The key to getting new players into a game is balance. Skill should decide whether or not you win or lose. They should learned this lesson badly from WoW. Favor items are not only a minor edge, but absolutely crush new players with the head start you get. The 15% run speed is not just amazing, it's godly versus a new player. Not because of skill but because in close matches even 1 kill can decide the game. If 3 random people had 15% run speed versus 3 other randoms with no or much weaker favor items there would be little chance of the 0% run speed team winning.
We saw this in WoW. You can't create necessary homogeny. If everyone has the minor speed, boars speed, or ____ speed enchants it simply becomes redundant to have them. And the fact is everyone did have them. I don't know about later on because i've played a bunch of single player and some MP and well you can't kil what you can't catch. Doesn't matter if you can hit for 1,000,000.
Anyways i'd hope to see NO favor games to encourage players or change the favor system. THe idea that you have to grind any sort of points as a new player is a turnoff. When i first bought this game i thought it would be fun because the favor system was an easy grind. But it's not. YOu'd have to spend 10-20 HOURS to get the best item. WHat is this? A fkin MMO? GImme a break. I don't play MMOs because they are grind trash.
I agree i work 50+ hrs have a child and married and get to play 2 to 3 hrs a day if i want to. 2 times 7 is 14 hrs 3 times 7 is 21. 14 to 21 hrs a week to play games is not all that much.
If you do not own your own bussines the you have 2 days off and usually only work 40 hrs a week.
Knowing when to run, is a skill Agent of Kharma (you should try it).
Fighting by your towers are a tactic, yes knowing when to let them have a flag to and denying a kill is skill. Standing there fighting a battle that turns sour is just playing poorly.
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Favor items do set new players at a slight disadvantage. I'd argue it's not as big of a disatantage as RainFall2112 or Agent of Kharma make it out to be.
15% speed increase favor item is very good, but guess what -- I've won the last 10+ games WITHOUT THEM. They are not required. In fact depending on which demigod you play it may not be the best choice.
Knowing which item to equip your demigod (i.e. itemization) is a skill.
I don't believe any favor item is that much better than another favor item. They're all balanced around the fact that you can only have one. Everyone starts with enough favor to purchase at least 1 item.
Sure getting EVERY favor item takes a long time, but you don't need every item to be competitive. In fact all you need is 3-4 items imo (which at say 100 favor per game and average cost of say 400 = 1600 / 100 = 16). So in 16 games you'll have a fair selection of items.
Now with that said I think favor items and gaining favor points should only be for Skirimish or Pantheon games.
Custom games should have EVERY FAVOR item avaliable -- in part because they can't control or stop the cheating in this mode so why not just have all of them avaliable. This would also provide a place where you can test out and see which favor items are good, which ones work well for either your play style or your demigod of choice.
-Jara
PS: I personally like the concept of favor items and having something be persistent (I was a huge fan of Netstorm). It does encourage you to keep playing and have something to work for.
OT for a sec, Netstorm! I loved that game. Such an original concept.
I'm for favor items, they don't feel OP to me yet. It's an extra level of customization for a hero. Since when you buy one it buys it for all Demigods, I don't think the prices are unreasonable. I've mainly used the +800 health/5 hp regen one since I'm still picking up how to play, and the extra health and regen at the start is a nice buffer. Kind of like getting Bracer makings and a ring of regen in DotA when you start off.
I said:
You said:
I said that I bought the two armor upgrades available at the start of the game. If you say he had an increasesed damage item then he should have had less armor and hit points than me. Are you saying that increased damage items trump increased armor and hit points? Can you prove this contention, or are you simply talking out of your ass?
What regen items are available as soon as the game begins? And again I say that I had increased armor and hit points, and so if he bought such an item then he did not have increased armor and hit points. Do regen items (and I still want to know which regen items are available as soon as the game starts) trump armor and hit points?
Are you sure that potions work in the middle of a fight? Don't you have to stop what you are doing and stand there for a second or two for a potion to work? Well, that didn't happen in this fight. We just stood there and traded blows.
How could he have had a higher armor factor than me when I bought all armor possible at the start of the game? You either don't know anything about this game, or you don't know how to read. Which one is it?
I shouldn't have had to run. I had equal hit points to him, had all armor upgrades possible to buy at the start, had hammer slam, landed the first blow, and landed more hammer slams. If you say I still should have "known when to run," then you are simply defending unfairness and an unequal playing field. Since that is not a defensible position, you just lost the argument.
Knowing when to use your brain is a skill Jaradakar (you should try it).
So what did he do differently? If it was a Favor item that put him over the top, you'll get yours soon enough. You lose a few unfair fights, by that time you have the favor to buy your own. OR you picked a favor item that didn't help you in that specific engagment.
I agree Favor items making it harder on the Newb up against the Veteran with almost all of them unlocked. But just think about it for a minute. Would favor items make much of a difference anyway? I mean it's a newb going up against a Veteran. I think that small bonus item will be overshadowed buy all the skill and experience he has anyways.
Yes. Yes it does. Has a cast time like anything else.
Anyways, he might of been juking or something? Or your hammer didn't hit directly. Hammer splash damage is much less than a direct hit.
my god what a buncha babies.. no favor items.. seriously why dont you just complain that your co-worker shouldn't make more cuz he's worked there longer.. same noob crying about op heros because you can't understand that some heros have str's and weakness no favor items.. first off 3 games = 15% move speed.. if you bought this game and think that playing 3 games to get a special item is unfair.. your not only retarded, and a waste of life..but you must also enjoy self-mutilation because you buy games that you hate everything about then force yourself to play them and waste evenmore time complaning about thier gameplay flaws.. go jump bud kthx
Wait, explain this fully. If he hit a potion while fighting, and then continued to actively fight while the potion was activating, wouldn't it cancel the cast on the potion? You see, I tested this very thing after the game was over, and I thought I concluded that he couldn't have used a potion.
Explain the mechanics of this better please.
Potions are not instant. He's either casting the potion, or he's fighting. There's no doing both at the same time. You'd know if he was using a potion. I suspect something to this story is being left out if the guy not only beat you, but has half-health left after the battle. Favor items alone would not be able to do this.
Also, Agent of Kharma, I think you're a dick and a troll. If there's a way to effectively mute someone on the forums, I'd certainly like to know. But none of that is neither here nor there, right? So how about you knock it off with the personal attacks since they're not relevant to the discussion. Try to be a bigger person than me, although I suspect you already feel that way about everyone anyway.
Without a replay it's hard to take this very seriously. Did you hammer land directly or did you just get splahs damage? Did you get hit by a tower prior to the engagement? Did he have a favor item that benifited him more than you (heck what favor item did you have?)? Did he use a small health potion (very quick timing) and you did not notice?
My point, any number of things could of happened...
It's possible that you don't know everything about what happened. So while you can say X, Y or Z was true or false it makes little diffrence if you don't know for sure.
As to my advice above, if it looks like you're going to lose, dispite the fact you don't think you should -- guess what you should run, it's better than giving him the kill.
As to the topic, if you have multiple favor items to choose from, picking the correct one that will help your chosen demigod the most AND how you plan to level that Demigod, is skill. Some favor items provide a boost in early game, while others are better for late game. Some are good for the Rook, some are not. Some are good for Erebus, others are not.
Itemization is a skill. Not having an favor item that your opponent has is a only a SLIGHT disadvantage imo and might not be a disadvantage at all if it's not the best item for you to use!
If you're playing Erebus the speed boots can be very good, but so can 800 health & +5 health regen and for my build with Erebus I prefer the latter. But if I don't have the option to use the 800 health and +5 health regen, Charm of life is not far off. It has 400 health & +5 regen plus reduces death timer by 20%.
So I have 400 more health, but they respawn faster. Both are good imo depending on the situation one is slightly better than the other. If I don't die much, the 800 health is better, but if I do die, the Charm of life can be better. In this way I think all the favor items are balanced (as you can only have one).
PS: Note the lack of childish jabbs, please try to be civil. In my previous post I was not attemting to insult you (and I'm sorry you took it that way) but I was just trying to give you advice.
Piffle
L2P
Get an R2D2 droid to calm your nerves or kick in frustration.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weGTZ5VXR4s&feature=related
The smaller the potion, the faster it is to drink.
So the small health potions are like 0.5-1 second cast time.
Bigger health potions are 3s cast times I believe.
The small one is very hard to stop and if I'm attacking you I can just pop it after a swing and I lose maybe 1 attack on you.
Landed directly.
Nope.
I thought that was what we were trying to figure out. That's been my operating assumption the entire time, unless someone can provide a better explanation (which hasn't been forthcoming). If the explanation isn't "favor item," then the situation is probably worse. I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to the game by assuming it was a favor item.
This is why I was asking about the mechanics of potion usage. Based on what I thought I knew before, and based upon what people have said here about potions - no, there was no potion use. We simply stood there and traded blows and hammer slams.
My point was, in this particular situation, in a mirror match where the conflict start within 15 or so seconds of game start (whatever time it took to buy my armor then run out to the first neutral flag), where we had identical hitpoints (I moused over him and checked)... there really aren't any number of things that could have happened. I think there is only a limited number of things that could have happened.
If we were both level 7 or whatever, and 20 minutes into the game, I'd say you are right, and that there are too many variables to analyze. As it stands, I think this is a perfect case for analysis. A favor item put him way over the top, and I only have access to one sucky favor item - the first one on the list.
This isn't a question of whether he used smarts or skill and picked a better item than me. It's a question of what each of us has access to, what each of us has an opportunity to equip. It is impossible for me to equip anything but the lowliest, suckiest favor item there is. I'm guessing he could pick whatever he wanted, and it put him way over the top. If we both had access to the same stuff, and he picked one thing and I picked another - fine, your contention holds. As it stands, I agree with the OP.
Well, in the example I gave, it was enough of a disadvantage for him to win and for me to lose, even though I was ahead in hammer slams, got the first strike in, etc.
Accepted. You have my apologies as well.
Oh, how rude we can be.
I gave you several things that could tip the balance in his favor. All you could return with are alot of insults.
Anyhow, i wont waste more time on a troll like you. You CAN'T decide if you fight on equal terms just looking at the hitpoints. He could have stayed at the base a few seconds longer than you, that gave him some extra cash to buy one more item than you. You can't be sure it was a favor item that gave him the advantage, hence your arguments are totally moot.
And from the description of your battle, you are a really bad player. If you stand toe to toe and se your are loosing, and still refuse to run, then you can really only blame yourself. When he defeted you the first time, you gave him free XP and money, which he could buy some item for the seccond fight. And as far as i know, the damage you do is not set in stone. There is some random factor to the damage. He could just have more luck than you in the first fight, and the seccond fight, he probably had bought an item extra from the money you gave him for free by refusing to run, and leveled up as well for the free xp you gave him for free.
Continue to play like this, and you will be the dream of every good player, free xp and money.
Thanks and goodbye.
That is the problem with your whole resoning. You are GUESSING. All this based on a guess. You have no real facts, other than you had the same hitpoint. So you have no real clue whatsoever of what was going on. Chanses are that he had bought other items, or the same, but one extra, especially the seccond time you met him. So basically, you don't have a real argument, just a bunch of whine and insults.
Oh, and by the way. Just to test, i played a couple of games without buying any favor items, and several of them was against pretty good player. I won them all, so favor items it not that powerful if you play well.
Allmight, the problem is, you aren't bothering to read what I write, because you aren't taking anything I have said into account with your responses. There is absolutely no point in going around in circles here. There is no point in my highlighting the errors in what you write and then giving further responses if you won't read or understand.
Now, if you want to have a productive conversation - fine, I'm here. But if you just want to flame me, then go ahead, I'll just sit here and let you beat up on me and get your frustrations out.
The fact that he had a favor item that benefited him more than you doesn't mean his favor item is overpowered. It just means it's more useful in a fight against another Demigod 2 minutes into the game.
Here's an example. Say you took the XP item (+10% XP, 250 favor) and he took Mard's Hammer (+40 attack damage, +5% speed, 950 favor). Right at the beginning of the game he'd have a major advantage over you in a 1v1 beat-down. But if you played smart and didn't let him get free kills off of you, you'd level significantly faster, especially if you spent any gold you got on the +XP citadel upgrades to nail down your advantage. So about 10-15 minutes into the game you'd be high enough level compared to him that you could just shrug off that extra 40 damage per hit and maybe even steamroll him.
A lot of the strategy in Demigod is about identifying what about the particular game you're playing right now is stacked in your favor and what's stacked in your opponent's favor, and making sure to mitigate as much of the latter as possible while taking full advantage of the former. In the example above, the other guy has an advantage in a straight fight, but time is not on his side because your XP advantage means you'll eventually become more powerful than him (assuming he can't chase you away from where his creeps are dying). Of course, your opponent will be doing the same thing: for instance, he might try to capture and hold the +XP flag -- but usually you can't actually get XP while defending that flag, so your counter-strategy is to grab it whenever he leaves and maybe even flag-lock it, except maybe he thought the same thing and locked it himself, but if you see him doing that he doesn't have as much gold, so you can buy items he doesn't have access to and catch up with his advantage that way, etc, etc, etc... and if you're playing on Pantheon, my experience so far is that most teams and players aren't coordinated enough to actually carry out strategies that are that complicated, anyway. (that includes me. )
I didn't cover the case of not having a favor item because it's not really interesting. You can get a nice +HP boost in your first game, and a few more games should get you the +XP item and a few other nice general buffs. We could have a long discussion about whether they're really as good as some other items, but I believe that they're close enough that you'd never notice the difference except at a level of play much higher than what either of us can manage.
(you might ask: how do you know what favor item he has? You don't -- but knowing that he's beating you in a 1v1 fight should be enough information to adjust your strategy; the same goes on his side for your XP advantage)
Not sure if you undertand my point. The point is, I have no access to favor items at all, except the first one on the list. It doesn't matter how many favor points I accrue (I've accrued tons). I have access to one and only one favor item, period, paragraph - the suckiest one. It will remain this way until a patch is forthcoming.
In this situation, every favor item is OP against me, because I don't have any choice as to what to equip, where as my opponents have lots of choices. Because of this favor item issue, I lost the game I described, in the manner that I described it.
In the long run, it's largely irrelevant. The game will be patched, I will stop playing it at some point anyway, yadda yadda. In the super-long run, I will be dead and none of this will matter. But in the short run, for what it's worth, I agree with the OP - I don't like the concept of favor items. There are a few things I dislike more about the game than favor items, but #3 or so on my list of "don't likes" is favor items.
I understand that you, and many others, like favor items just fine. Okay, fair enough. But I agree with the OP, and there are a few others who have agreed with us on this thread. It seems we are in the minority, and that's fine. So be it.
Actually, I don't like the concept of favor items. I just find the ones in Demigod to be below my annoyance threshold, because none of them are especially overpowering and they're easy to get (except for the huge bug in the favor system right now).
I agree a lot with lambdaman posts.
Losing the first encounter sucks and I do feel you're pain. You're fighting an opponnet that has better gear right off the bat for that situation. As lambdaman pointed out, your item might be better later in the game.
Also, just because you lost the battle does not mean you will lose the War.
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For example, I've been stuck at Negative Favor for what feels like FOREVER. Here is what happened to me:
I'm currently back to -200 favor, I've not played AI, just been playing Skirmish or Pantheon games.
Am I at a disadvantage? Yes, I am... but it's a very minor. My one Favor item is good one (800 health, +5 regen) it's not the ideal favor item for every demigod, but more life is always good.
Even with this slight disadvantage I've been abile to win most of my games.
PS: I really do hope that custom games will alow people to play with ALL favor items exposed (so everyone is on the same footing).
PPS: But for Skirmish and Pantheon, once the favor bug is fixed I think it just means you have to play enough games to get 3-5 decent favor items.
Also... personally I don't think getting both armors is the best move.
Assuming the wiki page prices are correct (I think some things are, some might not be).
http://demigod.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_items
While I think the Scale Mail is totally worth it:
Scalemail (400 gold)
+600 armor.
Banded Armor (550 gold)
+400 Health, +5 health per second.
I'm not sure Banded Armor is wroth it.
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Consider the small combat health potions run (275 gold) each, but give 750 health.
So for the same price as your armor you could of had x2 Combat Health Potions for an extra 1500 health.
Yes, they have a small cast time 0.5 seconds, but that's so quick that it's very very hard for other players to stop (I have in fact never had it stopped, but with Sedina's a silent debuff).
While in the long run after you use both potions you'll be left with nothing but we're talking about playing for the short term! Going this route would more than likely have guaranteed you won that first fight.
so now i read this thread ... only thing he ever could have done if you had the same amount of hp when you started out (which should have been 2300) could have been taking a pot or 2 (which you say he didnt).
see he could have gotten the hammer 40 damage 5% atk speed , and the atk gloves for 25 more damage , but this should not have put him on having 1150 hp left anyways..
and to further give a little proof of my ... well flaming of you .
you got more hammer slams in then him ? im guessing that is 2 then right ... which is 1000 damage , and you got the first strike in which is approx 150 damage thats half his hit points right there and as you were autoattacking in the meantime.
Now i dont have the knowledge of the exact cooldown time on hammer slam here , but YOU SIR are obviously LYING to make your point or you dont notice when people take potions against you.
/discussion
for the record i agree on the favor points making imbalances and i would suggest in tournaments , favor points should be reset and regained during the tournament to add another flavor.
during normal games i think its very nice as you can customise your character so much , 20% cooldown time reduction on fire TB is awesome and hammer is awesome on stats/passive build with regulus, otherwise i like 15% movespeed on rook and erebus
The only thing wrong with favor items is that my favor is stuck at -340.
Since he had the same hit points as me, and since banded armor gives 400 hit points, it seems that he bought the same armor item as I did, unless you can figure another set of items he could have bought to add up to 400 extra hit points. So the difference appears to be in the favor item he was allowed to equip. He gets to win because he is allowed to point and click something on a favor item menu, and I get to loose because I can't do that. That's not my concept of fun, its not my concept of spending money on a game.
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