Monday, February 23, 2015

The Fourth Spec Conundrum

In Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard gave Druids a fourth spec - Guardian. But that sentence is a little misleading. Guardian Druids really already existed. The way talent trees used to work, a Feral Druid would just assign some of his or her points in different things depending on whether they wanted to tank more or DPS more. But with the simplification of specializations, and the total overhaul of just what a "talent" really meant, there was no obvious way to distinguish between a Feral Druid who preferred to go Cat DPS, and one who preferred to go Bear Tank.

In a sense, Druids always had four specs, but the overlap between the two varieties of Feral was too great to make sense in the new talent system, and thus the Gordian Knot was cut and Druids were given a fourth spec.

But this raises an interesting question: Are there not some classes that could also use a fourth spec?

I'd argue that there are plenty of archetypes that existing classes could fit, but only if they were given a fourth spec. A ranged DPS Paladin, for example, is something that used to be quasi-viable way back in the day (the "Shockadin,") and it's actually a bit funny that there's no ranged Rogue spec, given that in most games, the Rogue is the archer, killing victims from afar (plus it would give us another class to use ranged weapons.)

The game is ten years old, though, and I can understand a certain hesitance to mess with what exists.

But let's look at some of the other weird things that have happened with specs and roles in the past.

For one glorious expansion, Death Knights were capable of tanking and DPSing in all three specs. Now, this was, admittedly, a bit of a nightmare to balance. In the end, Blood and Frost were the more popular of the two tanking specs while Unholy and Frost were the more popular DPS specs (though I loved Blood DPS, especially as a leveling spec.) Ultimately, Blizzard figured the self-healing theme of Blood made a lot of sense as a tanking spec, and so they rejiggered the class to turn it into a more standard T/D/D spread, like Warriors (thankfully they committed to making Frost viable for both Dual-wield and Two-handed play so that those of us who like two-handed weapons and not having to split our damage with a ghoul can have a DPS spec.)

Hybrid specs seemed to be out, with Cataclysm narrowing the three DK specs and Mists separating out the two Feral variations.

But since then, we've seen two experiments in hybridizing specs. One of these has been an utter failure and since removed, while the other had been a pretty resounding success.

In Mists, Demonology Warlocks got a glyph called "Glyph of Demon Hunting," which, in addition to trolling anyone who's been hoping for playable Demon Hunters, gave the Warlocks a transformation called Dark Apotheosis that, much like Metamorphosis, changed many of their existing abilities. The difference, however, was that these abilities were designed to allow the Warlock to tank.

Ultimately, though, Blizzard never committed to making Warlocks into real tanks. They clearly put some real work into transforming Demonology abilities, but it still wasn't a total tank toolkit. And because Warlocks couldn't really tank, they ultimately decided to get rid of the glyph in Warlords.

However, in Warlords, they went the other way with Protection Warriors. Now, while I'm a staunch Paladin supporter and I think Warriors - by virtue of lore and flavor - make more sense as DPS, I'll admit that, in WoW, Warriors are the standard by which other tanks are designed. (Hell, Warriors have the actual ability "Taunt," which is shorthand for what Reckoning, Growl, Dark Command, and Provoke do.) So in a sense it's almost heretical to turn Protection into a DPS spec.

Yet Gladiator's Resolve does that, and it actually works out quite well. Gladiators might even be the top DPS "spec" for Warriors right now, and if they're not, they're quite close to Fury and Arms - close enough that most people would be willing to play it if they prefer the style.

So why does this work while Dark Apotheosis did not? Why is ok when the DK specs were re-focused on individual roles?

My theory is that, primarily, it's a lot easier to make a new DPS spec than to make a new Tanking spec.

The thing is, DPS can come in all sorts of styles. As long as, over a long period of time (like the course of several minutes,) the damage output is relatively the same, it doesn't matter (at least in PvE) what kind of rhythm that output has. If there's a spec that does 70 damage in the first ten seconds of a minute and 10 damage every ten seconds for the rest of that minute, there can be another spec that does a flat 20 damage every ten seconds, and ultimately they're ok - because over the course of a minute, they're both putting out 120 damage.

But tanks and healers don't get the luxury of being able to burst and then slack off for the better part of a minute. If player health pools were enormous, they might, but even after the doubling that occurred post-item squish, the toolkit of every tank and every healer needs to be roughly similar to deal with certain situations that every tank or healer will need to deal with.

And that's why design space within these roles is narrower - you really need to be able to find a new way to do very similar things.

But I do think this means that granting more diverse DPS options is not as difficult. Certainly it's not trivial, but I don't think there's much standing in the way of trying out new ways to let players play the damage role. Gladiator really just took the existing tanking rotation and shifted around some of the passive buffs while transforming really just Shield Block. Tank DPS is already something they try to keep balanced anyway, so it's more or less just adding a coefficient to boost DPS and remove some of the survival bonuses to keep them from being unstoppable.

Now, we should also note here that the idea behind Gladiator's Resolve was to give us an archetype that never existed in game - the Sword-and-Board DPS. So it might not be necessary to give all of our wildest dreams new representations in-game if there's already something that exists like that.

Still, I think a Plate DPS caster would be wonderful (either a Shockadin or some kind of ranged-necromancer version of Unholy Death Knights - or both, of course), and a Rogue that uses a Bow (or Crossbow or Gun) is something we could absolutely look for. On the flip-side, we never got our Melee Hunter. And given that it used to be a thing, I'd love to see Blood DPS once more.

There are probably a ton of other ideas that would be great to see, but the key to remember is that all of this would require a huge commitment of development time. Gladiator's Resolve is really cool, but it cheats because of the relative simplicity of adapting an existing tanking spec to only focus on damage output.

If we want to see something like a Shockadin, it's probably going to need to focus on adapting existing Holy Paladin spells to function, like Denounce and Holy Shock.

If Blizzard were to really commit to creating entirely new specs for existing classes, it would probably mean we're far less likely to see a brand-new class. And it's likely that it wouldn't be fair, either. Many classes are thematically tied to three variations, like Mages, with its three schools of magic, or Death Knights, with their three runes and sources of dark power.

But perhaps with a more liberal use of things like Gladiator's Resolve, we could see some real variation in play from existing specs.

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