Alt-Chat has a neat post that triggered a thought.  Then it had me dig a bit deeper around the data analysis of the game.

Let’s start with the following MMO-Champ post on garrison achievements.  I think it would be fair to say that raiders have top level garrisons.  Maybe not so much that they have invested in the monument achievements exactly, but it’s certainly a barometer. That half the current playerbase has hit 100,000 apexis crystals isn’t really that tough to believe.  We’re nearing the 1 year mark and those things drop everywhere.  Epic crafting is also pretty simple, gated only by time.  Legendary ring at 18%, you’d kind of hope it was higher – but it’s not too far from the “complete all normal raiding” sitting at 13%.  The Mythic achievement being low makes sense, you’d sort of expect it to aim for the top 1%.

Pet battles though…that’s an odd one. It was super popular in MoP.  There’s more data here, where it seems ~25% of playerbase has had some depth in pet battles (getting quite a few to level 25).  Though there’s a rather significant drop after the 300 battle mark.  Even more data here in terms of the number of battles, where clearly the WoD implementation didn’t resonate with players.  Also quite evident, nobody gives a toot about PvP pet battles.  I wonder what Wilhelm has to say about that, given his series of pet battle posts.

Flight in Dreanor is also an interesting topic, to me at least.  Here’s some data on it.  It shows that ~30% of the active players have the appropriate achievement, though about 60% have the basics down.  Very telling is the drop from 100-200 treasures, as only the first is needed for flight.  Even after getting the ability to fly, very few are chasing treasures.  Given those numbers, it really is a head scratcher as to how important flight is to the player base if 60% didn’t think it worthwhile.

Class representation per item level is also pretty neat.  The ones with a downward trend would indicate a more casual/non-raiding attitude.  Rogues and Monks have neat low ilevel appeal but then people either quit them, or go deep into raiding.  5x more Hunters than Monks is pretty darn telling though. I would have thought better representation since Monks are a triple-spec, sort of like Paladins and Druids, but it’s also a class with weird momentum.

I’m trying to find an up to date version of this, but this March 2015 data on raiding is telling, about 2 months after Blackrock (raid #2) opened.  60% completed the first raid on a minimum of LFR, 8% for raid #2.  0.4% completed Mythic raid #1 (that’s about 25,000 people) and I don’t think it’s worth talking about raid #2 (~1200 people).  These numbers align with what was seen in SoO back in the MoP days.  The trend was around 70/40/25/10 for the first tiers and 50/20/15/1 for the later tiers.  I’d be surprised if Mythic raiding was even an option in Legion.  Given the user base, it’s pretty striking how few people actually bother with it.  It’s hard to see the breakdown in WoD for Normal & Heroic with that data, but the trends are similar to what happened in MoP.  I guess the days of banging your head against a single boss for a week are gone, people would want some sort of steady progress. I would find it hard to argue that WoW being more casual killed Mythic raiding as the % is less important than the actual number of players.  If anything it would seem that Mythic raiders just moved on.

I’d be hyper interested in the 5 man dungeon achievements, per expansion.  WoD had some good ones that were completely useless in terms of gearing, but MoP’s launch had some neat ideas.  Once Timewalking is fully fleshed out, maybe there’s some data from that.  If it’s anything lower than 50%, I’d be truly surprised.

Analytics are a tough one, since you’re often missing context.  Raids in WoD are arguably much more accessible due to Flex, so that Mythic content is only about prestige/e-peen, clearly less important than originally thought.  Pet battles, once a darling, have been underused in the expansion.  PvE content is highly active, given the apexis numbers.  Flight has only minor appeal to the playerbase, either indicating that people never leave their garrisons or that the movement system in WoD is sufficiently good to not be worth the effort to improve (my vote on the former).  Class balance is actually pretty good, if you look at it objectively, with only small variances within a class.

It’s too early for a full post-mortem on the WoD expansion but there are certainly clear trends that emerge.  I’m quite curious as to how the developers can/will try to use those trends to their advantage.

In a surprise move (or not if you saw the cinematic), Blizzard has announced that 6.2 contains the final raid for WoD.  This is odd for a few reasons.

Lack of Known Future

Aside from knowing that flying is coming in a “future patch”, there is absolutely zero information on what else is in store for WoD aside from raids.   Best bet is that Blizzcon has an expansion announcement and that’s in November, 4 months out.  And unless they drop an open beta that that point, it’s another 6 months until something releases.  I refuse to believe that they would let another 12 months go between content patches.

Lack of Devs

Tanaan Jungle was supposed to launch with the game and in the last few months was pulled back to polish it up.  Resources were moved around within Blizz to meet dates and quite evidently focus on Hearthstone, HotS and Overwatch.  WoW seems like the least profitable of the bunch, or at least the one they are investing the least into.

Lack of Content

WoD will clearly be marked as the expansion with the least amount of content since launch.  2.5 raid tiers, 8 dungeons, no races, no classes, Garrisons, which killed cities, Ashran which put the final nail in open world PvP, a near-complete destruction of crafting.  But we got selfies.

Items that were supposed to be in this expansion (from their Blizzcon): Shattrah raid, Bloodspire and Karabor (cities), Farahlon (zone/pvp).  You’d think that would be at least 1 more content patch worth.

What’s Next

Well aside from the already known largest subscription drop in the game’s history, I’m certainly curious as to what the Q2 numbers are. I don’t see this news as inspiring any faith in the community and one of the most tone-deaf announcements of the year.  ESO just finished launching on consoles, Wildstar announces a swap to F2P, FF14 just launched an amazing expansion, SWTOR announced a big expansion in the fall.  This just seems like that kid in the corner eating crayons.

Edit: As I posted this, I received an invite from Blizzard for a free 7 days of game time.  Irony, I love you.

Other Blogs Related

• Murf Vs
• Alternative Chat
• In An Age, and a follow up with numbers
• Balkoths’s World
• TAGN (sort of)
• Tobold

With no horse in the race, I find the WoW news about maintaining a lack of flight quite fascinating.  As always, stories.

I had a subscription for the first month or so of WoD.  It took a “normal” amount of time to get to cap, at least compared to MoP.  Which was near double or triple of the Cataclysm trainwreck.  Once I did hit the cap, I decided to bring a couple more alts to 100.  Did I mention that I was able to get one to 99 without ever moving past the garrison quests? Mounts were superfluous.  And zone design didn’t exactly necessitate any mounts either since the quests were usually a few feet away from a quest giver.  Long gone are the days of getting a quest on one side of the map and going to the other (which ironically, Cata had in spades).  I’m struggling to think of a single occurrence of character death while leveling, outside of the elite/rare kills I attempted solo.  There was never any real threat.  To get around the world was about hoping on a flight path and alt-tabbing until I got there, which in some cases was extremely long.

Once I did hit cap, I was mostly pet/mount hunting.  All of that was in the old content, because WoD held little appeal outside of the 7 day gronn mount spawn. My Boots quest in EQ has killed any desire to spawn camp.  Anyways, I have 6 alts who were at level 85/90 who could easily farm old content.  Zul was the only daily for the 2 mounts, which I never got after months of farming.  I got the Bird mount in Terrok pretty quick, which left mostly raid farming for the rest.  The cycle usually went MC, BWL, Kara, SSC, TK and then AQ.  Every single one of them was reached through flight, aiming the mouse and alt-tabbing until I got there.  I tried flight paths, which all landed next to the raid (MC, BWL and SSC excepted) and all were slower than aiming my dragon and going afk.  Not just a little slower either, a lot.  I don’t think I would have even bothered with half of it if it wasn’t for the fast travel.  So yeah, it was more about convenience than anything else.

Having flight while leveling made things extremely trivial.  Not so much in that it bypassed content (it did) but that it highlighted bad design decisions.  Dropping in, picking up 2 packages and then leaving isn’t super smart.  Neither is farming a drop for 20 minutes.  I think Wildstar’s approach here was better, where various actions provided progress on a bar.  Kill a lot of small things, a few big things, collect some items, destroy others.  Zones had some rough spots to run through, where you needed to pay attention.  You still had some boring taxi travel BUT each zone had 1 large teleporter or some kind to help with fast travel between the actual zones.

All that said, I think it speaks volumes that a company that hit the 10m mark, lost ~3m subs, put in a legit gold selling program (and will sell top-end gear for said gold) doesn’t think flight is worth the hassle.  WoW is the most accessible it has ever been, the absolute least social version ever and flight for some people is a hill to die on.  Such an interesting read to see people’s reactions (Wilhelm has a good collection of them).

I’ve proclaimed my love of fishing on many an occasion.  To me, you’re not an MMO if you don’t have fishing.  UO got me hooked (bad pun) and I’ve needed it since.  I think you can clearly see that the games I stick around with for the longest all have fishing.

Today’s post is about WoW’s fishing system.  And how the devs don’t seem to understand what to do with this bastard stepchild of a profession.

History

Vanilla fishing was 100% useless, outside of flavor and pastime.  I maxed it anyways.  BC had nothing to do with it until later in the expansion and the funtacular Mr Pinchy grind.  Daily quests started here. WotLK was a bit better, fish gave some rather decent food buffs.  I wouldn’t say mandatory but pretty darn useful – including a new fishing tourney.  Cooking as a whole was pretty neat here.  Cataclysm… let’s not talk about that ok?  MoP brought about a fishing faction.  Hell of a grind but you could become best friends with Pat Nagle, with some pets and vehicles

Today

WoD.  WoD changed fishing and didn’t at the same time.  Where before you needed to fish in pools to get a certain kind of fish, now you could also fish in any water in a zone provided you had bait.  You could only carry 1 bait for a type of fish at a time mind you, but it was common enough to keep you going.  3 types of size of fish, each giving different amounts of flesh for cooking (and first aid and alchemy for some reason).  For an expansion that broke dependencies between the professions, fishing was suddenly super important.

A few interesting notes.  Daily quests in the garrison gave you +1 fishing.  This required you to fillet a fish to get eggs.  Which is fairly reasonable, compared to the progress we’ve had in the past.  It’s a long slosh but that’s ok.  Fishing folk have time right?  Well, given that it was such an integral part of the grind, the devs bumped that to +15 per turn in.  +15 in normal casts is somewhere near the 200 mark.  Each is about 10s or so… do the math on that.  And a level 3 fishing shack took 700 specific fish, so somewhere of 2000 casts at max level fishing.  Not kidding a long slog.

6.1 first pass

So the first patch notes for 6.1 came out and said the following:

• Fishing Shack

• You no longer catch bait in your Garrison. However, Nat Pagle (Level 3 Fishing Shack) will give you any of the standard baits if you ask nicely.
• Lunkers can now be caught from fishing pools and have an improved catch rate with higher fishing skill.
• Summoned Cavedwellers now drops random fish flesh and drops less Worm Supreme.
• Fish Eggs used as turn-in for the Fishing Shack Daily quest are now bind on pickup and no longer have a sell value.
• Fishing
  • Fish caught in Draenor are now automatically filleted.
  • Different sizes of Savage Piranha have been consolidated into Savage Piranha and can be consumed directly for the transformation effect.
  • Players can now always catch enormous fish from pools, regardless of skill.
  • Fish that have already been caught can be converted to the appropriate amount of flesh.
  • Draenor fishing bait now lasts for 10 minutes (up from 5 minutes) and needs to be used within 15 minutes of being caught or it’ll spoil.

When I read this, I thought to myself – the person who wrote these notes doesn’t fish.  

One Day Later

So to give you an idea of how bad this was received by the fishing community, 1 whole day later we get the following:

Thank you all for your feedback regarding the auto-fillet change that was set for Patch 6.1. Based on your sentiment, we’ve gone ahead and made a change we hope will be beneficial for all anglers.

In 6.1, rather than have fish auto-fillet as you catch them, we’re adding a new consumable item called the Bladebone Hook which when used, will enable auto-filleting for one hour. This new item can be purchased from fishing vendors in Draenor.

Just a couple notes: Despite the tooltip, you won’t need a fishing pole to use this item, and it won’t overwrite your lure, bait, fishing line, or anything else.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with us!

I have a few more updates for you guys regarding bait which I’m sure you’ll appreciate. These are also slated to be in Patch 6.1 so please be sure to test them out on the PTR and give us your feedback.

• We’re reverting the change where bait would spoil.

• Reverting the change where bait could not be caught in your garrison; Nat Pagle will still grant you the bait of your choice (because Nat Pagle).

• Bait duration is now 10 minutes (up from 5) to mirror the duration of lures.

So can you say 180?

What’s Going On?

On the plus side, it’s nice that the devs are paying attention to the fishing community.  These are the people who spend hours just casting a line in the game.  The amount of effort a dev has to put in for the return is the smallest I can possibly think of.  I mean, I’m sure my Monk has more time spent fishing than leveling.

On the downside, when a dev attempts to put out a change and they have to revert it within 24 hours, it really makes you wonder what the thought process is within their shop.  That the feedback is so unanimously negative in a game of WoW’s size says a lot about the type of changes that can get through to the public.  At some point, you’re hoping that they look at their metrics, their design plan and say “this makes sense, players will understand”.  Then they put it out there and defend it.

Because the alternative, just throwing stuff against a wall and hoping it works out, just isn’t something I want to consider.

So my Rogue hit 100 and in an interesting path too.  I skipped Talador completely and opted to run the Spires instead.  The gear was better, I like the zone better and it unlocks the Salvage Yard and Leroajh as a follower.  That’s the bodyguard who gives you access to garrison missions.

Side note: I really think that rewards for Talador and Spires should be swapped, in particular the level 2 barracks which gives a bodyguard.  The sheer number of kills required (20,000) makes it near impossible to complete without farming.  Salvage yard is also incredibly useful, stupidly so.  Waiting until the mid-point of Spires seems…odd.

The first few missions were kind of tough as I was a solid 40-50ilevels below where I should have been.  I think I went from 530 daggers to 580/590 within short order, for example.  Along the process I had naturally burned through all my rested experience so I opted to try a slightly different strategy.

Once you get the level 2 garrison, for 100 resources you can buy a 1hr buff that boosts exp gains by 20%.  I used this once I left Shadowmoon.  Math-wise, that’s 2 levels I bypassed, at the least.  And the actual leveling experience was very focused.  I selected the same outposts as before (lumber mill, artillery, trading post and the ranch) so those quests and leveling path were easy.  I knew where the named enemies were and picked them up if I got a notification.  I raced through the “area quests” as they give rather good experience for the time spent.   It’s near a quarter of the time I took on the Monk, overall.

Rogues in WoD

I have a dislike for lockpicking now.  Lockboxes were originally a nice form of gambling for rogues, a perk if you will.  It took a lot to get anything decent out of it and it was a very bad money generator.  Now lockpicking gives you some cash (very small) and a non-tradeable item.  This item is swapped for coins which gives a bag of gold (~200 if I recall).  I leveled from 90-100 with pickpocket on every target with pockets.  I am 75% of the way to that bag.  In contrast, my level 2 jewelcrafting building gives me 200g per day to turn in 20 ore (or some dinky jewelry).  So yeah, pretty disappointing.

Leeching poison, Shadow Reflection and Vendetta make quick work of everything but an elite level 100 enemy.  This means that Barn farming is out for now but my ilevel isn’t even above 100 yet.  I’ve only just unlocked Telari in Nagrand, so quite a bit more to get.

I do like the pace of combat, at least as an assassination rogue.  There’s a significant critical hit breakpoint so that Seal Fate keeps me going forward.  The rotation is simple enough and energy pooling is close to what I follow on my monk.  I’ll have to give a few dungeons and LFR a pass once I get better gear.  I’d expect the pace of combat to pick up.

Garrison

This is a bit different than before because I opted not to build a lumber yard and I used the 20% experience potions @ 100 resources per shot.  When I hit 100 the level 3 garrison option opened and I was very short on resources.  My followers were also rather weak, since I didn’t send them on missions – further burning resources.  I wasn’t exactly brimming with options here.

You can generate resources in a few ways

• Daily allocation ~150 in the garrison
• Kill a rare mob for 15-30
• Find resources in the wild 25-100
• Complete specific 1 time quests, including garrison campaigns (25-100)
• Complete follower missions (20-500, depending on the follower assigned)

It’s funny really because my monk has every follower at ilvl 545, every building maxed and is still sitting on ~10,000 resources with nothing useful to do with them.  And here’s my rogue, short about 5K in resources to get over the hump.  Maybe the 6.1 will help with that…

Anyways, the only way to get over this for now is to scour every single rare and treasure on the map.  Spires, Talador and Gorgrond are done.  SMV is next (I skipped a lot surprisingly) and then Nagrand.  At least I have a bunker for Nagrand, which should boost my gear rewards there.  The downside is that I already collected the major resource treasures around Oshu’gun, so I think I’m in a bit of trouble.

Not that there’s any terrible pressure for resources mind you.  If I only use the daily allocation I should have enough for a solid set of missions for every follower, eventually being able to complete the resource missions on my own.

Before WoD launched, I had a bit of fun running old dungeons and raids to try and finish off some collections – pets and mounts.  I didn’t get lucky so much as simply following the odds.  Now that I have 2 characters at 100 (monk and druid) and a level 3 fishing hut (which took ~1000 fish to reach) I figured I’d try for them again.

In particular, Raiding with Leashes 1 & 2, which require kills in MC, BWL, AQ and SSC, Kara and TK.  I was running them pre-WoD with the monk, druid, rogue, hunter and shaman.  5 shots a week was decent enough, though my DK was sitting at 86 and a mage at 81.  Never really tried pushing those guys through.  I finished the 2^nd set of combat pets last week and was lucky on an Anzu drop as well (horror stories on that one if you read the webs).  Still no A’lar but that will come in time.

Running them post-squish made some of the fights interesting at 90, SSC in particular.  No big deal really, 10 seconds or so a fight (Broodlord and Twins are a PITA mind you…) but now with decently geared 100s (ilvl 630+), I was 1-shotting them.  That was certainly different.  I figured, why not try to get another to 100 to make it all a bunch easier (and fatten the coffers a bit more while I’m at it)?

I want a farmer for quick and easy runs.  Hunter, DK, Mage and Shaman aren’t there so much compared to a Rogue’s stealth.  Doing Baron runs with the rogue, I was in and out in ~ 4 minutes.  Even my cat druid wasn’t able to meet those times.  Asmiroth, probably the oldest character on the entire server (I made him 5 minutes after the servers went live 10 years ago) was back in the fold!

Starting Off

After the monk and druid experiences, I knew what I was up against.  Less people to compete with but I was aware of the travel path and linkages, where to collect followers and so on.  I opted not to build a Lumber Mill this time, and rather focus my resources on something other than missions.  Collecting treasures on each map and killing rares, so far, has kept me fairly well topped up.  I’ll worry about missions later.

Shadowmoon went by in a flash.  I think the quest flow (and the zone layout) is the best of the entire expansion here.  There are minimal walls and tunnels, so movement works pretty well.  Gorgrond came after and I have to say, I really do not like this zone.  I headed south (as I took the lumber yard) to run through all the quests and followers (Tormorkk and Blook are south).  It’s a pain to move around this zone, but it’s over with.  Interestingly, I’m now 96 due to rested experience and those area-mission-quests that I decided to pay attention to – enough that I’ve unlocked Spires and Talador at the same time.

Hurdles

That said, the actual leveling process hasn’t been uneventful.  The start of Tanaan and SMV was harder than previous.  Even though my Rogue wears leather like my monk and druid, his ilvl was quite a bit lower.  I think I died more in the first hour than I did TOTAL with my druid.  I changed a few things, in particular glyphs, to make the process easier.  Recuperate continues after a kill, S&D auto-refreshes as well.  I also started to focus on stuns a bit more, like in the old days.  That made things easier.  Upgrades through SMV were enough to get me back on track for decent damage and Gorgrond went by with little fuss.

I really like the rogue.  The playstyle is very aggressive and it always feels like you’re doing something, rather than waiting for something to do.  Druid cats feel like molasses.  Monks feel like slow bears due to the way their Energy works.  Rogues have been close to GCD locked for years and it’s a lot of fun.  My main issue with them remains though.  They have very little self-healing (it’s a weak HoT that drastically reduces DPS) though a few survivability options to counter known damage.  To contrast, the monk self-heal is part of the DPS rotation and druids are pretty similar.  This makes soloing at level quite challenging.  The lack of additional roles is also a bugger.  I mean, I understand that it’s hard to heal with poisoned daggers but every other game has a rogue tank.

Every expansion my rogue gets leveled up and then parked.  I’m sure it’ll be the same thing here but when he does get off the bench, he’s quite fast at getting the job done.  Works for me.

First off, I’ve been sick for what amounts to a month with a chest cold.  Turns out it was bronchitis and even with anti-biotics, things don’t seem to be improving much.  It’s worse when I talk and since my job is mostly talking, I’ve taken a few days off work.  Lungs are on fire after a coughing fit and woo, is that not fun. Hope this clears up before the holidays.

Leveling Without

Sort of stemming from Murf’s post, though predating it somewhat, I wanted to test the limits of the WoD garrison mechanics.  The requirements for this are a level 3 Barracks (for the 25 follower cap), level 3 Salvage Yard (for the large crates), a level 2 Dwarven Bunker (for follower items), and a level 2 Inn (for the headhunter for more followers).

Two particular tests mind you.  My Monk hit 100 the long way, capping off in Nagrand.  My Druid took the side road, hitting 100 in Spires but heavily supported through Character Experience missions.  100 is the bare minimum to do run the experiment, since you need a level 3 Garrison.

Ok, so that aside, here’s the details.

• Ensure an even spread of skills across all followers
• Have at least 1 follower with a scavenger trait (triples garrison resources)
• Avoid any tradeskills (replace with the Headhunter in the Inn)
• Avoid any bodyguards
  • Exception here is Leorajh.  Max him up so you can use the garrison table anywhere.
• Load up the bunker on orders, to get follower gear
• Run all level 100 missions.  They give a large crate.
• Upgrade followers with your items, focusing on getting 3 to 615, then 3 to 630 and then 3 to 645.

After that is set up, then you need only run every mission that has player gear.  They stick around for a while, so only run them with your best followers.

Here’s the result on my monk after a few weeks.  If you see an Agility weapon, then it hasn’t updated to my healing spec.  I’m at ilvl632 right now and I’ve never stepped into a heroic dungeon or a raid.

My druid only hit 100 last night but here’s his workup so far.

So far, the only piece of gear I haven’t got from missions is rings and off-hand items.  Everything else can come from there.

It’s an interesting experiment to see how far a character can go.  I wouldn’t say it trivializes the rest of the content, given that you’d likely be better off just running dungeons.  It does however, remove the social aspect of the gearing treadmill which I’m not a super fan of for the genre.  We’ll see where this ends up.

I want to talk a bit about proving grounds, or rather the gating mechanic that some games use for top-tier combat.  There are a few examples around but I think most would agree the shining example of this mechanic is TSW’s guardian fight.

The main purpose is to ensure that a player understands all the mechanics and how they interact with each other.  If you have an interrupt ability, then it should be something you know how to use.  Defensive and offensive cooldowns should be a part of it.  Realizing that numbers, or the power curve, can allow you to ignore certain mechanics but the top level challenge should actually be challenging.

TSW’s deck format ensures that people have to slot the appropriate skills to get through an event and doesn’t put in major barriers.  Everyone has access to all skills, so there’s really no excuse.  When everyone has the tools, then you can have a single bar for people to reach.  Or rather 3, tank, DPS and heal.

WoW’s proving grounds are a bit like this but there’s a considerable gap in ability sets between the various classes.  Sure, they all have an interrupt but the mechanics are different.  Rogues use poison, warlocks are DoTs, DKs are offensive blasts and so on.  Some focus on AE, some focus on ramp up damage.   And that’s just DPS.

Healers and tanks are a completely different boat.  Some healers are really only able to heal tanks, others are on AE.  Some tanks are sponges, some are ninjas.  Some cooldowns just don’t line up.  And we won’t consider the NPCs that the game gives you to complete these tasks as some suffer from, uh, missing a few cards in the deck if you catch my drift.

Then there’s the fact that proving grounds were built for MoP and that combat has changed a bit for WoD.  Situational awareness is more important.  Target swapping happens a lot.  Massive damage spikes are gone.  Proving grounds were also a mid-expansion addition, so the power curve was all over the place.  WoD has people coming in at very similar ilevels.

While asking for silver for roles is a good idea, the actual value of that silver is debateable.  Silver DPS doesn’t need any interrupts, which I find strange.  It doesn’t require any burst.  It does require some movement to avoid a slow-moving ball of amber and to stand behind shielded enemies.  The actual DPS check is hard if you’re not an AE focused class, mind you.  Healers should be required to dispel, not heal through it.  Tanks, well, even solid play isn’t a super solution for so-so AI.

I’m not saying proving grounds are the be-all and end-all.  I am saying that if that’s the only baseline for entry into heroics, and all 5 people barely got to that point, you’re going to have a bad time.  In their current state there’s still a fair amount of tweaking necessary to accurately reflect a role’s requirements and the actual combat mechanics in WoD.  There’s a ton of potential here.