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wargrimnir
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Re: Developer Musings: An Explanation of Recent Occurances & How We'll Fix Them

Post#171 » Fri Dec 04, 2020 10:36 pm

teiloh wrote: Fri Dec 04, 2020 9:26 pm
When these topics are brought up, we often hear "the realms aren't the same", "it's a good thematic fit", "that's how it was in the cinematic" - yet this doesn't seem to apply to universally. For example, "the realms aren't the same" except when mirroring Pounce and Ranged KD to the Squig Herder, or say giving BW Knockdown on Flame Breath (like in the cinematic).

I hope we can nail down consistent metrics for balance work in the future, so fewer of us are just shooting in the dark.
Don't forget magic. It's also magic.

You're doing a great job on illustrating why it's pointless to try and engage in balance conversations with the playerbase at large, and why we keep those discussions internal among a small group of people who aren't biased to one realm or the other. Clearly you have a bias in favor of Order, and that's fine. I very much support people who want to pick a side and stick to it when they're trying to maximize enjoyment and immersion. It's a bad basis to try and participate in balance discussions from, internally we don't do that. You've already made up your mind about this ability, that much is clear. There's no answer that you're going to accept, so there isn't any reason to give you one.

Here it is anyway; Run Away was already core to the class and no matter which primary spec you were using (aside from running ABM as it requires a pet active), it was worth using the last couple of mastery points to pick up. However it's not much of a shooty skill, and since the spec is focused on quick bow attacksa different ability oriented around actual shooty bow stuff would also fit there. There's only so many things you can jam into a mastery tree, we've tried. Would it make much of a functional difference to most specs if it was dropped to a core skill? No. What it did allow for was shuffling a few skills around the mastery trees so FEO could provide a finisher to the BS tree, and put RTA into the QS tree. The move wasn't so much focused on how many renown points RA theoretically used on some vague scale, but the actual functional use of the skill and where it made sense for the class. You might also note we've put a lot more emphasis on using your squigs, something RA also requires, because we're secretly planning on fixing all of the pet issues and getting rid of any loner specs. Shh, don't tell anyone.

I know it's really easy to pull in a dozen factors and try to make blanket comparisons to a dozen other factors and come out of it just more angry. Balance is not balance this class vs that class, it's balancing this class first. Is this class working well, is this class doing its job, does this class fulfill a power fantasy, is this class thematic and true to lore? We take lots of liberties to do so, even if it's just for the sake of changing something, we're going to do that too. Stale balance metas kill competitive games. We've been making changes for 5 years or so already, no sense stopping now. We are entering week 2 of a major rework for rSH (primarily), it's still early, we still have plenty to evaluate and feedback to collect. If you want to spend that time making a nuisance of yourself and causing a stink, this will probably be the last time you get a detailed response.

So provide feedback, don't waste your time setting a logic trap that we're just going to "lol magic obviously" our way out of. If you're looking for hard rules that your incredibly logical and clearly unbiased mind can grasp and create gotchas out of, we're not playing that kind of game on the forums.
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teiloh
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Re: Developer Musings: An Explanation of Recent Occurances & How We'll Fix Them

Post#172 » Fri Dec 04, 2020 11:05 pm

wargrimnir wrote: Fri Dec 04, 2020 10:36 pm Don't forget magic. It's also magic.

You're doing a great job on illustrating why it's pointless to try and engage in balance conversations with the playerbase at large, and why we keep those discussions internal among a small group of people who aren't biased to one realm or the other. Clearly you have a bias in favor of Order, and that's fine. I very much support people who want to pick a side and stick to it when they're trying to maximize enjoyment and immersion. It's a bad basis to try and participate in balance discussions from, internally we don't do that. You've already made up your mind about this ability, that much is clear. There's no answer that you're going to accept, so there isn't any reason to give you one.

Here it is anyway; Run Away was already core to the class and no matter which primary spec you were using (aside from running ABM as it requires a pet active), it was worth using the last couple of mastery points to pick up. However it's not much of a shooty skill, and since the spec is focused on quick bow attacksa different ability oriented around actual shooty bow stuff would also fit there. There's only so many things you can jam into a mastery tree, we've tried. Would it make much of a functional difference to most specs if it was dropped to a core skill? No. What it did allow for was shuffling a few skills around the mastery trees so FEO could provide a finisher to the BS tree, and put RTA into the QS tree. The move wasn't so much focused on how many renown points RA theoretically used on some vague scale, but the actual functional use of the skill and where it made sense for the class. You might also note we've put a lot more emphasis on using your squigs, something RA also requires, because we're secretly planning on fixing all of the pet issues and getting rid of any loner specs. Shh, don't tell anyone.

I know it's really easy to pull in a dozen factors and try to make blanket comparisons to a dozen other factors and come out of it just more angry. Balance is not balance this class vs that class, it's balancing this class first. Is this class working well, is this class doing its job, does this class fulfill a power fantasy, is this class thematic and true to lore? We take lots of liberties to do so, even if it's just for the sake of changing something, we're going to do that too. Stale balance metas kill competitive games. We've been making changes for 5 years or so already, no sense stopping now. We are entering week 2 of a major rework for rSH (primarily), it's still early, we still have plenty to evaluate and feedback to collect. If you want to spend that time making a nuisance of yourself and causing a stink, this will probably be the last time you get a detailed response.

So provide feedback, don't waste your time setting a logic trap that we're just going to "lol magic obviously" our way out of. If you're looking for hard rules that your incredibly logical and clearly unbiased mind can grasp and create gotchas out of, we're not playing that kind of game on the forums.
I want to say I'm arguing in good faith. To Destros that are engaging in the strategy of volume (in decibels and word count) over facts, yes, I will throw out controversial opinions and stand on them as a strategy to stop a tribalistic and emotionally charged nerf train. I simply don't type fast enough, even at 100+ WPM, to address 50 different versions of "nerf Rampage to the ground." It's far easier to slap the keyboard around and exhaust their emotional and intellectual energy with a gishgallop of 85-90% substantiated claims (far better than their 0%). It doesn't mean I'm invested in those particular arguments or unwilling to discuss them with people also arguing in good faith. I would actually greatly appreciate a space for formalized debate with factcheckers. There are so many fiddly bits in the game after Mythic changed stat contributions and tooltips across the board.

To be clear, I'm referring to the core Goblin Tactic of the same name (in all caps) which has direct parallels to Quick Escape. I want to say again that this was not a gotcha question but what I want to be a conversation starter. Here is how I would have responded to myself, anyway:

Personally, the RUN AWAY! tactic is a lot of fun, fulfills the role and class "fantasy" of the two Goblin classes. Yes, it'd be the equivalent to a 60-100 renown point ability, but I argue that this is partially due to uneven pricing of renown abilities. This caveat applies to the metric used to nerf Dirty Tricks as well imo, +chance to crit and -chance to crit should be valued equally. There is some finessing to be done based on how the bonus is applied, but they otherwise do a good job of simply cancelling each other out. Otherwise, there's a reason why everyone is pushed to get as much Futile Strikes as possible - it's the best option. Valuing +crit over -crit has has major impacts on the game from making WH/WE burst much lower to extending TTK to nerfing Knights and Shadow Warriors. IMO, this is an example of a legacy balance principle that should be more flexible. Whereas in the past initiative debuff stacking and crit buff stacking actually broke the code of the game, now that this isn't possible I think we ought to rethink it.

Getting back to runspeed buffs: they belong to a class of abilities that Mythic was deathly afraid of based on their experiences with Dark Age of Camelot, given their inherent power and large-scale knock-on effects on the rest of the game. Included in these types of abilities are long-duration CC (DAOC had 100+ second staggers), strong pets, lifedrains, powerful archery, perma-stealth, casting speed bonuses and AOE bombs. Other things they actively avoided were Aura Twisting and layering buffs. This is why Charge is so watered down in WHO vs in DAOC (where it was unbreakable and ignored CC). That it to say, move speed buffs were something considered very carefully and the core of the game was built up around an idea that there wouldn't be too many of them. Run Away and RUN AWAY both bend these "rules" quite a bit - and I think that's fine - but it seems that there has been much less flexibility allowed for, say, +crit vs -crit, or procs simply never being allowed to crit, or (almost) always having an ICD, for example. I can understand that the ability and tactic both fit in well with the class and don't *necessarily* need to be changed, but many other classes have had abilities changed in spite of all above factors (good performance, fulfil class fantasy, good internal balance), simply because a vague and dated Mythic design principle was violated. Take the WE, (IMO) it was more or less fine when Kisses weren't on an ICD and base crit rates were higher, as they were on live. Then there's a Sorc example: shades of death went from an insta-killing nightmare to a waste of a GCD. Applying blanket or changes of principle can have major impacts on game balance, so it's important to know what we're working with here. A lot of these are Mythic legacies which I believe you are (rightfully) exploring changes to.

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