Might as well start thinking about this now. Obviously no game can be balance perfectly, so some amount of thought is always going to be how it could be done better. I think there are three Areas we should consider:
Meta Balance
Things completely outside of gameplay that aren't balanced, such as maps (Flags on Exile are not the same) or starting Positions (Is the 4th player spawn on cataract too far from the shop?). "Exile isn't balance because Dark has an easy MPS flag, while light has an easy HPS flag."
External Balance
These are the balancing mechanisms once a game has started, between players. For instance, a certain Demigod vs another, or perhaps a certain Skill that one player has, compared to a different skill someone else has. "Spit is too strong, as it kills other Demigod's Well."
Internal Balance
These are mechanisms that each player has, and generally dictate what play styles work or don't. "Nobody ever uses Yeti's with Sedna because they are too weak." This kind of balance isn't something that makes a player win or lose against another, but rather just limits which strategies/actions are good enough.
For the purpose of the discussion, let us consider only a few things at a time if possible. A list of all the changes 'you would personally make' to something can be entertaining to consider, but we will likely get places, and come to better agreements, if we can cite actual reasoning, and discuss that. Here's an example:
Bad Example
Blade of the serpent is too good, I never use the staff of the warmage, staff should increase attack speed by 100%.
Good Example
Favor Item: Blade of the Serpent
What is the balance issue? The Blade allows for significantly better mana generation than other favor items, making it at the very least, not internally balanced. Compared to the Staff of the Warmage, it gives more damage, and 300 less mana. However, with a single activation of the Blade, and dealing 400 damage in 10 seconds, you get that back.
What kind of Solution? I think we should fix this balance problem by making the Staff of the Warmage Stronger
Proposed Solution: Allow the Staff of the Warmage to be activated to give a large attack speed boost for a short time.
This gives us three points to discus. First, do we agree the balance problem exists? Second, after we agree it does, what kind of solution do we want to do? (For instance, you could have also just made the Blade weaker, instead of making something else stronger, or even removed it if the concept is simply unbalanceable or too negative to play). Thirdly, what roughly should the fix be? I strongly urge you to leave out numbers. It is easy to negatively react to a large sounding boost to Damage, when that isn't really the point, the point is that it should give SOME amount of boost. Disagreeing over the exact numbers is a minor thing we do after all else is done, and is generally experimental in nature.
If at all possible, let's try to avoid too much bickering, and focusing just on good discussion for now. Once we can actually get the modding done, and have people willing to try it out, I think we will be able to make good progress!
Items
Armor
Banded Armor: HP changed from 400 to 350
Nimoth's Chestplate: HP Changed from 500 to 420
Hauberk of Life: HP Changed from 600 to 500
Gauntlets
Gauntlets of Brutality: DMG boost changed from 25 to 35
Gladiator Gloves: Attack Speed boost changed fro 5% to 10%
Wyrmskin Handguards: Damage boost changed from 15 to 25
Gloves of Fell Darkur: Damage boost changed from 30 to 50
Helmets
Boots
Unbreakable Boots: Health changed from 600 to 400 and mana changed from 800 to 700.
Trinket
Favor
Blood of the Fallen: Health changed from 800 to 600.
General Favor
Assassin Favor
i have some beef with this item:
Item: Ring Of The Anchients
What is the balance issue? Minimal Stats on the item for a high price. other items of same price are more cost effective
What kind of Solution? i think the item should be made stronger
Proposed Solution: change the 400 armour to 600 armour and 30 damage to 40
Great thread and good set up or what you'd call it. Think of this I will. (There is no Yoda smilie so this will have to do...)
Demigod: Torchbearer
What is the balance issue? TB has two aura's, one in fire mode that makes him attack/move faster and do more damage, and one in ice mode where he slows others and regenerates mana. Since he cannot 'chase' someone in fire mode, where the speed and damage boost would seem to make the most sense, it makes the value of these two skill lines out of proportion, and at the very least inappropriate.
What kind of Solution? Balance the skills to make them more fitting of the mode he is in.
Proposed Solution: Swap the bonus to damage and the bonus to mana regeneration. Fire TB regenerating more mana while Ice TB dealing more damage would seem to make the most sense, and will forestall a lot of the questions about the auto attack issue (Which has at least once been said to not be a bug).
Ring of the Ancients used to give an expierence buff...
I'm not sure if I think TB needs that kind of buff. The purpose with those skill is that you need to switch between them.
Maybe add a spell damage modifier for staff of warmage? make it unique and would fit. Like 10 percent.
GeneralWhat is the balance issue? Damage scales very badly into lategame for some DG, health scales too well for most.What kind of Solution? Fix health stacking, and especially priest. Proposed Solutions:
+ Massive boost of damage dealing items to counter health stacking.+ Reduce Priest Heal (not the wave priest, those should be left as is, but the minions). Reduce heal percentage or make the heal based on DG level not Health![/quote]
I think we should talk a bit about ntropies point. I think that his balance conern is legitamite. Having just recently watched one of Pacov's pre vs pre replays, where all players got blood of the fallen, all generals got monks, and everyone got banded armor etc as fast as possible... I think we can safely say that healing/hp is not balanced right.
Ntropy suggests increasing the effects of damage boosting items and/or reducing the effects of priests idol minions.
My thinking is that we should do a little bit from both sides. If we 'nerft' hp items down to the comparative level of damage items, I think most would find the new values 'shockingly low' and not want to play with the balance mod. Similarly could be true with damage items. Also, if we nerf HP items too much, we'll end up throwing ability damage compared to health balance a bit out of wack.
Here's what I'm thinking then, we give most HP items a 10 to 20% reduction in hp, and increase damage on items by about 50% (Once again, in general).
If I think other people agree with this solution, then I'll post some exact numbers in my reserved post as our first entry into the balance mod.
http://forums.demigodthegame.com/366616
This is my priest suggestion.
Okay, first round of changes has been updated. These are all in an attempt to make HP items a bit less effective, and Damage items a bit more effective.
For instance, Gauntlets of Brutality changed to +35 damage, and Banded changed to +350 Health. It now takes only 10 hits for one to compare to the other, in comparison to 16.
Please discuss if you wish to whether those changes look generally okay. I hit the Blood of the Fallen and Unbreakable boots the hardest due to their severe prevalence.
For right now, I think we should focus on items, because they are A) The hardest to truly screw up, and where the least variety is being found in.
Let me throw out a few talking points to move things along:
Yay less HP stacking. Will be very interesting how this turns out. We all want HP stacking to be toned down but now we can actually try it for real (when 1.2 comes out).
Demigod: Rook
Balance issue: Rook is quite slow, but he really isn't a behemoth after the early game. He's an average Demigod in combat.
What kind of solution?: Reduce the relative speed difference between him and his opponents.
Proposed solution: Increase Rook's speed to 6 and/or let him get poisoned arrows at level 10.
I agree that monk idols are overpowered, but HP stacking is fine as-is. When you get into a 3v3 or especially a 4v4 it's extremely easy for players to die in a few seconds.
Think about this: If you buff damage items to be comparable in effectiveness to HP items while also nerfing HP items, you are really attacking the problem from two different angles and you risk overdoing it. If someone grabs newlly buffed slayer's wraps instead of getting an HP item, they both deal more damage and have less HP and no nerf is required at all to get their HP down some.
However when you look at the artifacts virtually every single one of them is really quite good and no major changes to them are needed. The difference between DPS artifacts and DPS items is that artifacts tend to have two strong features, whereas regular items usually only have one.
If you add a bit of health/lifesteal/regen/mana to current DPS items you might find that instead of a person having 1-2 mana items with 3-4 health items you may have 1 mana item, 2-3 DPS items, and one pure health/armor item.
I just don't think that reducing everyone's HP by 30% and then increasing damage will have any positive impact, it'll just turn the game into a quickdraw competition and it'll primarily benefit the DGs which do the most damage, which, unsurprisingly, are currently the most effective ones anyway.
It isn't a question of whether people live too long, it is a question of whether cheap HP items are far too often the best to buy. That is, are the strategies to a player limited by them being too good?
Please note the changelog(reply #2), as I have not done what you have think I have. I do not plan to change DG's starting HP at this time, and I do not think it has been suggested. I have only changed HP items that are either favor items, or cost less than 2k gold. The biggest nerf was 33% to Unbreakable Boots (mainly because the item is by far the strongest of the ones being touched on). Most others are only about 10% to 15%. And the total HP reduction to someone is only a very small amount.
Banded + Blood + Regulus' starting 1400 went from 2600 to 2350, a change of 9.6%
Just nerfing HP doesn't mean that people are going to make smarter choices when it comes to items or even that they'll stop stacking HP. Just look at how many people buy Slayer's Wraps, a terrible item that costs 3.3k when Nature's Reckoning only costs 1.5k and has literally double the effectiveness at the level people tend to buy the wraps.
Early game most people tend to buy a handful of specific items, but there's still variation on whether they go balls-out on HP or pick up boots of speed, Slayer's Wraps (in spite of how bad they are), or something else. There's quite a bit of variety on how people go about taking care of their mana issues, so really I would say three out of five item slots actually see a pretty good rotation based on playstyle.
Then, as I said, you have artifacts which provide a broad range of effects and have incredible diversity.
Most importantly nerfing health by nerfing items hurts some of the very weakest DGs. It's a greater percentage of total health for a character like Regulus or QoT, while a character like UB, Erebus, or Rook can get by with their superior stats.
Also this kind of thing makes minion swarms even more problematic, I just don't think it's a very well thought out change, in all honesty.
The solution is to give current damage items a small amount of health/regen/armor/life steal. Make picking up a DPS item less of a decision between two extremes without just nerfing everyone's HP and dramatically upsetting current balance.
I'm not really sure how to reply to this, you don't seem to understand at all the point of 'balance'. We aren't trying to make HP stacking an invalid strategy, we are trying to make it more in line with strategies that increase damage. You use a lot of words up there, like comments about artifacts, or minion swarms, or even Nature's Reckoning vs Slayer's wraps (Which is a different point of balance we could discuss) that have little to do with this:
1. Do too many of the best strategies involve a set of items that is too small? We are arguing that 'yes' this is true, and that Set of items, are those that give HP.
2. How do we solve it.
Just to help us discuss this better, are you saying that you do not think HP items represent too much of people's expenditure's? Or do you think that they do, but that our reaction to that is too severe? Try to limit Hyperbole this time, since it gets in the way.
I really don't give a damn if there's 20 different items you can choose from that allow you to die in 5-10 seconds, I would much prefer a narrow selection which draws the fight out to 15-20 seconds, aka the status quo.
Your insistence that you would only drop total HP by 10% shows you're clueless about the changes you're suggesting. If a player is doing well at level 5 they may have about 4k HP with BotF, Nimoth's, Banded, and Unbreakable Boots. Let's say you have successfully convinced that player to pick up a DPS item instead of the boots, they lose 200 HP from the BotF nerf, 50 from the banded nerf, 80 from Nimoth's, and 600 from Unbreakable since they don't have that item at all. That's a total of 930 HP, dropping them to 3170 HP, aka about a 20% health nerf, well over double what you stated.
As you an see, the only way you get those innocuous sounding figures is if you actually assume your plan fail to incentivize people to take DPS items. So how about instead of talking down to me for using too many words or a bit of hyperbole (which was only about 10% off, the same amount what you thought was fact was off) and claiming I don't understand the point of balance, you just use a bit of introspection/common sense?
As you can tell I'm annoyed with your tone so I'm done with this thread. My last response is just this: Give DPS items more durability functions similar to the way artifacts have lifetsteal, health, significant regen, and/or armor. Don't turn the game into a quickdraw contest.
I agree with Obscenitor, don't nerf the HP stacking. Damage should be buffed instead.
a) Some items are just fundamentaly better then others. Items the are never better then others are just FAIL. Fix the useless first. Health stacking is the only option you have right know. It's simply superior. This is flawed. You should have a choice of doing different things. "Health build", "DPS build" with some Variation through "Reflect damage", "Shielding", "Mana Steal", "Health Steal", "AoE damage". This makes countering far more interesting.c) Make only minor nerfs to hp items. Nerf the priest first. Then boost the dps items and boost all the bad items, that nobody uses right know. Boost all rarely used spells.d) Watch how the game mechanic changes. The rest is baby-step adjusting.
i'm getting scared of the most suggestions here. i have the opinions most ideas here destroy the balance, although there are also some good ideas in here.
edit: priests are no op. nerfing them would make any general and ESPECIALLY sedna totaly underpowered. you can counter priests in many easy ways. beside of that priests are only very good when having a sedna with hw 2 enar them. don't forget that sedna does pretty few dmg on the other side. additionally at the time where dgs have stacked much health and sedna is arround with hw2 priests die pretty fast to attacks of most of the demigods.
pls, don't conclude from your lack of knowledge how to play against that that this is overpowered. i played many games against generals and as general and it is no way overpowered. but i saw most people not knowing how to play right against them. e.g. i'm quite succesfull with sedna (many people can confirm that) and i can assure you it is basically because most people don't know how to play against her.
just some basic ideas related to this:
1. stack armor - this makes sednas dmg pathetically
2. at mid game: kill her preiests!
3. allways focus sedna not other demigods
4. dont waste skills like penitance to early. interrupt her when she heals.
5.. if you have generals on your side watch out for sedna having counter healing. in this case don't waste mana for respawning your priests if you cannot keep them out of the aura.
6. learn to switch targets. if you put sedna under pressure and thens witch your focus it si nearly impossible for a player under this interface to see who to heal next.
and of course there are more dynamical tactical things you can do. basically learn to adapt your itemizuation and your playstyle to the enemys you face.
damn, i never wanted to get into details with that. it maybe will make my life somewhat harder with her.
but priests without a sedna are far away from being op. ofcourse priests add a strong feature but at the prise for being a seperated union, one you need to control and one that can be killed pretty fast, and it costs mana and has a big cd.
what i agree with is that some (not all) of the dmg-items should be buffed a bit, not much though. and there are some favor items that need to be made usefull.
Like Obscenitor already wrote, you HAVE to get enough health especially in a 3vs3 or higher. If everybody uses his more ore less instant ability with an average of 800 damage at the same time, you are half dead when you didnt stacked health and have to leave the combat (or at least temoprarly retreat). So all your +attack Items are useless even if you change the values of those.
So what about changing the average damage of the abilities instead of or in addition to the other changes? You dont need that much health because you can survive even if everybody uses their abilites on you and you can continue to use your auto attack.
If the damage from the abilites are changed then it would also increase the value of the passive ones (though they could get too strong ). Just thought that it could be a valid option.
One Change at a Time please: A set of changes will almost always touch on a few different parts of game balance. Obscenitor thinks that by us lowering HP from items, that combats will now be too short. I don't agree with all of his reasoning for why he thinks this will happen, but I think that it is a valid worry. WE SHOULD NOT decrease the duration of combats significantly. However please realize that the whole reason that you BUY damage items is because you want to kill faster. There needs to be some amount of tradeoff between HP (dying slower) and dmg( Killing faster). The reason few damage items get used is because they just don't help you kill that much faster.
To make this happen, while also trying to open up the rest of the items to being useable, how about we also BUFF the starting HP of demigods, and their HP per level? Not a huge amount, but enough that the impact of HP items isn't so significant.
Celmare believes that no matter how we weaken Monks, it will be too much. Obviously this isn't true. If we gave them -1 hp they'd still probably be used in every game by every good general player. Right now All good generals buy monks, and the only assassin that high end players regularly play is Unclean Beast (When they play competitively). I think that pretty much shows that monks are a meme of the game, and used at almost every opportunity. We do not want to eradicate them, but we want them to be one good choice amongst many, not 'the only choice'.
However, I really don't want to try to discuss how to balance Monks yet, because we haven't finished deciding about HP items, base HP, and damage. Obviously if we modify people's overall health it will effect the percent heals from idol minion heals.
I'm really hoping that we don't end up trying to balance Ability damage, Monks, HP items, damage items, and starting health all in the same go, as that is so many interdependancies that we will never agree on anything.
Just make other items more viable and make them have more unique effects. It doesnt have to be simply +500hp +300 mana.
Wrong. Invalidates everything you just said. Monks heal when you summon them, even if the enemy Sedna has CounterHealing.
Second, priests are not OP though they are extremely strong and I think that they do need some sort of adjustment, but not a drastic nerf. I'd like not to laugh at other generals when they don't get monks.
I suggested a far more 'balanced' nerf in ntropy's post.
I've always agreed with Zechnophobe's concept of HP-stack-nerfing which is slightly reducing the amount of HP items while increasing the starting hp and level-up HP of demigods. I also agree with Obs' comments about keeping the length of engagements the same amount of time, and I think that most gloves need to have some sort of secondary attribute (except maybe the first-gloves) to make them more versatile.
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