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Unholy Death Knight Guide

Unholy Death Knight Guide

Overview Unholy is a Death Knight specialization that focuses on dealing wide area damage via diseases and undead minions. It is most recognizably a cross between a dot class and a pet class. We have a permanent pet in the Ghoul or Abomination, and several temporary pets, including a platoon of Ghouls and a Gargoyle we can summon to our command, and potentially, a mighty Val’kyr Battlemaiden in…

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Every artist dips her brush in her own soul, and paints her own nature into her pictures. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    Our brand new banner (Not to mention our amazing new site icon and logo, above) are here at last!

Great thanks to Ruby, who has helped immensely with several aspects of this relaunch with her stellar aesthetic advice. Her amazing artwork lends new life to this blog as well as several other aspects of media I’ve been working with (If you’re linking to the Twitch from Twitter, or we’re offline, you can see both these epic pieces of art she’s designed for the sites in full.)

I’m merely a writer and no visual artist, but even I can see the level of design finesse that has gone into the creation of this wonderful banner. I have truly been impressed with Ruby’s work at every step of the process from beginning to end, and I hope that you, dear reader, are as well!

I’ve known Ruby for some time now, she was an upperclassman at my high school, and she has always been a great artist. As Goethe said, every artist paints their own nature into their pictures. I did take a few liberties with Goethe’s words (The “her”s were “his”s when Goethe said it), but the sentiment is much the same!

I asked Ruby for something that would capture my identity as a gamer in the now, which consists of playing a lot of World of Warcraft and League of Legends. I’ve been playing a lot of Warwick this past season, and as many know, I main my Death Knight Raveissa in World of Warcraft. So with the help of some reference shots of my armor pieces of choice, as well as a few shots of Warwick in my favorite skin of choice (Firefang, if you’re wondering) she composed this amazing work of art. Some of the reference shots will be shown at the end of this post, for those of you who want to jump to the visual references!

Ruby does take requests for commissions, which is awesome, and she does so on an estimate basis, so you’ll have to ask her how much whatever it is you’d like made will cost. But as you can see, the quality of her work does not disappoint in the least you definitely get what you pay for, especially in the art world. You can check her out on Tumblr, or hit her up via email at [email protected]

I’m so thankful for her help with these art assets, and I really hope you guys are too. She’s an amazing artist, and she puts so much of herself into her work, it’s hard not to be floored, if you ask me.

We Have Art! Every artist dips her brush in her own soul, and paints her own nature into her pictures.

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So, the title of this News of the Week really has nothing to do with the DC Universe, but there’s a few interesting news pieces to share this week (March 14th, 2017)

Starting today there’s a quest available in your Class Hall that calls you to Investigate the Broken Shore. Afterward completing this, it seems there’s no followup, but you’ll begin to get a new style of Class Hall Mission popping up in your list, that directs your Champions to missions on the Broken Shore. The rewards are pretty much the same as before, AP, Gold and whatnot, but they have new stories and thematic AP item styles if you care about such things.

In other news, specifically for Death Knights, we’ve got some changes on the PTR with regard to our new Artifact traits, which bear mentioning.

I spoke about Black Claws in a previous post, and it’s been changed yet again. Instead of causing our Gargoyle/Dark Arbiter to burst Festering Wounds be chance, the effect is now:

This is actually looking like a throughput increase, especially in combination with Infected Claws, tangentially increasing the relative power of the Bursting Sores/Infected Claws combination, on both single target and AOE, especially in combination with the new Lash of Shadows trait, possibly making these talents mandatory for AOE.

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This may push Bursting Sores back above Infected Claws as the go-to talent once you’re able to access these two abilities, and may influence the order in which you raise the newly increased basic traits of Apocalypse as you progress toward these.

For instance, the three best relics at the moment are Plaguebearer, Darkest Crusade and Deadliest Coil, but this change would increase the inherent value of Eternal Agony considerably. We have no solid numbers on these changes or how they may affect our output or rotation as yet, but these changes are looking promising, even though they’re somewhat distant on the horizon, Artifact Power-wise; with only 4 points distributable on Day 1 of 7.2, we won’t be able to reach these combination effects for some time, based on the current artifact power scaling rate… (The cost to get all of the required Traits mentioned here [4th point Eternal Agony, 4th point Darkest Crusade, 4th point Virulent Plague, 4/4 Lash of Shadows and Black Claws, is 285 MILLION)

    News of the Week: Reverse Flash So, the title of this News of the Week really has nothing to do with the DC Universe, but there's a few interesting news pieces to share this week (March 14th, 2017)

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Dedication or Diversity? (Part 2: RNG and Unlimited Progression)

Last time, we talked about the how game designers fight player power:time ratios through Caps and Exponential Curves. Today, we’re going to talk about two of the more hated ways that designers combat this issue: RNG (Short for Random Number Generators, which is gamer slang for anything that’s randomly assigned or obtained in game and can’t be controlled), and Unlimited Progression.

RNG

Randomness can be fun. It’s why people love gambling and slot machines.

Put everything on orange! That is how this works, right?

In games, typically the items that you gain from defeating a powerful enemy or boss are randomly chosen from a list of pre-determined items. Fellow gamers, you all know the drill. However, when the most important aspects of your playtime and your actual ability to be effective are determined by items that can be obtained virtually anywhere at random on a tiny percentage chance… you can all understand how frustrating it might be. Imagine if you were on your way to work one day and you were the 100th employee to walk through the door, and you got a promotion. Now imagine how angry you’d be if you were 99th or 101st? That’s a small taste of the hatred generated by RNG.

Gamers mostly can’t stand RNG, and yet, oftentimes we almost worship it, hoping for that one-in-a-thousand chance to strike, for us to get exactly what we want. We even have something of a religious messiah, RNGesus. (Well, there go my religious readers. Sorry, I blaspheme.)

RNG is a lever used by game designers to skew the apparent availability of certain powerful items, in order to draw players in so that they continue playing the game for this proverbial future reward. It’s very handy because it plays on our inherent belief that eventually something good will happen to us. And every game leverages RNG to some extent. Even Mario Kart.

GIVE ME THAT BLUE SHELL!!!

Currently World of Warcraft has arguably one of the worst implementations of RNG reward that many players have seen in some time: The Legendary system. Random items, available from a wide variety of activities, on a VERY small chance. However, the problem is that these items are randomly selected from a list available to your current class and specialization, and some are tremendously powerful while some are complete duds. To bring us back to our previous analogy: Imagine if you were the 100th person to walk through the door and you automatically either got demoted to the mailroom or a VP promotion based on a coin flip.

The changes in efficacy that these items can provide create a massive gulf between those who were lucky and those who were not. The RNG system is good, on a group basis, with items that drop from a boss that you can return with the same group and kill until everyone eventually has what they want. However, when something so vital to your personal power is tied to something you can’t do anything to affect, this creates problems. Even more so when a less skilled player, is suddenly more powerful than you are, just because they got lucky and you did not.

Like the other systems, RNG does have its place. However, it should not be responsible for wild swings in efficiency due purely to luck or the lack thereof. It utterly disrupts the player power:time ratio by granting gigantic power boosts that can come anytime, anywhere. It is a poor method of control precisely because it is random. It disregards effort for luck, and while the great Kakashi Hatake did say luck is a skill, it doesn’t feel very fun to get left in the dust because someone else got luckier than you did.

Unlimited Progression

Finally, we come to the last and worst offender. Unlimited Progression. With this model, time is power. If you have the most time, you will, no ifs ands or buts, have the most powerful character available. Most games with a system like this are typically very difficult to get into on the ground floor, as there is a ton of work that must be done in order to “catch up” to the highest levels of play.

Thank god real clocks don’t look like this.

Typically the players that have been playing since day one of launch will always be ahead of you, no matter what you do, unless there is some sort of level limit. Sometimes the level limit is tremendously high, and it’s nigh impossible to reach without a serious time investment. Nevertheless, if you don’t have hours upon hours per day to play? You should probably not even think you’ll be able to reach the higher echelons of play.

One bad example of this, and something it seems Blizzard is looking to address with some upcoming changes, is World of Warcraft’s Artifact Power system. After reaching a certain point, instead of remaining on an exponential curve, the artifact power growth system flattens out and the point difference from one level to the next barely increases. Worse, the scaling system that slowly increased the amount of points you gained from varying activities caps out as well. What this means is that there is no longer a growth rate, but a flat rate that you gain power and with no compelling level of compression, leading those with more time to dominate in terms of increasing their power relative to those with less time to play the game.

This was not the only game to have such a problem. One other notable offender was ArcheAge, a game made by Trion Worlds. In that game, you could own and build houses or gardens or orchards, or whatnot, on specific plots of land. You could take over the property another player owned if you were there when their “lease” expired. The times at which this happened were predetermined based on when the current owner had last paid their rent, could be seen by any player who walked by, and could literally happen at any time, day or night. This led to people literally logging onto the game at all hours of the day and night to snipe land from someone else to keep or sell to others at their leisure. But imagine telling your girlfriend that you can’t go to her birthday party because you need to be home to snipe your in-game neighbor’s land so you can put up an orchard next to your own house.

Five minutes, babe, I just need to check my in-game house snatching schedule before we go.

Now, like all of the other methods, Unlimited Progression does have its place. Having something to do in the game whenever you might feel like logging on, and for however long you choose is a great feature of any game. World of Warcraft definitely used this method well in the implementation of the World Quest system, which gives you a wide variety of activities to choose from, with a wide list of possible rewards that are available throughout the day and night. There are some problems with this system as well, but we’re focusing on the positive. However, when it comes to player power:time ratios… this is the worst, because it only caters to one end of your playerbase: Those with a LOT of time on their hands. And yes, with a limitation (i.e. a cap) eventually those players with tons of time will hit that wall and reach the same problems there are with caps: Player boredom, and people leaving the game to do other things.

Conclusions:

None of these, individually, make a great system of managing the player power to time ratio. Some are finicky and grant massive rewards with no time investment, or artificially limit the amount of time you can invest in a game, and others force you into being unable to do what you want to do at any given time, or cause you to play the game in totally unnatural or excessive ways just to gain an advantage.

Typically a combination of these methods is often best. Exponential curves offer a soft curb to playtime. RNG makes you want to keep playing. Caps give you a hard stopping point, and unlimited progression gives you something to do. Blizzard is making strides in these areas, reducing some of the RNG, giving players more sources for the legendary items that have caused so many issues in Legion, changing the artifact power system back to an exponential curve methodology. However, some of the problems with this expansion have arisen from trying to use too much of these levers in the wrong areas, while not using others correctly.

There’s too many buttons! How to balance?!

Now, I’m not a game designer, so I can’t speak to what is right or correct in game design, but as someone who has been on both sides of the player fence, I can say that there are unique social pressures on either side that don’t make them pleasant to be on. Many of the negative social views about gamers stem from these social pressures, and you can see which ones are the culprits often by the behavior of a given gamer. A gamer who is constantly playing is a victim of too much unlimited progression, or too much RNG. One who plays a variety of games may be suffering under caps in his games, or from boredom with an exponential curve.

For you non-gamers who may be reading, we love our games, much like you love your pastimes. And some of these problems can apply to any given pastime, I could write analogies for hours, so I won’t even start. But sit down with your gamers. Have a chat. Figure out what works. Just don’t let them sit feverishly at their computer at 3:36am in the morning, feverishly clicking on that “Build” button. That orchard is not worth it.*

*It’s totally worth it.

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Dedication or Diversity? (Part 1: Caps and Curves

My past couple of posts have been very Death Knight-centric, which is all well and good, because, well, I play a Death Knight as my main class in World of Warcraft. However, this piece, while still very much centered around a specific topic in WoW, is something that affects gamers from all walks and all sorts of different games. That’s because I want to talk about player power derived from time invested. This is going to be a series, friends, so I hope you’ll stick with me.

What this means, for you non-gamers that might be reading: How much should you be able to increase your character’s effectiveness (strength, ability to heal, ability to defend against damage) purely by playing the game for more hours compared to someone else?

Now this is a controversial topic. All sorts of people play games. 9-5 office types, kid gamers on school schedules, college students who go to a couple classes a day, graveyard shifters, the temporarily (or long-term unemployed), bored housewives, bored house-husbands, etc. Some people have a lot of time they can invest in playing games, and some people, well, don’t. The burning question here is, how do you satisfy the people who want to spend their available time playing the game, and have scads of free hours to play, while also allowing people with limited schedules to also enjoy your game?

How Do Game Designers Combat This?

Game designers fight the player power:time ratio in a variety of ways. Let’s look at a few.

Caps

One way games combat this is by having caps. You can only perform certain activities, or gain certain currencies at a specific rate over a specified time period. (Usually a week, but depending on the pace of the game, caps can be daily, or monthly). For instance, in some previous expansions of World of Warcraft, you could obtain a currency called Valor Points for completing some activities within the game. You could only gain these points up to a specific point cap per week, and you spent them to buy pieces of gear from an NPC that were of very good quality. You would get specifically stronger each week as you built up your points and reached the cost of the next piece of gear you wanted.

Theoretically, everyone could reach this cap by playing an hour or two each day, or less depending on the efficacy of your play. However, your ability to increase your power by playing the game more is completely stifled by a system like this. It was possible to reach the designed cap within the first day of each week, if you played the game enough. As a matter of fact, the cap was not something that was designed to take an entire week’s worth of measured play.

Even worse, once you reached the cap (which generally involved raiding, thus locking you out of another activity that increases player power), there was essentially nothing you could do to increase your character’s abilities that week, even if you were just barely on the cusp of being able to afford a second item, you had to wait for the next week in order to obtain the points required. This leads to player boredom. Players that have lots of time, are relegated to filler activities that do nothing to increase player power. This satisfies the players that have limited time, because they don’t get left behind in efficacy by the people that have more time to play, but disenfranchises those with time; they have no reason to continue playing this week.

And if you couldn’t play for a week? You ended up putting yourself behind a curve you could never catch up to. Because you didn’t get your points, you didn’t progress linearly, and you fell behind everyone else irrevocably, because you could never regain those missed points. If the point cap is 4000, and you miss one week out of the month because of a family vacation, everyone else has 16000 points worth of items, and you only have 12000. And unless everyone takes a week off, you are behind forever, at least until everyone has the best possible gear available. The social pressure of meeting a quota like this becomes astounding if you play with a group focused on improving week-to-week. It’s like being on a sports team and not showing up to practice for a week.

None of these things make caps a Bad Thing™, necessarily. Caps allow players to progress at specific rates. They create methodological and measured forms of gameplay wherein you know exactly the schedule on which you might get specific things that you want. And this is positive in its own right. The other thing that caps do, is allow you to put games down once you’ve reached a specific goal for the week, and do other things, like play other games, or get out of the house without that nagging feeling you aren’t doing something you COULD be doing to get better at your game. (This may be viewed as unhealthy, but it’s behavior that’s observed in workaholics as well).

Exponential curves

In the middle ground, you have Exponential Curves. This rewards people who have lots of time, with the ability to get measurably stronger than their time-restricted counterparts. One example of this is the initial implementation of the artifact power system in WoW. At first, each point cost multiple times what the previous point cost, leading to a compression of power not awfully far ahead of those people with limited time. It was as if, just ahead of the average player’s ability to gain points, there was a zone of sticky mouse traps that hindered you from getting too far ahead. There was also a scaling system that increased the amount of points you gained from every activity every few days, pushing that zone a little further out. You could grind infinitely if you wanted, but eventually you would reach a plateau where the amount of points you could obtain from each individual activity were essentially a drop in the bucket, so you would be somewhat obligated to wait for the scaling system to increase, to make the next point goal more reasonable.

With a system like this people have choice. You could grind out that next point, pushing against the low point gain to get to the next point, but you would always reach that plateau where infinite time still isn’t enough to gain enough points to get to that next level. (Getting 250 points per activity when you need 300,000 would take a long time, right?) you also reach a point where some people just don’t want to do that much work for a power increase. BUT, you also have the ability to set your own goals. “Do I want to push towards this specific increase in power? How good is it? Is it worth that time I’ll need to invest”

However, this system has its own flaws. It removes the player boredom of not having caps, and replaces it with player malaise. Players that feel like they want to be as strong as they can be, have no absolute limitation on where they should stop playing the game. Instead, the players with infinite time continue to play and push the limitations of the sticky plateau by banging their heads against the wall.

This is partly a community-created problem: People want the strongest characters and players on their teams. Therefore, if you are not the strongest or the best, you are, by definition, bad. This feeling of obligation to constantly increasing your power as far as you can leads very quickly to player burnout, as players repeat the same activities for hours on end, farming points to try and break through that plateau. And worse, you bring in one of the problems of caps: you reach a point where even if you played 168 hours for the whole week, you could NEVER get enough points for that next increase, forcing you to essentially put the game down because it’s spiting you.

Players want to play the games they love; they don’t want to be artificially induced into stopping or playing other games. But that feeling of obligation isn’t fun either.

With the next post in this series, I’ll be looking at some of the systems in WoW and other games that are positive and negative examples of addressing player power:time ratio, as well as discussing a couple of other ways that game designers go about attacking this problem: RNG and Unlimited Progression.