August » 2006 » Untitled

ancient rpg history 101

Ok, so… yesterday, I was looking for information on suggested secondary classes for my lowbie Assassin char in Guild Wars, when I stumbled across a preview of Nightfall at Softpedia.com.

I read some of it, hoping that it might be informative or at least entertaining. Nope. What it DID manage to do is get me all sorts of riled up about the current state of idiots in this country in a way that I’ve not felt in a few months at least

To quote the preview:

Paragons would be more suitable named paladins, but I guess that monicker is already taken by a World of We-know-what class. Paragons hold heavier armor, similar to a Rangerï¿½s, with extra protection from elemental and either fire or lightning attacks.

Questionable grammar aside, What kind of idiot even vaguely qualified to post reviews on fantasy games thinks that WoW is in any way has claim to the word ‘paladin’?

According to the dictionary:

pal‧a‧din /ˈpï¿½lədɪn/ [pal-uh-din] ï¿½ noun

any one of the 12 legendary peers or knightly champions in attendance on Charlemagne.

any knightly or heroic champion.

any determined advocate or defender of a noble cause.

[Origin: 1585ï¿½95; < F < It paladino < LL palātīnus imperial functionary, n. use of adj.; see palatine]

That’s right. The word is over 400 years old. In the more modern sense of a knight with healing spells, it has seen use in fantasy gaming for 30+ years. Probably before the author of this preview was even born.

I bet he spells rogue “rouge” and thinks Warhammer Online is a WoW rip-off too.

Two weeks ago, OGX had a very good article on this particular one. The Warhammer thing, not the makeup.

Back in april, Penny Arcade also commented on this misconception apparently prevalent in today’s world of newbish children who wouldn’t know a d4 if they stepped on one in the dark.

From Tycho’s blog post that day:

On forums of wanton reputation, I sometimes hear that Games Workshop – Games Workshop – has stolen this or that from Blizzard, and that odious charge will only grow in volume and intensity as screens and news of Warhammer Online achieve wider circulation. There is no small amount of danger involved in presenting this notion: as proof, I offer Exhibit A (ed: that day’s comic strip).

A charitable person might call the many points of continuity “homage.” These days, I think Blizzard genuinely owns their contexts to a much greater extent – there are what I would call “significant” story innovations in Warcraft 3, Brood War, and World of Warcraft that assert their homegrown narrative power. As Games Workshop has begun to license its properties in a more measured, “skilful” way, it’ll be interesting to see how well they actually do against the worlds they inspired.

Yeah… I’ve been waiting for a good Warhammer game for 10 years now. Mythic had better deliver with this one

But back to the subject of traditional FRPG character classes and their linguistic/historical origins. Here are a few other words that are ‘unique’ enough that the average wet-nosed kid might not have encountered them before.

Assassin

I’ll start with one of the easier and more interesting ones. I don’t really suspect that anybody seriously doubts this one, but so long as I’m in full rant, I may as well…

Assassin derives from the Hashishin, an old (like 11th century old) secret society who had members who engaged in the odd political murder or two. These missions were often suicidal and they were promised the standard extremist’s afterlife care package, which in this case included a substantial amount of hashish (pot).

The Wikipedia has a decent article on the subject.

One interesting thing to note from the article: They called themselves fedayeen from the Arabic fidā’ī, which means “one who is ready to sacrifice his/her life for a cause.” Coincidence that Frank Herbert’s death squad commandos are the “fedaykin“? I think not

Druid

Druids were the ancient Celtic priestly caste. In addition to the worship of assorted gods and chopping off people’s heads as saccrifices, they also worshipped trees and mistletoe and stuff. Legends have them doing all sorts of interesting magic like changing the weather and turning people mad. In several versions of the Arthurian legends, Merlin was a druid.

The shape-shifting aspect of the class comes from old fantasy roleplaying stuff. 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons (1970’s) had a druid class that could turn into animals… which ability is probably originally derived from old ceremonial costumes or from Merlin or whatever.

Ranger

A bit of abbreviated dictionary searching will discover that:

rang‧er /ˈreɪndʒər/ [reyn-jer] ï¿½ noun

one of a body of armed guards who patrol a region.

a soldier specially trained in the techniques of guerrilla warfare, esp. in jungle terrain.

a person who ranges or roves.

British. a keeper of a royal forest or park.

[Origin: 1350ï¿½1400; ME; see range, -er]

Let it also be known that Tolkien’s ‘ranger’ (Aragorn) was based on this original definition of the word and is the original template for all future incarnations. Aragorn does such rangerly things as dual-wield swords, track, shoot, talk to elves, run through the forest, etc…

Sorcerer

Sorcery is generally defined as black magic.

The modern WotC class and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld seem more inclined define the term in a slightly less evil terms and see it as a more primal, ancient type of magic. Less of written spells and incantations, more of making it up as you go along.

The word itself is a 16th century adaptation of some really old latin for ‘to cast lots’. Fortune teller types.

Shaman

I like this definition of shaman:

shaï¿½man (shï¿½mn, sh-) n.
A member of certain tribal societies who acts as a medium between the visible world and an invisible spirit world and who practices magic or sorcery for purposes of healing, divination, and control over natural events.

So what did we learn today, class? That’s right. Any time somebody’s coming up with a new character skill set that they need a name for, they’re actually go with existing words… because, well, those words already exist.

It’s like in that that 1960’sish sci-fi novel whose name and author I can’t remember right now where the author introduced this strange new creature with a strange new name. The creature looked like a bunny. It acted like a bunny. It even tasted like a bunny. But he refused to call it a rabbit. And that was dumb, he should have just called them rabbits and been done with it. And so people made fun of it sufficiently that I was told the story as a small child.

patch day

I love patch day, don’t you? WoW 1.12 launched today and it’s good. I like most of the changes they made. Except, of course, that one thing that they can absolutely never manage to get right. Ever

hunter efficiency

Earlier today, I had a discussion with Tony about the problems hunters have with mana burnout. They don’t get a lot of mana compared to other ‘caster’ classes and they certainly don’t get a lot of mana regen compared to them.

My general experience is that in instance runs, my hunter would be forced into operating at some sort of really low damage output level because despite mage waters, he’d be perpetually drained of juice. I now have some +regen gear (a whopping +11/5 atm) and am loving it to death – because it’s SOMETHING.

The normal procedure for a hunter in general bombardment mode is to use a big, slow weapon and fire off aimed and multi shots in what some people call the 10 second cycle (even though the cycle actually works out to be much longer than that).

So the question is this. What do I (and most other hunters) do wrong with my mana?

disclaimer

My math here isn’t perfect, in fact, it’s kind of lazy. But, even considering that, the point should be pretty clear and valid.

the ‘experiment’

Supposing 100 spirit on hunter with all the right talents for max damage and efficiency with shots and stings in question and no +regen eq.

Mana regen is 100/5 + 15 = 35 every 2 sec tick. 5 seconds after casting a spell that uses mana, this regen is disabled.

Aimed has a 6 sec cooldown and a casting tim of 3 seconds. Multi has a 10 sec cooldown and replaces your normal auto-shot. Aimed shot fires in addition to auto-shot and does not interrupt the auto-shot cooldown.

We will assume that there is only one target and that there’s no kiting or any other silliness going on, and that the hunter is using a weapon with an approx 3 second rate of fire.

The number in brackets is the approximate timestamp in seconds of the action, the column to the right shows what would happen if multi shot were not used.

[00] aimed start
[01]
[02]
[03] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)
     auto
[04]
[05]
[06] multi (+172 damage, -217 mana)               auto
[07]
[08]                                              regen (+35 mana)
[09] auto
     aimed start
[10]                                              regen (+35 mana)
[11] regen (+35 mana)                             (no regen)
[12] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)               auto
[13]
[14]
[15] auto
[16]
[17] regen (+35 mana)
[18] multi (+172 damage, -217 mana)               auto
     aimed start                                  regen (+35 mana)
[19]
[20]                                              regen (+35 mana)
[21] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)
     auto
[22]
[23]
[24] auto
[25]
[26] regen (+35 mana)
[27]
     auto
     aimed start
[28] regen (+35 mana)
[29]
[30] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)

So, over a 30 second period, it is reasonable to fire off 4 aimed shots and 2 multi’s for a total of +2745 damage +4 extra normal hits worth of damage (from the aimeds). It cost a total of 1550 mana and the player regenned a total of 140, bringing the cost to 1410 mana.

If multi-shots are removed, the amount of damage inflicted is reduced by 345 and the amount of mana spent is reduced by 434 AND the amount of mana regenerated is increased by 3 more ticks of 35 (105) for a total overall cost of only 766 mana.

verdict

Using multi-shot more than doubles your mana cost over time and if used against a single target, only increases your damage output by the equivalent of one extra normal shot (your normal shots -do- hit for 300-400 damage each, right?).

Just to grind the numbers a bit further… 10+4 shots in 30 seconds for an average of say 350×14 = 4900 damage (barring criticals) + 2745 from the spells gives us a total of 7645 damage (255 dps) for 1410 mana. 5.42 damage per mana.

Removing multi from the mix, we get 7300 damage (243 dps) for 661 mana and a ratio of 9.53 damage per mana.

Figure the average hunter has 4000 mana. Using aimed+multi, he only has enough juice to go for roughly 90 seconds this way (it’s actually a bit less because after the first 30 end, his next shot is a multi, which slows the regen down even more).

Using aimed alone, he can go for 180 seconds of solid bombardment w/o potions or other sources of mana regeneration.

stings

Throwing stings into the mix makes hunter mana efficiency even worse.

Over the 30 second period, assume a hunter fires off two serpent stings (one at 4 and one at 22 seconds). This costs him an extra 450 mana for a maximum of 1221 damage with a few gotchas.

sting damage is nature type, which is subject to resistance.
dots don’t crit, so the 1221 is the absolute max you’ll inflict with a pair.
because sting is a dot, that also means that the mob has to last for the entire duration to take all the damage.

In addition to costing 450 mana in the 30 second period to fire off the two stings, it also eliminates another mana regen tick, effectively costing 35 more
mana.

7645 damage + 40.7x(15+8)=936 from one and a half stings = 8581 damage total in the 30 seconds if the hunter uses sting (286 dps). But it costs 1860 mana to do it, giving us a ratio of 4.61 damage per mana spent and an approximate burn time of only 65 seconds before drained.

+regen/5

As I mentioned earlier, I finally have some +regen/5 eq and I love it. Tony brings up the point that a lot of the endgame hunter gear has this sort of buff on it (not to mention trinkets, etc…).

Most notable among these options would be the new Cryptstalker set (Tier 3 raid gear), almost every piece of which grants +mana/5 (to a total of +26/5). Completion of 6 pieces of the 9 piece set means you get 50 mana back every time you land a crit (which happens a lot since the set has +7% crit in addition to the +283 agi from the entire set for an additional +5.4% crit). Completing 8 pieces of the set reduces the total costs of your aimed and multi shots by 20 mana each…

Of course, I’m never gonna even see a piece of cryptstalker gear, much less ever wear it, much less ever see any of these set bonuses, so why do I care?

bangitty bang

In the wake of Gamespy’s article today, and my flipping through my boss’s copy of the art book… I have a wish.

I want one thing from WoW. And one thing only.

I want pistols.

Specifically, I want one-handed/dual-wieldable guns that count as normal weapons (ie, they don’t equip in your ranged weapon slot).

I want them to require either hunter class or engineering profession to wield (in addition to buying the weapon skill from a trainer – perhaps even a quest to activate the ability).
I want them to use ammo from bullet pouches, and I want them to use gun skill (or at least give dwarves the +5 bonus to pistols as well and require folks to level this separately – kind of like 1h vs 2s sword).
I want them in stead of a point-blank talent for high level hunters – possibly with a lvl 40 req to learn the skill (like polearms are lvl 20).
I want them to have a base range of 0-8m, which should probably be improved by the appropriate hunter talent.
I want them to work while moving, just like any other melee weapon (and unlike normal ranged weapons).
I want them to benefit from all appropriate hunter talents and buffs (ie, they use ranged attack power in stead of melee, they get firing rate bonuses from pouches, improved hawk, and rapid fire, etc…).
I want them to count as suitable weapons for hunter special abilities, shots and stings.

I think it would be appropriate if their base damage and rate of fire were similar to one-handed melee weapons. I think it would be appropriate if there were some pistols that were only allowed in one hand or the other.

I think it would be appropriate if hunters were required to do something like stances to switch between pistols/regular ranged.

I also think they should continue to be restricted to only applying scopes or other similar enhancements – no fiery enchant or crusader pistols thank you.

I want pistols.

Note: Rogue friend of mine thinks to complain about this idea. In fact, he was pretty vulgar about it. I don’t care I want pistols. I want pistols so much that I’m willing to forget my complaints about absolutely every other game balance/feature issue out there…

I want pistols.

Untitled

and still for good reason.