[Gear] State Stabilization

[Grunbag]

Crit and crit procs ruined live. It needed a soft and hard cap like everything else. Plenty of tactics with the 25% base proc rate were good until people were pushing 40%+ crit rates then crit proc just became stupid. Soft cap needed to be 25% like the base proc rate. Mythic never put a cap in because crit was never meant to get that high

Agreed ! That's what I proposed too : a cap for crit rate , also a armor cap linked to the class : a tank would have a highest cap than a light armor to prevent armor stacking .

[sotora]

I see certain things mentioned that keep coming back in balance discussion like bummerang. Namely : armor amount nerf (via various routes), RD and CW nerf, further crit nerfs and some others.

Most worrying from a point of future pvp is that most of those changes would massively disfavour one type of classes and massively favour one faction.

[Teefz]

@OP: Whichever way this thread goes, I sincerely hope that while people wanna do something about the "overpowered" difference in gear, they remind themselves, that this is ROR and not WAR. WAR had many flaws and many pocket items which granted characters a kick off into an entirely new tier of kickass: Herald's cloak, Crook of Radiance, The 3 LOTD cloaks, absorb talismans, crit talismans.. the list goes on. On top of all of this you had/have renown abilities which messed up the balance even more between high tier/low tier gear: TB, CW, RD, QE etc.

My point here being that people/I are theorycrafting on a basis, which was rotten to the core and therefore imho cannot be addressed and compared under the same circumstances, as a lot of these cirumstances have been removed/reworked. With that being said and while I may not see eye to eye with all your points, I still believe that something has to be done to all the upcoming sets. Quite honestly I was thinking you guys would go with the flow and choose the same method, as you have done with anni/merc/ruin - scaling the sets, fixing/reducing stats. But of course there has to be some form of progression and it is a fine line between putting out gear that's appealing to the community and not just squeezing the lemon - in other words please don't follow SWTOR example . Good luck

[sotora]

I guess my first question would be why not just address the creep by crunching the stats on the sets and weapons themselves? I think most of us would rather have the hard numbers, than having an invisible system handle how hard we hit/get hit etc...

Doing so makes progression less attractive, as the increase in power between sets is reduced. Despite my aforementioned distaste for gear advantage, power differences must exist and they must be noticeable. They just mustn't be allowed to be taken to extremes. The simple solution of compacting gear alone has two flaws:

• It maintains a limit on the highest power set that can exist without reintroducing the original flaw of excessive power advantage
• It fails to maintain a large enough power difference between two nearby sets.

Scaling / de-bolsering sytem will also make progression less attractive since numbers scquired will stop to have absolute value and internal layer will decide / modify things.

From purely player perspective it seems much less attractive gearing wise than reduced power creep between tiers of gear.

Most players try to acquire very good gear (+20 talis, +124 or higher armor talis, annihilator or merc set, infuence or scenario weapons, lvl 38 potions granting 80-100 stat, etc) even though power diffrence between them easier acquireable gear like Ruin Set, +16-18 talis, epic weapons, lvl 35 potions giving 72-90 stat is not big. Number diffrence dont have to be big to make progression attractive.

[Telen]

I see certain things mentioned that keep coming back in balance discussion like bummerang. Namely : armor amount nerf (via various routes), RD and CW nerf, further crit nerfs and some others.

Most worrying from a point of future pvp is that most of those changes would massively disfavour one type of classes and massively favour one faction.

Why? These things were all not present in the original game. They were all a factor of end game bloat and Mythic could never tackle them because at that point there were only 2 people working on the game.

[sotora]

Spoiler:

I see certain things mentioned that keep coming back in balance discussion like bummerang. Namely : armor amount nerf (via various routes), RD and CW nerf, further crit nerfs and some others.

Most worrying from a point of future pvp is that most of those changes would massively disfavour one type of classes and massively favour one faction.

Why? These things were all not present in the original game. They were all a factor of end game bloat and Mythic could never tackle them because at that point there were only 2 people working on the game.

It seems false to idealize intial balance and concepts and view all later additions as a band-aid to fix issues aroused from power creep or "bloat".

Wasn't i.e. Warhammer well known in video gaming/mmorpg world for ridiculous concept&balance of Bright Wizards after release?

We as humans generally have a tendency as a race to idealize earlier times and initial ideas concepts. In case of Warhammer I would be even more cautious considering how messy was whole creation of project of Warhammer Online in first place and how it was pushed out of the door. Making original /initial state of the game as something to strive for is quite risky.

I seriously doubt we'll ever known what was added for what reason exactly and who knows how exactly initial game balance was supposed to look vs. what was actally delivered in 2008.

I edited this post asking you answer the question - Why would it favor one faction more than the other? I am sure that you have analyzed several setups and specs to come up with this conclussion; if not, this is just speculation and not allowed in the Balance Forums.

Waiting for your (new) post explaining why it would massively favour one faction - Penril.

I am going to answer your question. Sent you an PM as well.

[Eathisword]

Crit and crit procs ruined live. It needed a soft and hard cap like everything else. Plenty of tactics with the 25% base proc rate were good until people were pushing 40%+ crit rates then crit proc just became stupid. Soft cap needed to be 25% like the base proc rate. Mythic never put a cap in because crit was never meant to get that high

A proposition about capping crit was already made and it has been discarded. Here : viewtopic.php?f=97&t=18087

[Telen]

We as humans generally have a tendency as a race to idealize earlier times and initial ideas concepts. In case of Warhammer I would be even more cautious considering how messy was whole creation of project of Warhammer Online in first place and how it was pushed out of the door. Making original /initial state of the game as something to strive for is quite risky.

Its quite clear a lot of what was added later were cash grabs though. You had to keep playing and buy the xpac to stay competitive. You cant compare that to the first round of aoe nerfs because that was to address balance issues that players had been pointing out for a year. It was only the test event on the dev servers where bomb group ran rampant that the devs hand was forced.

Also so what if changes to the base fundamentals of the game affect balance. Balance is going to change anyway. Better to fix the foundations sooner rather than later when work has been done on balance only to say yeah that crit stacking or proc meta is still an issue lets rethink it.

[Sulorie]

Agreed ! That's what I proposed too : a cap for crit rate , also a armor cap linked to the class : a tank would have a highest cap than a light armor to prevent armor stacking .

Without armor stacking you are theoretically below zero armor, when being debuffed. It's a problem with flat debuffs, that their efficiency depends on the target.

[Bozzax]

Sot is correct though.

Not doing a deep analysis but it is fairly easy to grasp. Also it is quite likely I overlook some class or tactic please don't focus on that.

So why ...

Archetype and classes
All dps typically have crit increasers but all dps don't have crit damage increasers. Lowering crits means crit damage increasers looses some value and melee dps as a whole becomes a tad weaker compared to dps such as SQUIGG, SW, DPS AM, DPS SH (or RDPS). (I'm not saying it is a bad thing or a good thing)

Realm
Order MDPs all (WH, WL, SLAY) have AA increasers while Dest has (self) crit increasers (Mara, Chp, WE). A cap obviously would hurt Dest harder don't need to be a brain surgeon to see that. I'd also wager dest (2h) tanks rely more on crit (increasers /damage increasers) then order counterparts. Exception would be BG that has AA while IB is more crit dependent. Diff for tanks is less obvious ofc.

Regardless I think ALL % modifiers like inc-dec damage, inc-dec crit damage/heal, strikethrough, avoidance, in-out crit/heal crit, AA-haste-slow, armor-resist mit-reduction. needs more tightly controlled. Doing so would create a more stable state.

Most importantly you can't just do one of them for example crits as this affects archetype blance and realm balance (as Sot said). Well unless those shifts in balance are needed as well.