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    World of Warcraft Tanking Tuesday - Your Weekly Tanking Thread

    October 20, 2020

    World of Warcraft Tanking Tuesday - Your Weekly Tanking Thread

    Tanking Tuesday - Your Weekly Tanking Thread

    Posted: 20 Oct 2020 02:37 AM PDT

    Welcome to Tanking Tuesday, your weekly thread for everything related to standing in front of mobs and saying "HIT ME" and taking it like a champ. There is class specific advice below, but you can also post general questions that you have pertaining to tanking of any kind.

    Check out pins within the Class Discords (Retail) or the Class Discords (Classic) for good, vetted information.

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    When your guildies start coming back for Shadowlands

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 08:17 AM PDT

    tried to make frost thorn to make my home feel more like northrend

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 08:54 PM PDT

    Me and my Friends are Ready to GO!

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 01:28 PM PDT

    Leveling your HoA can lower the given stats

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 09:28 PM PDT

    Hey Blizz, if you're going to abandon Archaeology during Shadowlands that is fine but can you at least replace the Explorer racial for Dwarfs? I feel like anything would be more useful in an expansion where Archaeology has been cut.

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 09:23 PM PDT

    The Chromie leveling system of "level through whichever expansion you want" is the best thing to happen to WoW in a very long time.

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 06:33 AM PDT

    Hollow's End is getting more and more weird each year

    Posted: 20 Oct 2020 12:07 AM PDT

    With the new level squish, Heirlooms are less rewarding. As an adjustment, I think heirlooms should just have their levels removed.

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 05:57 PM PDT

    BEFORE YOU SHUT ME DOWN INSTANTLY AND CALL ME A DUMB DUMB FOR MY STUPID HORRENDOUS IDEA, HEAR ME OUT.

    Ive been playing this game since Wotlk. Anyone who played back before 2012 era will remember when heirlooms were just a thing you had to carry in your inventory manually. Then there was that nice QOL update which made them part of your "collection"

    That update was highly welcomed, and with it, they were separated into tiers, relevant to each expansion. If you wanted that last tier up to current level stuff, you had to pay the extra amount to upgrade them. That is no longer the case, really.

    With the removal of the bonus XP, (which i think is great personally, im really enjoying the new leveling experience!) the main function of these is to provide scaling stats with a small QOL set bonus as long as the item's required level is met, based on the upgrade. (Rank 1 items do not provide the benefit to characters over lvl 30)

    Quite honestly, its not worth paying 7500g for the final level of a weapon upgrade from 45 to 50.

    In lieu of this, if the levels or scaling was to be simply flattened back into 1 level of scaling as they once were, they would provide scaling stats from level 1-50. I think taking them out of the last 10 levels for the experience of shadowlands gear is appropriate, but Ill leave that thought to Blizzard. (And you guys, i suppose)

    TLDR: No more heirlooms Level 1/4, simply make them required level 1-50.

    submitted by /u/havikryan
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    A drawing I made with pencil of Orgrim Doomhammer. ⚔️

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 02:04 PM PDT

    Nightborne by TamikaProud

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 11:17 AM PDT

    Stormheim with those autumn vibes

    Posted: 20 Oct 2020 12:51 AM PDT

    BFA / Shadowlands DX11 vs DX12 Performance Analysis

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 10:30 PM PDT

    A long time ago, I wrote this rudimentary benchmark analysis between the then newly implemented DX12 API for WoW, vs the DX11 implementation that WoW was running on at the time (late Legion, 2018). https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/940q0s/directx_11_vs_12_nvidia_performance_tested/

    Recently, a fellow Redditor sent me a PM asking if the findings still hold true a full expansion later. I was curious as I hoped that during my time away from BFA if the engine went through any further improvements to increase performance in DX12. WoW, like all MMOs, will be primarily CPU bottlenecked due to the long view distances and the frequently packed cities, player spells, outdoor elements like rocks, trees etc. The CPU is drawcall bottlenecked to heck and back, and DX12, being a much lower level API than DX11 was supposed to alleviate the concern and increase performance for multi core CPUs.

    End result? Kinda the same as before TBH, but I got new graphs now! I also got a system upgrade from an Intel i5-3570k to a Ryzen 7 3700x and to 32GB of 3200MHz RAM, so that made a huge difference in CPU performance for me. Still on my trusty GTX 1070 tho, cos apparently it's easier to find a good wife than it is to find a 3080 in stock anywhere....

    So here we go! https://imgur.com/a/VC3anjE

    Methodology

    Following the same ideas as my previous thread, I decided a Flight Path flyby would be the most consistent way to perform a benchmark. It is infinitely reproducible, and very little can change from one run to another, producing reliable results.

    On CPU affinity, WoW by default forces itself to the first 4 threads of your CPU. I have used ProcessLasso to automatically assign WoW full 8 CPU threads on my 8 core 16 thread CPU to eliminate any "optimizations" Blizzard may have implemented to make it run properly on lower end hardware. There are resources out there that have tested that WoW can perform slightly better with 6 threads assigned to it, so I went one step further and just dedicated 8 to WoW.

    • Fly from Isle of Fangs in Zuldazar to Tortaka Refuge in Vol'dun

    • Fly from Isle of Fangs in Zuldazar to Forlorn Ruins in Nazmir

    Each of these runs were done in DX12 first, with an API switch to DX11 with a full client exit and restart to eliminate any issues. Benchmark starts the moment I click on the flight path, with a 2 minute buffer after I finished loading into the game to let any and all addons settle down so I don't introduce add-on related outlier data.

    As you can see from the album link above, DX11 still offers SLIGHTLY higher maximum FPS, but introduces a lot of stuttering due to the single threaded nature of the implementation. DX12 offers a tiny bit lower maximum FPS but DOUBLES the 0.1% lows of DX11, offering a much more consistent time through WoW. There's almost no hitching, no frame drops or stutter of any kind.

    The last image is a comparison in frametimes for all 4 benchmarking runs I did. As is clearly visible, the Red and Blue lines exhibit much higher frametimes across the board, spiking regularly and spiking hard from start to finish. This in terms of gameplay experience results in a split second "lag/hitch" as you move through the world.

    Conclusion :

    DX12 more better for almost any and all situations. Switch to it if you can, but only if your GPU is at least a Nvidia 10 Series or newer, or an AMD Radeon RX 400 series or newer. These were IIRC the first generations of GPUs that supported DX12.

    EDIT : Before anyone asks, I used CapFrameX to record and analyze the data you see here. They can be found here https://twitter.com/CapFrameX

    submitted by /u/samfishersam
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    The shadowlands portal plinth makes for a great screenshot backdrop

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 03:50 PM PDT

    Arguably one of the best things about pre patch

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 10:09 AM PDT

    At long last... The reason I initially got back into WoW is complete

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 03:47 PM PDT

    Using Chromie time to appreciate zones I never really got the chance to play through properly before, here's a screenshot from Talador.

    Posted: 20 Oct 2020 01:31 AM PDT

    this guy makin a statement rn with this sexy midriff

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 07:20 PM PDT

    Ranger General Lireesa Windrunner made by me

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 06:01 PM PDT

    As far as I know, I’m the first level 50 warrior without a spec gained from leveling.

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 08:16 PM PDT

    Hmm....Maybe I misread the toolt--wait a minute.

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 06:15 PM PDT

    This tinker animation...

    Posted: 20 Oct 2020 01:45 AM PDT

    [SURVEY RESULTS] Player Preferences in World of Warcraft Game Design

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 05:59 AM PDT

    Hi everyone!

    Remember me? No? Well, I can't blame you. But you may remember this thread.

    If you do, you will find the results of that research project in this thread. If you don't, allow me to explain what this is about.

    My name is Dennis and at the time of conducting that study I was a student in the course Digital Journalism and Media at the Technische Hochschule Köln in Cologne, Germany.

    As part of my bachelor's thesis, I designed and conducted a study to measure how much players enjoyed the different versions of World of Warcraft available based on different aspects of the game. To do that I used a two part survey. The first part was designed by me and asked participants about which version of the game they most prefer for a given aspect of the game. The measured aspects are PvE, PvP, Leveling, World, Content, Character Progression, Class, and Overall Favorite and were identified based on an analysis of the game's development history. Based on patch notes and the changes introduced by expansions, these aspects were chosen as parts of the game that differ significantly between versions. In addition, participants were able to leave comments to explain their responses in more detail. The second part was an implementation of Nick Yee's Empirical Model of Player Motivation. This questionnaire allows for the creation of a "motivation profile" based on the replies given by a participant. In short, the results of this part told me why you like to play online games like World of Warcraft. For more information on Nick Yee's work, visit the Quantic Foundry website.

    The goal of this thesis was to collect the data necessary to draw potential conclusions for MMORPG game design. To achieve that, the survey measured if there is a statistically relevant correlation between a player's favorite version of the game for a given aspect and their motivation profile.

    Now, in this thread, I want to briefly present some general results as well as what are probably the most important insights. If you want to read the full thesis you can do so here. I'm currently still looking into how to best make the data set I worked with publicly available so others may work with the data as well. If you're interested in looking at the data I worked with you can message me on Reddit about it and we will figure something out.

    General

    First, some general data about the study. The survey was open for participation for nine days and during this period, 3.011 impressions occurred and 2.044 completed surveys were returned. Less than one percent of the data had to be pruned during the subsequent cleaning of the data. The resulting data set consisted of 2.032 entries. The gender distribution among participants was as follows.

    Gender Distribution

    Frequency Percent
    Male 1.803 88.7%
    Female 209 10.3%
    Other 20 1.0%
    Total 2.032 100%

    ​

    Versions Played\*

    Responses Percent of Cases
    World of Warcraft 1087 53.4%
    The Burning Crusade 1370 67.4%
    Wrath of the Lich King 1632 80.2%
    Cataclysm 1576 77.5%
    Mists of Pandaria 1566 77.0%
    Warlords of Draenor 1645 80.9%
    Legion 1870 91.9%
    Battle for Azeroth 1969 96.8%
    World of Warcraft Classic 1396 68.6%

    ​

    Version Profiles

    Based on the collected qualitative and quantitative data, version profiles were created for every version of the game. Due to the length of this section, I will only cover the most important aspects in this thread. More detailed versions of these profiles can be found in the full thesis.

    First, lets take a look at the general distribution of participant choices across the measured aspects.

    Version Choice Across Aspects

    PvE PvP Leveling World Content Char. Prog. Class Favorite
    WoW 2.8% 8.9% 10.3% 4.2% 9.9% 1.8% 3.4%
    TBC 8.9% 14.1% 4.5% 6.9% 9.5% 5.5% 9.5%
    WotLK 27.4% 23.7% 17.2% 9.2% 23.1% 19.6% 28.8%
    Cata 4.7% 9.9% 4.9% 1.9% 5.0% 6.0% 3.7%
    MoP 12.2% 24.0% 19.1% 15.2% 11.0% 24.5% 17.3%
    WoD 3.4% 6.7% 19.9% 1.8% 1.9% 7.9% 1.1%
    Legion 34.4% 7.4% 17.8% 50.7% 35.1% 27.8% 32.4%
    BfA 6.2% 5.4% 6.2% 10.2% 4.4% 6.9% 3.8%

    Allow me to explain the data in the table above. What you're seeing here are the quantitative results of the first part of the survey. From this we can identify a favorite version among participants for each measured aspect. As the data shows, the Legion expansion was identified as the favorite version of the Reddit community in every aspect except PvP and Leveling. Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor won out in those categories, respectively. You might also notice that the data doesn't add up to 100% for every category. This is due to a "No Opinion" option that is not included in the results displayed above. Most notably, there was a large number of "No Opinion" responses for the PvP category. Comments indicate that participants were not interested in PvP or do not PvP enough to feel that they can accurately give an opinion.

    Over the course of the survey, 4.178 comments in total were received. Based on an analysis of this qualitative data, more nuanced, written version profiles were created. As they would go beyond the scope of this post, you can find these profiles in the full thesis in the link above.

    Hypothesis Testing

    Before I go about the hypothesis testing for the survey, some background on the Empirical Model of Player Motivation is required. This model was developed by Nick Yee and verified and developed using a factor analytic approach. To date, the model has been refined and adjusted based on data gathered from over 400.000 participants and as such is one of the most substantiated models available for this purpose.

    In this model, player motivation is measured in ten components distributed across the three main components of Achievement, Social and Immersion. Using the results from this part of the survey, I could distribute participants into these three categories based on their test results. The criteria used for the classification was the upper quartile, the top 25% of a component. What this means is that if you scored in the top 25% of the achievement component, your data set was marked as an achiever. If you scored in the top 25% of the social component, your data set was marked as a socializer and so on.

    By applying a so called chi-square test, the statistical significance of a correlation can be measured. Following that, Phi and Cramer's V tests measured the effect size. What this means is that first, it was tested if a statistically significant relation exists at all. If it did, it was measured how strong it was.

    The result of these tests was that there is a statistically significant correlation of small to moderate size between a player's motivation profile and their preference in MMORPG design.

    This means that the reasons why you play online games have an influence on which kind of design you respond to or: Why you play affects what you think is fun.

    I can only assume why the effect size is small to moderate, but my theory is that since MMORPGs are designed to appeal to all of these components, the mileage between different versions doesn't vary enough to cause strong differences in the composition of the playerbase. Again, covering this entire section goes past the scope of this thread. More details can be found in the full thesis.

    Conclusion

    Lastly, I want to cover the game design conclusions that were drawn from the data. For this, the results were once again split based on the measured aspects. For this thread, I will briefly cover each category. More detailed descriptions can again be found in the full thesis.

    PvE

    • Players prefer design that gives them a feeling of agency
    • The structure of progression systems should be as transparent as possible
    • The game should offer a wide variety of content for solo and group-based activities as well as casual and hardcore players

    PvP

    • Again, players prefer a feeling of agency in obtaining PvP items
    • PvP vendors were cited as an efficient means of achieving this
    • The most favored expansions in this category were praised for their class balance and the large toolkits available to classes

    Leveling

    • Players enjoy zones with strong themes and a focus on storytelling
    • Players prefer being flexible in how they progress through the zones of an expansion
    • Players also praised the more involved questing experience of later expansions
    • Highly competitive players prefer to be able to shorten or bypass the leveling experience

    World Content

    • The world quest system was often cited as keeping the open world interesting and rewarding
    • Legion especially was praised for its breadth of world content

    Character Progression

    • Players enjoy progression systems that are easy to understand and give them a feeling of control
    • Players feel that later versions of the game introduced disproportionate amounts of RNG into their progression systems
    • Players prefer a variety of paths for progression
    • Legion's legendary and artifact weapon systems were praised as meaningful ways of character progression

    Class Design

    • In the most favored versions, players experienced their classes as well tuned with large toolkits
    • This gave players a feeling of being able to make an impact as well as a high skill ceiling

    What took you so long?

    Some of you might wonder why it took over four months for me to come back with the results. After I had conducted the study, I started analyzing the data and writing my thesis. The deadline for handing it in was at the start of August. Follwing that, my university had a period of up to eight weeks to evaluate and grade it, which they made complete use of. I received the results a few weeks ago and past that, I had to clear up some questions about publishing this.

    A Word of Caution

    As always with research, please take these results with a grain of salt. This was the first time in my life that I designed an instrument for research as well as the first time in my life that I handled statistical data and analysis to this degree. As part of the feedback given by my supervisors, I was told that my methodology is thin in places, limiting the plausibility of the resulting data.

    In addition, a bias in the analyzed sample cannot be ruled out. The overwhelming majority of participants came from this Subreddit. What this means is that I predominantly measured the attitudes of a particular type of player and also that I wasn't able to measure the attitudes of players that no longer play the game, among other things. Once again, this is detailed in more depth in the full thesis.

    A Word of Gratitude

    That being said, let me once again thank you all for your participation! I had a lot of fun doing this and the response I received was bigger than I ever could've dreamed of. Over two thousand completed surveys was a great set of data to work with and I believe that it generated truly interesting results. So once again, thank you to everyone who participated and helped to make this what it is.

    So what do you think about this? Please let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear your thoughts! If you have any questions leave them in the comments and I will try my best to answer them.

    Edit: Thank you for the awards!

    *Edit2: Thank you all for the comments and the good discussions! As it was requested by a number of people I have included the data of which versions participants have played in the "Versions Played" table. This data was gathered using a multiple choice question in which participants could select all the versions of the game they have played.

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    I would play a Tauren Shaman if they would just give them HD totems.

    Posted: 19 Oct 2020 10:47 PM PDT
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