Wheel of Time MUD

Name DB PB ABS Moves

a pair of lissome leather boots with metal capped toes: -1 0 65 8
a pair of animal-fur boots: -1 -1 65 10
a pair of gleaming metal boots: -1 2 75 7
-
a laced pair of brown boots: 2 3 0 16
a pair of light, well-oiled leather boots: 2 3 22 10
a pair of low-heel leather boots: 1 3 40 10
a black pair of silver-tooled boots 4 2 18 5
-
a pair of thin metal boots: -1 -3 40 10
two very used boots with steel toe caps 1 0 60 0
a pair of thick metal boots: -1 -4 85 5
a dark pair of steel boots -1 -6 90 5

Gear is sometimes difficult to describe sometimes because certain pieces are (a) obsolete (b) low tier (c) mob gear, etc. That said - it feels like items should still in general try to be internally consistent. Keeping items consistent/relevant allows players to make decisions, trade-offs etc. Obviously our coding knowledge allows us to skew our selections. I started this thread as "gleaming boots are OP", expanded it to look at other boot inconsistencies I thought I found, but really just came back to gleamings being too good... and then expanded it to leather gauntlets.

I drew the information from here (below). I attempted to test items where I could ie. if I had them. The items I tested were in line with the database which was why I moved forward with the post.
https://wotcode.azurewebsites.net/equipment

Irrelevant stuff:
----
-two very used boots with steel toe caps 1 0 60 0 - Irrelevant, but probably too good. I viewed this as an Immortal gift.
-a pair of thin metal boots - Probably a mob / low tier item, but its abs are too low if we're being consistent though they can't be too high or it might sneak in as a combo item.
-a laced pair of brown boots - Probably mob / low tier item. Obviously outclassed by oiled/low heel.
----

-Combo boots. The heart of the matter - Gleaming completely out-class both fur boots and lissome. Lissome appears to outclass fur.

While I think some sort of change should be made to fur to give it a reason to exist: ie. fur less abs, less malus -> lissome - more abs, more malus (ie. one should be matched to "riveted" and one should be matched to "dyed leather"), the most relevant thing that should happen is that gleaming boots should likely be downed defensively to:

a pair of gleaming metal boots: -1 -2 75 7. I will make a case based on further exploration that their abs is also too high.

The increased heavy combo absorption of gleamings should come with a parry malus, and this value would actually be in line with other boot items that have absorption ie. their is a linear relationship in the heavy abs boots (thick, dark) that gleamings would fit into if its parry was downed.

-For consistency though - I looked at all other body parts ie.
-Riveted vs gold plated vs ebony for arms and legs
-Finely vs gold plated vs abs type plates for chest
-and "Leather" vs rimmed vs Morion vs full variety for head gear.

They were all remarkedly consistent with heavier items being associated with greater malus that was consistent as abs increased. ie. there was no free lunch. There was no armor increasing and parry/defense also increased out of line. You always traded defense for armor.

There is another item though that is probably too good - a sturdy pair of full leather gauntlets. This is one of the only items thats in line with gleaming ie. technically a "combo" item that provides relatively decent absorption while also providing positive parry. What's interesting to me about full leather gauntlets is that there are other "leather" items at other body parts that provide +2 parry, but none of them provide the level of absorption that full leather gauntlets provide.

for example:
a sturdy pair of full leather gauntlets 0 2 68
a pair of dyed leather armsleeves 0 2 52
a set of darkly dyed leather leggings 0 2 54
a thick helmet of supple leather 0 2 54
a pair of emerald-trimmed leather gloves 1 2 40

Full leather gauntlets are providing substantially more absorption than other leather items though I'm willing to admit that the emerald gloves above are likely meant to matched to the other dyed gear. That said - if full leather gauntlets are meant to pair to "riveted" or one of the light abs sets, having a defensive bonus would still be out of line with that sets characteristic. They are very close in absorption to other abs type gauntlets items while still providing defense ie. 2 different gauntlets appear to offer (-1, -1) defense and 72 abs bringing full leather a hairsbreath away but without defensive malus. Gleaming boots though are obviously even more obscene since they pack an even substantial absorption at 75% while also providing parry.

There are other items of similar absorption (68%) to full leather gauntlets at other body parts ie. rimmed helm, finely tunic - both offer a defensive malus. A light hauberk of oiled chainmail does offer +1PB but it offers less abs.

I mentioned gleaming boots abs being fairly high above. Of the "gold" heavy combo items - only the morion at 75% abs matches the boots. Greaves and vambraces both provide 71% and the gold breastplate provides 73%.

I think its fascinating actually looking through the sets. A lot of this has been very carefully coordinated. That said - for the TLDRs.
-Gleaming boots and full leather have a free lunch affect.
-Gleaming needs a parry malus, not a parry bonus and possibly an abs loss.
-Full leather needs to either lose abs or lose parry.
-These items are not internally consistent with how other items like them function - within their body party or within their set.

I normally write this sort of post over a ...week and I wrote this in one evening so if I'm wrong then - bah, but I didn't spend that much time on it...

I'm in abs and just swapped my dark steel boots for gleaming, so you're probably right when it comes to abs setups as well.

What might help with balancing boots (and trinks?) is getting rid of the mvs cap. Mvs are either already maxed, or close enough to maxed that the difference is negligible. That would also make it easier to nerf mv regen across the board, since mobility is too high atm.

Thank you for responding to me, and thank you to everyone for not responding to Kryyg.

The other day a person sent me a tell that I don't exactly remember, but I shall "paraphrase" it:

"You are absolutely right that gleaming/leather gauntlets are broken, but I hope the Imms leave it in the game because it benefits me". -Obviously this person is a true crafty Wotmuder.

To further support my cause - I put all the relevant boot data into a scatter plot in excel and it looks... very beneficial for comboers. All the boots I charted have -1db so I just charted parry against abs.

I'm sort of skeptical giving up abs on an abser will be beneficial for a troll.
-The foot is not hit that much so you have that going for you
-But you will be hit every time so you are sacrificing absorption. The combo user benefits thrice (bash, defense, abs)
-With a good weapon you already bash combo at max percent - 60% (booo) so the additional parry doesn't add anything
-And you add 1% increased bash chance on some dodgers for every 4 points of parry you add, but you take ... 10% more damage from everyone to blows to the foot which make up 5% of hits landed on you.

A long time ago I thought it would be clever to wear silver tooled boots with full abs. It ended in bloody fragments. This won't end as badly, but I'm not sure its a straight win.

The person who sent you the tell was obviously the mighty Lord Benito, and it’s okay to oust him as a self proclaimed crafty wotmudder

Eol wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 31, 2024 10:16 pm

<lots of great content>

First, really appreciate the thoughtful post. It’s clear a fair amount of analysis and time went into it and it’s quite impartial.

Second, combo is really hard to balance. It is easy to veer into a state where it is superior to certain dodge or abs items on an item-by-item basis. I honestly thought - and still think - it is not worth maintaining a bunch of gradients of combo. When I did the 2020-ish eq balance round, I nerfed (in order to eliminate as top-tier) a bunch of niche sets that had accumulated over the years as various imms introduced new items. So dyed leathers, emerald leathers, etc I just outright made worse than the rivs + finely tunic + fur + steel gaunts + rimmed “standard” combo set. I also eliminated the full-parry set as a viable PK set (for the same reasons — it allows too much min/maxing with dodge and combo, once you start to factor in the hit-chance of various limbs). For heavy combo, I made the gold gear ok but not great. I made abs substantially worse for combo so it was not tempting to throw on the odd piece of abs gear (e.g., shining steel combo). The net is I wanted combo to require more skill rather than be the default “best of all worlds” set: I made it have a high skill ceiling as well as floor. This was an intentional effort to throw-back to the 2000s era where I felt combo was most balanced and abs especially was more competitive.

Later on, Korsik had the good idea to introduce a “rare” combo set and repurpose the gold items for that. I believe gleaming boots are part of that set, so yes, they are intended to be outright superior to the basic combo set. The set is gold plate, gold greaves, gold vambs, gleaming boots, and morion. There may not be a set of hand-gear for it, can’t quite recall.

The scenarios where we would start to look at making changes are if…

1. Combo becomes a substitute for abs (ie, abs setups wearing combo as “best in slot” for extra PB)
2. Abs becomes a substitute for combo (ie, combo players wearing abs as “best in slot” because abs gain offsets PB loss)
3. Dodge players wear combo in a particular slot (because abs gain offsets DB/PB loss)
4. Combo becomes obviously better than any other setup in a theorycrafting (ie, stand still and fight) scenario. My belief is combo should lose in this scenario since it benefits from both abs and defense, if played smartly.

I don’t think you outlined one of those, since this seems to compare combo to combo pieces, but chime in if I misinterpreted.

Really does seem to boil down to physical stats being functional non-factors.

Scenario 1:

- A 19 19 19, 400 HP abser with (functionally) 0 defense and 83% absorption.
- A 19 19 19, 400 HP combo character with ~240ish defense and 73% absorption.

Scenario 2:

- A 19 16 19, 400 HP abser with (functionally) 0 defense and 83% absorption.
- A 18 19 17, 350 HP combo character with ~235ish defense and 73% absorption.


It's pretty obvious which scenario you see an actual trade-off and that trade-off can cover some minor imperfections or imbalances in equipment balance, i.e. the type of thing Eol is pointing out.

Also manifests in combo weapons vs. abs weapons (and then you have to consider the impact on dodge if you down one or the other to create a diversity of choice). It's tough to balance anything with the few levers available on this game and we seemingly just opted to give one away when we decided physical stats needed to be pretty much uniform (for non-channies).

Outside of some rare weapons, I think combo is in a fairly good place right now. What really hurts pure absorption set ups disproportionally is the 6d6 to 8d5 range on pretty much every weapon used in PK on top of the creep of damage bonuses. But higher damage is also necessary if you want people to die in the era of experienced players, smarter MUD clients, maps that do some pretty outrageous things for players, high hit-points, and stats that generally trivialize flee-lag.

Which is all basically to underscore:

Aureus wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 06, 2025 5:44 am

combo is really hard to balance.

But also adding that fiddling with slots and preventing min-maxing, etc. doesn't really get to the core issue because it's leaving another (extremely) important dimension completely untouched.

Thank you for responding Aureus. I mostly view posts like these as opportunities to try to gently change your opinion for future game balance.

1. In the end – this discussion is about some variation of a maximum of 4-6 points of parry depending on whether we are talking about boots and/or gauntlets. In the history of the excesses of the game, this may seem trivial, but I would point out this benefit exceeds the benefits of a double trinket slot. Recent trinket adjustments are often made 1 pb/db point at a time.

2. If the “excess” parry points within boots had been spread across the entire set – I would probably never have caught or commented on this. I might have thought it odd that certain gold items seemed just slightly too good ie. they were 1 parry off from reasonable, but the boots were made such an excessive outlier which was what made me notice them.

3. Looking at a scatterplot of parry against absorption is interesting because there’s not a tremendous amount of variation in parry across items – different sets move perhaps 1 pb at a time. You can create small buffs in equipment (make it over-perform) by gently increasing absorption. Gleaming are just wild though. No matter what combo set-up you use – you should include gleaming in it.

4. Gold gear through time has been uncommon. It loaded on one mob. You’d kill a stacked fade with gold vambraces/greaves and they’d be in fair condition because they were so uncommon that they couldn’t be replaced. You all know more than I do about loads/frequency, but gold gear does not seem uncommon/rare right now. The only exception being the ornate shirt.

5. I personally think you should break any notion of items being “special” or “superior” etc unless an item is an actual rare. Almost everything ultimately becomes common and then they outperform and we wonder why everyone is in the same set. Creating new special items is the historic source of a lot of items that ultimately just become a big mess. Most items in your current meta, love it or hate it, do a pretty good job fitting a reasonable absorption / defense curve. Dropping the special mentality will save us from some new Immortal in 4-5 years introducing “platinum plated armor”.

6. I’m not aware of any instances of your points #1-3. I would implore you to consider internal consistency within classes as a reasonable metric that should still be pursued and is worth making changes for.

7. I personally believe #4 already exists in the game for gold-combo humans against troll absers. I’ve posted about it elsewhere and I won’t waste your time repeating it. It would be wonderful if we had someone who could run a Monte Carlo analysis for us, but I think that’s a dream. Small tangent – I still think you all need to look at the 5+% ride bonus. I’ve obviously advocated changing it a specific way, but I don’t think you’ll ever balance dodge until you look at the enormous bash rate spreads across characters. The game might even better off without it rather than moving it around.

8. I’ve made it this far without sharing any anecdotes, but I’m exploring gold gear on trolls using items that have been rightfully debuffed ie. 1 handed clubs, DST etc. Were gleamings/gauntlets to be downgraded, I would simply either (a) accept a deserved defensive malus (b) or decrease my abs to try to increase parry. Neither would be the end of the world. I spent some time looking at the hit calculator with 180 OB(solo) vs a variety of 75DB/PB combinations ie. 140-150-160-170-180. Moving from 180 to 170PB doesn't break the game - its still solid defense. I will concede combo starts taking hits when you are in the 140PBs.

*Will digest Erulak's post. Took too long to write this one.

Korsik said he would take a look at the specific numbers (he’s been meaning to reply but hasn’t had a chance — RL interfering and all that). So we may make a tweak here based on your numbers. I won’t comment further since I am arms length from most specific eq number tweaking these days.

A few things in general though about our (current) eq balance philosophy:

1. re: trinkets vs main sets — we have intentionally loaded a lot of the benefit into main items to make it easier to re-gear after dying. We also narrowed the gap between rares and the “normal” top tier items: a bit too far at first, but I think in a better spot now. It’s a tricky balance between wanting the harder-to-get items to be desirable but also not mandatory to play at the top tier (or to make certain fully-decked out chars essentially unkillable except by freak accident). An example from before we did our 2020 balance: a fully-geared, 19 str trolloc master abs hunter’s chance of bashing a 19 dex Kin channeler in full rares (but not uniques) was somewhere between 4-6% without a rare weapon. Today we aim for general bash rates against full dodge to be in the ~20% range so some counter-play is required on the dodger’s part.

5. agreed! Rares and the current uniques are as far as we are going (and we try to make rares items that decay with use, as opposed to rare trinkets that don’t leave the game over time). We have also removed a number of the “anime” style weapons (colossal sword, gsword, etc.) and nerfed them. We are not adding new tiers of weapons or items, and in some cases are removing or nerfing items when there are too many to have meaningful choices/niches than can be reasonably balanced.

7. We are nerfing the armor weave’s DB bonus in the future for this reason. No plans to change the riding bonus as trollocs do have an OB bonus and we prefer trollocs to favor abs/combo over full dodge setups due to all the benefits not having to ride accrues to stabbers, but you never know. We have not run a Monte Carlo per se but we do have a very obscene spreadsheet that models out combat under some different scenarios. I cringe for the imm who one day inherits that from Korsik and I.

Thank you Aureus. I appreciate what you are saying and really enjoy being given the opportunity to understand your balance philosophy. We’ve had a few threads where bash has been explored and its fascinating to see something being adjusted that through time that to me has been one of the 3 wild cards of bash.
(a) ARMOR
(b) STR/Potions on trolls
(c) And berserk – because whenever someone complains about their bash percentage chance they always do it brave and never admit what their berserk odds would be.

Part of me wonders if I’m making a big deal out of nothing, or perhaps that I’m misunderstanding something, but this is literally something that led me to walk away from the game for a year. I understand the Imms wanting trollocs to focus on abs and combo, but ever since the bash calculator came out I can’t wrap my mind around why a troll would choose to be abs.

I feel like the idea of the powerful troll basher has essentially been a myth that we fell for. Trolls have prided themselves on being strong bashers, but everything I’m seeing says trolls are inferior bashers. The identical troll – switched to being a mounted human is an inherently superior basher with a marginally higher ride dependent OB, but dramatically improved due to the ride 5% bonus which essentially functions like the club bonus.
Players have a tendency to be obtuse when it serves them or when they want something so I want to be clear that obviously there are asymmetric components between trolls and humans. There’s obviously more to each side than just how they bash. Historically, I would describe myself as someone arguing that individual humans need more perks, that being a basic human is like being in a sensory deprivation tank compared to how trolls gather intel. I appreciate that the Imms have made riding substantially more tolerable since it really isn’t optional for humans.

I can trust the process ie. that there’s a plan for addressing and adjusting dodge and I can even see it in action. I’m going to stop posting about this, but I feel like my mind is going to keep coming back to mounted humans bashing trolls 65% when trolls bash them 60%. It brings to mind something I felt that I abused for years – the offensive uncertainty of trolls against things like channelers. When I was doing it – I didn’t know what landing rate trolls bashed at, but I knew that their path to hitting me was fraught with uncertainty and my spells mostly were a direct path to damage. The difference between 60 and 65% may only be 5%, but the transition from one to the other is about 8% and that 8% can potentially command a fight, not just deliver damage but reduce hits received. You can’t control the tempo of a fight if you aren’t landing bashes.

Eol wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 07, 2025 10:06 pm

Part of me wonders if I’m making a big deal out of nothing, or perhaps that I’m misunderstanding something, but this is literally something that led me to walk away from the game for a year. I understand the Imms wanting trollocs to focus on abs and combo, but ever since the bash calculator came out I can’t wrap my mind around why a troll would choose to be abs.

The key reason is pracs, especially for warriors, and doubly so for the 21 14 17 bearish wearriors. With troll pracs and using voulge or lamans, a 19 18 19 troll with decent mentals still ends up with a fairly gimp set up -- the power of the unique countering the less than stellar prac %'s that are needed to make things work out. Meanwhile on a LS warrior, I can get 93% dodge (compared to mid 70's on a troll), and 99% weapon/shield/bash without issue, without having to drop notice, or lower track, search, or survival down to levels that make things painful.

Abs is the only viable set up that lets one get level 6 survival, 85% track, 90% notice, and then a few spare pracs to shake things up (kick, wisdom lore, sneak) without having to sacrifice stuff just to make the bottom line of making things work.

With troll warrior combo, you are still pigeon holed into wearing the set that Aureus is concerned about -- morion, full leather gaunts, gleaming boots, and then abs/murgoz for the chest/legs/arms as a warrior really won't be able to get enough total defense for some other equipment set up to function in a way that can hold its own in pk.
Even on LS chars where pracs are not an issue, the defense imbalances mean that using spears (especially gold war spear), polearms (non-rare), lances, or flails mean you are siphoned into that set as you don't get the 20-25 defense that a combo Lblade would give, and then you end up dropping into the sucky spot where you find switching a finely tunic with a shiner makes you live a lot longer in pk as you don't have enough defense for mood wimpy to stop the guy from meleeing you through your defense unbashed.

That said, the main power of a combo troll is fighting indoors. With a str tea up, a combo troll vs a dism combo human will give the troll a noticeable advantage. That said... that is a rare situation, and with recent balance passes on areas, gets increasingly more rare.

Eol wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 07, 2025 10:06 pm

I can trust the process

this is usually the go-to option for many combo trolls to make pracs work out a lot better... which means when a stabber shows up in pk, pk ends as you have to leave or you get stabbed.