aSW+WL+SM combo

[Aceboltz]

Yesterday's event was a joke. How can anyone call this circus a "tournament"?

I missed the first match where destro won but then every match was the same: a team of white lion + x (usually a shadow warrior) free farming the same 3 destro groups again and again. There was 0 fun in this, some destro just ragequited, and I understand them. Do you think it's a good game when one faction just gets farmed over and over while not being able to do anything, not getting a single kill to the point where some of them feel bad and powerless and just quit? Can we still call this a game? There was 2 or 3 destro prem vs 6 order prem so destro just had to get rekt back to back with only a small break between 2 matches. That is called torture.

At best it was a tournament of how many kills your wl+sw prem can get on a vastly underpowered destro prem. It was totally unbalanced in order favor, it was ****, oder totally dominates small scale and I hope you will understand the classes responsible for this not only make order the absolute best choice for small scale but also for rvr.

The developpement team changed during the lifetime of this project: the direction and understanding of the game changed quite a lot and at the moment we are in a standby phase balance-wise. I feel like the balance process is not done yet and there are still some easy things to change to bring a more enjoyable and balanced experience to the player. I hope you will understand this more than just a "nerf x" thread based on emotion, this is a last call to devs: this game is still order biased and it really needs one or two balance passes to make it fun and fair.

-SW assault spec needs tuning
-mobility and burst damage must be shared evenly between factions
-wounds buff is in the wrong faction


Small slice of my life:
I played on official warhammer online servers in 2008 and 2009, I mained a white lion because the game was not only laggy and bugged it was also vastly oder biased and wanted to spend some relaxing time after work. Easy class on easy faction. I have been playing on this server since day one and I hook on it because I like pvp and the devs really wanted to make the game more balanced. I have a rr80 sorc and rank 40 squig, swordmaster, marauder and black guard. I have also been playing some witch elf, disciple of khaine, shadow warrior, white lion and magus.


I was very happy when the devs finally nerfed what I think were the biggest balance offenders in this game:
-knights giving 20% crit and 10% healcrit to the whole order faction
-shadow warrior oneshotting people
-Archmages being unmatched invincible killing machines
-bright wizard bombing and instaspells
-swordmasters being able to strip enemies naked of spirit resistance
-white lion infinity pounce
-slayer shatter limbs+rampage+inevitable doom combo
I though with these awful design choices gone we could enjoy fair play. But we are not done yet and here is why.



Order just have much better mobility than destro. Order has 3 classes that can teleport to the enemy: white lion, shadow warrior and sword master. This gives oder an easy acces to enemy backlines. Not everybody can be guarded at all time and order can just jump on a unguarded enemy while destro can only try between slows, stuns, knockbacks, disarms, etc. This mobility is, of course, really good in small scale and we could see it in the "tournament" where every order prem had a white lion and a swordmaster. Yep, all of them. In small scale melee teams dominates, rdps classes are just out. In this setup mobile melee classes are just superior because they can easily switch targets. Order gets 3 awesome classes for this while destro only gets the half finished squig herder. Destro just does not have the mobility and the ability to jump on distant targets the order gets.




Not only order has unmacthed mobility but the "pounces" are on awesome classes for this task. All 3 of them (wl, sw, sm) are great classes with ways to deal insane single target damage. The wl is well know to be able to delete people in 3 gcds, everyone knows it, every day people complains about it but nothing is done. Only after like 1 year of protest the devs finally put some cooldown on pounce before buffing wls to insane levels for monthes (!) before putting him back to his former overpowered state. The sw is not bad either: insane ST burst, 3sec stun, shadow step, healdebuff. And finally a pounce on a tank, an awesome greatweapon user that can guard his wl/sw and jump with them on the enemy to deal great damage while enhancing his teammates damage.
Here comes to the biggest problem: the 3 classes synergises just too much: not only they can easily reach unguarded targets, they also deal insane damage and also enhance each other abilities. The sw warrior can crit debuff the enemy so all 3 of them do more crits then the sm adds damage on crit while also protecting the dps classes and providing tank stuff. This just makes the already ultra high wl burst damage to be too much. All 3 of them can bypass/ignore armor, they can just whack a heal debuffed defenseless target with just too many slows at their disposal.
This is a game where group setup and group moves and tactics matter this means we are supposed to use defensive abilities, protect team mates, move as group, etc. Defence, reflexes, reaction, team play are supposed to matter, and I think it's good: it makes fights longer, more tactical, more enjoyable. In this setup a class that can destroy an enemy in 3 seconds seems completly out of balance and context. Yes I'm talking about you white lion, but the shadow warrior is quite bad too. As a sorc player I stopped counting the number of times I just got deleted by a wl during a stun, in rvr or in scenarios and to my worst displeasure I learned that good wl players won't bother use the stun on a sorc: it's just better to keep the cooldown and use silence. The sorc can't even detaunt while silenced, dies just as fast, and the cc lasts 4 seconds instead of 3, this is called overpowered.



Finally wounds buff. Yeah I know usually people eludes this question and I will probably be laughed at for this. But I must say it: WOUNDS BUFFS ARE THE BEST BUFFS IN PVP GAMES. Period. Everything that increases your health points pools is just great. It makes your character more durable, less subject to spike damage because it reduces your chance to be onshotted and less subject to sustained damage because you are easier to heal. It makes takes more reliable and easier to heal. It protect backline healers by reducieng their weakness to target switching by giving the tank more time to react and switch guard. Against a burst based class, the HP increase might be enough to make your hp pool superior to what the dps can do with his rotation. This is specially true against classes that rely on burst rotations to do slightly more damage that the average hp pool: sorc, we, wh, wl, sw: the hp increase gives you more hp than what they can remove, basically making you immune to oneshot rotations. It's not just good, it's THE BEST DEFENSE.
Very often people will say order has offensive tools and destro defensive ones but it's fake. Order gets both defenses and offense. In a balanced game you would give offense to one side and the defenses to counter this to the other side. If a faction gets big ST damage burst then you are supposed to give the other one a way to withstand said damage, a hp buff for example. But here in ror order gets the burst AND the hp to survive burst. This was very clear to me during yesterdays tournament: every order just had 680 more hp than destro, basically and extra gcd of lifetime. They just have an extra buff, every one of them, and they best kind of buff you can get in a pvp game. You could argue it's 2 buffs instead of 1 so tanks will just shatter it and be done with it but no. Nobody will bother wasting times and AP to try and debuffs tanks and healers, they just keep it at all times. It's differend on dps classes because when they get focused they eventually get the hp buff shattered but then the warrior priest can just rebuff. From what I see yesterday, whitle lions, shadow warriors and the occasional slayer had 95% uptime on the hp buff.



So that's it, sorry for the wall of text but I think the tournament showed a glaring imbalance between factions because the wl+sw+sm is just too much and everybody uses it for good reasons. I'd like to point out this problem spills over to rvr because order gets more and better ways to bypass/ignore/skip tank lines and can reach more easily unguarded and kiting targets who alors happens to have less overall hp. But let's stick to the topic.
Order dominates small scale for the reasons mentionned above:
-wl+sw+sw is the meta setup, they have insane mobility and synergises too well
-destro lacks defenses and counter to this

My suggestions:

-aSW needs nerf. No more 100% crit debuff, it breaks the game. Then either give ST burst damage OR healdebuff but not both. For the sake of the game and fair play the best choice would be to split his power bewteen damage and utility, of course.

-nerf wl , the class is broken, everyone knows it. Coordinate strike, force opportunity and cleave limb are above every other melee class abilities and can been seen overpowered. Compare cleave limb with every other dd class: it's the best of all of them, does the most damage and the pet has permaslow. Make it 5sec with 10 sec cd like every other melee class. Ensnare makes no sense on white lion and has to go.

-Mirror wounds buff to destro. They are the defensive faction, it makes sense they get the defensive buff. Even more when order has front load burst classes.


Thanks for reading.

[Mystry]

I bathe in the tears of Destro. I have absolutely zero sympathy for Destro in any capacity, as I suffered for years of Destro being absurdly, ridiculously overpowered, first in live, then for periods here.

[gerard86]

in b4 lock, stop crying

[Nekkma]

Well, balancing is difficult and should be done with care. I think the bigger reworks have been the main offenders (guardian wl and asw most recentas) and that style of balancing should imo be abandoned. Removing asw teleport Seem like a no brainer ( i would prefer to rewert the changes all together and the proceed with small balance changes). The bigger reworks risk creating huge imbalances which in turn forces the team to make alot of subsequent adjustments.

[Aceboltz]

Sorry to break your little bubble guys, I have arguments and the tournament as a proof to back them up. Thanks Nekkma to bring water to the mill.

[Scrilian]

Someone got actually angry about the whole 6v6 tourney, holy fuсk! Cringe as the arguments and salt to back it up!

[Manatikik]

I would suggest you take some time to familiarize yourself with some grammar rules and learn how to format your giant walls of text. This is very hard to read and just comes off as incessant whining (especially with all the factual errors you have presented).

[qwerty113]

Ofcourse nerf order bla bla bla.. How about op choppa's pulls and mega megus's burst damage ?!

[Aurandilaz]

You have to consider the interrealm balance as well;
-BW Engi Slayer with AoE specs
-WL SW WH with ST specs

Because WL and SW cannot perform in warband fights (spam one Slash yay? or slow firing Lileath Arrow spam?) they then in turn have more ST trees and more ST specs and tools.

Apart from SM/Kotb/Slayer/Mara/BO/Chosen, not everyone can be both good at 6man level and warband level.
Then there is also "racial features" which somehow mean high Elfs really suck at all AoE and just do potent ST dmg/debuffs instead.

Game is bit imbalanced in many ways, but what can you do. Nothing is exactly new. Why do you think so few Destro teams signed up?

[MeanMachine7519]

Yes , yesterday's tournament was a joke but it's aint order fault...
I mean when u put rr8x premades who are use to play together vs /5 lf parties well **** happens
The WL / SW is a great combo maybe we should cry less and find the same type of combo in destro