Mana is Life

It is a problem that is slowly building in WoW PVP and if it doesn’t come to a head in Season 3, it certainly will in Season 4 unless Blizzard does something to address it. The simple fact is, seven of the nine classes in WoW have a mana bar and six of those seven (the Warlock being the exception) depend on their mana bar more than their health bar.

Just think about it like this for a minute. You are a priest, paladin, mage, or a non-enhance shaman. Once you are at zero mana with no more mana restoring CDs, what can you do assuming the other team doesn't let you drink? The answer is, basically, nothing. Which is a lot like being dead really. So this means every one of those classes really has two health bars. One is their hit points and the other is their mana. Reduce either to zero and they are out of the fight. But look at the differences:

1. Hit point pools are larger than mana pools yet mana drains deal comparable "damage" (less, but still comparable).


2. Hit points can be healed, mana cannot (beyond a few CD limited and counterable abilities).


3. You must spend mana to do anything useful, so even when you aren't being focused, one of your health pools is always being depleted.


4. There is no damage reduction or absorption abilities that stop mana drains: PW:S, Shadow Ward, PS, all do nothing.

So really, if you've got mana drains on your team, you'd be silly not to focus on using those abilities to "kill" the classes weak to them when mana drains have such strong advantages despite not even being scaled by damage gear. Note that I am referring to all methods of forcefully removing mana from players: Viper Sting, Drain Mana, Mana Burn, Mana Tap, Feedback, and any others I may have missed. Channeled, DOT, hard cast, instant cast...doesn't matter to me; the term "mana drain" encompasses all such effects.

The bottom line is mana drains as a mechanic are far too strong. They shouldn't be removed because they are a very valid counter-tactic. But right now they are an overpowering strategy that is effective so quickly, there just isn't a reason to try to burn down a non-warlock caster when nearly every ability on every healing class protecting your target is designed to work against damage and not mana drains. Use mana drains and their team might as well not even have healers.

But I think a very reasonable fix is already available and just waiting to be implemented. Resilience could easily be made to affect mana drains of all flavors. As a bonus, using resilience as a counter will have zero effect on PVE encounters requiring anti-mana tactics. Now exactly how much effect resilience should have is a good question, but I believe the full 2% per 39.4 rating is the correct amount. Even when nuking mana only 75% as fast, mana drains will still be dangerous. But that extra time will hopefully keep them from become the sole strategy behind every top-level arena team.

Ultimately, mana drains are crowd controls of the permanent variety and without any diminishing returns. Much like Wizards of the Coast did with Magic: The Gathering when it came to Land Destruction, mana drains need to move away from a core strategy and become more of a spot application tactic. Land Destruction wasn’t fun to play against in MtG and mana drains aren’t fun to play against in WoW.

Rock, Paper, Scissors: Part 1

This is the concept that kills PVP balance in World of Warcraft. Nothing the developers do to actually balance the game will make players happy because it will violate the RPS image players have in their minds. On the other hand, if the developers do try and obey a RPS-oriented design, PVP fails to be balanced and the players who would otherwise be happy about the RPS design are unhappy because the game isn’t balanced. The only solution, the only way for WoW to move forward in terms of balancing PVP, is to official abandon RPS completely (not that they were following it in the first place). A statement something like this, to both their players and developers would work:

In no way, shape, or form is a Rock/Paper/Scissors model used to balance PVP. No class is a “Rock”, none are “Paper” and there aren’t any “Scissors.” You don’t have a counter class. If any class is an auto-lose for you one of the following has happened: 1) you were out geared, 2) you were out played, 3) we messed up game balance.

But why won’t RPS work to balance PVP? As a prelude to discussion, consider that WoW is made up of a collection of PVP sub-games: Battleground PVP, World PVP and Arena PVP. All three must be balanced simultaneously or players will feel the game is unbalanced. No matter how awesome you are in the battlegrounds, and how key you are in arenas, if players three levels under you in green gear own your face in world PVP every time, you are going to feel something is wrong. That is because people expect good performance in one area of PVP to roughly translate to good performance elsewhere. Sure there is a learning curve, but each area shouldn’t be a totally different game with different rules.

So what is a Rock/Paper/Scissors design? Nearly everyone thinks that this means each class is one of the three “types” and can handily defeat one other type, and be easily crushed by the third type. The exact degrees of how much advantage each type should have over the others varies as much as there are people who subscribe to the concept. So for simplicity, let’s consider the extreme: auto-wins and auto-losses.

Now let’s look at World PVP. WoW has stealth on two classes: Rogues and Druids. As a result, their counter classes must be able to find them despite this. That leaves just Hunters (and they barely have the tools to do this in World PVP). So if Rogues and Druids are Scissors, Hunters must be Rocks, and that means everyone else is Paper. I don’t think Hunters will be happy with that setup. In fact, to balance World PVP at all using RPS at least one more class needs stealth and two more need very strong anti-stealth (and the Hunter probably could use some strengthening here). And let’s not even touch on Nightelves, which are a race that grants a limited form of stealth to multiple classes but for only one side! A Nightelf Hunter would end up being a Rock with Scissors’s ability to hide from Paper.

If you think auto-win/lose is the problem, consider if it was just a 2:1 advantage. That is, Hunters would beat a Rogue or Druid twice for every loss. Maybe that sounds okay, but remember that the other six classes (seven in the expansion) will beat Hunters twice for every loss too. If you try and just pick some classes to be Rocks, Rogues and Druids simply hide from them in World PVP or only attack when they can make up for the 2:1 advantage.

And the problem doesn’t end with World PVP. Arenas don’t work with a RPS model either. I’ll skip 2v2 and 3v3 as Blizzard feels those are the least “balanced” already and we’ll go straight for 5v5. There will always be a class that is perceived as dominate in such a competition. Whatever class that is will appear a larger percentage of the time compared to other classes. If that class is Rock, teams with a lot of Paper will beat them. But then Paper gets the reputation for being overly strong which swings things to Scissors. Some teams will try and be balanced, but they’ll be one short. That means for example, RRPPS will lose to PPPSS. And things will just keep changing. The game stops being about PVP and becomes about what team you just happened to bring to the fight. All arena matches are just like the card game War, where both sides reveal their teams and you instantly know who wins.

It is only when skill is why you beat your opponents, not the innate abilities of your classes, that PVP can be balanced. Name any two classes with any spec you want and both should have reasonable shots at defeating each other when they have the proper gear and skilled and experienced players behind them. A lot of people feel this is an impossible goal, and that is why they don’t balance games. As long as you believe it cannot be done, you can’t do it. As long as Blizzard believes Rock/Paper/Scissors is the way to balance WoW, they won’t be able to do it.