[General] Morale Damage

[Tesq]

Spoiler:

There are to me two main issues with morals.

A) no counter play to instant damage morals
B) no mitigation feature to the damage

Altering instand damage morals to cleansable dot or channel would allow some counterplay
Having morals use standard damage rules would make them have less impact on the game and reward /punish how the toon is setup. I think it sounds fun with moral vs moral but this just drives the game into sub games and over complexity in my opinion.

The counterplay to instant dmg morals are:
Max wounds (make sure all tanks in your warband have at least 10-12k wounds)
when moral dmg fills your screen or you know its about to happen, Pot asap - and have good healers in your warband prehot you adequately.
spread out; no one (well most are not) going to dump a moral bomb on 2-4 people; no - they are saved for getting rid of a pile of people that are tightly packed. No one forces you to enter a blob formation and no one forces you to march in a deathstack that is where every enemy AoE dps is pouring their AoE, soon followed by morals.

good warband tanks (meaning not random pug wb 2hander loldps tank) are stacking wounds because that makes them more likely to survive a moral bomb drop, unless its extremely well launched nuke that deals +10k dmg within seconds, there exists a chance that lesser "nukes" can be brushed off.
What does this mean? It means that in actual large scale combat between organized guild warbands you need extremely high amount of burst to tear down the enemy tankwall, which can be extremely hard in situations like funnels where you cannot touch their healers, so you have to apply raw force to get into the keep past their massive funnel formation - this is why you have morals, to prevent long stalemates that bore people to such extent that they log off because no real way to force a breakthrough or advance the RvR campaign.

It sucks being moral bombed, but if you coordinate well, it might mean that your sacrifice of soaking enemy morales allows your allied warband to advance without threat of being moraled, possibly allowing a decisive manoeuvre that wins the fight for your realm.

Obviously with declining playerbase and organized guilds vanishing you might think that morals are just mean and make life harder for pugs, but if this game ever gets to a stage where you have multiple well geared and organized warbands going to gargantuan lengths in order to lock down a zone or push the campaign to the enemy capital, you will be needing massive moral bombs to ensure that zones don't become stalemates. People will explode, some will be sad over dying, but renown will rain, medals will be looted and the campaign will advance. This game is all about killing, and when you have 2 optimized warbands that do their absolute best to ensure that they can not be wiped with normal means, you need that moral drop.
Leading to the conclusion, do you want the game to be Age of Pughammer 2018, or do you want to move the game in direction where organized warbands become the primary tool of campaign advancement with all the associated large scale RvR tools (i.e.; AoE bomb morals) that help them in their campaigning.

This is unlikely to happen, you need to offer"active counter play that anyone can put up, what if you face 2 wb vs 1 ?? Fixed number wont save ya rvr is getting more numbers lately and multiple wb emgagement are the norm, pull gona **** you litteraly, if you ate able to have active counter play you will able to counter 2 wb togheter

[Karast]

There are to me two main issues with morals.

A) no counter play to instant damage morals
B) no mitigation feature to the damage

Altering instand damage morals to cleansable dot or channel would allow some counterplay
Having morals use standard damage rules would make them have less impact on the game and reward /punish how the toon is setup. I think it sounds fun with moral vs moral but this just drives the game into sub games and over complexity in my opinion.

It is not exactly true that there is no counter play.

Counter play exists and it is widely used atm on destro side to counter the current BW meta.

*Counter play for instant morales like BW M2's include AoE Punts / Staggers when BW's cluster.
*Focusing down BW's to desync M2's
*Using Mara's to drain morales to prevent gain to M2
*Splitting up to prevent death to bomb. Most instant morales have a small radius or spread. If you spread out they won't do as much.
*Stacking 2-3wb's together in a tight melee heavy ball. The thicker the front line the larger the spread and the less damage that morale bomb does.
*Stacking wounds into the 9-10k range across the WB to help survive the spike.


Theses are all valid tactics currently used to break and survive morale bombs in an organized WB setting. There is a lot you can do to break and prevent morale bombs and on a strictly WB to WB setting they are not usually the determining factor in a fight. Movement, res training, and comp tend to have a greater effect than morale bombs, since it is usually very doable to break morales bombs, survive them, or limit the damage. Unless if you have 10-12 instants going off at the same time, and no lone WB has that. It is hard to find WB BW's right now so order might get 5-6, so if 1-2 die or get CC'd that's the bomb over, and due to front line morale drains and lack of decent damaging morales on SL / Engi. Order doesn't really have much else to add. Destro suffers from a pure lack of instant morales at M2. With namely mara's bring their M2, and then tanks with raze, or sometimes Defeaning Below from BO's. But even then it is still easy enough to break / avoid. With punts, staggers, wounds stacking, and constant movement.

Now an unorganized WB won't have many counters, but the counters do exist and are widely used in organized WB's. Morale bombs are pug killers, but they lose their importance in a lot of WB fights if numbers are even. Other things usually come into play, and a skilled WB can recover from even a nasty bomb with a fast rez train, and good CC usage.

[Bozzax]

Why not simply test with old morale rates ingame before making alterations to morale abilities?

[Azarael]

That is exactly what we are going to do.

[adamthelc]

It should be tested to see if there is even a problem. But I am going to post some of my ideas I had just after reading everyone elses.

Morales mitigating the damage of other morales seems like a fair way to add some counterplay. But I think it should be done in a way that that nessecitates the same type of organization that it is designed to counter.

So no one should have something like a straight 50% morale mitigation. It should be small and have a small duration. So you could give all tanks a morale that reduced incoming morale damage by 5-10% for 5 seconds. But make it stack so if they were organized and timed it well, they could neuter the bomb.

Morales are also kind of boring. AoE damage all at the same time is the best way to go. I think there could be better utility morales and you could increase the strength of single target morales. The problem with the latter is it might cause problems in smaller settings.

A little more outside the box, no idea if these are possible from a technical standpoint and might cause more problems than they fix. You could make a morale that made a party ignore collision detection for a small amount of time. Or maybe a morale that allowed the caster to change places with the target. A charge in a straight line that knocksback anyone it hits for tanks. A morale that redirect a portion if morale damage back into a cone in front of them.

Again, I dont have a problem with the current way morales are or what is being proposed. Just putting out goofy ideas for the sake of conversation.

[Darosh]

Unless if you have 10-12 instants going off at the same time, and no lone WB has that.

Slightly OT:

Spoiler:

Have a look at how Phalanx ran their order warbands (their footage should still be on the forums), it did require setup (had them kite and consistently move/use cannonfodder/AM pumps) but there is virtually no counter to 5-8 M4 (BH) ranged, instant PBAoE that totals anywhere between 8k and roughly 12,8k undefendable damage ~ disregarding the ST component ~ followed up by FB+FFB rotations (rather FB[FF]->BH->FBB).

Just because people aren't running as tightly and neatly organised as the allmighty Hao Youth, or choose to mindlessly charge twice or triple their number opting to soloely rely on M2, doesn't mean that morale bombs are trivial - easily or reliably counterable.
Wounds is essentially the one thing that isn't a coinflip ~ BH doesn't care about tank walls, punts or w/e... yet, effort (setup, coordination) required match BH's potential impact.

Imho, if all (damage) morales were adjusted to match BH requirements of coordination and setup there wouldn't be as much of an issue, considering that - as with all potent and potentially entirely gamebreaking things - barely anyone makes an effort to stray off the pug-meta that revolves around 'least effort imaginable', you would see damage morales used in a truely organized fashion (now that Phalanx is gone) once in your remaining lifetime and then never again.

Aza, do you mind creating a roadmap for tests etc? It might help structure discussions and such.

[roadkillrobin]

Personally I would think that some Morale synnergies between archetypes would be pretty cool. Like you get a chain reaction of stackng buffs that up your damages/defences alot for a short time if you do it synnergisticly, but have almoast no impact when done by a single player.

For example, Raze could be a 5% dmg buff for group for 5 seconds. SW's Outrider Patrol makes all groupmembers attack for next 5 seconds to be undefendeble, Ruin and Destruction makes Flames of Ruin and Flame Shield 100% proc chance for 5 seoncds at 100% increased base dmg for all groupmembers. Rampaging Siphone buffs all groupmembers to heals all groupmembers for 25% of the damage they deal for 5 seonds. (Timers anywere from 5-10 seonds, they need be tested in practice)

So with this combo your group have: Undefendble attacks, dealing proc dmg from FoR and FS on every attack/hit, heal entire group for 50% of the damage they deal (counting every AoE hit and proc from FoR and FS) at 10% increased dmg from stacking Raze.
It's basicly a combo system.

[Tesq]

The problem of road idea is that stack those buff allow to get benefith while also keep use other stuff as hold the line, the channeling of Raze other than offer counterplays. (interrrupts) also prevent you while razing to use other stuff so you do dmg but at price to get more dmg aswell.

[kindred4080]

My humble opinion:
1) equalise BW and Sorc m2, to be both instant 1200 or dmg reduction;
2) return m2 for SH and SW to make them viable choice for a wb.

[Azarael]

Aza, do you mind creating a roadmap for tests etc? It might help structure discussions and such.

Not much to roadmap. On the next push, morale rates will be restored. We'll see what happens as a result of that and work forward.