Some upcoming changes (april 2014 classleads)

Garryn

As has become traditional over the years, I often add some changes of my own to the ongoing classlead rounds. This one's no exception, and here are the alterations I'm planning to include - as always, feedback is very much encouraged.

• I'll be removing the concept of seraph/ouroboros energy. The professions already have similar "power bars" in Devotion, Necromancy, and Kanai, keeping yet another of those feels redundant. There isn't anything significant enough in Fayth/Malignosis to warrant the mechanics, so we'll just get rid of it.
• One more for Devotion and Necromancy - I'll be changing up how devotion and essence works - instead of a big pool that takes a long time to replenish, they'll change into a much smaller and more dynamic resource that is easier to both use up and replenish, to provide some opportunity costs for the included effects. Don't expect anything super-amazing here - these are secondary/support skills, after all.
• Limb damage. I'm considering adding a 15s cooldown to all the feint attacks and providing a channeled skill to heal limb damage (possibly with some alterations as per classlead 47). This is rather tentative, thoughts are quite welcome
• Finally, mages. I think I'm going to go ahead and change the attunement system to a mechanic similar to the Summoner taint, with corresponding changes to effects, usage, and so on. I'm not entirely keen on this (as the beta participants surely know), as we have several classes using this approach already, but the attunements aren't really working as well as I had hoped they would.

Okay, there you have it, comment away! I'll announce this in the game later on too, once I'm sure that we'll be doing these.

Sarrius

It took a year, but moving to an 'arcane power' or 'elemental power' mechanic is way better than current attunement. I love it.

Can we also maybe see some more Bard tweaks? The resonance system, Thespia, and Artistry need some more to tie them together. While resonance is a HUGE step forward, Bard is still sort of clunksville.

Any chance of a classlead beta this round?

Khizan

While you are looking at other alternative resources, could you possibly look at removing Shadowbinding haze, as well?

Once you've been a defiler for a bit and had time to fill your shadowgear, haze ceases to be a consideration because the shadowveils still continue to generate and store shadowgems. At this point, haze is generally not a thing you ever consider, other than to occasionally stop to siphon more haze out of the veils.

The first few days as a Defiler, though, haze is astoundingly punishing. After learning defiler to tri-trans, I was unable to even put up my class defenses because I didn't have enough haze to do so. I wasn't even able to practice/test my new abilities, because I didn't have the haze to do so and I wasn't willing to spend the little bit of haze I generated to just see what the skills did.

Haze is really quite useless as a resource. You could remove the haze system entirely and established defilers would never notice the change; they have so much of it that haze management is never an issue. The only thing that haze really does is hamstring players who are new to the class.

My suggestion, honestly, would just be to remove it. The idea of "You have fought so much today that you've got to suck for the rest of the day" resources is frustrating and dumb.

Gurn

Another thing: I've been discussing Hunter with a bunch of people, and the problem is that it's very difficult to balance the class with classleads, especially if we don't know what will or won't be rejected. If certain classleads are accepted while others are not, it either makes the class far too powerful or far too nerfed(or too complex/difficult for 95% of the population).

How can this be addressed?

Garryn

Beta - very likely, especially if we do the mage changes

Bard tweaks - possibly, but nothing big in this round.

Haze - possibly, will think on it

Hunter/big reports - it really depends on what you want to propose. As a generic and not-very-helpful answer, include the inter-dependencies in the reports. Generally classlead reports aren't really meant for sweeping changes.

Sarrius

The problem is that there is no platform for sweeping changes, which some classes do need. Bards are a good example. Defilers were a good example. Defilers only got to where they were due to an incredibly extensive classlead beta and a lot of independent reports in one season. That is very very risky.

Some classes need to be brought on to a beta realm with no precise plan and a handful of typical beta people need to help you hammer out their kinks.

Garryn

All in due time! There are many things in need of doing, so we need to schedule bigger profession changes accordingly.

Ahkan

Defilers got where they were because:

-Rushed design. Too many cooks in the kitchen

-An over-nerf that balanced the already badly designed class into the stone age

-Going native during the classleads and deviating from the stated classlead that was accepted

-Directly controverting the mechanic that made the whole shebang balanced.

I've been a defiler through the iterations of awesome --> terrible --> decent -->omgwtf. I'm also going to answer the question of how do you fight a defiler 1v1. 

"The only winning move is to not play."

If you can't kill me in 30s (you can't) you will die terribly to the tune of 100% of your health in one shot.

The bellow nerf was necessary. It was a terribly designed skill undeaf->sensitive-> added modifier for sensitive. The nerf was ham handed and terrible and destroyed the class. The entropy mechanic was terrible and made more than 1 defiler unnecessary and punished success at accidentally sticking toxins  a bad thing. The new entropy system was not implemented to spec (because the person putting it in didn't play the class) and the result is an on-hit mechanic that is favored by speedspeedspeedspeed (a recurring theme in Imperian.) You cannot stop me from generating entropy, especially when I'm in +1/+2 balance.

The second problem is that the end of the entropy mechanic was equally terrible. Seeds had 3 outcomes, low/medium/high which was Seed/no seed but damage/seed and damage. This de-incentivized my hitting. I couldn't get high on anyone tanky, but I'd always land in the middle. The middle was ****. I don't want damage, I wanted a god damn seed. This is why Azefel shot people with pistols. You didn't want to ravage because it would screw you up. The misinterpreted classlead was intended to fix this by standardizing entropy regen and tying it something else that wasn't cure-time/afflictions. Secondary to that, the thresholds were out of whack. Now the thresholds are un-whack but the damage thresholds are often unreachable...and beaten out by....

Splintered seeds! The classlead 'asked' for more variety and depth to the profession, a manner in which to keep affliction/entropy damage churning while playing to the seed/2 seed end game. Well, we have depth and versatility that loads 6 splintered seeds into your cryfacing profession and we detonate them all at once. It's now a time bomb. It would be balanced if you could only generated splintered seeds via ravaging, but my gimp arm (that khizan hates) controverts that by making a balanced 3 seeds into 6 seeds, which is not. The idea was branch would be a prone, limb break, anything but what it is now (misinterpreted class lead disagreement 3). In a moment of we told you so, Azefel and I said this was craycray in the beta. Then Azefel captain exploited it and I road on his coat-tails and made the flavor's of the month cry when they failed to figure it out and we did.

Defiler needs another overhaul, not some  band-aid like "remove whirl" because then you're really hamstringing the class because you're sacrificing all of your entropy to make splintered seeds and not focussing on making real seeds for things like bellow and implantation. You put a fork in the entropy train the pretty much removes those skills as viable end-game kill strategies (likely because of 0% experience in class). It's a time bomb that is 10x worse than limb damage. Tbh, I'd prefer it be a limb heavy class because of treant smash and holy crap flail. You're going to cry about this because of 'omg vivisect' but this hasn't stopped anyone from bear quarter, bbt, incendiary, brainmelt, nairat/loshre/attunement, transfix-spam, enlightenment tag-teams, totem-tag teams. It needs to be something other than time-bomb especiale or I either have the damage to kill you or don't.

As an aside, when you're approaching defiler, you need to listen to the people who play the class, not the people who get rolled by it. There's a huge flaw in the classlead system that is pretty much back end whining. Instead of filing a classlead, you get into the beta and piss and moan about something you personally don't like with the hopes of bypassing logical rebuttals.

Gurn

Garryn said:

Hunter/big reports - Generally classlead reports aren't really meant for sweeping changes.

Absolutely true. However, because Hunter literally revolves around a single skill, Trigger, it makes it extraordinarily difficult to change/balance correctly. If a Hunter does not use Trigger, a Hunter cannot afflict, brainmelt, or rupture at all.


This means that a slight change to Trigger in one direction needs a counterbalance in another-- If Triggers are reduced down to 1 or only allowed for shields or whatever weird thing happens, there needs to be a counterbalance in another place, changing the function of poisonmind or breath weapons or whatever(before anyone freaks out, no, these are nowhere near the changes we've been discussing-- They're bad examples on purpose). 

Since only a certain amount of classleads can be submitted, there comes a problem. Either I do a ton of 'linked reports' where I use up my allotment of classleads and convince others to do so as well, or try and cram dual-solutions into every classlead I make. Neither is ideal.

This might be a problem that's more unique to Hunter, as both kill methods in both primary fighting skills rely on Trigger. 

Ahkan

Trigger is a bad mechanic.

"I am on fire. Let me put it out with this can of gasoline."

Iniar

So is instability but I don't play Hunter so w/e

Ahkan

Addressing the ‘defiler dilemma’ here. I really just want to put Defiler into context of why this skillset is a **** show. Splintered seeds add variety to the class but they're also fundamentally flawed within the context of the rest of the skillset. The current build setup for Defiler promotes an excess of ‘time bomb’ damage given a specific time frame within the fight. There is a need to balance this out across the full range of the skills available to the class, not through simply removing the utility of a single part. The current mechanic that fuels the class is as follows: Important words to know: Thorn root: From flail. Absorbs entropy damage done to target. Entropy: On hit mechanic (corrosion) that does psychic damage. Also from a few skills. *Entropy is subject to psychic resistance Splintered seed: Created by torment:splinter and desecrate:branch. Used in torment:empower/germinate Demonic seed: used for torment:bellow and kill condition for torment:implantation How defiler works: Ravage hits with a toxin. Thanks to torment:corrosion the defiler does on-hit entropy (psychic) damage that is ‘stored in the root’. Terror takes hold, as a numb sensation overcomes your body. You are afflicted with numbness. Sudden pain washes over you as the torment strikes you. Damage Taken: 23 psychic (raw damage: 31) Terror takes hold, as a numb sensation overcomes your body. You are afflicted with numbness. As the torment strikes you, the thornroot inside you is suffused with strength. That 31 damage that the victim took here is now stored into that root. Now keep applying this entropy damage for every combo. For simplicities sake, we’ll say all entropy is 31. So four ravages will be 31*4=124. That stored damage is then compared to the target’s maximum health. If that health is greater than or equal to 10% of their max health, you can then torment:splinter a splintered seed and use it for torment:empower/germinate. This is a ‘fork’ in the road as it were, because that entropy is spent, resetting the total entropy of the thornroot to 0. You cash in (out) the stored entropy for a splintered seed. (this becomes important later). The old mechanic for defiler was you hit someone continuously for 30s and then the system checked to see how much entropy damage you did at the end of 30s. Then, depending on how that damage related to the target’s max health, it decided one of three outcomes which were/are: The old mechanic for demonic seeds was: <20% seed 20 < e < 25 explode for damage stored > 25% seed + explode for damage stored Seed = bellow bait which functions as the finisher. The new mechanic for demonic seeds are: < 20% nothing <25% explode for damage stored >25% seed + explode for damage stored Both of these systems are in play right now and work against each other. You just don’t know it because splintered seeds are significantly more useful for secured kills than bellow. Splintered seeds interfere with pushing a 'seed' strategy. If we're going to push for splintered seeds you're going to shut the door on using bellow as a finisher. In the current mechanic this is 100% ok. When you start nerfing things (starting with whirl) you're going to remove that kill condition of 6 seeds and force it into a much neutered 3 splinters version. They're not going to be enough to pack a punch to drop you and you're missing out on bellow as the finisher because you were forced to use all of your entropy to power the 3 seeds to set them up to be low enough to die to bellow. What you die to is a 30s set up. You pull 2-4 splintered seeds from entropy generation and you can pull 2-3 seeds from desecration:whirl. What this lets a defiler do is something like this, and it’s awful. ravage target with toxin (hopefully strychnine) treant germinate hawthorn (1) treant germinate birch (2) treant germinate elder (3) treant empower blackthorn (4) treant shred whirl tar blackthorn treant germinate blackthorn (5) Under current conditions, the maximum damage delivered in testing was ~713 vs Iroth. This combination can be further elevated through the use of desecration:skin, as this is damage delivered via the treant, which is a target specific modifier. Additionally, given adequate knowledge in the player, they are likely to set up with strychnine, delivering an additional 30% damage. The relevance of this is in that in attempting to rectify whirl (Desecration:Branch), it is important to recognise the greater structure of the class and not remove the overall burst capacity, while mitigating the somewhat outlandish damage able to be generated. The splintered seeds need nerfing, but nerfing them removes the teeth from this class and reverts it back to having issues putting away fights, especially given the overlapping 30s timers. Right now, it's terrible, but it doesn't need to revisit the stone age.
Kudos to Aleutia and Bellentine for being awesome.

Iniar

Importantly, the whirl seeds don't last 30s like the thornroot seeds.

Azefel

It doesn't set entropy to 0, just takes away the amount required (so in fast statpack you can ravage x4 then ravage + splinter x3~, etc)

Iriaen

Garryn said:

As has become traditional over the years, I often add some changes of my own to the ongoing classlead rounds. This one's no exception, and here are the alterations I'm planning to include - as always, feedback is very much encouraged.

• I'll be removing the concept of seraph/ouroboros energy. The professions already have similar "power bars" in Devotion, Necromancy, and Kanai, keeping yet another of those feels redundant. There isn't anything significant enough in Fayth/Malignosis to warrant the mechanics, so we'll just get rid of it.
• One more for Devotion and Necromancy - I'll be changing up how devotion and essence works - instead of a big pool that takes a long time to replenish, they'll change into a much smaller and more dynamic resource that is easier to both use up and replenish, to provide some opportunity costs for the included effects. Don't expect anything super-amazing here - these are secondary/support skills, after all.
• Limb damage. I'm considering adding a 15s cooldown to all the feint attacks and providing a channeled skill to heal limb damage (possibly with some alterations as per classlead 47). This is rather tentative, thoughts are quite welcome
• Finally, mages. I think I'm going to go ahead and change the attunement system to a mechanic similar to the Summoner taint, with corresponding changes to effects, usage, and so on. I'm not entirely keen on this (as the beta participants surely know), as we have several classes using this approach already, but the attunements aren't really working as well as I had hoped they would.

Okay, there you have it, comment away! I'll announce this in the game later on too, once I'm sure that we'll be doing these.

1.  One of the original opportunity cost mechanics was smite+seraph fortify or the less used "hit the ouroboros, make them fortify" strategy.  You might want to ask yourself how things reached a point where there is no reason to keep an energy mechanic that used to already provide some variety and opportunity costs.

2.  The problem wasn't with how essence and devotion work but that certain "super" skill effects became commonplace, like animation, redemption and destroying devotion rites.

3.  I would suggest no limb-healing skill and instead a longer cooldown on feint, like 30 seconds or longer.

4.  I don't like taint.  I think it's been popular in theory because it's easy to use and number crunch it but in application people aren't fighting because they get to play with the taint system.  Maybe you should simplify attunement by having one attunement for pyroglacia and another for terratheria, each one being cured by herbs that people will actually want to eat.  For example, orphine is essentially at the bottom of the list now that stupidity does almost nothing; nightshade and kelp and bayberry are still popular.  If you really want to mix things up, I would suggest making terratheria attunement cured by applying epidermal to head (which also removes blindness) or by applying restoration to legs (which would make the mage's leg break skills more conditionally useful) and create a dynamic where you can fake attunement curing by applying the wrong salves (I used to bait kai cripple by doing that).

Sarrius

Taint is popular because it is easy to use, easy to learn, and is a clean mechanic that has relatively balanced opportunity costs and counterplay.

Attunement does not have any of those. It is a messy, difficult to understand or utilize system on the surface. In truth, it is actually very easy to use - so easy that there is actually no thought in the system. If you pointlessly mash Soul Calibur style, chances are you will hit the max attunement level and blow somebody away. The only question is if the guy next to you picked Kilik (better buttonmashing cheese) or at least knows how to block ("THAT'S CHEATING!"). The system does not work and provides nothing unique or interesting to the Mage gameplay experience. You never actually feel like you are making any decisions, just mashing to max fire and torching dudes. That is also the same for fighting one - there's no decision making. Chances are unless they are breathtakingly awful, you aren't digging down in to the ooey-gooey center of the attunement underneath tons of spammable, powerful afflictions.

Sarrius

Garryn said:

All in due time! There are many things in need of doing, so we need to schedule bigger profession changes accordingly.

Also, apologies for the double post - but if not now, when? This is a profession we are talking about here. It is a core feature of gameplay for basically anybody using it. They picked it to be a Bard. They picked it because, chances are, they liked what they thought Bards could do. This applies to any profession sorely in need of a 'retool' like what I proposed - if this isn't important enough to address as soon as possible, what is? I hate to sound critical, but I feel few things are more 'relevant' to Imperian than making every profession actual have working, cohesive design. I don't mean to say that combat should be the be all end all of your time spent, but man.. a combined team of coders up there, over the years, ave Bards several impromptu mechanical facelifts and all of them have sort of combined in to something not very attractive or cohesive. Some of these changes even came without beta or any input whatsoever from players.

Classleads are not the platform for this kind of work. What is? When is it? Other classes need this kind of attention too, Bard is just the latest and greatest example.

Iniar

@Iniar‌

1. Wishes he were a Mage

2. Realised how much fun he would have as a Mage

3. Wonders why there aren't many many many many many more Mages - probably because they're squishy like a tomayto.

Also, @Garryn, just curious how were you hoping attunements would pan out? Like, what is the ideal most engaging scenario you could imagine for a Mage v Anything? Cause I can't really see it

E: What if you made attunement curing share the same curing level as other afflictions - that it is not cured last? Would that help?

Khizan

No, that wouldn't really help, it would just make it hilarious in teams when attunement becomes hilariously effective at padding kelp/nightshade stacks.

Menoch

We tried attunement curing at 2 sec bal like reg herb eats in beta iirc, which had the predicted effect.

Iniar

Outside the scope of this classlead, how would you redesign defiler, Ahkan?

What are the things you would want to keep (that make Defiler special)?

Kalon

Iniar said:

@Iniar‌
just curious how were you hoping attunements would pan out? Like, what is the ideal most engaging scenario you could imagine for a Mage v Anything? Cause I can't really see it

E: What if you made attunement curing share the same curing level as other afflictions - that it is not cured last? Would that help?

I suspect the way he wanted the class to pan out is the way I spent weeks trying to use it before Kryss taught me to pick an element and flail. I was trying to push multiple elements at once by using the cure for the afflictions I was giving to signal which elements I should pressure next. Turns out, because attunement is cured more quickly than other affs, if you try to push too many elements your stacks of fodder don't get deep enough and you can be out-healed.

Cassius

@kalon: that isn't entirely true. Azefel had me fully attuned to all 4 elements as an int Mage last month. It took some work/time but he made it happen. Granted, I could have just shielded away his entire decompose though. He did it, that doesn't mean he had to do it to gateway into high damage. Edit: suck it mobile forums.

Ahkan

@Kalon
So, mage. I disagreed with you because mage is off the wall awesome. The biggest thing in your favor (pre this classleads) was that elemental attunements are always at the bottom of their curing tree, outside of randomized curing. You never needed to track the afflictions themselves, just the levels of attunement on the target. It was often better to push 2-3 elements instead of farming 1 element in 1v1, because I'm just going to high-priority fire above other herbs and shut you down. Crosstune is your friend here. This is why Kryss was a one-and-done disruption mage who jumped ship as soon as disrupt spam showing signs of nerf batting. In teams, you stick to 1 or two elements and rock those. Protip: It's not fire. <-- This is why Bellentine is scarier to me than Kryss, Mathiaus, or Seraphyne.

Decompose needed to be nerfed, but I feel that making it a 100% channel skill is a waste of 4,000 earth attunements.

Gurn

The more I talk to people about it, the more I'm convinced that Hunter being literally based around one ability, Trigger, is a really bad idea.

All Ahkan's ranting aside, I'm also extremely saddened when a newbie comes to me, fresh-faced and excited about being a wyvern and can shoot fire and ice and whip people with their tail... And I have to tell them, no, you can't actually do anything to anyone until you learn Trigger in Supremacy.

There is just literally no way Hunter can kill, even at a low level, without Trigger. Autocuring is just too good. This makes Hunter a profession made almost only for people who  tri-trans it.

I know it's a lot to ask, but Hunter could really use a re-design. The themes are awkward too-- Basilisks? Brainmelting? These things don't really fit with the entire "magickal Wild" sort of theme. With basilisk being  Wyvern shapeshifting was cool, and a great step-- However, being that we don't have wyverns anywhere else in the game it also makes it a little weird(I'm told we're not supposed to have dragons, but wyverns don't seem to exist either. Not only that, but we don't really get to use these wyvern abilities in any useful way.


Bloodpoison doesn't seem to fit thematically either. Poisoning blood to kill? If I told someone that this profession poisons blood and ruptures, or overwhelms an opponent to melt their brain... No one would think "powerful nature profession". Instead, they might think, "Psychic assassin" or "infernal torturer" or something.


So, I guess what I'm saying is that Hunter right now is in a bad place. It's pretty powerful, but it's also atrocious for anyone who's not really tri-trans. It also doesn't fit thematically. It's balance is in such a way that everything teeters on a single skill-- A hair this way, a notch that way can either make the profession far too powerful or way too nerfed. There's also an artifact that pretty much says "-2 afflictions to kill", which is mind-boggling pay-to-win. Not only that, it makes it really hard to balance the artifact, or balance the class with the artifact. We go one way or the other, we need to figure out how an artifact that powerful will affect things.

Sarrius

Every class has to basically tri-trans. Look at Wardancer. Outrider. Predator. Defiler. Bard. Mage. Assassin/Renegade. I could go on, man. I cannot name very many budget classes. Knights? You can omit Smithing, I guess?

I agree that the 'house of cards' style is probably not the way to go, and Trigger is a really dumb skill, but I don't think we can afford an actual total mechanical rewrite of Hunters again. The most we could do is a Resonance-level tweak. There's just too many classes that need attention.

On themes.. the themes are that you turn in to a magickal creature of nature. Everything you do, you are emulating or controlling a magickally enhanced aspect of nature. I know it's sort of a muddy concept, but it fits. Everything is in the creative, and your creative end is that you turn in to a huge magickal wyvern and you have a slithering sidekick who happens to have some unsettlingly powerful psychic magick locked away somewhere in his otherwise terrible instincts.

Ahkan

Trigger is a bad mechanic that pretty much drags down the rest of the skillset. I don't know where we stole it from but we probably shouldn't go back there. Talking to Gurn earlier, I'd really revamp trigger and put all trigger effects on the hunter instead of the target and change up some of the trigger activating:

-Hunter health level 75, 50, 25

-Target health level, 66, 33

-Target shield

-Target blood poison level

-Target limb broken

-Target specific aff

-Hunter specific aff (limited list)

-Target attempts to leave room

You could then have specific effects that would proc for a brief duration (maybe 1-2 balances) and you could use these triggers to augment the hunters otherwise lack-luster mid-game. Just spitballing here but

+bonus effect to lash, claw, other crazy wyvern shenanigans

+mod to breath weapon effects

+aff to claw.

+relapse effect on claw

+mod to lash (-1 mental aff, +% damage)

Give this a cd, tone down the effects, file a few classleads to bring some other skills to the forefront, could be interesting. I'm tired, don't judge me too harshly.

Gurn

There's no singular classlead that would fix Trigger in its current state. Anything else would, unfortunately, require extensive testing.

Iluv

Lowbie hunters should do fine in team combat with numbness -> lash -> anorexia.

Who are you expecting a non-tri trans Hunter to kill?

Sure, some professions require less lesson investment (like the knight professions) but most of them are in the same position.

Ahkan

Balancing classes around "Think of the newbies" is a terrible mentality to go into combat with.

-Slow purge

-Slow focus

-<400hp.

It's not the fact that they suck that's going to kill them. You balance for trans survival, guild skills, purge and maybe evasion.

Gurn

I didn't say 'balance for newbies', I said 'newbies have nothing fun to play with'. 

EDIT: Also, not really the point of anything whatsoever. Why do you guys always latch on to the least relevant thing?