A Modest Proposal: Down With Buffs

Note to new readers (aka all readers, considering this blog is less than a week old): sometimes I might do a post like this one here.  Today isn't Sunday, now is it?  No sir (or ma'am - most of the best WoW players I've met have been women so there you go).  And that header says "updates Sundays," so it's damn well gonna update on Sunday.  However, I've got a topic in mind that won't be enough to carry an entire, full-size article, and it also doesn't focus on us monks.  As a result, I'm going to write a short post on the subject, and I invite you to discuss it in the comments section below.

Also note that the title is a reference to something.  Don't flip your lids before you hit the bottom, folks.

So.  I was listening to this week's WoW Insider Show (I cannot sing the praises of this website enough, and their podcast, linked here, is excellent).  They were discussing the upcoming changes to buffs in Mists of Pandaria, and I got to thinking.

What's the bloody point?

You can stop glaring.  I'm really super serial.  The way buffs are being designed to operate in Mists, according to Ghostcrawler, is as follows:

• Give you lots of freedom to invite whom you want. This gets to be a problem when there are too many mandatory buffs spread out among too many specs...
• ...But not offer too many incentives to class stack. If you can achieve every buff with, say, only three players, then there might be a tendency to fill all of the other slots with whoever is best for a particular situation. Some class stacking is inevitable at the cutting-edge level, but to some extent, the players on the cutting edge of raiding enjoy extreme min-maxing. For the rest of us, we try to make sure you can finish all of the encounters without feeling like you need a huge roster of folks waiting in the wings for their one fight.

This culminates in a system wherein any few classes are able to provide all of the necessary player buffs and boss debuffs.  I have one significant problem with this.

Allow me to preface my concerns by saying that I've never been one of the people to cry foul at "catering to the casuals," nor have I spat at the term "homogenization."  In fact, I consider myself a rather casual player, and believe me when I say I was thrilled when the tank specs began to get comparable (i.e. COMPLETE) toolkits.  Still, I have to admit that this idea just does NOT sit well with me.  It's commonly agreed that class balance while leveling is merely a fleeting concern, so let's look at endgame.  If encounters are designed with these buffs in mind, AS AN ASSUMED FACTOR IN YOUR POWER LEVEL, then why even have them?

Then I got to thinking further, and I realized: this has nothing to do with homogenization.  Even the current system is largely flawed, on a fundamental level.  Blizzard has spent the better part of an expansion trying to prune systems from the game that aren't fun, right?

Right?

Well, I don't know about the entire playerbase, but I can speak for myself.  Hitting my Blessing of Might button one time, out of combat, is not compelling gameplay, folks.  And all it does is make us meet Blizzard's expected level of capabilities!  You know how some Patchwerk-esque bosses are gear checks?  Imagine if every boss had a door, and you opened it by having everyone in the raid right-click the doorknob before every pull.  Call it the, "Open the door, you tosspot," check.  Well hey guess what that's the system we have now.  The doorknob is just shaped like a diamond or a blue glowing eye or a horn.

These buffs don't really do anything except make us baseline quality, stat-wise.  Same goes for the assumed debuffs.  They're boring, non-decision talents that we have to re-select every time we want to fight something.  I thought these elements were going away.

Really, the only part of Ghostcrawler's explanation that makes sense to me is keeping them SOMEWHAT spread out to avoid class stacking.  Because that totally works.  The only things buffs seem to do is put a small handicap on players who were just battle-rezzed, or their teammates.  "Quick, give the tank Wild!"  That or trying to convince the damn Ret pally to turn off Crusader Aura.

Do I think buffs need to be removed completely?  No way, mis amigos!  Some are both interesting and dynamic.  They can provide some unique gameplay elements, or give some real flavor to a class.  These are the buffs that I think really work.  They're engaging.  They're diverse.  They're short term and powerful, not autoequipped stat sticks.  Looking ahead to Mists, I'd say we need more of those, not less.

Check back in on Sunday to see why that last sentence is a great segue and I'm the best writer in the world.