Band'or shorel'aran…

Anathema or Benediction? Class variety in WoW.

August 28, 2009 at 1:40 pm (Behind the character, Farfalla, General ramblings, Lore) (Alliance, Azeroth, bosses, Burning Crusade, Cataclysm, design philosophy, dorkiness, Eastern Kingdoms, expansion, Farfalla, Horde, Illidan, Lore, musings, priests, raiding, rewards, Sin'dorei, Sunwell, Wrath of the Lich King)

Yesterday’s post seems kind of well-timed now because last night I finally accomplished something that I’d wanted to do ever since I picked up the game. My server finally had its instance servers fixed, meaning you can run them now, and so last night I headed into the Molten Core, WoW’s original raid instance, with a couple of guildies to see what we could take down. We cleared the place pretty quickly, and to my utter delight, I picked up a couple of pieces of Tier 1 and the Eye of Divinity from Majordomo’s Cache.

The Eye of Divinity is a priest-only trinket that, when you equip it, allows you to see NPCs you couldn’t see otherwise (including Ricole Nichie, ex-Socialite, standing next to Haris Pilton in the World’s End Tavern in Shattrath.) However what I was most interested in was heading off to the Eastern Plaguelands so I could see Eris Havenfire, who offers you a quest.

The lore behind this quest is utterly amazing. Basically, Eris Havenfire was a priestess who attempted to save residents fleeing the town of Stratholme while Arthas Menethil destroyed it after being taunted by Malganis. She failed when she was overwhelmed by the corpses of the villagers she was trying to save, as they were reanimated as the Scourge. Now you have to seek redemption for her, by accomplishing what she failed at.

You equip the trinket and accept the quest The Balance of Light and Shadow.

You must do what I could not: Save the peasants that were cut down while fleeing from Stratholme.

They will walk towards the light, you must ensure their survival. Should too many fall, our cursed existence shall continue – you will have failed.

Every ability, prayer, and spell that you have learned will be tested. May the Light protect you, Farfalla.

You have to do this on your own – if anybody else helps in anyway, a demon spawns that hits for about 8k and cannot be killed, which obviously promptly wipes the party.

So you do the quest (and can I just say, I cannot imagine how hard this would have been at 60? It was still a test at 80). Villagers spawn, some of which have diseases on them, and they’re being attacked by spectral archers (who can’t be killed) and skeletal warriors (who can.) They walk from the mouth of a cave towards a pool of light about fifty yards away, and you have to save 50 of them before 15 are slain. You cure the disease on the diseased ones, Renew them all, Holy Nova the skeletons, and then dash back to the start where more waves are spawning (I found out the hard way that if you don’t, if you stay with them to the end, you lose too many of the new wave.) I failed it once (probably because I was busy taking screenshots) at which Eris Havenfire despawned and didn’t come back for 20 minutes (and I was stuck in combat, which meant no mana potion for the next try.) When she respawned, however, I knew what I was doing, and I completed the quest.

What do you get as a reward? A Splinter of Nordassil, Nordrassil being the World Tree. When combined with the Eye of Divinity and the Eye of Shadow (which I already had, it drops off high-level demons and Doom Lord Kazzak), they get combined into Anathema/Benediction.

Anathema/Benediction is the iconic priest weapon, so you can imagine I was absolutely psyched to get it. Benedicton is the holy side of the staff, and looks like this:

Whereas Anathema is the dark side, and looks like this:

Obviously, the two sides reflect the two sides of a priest’s powers: shadow magic and holy magic. You switch between the two by clicking the staff.

Now, the reason I think this is interesting (other than being a gigantic lore dork and feeling very strongly about my priest, having played her for two and a half years) is because yesterday I wrote about class quests, of which this is the ultimate, in my opinion. These quests are closely tied to the class design and philosophy of WoW.

Things like the Anathema/Benediction questline point to Blizzard’s original intention when designing classes. They all had their niche, mostly being drawn from other fantasy genres like Dungeons and Dragons. Warriors were tanks, priests were iconic healers, rogues epitomised skill with weapons, warlocks were demonic summoners, mages were masters of the arcane, shaman were masters of the elements, paladins were attuned to the Light, druids were at one with nature, hunters lived in balance with the land. Like I said yesterday, all these classes had special questlines and lore behind them. Warlocks spend levels 1-60 learning how to summon different kinds of demons, increasing in power all the time, until at level 60 they’re able to take part in a long, difficult questline to summon a demonic steed to ride. Similarly, paladins go on a journey that teaches them how to use the Light to help others – a questline that involves helping a wounded soldier, at the end of which they’re worthy of using the Light to resurrect the fallen; a questline that has you defend a woman whose husband was sent away by war and who is now defending their farm from invaders, at the end of which you learn to sense undead. Finally, you master the light enough to call a Charger from it, which is also obtained via a long and time-consuming, difficult questline. Even better, with the introduction of Horde paladins, Blood Knights, Blizzard were careful to differentiate the lore between the Blood Knights and the Silver Hand – members of the Silver Hand worship the Light, while the Blood Knights subjugate it. The paladins of the Silver Hand have a questline which gives them a weapon – they have to collect a purified Kor gem, along with some lumber and refined ore. The Blood Knights, on the other hand, have to collect a corrupted Kor gem, the blood of the wrathful, and the insignia from a dead paladin. There’s a real difference between the two factions.

The thing is that questlines like this are now, for the most part optional. You learn Redemption as a paladin without doing the quest; the same with Sense Undead. The same again with the mounts for both warlocks and paladins. Similarly, druids no longer have to do a long questline to learn Cure Poison. Priests used to take part in two quests to learn their racial abilities – these have now been removed. These racials were great, tiny little bits of lore – blood elves had Touch of Weakness, a magical debuff which weakened the melee power of their enemies, and Consume Magic, which consumed a magic buff on the priest to return mana, both of which fit perfectly with their dependency on magic. Night elves had Starshards, calling down the stars of Elune, their goddess, to harm their enemies, and Elune’s Grace, which temporarily reduced their chance to be hit by attacks, perfectly in line with the night elf ability to stealth and their increased dodge chance. Forsaken had Touch of Weakness and Devouring Plague, a disease DoT – perfect lore-wise since the Forsaken were mostly killed by the plague themselves. And so on.

With Wrath of the Lich King, these racials were removed. Instead, all priests were given a nerfed version of Desperate Prayer (the Dwarf/Human racial which gave an instant heal) as a talent in the Holy Tree, and Symbol of Hope (the draenai racial which restored mana over time), renamed to Hymn of Hope and made a level 80 channelled ability, restoring 3% of mana over time for up to 3 nearby friendly low mana party or raid members. The justification for this was that the racials were too difficult to balance.

It was true that there were certain racials which were more useful and powerful than others. Dwarves originally had their racials as Desperate Prayer and Fear Ward, a ten minute buff with no cooldown which would consume one fear effect. Certain fights (Nightbane in Karazhan, Archimonde in Mount Hyjal) were immeasurably easier with this buff, which eventually led to Blizzard reworking the spell, giving it to all priests as a 3 minute buff with a 3 minute cooldown. Certainly Chastise (the racial they replaced Fear Ward with, and also available to Draenai, a 2 second root) was much more useful in PvP than Consume Magic, which could actually be dangerous in both PvP and PvE because you had no control over what buff it dispelled – if it dispelled Power Word: Fortitude, you’d have to rebuff it anyway, wasting two global cooldowns and most of the mana you’d got back. It’s also true that Blizzard looked at their game at the end of the Burning Crusade and decided that it was too class-based, and that instead you should be able to ‘bring the player, not the class’.

As such, at the same time they removed priest racials, Blizzard decimated the class-specific abilities they had created. Totems became raid-wide rather than party-wide, so that you didn’t specifically need an enhancement shaman for the melee party but could have a restoration or elemental shaman drop Windfury totem instead. Shadow priests lost their niche (restoring mana to their party as a percentage of their damage done), as a new effect, Replenishment, was added to the game, restoring a percentage of mana on up to 5 targets every five seconds. This effect could be procced by survival hunters, shadow priests, retribution paladins and now destruction warlocks, too. Salvation, a blessing that paladins could buff on the raid that reduced threat, and which was an absolute necessity for DPS players, as well as the ability to manage threat, was removed, as tank threat generation was far increased. Certain fights were also changed – the main one being Illidan, who had his Shear effect removed. Shear did a massive amount of damage to the tank and had to be Shield Blocked, which meant only Paladins and Warriors could tank him – Druids, originally, were out of luck. To make up for their loss of niche utility, which had historically been compensated by the unique buffs they brought, hybrid classes had their DPS increased. And, most importantly of all, certain buffs were made identical, so that only one of them could be on the target at a time. Improved Divine Spirit was identical to Totem of Wrath, so the one would override the other, just as Improved Blessing of Wisdom is overwritten by Improved Mana Spring Totem.

You can sort of see why Blizzard would do this. The amount of class stacking in Sunwell was, to be fair, a bit insane. Shamans were wanted for their Bloodlust, and you’d bring three at least, for their amazing ability to heal the high amounts of raid damage going around. Similarly, holy priests were in a good place, because they could both tank and raid heal, whereas paladins were more limited in their abilities (although they were still excellent tank healers, much better than priests; they just couldn’t do both.) Two or three shadow priests were ideal, despite their low DPS, to bring the mana restore effect. There was no real place for mages, because warlocks synergised much better with shadow priests and their shadow damage debuff placed on the boss. Specs like ret paladins were only really useful on niche fights like Brutallus, because their Judgment of Light did so much healing on the melee; their DPS wasn’t good enough to justify bringing more than one, and then only if you had enough rogues to make up for their loss. Rogues! Rogues did insane damage whereas arms and fury warriors lagged behind, as did cat druids and moonkin. All this meant that raids were bringing classes rather than players, and those who were playing an underpowered class were being passed over, which was not a state Blizzard wanted the game to be in.

So they homogenized a lot of stuff. There are just two problems with that, from my point of view.

Firstly, the amount of class stacking being done by guilds like mine (which was 5% off being 2/6 in Sunwell when it disbanded in July 2008) was not, repeat not, that insane, when you take into account that we were a raiding guild. Sure, Nihilum were bringing 10 warlocks, 5 shamans, 3 priests, two warrior tanks and the rest rogues to their raids, so that they could get world firsts, but we weren’t because we weren’t interested in that. For a semi-serious raiding guild, we went with what we had. We never had a shadow priest in our raids until Sunwell, and we only had one then, because we just couldn’t recruit one. Similarly, we used a druid to tank Illidan before his Shear ability was removed, because we didn’t have a warrior available that night. I promise you, if you were skilled enough, there was nothing that the lack of one class or the other prevented you from doing. Of course, we weren’t saying ‘Retri paladins! Come raid with us, we’ll bring you all!’ We were a raiding guild and we had a good class balance in most of our raids. But we weren’t incapable of working with unusual specs if that was what we had, and when Ghostcrawler said that tanking Illidan with a bear was impossible, we proved him wrong. So when you see it being stated that class balance was out of control in the Burning Crusade, I promise you that it’s hyperbole.

And secondly, what about the lore? What about all the things that distinguish your class, your race, from all the others? Maybe it’s because I identify so strongly with Farfalla, but I play my priest as a Blood Elf because I love the lore behind her and what her skills stand for. I don’t want to see her turn into the same as all the other races; I don’t want to see her abilities turned into the same as what every shaman, paladin and druid can do. I don’t want her to be any more powerful than other healing classes – I used to want priests to be the best healers, but I’ve lost that opinion – but I do want her to be distinct from all the others. Blizzard removed a lot of the class quests because they saw them as not consistent with the current content – they don’t want people to have to work too hard in the old world, so that they’re there for too long and don’t get to see enough of their latest work. Their latest expansion is what they want people to be in, after all. But I don’t agree with the idea that these quests are too difficult. They are time-consuming quests, but they’re not impossible – I appreciate that there are less new players than there used to be, so the group parts can be tricky, but that’s beside the point. People roll alts, and if on those alts they had to do the quests, groups would be easy enough to find.

There were a few buffs that remained specific to class – Power Word: Fortitude, Blessing of Kings, Gift of the Wild – but Blizzard announced yesterday that they’re making buffs that are equal to those available via leatherworking and inscription. The justification is supposedly that it’s hard to make sure you have all those buffs available in a 10 man. Besides the fact that this misses the point – if you can’t guarantee a druid, how can you guarantee a leatherworker? – that’s simply not the case. How many ten man guilds consistently push new content which is made difficult without these buffs without one single priest, one single paladin or one single druid? I’m willing to bet not many, especially since paladins and druids can fulfil three roles in a raid.

I’ll play my priest even if they make her a carbon copy of every other character out there, because I love her and she’s the only character I’ve ever been able to log onto and feel excited about. But that doesn’t mean I like what Blizzard is doing. Bottom line for me is that MMO’s need some diversity to work – players need to feel like their character is special. Luckily, it looks like Blizzard may have recognised this, with the introduction of the Path of the Titans feature in Cataclysm – it seems they want players to be able to progress down the path they feel suits their character best. Could this be a compromise between the high class diversity of vanilla WoW and the homogeneity of Wrath of the Lich King? We’ll just have to wait and see.

~Farf

Permalink Leave a Comment