Thursday, October 17, 2013

Flexible Raiding by Rigid Numbers



Ion Hazzikostas, the lead encounter designer of World of Warcraft also known as “Watcher” on the Blizzard forums, jumped into an interesting thread about Flex Raiding and Magic Numbers. MMO-Champion has a convenient Blue Post watcher that sums things up.

Flex: Magic Numbers


The gist of it is that some people have noticed that certain mechanics become easier or harder depending on the number of people you take. For example, on Sha of Pride the number of prisons goes from two to three when you bring eighteen people. Norushen is another encounter which penalizes you heavily for bringing extra players, because as Watcher mentions, health of the bosses scales up, but you can’t actually stuff more people through the test realm to get purified because there’s a set number of orbs.

Bashiok argues:

“If a raid leader is attempting to build a rigid group to attempt Flex and is telling members of his own 25 Normal team to sit out because some lower number is optimal, that person is overthinking it.”

Which for Flex raiding is certainly the intent of the feature. And would be nice to have, but practice diverges from theory. The difficulty spike from two prisons to three on Sha of Pride was too much for our raid. When you have eighteen people, suddenly three prisons is a lot to deal with, and given the penchant for it to choose our more active raid members, it honestly stonewalled us for nearly two hours before people started to drop, at which point when we passed that magic number and had seventeen people, we one shot it from there.

Now, not all the fights suffer from this problem. For example, the entire second wing, excepting General Nazgrim, was relatively easy regardless of the number of players. At that point it just became a healing/DPS throughput game, and we had more than enough there.

Nazgrim himself was a bit tougher, though to be fair our first set of attempts had eighteen people, six of which were healers, and a few DPS below the minimum DPS threshold (more on that in a bit). The next week our DPS:Healer ratio was far better (nineteen people total, four healers), and we blew the enrage timer out of the water. We probably could’ve used another healer given how few people were alive by the end of that. But I would argue that’s still well within reason for Flex. You’re still expected to bring the appropriate number of players for each role, so that was on us.

But when the mechanics themselves unduly punish you for bringing a sub-optimal number of people? That sucks. Watcher is correct in saying “Boss mechanics inevitably involve some breakpoints (alas, there's no way for Malkorok to create precisely 3.7 Implosions),” but I wonder if there’s some other way to smooth out that difficulty spike when you wander over into 25-man mechanics. Or perhaps it’s just a matter of eighteen people being slightly too few to handle 25-man mechanics well. Perhaps they shouldn’t scale those linearly, and instead start them at twenty players? You still have the problem of a magic number at nineteen to twenty, but at least with the two extra players at twenty, mechanics like prisons or implosions become easier to deal with because you have enough people on the board to actually handle it.

Flex: Real Numbers


The other half of the story is Watcher has given us approximate numbers to play with in terms of boss health and damage scaling, so now we can actually calculate the minimum DPS threshold before a DPS player becomes a burden on the raid rather than a help. 

Watcher states:
“Thok, for example, has 355 million health with a 10-player Flexible raid. If you add an 11th player, his health will go up to 390 million. I.e., you've increased your raid's damage output by somewhere between 14 and 20% depending on how many healers you were running, but the boss's health only went up by 10%. Adding that 11th player will also make Thok melee for about 3% more damage, which will barely be noticeable.”
Now, I may be incorrect in extrapolating the 10% increase in health across all bosses, but I figured I’d use an easier boss with no adds to do our calculations. Specifically, Iron Juggernaut. Single mob, single health pool. Wowhead states that Iron Juggernaut has 361 million base health in Flex, and a ten minute enrage timer.

If we add nobody, we’re talking needing approximately 86k DPS per player (tanks included) for a basic 10-man raid consisting of two tanks, five DPS, and three healers, and that’s to kill it in ten minutes precisely. (361 million, divide by 10*60 to get DPS for the raid, divide by 7 for players).


For every player added, we add 10% to the boss’ health pool, which is 36.1 million health per player, which amounts to ~60k DPS per added player to ensure they’re helping the raid rather than hindering.

Except that’s not enough! When we add healers, they aren’t really helping DPS at all. If we take into account adding a healer every five DPS (so that we’d have five healers for a 25-man raid, sufficient for Flex if they’re good to great healers), you’d have to up the amount of damage done by each player 20%, bringing our total baseline requirement to be 72k DPS per new player. And that’s just to hit enrage.

Now, 72k DPS isn’t that much to a relatively skilled player. Heck, I ran in on my 502 ilvl Frost Mage and pulled 92k on that fight in Flex, according to our World of Logs parse. But Flex is also billed as something where you wouldn’t leave your friends or family behind if their output or skill is subpar. So what do you do when you’re hitting enrage on Nazgrim over and over again because you have three players pulling 30k each along with those six healers? Turning a healer into a DPS--even a subpar DPS--is probably better, because then you still have the body, but you’ve made up slightly for the DPS deficit and don’t need to boot anybody.

I can tell you that people get incredibly frustrated quickly when they run up against an enrage timer. At that point you know you’re executing the mechanics correctly, because if you weren’t you’d have been dead well before enrage (like watching five Ravager axes whirling through the raid within a minute of the fight starting), but then it becomes a question of “How do you eke out more effective DPS?” Either players have to improve (which is not impossible, but see the conversation between Milady and myself on my Motivation post), or folks leave. Healers or DPS who are below the minimum threshold, as each player leaving is less health on the boss and the adds.

I think there needs to be a bit more patience walking into these raids. There’s still progression of a sense. They’re definitely a lower difficulty level than normal, but definitely more difficult than LFR, which is great, so folks should expect wipes going in (and do), but when you hit that enrage timer wall over and over again, it’s not just the boss that gets enraged.

Flex: The Reality


Let me be clear, Flex has been absolutely awesome. That level of difficulty between LFR and Normal was sorely needed, and has been great. Folks are jazzed at being able to raid in a more relaxed atmosphere, and the fact that we don’t need exactly ten people is fantastic. People can join in or leave as the night goes on. It’s really, really awesome. But there’s still those rough edges that cause frustration, and hopefully mechanics can be tweaked, either now, or in future designs, such that we can smooth out these frustrations. It’s also nice to participate in a raid where I’m not the one raid calling (though old habits die hard and sometimes I accidentally take over that job, whoops!).

As Bashiok states, we may be “overthinking it,” but as raid leaders who want to ensure some amount of success to our raiders, our job is to overthink it. We just need to provide Blizzard the feedback to ensure that we don’t need to anymore.

13 comments:

  1. "Or perhaps it’s just a matter of eighteen people being slightly too few to handle 25-man mechanics well."

    25 mans get all FOUR prisons.

    You just needed to assign tanks to one prison, healers to another, and DPS to the third (tanks and healers cannot be targeted).

    "So what do you do when you’re hitting enrage on Nazgrim over and over again because you have three players pulling 30k each along with those six healers?"

    I hate to sound like an ass, but 30k is what you could pull in 435ish ilvl. 30k was what was expected at MoP launch heroic dungeons.

    "At that point you know you’re executing the mechanics correctly, because if you weren’t you’d have been dead well before enrage"

    Is that really true, though?

    Immerseus -- if people don't put out enough DPS/HPS to kill/heal enough adds, you'll hit berserk if you're going down by 5 corruption each time or something.

    Norushen -- there's just so many ways to do the fundamental mechanic of the fight wrong and hit berserk as a direct result.

    Sha: if you did nothing but focus on killing reflections, breaking imprison, and killing the big add, you could easily hit berserk before hitting 100 Pride without doing enough damage to the boss.

    Galakras: on Flex the orb of fire is trivial to handle (can't hit more than 3 people), but on normal/heroic you can easily wipe at 5% before you messed up the orb and got too many stacks.

    Iron Juggernaut: bring 5 healers in a 10 man Flex raid and easily survive bombs going off, lasers going through tar, etc. Hell, it's often 4 healed on 10H but the berserk is then rather tight.

    Dark Shaman: again, bring like 5 healers in 10 man Flex raid to make it super easy to survive people getting hit by bad.

    Naz'grim: if everyone focuses on just killing the adds and ignores Nazgrim, you're going to hit berserk.

    And so on. I even skipped Protectors here because there are some built in DPS checks (Garrotes and Mark of Anguish) that prevent you from hitting berserk with bad DPS -- but that's still a DPS check!

    I mean, the main reason berserks exist is that so people don't bring a ton of healers to easily survive everything which means Blizzard has to make mechanics literally one shot people or it's easy to heal through people standing in stuff.

    And if you have some actual raiders in that group pulling 150k+, they can even carry those 30k people if you want.

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    1. Thanks for the comments! :)

      "You just needed to assign tanks to one prison, healers to another, and DPS to the third (tanks and healers cannot be targeted)."
      ~ Oh, that's an excellent point. I didn't even think about the fact it's only DPS who are targeted. Our flex isn't my raid to lead, but I'll definitely bring that feedback back.

      "I hate to sound like an ass, but 30k is what you could pull in 435ish ilvl. 30k was what was expected at MoP launch heroic dungeons."
      ~ On one hand, I certainly don't disagree with you. In our 10N SoO raid, our DPS players regularly hit 150k+, and our 10N ToT raid, 90k+ is the minimum bar. I would certainly never entertain less at this point in the game because there's no way you could carry that in a group of 10 players. There's no wiggle room. In Flex, however, it was billed by Ghostcrawler et al. as a mode where we wouldn't dream of dropping people for performance reasons, and we do have players in ilvl 500+ who are pulling as little as 30k to 40k damage. Yes, they're definitely not very good DPSers, but they really want to be part of guild events, and raiding is a very big, regular guild event. So my question for the developers is at this point, is this a progression raid, albeit easier than normal, or is this something that we can bring our friends and family regardless of performance? Because if they are unable to improve, we're going to have to drop some of them eventually so that we can hit the numerical balance that berserk timers demand. I've seen the devs claim it's both, and my counter-claim is that the two are diametrically opposed concepts.

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    2. "Is that really true, though?"
      "Immerseus -- if people don't put out enough DPS/HPS to kill/heal enough adds, you'll hit berserk if you're going down by 5 corruption each time or something."
      ~ If you don't kill enough adds, the adds exploding in the center will wipe your raid.

      "Norushen -- there's just so many ways to do the fundamental mechanic of the fight wrong and hit berserk as a direct result."
      ~ This one I'll grant you. But it also makes the DPS imbalance even worse, because every extra person that we can't get through the test realm regardless of role is dead weight. Either they don't do enough DPS to make worthwhile to throw through the test realm, or too many healers just increases the health of the Corruption mobs too much. Thankfully Blizzard changed the orb mechanic to make it easier to stuff more people through on flex.

      "Sha: if you did nothing but focus on killing reflections, breaking imprison, and killing the big add, you could easily hit berserk before hitting 100 Pride without doing enough damage to the boss."
      ~ Yup, there's a soft-enrage here, but honestly in flex most folks were struggling with the basics of avoiding attacks and were wiping the raid before 30% by getting far too much Pride and exploding themselves and the raid, or not freeing folks from prisons correctly. Once we got to 30% getting the kill from there was immediate. The soft enrage on flex isn't terribly strict.

      "Galakras: on Flex the orb of fire is trivial to handle (can't hit more than 3 people), but on normal/heroic you can easily wipe at 5% before you messed up the orb and got too many stacks."
      ~ Galakras certainly is a better boss to embody the idea of not having an enrage timer. As long as folks followed instructions, it went down pretty well.

      "Iron Juggernaut: bring 5 healers in a 10 man Flex raid and easily survive bombs going off, lasers going through tar, etc. Hell, it's often 4 healed on 10H but the berserk is then rather tight."
      ~ Iron Juggernaut actually wasn't a big deal either. His enrage timer is super long, so people could focus on getting the mechanics right to avoid damage. I'd argue this one already meets the ideal as well.

      "Dark Shaman: again, bring like 5 healers in 10 man Flex raid to make it super easy to survive people getting hit by bad."
      ~ Poor melee. Even on flex melee got hosed in this fight. We end up cheesing this with 3 tanks, which trivializes the encounter mechanics, though we did actually beat it once with two tanks. We did have an over-abundance of healers. Again, though, the berserk timer is not tight at all on this fight.

      "Naz'grim: if everyone focuses on just killing the adds and ignores Nazgrim, you're going to hit berserk."
      ~ If you don't have enough DPS to begin with, you'll get overwhelmed by adds. Which is what happened with us. Either we hit enrage, or we got overwhelmed. He went down quite easily the week after when we brought two fewer healers and had no DPS under 80k. And we did this again, and again, and again for over an hour. It was clear what the problem was, but short of kicking someone then and there, there wasn't a way to remedy it. No amount of changing strategy was going to make up for that much DPS shortage. If it was normal mode, I'd definitely tell my raiders to go up their DPS (and have in the past). In Flex, we can tell folks to up their DPS, but some are literally not capable of doing so (some may have disabilities, one case was a computer from 2001 still running XP and getting 4 FPS and oh, god, how on earth does anyone play games on a machine that old?). So then the hard question there is do we drop them? Which sucks for them, because they just want to be included.

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    3. "I mean, the main reason berserks exist is that so people don't bring a ton of healers to easily survive everything which means Blizzard has to make mechanics literally one shot people or it's easy to heal through people standing in stuff."
      ~ Agreed 100%, and I have no problems with Berserk timers in general. I'm just questioning whether they're appropriate in flex.

      "And if you have some actual raiders in that group pulling 150k+, they can even carry those 30k people if you want."
      ~ We do, and the math works out if we want to carry a couple folks. But when literally half your raid is contributing < 30k DPS each (some combination of healers and weak DPSers), something's got to give.

      (Apparently I have a verbosity problem when my own blogging platform keeps complaining my comments are too long O.o)

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    4. "Oh, that's an excellent point. I didn't even think about the fact it's only DPS who are targeted."

      Technically speaking I am simply assuming that the 10 man normal and 10 man heroic mechanics apply to flex, so there's a 0.1% chance I could be wrong about healers not getting targeted in larger groups. I know tanks never get targeted for sure, though.

      "I've seen the devs claim it's both, and my counter-claim is that the two are diametrically opposed concepts."

      I'm not sure they are, though. I'm pretty sure that as a Shadow Priest I could do more than 30k DPS doing nothing but spamming Mind Flay at 500 ilvl. A rogue does more than that autoattacking.

      I mean, hell, we were doing 100k+ DPS back at 470 ilvl. Asking for a 500+ ilvl character with legendary meta gems and a legendary cloak to do 72k DPS...is very lax. Doing 30k DPS is like having tanks who never taunt swap or healers who never do anything but a single target heal.

      Flex is supposed to be harder than LFR but easier than normal -- to be a place where you can afford to make more mistakes and have relaxed DPS/healing/tanking requirements. But a group of 30k DPSers couldn't kill bosses in LFR -- why should they be expected to do well in Flex?

      There has to be a minimum expectation for performance and it's already quite low.

      "If you don't kill enough adds, the adds exploding in the center will wipe your raid."

      You'd be surprised what you can live through in Flex with a bunch of healers and using some raid cooldowns.

      "But it also makes the DPS imbalance even worse, because every extra person that we can't get through the test realm regardless of role is dead weight.

      "But it also makes the DPS imbalance even worse, because every extra person that we can't get through the test realm regardless of role is dead weight."

      Unless it's a Discipline Priest, no reason to send down healers. Most of our kills on Flex didn't have every DPS cleansed anyway -- we simply had the non-purified people focus on adds (which still take full damage) and purified on boss. Don't send any DPS down after 50% either.

      "Yup, there's a soft-enrage here"

      I was saying the opposite of a soft enrage -- that you could hit the 10 minute hard berserk before hitting 100 pride.

      "His enrage timer is super long, so people could focus on getting the mechanics right to avoid damage."

      But you can easily bring some extra healers and get hit by everything and simply not care -- I mean, I'm not even sure three mines going off at once would wipe you.

      "Even on flex melee got hosed in this fight."

      Send the melee to attack Earthbreaker, they simply tunnel on the boss the whole fight (and dodge Foul Stream every 30 seconds).

      "If you don't have enough DPS to begin with, you'll get overwhelmed by adds."

      I'm saying that you could have just enough DPS to kill the add waves but no time to attack the General...which means you don't have enough DPS overall. Handling the "add mechanic" correctly also includes killing them in time to be able to nuke the boss a bit between waves.

      "So then the hard question there is do we drop them? Which sucks for them, because they just want to be included."

      But at some point it's simply no fun -- I would not want to play basketball with someone who can't dribble the ball three feet without it flying away from them. You don't have to make 90% of your free throws or be able to do behind the back passes -- but you do have to be able to dribble the ball well enough to be able to move with it.

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    5. P.S. You mentioned DMing and also mentioned playing other games -- you play NWN (Neverwinter Nights, the 2002 one) at all?

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    6. Yeah. Overall I don't disagree with you in the end. There is a minimum bar, and yeah, you can carry a small number of people, but eventually you'll hit the limit and then folks either need to improve, or if they cannot for whatever reason that I don't necessarily fathom, people will need to be dropped.

      The basketball analogy is pretty spot on I think.

      As to your PS, yup, NWN the gold box. Own the original, and the one from GoG.com :) I loved that game to pieces when I was younger.

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    7. "The basketball analogy is pretty spot on I think."

      Thanks!

      "As to your PS, yup, NWN the gold box. Own the original, and the one from GoG.com :) I loved that game to pieces when I was younger."

      We should play it sometime if you want. I also build and mod in it -- if you still like the game you'll probably like some of my work.

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    8. I might have to give that a spin at some point. It's been a while. I'll just have to play something other than a Wizard. Summon Monster III gave me the heebie-jeebies every time I played. Stupid Dire Spider. I think I stuck with Summon Monster II until I could get the Dire Bear via Summon Monster IV if I recall correctly.

      Good times.

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    9. Yeah, I remember the spider freaking me out as well initially.

      But it was Summon Creature IV -- I was badger, II was boar, III was wolf, V was bear. Drop me a line at balkothwarcraft at gmail dot com if you want.

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    10. Oooh yeah, that's right. Good call.

      I may have to take you up on that. It's just an installable mod, right? I don't have much time at the moment to play it, but might be fun down the line.

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    11. Yeah, there are literally thousands of installable modules -- just copy it into your module folder and boot it up from within the game. Many of them are better than the official campaigns by far.

      A good chunk also take available of custom content (new creature models, new tilesets, new item models, and more) with "hak files" and "tlk files" but that's the same principle -- drag the haks to the hak folder and the tlks to the tlk folder. Crazy.

      My current project is a bit of an unusual module -- it's a level 40 (max level) adventure focused on more WoW-like boss combat. It's probably the only one of its kind in many ways. I also am specifically avoiding custom content to make it very easy to download and play.

      But overall there are hundreds each of low level modules, epic modules, campaigns spanning from low to high level, online persistent worlds that rival most MMOs, and more!

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