SubscribeCosting Abilities and Motivating Players to Advance
August 20, 2008 1:03 pm
Blizzard’s been taking advantage of the Wrath of the Lich King beta to make major changes to their core RPG. This is a nice situation for them — they get to iterate, they get tons of player feedback, people are actively playing (unlike most games’ test servers), and they don’t destabilize their live service.
One of the latest changes is a change to the way that mana costs are calculated. They’re switching from the normal fixed costs for particular spells (Generic Fire Nuke (Rank 1) costs 17 mana and by god, it always costs 17 mana) to scaling percentage costs (Generic Fire Nuke (any rank) costs 10% of base, unmodified mana no matter what).
A few players are excited, but the majority are unhappy about this because it does away with “downranking” — casting a lower-level version of the same spell because it costs less mana and is more efficient for your purpose. Healers do this quite a bit. If I know that my target only needs 1k HP healed, why should I spend a ton of mana to cast my max-rank heal that heals for 3k, when I could cast a lower-ranked version that heals for 1k and costs much less mana? Smart healers usually play with a couple of different ranks of several of their spells on their cast bars. Hey, it’s strategy!
Usability-wise, in World of Warcraft, where your spellbook displays all the old ranks, it’s not hard to sit there and do the mana-per-HP healed calculation yourself, or you can use a mod like DrDamage to do it for you. (People downranked in Shadowbane too, but they had to rely on oral tradition to get the slash command to access those “obsolete” spell ranks.)
Loss of the strategy of downranking aside, it’s a good change for the designers, in terms of using their time efficiently.
When I’m costing a spell the traditional way, I’ll use a spreadsheet that says something like “okay, this is a level 10 spell, and at level 10, you should have about this much mana and this much mana regen, and I want you to be able to cast this spell this many times before you run out of mana.” I’ll have to do that for every rank of the spell, taking into account how much mana and regen I think the character should have at that level. And later on, I may have to revisit those numbers once I mine the character data to confirm those expected mana values — if that data is available to me.
Generally speaking, I want that number-of-times-cast value to remain consistent as the character gains spell ranks, because it fits the player’s expectations — a lowbie spellcaster knows that she can kill a certain number of mobs with Generic Fire Nuke before she has to rest, and every time she gets a new rank of Generic Fire Nuke, that should remain the same as before. In other words, her downtime shouldn’t fluctuate dramatically as she advances, because downtime is a defining class characteristic.
The percentage cost model makes my life a lot easier. I don’t have to figure how much mana I think you should have at that level, and I don’t have to check the character data to confirm. I just say that I want you to be able to cast Generic Fire Nuke about 10 times before you run out of mana, so I say it costs 10% of your mana. DONE. (Okay, it’s not quite that simple because I need to account for mana regen, but I’m still DONE in a lot less time.)
Now, this breaks down a bit if new spell ranks aren’t granted quickly enough. Lowbie Spellcaster will find that she has to rest more often, killing the same number of mobs, because Generic Fire Nuke does less damage relative to the content she’s doing, so she has to cast it more times, but she can’t cast it more times because it still costs the same percentage of her mana. Theoretically, with traditional fixed costs, if her mana pool was scaling at the same rate as her other stats, she’d be able to cast it more often before resting to make up for doing less relative damage. (However, this means that her mana pool needed to scale properly … but math is hard and it doesn’t always work out that way.) And she still feels slightly less powerful with every level that passes without a new rank, because she has to cast more often.
The thing is, stairstepping is required to make advancement feel meaningful. I wouldn’t do percentage damage to make up for that problem. Damage is usually figured as a percentage of the intended target level’s HP, same as the traditional way of doing mana costs. The Generic Fire Nuke I intend for Lowbie Spellcaster to use at level 10, versus level 10 opponents, is probably supposed to do N% of the average level 10 mob’s health. If Lowbie Spellcaster use that rank of Generic Fire Nuke against level 12 opponents, it’ll do less relative damage. But this is the way it should be. It motivates Lowbie Spellcaster to get off her ass and level to earn the next rank, same as Lowbie Fighter should be motivated to level to use a new sword. When they get their respective rewards, they feel like they’ve accomplished something.
Going back to WoW’s situation: the loss of downranking, to be fair, might increase workload because the designers may want to build and maintain abilities that perform the same purpose (like small, low-cost heals for that poor shaman in the thread I linked). But in the long run, percentage mana costing makes their lives easier. If I were balancing an RPG right now, I’d be inclined to make the same decision.
Psychochild wrote:
Hmm, not sure I agree. Usually, things that give more options are good.
Really, the only people affected here are healers. Usually the DPS/mana cost of spells improved as you went up levels. Buffs were usually applied during “off times’, so the mana cost meant little. Melee abilities used rage or energy, which had fixed costs. So, this change is really only making the job of healers a bit harder.
As for designing a new game, I think the whole “rank N” thing is silly. I guess it appeals to the Achiever types more than me. But, that’s one thing I tried to avoid even while adding new abilities to M59, the “this is just like spell X, only bigger!” situation.
Posted on 20-Aug-08 at 4:46 pm | Permalink
L wrote:
“Really, the only people affected here are healers.”
Actually a ton of classes are affected when it comes to pvp
Posted on 21-Aug-08 at 9:42 am | Permalink
Gooney wrote:
What I think your missing here is the impact this decision will make on peoples gear.
Casters generally try (among other things) to maximize their mana pool, this is done (in WoW) by acquiring gear with higher stats on it, or by increasing stats with enchants.
A percentage based mana cost system will mean that as your mana pool grows due to increasing stats, your spells will cost more to cast.
Such a change in WoW will be very difficult for them to implement, not impossible but I think they may generate a good deal of ill will.
Having said that though, if it leads to better balance and a better over all gaming experience it may be worth it. It would be a hard sell from a company who isn’t all that into “selling” changes at all.
-Gooney
Posted on 22-Aug-08 at 5:27 am | Permalink
Sulka wrote:
“Casters generally try (among other things) to maximize their mana pool, this is done (in WoW) by acquiring gear with higher stats on it, or by increasing stats with enchants.”
You can still make this happen with the scaling costs. The system just needs to fix the point the scaling cost is relative to and then allow you to boost past the 100%. This way a caster with 100 mana and 20 point boost from an item would be able to cast a 10% mana spell 12 times, instead of 10.
One form of scaling that’s not mentioned above is that even with the scaling costs, a scaling system can change the scale in a multitude of way. Say, what if the cost of spells started at 10% but dropped to 2% by the time you’ve reached the level cap? Individual spells would still be weak, but you would be able to cast 5 times as many of them.
Of course you can both increase the spell effect as well as scale the cost. Not sure if this would be easier to manage, though.
Posted on 22-Aug-08 at 5:58 am | Permalink
Sara wrote:
The WoW change explicitly says that it’s percentage base mana cost, so you still benefit from gear.
“Actually a ton of classes are affected when it comes to pvp :)”
Yeah, I was simplifying for the readers who don’t play WoW.
I know it’ll make it harder to flush out stealthers with AOEs, and I would assume that there are CC abilities that due to PvP duration scaling, you’d rather use a downranked version because it’ll have the same effect. What else is affected?
Posted on 22-Aug-08 at 1:07 pm | Permalink
Zubon wrote:
See CoX, WAR, The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™, and other games that have no downranking because they have no Heal I, Heal II, … Heal XIV. They just have Heal, which levels up with you. For dedicated healer classes, they have Small Heal, Medium Heal, and Big Heal, which all level up with you.
As a player, I do not want to re-buy all my skills every five levels, complete with the fun of having lousy levels where my main skills are just about to level (and therefore are as relatively bad as possible). You covered the developer side. Sounds like a perfect match with a solution already in use elsewhere.
Posted on 23-Aug-08 at 1:33 pm | Permalink
Silvanis wrote:
This also has the side effect that your spells are now costing more per level (as your base mana pool increases) without increasing in effectiveness until you buy the next rank. Which argues even more against buying the same spell in a higher rank. At the very least, scale the damage some with level increases. You can still make the next rank more powerful, but now you’re not asking the players to believe their spells should cost more for no benefit.
Posted on 23-Aug-08 at 5:02 pm | Permalink
Andrew Crystall wrote:
“What else is affected?”
Mana costs! For example, the main hunter abilities are getting on average a 20% increase in their mana cost because Blizzard are only using whole percentages and Hunter base mana is the highest of any mana-using class.
Posted on 25-Aug-08 at 11:24 am | Permalink
Sara Jensen Schubert wrote:
“Mana costs!”
No shit! I was asking specifically about other PvP implications.
Posted on 05-Sep-08 at 11:41 pm | Permalink
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