CDV17: Ter'angreal tweak

[kaldar]

Again, you are talking about dueling. I am talking about horde bashing. How many hordes have health gain as a stat? Not very many.

in a duel, it would be difficult to work out how many points of damage the taint would be worth, but assuming best case, for 3 of the shadow, would be something like

15 * 3 + 30 * 3 + 45 * 3 = 270 points. That would be against a speed health gain build , and if the taint went off every time which wouldn't be expected.

A more realistic expectation might be closer to 15 * 6 + 30 * 3 = 180 points and if instead we had the 30 poison in the same assumption of successful application would be something like 60 + 40 + 63 = 163.

So, in a dueling scenario, I agree the change doesn't make much difference. However, in a horde bashing scenario where it is possible to get the turn advantage much more easily, and one expects to get closer to 9/12 hits , the poison is significantly better.

[Seitaarin]

So to be clear here, you're saying that despite the threads and the arguments, you actually DONT want any balancing done to help against health gain? you can't have it both ways, you're arguing against yourself.

[kaldar]

I have no idea what you are talking about, or what "balancing against health gain" even means with respect to the changes to the "of the Shadow" TA, which is all we have been discussing for the last dozen posts.

Taint not being healable was done to balance against health gain. But the entire discussion about the overpowered health gain referred to dueling, not fighting hordes.

Anyone who tries to use of the Shadow , the old version or the new version, to duel someone using similar strategies of poison/health gain as we saw last age, won't find any success, so I don't see how it is relevant.

Unless you are trying to suggest that someone using melee to duel, might now win by having some taint that is unhealable thrown in with the melee strength? In that case, I would say that it will do more damage but still not be near enough to make a difference.

But as I said, I'm really not sure what point you are trying to make here

[gerdonat]

When you talk about horde builds, you are usually getting 8 to 9 hits vs horde or army, in that case poison is more usefull than taint 1 to 1.

I think Tim needs one more age of defense builds totally overpowering melee builds in duels, to consider further changes, as I said, the current changes wont make melee competitive vs poison/taint, but Tim wants to go slow, and I totally understand it.

You and me pointed when Tim proposed taint as a counter to health gain, that it would be much easier for a defense build to incorporate it, for a melee build, wound would have been a better alternative.
So, taint will make health gain be less powerfull, and some dueling builds without 75% health gain will arise, but not melee builds.
A melee build in order to be able to get through the defense alone, needs to invest almost all his skills/ta's on damage, if it starts switching damage for taint, he will do some unhealable taint damage but wont do any melee damage, and if you are not doing melee damage, it makes no sense to invest any portion of your skills on melee... so you end with a poison/taint build...


In any case, all of this is just theory, we will be able to test it next age, my prediction for next age, is that melee builds wont be able to beat poison/taint builds...

[Seitaarin]

So you're arguing AGAINST a small step towards adding unhealable damage to melee to help it out. You're just arguing to add more horde damage now. Because 10k+ isn't enough, even with additional stats being added elsewhere. You don't actually want small changes done to balance an overstatted item to help towards pvp balance, you just want to hit pve harder and just whine about pvp balance without actually making changes that might help a little. Understood, we're clear now, new conversation.

[gerdonat]

I dont want to do more damage, I just pointed that you were actually nerfing of the shadow, anyway, its a small change so I wont keep arguing about it, its clear that once Tim announces somethings, its really hard to nudge him even a little.

[Tim]

Sorry. Been sick so haven't been checking the forum.

Of the Shadow was changed to Taint instead of Poison because I felt there were already a lot of good poison TAs, but not enough good Taint ones (beyond the straight Taint). Taint fit better on something with the name "of the Shadow" anyways. It changed from 10 to 5 because I felt that 10 taint on top of the other stats would have made it prohibitively expensive equip points wise to use. Previously, the stats of "of the Shadow alone added up to about 82 points (not counting mulipliers when added to other gear). If I went with 10 taint it'd be 108, where 5 taint is about 81.

As with any ter'angreal the final points cost depends on what you apply it to, but was trying to not make it expensive to the point that you don't have the equip points to make use of them. You may have more equip points than you know what to do with at the very end of the age, but I don't do my planning JUST for that phase of the game.

[gerdonat]

Tim, I understand what you say... the question is, its justified that taint costs more equipment points than the equivalent poison?
I m pretty sure that till last age, it wasnt, as a matter of fact it should have costed less points... Now they may be more equivalent, but i dont think they should cost more...

That makes, I guess, taint ta's start dropping later than poison taints, which is ironic since by the time taint ta's were dropping, they were useless...

Anyway, does cost of base ta impacts when it starts dropping in the game?

[Tim]

Saying Taint costs more isn't ENTIRELY true. Without completely digging into the the equipment cost formula (which there's NO WAY I'M CHANGING AGAIN AT THIS POINT. At least not for next age), Taint adds a 'large' straight cost of equip points where poison adds a small straight cost AND increases the cost of the item by a decent percent. So which taint TAs, they will always add ABOUT the same amount of equip points, regardless of what item they are applied to. With poison TAs, the cost varies greatly depending on if you put it on an item that costs 30 pts or 300 pts.

As for order, yes-ish the cost does effect the order, but not directly. The TAs are put in tiers of 8 (4 pre and 4 post) that slowly get rolled out as we level up. The order was manually setup by me, but I started by ordering them by cost then rearranging in ways I thought made sense. I'm currently working on redoing that thanks to the TA changes I'm making, so when I get that list updated, the full list will get posted on the forums.

[kaldar]

I hope you are feeling better Tim. Any chance we can get an update of where everything stands and an ETA ?