Anatomy of a Failed Patch

[Sulorie]

TB is fine and it was also fine in Live. Only bad players kept whining about it back in live and it is the same deal here. Spending 45 RPs on renown trainer for %40 crit dmg reduction is not even a good investment at all considering your renown points is limited to 80.

Yeah, no.

If you are even remotely serious about RvR you are going to abuse the hell out of it, because reinvesting from 3FS 4Crithit to 4TB 3Crithit the difference literally is 5% chance to crit, which you can get from liniments, slightly adjusting gear/set bonuses or even simply not slacking on Sentinel Talismans. And even against low crit damage classes it still performs around the average value of FS, while against sorcs it literally guts 25% of their damage output.(Or more if you run onslaught)

It has no counterplay, it has nothing to counter the effect, it is vastly more reliable than FS and it makes healing you vastly easier by normalising incoming damage to average values instead of random spikes. All at the grand cost of 5% chance to crit something.

You still ignore, that without FS your ctbc is positive around 10% on a dps class. Without investing more in FS you give your enemy like 20+% crit chance for free.

It's not only about an additional liniment to fix the disparity. It's about having a set budget on renown points for defensive traits and opting to get critical hit significantly more often.

[Onigokko0101]

TB is fine and it was also fine in Live. Only bad players kept whining about it back in live and it is the same deal here. Spending 45 RPs on renown trainer for %40 crit dmg reduction is not even a good investment at all considering your renown points is limited to 80.

Yeah, no.

If you are even remotely serious about RvR you are going to abuse the hell out of it, because reinvesting from 3FS 4Crithit to 4TB 3Crithit the difference literally is 5% chance to crit, which you can get from liniments, slightly adjusting gear/set bonuses or even simply not slacking on Sentinel Talismans. And even against low crit damage classes it still performs around the average value of FS, while against sorcs it literally guts 25% of their damage output.(Or more if you run onslaught)

It has no counterplay, it has nothing to counter the effect, it is vastly more reliable than FS and it makes healing you vastly easier by normalising incoming damage to average values instead of random spikes. All at the grand cost of 5% chance to crit something.

You still ignore, that without FS your ctbc is positive around 10% on a dps class. Without investing more in FS you give your enemy like 20+% crit chance for free.

It's not only about an additional liniment to fix the disparity. It's about having a set budget on renown points for defensive traits and opting to get critical hit significantly more often.

If you have a person healing you that extra chance to be crit dosent matter because it evens out the spike, sure you are getting crit more often but the crits do significantly less damage. Spike kills players when they have heals, not steady damage.

[Sulorie]

If you have a person healing you that extra chance to be crit dosent matter because it evens out the spike, sure you are getting crit more often but the crits do significantly less damage. Spike kills players when they have heals, not steady damage.

Spike is not a single big hit. It's a chain of critical hits within a small time frame. How much more likely is this event, when you give your enemy additional 20% crit chance, not to mention additional ctbc
or initiative debuffs? A single crit hit you are not getting, is worth several reduced critical hits with TB.

[M0rw47h]

Spoiler:

They were fine before, I get killed often by engies and I always found it fine, they kill when the enemy does not care any attention to them.would someone say "WH OP" if they would stand still while WH attacks him? and it is easier to escape from engi attack then from WH attack.
Said that, if you find find fine a reduction in dmg from 4k to 3k, would you be fine with a 20% dmg reduction for slayers, or WL, or choppa, or whatever? there would be huge complaints everywhere.

This 25% damage drop on crit (4k -> 3k) is due both TB and reduced stacks. While it may look severe, its not 20% or 25% damage reduction after all. As your crits will crit for less, but you will crit more often.
If your taget was using FS and now gonna use TB instead, then your timestamp (read: hiting multiple abilities same time) will have weaker crits, BUT you will get more crits among those abilities hiting at once.
Obviously, it's huge nerf for "perfect rolls" (crits only), but on average not really. Keep in mind, that Engi/Magus weren't hit by TB as much as BW/Sorc, WE/WH or even Mara/aSW/WL.

Spoiler:

"Generaly it's a PvP MMO. Not a solo sniping simulator. Classes should be designed so you want to group, always." There is a problem, single target spec does not have to mean solo gameplay. It looks like solo gameplay was expected and planed part of the game right from the beginning (WH/WE is a good example - AM/shaman as dps too). And the biggest disadvantage of soloers is the fact they are solo. To be solo is huge disadvatnage on its own, so why to punish it even more? To be in WB and die against solo player is not the fault of game design in this game. Lets take a look on WH and WE - solo gankig classes, which are designed for this purpose. They are mainly soloers or gankers, you can see WH squads ganking everywhere. Same was with engies. I do not take the reasoning for this nerf as you descibed it (it is my problem, I know) - but yes it has a logic and it looks like devs are tuning the game the way you descibed, you are right it seems. It is like I wrote - players are forced to play in Warbands, but it looks like there is something more. Players are forced to play in warbands AND if they want to get in to WB they should forget some specs or the whole classes, so why do we have so many mastery trees here? ST specs are not popular by devs it seems, because all in all we could see that the only wanted way of gameplay is - massive aoe battles. IT started with 24 aoe cap and it goes even further. ST specs based on crits are getting unpopular.

You want to punish solo, so people group up, as you want to balance game either around 6v6 or 24v24.
Constant tears (sorry, "feedback") about 1v1 on those forums is just driving away attention away from important issues.
I agree that ST dmg doesn't mean solo play, as entire smallscale is mostly ST train and keep in mind you still run ST parties in some warband (City Siege) for healer hunting etc.

Anyway guys, why not play a bit with a change? I guess they will collect data and decide whats next with it. Keep in mind tears aren't data.

[lyncher12]

didnt know a slight damage nerf would effect the viability of sniping level 31's with twenty engineers on an unreachable cliff.

[Jastojan]

Spoiler:

They were fine before, I get killed often by engies and I always found it fine, they kill when the enemy does not care any attention to them.would someone say "WH OP" if they would stand still while WH attacks him? and it is easier to escape from engi attack then from WH attack.
Said that, if you find find fine a reduction in dmg from 4k to 3k, would you be fine with a 20% dmg reduction for slayers, or WL, or choppa, or whatever? there would be huge complaints everywhere.

This 25% damage drop on crit (4k -> 3k) is due both TB and reduced stacks. While it may look severe, its not 20% or 25% damage reduction after all. As your crits will crit for less, but you will crit more often.
If your taget was using FS and now gonna use TB instead, then your timestamp (read: hiting multiple abilities same time) will have weaker crits, BUT you will get more crits among those abilities hiting at once.
Obviously, it's huge nerf for "perfect rolls" (crits only), but on average not really. Keep in mind, that Engi/Magus weren't hit by TB as much as BW/Sorc, WE/WH or even Mara/aSW/WL.

Spoiler:

"Generaly it's a PvP MMO. Not a solo sniping simulator. Classes should be designed so you want to group, always." There is a problem, single target spec does not have to mean solo gameplay. It looks like solo gameplay was expected and planed part of the game right from the beginning (WH/WE is a good example - AM/shaman as dps too). And the biggest disadvantage of soloers is the fact they are solo. To be solo is huge disadvatnage on its own, so why to punish it even more? To be in WB and die against solo player is not the fault of game design in this game. Lets take a look on WH and WE - solo gankig classes, which are designed for this purpose. They are mainly soloers or gankers, you can see WH squads ganking everywhere. Same was with engies. I do not take the reasoning for this nerf as you descibed it (it is my problem, I know) - but yes it has a logic and it looks like devs are tuning the game the way you descibed, you are right it seems. It is like I wrote - players are forced to play in Warbands, but it looks like there is something more. Players are forced to play in warbands AND if they want to get in to WB they should forget some specs or the whole classes, so why do we have so many mastery trees here? ST specs are not popular by devs it seems, because all in all we could see that the only wanted way of gameplay is - massive aoe battles. IT started with 24 aoe cap and it goes even further. ST specs based on crits are getting unpopular.

You want to punish solo, so people group up, as you want to balance game either around 6v6 or 24v24.
Constant tears (sorry, "feedback") about 1v1 on those forums is just driving away attention away from important issues.
I agree that ST dmg doesn't mean solo play, as entire smallscale is mostly ST train and keep in mind you still run ST parties in some warband (City Siege) for healer hunting etc.

Anyway guys, why not play a bit with a change? I guess they will collect data and decide whats next with it. Keep in mind tears aren't data.

This patch is fail. Simple as that. As there were no relevant data for nerf engi/magus (or screenshot from cities are) there won't be a relevant data to reverse it. There is only the will of devs. If the data would be relevant here, there should never be TB + nerf at one time, in one patch. How does anyone know how exactly will TB affect the whole game? Ok, there could be a forecast, but the real state could be seen after certain time will pass to get relevant data. But somehow someone knew that TB will not be enough for engi/magus to lower their dmg, so hand in hand with TB came even this nerf (covered as bugfix). I dont believe in data here. I hope it will be reverted.

[M0rw47h]

This patch is fail. Simple as that. As there were no relevant data for nerf engi/magus (or screenshot from cities are) there won't be a relevant data to reverse it. There is only the will of devs. If the data would be relevant here, there should never be TB + nerf at one time, in one patch. How does anyone know how exactly will TB affect the whole game? Ok, there could be a forecast, but the real state could be seen after certain time will pass to get relevant data. But somehow someone knew that TB will not be enough for engi/magus to lower their dmg, so hand in hand with TB came even this nerf (covered as bugfix). I dont believe in data here. I hope it will be reverted.

What you call "screenshot from cities" were instances of organized vs organized warbands, where players had hands and clues what to do. What else "data" you would want? Average pug performance?

[Onigokko0101]

Spoiler:

They were fine before, I get killed often by engies and I always found it fine, they kill when the enemy does not care any attention to them.would someone say "WH OP" if they would stand still while WH attacks him? and it is easier to escape from engi attack then from WH attack.
Said that, if you find find fine a reduction in dmg from 4k to 3k, would you be fine with a 20% dmg reduction for slayers, or WL, or choppa, or whatever? there would be huge complaints everywhere.

This 25% damage drop on crit (4k -> 3k) is due both TB and reduced stacks. While it may look severe, its not 20% or 25% damage reduction after all. As your crits will crit for less, but you will crit more often.
If your taget was using FS and now gonna use TB instead, then your timestamp (read: hiting multiple abilities same time) will have weaker crits, BUT you will get more crits among those abilities hiting at once.
Obviously, it's huge nerf for "perfect rolls" (crits only), but on average not really. Keep in mind, that Engi/Magus weren't hit by TB as much as BW/Sorc, WE/WH or even Mara/aSW/WL.

Spoiler:

"Generaly it's a PvP MMO. Not a solo sniping simulator. Classes should be designed so you want to group, always." There is a problem, single target spec does not have to mean solo gameplay. It looks like solo gameplay was expected and planed part of the game right from the beginning (WH/WE is a good example - AM/shaman as dps too). And the biggest disadvantage of soloers is the fact they are solo. To be solo is huge disadvatnage on its own, so why to punish it even more? To be in WB and die against solo player is not the fault of game design in this game. Lets take a look on WH and WE - solo gankig classes, which are designed for this purpose. They are mainly soloers or gankers, you can see WH squads ganking everywhere. Same was with engies. I do not take the reasoning for this nerf as you descibed it (it is my problem, I know) - but yes it has a logic and it looks like devs are tuning the game the way you descibed, you are right it seems. It is like I wrote - players are forced to play in Warbands, but it looks like there is something more. Players are forced to play in warbands AND if they want to get in to WB they should forget some specs or the whole classes, so why do we have so many mastery trees here? ST specs are not popular by devs it seems, because all in all we could see that the only wanted way of gameplay is - massive aoe battles. IT started with 24 aoe cap and it goes even further. ST specs based on crits are getting unpopular.

You want to punish solo, so people group up, as you want to balance game either around 6v6 or 24v24.
Constant tears (sorry, "feedback") about 1v1 on those forums is just driving away attention away from important issues.
I agree that ST dmg doesn't mean solo play, as entire smallscale is mostly ST train and keep in mind you still run ST parties in some warband (City Siege) for healer hunting etc.

Anyway guys, why not play a bit with a change? I guess they will collect data and decide whats next with it. Keep in mind tears aren't data.

This patch is fail. Simple as that. As there were no relevant data for nerf engi/magus (or screenshot from cities are) there won't be a relevant data to reverse it. There is only the will of devs. If the data would be relevant here, there should never be TB + nerf at one time, in one patch. How does anyone know how exactly will TB affect the whole game? Ok, there could be a forecast, but the real state could be seen after certain time will pass to get relevant data. But somehow someone knew that TB will not be enough for engi/magus to lower their dmg, so hand in hand with TB came even this nerf (covered as bugfix). I dont believe in data here. I hope it will be reverted.

You cant make a statement that there is no relevant data when you dont have access to the data cupcake

[Jastojan]

This patch is fail. Simple as that. As there were no relevant data for nerf engi/magus (or screenshot from cities are) there won't be a relevant data to reverse it. There is only the will of devs. If the data would be relevant here, there should never be TB + nerf at one time, in one patch. How does anyone know how exactly will TB affect the whole game? Ok, there could be a forecast, but the real state could be seen after certain time will pass to get relevant data. But somehow someone knew that TB will not be enough for engi/magus to lower their dmg, so hand in hand with TB came even this nerf (covered as bugfix). I dont believe in data here. I hope it will be reverted.

What you call "screenshot from cities" were instances of organized vs organized warbands, where players had hands and clues what to do. What else "data" you would want? Average pug performance?

Where did I write something like that?
What do I want more? Every city is unique battle and the final result table is based on many many various circumstances. You can let fight same teams against each other forever long but the results will be different (I don't even need to write that situation will never happen). And this is one of the reasons why the screenshots are not RELEVANT data for such changes.

[Jastojan]

This 25% damage drop on crit (4k -> 3k) is due both TB and reduced stacks. While it may look severe, its not 20% or 25% damage reduction after all. As your crits will crit for less, but you will crit more often.
If your taget was using FS and now gonna use TB instead, then your timestamp (read: hiting multiple abilities same time) will have weaker crits, BUT you will get more crits among those abilities hiting at once.
Obviously, it's huge nerf for "perfect rolls" (crits only), but on average not really. Keep in mind, that Engi/Magus weren't hit by TB as much as BW/Sorc, WE/WH or even Mara/aSW/WL.



You want to punish solo, so people group up, as you want to balance game either around 6v6 or 24v24.
Constant tears (sorry, "feedback") about 1v1 on those forums is just driving away attention away from important issues.
I agree that ST dmg doesn't mean solo play, as entire smallscale is mostly ST train and keep in mind you still run ST parties in some warband (City Siege) for healer hunting etc.

Anyway guys, why not play a bit with a change? I guess they will collect data and decide whats next with it. Keep in mind tears aren't data.

This patch is fail. Simple as that. As there were no relevant data for nerf engi/magus (or screenshot from cities are) there won't be a relevant data to reverse it. There is only the will of devs. If the data would be relevant here, there should never be TB + nerf at one time, in one patch. How does anyone know how exactly will TB affect the whole game? Ok, there could be a forecast, but the real state could be seen after certain time will pass to get relevant data. But somehow someone knew that TB will not be enough for engi/magus to lower their dmg, so hand in hand with TB came even this nerf (covered as bugfix). I dont believe in data here. I hope it will be reverted.

You cant make a statement that there is no relevant data when you dont have access to the data cupcake

I cant have access to something what doesn't exist.