indefenceofvanillawow

[indefenceofvanillawow]

Spell Ranks (Part 2)

Link to Part 1.

There's a particular quirk of Vanilla WoW's implementation of spell ranks that I consider to be beneficial. An extraneous complication that adds player choice, and would be significantly worse if it were paced too differently in either direction.

You might start Vanilla buying every single spell available from the class trainer as soon as it becomes available. But you might find that this is a bit costly, and eventually, you just might not be able to afford a particular spell or rank. This is an intentional friction, from which you're supposed to come away with the realization that you can simply opt out of buying spells you don't want.

Relatedly, you might've also realized that you don't need to come back to the class trainer every time they have something new, and you don't always need to use the highest rank version of a spell.

These realizations open up a bit of player choice. Ignore spells that don't fit your build, save money for spells that do. Ignore your class trainer for 6 whole levels because last time you purchased a crucial upgrade and it's gonna work fine for a while. Ignore the highest rank of a spell because a lower rank is more mana-efficient, otherwise known as 'downranking'. Ignore all that and go to your class trainer because you might just need that extra edge. Getting a new spell or rank of a spell is a power spike, and that can feel really good.

But eventually things started to change. Downranking was causing problems, as healers would prioritize mana efficiency over raw healing output, and lower ranks scaled decently enough with stats while their mana costs remained static. The solution Blizzard went with in WotLK was to replace all mana costs with a percentage of base mana cost. This meant the mana cost still had no relation to the effectiveness of the spell, but in the opposite direction, causing your spells to accrue mana-inefficiency with each level.

There were also new problems as a result of the expansion model. Every new expansion added new ranks to most spells, along with new spells, and that means a lot of stuff to learn. Expansions wouldn't follow the 'every second level' rule either. The new zones would also lack class trainers, even in the capital cities of the new zones, requiring players levelling in the new zones to go back to the old world for class training and nothing else, as all the new profession training and everything else important was in the new zones.

These factors made class training more annoying and less purposeful. So people complained. It doesn't matter that the feature was working fine until outside factors ruined it, the feature itself was blamed. But they didn't entirely remove it.

In Cataclysm, they removed spell ranks, so spells fully scaled with level, but you still had to go to a class trainer to learn the spell. So instead of getting something new on the class trainer every 2 levels, it's a lot more sparse. I don't know why they did this.

In Mists of Pandaria, they removed learning spells from class trainers entirely. They also allowed you to reset your talent points from anywhere, though I don't know which expansion this was implemented in. Thus, class trainers became superfluous.

The new Pandaren starting area didn't have any class trainers, as they simply weren't needed. Now the game could funnel you through the starting questline without any distractions. But now there were fewer useful NPCs to populate the towns. No class quests either, same route for every class.

Class order halls in Legion were something of a return to form, as they were places that your class would go to that other classes wouldn't go, with NPCs only your class would talk to, and quests for your class only. This feature didn't return in later expansions.

Spells ranks as a feature have survived though, in another genre. MOBAs, or Action-RTS games, feature spell ranks prominently as an important aspect. Which spells you choose to prioritize can determine your power spikes and what situations you can respond to.

[indefenceofvanillawow]

Spell Ranks (Part 1)

Why did Vanilla WoW have a system where you have to go back to a class-specific NPC every so often to level your spells and learn new ones?

The correct answer is probably 'Everquest did it', with a little bit of 'Warcraft 3 also had spell ranks'.

It was eventually entirely removed in Mists of Pandaria, the fourth expansion, 8 years after Vanilla's release. Other modern MMORPGs would never use this system either. And the prevailing attitude is that this system was just busywork, and didn't have any place in the game.

But did it? Why wasn't it removed earlier? And how did it change before it was eventually removed?

First, I want to dispel any notion that this was a technical limitation. Many spells already had in-built level scaling that simply halted at the level when the next rank of that spell was available.

Spells with no damage or healing component, like poison cures, would often scale their cost with your base mana. Modern WoW currently uses this base mana scaling for all mana costs.

Many physical abilities would scale directly with your weapon damage, and tack on a damage bonus based on its rank. Bloodthirst is even an example of an ability that scaled directly with attack power, and it still had ranks. (By the way, whenever I use the word 'spell' in this post, I am also referring to abilities, it's just easier).

So the spell rank system was not something they had to do, but they did it anyway. Why?

The aspect of returning to a class trainer repeatedly over the course of levelling seems odd, but there's a point to it. The Soulsborne games actually do something similar, where the places at which you can level up your character or upgrade your weapons are always limited, often to your home base. So you keep returning to your home base, and eventually, it becomes familiar. Dark Souls 1 is a bit of an outlier, but it did some other interesting things to keep Firelink Shrine as something of a home base, partly to amplify a nefarious midgame betrayal.

There's also the facet of class quests, as sometimes you'd return to a class trainer, and they'd have something new for you to do. Sometimes the reward is gear, but most of them reward new spells. Shamans receive quest chains from their class trainers at levels 4, 10, 20, and 30 to earn each element for their totems, which are a crucial class feature. The player needs to know to keep returning to class trainers.

The aspect of having to manually learn and upgrade every spell also might seem like a pointless inconvenience, but this is a dismissive description that doesn't engage honestly with the system. An interesting perspective I saw of this was from someone who had never tried it before, J1mmy in his video, 'I never played WoW, so I tried all of them (a lot)'.

Around the 9 minute mark, he starts to talk about learning spells, and how it differs between Classic WoW and Retail WoW. He felt like in Classic, the game let him earn his spells at a pace he felt comfortable, and he even pointed out something I didn't realize, that the currency cost of acquiring spells meant there was more of a reason to know what you were getting.

By contrast, he felt as though the Retail game was just dumping levels on him, and by extension, dumping spells. To quote, "I swung at a guy like three times, and I was levelled up again. I was immediately rewarded with two new abilities that were inserted right into my ability bar. I did not pay for them, I did not ask for them, I suddenly have these two things here. Something felt weird about it".

It's something to notice about people who try Classic and Retail back to back. Classic is definitely slower, but much more careful with how it introduces things to new players.

In Part 2 of this post, I'll be examining some benefits of the system unique to Vanilla WoW's implementation, the erosion of those benefits, and the erosion of the system itself. Additionally, some knock-on effects of removing it. Link to Part 2.

[indefenceofvanillawow]

Starting This Blog

I have something of an appetite for MMORPGs. Runescape and WoW were the two I was hooked on as a kid, specifically the free version of Runescape 2 and a somewhat scrappy Wrath of the Lich King private server. You can tell I couldn't convince my parents to pay subscriptions.

This appetite has spurred me on to trying a decent variety of experiences. I've sampled Rift, Maplestory, and Realm of the Mad God, I've bought Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online and reached max level in both, I've been trying Final Fantasy 14 recently, and I have plans to try Warhammer Online. Runescape 3, Oldschool Runescape, and Warframe are probably my most played MMORPGs, and for good reason.

But an important part of this journey is that time when I decided to go back and try some of the older versions of WoW; TBC, Vanilla, and even another shot at WotLK. But while WotLK didn't hold up to my nostalgia and TBC had some real problems, Vanilla blindsided me with a lot of surprisingly great design. Not that Vanilla is perfect or even remotely polished, but it's clear why this game became the gold standard for its genre for such a long time.

What inspired me to make this blog was noticing, among some of the people I talked to, a pervuading dismissive attitude toward the original game's design. And after playing some of the more modern MMORPGs, I feel like they're affected by a similar attitude.

People see design elements that stem from Vanilla WoW, think 'that's poor design, I could do it better', and then it turns out they can't, because they fundamentally refuse to understand what those design elements were actually for. Other MMORPGs have long since surpassed Vanilla's weaknesses, but none have surpassed its strengths.

What strengths? What weaknesses? What design elements? That's what I want to elaborate on in this blog.

Game design is unfathomably complex as both an art and a science, and I resent any dismissive attitudes toward any game's design. That said, I do believe a not-insignificant part of Vanilla WoW's brilliance is by accident, with one particular rumour that one of its most brilliant and innovative decisions was originally a byproduct. These are also things I want to elaborate on later.

Vanilla WoW, despite being a genre touchstone, is something of an odd duck, the oddest duck of its genre. I'm dedicating this blog to examining this fascinating game, and I want to put special focus, not just on the pieces of brilliant design that didn't make it into other games, but the pieces of iffy design that stayed with the genre.

Ultimately, I want another game to do it better, and a richer understanding of MMORPG design and game design in general would help with that.