[Gear] State Stabilization

[Jaycub]

Hold on, stacking armor is an issue? If i stack armor I will not do high damage. If i stack strength i will have armor. What is the problem here? Isn't this just up to the player to decide what he or she wants to get out of the game? Is stacking armor just not part of groupplay as well? Be the best tank i can be and take away damage ment for a slayer? :/

Armor talismans are depending on the base damage/healing of the skill slightly less than, to more than 2x as effective in terms of damage vs mitigation (or healing) ratios. Physical damage caps at 75% and is difficult to reach, whereas magical damage is relatively easier to keep with gear and buffs and not restrictive based on archetypes.

The other problem is class design itself, take for instance robe annihilator gear. It has 1048 armor total. However, you can slot up 5 +180 armor talismans in it, 1-2 in your weapon(s), +210 from tome jewelry, and an additional +124(?) in the skaven ring.

That's 1414 to 1594 increase in armor, which is more than twice of what the class gets from it's armor base even if you cant afford 180 tallies the cheaper ones still push you to over twice. But wait there's more, 660 additional armor from pots...

This is compounded by the fact that flat scalers are pretty terrible, as a healer the prospects of additional healing numbers from willpower are pretty low in comparison to becoming much, much harder to kill in comparison by using say armor talismans.

[Thayli]

Hold on, stacking armor is an issue? If i stack armor I will not do high damage. If i stack strength i will have armor. What is the problem here? Isn't this just up to the player to decide what he or she wants to get out of the game? Is stacking armor just not part of groupplay as well? Be the best tank i can be and take away damage ment for a slayer? :/

Many armor debuffs in the game have static values and do not scale. Consequentially, an armor increase does not scale linearly either. This has been outlined in the OP.

Either way, back on topic, people. Stick to discussing the proposal, not armor stacking.

[Toldavf]

On the flip side high armour on live reduced tank damage significantly, as most couldn't get anywhere near enough bypass. It was a in that regard at least as it reduced the pressure on cloth healers from tanks Xguarding and loling into the backline.

[altharion1]

Spoiler:

The OP clearly has valid points and seems to know exactly what state he wants the game to end up in.

The problem is neither of the two original proposals go into any detail on how the calculations would actually work. How would healing, mitigation, wounds, outgoing/incoming damage potential work? How much of an advantage are you proposing that +2 tiers of gear would actually give? If a RR80 mdps in SOV hits an RR40 player in Anni and gets the use of "secondary stats", how does the RR80 healer activate the use of his secondary stats?

The OP has gone into extensive detail to explain the issues but hasnt spent the same time detailing his preferred solution. As we saw in the WP/DoK changes when an issue is particularly close to the OPs heart, the solution generally comes from the internal RoR dev/test team, rather than a community lead effort.

Lets not mess around, its pretty clear that the OP has decided we are going to have state stabilization. So we really need the OP to come back with a firmed up, detailed solution - then the community would be better equipped to comment. Rather than people just throwing out their own proposals, when lets face it, none of them are ever going to be used.

I cant help thinking the OP is proposing an extremely complex way of giving people a placebo to imitate perceived gear progression, when a much simpler solution would achieve the same results.

As mentioned several times now in the first 10 or so pages in this thread, the goal is to see how the community feels about state stabilization and the suggested ways of dealing with it. Implementation can be decided upon (and changed) later.

Furthermore, if something had been decided already, or community counter-arguments wouldn't be found valuable, this thread wouldn't have been made in the first place. Stick to discussing the actual proposal. - Thayli

[Karast]

@Stmichael1989

Karast did, and I do. Since his proposal still has vertical progression (albeit lower) in it I imagine he finds value in it being in the game. In addition, he points out that the OP's proposal removes a sense of progression and risks the playerbase losing drive because of it. I imagine he wouldn't favour removing vertical progression so I really can't see why he accepts minimzing it as an option. Am I the only one pessimistic enough to not see the game designed around vertical progression doing well if that is removed? And I don't believe this is something that can be remedied, the skill ceiling is too low to not have some sort of a treadmill in place to hold the player's attention.

Perhaps Karast himself can chime in?

Sorry I am so late to respond missed this post.

The main reason I still go for the gear progression is that it is a core part of the game already from T1 to T4, and from an effort stand point reducing set stat values is simply an easier all be it more time consuming fix. It amounts to little more than stat tweaks on a vast majority of items, but those changes are not something the devs haven't done before.

It is important in my opinion to protect the gear grind to an extent. To give people targets for advancement, that make them push a little harder, stay online a little longer, and keep themselves interested and motivated in the down hours, or off days when the RvR and SC queues are less than optimal. I worry that the proposed state stabilization might gut that if there is no need, and in fact potentially a detriment to leveling up.

On the comment of procs. I agree crit procs are OP. But they can be balanced with value reductions, splitting crit / damage, and by placing them on only certain careers. There is a lot of diversity / side progress that can be created using some of the different procs. Even on live there was often debate between many careers pre sov as to whether conq - sent - dp or invader were the best. Invader had better stats, but sent. had an incoming heal debuff proc at 25%. It was a hard choice between the two of them.

[Arteker616]

Reading all of this

I think it's fair to state at this point to mention that no price of gear should "solve" a classes inherent balance issues, classes like BG and Ib shouldn't suddenly be great because of some sov set bonus or proc

To that extent the claim by az that he will shut down the balance fourm till we see the impact of high tier sets make no sense

Now I was under the assumption that things such as the massive armor scaling and what not discepencies would be addressed down the line by the devs but this was why I opposed people who wanted the pre 1.40 armor system, t4 should have been from invader to sov and anni and what not should have been in t3

Also like blaqwar said as proposal will ruin that sense real progression and power

Spoiler:

the problem was the bad system for debuff u had late in game. the original stack debuffs such choppa, bo, and engi etc at launch proved to much op for the early armour sets, but when these were removed or nerfed the armour creep become to insane with later sets .
why? because the debuff system become obsolete , they tried the ward system and such wich just made things worse. but that is just my opinion

Issues with post: not contributing to the discussion by a) agreeing with a frame work to proceed with to achieve state of stabilization. b) not disagreeing and explaining why any of the frame works proposed do not achieve the state of stabilization.
c) not posting legibly.
-Gerv/Rayray

[TenTonHammer]

Yes, so the scaling of the abilites themselves should be addressed

[Ninepaces]

Spoiler:

Two things:

1) Its an ok concept but care has to be made to avoid any sort of rock-paper-scissors situation where gear set A is countered by B thats countered by C thats countered by D that is countered by A again. I dont think anyone wants gearset RNG to be a factor on who wins fights. Some thought and gameplay knowledge has to be used to ensure that doesnt happen. The designers need to imagine the possible permutations and see that doesnt happen.

Also the gear sets have to be considered from a 6 man point of view. You can bet that the 6 mans are going to come up with setups that have optimal synergy with each other. Again gameplay knowledge is needed.

So I'm a bit concerned because the last time I saw OP play his swordmaster (a few months ago, granted) at lvl 40 in an sc it was with s/b, by far the least optimal way to play a class akin to melee shadow warrior/sh builds. And then we have SM that already has an advantage with 100% spirit damage given a spirit debuff stacking with other spirit debuffs and it just makes me wonder. This thread isnt a bad idea just be careful and think when designing the sets.


2) Is this what the game really needs? Lets say you make 20 or even 100 gear sets all somehow balanced. When players eventually collect all the sets whats left to do? Whats going to keep this game fresh and exciting?

I'll throw this idea at you: Implement some sort of season-based system with leaderboards and scores and all that stuff, like diablo or path of exile. Every 1-3 months players can (or can not choose to take part and stay t4) take part in the season and reroll T1, and they go about playing the game as normal. At the end of the season the individual/guild winners (based on RP or keep captures or medals or whatever... something like that) get some sort of award like an armor skin or title or a just simply recognized on the forum. There has to be an incentive. The best part... YOU, the game designers, can change sets/rules/class balance every season. So no two seasons are the same. Check out this game called utopia, I played when I was younger for about 10 years... its an online text based RTS. http://forums.utopia-game.com/showthrea ... st15407478 They have what they call "ages" which last for about 4 months and are essentially seasons. They're on their 70th!! season, and every season they shake it up a bit. It keep things fresh, keeps guilds planning, and if people want to change classes or even realms they can progress together as a guild through the tiers experiencing all the t2/t3 maps again. No more of that lonely grinding to 40 just to join your guildies then getting burned out or bored because the game hasnt changed for months and you've maxed out all the toons you want to max out. Just think about it.

Issues with post: not contributing to the discussion by
a) agreeing with a frame work to proceed with to achieve state of stabilization
b) not disagreeing and explaining why any of the frame works proposed do not achieve the state of stabilization (see page 15 for a summary)
c) not linking the post to the discussion in a logical and understandable manor
d) posting off topic on unwarrented tangent

Anny issues, send me a PM or to Natherul
-Gerv/Rayray

[sotora]

The other problem is class design itself, take for instance robe annihilator gear. It has 1048 armor total. However, you can slot up 5 +180 armor talismans in it, 1-2 in your weapon(s), +210 from tome jewelry, and an additional +124(?) in the skaven ring.

That's 1414 to 1594 increase in armor, which is more than twice of what the class gets from it's armor base even if you cant afford 180 tallies the cheaper ones still push you to over twice. But wait there's more, 660 additional armor from pots...

Increasing armor 2x by cloth squischies is problem because?

[Stmichael1989]

The other problem is class design itself, take for instance robe annihilator gear. It has 1048 armor total. However, you can slot up 5 +180 armor talismans in it, 1-2 in your weapon(s), +210 from tome jewelry, and an additional +124(?) in the skaven ring.

That's 1414 to 1594 increase in armor, which is more than twice of what the class gets from it's armor base even if you cant afford 180 tallies the cheaper ones still push you to over twice. But wait there's more, 660 additional armor from pots...

Increasing armor 2x by cloth squischies is problem because?

Armor doesn't scale linearly. In terms of increasing effective health, which is the amount of raw damage (before mitigation) needed to kill you, each additional point of armor is worth more than the one before it.