At the behest of Sir Bildo the Creepily Gazed, I decided to play a little more of my Draenei priest in World of Warcraft last night in order to see just whether the latest patch, 2.3.x, could really improve what I dub the ‘mid forties death grind’, where all but the most exceptional of one’s characters are usually abandoned, floating in the lifeless inky void of the quest hole.

A little back story: I currently have two level seventy characters, the druid was my main for the majority of the game when, I think it’s safe to say, fully half the known world was playing WoW. I played my paladin in the rare gaps when friends weren’t online in an attempt to not advance my druid too many levels ahead. After the initial rush, pun intended, was over I had a level sixty druid and a paladin in the mid forties where he’d been abandoned in the dark depths of questing hell, where even the light of the holy often failed to reach him. After a significant break I returned to WoW, as any player who has been touched by the game’s dark chaotic tentacles is wont to do, and found that a friend, who was looking for a change from their raiding main, had a character who was also stuck in the mid forties. We teamed-up, worked our way through various quests that wouldn’t have been possible solo, and mutually boosted one another through the slog, like a couple of mountaineers battling their way against the blizzard to eventually break through the cloud cover and, gasping frosty breaths, lay eyes upon the sunny summit. From then on it was the plain sailing of sunken temples and black-rocked depths as others succumbed to the Cthulhu-like pull of the Elder Game, allowed a little of the insanity to enter their lives once more, and returned to adventuring with us. Come the time of the Burning Crusade I found little trouble in getting both my level sixty characters to level seventy, and although many a group adventure was had, soloing was always an option when others weren’t around. The Burning Crusade came and went, extinguished as quickly as a candle in a waterfall, and the migrating players took wing and looked for the warmer climes of other games. I hung around though, and took the opportunity to explore the new content at the other end of the scale, creating my Draenei priest and blasting through the first twenty levels of excellent new quests, slowing somewhat as I went through the enjoyable but many-times-undertaken quests in Darkshire and Redridge, until eventually (having worked through all of the Night Elf areas up to Ashenvale in order to become Exalted with Darnassus by level forty, and thus be able to buy my Draenei a graceful, lithe kitty as a mount rather than some monstrous waddling mutant pachyderm) I hit a wall at around the mid forties and I drifted away from the game on the flotsam of disenchantment.

Fast forward to yesterday, which is an impressive manoeuvre if one thinks about it, and it was with some anticipation of disappointment that I took the five and a half hour journey from Ironforge to West Feralas where it had been determined that there were probably quests that I had yet to undertake. I found some quests of suitable level range, some below my character’s current level which are always good for warming-up and getting back into one’s stride, and a few more challenging ones. What followed was a couple of hours of insane experience gaining, loot gathering and general all round OMG and indeed, as those kids say, WT to the F. Yo. My character gained a level and half in what seemed like the blink of an eye and, although I’m not sure if this was due to the recent patch or that luck was having a day off from being a shrewish harridan and was now a lascivious lady of loot, I gained my first ever epic world drop, a mountain of green items, a fourteen slot bag and more pearls than I’ve ever seen.

Certainly, if Blizzard are trying to entice players back to the game, then this is a fine way to go about it, much to the chagrin of the ‘dedicated’, ‘hard working’, ‘skilled’ ‘elite’ of the game’s upper echelons I’m sure. I shall certainly be returning to my priest again tonight, and although lady luck might not be putting-out with the amply lubricated lootual favours this time around, I can already see the summit of Mt. Grind where the Outlands Express awaits to whisk me onwards to the golden land. Either that or I’m being fed a pleasant dream, an enzyme-induced euphoria, while the Elder Game wraps its dark velvety tentacles around my head and sucks away the last remaining ebb of life force through my brain.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh WoW R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

WoW fhtagn.

The current character that I’m playing in City of Villains, as part of the Monday n00b Club‘s excursions into all things Strike Force, is a true favourite of mine even though the power-set combination that he utilises is deemed to not be amongst the more ‘uber’, ‘down with the kids’, ‘too hip to be cool’ combinations. Inspired somewhat by other’s detailing of their characters I thought I would ramble on a little about the character that makes me smile every time I come to play them of a Monday evening. A Stone/Dark Brute, he is an absolute joy to play, and despite having not yet gained some of the signature powers of either power-set, nevertheless each gaming session sees me with a face of childlike wonder and merriment, grinning through a bottom jaw set firmly away from the top one as if each had been magnetised as an opposing pole, watery eyes wide open trying not to blink and miss a moment of the utter carnage that is centralised around the ground zero, the focussed point of fury, that is my character.

Stone Melee and Dark Armour are interesting power-sets because they both give up a little of their primary function – that of damage for melee and resistance/defence for armour – in order to have a little more capacity for utility. For these two power-sets the utility provided is that of soft and hard control elements through which develops a very nice synergy, alas it is a synergy at a price, and that price is three pounds, fifty four pence.

Oh, sorry, that’s the price of my lunch. The price of synergy for these power-sets is in fact Endurance, great oceanic swathes of that beautiful bright blue bar which is the steam locomotion, the petroleum ignition, the controlled nuclear reaction, in essence the ‘power’ to any hero’s ‘super’. It’s a high price to pay, and it leaves the player running a tightrope between not taking mobs down quickly enough and not being able to take them down at all. There’s nothing worse than hearing that dreaded “BWOOOoooo” as all your toggle powers (generally these relate to armour and status protection) shut down and you’re left standing amidst a horde of angry hooligans slavering for blood, at which point your character’s limp and impotent body allows for nothing more than a meek smile and a gentle covering of the wibbly bits before taking a beating that would make the eggs in an omelette admit that life was really pretty good, all things considered.

Stone Melee

New Improved Inferno, now with headings! It’ll never catch on.

In short: stone melee rocks in all senses physical, metaphysical and metaphorical. It is for me the quintessential melee power in the City of Supers series of games, with its huge thundering attacks that encapsulate everything that the Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff preached unto us in their song about the joy of boom, right down to the shake-shake-shaking of the room; one feels an instant urge to let rip a wild eyed maniacal roar of laughter as foes walk headlong into fists of solid stone or are flung through the air on the end of a rock mallet, and the dangerous part of this adrenaline rush is the need to fuel it further, to continue smashing saints and pummelling the penitent for as long as your fingers will maintain a point with enough resistance to depress a key, until several hours later you are mashing chunks of keys at a time with the bruised and bloodied knuckles of what remains of your abused and ravaged hands. Now take into consideration the need, nay the very desire of a Brute archetype to keep fighting, for the more that the character fights the greater his rage builds, and as we all know, with great rage comes great responsibility.

I jest of course, because with great rage comes wild abandonment of reason and the reduction of intellect to that of a gibbering marmot that never bothered with school and instead spent all of its days down at the Nevada arcade playing Bubonic Fighter Alpha and Virtua Groundhog.

It is hard to describe to anyone who has not played a Brute just how completely the developers have managed to tap into the essence of our cave dwelling ancestors, to hit that primal nerve that triggers ancient genes long forgotten in the darkest depths of the brain, from a time when the RFC for flight as a method of survival had yet to be ratified, and fight was the protocol of the day. When you are beating upon enemies and they, in turn, are beating on you, then the rage bar builds, and with that comes a seemingly exponential increase in damage; when you stand still and are not in combat the rage bar will decrease until it is nothing and hence, therefore, are you. Given such a choice: between glorious, dry-mouthed, heart-pounding combat, raging amidst the waves of the enemy as they crash and break against your coastal form, immovable as the land itself, and like such, only to be gloriously defeated if the waves determine to rise up so high as to drown you beneath them in a tsunami-like torrent; or to stand limp and feeble, like some frail old man unable to summon even the strength to draw up his incontinence pants to maintain his dignity at the bus stop where he stands, and where moments ago the elastic on his underwear decided unkindly to fail him.

Then I say there is no choice at all.

Having said that, it is clear that allowing the combination of the stone melee power-set with the Brute archetype is in absolute contravention of several articles of the Geneva Conventions.

It is worth noting that I’m feeling this way without having taken a couple of the signature powers of the stone melee set yet. My character is currently level twenty five and has been developed more on the Tank side of the Tank/DPS hybrid scale that Brutes straddle, mainly due to the fact that as the rest of the formation of the Monday n00bs consists of a Stalker and a couple of Corruptors, it seemed like a good idea to have someone to absorb the bulk of the enemy’s ire. This meant getting Dark Armour’s shields and damage aura (which acts as a very nice field o’ taunt and beats having to shout “Yo Mamma!” all the time) set up early along with the requisite power pools of Fitness (for the lovely and ever-needed endurance booster that is Stamina) and Leaping (for not only the essential travel power but also Acrobatics, which prevents my character spending most of the game getting up from being knocked down); the tank-like setup left little room for actual attacks, and so he has the minimal number of attacks that I felt would put out a decent amount of damage once the rage bar got going but also wouldn’t suck down a lot of endurance before I had Stamina and various other powers slotted with Single Origin enhancements, which make all the world of difference to how a character plays. As such, he has Stone Fist, Stone Mallet and Heavy Mallet only, and is missing the lovely soft-control Fault power, and the insane damage with extra disorienting goodness that is Seismic Smash.

Considering how much fun it is to play with just three powers, I can’t wait to see how things go when the entire arsenal of smash is fully assembled and he realises his full potential. I foresee much tongue-lolling, dribbling and drying-out of the eyeballs.

Dark Armour

Dark armour has toggles, and plenty of them. A toggle power is one that is turned on and left on until you decided to turn it off or it is forcibly turned off by the enemy. In return for whatever ability this toggle bestows upon your character you pay a small debt of endurance that constantly ticks away at a set amount over time; inherent endurance regeneration and the extra boost to this provided by powers such as Stamina mean that you can invariably run one or two toggles with little effect on the overall, um… endurance of your character in a fight. However, the more toggles that you run the more likely you are to chew through your endurance once a fight begins in earnest since you will eventually overcome your natural regeneration from simply running the toggles alone, and the larger amounts of endurance required to power your attacks, especially with an endurance hungry power-set such as stone, becomes very noticeable indeed, until the point that you hear the dreaded “BWOOOoooo” and big bald men in leather jackets come around and repossess all of your toggle powers due to your lack of payment to the endurance lenders. So a few toggles are manageable, more toggles become a problem, and dark armour has a lot of toggles; there are toggles for basic resistances and obscure forms of damage such as fire; toggles to counter status effects such as sleep and hold; there are toggles for damaging your opponents and for fearing and disorientating them, and there are toggles for repelling small Yorkshire Terriers in smoking jackets, for defrosting your car in the morning and for washing wool at sixty degrees without shrinking it.

In return for this drain of endurance the dark armour wearer is blessed with respectable protection from nearly every type of damage that the enemy can throw at them, and on top of all that they get some lovely soft-control powers to prevent the enemy from even having the chance of attacking them in the first place. Alas, the control power of the dark armour set doesn’t come until the later levels and as such my Brute will have to wait some time for this pièce de résistance of the set, irony intended, since all the powers I have taken up until now are actually to do with the resistance of damage, whereas the pièce de résistance is not.

So far the tactics for dark armour – as much as I have developed any tactic other than a Leeroy Jenkins-like charge into the midst of huge crowds of angry protagonists accompanied by a vague hope that the rest of the team noticed my disappearance beneath the angry writhing mob, and more importantly can be bothered to help dig me out again – is the common sense option of only turning those toggles on that are required at the time: if the enemy is mainly firing guns and punching my character, then I only need the most basic armour, if they shoot flames or energy beams then I use the specialised ‘Other stuff that isn’t punching or shooting’ shield for dealing with that while turning off the basic armour, and when a boss or arch-villain comes along, well, it’s a case of turn everything on and hope that he runs out of health before I run out of endurance.

And so far, fighting alongside an awesome team of fellow villains, the tide has always turned once it hit the rocky coast. Or, at least, when the rocky coast hit it back.

From the Cryptic Blog:

“Traditionally, there have been two dominant design motivations for instancing:
[…] Secondly, in the early days of MMORPGs one of the ongoing problems was
players camping valuable spawns or drops, effectively locking other
players out of content.”

And the devs of the various MMOs weren’t having players doing that!

Not when they could create raid instances and lock the majority of players out of the content themselves. Why should the gankers and campers have all the fun?

Welcome to my new feature, MMOon on a Stick. Here I’ll just dump out random ideas that, riding on the back of cosmic rays, have struck my head and burrowed their way into my brain. They’ll be fanciful, bizarre, incomprehensible, impossible, and all other sorts of ibles. It’s just a quick dump of the contents of my brain when I think “Hey, what if?”

The first cranium crusader, and inspiration for this post, is as follows:

I was thinking about the hunter class in WoW, having been playing one for the first time recently. I’ve been enjoying the dynamic that exists between the hunter and their pet, with the pet as tank and moderate DPS and the hunter as DPS and moderate healer. It became clear that this worked well as a duo, but that once a hunter joins a group of adventurers their pet is often a mediocre tank compared to a warrior, and the hunter is not often the highest DPS compared to Rogues or Mages or Warlocks; I daren’t suggest that hunters are mediocre DPS lest I call down the firey brimstoning wrath of a hundred thousand million hunters. Hoo boy, there are a lot of hunters, don’t ever annoy them, they’ll rise up and devour the world.

Anyway! What I thought was this: once the hunter joined a team, what if they could turn off their pet and in exchange get a boost to their DPS or crowd control abilities, such that they could contribute that much better to a defined role in the group. Extrapolating this a little further, it seemed like a fun idea to have any class have abilities that helped them to solo, but which they could turn off when joining a group in exchange for becoming a more pure class of tank, DPS, crowd control, healer, burger vendor, accountant or what have you.

Taking the superimposed reduction of this extrapolation into its primary quanta and then running it backwards through an inverted induction field (what?), I landed at the following: have players with skills that are unlocked based on the composition of the party. For example: with no healer in the party all DPS/Tank characters would have their innate healing abilities unlocked, but at considerably reduced DPS due to certain combat powers becoming locked and unavailable to them; they will be able to achieve the same content as they would with a healer, but it will be more difficult for them as they will have to concentrate on healing themselves at the same time, and it will be a slower, tougher fight due to their reduction in DPS. If a healer were to join the party the self-healing skills of the DPS players would be locked, but their greater DPS skills would become available, meanwhile the healer class’s DPS skills would become locked but their more powerful healing skills would become available.

Changing the makeup of a character in this way seemed like not only an interesting additional dynamic to the game-play, but could also go somewhat towards alleviating the problems of solo play as a non-DPS class and group play when no healer is available. I use the healer example here, but it could work equally well for tanks and crowd control classes too.

So there you go, the self-induced public craniotomy that is Moon on a Stick.

I was reading an interesting discussion on Zen of Design about how to address the public’s innate desire to play as Batman or Wolverine in the forthcoming Marvel and DC MMOs; I haven’t any contribution to make to that discussion other than the fact that if you think having some “Kekeke LOLZ” person playing as one of your nearest and dearest intellectual character properties is a good idea, you must have been snorting the Joker’s dandruff. I mean, just go on to an MMO server, any server, any game, and turn on general chat and listen for five minutes. Ok, that, that right there is going to be what it would sound like in Professor Xavier’s school for the ‘gifted’:

Cyclops: “Wolverine is FAG!”

Wolverine: “I am not! I kik ur ars in PvP. QQ more Siklops you == teh lose”

Cyclops: “Ur just got overpowered regen FoM character.”

Rogue: “Hey guys, can’t we all just get along.”

Wolverine: “Show us ur boobs Rouge!”

Cyclops: “LOLZ!”

Beast: “LOL!”

Rogue: “Oh please.”

Cyclops: “Jean Grey has the better boobs.”

Wolverine: “NO WAI!”

Beast: “Yuh uh!”

Jubilee: “Reported.”

Cyclops: “What who?”

Cyclops: “Who u reporting I not done anything.”

Jubilee: “I’m reporting you and Wolverine.”

Cyclops: “We didn’t do nothing.”

Wolverine: “Jubilee got no boobs.”

Cyclops: “LOLZ!”

Beast: “Ha ha”

Iceman: “ROFL!”

Storm: “Hey what about my boobs?”

Letting players loose on your carefully crafted IP is just going to end in tears and far too many screenshots of Wolverine and Cyclops trying to gangbang Rogue or Magneto or each other. So what to do? I’d like to see the game building a story of your character as a hero in their own right. Starting off the game as a civilian could be an interesting ploy, it allows you to build the story right from scratch and work your way through one of the most interesting parts of any hero’s story, the act of transformation. Bruce Wayne’s struggle and eventual coming to terms with the bats in the cave beneath Wayne Manor for example, which represented more than a phobia of flying rodents, but a struggle with helplessness and fear. Peter Parker’s horror and confusion at his newfound power, followed by jubilation and freedom and then regret and the oppression of responsibility. It could be argued that these moments, above all things, make these characters what they are, to themselves and to their audience. The act of discovery is beautiful in its own right, so why deny your players the chance to experience this with their own characters, and perhaps provide a unique bond between that player and their virtual alter ego.

It would beat starting the game as a low powered hero.

Officer: “Help! Infernus! There are people stuck in the bank’s vault; they’re running low on air and it’s been frozen shut by the icy Dr. Blain!”

Infernus: “Sorry officer, I’m only a low powered hero. My powers are quite limited. I can reheat that cup of coffee for you though, if you’d like.”

Officer: “I, uh… sure.”

Infernus: “Ok! It’ll take me about twenty minutes or so, but then it should be nice and steaming again. Stand back now. Infernus calls forth the inferno of Hades to do his bidding!”

<A little puff of smoke and a tiny match-like flame spring forth from the palm of his hand>

<Infernus grins sheepishly at the unimpressed policemen>

Have your players start out as civilians and have them pick the route they want to go through to become the hero of their choosing. A player could run missions at the local military facility if they wanted their hero to be the result of scientific military experiments, or perhaps they will find a military battle-suit that they steal and use for the good of mankind. Once the basic concept of the hero has been decided through pre-hero quest choices the transformation mission would be undertaken. Lord of the Rings Online has shown that the instanced, scripted mini quest is very viable as a method of storytelling, and I imagine it could work well in the super hero genre as well.

But it shouldn’t stop with the drama of the transformation, the life of a super hero is defined not just by the villains that they fight and the wrongs that they right, it’s also about the struggle with anonymity and with being misunderstood, it’s about having to leave loved ones behind or neglected, and it’s about the crushing responsibility of power over the lives of others.

It’s about human nature when faced with the unnatural.

And this is the problem that Marvel and DC have with their games; in my view their heroes are compelling because of the story surrounding them, it’s not about the flashy powers (if you think about it, most of them have a very limited range of powers), it’s about the way that they use them and the stories that result from the use and misuse of these gifts, as a normal human being comes to terms with the extraordinary and the resulting moral decisions. The problem is that the MMOs of the past have never been the greatest medium for the telling of tales where the character is concerned, oh yes there are stories, stories abound, but they are not about the character, they are about the world the character lives in, or they are about the lives of the NPCs with which the character interacts. What I’d dearly love to see in these future super hero games is a new take on MMOs, where storytelling becomes an integral part of the player’s game, such that a player becomes so involved in the story of their character, where to live the decisions, victories and failures of the character becomes so integral to their idea of a super hero that they do not care to play as that meat-headed Wolverine, because their character’s story is more compelling to them.

The super hero genre unlike any other has the ability to break the boundaries of MMO convention just as their characters break the boundaries of human endeavour, but it may well take a super human effort on the part of the developers to make it a virtual reality.