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All balance suggestions in this thread are subjective opinions or complaints submitted by posters in this thread.
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Status changes as discussion progresses. Check the update history at the bottom of this post to see which posts have been accounted for.
Read this first! (or at least skim over it)
On the whole the current cast of demigods is quite well balanced. A win is mostly decided by skill and less by the choice of your avatar.
Admittedly some builds seem downright overpowering - immortal Sednas for instance - but even those builds can be cracked ... and they usually have a harder time in other aspects of the game, like getting to the point where they are finally awe-inspiring.
I want to know what the experienced players think about the current state of balance (sorry newbs, but getting trashed by tower rooks and not having a clue how to beat them doesn't make rooks overpowered).
Also, I'm not looking for single-skill complaints - everyone knows by now that QoT's Tribute skill sucks (at level 15 at least) - but rather how the overall performance of a demigod skilling strategy compares to the rest of the game.
For example: Regulus has at least three skilling strategies one can pursue: Snipe, Mines, Angelic Fury.* Clever minelayers are quite feared for their incredible burst damage and can easily dominate careless players but they can be comfortably countered by competent generals. Strong build but not everpowering. * Snipers deliver unexpected kills from a great distance, frustrating many players that fall victim to him. Can't really be countered, but the skill depends on the target having low health in the first place which means that the snipes rely on the performance on your teammates or the carelessness of the opponent. * Angelic Fury - er, I played that in the beginning. Are there good builds out there?
Anyway, Regulus has several main paths he can pursue, several pretty strong ones but not so strong that he can't be beaten without the need of a balance patch. But are some of his skills so weak that they will never get picked at all? If so, how should the change happen?
Please post your opinions and suggestions and I'll do my best to summarize the general consensus (btw, the initial QoT summary is solely my perception of her. Additional opinions welcome).
Lord Erebus
Build Strategies:
Summary:
Balance Suggestions:
Oak
Queen of Thorns
Build strategies:
QoT fares bad with every build against every Demigod. Sure, at the beginning she has great staying power, comparable to tower rooks. But she will barely ever land a kill. Her dps and burst damage are low. Popping into open form for spikes/spike wave/uproot consumes much time. Theoretically a combo of ground spikes, spike wave and mulch could deal heavy burst damage, but the delay between form switching makes that unfeasable.
She has only two feasible ways of playing her: Support and Siege.
Balancing Suggestions:
Regulus
Rook
Sedna
Passive and active self-healing skills can make Sedna nearly immortal. Her Pounce deals good damage and doubles as an interrupt. Silence interrupts, too, and prevents skill usage alltogether for some time in a large area. One of the strongest - if not the strongest - demigods around when played correctly. In fact, her healing builds are so strong that every other build of hers that isn't a variation of that becomes obsolete.
Torch Bearer
Unclean Beast
ITEMS
Update history:
added the suggestions up to reply #25.
Also marked suggestions depending on how strong general approval/disproval is.
The fatter and larger, the stronger the general consensus (be it positive or negatice) regarding that statement.
That's a cool idea. Although, you usually want the creeps away from that tower.
But it's an interesting method to cut off a fleeing Demigod's retreat without the use of Spike Wave.
Another interesting idea would be to add a chance to interrupt enemy skills. This would cause them to AVOID the shelter of their towers.
I also like the idea of a stunning effect.
Sedna needs an anti-minion build
It's important that a viable Yeti build both enables Sedna to deal with minions and force Sedna to get a large amount of skill which precludes maxing out pounce... because seriously who wants to deal with a Sedna that's got AoE damage, heavy minion hits, a self heal/debuff cleanse, super monks, high speed, and high burst damage?
Sedna needs some minion defense but it needs to be delivered in a way which forces a significant sacrifice.
Rook's run speed should be increased from 5.4 to at least 5.5. 5.6 was suggest earlier and I'd be fine with that. Currently Rook cannot outrun minions without a 15% run speed increase, which is extremely expensive.
Minions in general need some kind of redesign. Either they need to give exp or items and abilities which improve minions need a finite range, something along the lines of 30 yards.
Seriously, Erebus minions are fine. What is not fine is horn.
interesting.. so it procs off auto attack? i thought it would proc off the snipe ability, i mean leveling snipe to lvl 4 and then getting an auto attack buff from it at the end
so what i mean is when someone gets hit with snipe with dead eye, they would get stunned for 1 second.
actually if u cast shield after spit has been use on you the debuff will be removed.
I think if you are going to say Sedna needs balancing early-game, I would also suggest that Sedna needs balancing late-game. 1000 HP is absolutely ineffective in the 17+ level range, and Sedna becomes one of the most leech-like DGs above that level because her damage is so low (in part thanks to a healing build) compared with other DGs. Yes, Sedna can do decent damage if you pimp her ride with artifacts, but it is absolutely minimal compared to what your teammates can do most likely, and your teammates will have slows/additional effects with their damage.
I would imagine that Sedna is intenionally strong early-mid game due to this.
Finally noted.
Way too many changes to consider changing at once. After changing all of these you'd end up with a list just as long with things unintended.
This is funny to me:
And yet your list is a line-by-line opinion about how you would design each skill. That really has nothing to do with overall performance of a demigod. This is a "let's redesign the game" list.
For example: you say you want to buff yetis, but that Sedna is an amazing Demigod. That's counterproductive and going to be problematic. Just because yetis are the worst pet doesn't mean they should be buffed and sedna should be overhauled. She's a competitive character the way she is now.
I'd say one of the biggest balance issue is with the two mulfi-form characters. Queen and Torch have some problems in competitive games because as burst and damage in general increases, form shifting costs relatively more to the player. Perhaps the time it takes to shift forms should be reduced as the Demigod levels up. I don't know what would be best here.
In any event, keep changes simple and with a purpose. Don't change someone's skills because "they don't feel right" or whatever. Mostly the game is need of way more attention in other areas, and balance is reasonably good.
Ah, well, it doesn't always turn out like you want, does it?
Anyway, these are not all my opinions. These are everyones. And by moderating the input I hope get a list of balance issues that are more valid than the insulted DG-XX-IS-OP-NERF-SKILL-XXX rants.
I agree that Sedna is one of the stronger Demigods. But her self-heal build is so overpowered compared to any minion build of hers that Yetis are nearly obsolete. So it does make sense to improve her minion tree, just for the sake of variety, not for the sake of making her even stronger.
That, for example, is an idea that I support.
I agree wholeheartedly with the philosophy here. If a game is offering you a choice between a number of options, they should all be interesting and worth considering. If one option is stronger across all circumstances, then why even give the player a choice?
Although TDude's `if it aint broke...' point of view also has merit - by enhancing Sedna's under-utilised skills we risk making an already strong demigod stronger, perhaps in as yet unforseen ways (ie hybrid yeti-healing builds or whatever).
Another suggestion - is it worth appending a list of suggested item / upgrade balance changes? At least for the specific cases where items / upgrades interact with particular builds in rather horrific ways.
edit: Lastly, great thread here Aroddo. At the very least it gives us a constructive & interesting distraction.
Thing is, making Yeti's better doesn't necessarily make Sedna play better. If she takes Yeti's instead of Heal, or healing wind, or pounce, then the only time she would be 'better' is if the change to the new better Yeti's were more effective than the current pounce/heal/wind combo she has going on.
[quote who="Polynomial #10 and rest of " reply="10" id="2312337"]Thing is, making Yeti's better doesn't necessarily make Sedna play better. If she takes Yeti's instead of Heal, or healing wind, or pounce, then the only time she would be 'better' is if the change to the new better Yeti's were more effective than the current pounce/heal/wind combo she has going on.[/quote]
Of course. Conversely, at present you could probably remove all yeti related skills from the game and leave the balance unchanged.
edit: rage @ quote button.
I dont think anyone mentionned Bestial Wrath. You guys do know that skill is practically obsolete right? The thing is level 1 wrath might be a bit of use late game, but the skill is simply bad and not worth the mana, especially early on. In 7 seconds, you're only going to get like 4 hits off, and if it's the beginning of the game, your typical attack does about 150, which means you'll get an additionnal 150 or so damage from it, and 150 damage sure as hell isn't worth 550 mana. The skill doesn't scale well either, you only get 10% more at each level after level 1, but have to use 150 more mana.
Change: Reduce the cost at every level by 100 mana, and add +5/10/15/20% attack speed bonus, and switch the cast times of Spit and Wrath, so Spit becomes 0.5 and Wrath becomes 0.3. Not sure what to about the bad scaling.Acclimation is way too good, by far the best level 15 ability in the game, and the effect seems to have no recharge. Reduce it to 25% damage reduction, and make it so it can't trigger more than once every 10 seconds.Ooze is too good late game too, it should drain mana too, make it drain 15/20/25/30 mana per second.
Rook's towers simply are overpowered. They do too much damage and take too long to kill, plain and simple, and they're so cheap in mana, it's so easy to replace them. They do like 80 damage per hit and that's even when you have both Scalemail and Nimoth's and they attack so fast, it really adds up if there's 3 or more. Their attack speed should be reduced by 25% and their health by 250.
To compensate for a tower nerf, Rook's base armor should be increased by 150 (he's a freakin castle made of stone, why on earth does he have the lowest base armor?), move speed increased to 5.5, increased damage on boulder roll, plus make it so he's immune to interrupts and stuns while doing Structural Transfer past level 2. I don't like the idea of him being to heal his own buildings, not to mention in some emergency situations, you might want to take to transfer off your own building if you're about to die from spit or something.
Regulus mines are overpowered. Stepping on all 6 is practically auto-death if he's nearby. No, you shouldn't have to place a totem everywhere you go. Increase the recharge from 10 to 12, and the cast time from 1.0 to 1.5, and decrease the snare on shrapnel mines to 20%.
No, they're not.
First, OP, move the color-index to the top. I completely misunderstood the list at first (thought color was referring to nerf/boost).
Haha, just cause you can swarm them with your gay minions?
this.
edit: personally i think form switching is fine for QoT and TB
Stop charging into a tower farm at level 2 like an idiot and learn to stack health and armor like everyone else or stop complaining. Towers are fine, end of story.
Anyways, Foul Grasp needs to cost less mana. Even if you reduce the stun time it won't convince people to upgrade it, since at FG's max rank it is one of, if not the most mana intensive skill in the game, and is mostly used to interrupt. Reducing it to 700/900/1100 or something similar would make it better.
Total bullshit. It is literally impossible to drive a Rook away from a flag if he has 3 or more towers up at it by yourself, and even with an ally, it can be frustrating. Don't tell me to stack armor, I do stack it, they still do roughly 80-85 damage a hit (it's like 115-120 without stacked armor) and they have attack almost once a second. It takes about 7-10 auto-attacks to bring one down, and in that time, you'll probably take around 600-700 damage from it, and that's just from one tower. AoE abilites? Go ahead and deplete your mana pool just to take out towers. O yea it's only 400 mana to replace it, 200 if he's maxed it out. Leaving Rook alone isn't an option, he'll rape all your towers on that side of the map if you do. "double team him" is not valid advice because first of all, your team will be at a disadvantage in the rest of the map, not to mention what's stopping one of his allies from coming over.
Every single Rook that I've ever seen that did not spec in towers failed, whether on my team or with the enemy. Failed in varying degrees, but still failed. I've read on these forums that apparently some people play slam Rooks, or AA-buff, or speed-buff Rooks really well without using towers or with minimal use, but I don't remember ever coming across one. I guess I'll believe it can be done, but extremely rare to actually see it.
counters to rook towers:
TB: circle of fire, frost nova, fire nova, rain of ice, fireball
UB: spit
Regulus: mines,snipe
Rook: structural transfer, hammerslam
QoTs: groundspikes, spikewave, uproot
sedna: pounce
all seige idols.
there are many more that i cbf to list right now.
I'm not going to have this idiotic debate again, and explain to another whiner why towers aren't unbalanced, because quite frankly I'm sick of it. I don't have a problem with towers, and based on the lack of nerf threads or suggestions it can be assumed that the majority of the players don't either. So signs strongly suggest this is a "learn to play" issue.
Also, no on the 5.6 move speed for Rook. Besides being a fiddle for fiddle's sake, it makes Rook the fastest Demigod on the map if he's got Swift Anklet. And don't give me this crap about him needing HP or whatever, he doesn't even need to be in melee range of you to do damage the whole time he's chasing.
Edit: Quote Tags not working. I'm quoting StAcK3D_ActR.
Lord erebus balancing suggestions: nerf coven slightly(4/6/8 minions)I'm going to have to disagree with you here Stacked. With the Bite Nerf that occured previously, Erebus' ability to deal damage with his primary attack was rightly brought into line. Combining Bite with Minions used to be an amount of DPS that was thanks not only to Bite's damage but also the additional effects such as armour reduction that indirectly increased the Minions DPS. That nerf effected the DPS output of Erebus' minions indirectly. Bringing down the amount of minions would also decrease the DPS output, which is why I'm guessing you listed it, however it would be a fairly significant decrease as the DPS generated is also due to the side effects of Erebus' other abilities. I feel the number of minions is sufficent.
reduce health gain slightly on conversion aura(100,200,300)Due to the ease of which Erebus' can gain his minions compared to others, I feel this is a warranted adjustment. However, this should not be applied in conjuction with the above balance tweak; less, weaker minions would negate the use of Minion builds for Erebus.put a max duration on mistAgreed. 45 seconds would be sufficent - I don't feel Mist was ever supposed to be the main component of a build, rather like Bat Swarm; a complementary ability.reduce range slightly on batswarm lvl 2/3 (25 range)I'm not sure why you've listed this change; the ability is designed to allow Erebus to get into and out of a battle and it does this quite well however still requires proper planning to be effective.
Tower Rooks are just something we all have to learn to deal with. Every general has decent ways out against him, and most others have little harrassments they can do. He's literally a sitting duck for a gank, and has a really hard time surviving one.
Just remember that his towers are not under his control, and will shoot at whatever is close to them.. like grunts and minions. Once you negate a good chunk of his damage, tower rook is nothing more than a pixie running around in a grove of trees.
Being able to temporarily hold a lane against two DGs is a critical design concept for the rook. If that changes then he needs to be able to chase, escape, and build up momentum as quickly as other DGs. That means major, major revamps to pretty much every aspect of him.
Bottom line is the kind of revisions it would take to make a rook who can't temporarily hold a lane against two characters still playable isn't going to happen in the near future. Currently Rook has the most interesting character concept, most unusual playstyle, and overall is just the most well made DG out there, in my opinion anyway and I really think that for the most part he should be left alone.
I support a bump to 5.5 or 5.6 speed solely so that a 10% run enhancement will allow him to outrun minions, but other than that I think he's one of the best designed characters I've seen in any game of any platform.
Didn't the OP basically say "tower rooks are not OP. l2p. Why are we still talking about this...
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