Howdy, Stranger!
Classleads: Summer 2k17
Gjarrus
Member, Beta Testers Posts: 705 ✭✭✭✭
Per the lovely livestream hosted by @Jeremy and @Eoghan, we know that classleads will be coming up after Engineer's release sometime before the end of the summer (Soon? *hopeful* *peer lesson pile*). So! No time like the present to throw out ideas for comments.
[I'll have my first comment soon, but I'm scatterbrained and have lost 3 posts since new discussions don't save drafts + I'm too daft to use a real editor]
[I'll have my first comment soon, but I'm scatterbrained and have lost 3 posts since new discussions don't save drafts + I'm too daft to use a real editor]
Tagged:
0
Comments
Of all varieties, reflections are a bit cancerous in combat right now. Single reflections come at 1.9s eq, with diadem (all further eq times assume diadem) making a basic point wand at me|touch shield overwhelmingly effective at stalling. The ritual is better than old prismatic at turtling, offering 30-40 reflections in batches of 10 with only instakills (dangerous for user, stoppable by allies, and has no aff/damage pressure) and force commands (which you can just stay offbal for by spamming shield) as counters for classes that don't bypass it (AKA most classes).
Solution 1: Alter the ritual to provide a reflection every 5s for 1m. Increase single reflection skills to use shield timing. This eliminates the immediate turtle power of the ritual and is a basic cost nerf to basic reflections.
Solution 2: Make reflections fade after 1s. Alter the ritual to provide a reflection every 5s for 1m. This alters reflections into more of a timed block mechanic than its current use as a stackable turtling defense.
Soluion 3: Make aggressive actions against someone with a reflection negate the attack completely, knocking the attacker off balance for ~1s instead of the attack's typical cost. While a bit ugly, it sets the time exchange in favor of the attacker at roughly the same ratio as shield (3.6s) vs hammer (1.9s).
That's kinda where I'm at right now. Some other things I've been considering are not allowing eq/bal use with reflections up and making shield-breaks break both shield and a single reflection.
so...
solution 1) having the wand increased to shield balance level makes the wand totally useless. it becomes a 200 credit investment that I can basically get for free in shield skills/shield tattoos
solution 2) fading after 1 second isn't nearly as bad, but then it becomes a niche arti, which I guess isn't bad thing. I'd still want my full credits back just because I don't have an advantage over people using free shields since they should be able to squeeze an attack in between wand points(only costing them a fraction of a second if timed right), where people can possibly spam shields(I would need to test more and see what the balances on shield breakers are, but outrider's is pretty lengthy) to a more effective halt of offense(I would think anyways, since shields don't fade, and you have to break them to continue, costing you valuable seconds compared to the tiny amount of time you would lose just waiting till the reflection fades).
solution 3) this is the only one I particularly don't mind, as long as the eq balance for the wand remains as it is now, because it still gives you an advantage over shield users.
now to get back on the (hopefully) more popular side of things: reflection rituals. both solution 1 and 2 are the same for the ritual, and I agree completely with this particular change.
the ritual is obscenely overpowered, and heavily weighted to the side that is winning, making it pointless to even regroup and try to go back to a fight. shields and single reflections already do a damn good job at slowing down the offense of others, but the ritual, for most of the professions in the game, puts a complete halt to it. I really like the idea of 5 seconds for a minute, it gives you some breathing room, slows your opponents down some, and allows room for more counter play on your part, such as using shields, active healing, shard healing, etc. yes this involves some skill/knowledge of your profession skills, but its better than throwing your hands up and going 'stahp hitting me!' and then sitting there watching as the opposing team loses all momentum against you, giggling all the while at how easy that was to halt some of the more complicated/more coordinated offenses in the game.
Quoting myself from almost a year ago.
The wand isn't intended to save you from group focus fire, really. Even if it's bumped up to shield timing, you can still use it preemptively, use it against some attacks that otherwise bypass shield, and it can be used in some situations where you couldn't shield at all (immolation, numbness if you rely on tat, etc).
S1 isn't my favorite with regards to the wand solution, but it's still more powerful in many cases than the 1s:2s ratio. Charges may be an option for it, though.
DK stuff
While both DK and Templar aren't without teeth (ha), once the basic strat (Bleed for DK, reave/flare for templar ((bleed templar is lol))) goes, they don't feel like they have the same potential that RG does. That said, I would put RG at just okay 1v1 (without considering tex/totem) since they have options opened up by rune flares. With that in mind, I started considering how to give DK options when longswords won't work without tilting longswords much higher. More or less, it involves cannibalizing (hee) some Necromancy skills into sorta-copies of RG flares.
C-C-C-ombo changes!
Decay
2.5s eq
15s cooldown, reduces damage dealt by the affected by 10% for 3s
Leprosy
2.75s eq
15s cooldown, causes the next 2 salves within 4s to fail. Shares a cooldown with shrivel.
Shrivel
2.75s eq
15s cooldown, applies limb damage (no hp damage) to 1 limb or half that to two limbs. Shares its cooldown with leprosy.
Chill
2s eq
2 charges with 16s cooldown, applies a dose of freezing
Disfigure
4s eq
15s cooldown, same effect (aff show disfigurement)
Belch
4s eq
16s cooldown, causes a 2s elixir balance loss
Leech
4s eq
10s cooldown, 5% mana drain, doubled on hindered targets.
Screech
3s eq
12s cooldown, short balance loss
Feed
2s eq
15s cooldown, your next Necromancy ability is sped up by 1s. If the target is prone or hindered, it speeds up the next two.
I think the way in which classleads are handled could be improved in general. Maybe get a handful of testers during a time period and allow them to test professions in the arena from other circles, etc. without a lesson cost or permanently owning that profession.
In its current form the classlead system is prone to abuse, and almost encourages people to only try to get their profession buffed and nerf the ones they like least or don't quite know how to handle. I feel like giving top combatants or a group of testers the opportunity to roll through various professions and learn their strengths and weaknesses could improve their classlead suggestions for buffs and nerfs.
An example of classlead abuse that comes to mind pretty much immediately is what was let through via Juran's suggestions for Priest. The entire profession is built to last -- it's never been intended to be quick or exciting. The changes that were made were even made under the guise of opening up more "decision making" and "offensive opportunities," if memory serves... yet all it did was make it a million times easier to sap-spam, and that's all people are doing. At least when there was sap/smite, before you popped alacrity (which was likely a long time,) you had to choose to pressure health or mana.
No more. Now you can just righteousness right up to alacrity almost, pop it, and sap to your heart's content -- because we all know you're not going to do anything else. Why would you?
I also didn't understand why Absolve wasn't put on the hp/mana threshold hybrid. Half mana is pretty stronk, even (especially?) if all you do is sap or sap faster.
Also, Absolve is too strong with Priest how it is. But it's my opinion that Absolve isn't actually the problem; sap speed and/or sap drain amount is the problem. I love the fact that Priest is super easy to use; it's a fantastic profession to dip your feet into the pk waters with; it's how I learned. Priest used to teach you that you had to live if you wanted to kill, while also being pretty forgiving of mistakes you made (perform hands, rite of healing, etc.)
But it was slow. But it worked, because absolve is as strong as absolve is. I would like to see absolve stay the same and the sap speed/drain numbers get adjusted if anything.
How do you quantify any of the qualifications you want in those kinds of testers? Is it alright for them to hold the reins for the vision of where Imperian's combat 'should go'? If so, why? Please be real: all you are really doing when you move to a model where you have a team of testers is you've narrowed the number of people allowed to let their bias influence the game. Humans are always going to be biased, and the concept of 'combat ego' in IRE is very real.
Last time I was around, the rest of your request was already satisfied via a 'classlead beta'. The beta realm allows free swaps of race, profession, artifacts, etc to make sure everything not only works, but isn't heinous. A lot of the time, these betas never worked quite right because the beta population consisted of people writing and updating their systems, looking to just see new stuff, looking to get the desire to play other professions out of their system (i.e, it was a cure to 'grass is greener' syndrome for a little bit), et cetera. There were some well-meaning testers, but it came down to a far smaller population than the pool of people invited. You're all kidding me if you think it would be any different now; it would just be less people in all of the columns.
Something I was kicking around in my head last night was that Imperian's combat classleads might benefit greatly from a 'design manifesto' or some other guideline. What I mean by that is a collaboration between what players want and the administration feels is feasible for the game; something that outlines a general direction for combat and where we as a collective want it go, which could be used as the rubric for how appropriate a submitted report is. This would give more direction to report commentating (if that still exists), as well as giving us a fallback to raise concerns on any accepted or denied report.
Highlighting his argument further really, people who are too invested in getting their enemies nerfed or their own classes buffed have too big a voice. Ideally people who are objective would be the ones setting classlead changes. However that could happen. I've always felt the process is flawed, but there's no real way to fix it because the users of the classes in question would have the most knowledge about how to make the classes competitive.
An addendum regarding sap spam - how is it easier to sap spam now when historically it was never blocked by shield? Cause it is now. If I recall I had the copper slab too, which buffs speed outside of normal. I'm not making an argument for how easy the class is to use or how powerful it is, just questioning your motives and reasoning.
EDIT: You had the slab. Why do you think I was there?
Also, I'm not cherry-picking AM professions for nerfs. Bard is a way higher priority to get nerfed than Priest, but that doesn't mean Priest doesn't need changes. As I said in my post, I love Priest; it's how I learned. I still have my L3 mace and custom Seraph. I think you're maybe taking the fact that our characters don't like each other in the game and projecting those feelings onto my analysis of the situation. Also regarding shield blocking sap spam, it did when I was using it too -- unless you're using purification. That's super easy to get around.
EDIT EDIT: @Septus what do you think could be done? There has to be some way to improve things.
@Owyn:
Removing classleads from the hands of the players is the only reallistic way you will get an entirely unbiased classleads process. Unfortunately, the players are also best placed to know the legitimate issues with mechanics in a game with the typical population of the ire muds, so its a bit of a catch 22. The problem with having a small group making balance calls basically comes down to longterm competency decay. You'll probably start out with a fantastic group (or the system wouldn't have gone in), but after a year or two and you've lost some of those people to inactivity or whatever else, there's a good chance their replacements will be less qualified/more biased/etc. You then probably start taking recommendations from these people for the next replacements, and get more people of a similar disposition. Basically, it goes downhill fast after a while.
I wish I had an answer though, sadly I don't.
In reality though, there should be a counterpoint from the other people in the classlead/beta to argue against bias. And IRE should have the people to review the arguments and make the smart unbiased and informed decisions. If you don't provide that input to the devs, then you probably deserve getting facerolled by the OP class coming out of classleads.
Of course, that's asking for more maturity and self-moderation than I think is possible in an online game community, especially considering we've had more than a decade to demonstrate our capacity for it during the classlead process anyways..
Report #470
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Submitted by: (Dyron) Status : Rejected
Skillset : Hypnosis Skillname : Hypnosis
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Problem:
In its current state, hypochondria will give its first affliction the moment it is afflicted. This means at the time of affliction it'll not only give hypochondria but its random mental affliction as well. This gives an immediate advantage right at the beginning giving the target no time to even try to prioritize the curing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Solution #1:
Make it so that when hypochondria is afflicted it begins its timer from there. The first affliction is only given after the timer has been reached. This will give the afflicted time to cure it before he starts suffering from the maluses this affliction gives the afflicted.
Solution #2:
Remove the random mental afflictions hypochondria gives and turn it into a way to confuse diagnosis. If you diagnosis while under hypochondria, it'll show random afflictions under the diagnosis. Autocuring will then believe these are actual afflicted afflictions. Due to the random afflictions of the cobra, this will still be a great perk.
Solution #3:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Decision:
This doesn't seem to be needed at this time. Also, not interested in reverting hypochondria back to its old functionality, sorry.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The above I've no clue how they couldn't think a double affliction from one affliction is needed. Example:
H:580 M:379 Bleed:0 Faith:100 <eb db>
You are afflicted with an unknown affliction.
Your myriads of maladies plague you once again.
You are afflicted with hypochondria.
The thought of food revolts you all of a sudden.
You are afflicted with anorexia.
H:580 M:379 Bleed:0 Faith:100 <eb db>
In the example above, I did not have hypochondria. When the hypnosis chain hit, it hit with that and anorexia in one go. The current way this is being used is hypnosis chains of impatience, hypochondria, impatience, hypochondria, etc.. Mix that with shadowplant to stop hypochondria/impatience cure, and follow up with instilling impatience. My personal belief, is that hypochondria should go away entirely but I didn't classlead for that. I classlead for something that would help tone down the problem but doesn't fix it completely.
What do you do in this scenario? You lost a classlead with the decision of "not needed at this time." No discussion. No nothing.
Administration can't be the sole people making these decisions. They are not active in the PVP world. Players have to comment or chime in. A feature letting them just do an agree at the least would help administration know that others agree with this.
Another idea, that Aetolia used for a bit, would be to have Envoys for all the circles. These Envoys would get a credit reward at the end of the classlead process. Due to classleads rarely occuring on Imperian, they would just need to be paid during the open classleads. Envoys could be picked by the players of each circle on who they think understands the combat process the most. This would give power to the players and give them an incentive to be active in each report so the players are fully represented in each classlead.
Another thing about this, which would of helped me, would be a followup to a rejected report. You get one followup to clarify the rejection comment. This would give you clarification of why they believe it wasn't needed. Maybe the administration didn't fully understand your problem? Maybe they didn't know all the features of that class being tied together that would make this issue even more so? There are a lot of steps that could get missed in a rejection.
Classleads rarely occur, so each one is extremely important for fixing things. Imperian, out of all the IRE's, seems to have the most defunct professions I've ever seen. I strongly feel that this is part of the reason.
1 - make it readd suggestions from the stack to the back of the queue when they tick. It removes the (frankly unnecessary) affliction power in exchange for empowering the trance (effectively, lower burst aff/sec for higher aff/sec over time).
2- rework it into an aff that causes aff effects (except for its own) to linger for 1-2s. Example: Bob has hypochondria and confusion. Bob eats wormwood, but the effect persists for a moment and makes his next spell take longer. This would remove its affliction rate entirely but be pretty aggravating.
Bard - Resonance is not successfully gating people's choices. +3 every 2.5 (assuming double resonance word combos) and -2 every 5 means you'll hit resonance cap around 8 combos (10 for singers) after songing up, each with 2-5 affs that then leads to taking those aff combos with massive damage thrown on top. I anticipate having to pop moonwort about 4-5 combos in for the standard Iluvbot offense. And no one even uses the lol that is Oyiem to guarantee you'll never lose an aff battle (not that it's particularly needed with double passive cures). The only saving grace is that their holding is limited to RG sketch engage and aff-based hinders.
Like a daydream.. or a fever
Like a daydream.. or a fever
Now it's still boring, and it's just broken. Reducing obliviousness percentages is one thing, but being able to alacrity/purify at 90% fanatism together is still ridiculous especially if you're getting there anytime soon with the way it's currently designed. I still believe that the answer is either a speed reduction or a drain amount reduction.
As for the other one, Bard does need a nerf. Period. There aren't any bards in the game anymore than can beat me with bard; that's not the point either. The point is that it needs a nerf and everyone knows it needs a nerf. But if you're not satisfied with my opinion, for whatever reason, maybe @Septus can parrot it too. If he said instead of me then I'm sure you, like everyone else, would click that agree button.
The balance consideration here is opportunity cost. Right now it takes Priest too little time to get to this point, and they reset from it too quickly. This is why you need to address Obliviousness, and not the actual fanaticism closers themselves. If you let yourself get into a situation where a Priest is bearing down on you with Alacrity -and- Purify, your options should be to aggressively hinder or run. Trying to pretend it isn't happening while hammering your attack macro should result in you dying.
Edit: Your argument seems to be that Priest is a 'noob class', and they don't deserve to be able to kill you. I would just like to remind you that you're playing Wytchen.
Like a daydream.. or a fever
EDIT: Oh man, now I need to go change my profession because someone who doesn't even play anymore, who isn't even relevant to the conversation, just called me out on using a beginner profession.
Aside from fitting a narrative for nerfs, what exactly constitutes Priest being a 'noob class' these days? That attachment seems arbitrary. More to the point, we shouldn't be taking 'good for beginners' in to account when talking about blow for blow balance. A class should be balanced in a vacuum where there is no player piloting it. You should remove the concern of difficulty level from your argument, as it makes you seem biased towards wanting it nerfed because 'newbies play it and shouldn't beat me with it'.
I think you need to make a more substantial, mechanically-backed claim before I would accept your call for a Priest nerf. Maybe a log with timestamps or at least some napkin math done right here in front of us? Much like a lot of things in this thread, I am leery of any conversation about 'class balance' that happens behind closed doors or without statistics to back it up.
Less anecdotal evidence, more substantial evidence with numbers.
As for napkin math, etc., I'd be happy to look at numbers with anyone. I still have Priest. If you want to crunch some stuff or even see it for yourself I'd be happy to switch and do some arena tests or even just stand around Caanae and let you see some numbers.
I don't know why anyone got hung up on me calling it a beginner class. I just want to point out, again, that when I even brought up its difficulty in my original post I was saying that it was a good thing. I was saying it should be kept simple.
Make burrowing fun again. Burrowing has been nerfed (Often with good reason) and changed substantially in ways that fundamentally broke it. Not in order, here are the changes made to burrow in a relatively short span of time back when I was last active:
- A message added when someone moves burrowed, so you know where they've gone.
- Burrowing deep removed entirely
- Artifact/Token shovels added to make removing someone from burrow simpler
Regardless of why these changes were made - And the shovel was necessary, at least, because burrow could sometimes be quicker than digging so someone determined could just burrow again - They made the skill uninteresting. Burrowing should have been slowed, or digging sped up to make it less useful as an escape. Retaining burrow deep but making it harder to initially escape whilst burrowed would have left the skill largely intact and interesting, and if the initial burrow were made sufficiently slow, it would have kept it from being an artifact-available escape skill.The main issue with the current form of burrow is how limited it is in terms of mobility and usefulness, owing to the burrow deep change. Originally, certain environments such as roads could be burrowed beneath. If burrowed deep, you could burrow laterally under road and similar, but not burrow out. The addition of the burrow movement message also meant that any use of burrow to sneak was ruined.
As several classes have access to burrow and it is available in artifact form, it would be nice if something could be done to restore the usefulness of the skill. I agree that it shouldn't be an escape skill on par with something like blackwind, but right now it's little better than a novelty.
My suggestions:
I feel that it's important to differentiate between professions with burrow and the artifact, or the artifact should come in multiple forms, with the 100cr one being the basic burrow-and-no-flavour form. It's a skill that used to be really interesting, then I went and abused it to escape combat and it ended up a shadow of what it once was.
On to the rest: the onus falls upon you as the person asserting the point (in this case, that Priest needs changes) to come to the table with a lot of evidence. It isn't like you can't test these things yourself before making a post like the one you did. This is another one of those preparedness things alongside making sure nobody can muddy your argument with "you're just a scrub" flaming. For instance, if we could demonstrate that sap is faster than mana regain, and faster by an insurmountable factor, then we have grounds to analyze and dial it back.
For Priest itself: my opinion isn't that it doesn't need changes. I remember playing Priest myself, I know that Kanai as a skill is fairly powerful. I have to side with Naruj, though; if Priest does need changes, the proper dial to configure is probably going to resource gain. This is because that seems to be the basis of your previously stated concerns. Adjusting resource gain allows us to hone in on how much gating the class needs before it can get going with the 'finishers'; more gating means more time for the opponent to operate. Because of this, Obliviousness might well be the culprit because that entire aspect of Kanai was designed for a different era of Imperian.