (values in thousands of mana):

• 300 (starting mana)
• 432 (base regen (6000 Mp5) over 6m)
• 487 (6 minutes of Spirit regen, at 12k Spirit (6768 MP5))
• 285 (1.61 meta procs per minute, @ 3 Rejuvs (26.1k mana) per proc (with a 13% bonus for bad luck protection))
• 129 (ilvl 561 Dysmorphic trinket, average value running for 6 minutes at 37.5% haste)
• 120 (two Innervates at 12k Spirit)
• 87 (two Mana Tides from a Shaman with 12k Spirit)
• 18 (regen effect from one Hymn of Hope)
• 30 (potion)
• Total: 1888 (1.89 million mana).

# Raid Awareness is a Learned and Practiced Skill

Italicized quotations throughout are from my old raid leader Sebudai, well-known for his efforts to teach his raiders to be better at playing WoW.

I’ve written many WoW guides over the past years, largely covering the details of min/maxing a particular class, but I always knew I was addressing a narrow slice of what makes a good raider. While there are reasons that players who know the nuances of perfectly optimizing their class’s output and ability use are prized, even they are no substitute for a raider who excels at the most important skill of all: not dying.

Volumes have been written on how to do good DPS, healing, or tanking. If you raid or want to raid at an intermediate or high level, I imagine you have long immersed yourself in that discourse already. There are many reasons why existing WoW guides, forums, and discussions are largely about optimizing those roles. They are the primary way players are measured by themselves and by raid groups. Large parts of them can often be solved with math, leading to simple and easily implemented results. But most important, I suspect, is a widespread impression that I hope to refute in this post: that your awareness and survivability in raids is a part of who you are as player and cannot be changed.

After outlining the basic premise that not making avoidable errors that kill you or other raid members is an area of play you should seek to improve, the bulk of this post is about specific things you can do or practice to accomplish that. Through the survey of techniques discussed—gearing your UI towards awareness, being more cognizant of your encounter routines, and constructive behavior post-wipe—what I most want to convey is a mindset. I couldn’t list out all the factors in the mental game of raiding even in much longer post than this. But if you adopt the ethos that every death is a puzzle to be solved, that somewhere in series of events leading to it is a decision you could have made better, you can train yourself to look for it.

# The Lack of Holiday Updates in Mists of Pandaria

The Feast of Winter Veil starts today and the addition of a seasonal gift, battle pet, and seasonal achievement makes it the most developed holiday this year–the only holiday to get a development besides Day of the Dead. A common thread whenever a holiday rolls around now is that there’s nothing new for players to do. Holidays haven’t always gotten major developments in the past, but changes in Mists of Pandaria let players burn through holiday content faster and discourages repeat play on alts. It’s interesting to note that the Darkmoon Faire has gotten a lot of updates during a period where holidays got nearly none–but holidays occupy a special place in players’ memories and shouldn’t be neglected in favor of the Faire.

To start off, let’s analyze major developments for each holiday over the past few years. A stand-out year for holiday content started with Children’s Week 2011, continuing with major Hallow’s End, Winter Veil, and Lunar Festival additions. In this year-long period, Brewfest, Love is in the Air, and Noblegarden received interesting new vanity items as well.

# No Time to Explore on the Timeless Isle

Much has been made of the experimental design of the Timeless Isle, with more zones in this style promised in Warlords of Draenor at BlizzCon. On the surface, it’s a crowd-pleaser. Players hate daily quests and the Timeless Isle has none. Players of all types love vanity loot and quirky rare spawns and the Timeless Isle has many. Players miss the magic of pre-flying Azeroth and the Timeless Isle bans flying and rewards players for exploration. But is it too much of a good thing? And why do people AFK so much in a zone designed to foster exploration?

Geography

The Timeless Isle keeps the illusion of looking full even when many players aren’t around because of the design. You can’t see much of the island at once between the mountains, bridges, and caves. By putting players into naturally small areas, the areas always look kind of full. And there’s so many scripted things going on that the island never looks dead or abandoned. This leads to some initial excitement when discovering the Timeless Isle, but it also prevents players that are goal-oriented or simply short on time from feeling accomplished.

The island’s geography makes it very difficult for players to reach other parts of the island quickly. While this initially forced players to encounter every area of the island and hopefully stumble across some hidden events, users who have gotten some of the easier achievements or objectives out of the way are blocked by the long travel-times required to get around the island. This encourages users idling by a rare NPC’s spawn location, instead of traveling around the island and participating in multiple content types available. If someone calls out that a rare spawn has just popped in General chat, a player will most likely not make it there in time since the NPC gets obliterated with a small health pool.

The geography on its own isn’t necessarily an issue–a complicated small zone requiring players to invest effort in exploration isn’t bad–but when paired with the rare spawn mechanics and low droprates on many cool vanity items, the geography begins to feel like a hindrance if players are encouraged to kill the same rares many times.The Pandaria rares, in contrast, didn’t have this same issue–while there were numerous rares introduced in Mists of Pandaria, flying mounts let players take a quick spin around a zone, higher droprates on vanity items meant players collected their coveted items faster, and no achievements tied to vanity items didn’t trigger OCD the same way Going to Need a Bigger Bag does.

# Blizzcon WoW Announcement Responses

I’m finally getting around to writing down my initial reaction to the various things that were announced in WoW panels on Friday and Saturday at Blizzcon. I haven’t even caught up on everyone’s discussions since then due to travelling (…travelling and XCOM expansion being released), but it seems to good to get these down first anyway. Basically my first impressions of everything in no particular order. The biggest part will be on raid changes since those are most interesting for me (well, and there are no detailed class changes yet).

## Raid Changes

Putting aside the name changes (which, aside from surely causing constant terminological confusion for the next many months, aren’t too significant), and putting aside LFR (because it’s not raiding), there are still 3 raid difficulties. But we’re going from [easy (Flex), medium (10 or 25), hard (10 or 25)] to [easy (Flex), medium (Flex), and hard (20)]. Many takeaways from that.

• There’s no longer _any_ difficulty with two disjoint raid sizes. This is great. No more 10 vs. 25 issues. I don’t even want to rehash all the reasons that was a problem, except to the extent it comes up in the remaining points.
• There is no more hard-mode content with fewer than 20 people. Some will see this as a dubious accomplishment, but I’ve been arguing to do away with 10H for years. It has a lot to do with the problems I discussed in the above blog post: primarily, a game with 11 classes and 34 character types can’t be balanced cleanly around 10-player teams when you’re considering the razor’s-edge tuning of Heroic raiding. “10H WoW raiding” was simply a less great game than “25H WoW raiding.” Slightly less great, but less great. I know there are some of you out there with exactly 9 friends. What I’d want most for you is a game where the systems were made from the ground up to dovetail with 10-player content, rather than a 25- or 40-player game that was pared down as well as could be managed.
• Guilds can grow to 20 or 25. I think people will take some time to truly internalize this. We’re so used to saying “We’re a 10-person guild, how could we get to 25?” In Cataclysm and MoP, that was a valid question with no good answer. But now? The answer is that you invite people. You can! You’re so used to thinking that you can’t invite people (because there’s no “room” for them), but now you can. I know it sounds crazy, but you get from 10 to 20 by inviting people. You won’t be a 10-player guild in WoD, because there won’t be any such thing. You’ll be “a guild” and until/unless you’re raiding Mythics, you’re not pegged to any one size.
• Flexible normal-level mode raid tuning. I’d been skeptical of this–not because I thought it would be bad, but simply because I thought (in fact, I’m still quite confident) it’s very hard to do. But they’re only releasing it if they think they’ve got it working, and I’m looking forward to seeing it. One key piece of the puzzle is a new tech feature they briefly mentioned: boss abilities that target N people will no longer stairstep at certain raid sizes, but will, at intermediate sizes, have a pro rata % chance to target 1 extra person each time. This is a crucial bit of tech that allows boss difficulty scaling to be smooth enough to fit within the expected precision for “normal” tuning rather than “easy” tuning.

One thing I still feel isn’t totally answered: why 20 instead of 25? This post very nicely answers the question “why 20 instead of 15 or some other smaller number.” But, to be frank, I didn’t consider 15-player as the only raid size to be a serious option to begin with. People always touted it as a solution to the 10/25 problem, but I never saw how it was a solution at all. 15 would have been tantamount to giving up on “big” raiding. I mention this only because 20 is still too close to 10 or 15 for complete comfort. Even for important goals like ensuring 1 of every class, 25 is a much more comfortable number. Specifically, it’s more than 2x the number of classes, which feels like an important threshold. When you have only 1 of some classes, attendance fluctuation will often give you 0.

I press on this point because the only rationale I have heard people guess so far is that it’s a sort of compromise. Something like, there was a debate between 10 and 25, and if one side flat-out “won,” people would be upset. Or more subtly, it’s the middle ground fallacy: when two sides are debating strongly, the right answer feels like it should be between them. Anyway, I hope that’s not the reason, since it’s a pretty poor one. I don’t know what it is though. I can think of a few other really minor advantages. 10% of the raid is tanks instead of 8%, slightly better for role composition. Hypothetically two 10p groups could merge (I think this is a rare case). There’s some advantage to having the flex size cap out at something higher than the hardmode size so you can bring the whole guild on farm runs. None of these, to me, outweigh the potentially added robustness of the 25-man raid size.

Overall, I think the changes are huge net positive. I said on 6/6/2013, the day Flex was announced: ”[It] will probably take some thinking to lay out a good array of raid modes to cover the various kinds of players efficiently. Just to throw out brainstorms, I think the most lightweight extreme would be to have only 2 modes: flex and 25H.” I thought that was just an idealistic example to make a point, but man, they landed pretty close to it.

Just to address the most common complaint about the changes (“what will my guild do?”). If your guild is made of the right stuff–players who want to play together and have generally similar goals in WoW–it will be fine. I’m not worried at all about 25H groups, who are only affected insofar as their recruitment officers get a break at the turn of this expansion (for once). I do understand the plight of 10H guilds. It’s not fun to be the person to has to make changes for the good of the game as a whole. I think the portion who quit will be vastly outnumbered by the portion who find that 20M is no less fun than what they’re currently doing.

## One Free Level 90

I know, you’re thinking, “this is the next most important announcement?” To me it is. We live in a different gaming world that we did in 2004 and people’s expectations have changed. In a lot of ways, as a gamer, I heavily resist that–I am perennially nonplussed by microtransactions in any form, for example (and I will be by the inevitable WoW ones that are already appearing in more microtransaction-oriented regions). But one I’m fine with is that newcomers to a game need a smoother experience getting pulled into fun content at the outset without doing a lot of work (WoW needs better onboarding, as the f2p marketing types might say). Some people, or most people in fact, like leveling more than I do, but you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that it’s the best part of WoW.

The only rationale that people seem to give for the requirement of doing all that leveling is that you learn to play the game and play your class in the process (“enjoyable quest content” is not a reason to require players to do it before doing other kinds of content). But any game that required people to go through 100 levels (or the equivalent number of hours) of tutorialization would be a failure. You shouldn’t look at WoW’s new-player experience any differently. Similarly, no game that’s the 6th in a series makes you play the first 5 before being even allowed to play, especially not a multiplayer game where you want to play the 6th with your friends.

At first I thought it was a little odd that new players will level their first character in only 10 levels, but if you want to play another, you’ll have to do 100 levels and it will feel horribly ponderous. But it actually makes a lot of sense. In this game, you’re supposed to hit max level and then decide what types of content you like (this was a specific focus of MoP). If some of the content you like is “leveling,” that’s the time to do it, and alts are the way for you to experience that content.

## Garrisons

Short because we’re still short on details (they listed a lot of things, but it’s really hard to put it all together until beta). I think that cosmetically, these look like WoW’s take on player housing–in fact they may have described it that way at one point. But WoW always said it never had a use for “player housing” as most people think of it, and I’m not sure that’s changed. The biggest role I’m seeing for garrisons is “something that makes you log in the next day (that’s not daily quests!).” That’s not what most people think of as “player housing.” It’s a giant version of the Halfhill farm (which I think they also said at some point). It’s another way that WoW is staying with the times–ever notice how every f2p game (like Hearthstone) has a thing making you want to log in at fixed intervals (often 1 day)? But WoW is really staying ahead of the times in that way, because it’s moving on from “do this quest every day to get your carrot” (which is tremendously boring) to “here’s a minigame where you sent a guy on a mission and as soon as you get home from work tomorrow you’re going to log in to see how it turned out.” It sounds infinitely better.

There are traditional player-housing features as well like trophies to show off to your friends. To be honest though, I don’t see the novelty of going to my friends’ houses lasting very long. Even if the customization is as rich as something like Animal Crossing, where people can do truly creative things with the vast array of options (I kind of doubt that it will be), they’ll just tweet their screenshots or whatever. This is probably why WoW never had player housing. It’s the minigame aspect of the Garrison that makes it worth doing. The biggest watershed in quitting any game, in my experience, is the first time a few days go by where you didn’t play or think of it–that’s when you find you’re mentally quit before you even realized it. Dailies were a way of making sure that didn’t happen, but they were so awful to actually do that it probably cut into their retentive effect. Building an entire minigame to leave you with goals that will take place at certain times in the future is a much better effort and I’m looking forward to seeing how it works.

## Hit and Reforging

Plagiarizing myself again (lazier than typing). 4/26/2013:

“–Everyone has to hit 100% in PvE. Every single raider of a given class has their hit stat at exactly the same amount. The most telling part of this is that healing specs get 15% to hit. Literally the only effect of the hit stat on a piece of gear is to cause you to reforge to cancel it out.
–Reforging is not very interesting. You shuffle your worst secondary stat to your best. All it really does, other than manage the hit cap, is mute the difference between items with different secondary stats. That may have necessary when stats were less standardized, but now all it does is make gear choice less relevant. Also the little bit of free-from stat choice that it adds is completely redundant with the whole purpose of gems.

We have multiple systems now (the hit/miss attack roll and the hit stat, and the reforging system) whose sole purpose is ensuring that everyone hits everything 100% of the time. I want to argue that they’re all completely vestigial and should be gone next expansion. There are some obstacles, like the need to come up with a fourth DPS stat to replace it, but one thing at a time.”

So yeah, that happened. Unsurprisingly, I approve.

## Tertiary Stats

Really neat, not an idea I’d ever even considered. To summarize:

1. Primary stats are always present in fixed value on items of a given slot/ilvl. There’s no player choice associated with them, but they mediate scaling. The increase in primary stat as you get better gear drowns out most other terms that would cause scaling imbalances.
2. Secondary stats affect your core min/maxy character ability, such as DPS or healing output. There’s player choice is figuring out which is best, but they tend to be a little one-dimensional (your spreadsheet tells you which to favor). They contribute to scaling and should be generally balanced. All items of a given slot/ilvl have comparable total secondary stats.
3. Tertiary stats don’t affect DPS and the like (“cleave” does a bit, consider than an open point for now). They don’t affect scaling or balance–your raid leader won’t view you as behind because you have less lifesteal or runspeed than someone else. It’s okay for comparable items in the same tier to have different amounts of tertiary stats (I believe many or most items will have 0, in fact).

Viewed this way, the third stat category makes a lot of sense. When thinking about how to work in e.g. runspeed as a stat, I kept getting stuck on how to balance it against DPS. An interesting debate by the way–normally players always favor DPS (in fact the whole MoP talent redesign was driven by that notion)–but there’s clearly a tipping point (a player who doesn’t use a runspeed enchant on their boots is bad). Anyway, a new category of “optional” stats is great.

As an aside, gems are being changed to an analogue of Thunderforged. It’s an extra bump to non-tertiary stats that you might roll up occasionally. Basically now there are two ways instead of one that an item can be little better than average, a socket or being Forged. So they really like the Forged idea since they’re doubling it, and even the whole tertiary stat concept is a variant of it.

I’m mildly surprised they’re doing away with (traditional) gems as well as reforging. Much of the thrust of my issues with reforging was being redundant with gems (free stat choice). Getting rid one of one mode of free stat adjustment felt like an obvious change to me, but not both. Still, I can’t say picking gems was very interesting, so I have no reason to complain.

—–

Okay, have to stop typing for now, I hit on the big design issues we know about. I didn’t touch on L100 talents, but it mostly would have been “a bunch of neat ideas, too early to worry about min/maxing them anyway.” I think doing in-depth into the L100 talents so far will be a good avenue for launching into thoughts on class changes (which we otherwise haven’t seen). But right now, reading them doesn’t let me infer anything big about what they’re doing with classes in WoD.

# Theorycraft 101: 5.4 Trinkets

Blizzard’s pattern of trying to make more interesting raid trinkets in MoP has provided a lot of interesting theorycraft material. As in past Theorycraft 101 posts, the goal is here both to give theorycrafters some useful conclusions and equations to save them the trouble of reinventing them independently, and to give everyone some general information that helps them evaluate these new bonuses when selecting items.

## Item Budgets

In general, the amount of any stats budgeted to a certain slot scales like:

$V \cdot Q^I$

• V is the budget value controlling how many stats that item slot gets compared to other slots.
• Q is a constant equal to the 15th root of 1.15.
• I is the item’s ilvl.

Often a more convenient way to think of this, especially when dealing with trinkets, is to use ilvl 463 as a baseline. The reason is that most trinket procs are coded into the spelldata with ilvl 463 values (which is the pre-raid baseline for MoP), and then scaled from there on any individual item based on its ilvl. The Int proc on Nazgrim’s Burnished Insignia, for example, is this this spell. So in general, since looking up the ilvl 463 value for any proc/bonus on Wowhead is easy, you can think of the value at higher ilvls as:

$V_{463} \cdot Q^{(I-463)}$

or

$V_{463} \cdot 1.15^\frac{I-463}{15}$

# Healing Theory, Part 5: Haste

Previous posts in this series can be found here. In particular, the Haste section of Part 2 might be useful background.

Haste is the most complex of the healing stats, and often appears to be the least well understood. Its effect is a combination of added throughput, increased mana consumption, and increased HoT healing due to those “haste breakpoints” that are so easy to look up online but so hard to evaluate in importance. Part 2 in this series, linked above, gave some high-level comments on the behavior of haste, and generally concluded that based on its basic function, it’s likely to be unattractive. I said that I would dig into its effects on a class-by-class basis in the future, and that is what I’m doing in this post.

Incidentally, this post is written from a patch 5.4 perspective. Among various other things, haste will have no effect on the RPPM proc rate of the legendary meta (and legendary cloak), greatly simplifying the analysis.

## Concepts

First, a slightly different framework for how haste effects the two main categories of spells. We’ll refer to this throughout the post.

1) Non-HoTs. Haste does not increase the healing per cast (HPC), nor therefore, the healing per mana (HPM). It increases the healing per cast time (HPCT) by 1% every 425 rating. It is worth pointing out for comparison that a typical mastery, like Druid, Holy Priest, or Paladin, increases all of these metrics (HPC, HPM and HPCT) by 1% per 480 rating. In general even from a pure HPCT (spam throughput) perspective, haste tends to be only slightly ahead of stats that increase your healing on a per-cast basis.

2) HoTs. Haste now increases the HPC. An important point I want to press on: in the long run, haste still increases the HPC by 1% per 425 rating. The “haste breakpoint” (HBP) phenomenon means that that increase to HPC comes in clumps, but the average gain is unchanged. Especially late in the expansion when the difference between a high-haste and low-haste build may be 20000 rating, it’s this overall scaling pattern that generally determines the relative attractiveness of the two. HBPs tell you what haste points to “snap” to in your reforging, but generally don’t control the overall value of haste. The only general exception is the first non-automatic HBP for any important spell, which requires a smaller investment to reach.

# Cosmetic Armor: Style Analysis, Target Audience, and Store Suggestions

Transmog has been a hit since it launched in Patch 4.3, and it seemed inevitable that armor would eventually find its way to the Blizzard Store, as it finally did last week.

My opinions have gone back and forth on the store helms over the past week. Initially I thought that adding more transmog flexibility was a great idea, then I balked at the prices announced on Tuesday. However, after seeing so many users enthusiastically upload detailed screenshots to Wowhead, I’m thinking that the items have a targeted niche, and I’m just not one of the people intended to  purchase these items.

I want to look at why these helm designs were possibly chosen, explain why I’m not the target audience, and suggest some potential Blizzard Store armor for the future.

# Proving Grounds and Endless Games

After one day, my first big comment  on PG is structural. When I think of an “endless” game that worked really well, let’s say Plants vs. Zombies, a key feature is that you’re carrying over a lot of game state from one wave to the next. All your plants and their locations (which is a lot of information), as well as how much money you’ve banked and whether some plants are at partial HP. The first one (the plants you’ve already set up) is the important one. In fact, the point of Endless is that you handle later waves by using the easy early waves as efficiently as possible to build up as solid of an arrangement as you can. To put a finer point on it, the early waves are still interesting because you have a big incentive to find as much slack as possible that you can use to set up plants in a way that will pay off later. For example, saving up for very expensive plants right away, which makes the early waves harder because you have almost no defenses.

To sum up in two words, I think a completely necessary feature of an endless-series-of-waves challenge is the ability to “get ahead” early on.

In Proving Grounds, almost the only game state you’re carrying from one wave to the next is your mana bar (and cooldown state, but that only has a 1-3 minute lifespan). The only others are your party’s current HP (mostly isomorphic to “mana” since you can use mana to top people off between waves though) and whether all the mobs are dead (more on this later). So at the outset of the discussion, mana is brought front and center. It’s all that connects one wave to the next. I want to point out also that I only tried healing so far, but for DPS/tanks who don’t even have a mana component, is there anything connecting a wave to the next? Or is it a series of completely independent fights?

The PvZ example is meant to illustrate the importance in an endless-waves challenge of having some continuity of action throughout all the waves. If they are truly independent, then once a player can do waves 1 through N and fails at wave N+1, there is no reason for him to keep playing waves 1 though N. In fact this is very quickly going to become boring or annoying. The player needs a reason to re-engage waves 1 through N mentally and make a continuous challenge out of optimizing his performance, such that each time he does so he improves his chances of beating N+1.

Anecdotally, I had this response as a player yesterday, literally the first time I’d ever lost in Proving Grounds. I was at Endless wave 8 and thought, “ugh, I have to do waves 1 through 7 again to try that again”. The reason I thought that (I realized later) is that nothing I saw doing waves 1 though 7 the first time made me think that doing them better or differently was going to improve my odds in wave 8. The only thing I needed in order to get past wave 8 was to try wave 8 a few times in a row to see exactly what was giving me trouble. That I couldn’t do that without replaying 1 through 7 felt tedious.

In the healing case, we have mana for some continuity. I think the ramifications of having the mana system bear this much weight in a healing challenge are something I’ll get into in a later post. It’s worth commenting in my personal example that mana wasn’t a factor at all when I failed wave 8, it was pure spike damage. And again, in the non-healer challenges–will I find anything serving this purpose or will waves 1 through N be a matter of rote repetition once I’m attempting wave N+1. All I can think of is cooldowns, but that’s only a partial solution: I can get some value out of learning to do N and N-1 without my cooldowns, but still, none of the earlier waves matter.

So this whole post was on one issue, but if I’d been sitting in the room when people first discussed Proving Grounds, this would have been a fundamental objection. Right now I’m not convinced there’s anything here that justifies an Endless mode. I know that sounds dramatic, but what I’m pushing for isn’t to delete Endless mode. It’s to think of something we can add to Endless mode that will make clear why the “Endless” structure is a better idea than say, a distinct 4th/5th difficulty level (where the final difficulty would be the same as waves 25-30 of current Endless).

PS: I framed all my thoughts in terms of Endless as I wrote this, but in retrospect this issue is not so narrow. Any additions/changes that are responsive to what I’m describing here would improve the gameplay of the other modes as well as Endless.

# Soylent Green

A collaborative essay by Hamlet and Perculia.

Tuesday night. Like many others, you queued for LFR because you were Looking For a Raid. The question we want to explore here is, is what you found actually a raid?

We know what you’re after when you queue up. It’s not so much a raid, per se, that’s on the forefront of your mind. It’s that you’ll win an epic. Yes, the odds are low (you’re not even totally sure what they are), but maybe this will be the week. Maybe your item is from the final boss, so your hopes are prolonged further before being dashed by a bag of gold. Yes, that bag of gold you bitterly accept, but you’d almost rather throw it away in protest. Preferably at someone’s head. But since WoW doesn’t let you do that, you dutifully click on it and add the gold to your inventory. Nobody will ever know anyway. You’re never going to see these people again.

If ever, in that moment, you wished you hadn’t come to LFR, you’ve already begun to understand what we’re telling you today.

This is at first blush a piece about LFR. But what it’s really about is raiding, and the things that make raiding a unique gaming experience. LFR demonstrates what remains when you strip the element of human interaction away: a shell that resembles raiding only superficially. Through the case study of LFR, we hope to remind you of what raiding is about, why you got started doing it, and why so many people love it.

There is one exception that runs throughout all of our comments. The people who make a group with friends and run LFR because they can’t raid Normal for whatever reason (group size, cross-realm, skill level, scheduling, or maybe they’re also raiding Normal but still doing LFR for gear). This is the exception that proves the rule. Because they’re using the “LFR” system as a workaround for logistical or other issues, not because they need to Look For a Raid. As will be discussed below, these people are the target audience for Flex raiding, which is better suited to their social raiding needs and will hopefully replace LFR for them. Our primary focus is the player who doggedly runs LFR outside the context of an already-established raid group. It is to these people that we send the message: don’t.