Ninja Gaiden. The game has been sitting in my xbox inventory collecting dust for years. I literally hadn't popped it in in well over a year. But, I had some free time this weekend, taking some time off from wow, and sat down and finally beat it. And, I have come to the shining conclusion, that even after all this time, that game is still fricking hard.
I spent the better part of my weekend banging my head against one of the most difficult games in recent memory. But, something I noticed about it, is that there were really only a couple of diffucult boss fights. Most of the difficulties I encountered were not in the bosses themselves, but in the plethora of baddies between the bosses. And, if I happened to die, the amount of the game I had to
replay. There's nothing more annoying than spending 20 minutes to get to a boss, die, then having to do it all over again. But I digress, some of it reminded me a lot of wow. Most of the boss fights were simply, avoid this, press a few buttons. Rinse, repeat. The only real difference was, that I was the tank, healer, and dps at the same time.
It made me think a little. What if tanks, had to dodge manually, and block manually? What kind of difference would that make to the game? Say, each of the tanks had a block button, and a dodge button, obviously on some sort of cooldown, would it make the game too complicated? Perhaps with 25 people all standing in the same spot, but I do kind of like the idea of the gameplay. Blizzard has been saying lately that they want to put a tanks survival more in the hands of the tank, and well, there's a way to do it. I doubt it would work, but it is fun to think about. I have a warrior tank myself, mainly because I like to press charge and thuderclap, but it would be nice if I had a little more control of the damage I took.
It also got me thinking a little bit about healing. While things are definitely more challenging now than they were in wrath, most of the healing challenge come from high damage, low throughput heals, and a limited resource. This, while contending with boss mechanics. It would be nice to get away from the more formulaic method of repairing damage that we've endured for quite some time. I'm not saying we have a healing rotation, but as healers, we deal with damage types with pretty much the same spells in nearly every instance. Big group wide damage, prayer of healing followed up by circle of healing. Non group wide aoe damage, circle of healing, and a couple renews usually do the trick. What I'm saying here is, that once you get the jist of what to do, it's basically just situationally applied based on how full the colored squares are in our box full of boxes.
What I'd really love to see mixed into this, are things like healing combos. Ninja Gaiden has a myriad of different combinations of moves, tailored to different situations and button combos. I want more things like serendipity. But I want more than that too. I want healing combos. Casting 3 rejuv's in a row increases the healing of the next wild growth, or increases the healing cap/radius/healing done of swiftmend. Casting holy word: sanctuary increases the number of targets affected by your next circle of healing. Casting prayer of healing, followed by circle of healing, or renew, or any other spell, increases the healing of another spell. I just want more variety in healing. And to be rewarded for successfully completing healing combinations. Maybe it'll never work, or would make healing too difficult to balance. But I think it sure would be a lot of fun.
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