Getting Started with MMOs: A Beginners Guide to Massive Multiplayer Gaming

I wrote this piece for a freelance site. My article was not chosen to be published, so I'm taking the liberty of publishing it myself. I can't doing work without doing SOMETHING with it, even if it's just a sketch in my notebook. Thinking back, the article was probably too long. They wanted 800 words, this one lands north of 1000.

In the age of social networking and internet communication, there has been a growing interest in the Massive Multiplayer Online gaming genre. MMO's typically place a player controlled avatar into a persistent world consisting of both PCs (player characters) and NPCs(non-player characters). MMO games connect thousands of players together, usually with social networking-like components to enhance peer-to-peer interactions in-game. MMOs can take place in a variety of settings, giving consumers the opportunity to adventure in a land that most appeals to them. This article will (hopefully) serve as a general guide for players new to the genre who are looking to get started in this gaming sub-culture.

Entering an MMO world can seem daunting at first. A lone player, fresh from the character customization screen, set loose in a new world with (usually) little direction and virtually no equipment or resources. Don't worry. There are a few important things to keep in mind when you set foot in your new game world that will help ease you into your environment and jump-start you on your journey though the game.

The first thing to remember is that while the settings may change, MMO games all stem from the same background: the MUD (multi-user dungeon). MUDs are text-based multiplayer fantasy games. Think of them as a paperless Dungeons and Dragons game. MUDs set many of the paradigms that exist in current MMO games, such as player-player and player-environment interaction. It is also where the persistent world comes from. This is what separates MMO games from Single-player and other Multi-player games (like Halo). When you stop playing an MMO, the world continues to exist and change. Players continue to play in the world environment, and your character state is saved. In some games, you may sign back in the next day to see the world around you has been invaded by an enemy faction.

The second concept to keep in mind while playing an MMO is the "Holy-Trinity of MMORPG (role-playing game) gaming": Tanking, Healing, and Damage Dealing. This relates directly to the combat system within the game. Most MMOs allow you to choose a character class or path while playing, which gives you the ability to tailor your character's abilities to you preferred play-style, but character classes can be simplified to one of three roles loosely based on character archetypes pulled again from Dungeons and Dragons (credit where it's due, this pen and paper RPG set many of today's gaming standards). Damage Dealing classes are fairly straightforward; they choose a target and, through the use of spells and abilities, bring a creature or player to its death They are often referred to as DPS (Damage Per Second) classes. Some common classes include: Warrior, Rogue, Ranger, Sorcerer, Warlock.

Tanking classes are designed to take the abuse from an enemy. Their goal is to select armor and use abilities to mitigate or avoid as much damage as possible while keeping the target's attention (aggro) on them and away from the comparatively more fragile Damage Dealers and Healers. Tanks vary in name from game to game, but ultimately have the same goal.

They are not typically immune to damage, however, and that is where the job of the Healer comes in. In most MMOs, players will be exposed to death if their life bar (commonly called Hit Points) runs out. It is a Healer's job to restore hit points to a player after they have taken damage. Healer achieve this through a variety of means, but most commonly by casting a direct-healing spell at an injured player. Healers vary in name like the other two roles, but will commonly be found as Cleric, Priest, or Paladin.

The last and possibly most important idea to remember while playing an MMO is that they are by nature social games. MMOs provide tools to players for social interaction, whether that be through temporary groups/parties or larger guilds and alliances. This can be used to a new player's advantage, as most players playing an MMO do so for this reason, therefore you are likely to find helpful players within the game or in online communities that will offer assistance to new players. There are many fan-created resources that new players can visit online to read game-specific guides or ask questions of veteran players. Being social in nature also means there is likely much enjoyment to be had grouping with other players. In fact, in some games, it is required to group with other players to tackle difficult content. For gamers who like to play with a team to overcome obstacles, MMOs offer a high level of enjoyment and challenge. Just be mindful of your behavior: there is another player on the other side of the game world who is looking to have fun playing just as much as you are.

Hopefully you have a better idea of what to expect from the MMO gaming scene. To close, here are some of the more popular MMO games available today.

World of Warcraft - The current juggernaut and standard against which other MMORPG games are measured. Based on the popular Warcraft Real-Time Strategy game series, WoW is very beginner friendly with a multitude of resources available to assist newer players. Subscription fees start at $14.99/month, with discounts for multi-month purchases.

Lord of the Rings Online - LotRO is another very popular MMORPG. LotRO puts players in the J.R.R. Tolkien world of Middle Earth. Subscriptions is also $14.99/month with discounts for multi-month purchases.

Aion: Tower of Eternity - Aion is a relatively new MMORPG. Aion borrows many elements from World of Warcraft, specifically those which make WoW so beginner friendly. Aion separates itself with a unique take on Player versus Player content. Subscriptions start at $14.99/month.

Warhammer Online - Set in Gamers Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy universe, WO seeks to bring new definition to Player versus Player content. WO's goal is to make the entire game world feel like a conflicted battlefield, in which territory changing hands is entirely up to player controlled battles. Monthly fees start at $14.99/month.

Eve:Online - Eve breaks away from the typical swords and sorcery setting and drops players into deep space. Instead of choosing a character and class, players instead design and built their own vessels. Eve has a steeper learning curve than other MMOs because of the unique nature of the game, but for the dedicated player offers a world open to creation and exploration. The game world has more player intervention, however, allowing players to create their own corporations within the game world. Eve fees start at $14.95/month.

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Armor is the new Black (T-10 Set Change Inc).

This just in from the official forums, there are changes incoming to the plate armor tier-10 tank sets. From Zarhym:

"We recognize that many plate tanks are making their gear choices based on the amount of armor they're provided, as this is currently the most preferred stat. In order to make the tier-10 plate tanking sets more desirable, we will be adjusting the stats on the gloves and chest pieces in order to inflate the amount of armor they provide in the next minor patch. This will apply to all item levels of the tier-10 death knight, warrior, and paladin tanking gloves and chest pieces."

Why are they doing this? Chill of the Throne is why. With the reduction in dodge, tanks have turned back to focusing on mitigation; that is, stacking on more armor to reduce the hits that they are not more likely to take. With the higher iLvl gear available in ICC, tanks don't have to sacrifice all of their avoidance to do this. Some, yes, but not all.

To help illustrate this point, here are two tank items: the Warrior Tier-10 Gloves and the Frost Emblem Gloves. The tier set grants more total avoidance (and the added benefit of hit), but the Emblem gloves have 658 more armor. To put this into perspective, let's check out my warrior. Unbuffed, at rest, I have 26,829 armor. This puts me (and I forgive me if my math is off) at 61.7% damage reduction from armor. I don't have the Tier-10 gloves, but hopefully this will illustrate the effect of adding more armor to gear. My damage reduction at 27,487 armor works out to 62.3%. That's roughly 0.6% more damage reduction. Doesn't seem like a lot (if you were getting hit for 20,000, you'd now be getting hit for 19,880). Looking through the available ICC "armor" items, though, you'll find that you can add 3,746 armor, and another 465 with armor enchants. Add in a ring and neck piece, and the most amazing trinket a tank has ever seen, and the grand total comes to 7,683 more armor than without armor stacking.

Let's take a look at the impact this will have. Starting with my Warrior's 26,829 armor, let's add the bonus armor (7,683) on top: 34,512. Running this back through the damage reduction calculations, we get 67.5% reduction from armor, a gain of 5.8% damage reduction. That 20,000 damage hit is now down to 18,840, a reduction of 1,160 damage. That's almost as much as blocking the attack outright. Add on to this the extra socket that most "bonus armor" pieces have and you'll see that they become very powerful items

The ultimate goal with armor is to reduce the damage of attacks that are not avoided. In ICC, landed hits are more common because of the dodge debuff. We don't know yet exactly what will change with the tier pieces, but I would expect to see them become more well-rounded, so don't plan on them having as much armor as the "bonus armor" pieces. Hopefully, though, it will make tanks desire their tier pieces as much as they have been the non-set pieces.

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Crimson Halls Hotfixes

The Blues popped by the official forums today to announce some hot-fixes to the encounters in the Crimson Halls (Blood Prince Council and Blood Queen Lana'thel).

Blood Prince Council

• Prince Keleseth will no longer melee players. So if you get knocked into Keleseth or happen to move by him, he won't swipe in between his casts and kill a non-tank.
  
• The first Shadow Resonance should appear earlier in the fight, which will allow the Keleseth tank to have more orbs on him or her if Keleseth is empowered second instead of third. We didn't want which Blood Prince was empowered second to be a major element of the difficulty in the fight.
  
• We reduced the melee damage for the Princes by 10% for the 10 player difficulty. They were doing less damage than the 25 player before the hotfix, but this change lowers the damage further.
  
• Empowered Flames will now run out of power after shooting fewer firebolts in the 10 player difficulty. We did not change the initial impact damage.

The first change, the change to Keleseth, makes it easier if you decide to use a ranged tank on the fight. There has until now been a danger of being knocked into melee range of Keleseth from a Shock Vortex. Normally, if Keleseth's primary target is out of melee range, he only casts spells. But if you were unlucky enough to get bounced near him, he would take a swing at you. A quality of life change, but a welcome one nonetheless.

The second BPC change is a much needed change. The Dark Nuclei are the only way to successfully tank Keleseth during his time with the Orb. It wasn't a huge deal if he was the third Empower target, but if he was chosen second, there was little time to gather the necessary Nuclei to survive his attacks, almost guaranteeing death.

The final two changes affect only the 10-man version of the encounter. It seems they were made to further tune the encounter for 10 players. Speaking from experience, this encounter is difficult with 10, especially when trying to reduce the damage of the Empowered Conjure Flame ability. Melee damage suffered greatly because of this. The melee damage reduction should alleviate some healing stress. I imagine tank damage was not supposed to be the healing challenge in this fight, but rather the Keleseth tank's damage and the random AoE.

Blood Queen Lana'thel

• Blood Queen Lana'thel will only be available after the Blood Prince Council is defeated.
• Blood Queen Lana'thel's Essence has a longer duration.
• Kinetic Bombs no longer aggro Blood Queen Lana'thel during the Blood Princes encounter.
• Blood Queen Lanathel should no longer cast Vampiric Bite on pets.

The first and third change listed are fixes to what are essentially bugs. See, within the BPC fight, there are orbs that need to be kept in the air. Lana'thel's platform is above where you fight the Princes. Before the fix, the orbs could float up close enough to Lana'thel to activate her. BPC is a tough fight as is; having to fight them AND Lana'thel is asking a bit much.

I can't comment much about how the change to Lana'thel's Essence will alter the fight as I haven't yet seen the encounter in person, but from what I've gathered players were letting the first target die to avoid having to deal with the mechanic of spreading the debuff to other players. Check out a fight strategy for more info on what I'm talking about here.

Overall, these changes should make the fights behave more like what is expected of them. The encounters have been defeated since release, so they weren't impossible, but they required a lot of dumb-luck (even with perfect execution). I'm looking forward to getting back in and trying these changes out first-hand.

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Maximizing Healing Synergy with Other Healers (Part 1)

**note: This article was originally written as an application sample for WoW.com's priest column. I'm posting it here because I took the time to write it and I think it's quite helpful.

Among the healing classes, the Priest has the unique ability, when dual specced, to be the most flexible healer in WoW. Possessing strong single target and AoE healing spells, a Priest can link up with any other healer to properly cover any healing need in a raid. In this article, I would like to examine the core spells and play styles of our fellow healing brethren and provide some insight on how to best synergize with these classes as Discipline, Holy, and dual-specced Holy/Disc. This article will be released in several parts reviewing each class. Today will focus around the Holy Paladin. Please keep in mind, however, that the information covered in this article is a general guide based on my own experience playing with and playing as all of the healing classes. It is possible that the healers you encounter will not play to the paradigms laid out in this guide, and since these are not the end-all methods to play each class, please be respectful when dealing with other players who may not subscribe to them. Now, without further delay...

Paladin

The Holy Paladin has gone through many revisions to improve the breadth of their healing arsenal, but they remain first and foremost a main tank healer. Their ability to sustain continuous big heals through Holy Light, as well as mirroring their healing to a second target with Beacon of Light, makes them very strong and very powerful healers. Their strong healing is, however, balance with the comparatively mediocre group and raid heals.

As Holy...

As a Holy Priest, you will fill in the raid healing gap left by the Paladin. You should focus most of your attention covering incidental and environmental damage. Should you find yourself with a free moment, tossing some flash heals on the tank will allow you to maintain serendipity stacks while also, and more importantly, providing the tank with the valuable damage reduction from the Inspiration buff. Power Word: Shield and renew on the tank will also help smooth out damage intake on the tank, but don't forget that it is as much the Paladin's responsibility to maintain healing on the tank as it is yours to help when you can, so make sure not to neglect your primary focus as a raid healer.

As Disc...

A Discipline Priest/Holy Paladin combo will provide your group or raid with the most powerful tanking healing team in the game. The Holy Paladin's naturally high HPS is augmented well by the Discipline Priest's impressive prevention and mitigation abilities. For two tank encounters (Such as Gormok the Impale in To(G)C) you will find it best to each choose one tank as your primary healing target while providing each other with secondary healing. Spells such as Renew, Prayer of Mending, and Power Word: Shield will help ease the healing on your secondary target. Try to avoid using Flash Heal or Penance on your secondary healing target, however, as these spells will apply Grace to the other tank, clearing them from your primary target, temporarily reducing your healing throughput on your main target (do note that a living tank is always preferable to a dead one, so don't get locked into the mentality that it is bad to lose Grace stacks on your target).

Dual-Specced...

Much of your spec choice will come down to the makeup of the rest of your healing team and the size of your raid while healing, but this is especially true when healing alongside a Paladin. If you are in a 25 player raid, ideally you will have a proper balance of healing classes. Assuming this is the case, you will most likely provide your raid the largest benefit by utilizing your Discipline spec. While Shaman and Druids can easily provide raid healers, no other class boasts the strong mitigation tools and shields provided by the discipline priest. Your role in a 10 player raid will vary greatly based on whether or not you are running three healers. In a normal mode instance, a single Paladin will likely be able to provide most if not all of the necessary healing to a tank (and depending on fight mechanics, tanks). Although strong Power Word: Shields will be missed, your largest contribution to your raid will likely come with you using a Holy spec. Powerful group heals will be an asset on most encounters, and your strong Renew HoT will help augment the Paladin's tank healing without requiring a heavy investment in cast time on your part.

Check back in the coming weeks for the continuation of this series.

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Updates and Twitter

It's been almost 3 months, but I'm back. A lot has happened since my last post, so let's get caught up, shall we?

Wrath is in full swing. Icecrown Citadel has been out for some time (and it's a blast). Patch 3.3 has been good to my alts (Triumph badge farming, huzzah!). Progress on my characters has been great.

My writing efforts have been focused elsewhere. I have twice applied to be a write for WoW.com, once as a Priest columnist and once as a Shaman columnist. The Priest thing didn't happen, but there is still hope for the Shaman columnist position (cross fingers).

By far the biggest change since then, however, is that I have taken over leadership of my guild. It has been a challenge, to say the least. Thankfully I have a knowledgeable support staff to help me. They have been instrumental in helping me transition to this position. Thanks guys!

Two last quick things. First, I am going to make some video guides when I have appropriate ideas for them . The first is a guide to Power Auras, which you should see (hopefully) within one week. The second thing is that I have signed up for Twitter. Follow me @KhanusSmash to get up to the (approximate) minute info on WoW happenings.

That's all for this one. Thank you loyal reader(s).

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Icewell Radiance.... lulz...

AHH MAH GAWD WORD IS ENDIN' NOZE!

Oh wait, no it's not.

Incoming with the release of Icecrown Citadel is a new raid-wide NPC mob buff called Chill of the Throne. The short version of the change is:

• "For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets."

This addition has come to be (un)affectionately named Icewell Radiance, a comedic portmanteau derived from Sunwell Radiance. Sunwell Radiance did essentially the same thing that Chill of the Throne will be doing, reducing a tank's chance to dodge (post-diminishing return) by 20%. The reasoning behind this addition is the same reason for including it in Sunwell Plateau, namely that tank avoidance is climbing too high to keep healers from having aneurysms (more on that in a minute). There are three major points I would like to hit concerning this change: why avoidance is a pain (specifically, my experience both tanking and tank healing), why the developers screwed up, and why it's forgivable that they did screw up.

To start, for those who don't know (which is likely none of you, since, to my knowledge, there aren't any people outside of my guild who read this) I have four tanks and two healers. Three of my tanks have tanked ToC raids, both of my healers have healed them, and two of my tanks and one of my healers have been to or through ToGC 10. I've seen the issue from both sides. As a tank, I stamina stack, not because I'm focusing on being an EH tank, but because with the natural evolution 0f iLvl on gear, avoidance from gear is enough for raids. Avoidance works great on melee attacks, but stamina has the added benefit of keeping you alive through magic damage and those unavoidable special abilities (Gormok's Impale bleed, for example). Stamina is also a guarantee. There isn't a random chance that my hit-points will count. They will always be there. Avoidance is very tricky, and can lead to a false sense of being on top of the healing from a healer's perspective.

As an example, I tanked VoA 10 on my warrior last night. Her gear is decent, but not nearly as good as my other tanks. I was the boss tank for the Emalon encounter. I watched my incoming damage because I was benchmarking my warrior. I noticed a string of avoids, a good three or four of them, followed by a melee hit which brought me down near 50%. I then took a second hit which near killed me. It was primarily thanks to Emalon not hitting as hard as Heroic Northrend Beasts that I didn't drop instantly. Sure, I got some quick heals too, but I wondered if, had the boss not hit as hard and I not avoid as much, I wouldn't have gotten so low to begin with. More on this in a minute.

The first thing that came across my mind when I saw the announcement of lolnododge was "Again?". We've seen tank avoidance get too high before. This same change had to be put in place at the end of BC. Diminishing returns were specifically put in place to prevent this from having to be done. So why did it happen again? Item level grew too fast, and itemization of avoidance became greatly inflated. Some tanks began to stack avoidance because of the sheer power of it (and necessity in some encounters), but even stam-stackers like myself saw avoidance numbers climb incredibly high. The developers point to the additional iLvl tiers from hard modes to be the prevailing cause of this, but as far as I'm concerned that was poor foresight. I understand that there needs to be better tank gear from hard modes, and that's fine, but if the lesson learned from BC was tone down avoidance, then to increase avoidance drastically on the hard mode gear. Give a crap ton more stamina, add a socket, or add more hit/expertise. I don't think any tank would turn down an item that had the same amount of avoidance, but also came with expertise. Balancing threat stats while gearing a tank is a delicate art, and rewarding a tank who completes a hard mode with gear that makes choosing pieces easier is a great reward. So good game, itemization team. I have yet to see one post from a blue explaining why they chose to add more avoidance over threat stats or armor to hard mode items.

But I'm not going to hate the devs for making this mistake. In fact, I'm going to forgive them, not only for Chill of the Throne, but Sunwell Radiance as well. As the devs have stated, each new tier of content requires that a boss put out X damage per second on the tank. Damage taken per second varies drastically as you add avoidance to the mix. To ensure that a tank still takes that same damage per second, you need to drastically increase the strength of a melee swing or ability. It's not as much an issue when starting out in Naxx, since the DTPS requirements are lower and tank avoidance is lower, so the hit that DOES land doesn't have to be as strong. In ToGC, however, avoidance is so high, and because it is the 3rd tier of content the DTPS is high (as a natural evolution). So when you avoid 60-70% of the attacks, that one that DOES land needs to hit incredibly hard to bring up the average damage taken. It needs to come up so high, in fact, that if the second hit is not avoided, a tank will likely die.

This isn't fun for a healer. There is less reliance on big, effective heals, and more reliance on spamming fast healers, even if the tank isn't taking damage, because he just may end up getting hit mid cast, and you can't afford to not get a heal off immediately. By bringing down avoidance, they are able to reduce a boss's melee damage to still achieve the same DTPS by the tank. Healers don't have to be as twitchy, tanks can better predict incoming damage (and therefore cooldown use), and everyone can worry less about having a stress-induced heart attack.

I don't fault Blizz for having to add Chill or Radiance, because they came from respect for the player-base. In BC, the goal was to end the expansion with Black Temple. WotLK development was taking longer than expected, so to keep players in the game they rolled out Sunwell Plateau. Problem was, tanks going into Sunwell were full T6 geared, so they were nigh-unkillable. That was acceptable for T6 raids, because you should be able to trivialize a raid when you outgear that raid. They wanted that gear to be great, because they hadn't originally intended on adding another tier. When that did end up happening, they had to reduce avoidance to keep tanks from being insta-gibbed (having never been in Sunwell, as I understand it avoidance was reduced but boss damage continued to scale. I hear Brutallis was quite the stressful encounter.). For WotLK, it was necessary to nerf dodge in ICC because of the popularity of hard modes. Sartharion was such a fun new idea that when the players called for more hard modes, Blizz ran with it. Yes, the gear scaled way too fast because of this, but I (and I bet all of you) wouldn't give up access to hard modes just to NOT get dodge nerfed in ICC.

Unforeseen circumstances brought about the necessity of the dodge nerfs, but they only resulted in a better game overall. We have better content, scalable instances (to some degree), and overall more polish to the encounters. A necessary evil that resulted from so much good. So Blizz, great work. And for all you people who think the sky is falling, crunch the numbers. You'll live. The world isn't ending in 3.3.

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Early T-10 Armor Art Review

Chalk this one up to my attempt at increasing post counts, and that I'm kinda tired of talking about set bonuses, but lately as the PTR rages on, there have been more and more model previews of the Tier-10 armor sets. Today I'd like to give my early general impression of the styles used and how they stack up, as a whole, to previous sets. If you'd like to actually see the sets, bounce on over to MMO-Champion and browse the news posts (I'm not collecting all those here, I don't like you that much).

First off, these new sets are a radical shift from the faction specific sets we've seen in Trial of the Crusader. In place of shiny faction armor well crafted for warfare, we will be treated to somewhat grotesquely designed armor pieces reflecting the undead nature of the Citadel. For some classes it works, for others... not so much. For instance, Death Knights are, by nature, evil, and the attitude they present is that of the vicious yet elegant swordsman. As such, the Death Knight armor set is very dark with glowing highlights, and the obligatory skulls abound. It is also somewhat reminiscent of the saronite starting gear (massive plates strapped over fur linings).

Other classes, however, to not quite transition well into "demonic" mode with their armor sets. Paladins suffer from this. Paladin armor sets have always been geared towards the bright, "holy-warrior" image, with brighter armor and shining highlights. For Tier-10, however, the colors have been radically toned down and subdued. And there are skulls. Skull on paladin gear. That's like putting flowers on Death Knight gear. To me it just portrays the wrong image. On top of that, the Paladin set just isn't that visually appealing. It's, well... boring. Another class that doesn't quite make the transition to this new environment is, surprisingly, Warlocks. Warlock sets have always been demonic in nature, which fit well thematically during the BC era (and, arguably, the BC era 'lock sets were the best looking). But undead just isn't quite the same thing as demon. The 'lock T-10 armor set is just laughable. The witch hood just doesn't quite evolve on top of previous sets (though few things compare to the Grand Apothecary Putress armor that was T-8). The shoulders on the 'lock set also look as though the 'lock is wearing an entire wing of the Saronite Citadel, which just looks ridiculous. It doesn't fit.

And finally, there are some sets that, well, I guess just need to be seen in game to give them a true evaluation, because these sets, from the screen shots, just look pretty... meh. Take the priest set. Very small number of colors used. There just isn't much depth to the set. The model itself seems pretty sedate, too. It looks like it could be a dungeon set. T-8 Priest seemed very regal, as though it demanded authority. The use of color helped to accent the armor nicely, and the ninja-hood was just icing. Very fitting of a healer, especially one that devotes themselves to the Light (it made less sense for shadow, but I don't like shadow). I want to see the druid set in game, too. It seems to have captured the scourge themes we'll be seeing in the Citadel while retaining the nature aspect of the class. It looks like robes covered in Venus Fly Traps. From the screenshots, it appears to be the most polished (texture- and geometry-wise), but I'd like to see the set in game to see if there are any animations or additional effects that come with it.

In closing, I would like to give mention to what may end up being the coolest looking set in T-10, the Mage set. The Mage set combines elegance with evil, in a way only the darkfallen San'layn can. So at least one class has something radically imaginative to look forward to. The rest of us get reused themes, dull decorations, and under-refined armor (even considering the function-over-form mentality of the Scourge).

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