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Post by kaldar on Dec 6, 2016 8:38:39 GMT -6
Seitaarin, make your points and defend your side of the argument, but watch out for stepping over them into the realm of being disrespectful to those arguing the counter side.
You accuse Ger of things you know nothing about, including not being able to analyze the data and the mechanics of the game. He was one of the first players to ever play the game, and is one of the best at analyzing the mechanics to find the holes. That is why he and I always bounce ideas off one another.
I'm not sure when you started playing the game, I'm not sure I remember you from our days of playing prior to 8 years ago, maybe you played under a different name then. I respect the build you came up with, and the skill you have demonstrated this age, but don't disrespect our knowledge of the game.
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Post by kaldar on Dec 6, 2016 8:56:25 GMT -6
Health gain is not equal on both sides, since it occurs on the attack turn only. Health gain is much more beneficial to a high speed build because they are much more likely to attack last, and thus get the benefit of the skill.
Health gain used to be based on DAMAGE DEALT similar to how Damage to self works now. So, by the way it used to work, of Tinkers would not be broken at all, because you wouldn't be receiving any health back from your current build. Now it works against damage taken, and therein lies the rub.
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Post by Seitaarin on Dec 6, 2016 8:59:11 GMT -6
With all respect ... the game you knew is a different game, and respect is earnt, it's not a privilege.
The simple fact of the matter is that an argument about duelling being out of balance was put forward by someone with not so many duel wins on his main duel character, before the age has even reached the real nitty gritty bits, and who has made little to no effort to make any in game counter to the builds he was lodging a protest against. To your other point, I am making this accusation about something I am rather well versed in actually - I have made no grand claims ever about being the best of anything, but I am very well versed in the ebb and flow of duel mechanics.
Those are the simple facts as things stand. You might not like them, and hey that's entirely up to you, but if I tell you something then I am speaking in the best interests of the game ... I care nothing for winning or losing for myself, it's all in the challenge and the fun, and I want to see things balanced. If you want to dismiss my analysis, then you're also welcome to do that ... but this age has shown you in real terms how far your understanding is yet to go to catch up.
I hope you guys can adapt to modern duelling, I really do. But if you keep going down the straight path you're heading down and coming here to make posts about how unbalanced things are without making any real effort to understand how things really work together, then there's really no hope for you.
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Post by Seitaarin on Dec 6, 2016 9:06:54 GMT -6
Health gain is not equal on both sides, since it occurs on the attack turn only. Health gain is much more beneficial to a high speed build because they are much more likely to attack last, and thus get the benefit of the skill. Health gain used to be based on DAMAGE DEALT similar to how Damage to self works now. So, by the way it used to work, of Tinkers would not be broken at all, because you wouldn't be receiving any health back from your current build. Now it works against damage taken, and therein lies the rub. So you equally are able to build more speed/wound/stun and control the flow of the battle as the other person can is what I'm reading here. That's how it's equal - you have as much opportunity to build it and synergise with other stats as the next guy. Health Gain (v.x? - v.11) was actually broken. I'm not saying it was in whatever version you played, but during this period, it was broken. Players were able to stack > 100% health gain, which was nullified on multi turns and was completely messed up if you were applying taint damage. Now it's an even playing field. You might not like the fact that enemies can build 75% of health gain, that might not play into your ideal build scenario, and this causes you to change your build to suit that if you want to level the field, but the fact is you CAN level the field, you have that ability.
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Post by kaldar on Dec 6, 2016 9:10:56 GMT -6
Maybe I should look back on age 11 as you suggest and see which side of the dodge argument you were on ...
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Post by Seitaarin on Dec 6, 2016 9:27:19 GMT -6
You might also ask about how many times I changed it up and made an actual effort to counter the build, how many trials and losses I took in that little experiment to gather data and come to a conclusion. Good info there.
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Post by Seitaarin on Dec 6, 2016 9:29:01 GMT -6
While you're looking that up you might come to find some prompts for that lateral thinking that I mentioned to you.
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Post by gerdonat on Dec 6, 2016 11:31:11 GMT -6
Health Gain - it's equal on both sides of the equation, equally limited, equally beneficial, equal in every way. If someone else is building health gain and you find that you don't like the outcome, you are well within your rights to build and equal amount of health gain, which levels the playing field. Or you can work some other way out around the problem if you don't like that solution, but in the end xa=xb, eliminate x as a variable. Now if you'd like to discuss potential taint fixes, I think that adding a secondary effect to taint that nullifies half it's damage value of Health Gain (or something to that effect, maybe 10-20% might be a better number in thinking about it a bit) could be a very interesting revitalisation of taint as an effective damaging stat. That could be very interesting indeed - almost OP interesting to be honest, but yes taint needs a lift in my opinion. I agree that health gain can be built by both sides, with the only caveat that damage dealers cannot use "of tinkers", but lets forget about that, the problem that I want to avoid, and that I envision it could happen, is health gain being the only way to counter health gain, that makes the dueling part monotonous. The problem could be: everyone being forced to use health gain to compete. I agree that the solution could came from taint, and make people diversify to fight health gain, as a matter of fact its better idea that the ones I came with. Something like: Suppose I do 250 damage between poison and physical damage, and you have 75% health gain, and suppose you have 50 taint stack. Right now, In your turn you would heal 225 points (250 + 50 ) * .75 . I would make the taint part not healable, and subtract half of it of the amount you could heal from the poison/physical damage, so in that case you would heal 162 instead of 225 (250 * .75) - 25. Obviously, the numbers can be adjusted and tested, but I think its a great option. The idea is that if i do lots of physical/poison damage and low taint, the taint part wont affect healing a lot, but if you do a lot of taint then you can get pass some extra physical/poison damage.
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Post by Tim on Dec 6, 2016 13:09:52 GMT -6
Everybody needs to cut the bickering about who has 'most experience' and who has 'best calculations'. If you want to measure your creds against others, do it in personal messages or elsewhere please. What this discussion should be about individuals observations about the balance between different builds. You can disagree with others opinions, but everyone should feel welcome to share them and ALL observations are helpful. There are some things here that I think could use some tweaking and a good discussion about that will be helpful for next age. Who played the game first/longest/most/with the most duels doesn't matter to me. I just want to hear what everybody thinks. Really, the only one you guys need to convince that there is an issue is me. A lot of points have been raised. I'm working on a detailed response. Or I will as soon as I can stop playing referee.
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Post by Tim on Dec 6, 2016 14:04:11 GMT -6
Gah! Had a nice long, detailed response written, the my connection dropped when I tried to post and lost it. *sigh* Will re-write later.
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Post by Jenlyn on Dec 6, 2016 17:11:04 GMT -6
I'd just like to interject and go on record as saying that even though I am not a good dueler, and I am in Ger and Kaldar's clan, I forsook a damage build for poison, and in the beta, I wanted to test a poison/health gain build but gave in to Ger's mockery. I should have tried it anyway regardless of what he said about it, but I had this idea that because he was a god-like player in the other game I played with him, he must always be right in this one, too. Anyway, I'm not straight damage this round. I can't beat Faile or Talena, but I am not a clone.
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Post by kaldar on Dec 6, 2016 17:35:57 GMT -6
It wasn't really Ger's fault , except that he trusted the information I gave him ... I provided him a spreadsheet of the classes, and the TAs .. only I had already filtered out the TAs I considered useless. I filtered out of Tinkers because of the extreme damage penalty. I couldn't envision a poison build that wasn't also built around physical damage. It was my shortsightedness, not really Ger's
And in fairness, without of Tinkers, Ger's conclusion about poison would have been sound, I believe.
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Post by Tim on Dec 6, 2016 17:45:59 GMT -6
Tinkers makes it easier, but defensive poison builds work just fine without them. Rufus was a beast a few rounds back with his even before we got to where Tinkers started dropping. The big downside to the defensive poison builds: they suck at dropping hordes/armies. LB of that Age Rufus was doing lucky to 1k damage to a horde per battle, where the damage builds were doing 3x that.
EDIT: Full response coming in an hour or so after I get home from work.
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Post by Tim on Dec 6, 2016 20:16:31 GMT -6
Ok. Take two. Lots of points in this thread that need addressed, so I'm going to try and hit them all here. Let me know if I miss something. General:Not to toot my own horn, but I think character builds have come a long way since I first took over the game. Back in the day, damage and speed ruled the roost. Now there are a few different builds that are viable to use. But that doesn't mean I'm satisfied with how things are. No system is ever perfect, and I'll be the first to admit there's plenty of room for improvement. So discussions like this are vital to have. A lot of the recent changes from the last few versions are because Seitaarin came a long and dug into the mechanics and made a group of unstoppable duelists. Players adapted and some tweaks were found to be needed. The system needs a combing over and a shake up every once in a while. Tweaking balance is a pain. I've made the system complicated enough that it's hard to just look at the numbers and say "this stat is the strongest". But that also means that it's hard to judge the impact of little tweaks. Takes a lot of trial and error and testing of changes. Some changes are good and some are steps in the wrong direction. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be tried. Health Gain:Health gain used to be based on the amount of physical damage you dealt. This just reinforced that straight damage was the way to go and health gain was more of an after thought for a build than something people truly focused on. About 5 versions back or so I did a major overhaul of it and the result was way too strong. I've since weakened it some, but it still is pretty strong. The problem as I see it is that health gain is still really strong AND that there isn't really a counter other than health gain. I'm fine with it being strong if there's a counter, but builds shouldn't just devolve into a health gain arms race (still have flash backs from the speed arms races of my early versions). So there needs to be something else or it needs weakened some. I'm really liking the idea of making Taint a counter to health gain. Taint is currently underpowered, at least in the late game. Early on it's pretty powerful when the turns are alternating pretty evenly, but once movement stats start stacking and turns change more sporadically it loses some of its luster. It's already immune to dodges critical misses, so making taint damage not heal might make it a little OP, but it does fit thematically. Without crunch the numbers too much, simply making it so Taint damage is not counted in the health gain calc sounds like a good balance, but I'll probably need to do some testing to see how it changes things. The other idea I had (which I admittedly don't like as much, but still want to throw out there) is that I could make health gain more random. Instead of gaining x% health, you could gain somewhere between x/2% and x%. So 70 health gain would gain somewhere between 35 and 70% health. If I did this, I'd probably raise the max health gain back up to 100%, so the average would still by 75%, but that way it's not a guarantee. But 1) it still doesn't give health gain a counter and 2) even I'm not a fan of adding more RNG to the battle calcuations. Tinkers:I agree Tinkers is one of the stronger TAs in the game right now. And honestly, I can't think of another single TA that is better for a specific build. One could argue that the Mercenaries TA is a good counter to it, but it's not quite as easy to mitigate the -30% defense as is it -30% damage (though still doable). It might be a little too strong though, or there aren't enough strong options for other builds. I'll consider SLIGHTLY tweaking it for next age, but I think TAs like it add things to the game and don't want to nerf it completely. I'd much rather add some more strong TAs though... Speed and Wound:In my honest opinion, Speed > Wound and Stun > First strike, though both are equal in equip point costs. I added Wound as counter to speed, but it's never really worked out. It's kinda close, but speed is still king, no matter how much I try. Changing Wound to cost a little less than speed might balance things out some, but really I'd rather weaken speed than make Wound any stronger, as I think Wound IS pretty strong already. Honestly, the thought of making changes to the movement stats again scares the crap out of me. But if anyone has ideas of how to tweak things, I'm definitely interested in hearing them.
Probably have a few more thoughts, but I think that's probably enough for now.
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Post by AnotherGer on Dec 6, 2016 20:52:02 GMT -6
If mercenaries added speed instead of wound. It would be a better counter. Right now the only way to counter speed is with speed. Wound is much worse than speed. Not only may not trigger, when it triggers it does for average half the amount, and in top of that speed makes you go first compared with equal amount of wound. There is not decent speed option for damage dealers right now. A strong Ta with speed for damage dealers would be welcome. And totally agree with taint not being healable. Maybe its not enough but could be a good start. If there are other comparable tas then maybe tinkers should not be touched. But tinkers and the other tas should be expensive enough that you cannot pack 5 of them. Otherwise the others Ta become obsolete.
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