Discussion Topic: Upcoming Weapon Changes

[isabel]

It's also important to note that upping damage and lowering ob for abs weapon actually hurts absers. They get to eat all of the extra damage when they're buffing absers and don't get to actually deal damage against combo or dodge because they're getting parried while bashed.

Similarly, the changes to mob weapons are biased against absers. Take nasty spiked club for an example, it went from 60ob 4d5dmg to 47ob 4d6dmg. They're dealing on average 2 more damage against abs hunters and an average of 0.5 more damage against abs warriors and they're probably never going to hit the dodger/combo user unless they're bashed with multiple on them.

Yeah and the damage mitigation I think is offset by the extra damage the mobs are doing with the upped damage on lowbie weapons? Prety sure brigs / blight mobs are doing more damage than I remember.

[Thore]

This is completely untrue. My mains are ABS. Several other imms I know play ABS actively. I get that you want to believe the immortals are out of touch, but you're just wrong.

Well. Either you had a hand in the recent weapons and abs changes in which case I am completely correct and you are out of touch even despite playing abs. Or and this is more likely, you had nothing to do with the changes and I should/could have just said the immortals involved likely don’t play absers.

So much hubris in one post.

I'm not sure it is. Regardless of who did what or who said what or who believes what, I think classes should be balanced. Period. It's likely coding though, do we have access to those files? Someone mentioned damage per second and I think that's a good way to start thinking about it. Take an average PK session with four players verse four players, one of each class, and see who is dishing out the most DPS over a 15-minute session. Ignore mobs for now. Try and balance that. Make it so that a top-tier player killer would want to play ABS because it's going to help them kill that channeler that has the rare or unique. Make it so that Dodge and combo have a tiny tiny advantage only because it is more difficult to assemble trinkets. Or make ABS trinkets just as difficult to assemble and just as beneficial.

Then, and only then, start looking at mobs and the way rooms and doors and mobile and mobs interact with a 15-minute session. Honestly I think that's what the Immortals are doing. I'm not too concerned with where things are at currently. I think resetting back to zero and then building from the ground up is a good way to do it because the game has kind of been in a not great state balance wise for a long time. Top player killers will probably disagree with this because they are currently crushing me with combo and OP uniques and rares that I will never have.

In fact, someone mentioned how they don't take rares because they will just lose them. I do that too. I think that sucks balls lol. I should get that rare and I should have fun with it until I die. But it shouldn't be so good that every single good player is gunning for me and ignoring everyone else. Although, even if it is a single DB more, those players will still do that because... Well... It is a single DB more.

Someone wise mentioned to me that when a good player loses his kit, he will alt to his ABS character and get the kit back and give it back to his combo fade or gayden. Lol gayden.

Anyway, good stuff. Love, Thore.

[Sarryn]

Is a great way to get great gear. Play a char that has nothing of value, aka abs set random abs weapon. Get low, run to a pat. Zerk bash them and watch them splode. Or you die and you lose basically nothing. Love abs for just this. Is even better if you do it on a random alt no one knows. So many come ups. Secret to success friends.

[Rig]

Is a great way to get great gear. Play a char that has nothing of value, aka abs set random abs weapon. Get low, run to a pat. Zerk bash them and watch them splode. Or you die and you lose basically nothing. Love abs for just this. Is even better if you do it on a random alt no one knows. So many come ups. Secret to success friends.

stop giving away my secrets

[Sarryn]

Just facts :p Why I am laughing at basically everything on this thread. Comedy at it's finest. Abs has and always will have it's place. It's worthless and barrel gear. But it's also a rare set taker, and generally costs you nothing but a lil time and effort.

[isabel]

I hear your oversimplification and raise you one overcomplication.

[Eol]

Agree with what most of Zarth / Tekela said. That said - I have my own insane ideas. I've spent the day writing this and its just too damn long so I shall paraphrase into something still too long.

-Everyone is a "blademaster/fade" now in the sense of - high armor + great damage + great defense + great bash (often exceeding how absers bash). Essentially, we all have it all and its too darn much. The only thing I like that comes out of all of this is - I still want to live in a world where dodge can be bashed. More on that below.

-Coding inherently makes defense superior to heavyabs. One gets hit every time. One gets autowimpy adjustments, flee before bash = 1 round, sits with no hits in the next room. There is no solution to these things.

-If I were to make a coding change - I'd be terrified of the above blowing up. Weirdly, I'd simply set everyone to build fleelag at exactly the same rate. Bumps the bottom, downs the top. Takes a stat dependent trait and separates it out. Wil will still help with sps and stat total.

-Something is way out of line with how hard defensive weapons hit. I know we need weapons to hit hard so more people die, but not kidding - we need to cap 1 handed weapons at something like 6d6. 5d8 max maybe if we think values from a year ago were appropriate. And that needs to apply whether its a heron or a razor sword or whatever. These builds will still be as potent as we allow defense to be, but armor weapons need to hit harder than them. You can kill anything if you hit 6d6.

-1-2 handed switch needs to be removed for all 1 handed weapons. This feature really is quite comical and its removal in the past was a solid idea. It really is quite funny how we can never for a second stop making combo weapons outhit abs weapons.

-Players are clever and some of the recent coding revelations obviously changed how people set characters. ie. we know that low DB really doesn't do anything while trading it for parry also ups bash. But the parry adjustments were supposed to help absers bash and instead it helps absers not land hits.

-I wonder if the Ghar badge could be used as an inspiration for how to adjust parry items. ie. build negative DB into items.

-Alternatively, I wonder if there's an opportunity here to try and separate what absers and combo users wear so that these items could then be adjusted. Random stupid idea - use disincentives to push armor and combo characters to use different items so the items can be adjusted accordingly. ie make Murgoz the dominant abser item (I know, it has its own problems which can be adjusted) and then adjust ebony or whatever so that combo users still pay in defense to have absorption. Or make the basics of an ebony set defense punishing ie. negative DB so that combo users actually wear riveted gear and therefore take more damage. I know, the specifics matter, but the idea is to separate people off through a powerful mechanic like was done with the Ghar badge.

-I'm going to strawman here - players have said we need to create a world where all builds are equal. It will never happen, but we can definitely make builds less rewarding. I'm making up fake numbers here, but sure - Rig/Davor can kill anyone, but we could create a world where they'd rather have 84 abs and a ...8d5 axe then being 55%/225 and 6d6. They'd still succeed in that build but they'd enjoy doing it a lot less than being 78%/290/8d5 or whatever insanity we're allowing now.

-Elysia's market opens the possibility that issuable gear could (and should) mostly be removed from the game. Obsidian pendants should come from quests, killing, crafting, and that's it. I know, they don't decay and all that but I think this is something that should change (maybe benefit?) the game.

-Similarly, all rank 8 type stuff ie. fade, DL, rank 8 whatever needs to be identical. And the future should be for these items to be downed like everything else. The simple truth is I think the world would be totally reasonable if the difference between basics and "uniques" really wasn't that much. Issuable items should never be the same as rare items.

-I don't want to say much about dodge because I'm pretty biased, but to me - straight pure unbashable dodge is one of the worst things to ever be invented in this game. So many of the "heroes" and great PKers of the past were really just people dancing around in unbashable poorly designed sets. I approve of the idea of finding a realistic cap for DB. I'd personally remove the armor weave ie. block its practicing (and no, I wouldn't secretly down the road let Aes Sedai and dreadlords still practice it). As I indicated above, inherent coding still favors dodge and defense.

-As much as I cringe at high super high defense I do like that combo characters can bash dodge ...except my parry defensive character literally bashes better than my abser. I don't see the Imms changing parry coding, but something about it just can't be right.

-Maybe I'm the only person thinking this, but Orma gear to me is just ridiculous. No, it doesn't fit the power of old school dodge, but I'm mediocre and I can do things in it I could never do back in the day. Its funny to think that at one point they invented "parry" gear that was terrible and call me crazy - Orma gear is like so much better than it.

Long story short. We've invented monsters and they are us. There are coding things that could be done, but a lot of fixes for the game can be found in simply how we buff and power things. We're literally playing a game where the Imms totally knew short blades were overpowered, downed them very appropriately, and then they got upped again to be better than they ever were.

[Thore]

Could it be that shifting dodge's power to parry is supposed to balance it for group PK? A 160 (or whatever) DB unbashable char is awful for balance's sake, and shifting that to parry makes sense in my head at least. The dodgers should probably do well one versus one. But get a second person on them and they should struggle a little bit more, which happens with parry. Honestly I forgot that party helps dodge - perhaps Austin and Itesh can convince Flash to give them access to that file for the sole purpose of removing that part of the formula?

Perhaps we all need to stop harping on what it used to be, what used to be good, etc., and just use that history to help us get to an even better spot with balance? It does very little good to accuse the immortals of messing up or not understanding balance. It's just going to make them not want to try. Thankfully I think they have pretty thick skin.

[tekela]

-Players are clever and some of the recent coding revelations obviously changed how people set characters. ie. we know that low DB really doesn't do anything while trading it for parry also ups bash. But the parry adjustments were supposed to help absers bash and instead it helps absers not land hits.

Parry is pretty strange, but I would view it as an opportunity -- to have something tied to bash that is not OB and weight actually presents a really interesting opportunity for weapons balance. I think it's confusing to some people because parry is defensive, but it seems like we can actually use it for balancing a lot more than just defense. We went literal decades without high-end parry equipment, possibly because someone (Myrddin? Seems most likely, if anybody) was aware of the implications of parry on bash before 2017 or whenever it came out.

I think if you scale back parry trinkets (torcs, gold and ivies, sungwoods) and tied more parry to ABS weapons (not too much, something in the range of 30-40 parry can have a big impact on bash combined with 17+ lbs and decent OB) and down some of the innate parry on high end combo weapons, you address a few things that were cited as issues in the past:

1. Dodge gets hit unbashed too often by ABS weapons. You can keep the OB at their current lower levels because bash wouldn't suffer as much with parry/weight offsetting the OB loss.

2. Combo defenses are too high. With parry trinkets reduced and dodge trinkets the go-to, you'll see combo immediately start coming back down to earth. The problem of heavy combo would still exist until you lowered absorption or just removed gold abs completely, but that's a separate issue.

3. ABS weapons can't hit bashed targets 1 v 1. Same as above -- this is an issue of inflated parry stats. With parry more a function of weapons than trinkets, this will not be as much of an issue.

4. Short blades are crowding out fencing blades. By tying parry primarily to weapons and shields rather than trinkets, give fencing blades substantially better parry for the ability to parry some of those bashed hits and you'll see a space for them open up rather than just using a CC if you want to do everything well on top of stabbing.

5. Combo weapons bash better than abs weapons. Lower the parry on weapons and use weapon weight/ob to determine how well combo weapons should bash. I think there's space for a big bad combo weapon that can bash stuff with the trade off of crappy defense (the zero parry iteration of bone clubs that bashed EVERYTHING, but your parry would probably top out at 145ish with like 65-69% abs), and this preserves that.

[Thore]

As a famous MaRo would say, "Restrictions breed creativity."