nuadarstark wrote: ↑Fri Aug 14, 2020 11:45 am
Most of the destro folks don't care about forts, keeps and oRvR aside from maybe guild/alliance events (that also usually align with weekly 5 star Dorf siege, I wonder why...) and only log for cities. Half of the time your whole campaign effort hedges on the 2 PnP/FMJ warbands running around during the european TZs.
Compare that to Order right now, who now has solid amount of new-ish hungry guilds (us, FoW, etc) and leaders and has just now started to make big, server-wide alliances and you'll see why you're getting pushed back to the point campaign literally resets 3 times a day, once with city still on lockout.
People screaming murder to balance after 1 small Mara AoE nerf is absurd. Our side (Order) was getting largely shafted in oRvR for months now, aside from some TZs where destro has less presense. We endured it on Order, we still endure it in cities, you can take it for few weeks too before there is some other change and the ebb flows to the otherside.
Also, love the talk that "everyone" agrees Order classes are OP while the absurd cc pressure and utility of destro setups, bullshit pulls, bugged immunities and monstro procs, etc are still completely ignored. Sure, it's the damn WLs that are causing all the damn trouble.
Ok, this isn't a great take. Again, I play both sides and try not to see it from one perspective.
I want to be fair here, Order has some advantages, Destro has other advantages, but I can explain in more nuance
1. Destro does care about forts, keeps, and ORVR. That's not a good assumption, and you can't lump a whole side together like that.
2. "Order right now" and the "new hungry guilds" are frankly, mostly Destro players who are rerolling to try it out. Our massive 10 guild alliance has a few guilds rolling and playing Order in the lakes. I'm one of them. Some nights we're fielding 2 full wbs of destro rerollers alone. -50 destro +50 order will have a big swing when there's only 200-300 people in the lakes.
3. The Mara AoE nerf is not the issue on balance here, it's a different change.
4. The real issue we're seeing now are combat formula changes and how they impact the game. With the absorb and toughness formula changes, effective damage is much higher this patch across the board, primarily because of the toughness change (less so the absorbs). I will explain further:
What changed in the patch is this: Toughness mitigation used to be calculated prior to damage buffs (such as Choppa/Slayer mechanics, Flanking tactic, etc...), however this order has been switched. What this means is before the patch, lets say you had 1000 str and were hitting a 500 toughness target. Your damage would get reduced by the 500 toughness, and then be multipled by your damage modifiers. Now, your damage gets multipled by your damage modifiers, and then reduced by toughness. What this means is two things:
1. Toughness is way worse on this server than it was pre-patch.
2. % stacking damage bonuses are MUCH stronger than they used to be.
The issue is that we are now seeing, that this is effectively impacting different classes and realms differently. Some of the things I've noticed.
1. Magus/Engineers are much stronger than before and do way more damage in general.
2. As damage is up, it gives the side with the better ranged/aoe pressure an advantage in bottleneck situations (Destro basically can't push forts if component order is defending at the moment, they instantly melt even with morales up).
2. Slayers in particular are disgusting. The % damage changes buffed them and Choppas more than any other classes, however, Slayers do a lot more sustained damage than Choppas (ID/Rampage), which is causing them to be extremely hard to deal with and they honestly feel far worse than AoE Marauders used to.
I don't have a fix or a solution, but I want to make sure you have a good understanding of what's going on right now. At the moment, Destro is having a rough time basically everywhere. Sure it's only been a week or so, and it is what it is, but balance is not "my side is stronger because yours was stronger before", that's just tit for tatting.
Anyway, I need to do more testing/research and gather my thoughts on the recent changes a little better. The Marauder AoE nerf is still fine and irrelevant to this discussion though.