Terminally Online
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMORPG column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
World of Warcraft did a pretty brave thing recently, and decided to take an axe to its combat addons. And while I still think there’s plenty that needs to be done (I am so sorry, healers, that dispels are now borderline impossible for you) I can mostly see that it did need to happen.
My own specialisation, the outlaw rogue, had an entire slice of its rotation replaced by an addon that told me when to hit a button—and as I’ve tinkered around with Midnight, I’ve found that I’m mostly in the clear. Every specialisation in the game has been trimmed down to meet similar goals—to a blurry degree of success.
Even my beloved outlaw is struggling to pump numbers in raids, but given I’m not all that into hardcore endgame content, I’ve been sitting pretty. Then I tried to level up some alts, and ah. Oh no.
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For some context: The other major MMO I play is Final Fantasy 14, and in that game, the two minute meta is king. This means that (more or less) every two minutes, every single job has a burst window. You hit your cooldowns, you play your keyboard like it’s a piano for ten to twenty seconds, and you go back to hitting your lazy river rotation until it’s go-time again.
Even the exceptions aren’t really exceptions. For example, my job of choice, ninja, has two burst windows—one with Trick Attack, and one with Trick Attack and Mug. But one’s bigger than the other, and when does that bigger burst window roll around? You guessed it, every two minutes.
This has some limited upsides: It’s pretty satisfying to hit your burst buttons and go nuclear on someone, especially alongside all of your party members, and it can be an interesting puzzle to try and slot this mandatory do-things window into your average boss fight.
That’s about where the benefits end, though, because the downsides are numerous—to help balance raid content, most jobs are quiet outside of that brief window of exploding things to death. My ninja basically rolls through his three-part combo and occasionally spends a resource, with precious little else to do.
This means that when you aren’t in FF14’s silo’d, high-spectacle boss fights, things are all over the shop. It also means that anything that doesn’t start with you hitting a nasty big bad with all your cooldowns unlocked risks the dreaded drift: The horrible, icky sensation of all your big damage cooldowns getting out of sync with each other.
It just makes it harder to design anything that’s not a static boss fight—and for a genre like the MMO, that’s generally a bad way to go, because said boss fights are ultimately a humble sliver of your playtime. FF14’s yawed so heavily towards that direction, however, it’s become an issue in need of actual addressing—eating up some non-two minute jobs, like my beloved paladin, along the way like a horrid design katamari.
That’s because of these cooldowns often being force multipliers for the entire group. If your job doesn’t deal burst damage in that window, while everyone else’s big buffs are rolling, then you’ll lag behind to the sheer power of numbers—a flat, sad, sub-par damage profile with no spikes.
It places all of your designers firmly between a rock and a hard place—let certain players struggle, or roll them into the homogenization orb?”
One that can’t be too highly buffed, lest it spoil the balance of more casual content—the reason a non-bursty class or job underperforms in raids is because everyone’s coordinated on that two-minute feeding frenzy, so if you buff them too hard, they get too strong elsewhere where players aren’t doing that. It places all of your designers firmly between a rock and a hard place—let certain players struggle, or roll them into the homogenization orb?
Back to WoW: When I logged out of my outlaw rogue to do some quests on my retribution paladin and my marksmanship hunter, I nearly flinched. Both of these classes (my hunter more than my paladin) had big, bursty windows and hit like a wet noodle outside of them. Ah, cripe.
This is especially a problem for World of Warcraft, mind, because there’s a bigger emphasis on world content. You’re doing side quests, daily rep grinds, rare hunting, world quests, and let’s not forget about the entirely new system, Prey—there’s more solo instanced stuff to do as well, like delves. Basically, you’re out in the world a lot more, and hitting enemies a lot more to boot.
And when you’re on your own, these big explosive windows followed by long, treacle-sticky seconds of quiet are an utter nightmare—I’m flip-flopping between either nuking enemies immediately and disintegrating them into a pile of numbers, or spending long stretches between my haymakers whapping them with a pool noodle.
There is a silver lining, mind. Flattening the damage profiles of the game’s specialisations a bit more shouldn’t be impossible, and Blizzard—for good or for ill—is a far more reactive studio than Square Enix, who has only just recently caught onto the idea that you can’t leave midcore players in the lurch.
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