TOV All About Rankless Buffs

[fendaann]

Dev post in Beta...

All About Rankless Buffs

Our decision to make spell buffs rankless is probably the biggest functional change we're making to spells for this expansion, so I wanted to take the time to post information about why we made the change, the decision making behind what we changed and didn't change, and to get some feedback to see if we missed anything.

What's happening?
Starting in ToV, we're making all long term player buffs have just one rank. This rank is as effective as rank III would have been, and will continue to get upgrades as though there are multiple ranks in the future -- just all in one step.

All of these spells will be available on vendors along with all the rest of the rank I spells, which means that as soon as you reach the level you're able to cast them, you can use the best buffs that are available in the expansion.

Since rank II and III of these spells will no longer exist, the rank II and III runes that grant the spells will have fewer spells to give out. It doesn't appear that any class will drop below 5 needed runes per level due to this, so hopefully it just means there's a little bit less need for buffing classes to spend that first rune on buffs every time (or get yelled at for NOT spending their first rune on buffs).

Why?
Ever since we added spell ranks back in The Serpent's Spine, there's been a great deal of conflict around buffs. If you're a grouping cleric and someone joins your group with raid buffs on them, you just can't do anything for them until those buffs wear off. There's a long period after new spells are available where people have a mix of levels and buff ranks, and it gets really confusing about who can land what on whom.

For the first time in the spell line's existence, we don't have to allow the cleric spell haste buff to stack with older versions since there's no longer a point where you would get more benefit from rank III of the old buff than rank I of the new buff.

Finally, and selfishly, the interaction between cleric, druid, paladin, and ranger HP buffs was just not fun, for players or developers. Getting stacking to work correctly for all the ranks of those four spell lines regularly took more time than it takes to make spell upgrades for an entire class. Reducing the scope of the problem to 4 spells rather than 16 is a huge help.

Why didn't you just remove all ranks from everything?
We still believe that spell ranks in general are a good reward in personal power for conquering group and raid content, so we limited this initiative to just the things that caused the most conflict.

By limiting the number of spells that are rankless, we keep nearly everything we like about having ranked spells (further opportunities for character growth). If we were to expand the scope of things that can be rankless to the point where some caster classes need fewer runes per level, that would be too far.

Why did X become rankless? Why didn't Y?
Here's our heuristic for making buffs rankless:
Is the spell beneficial?
Is it meant for players (not only pets)?
Does the spell last an hour or more?
Does the spell target other players (Targeted Other or Group)?
Does the spell NOT have limited counters or cumulative caps?
The first check is pretty obvious. This is a buff-focused initiative. The second check is what excludes pet buffs like Burnout and odd effects like pacification. These are mainly personal power and we still feel that personal power is a good driver for seeking loot. The third check is where we lose stuff like Savage Growth, HoTs, and bard songs. The fourth check is where we lose self buffs -- again going back to personal power. The fifth check is where we lose runes, proc buffs, limited-use high-power damage shields, and other effects where you need the buffing class to be present and active.

What should we be testing? come to Beta and test.
In particular we want to make sure that Unity-style combination buffs still function correctly, AA, worn, and buff focuses function correctly, and that we don't introduce more complexity in our effort to reduce it. I also want to make sure that any combination buff that now only casts rankless effects has been made rankless itself. Please use this thread to ask questions, report bugs and problems that you find, or let us know if you have found other buffs that meet the above criteria but aren't rankless.
Time is of the essence here. Once I begin making the reward sets for ranks II and III, it will be time-prohibitive to change any more spells.