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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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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:
HP stacking is currently the dominant strategy because the offensive tools are too week. Playing more carefully but having a higher damage output should be a possible tactic, but because you can only ever do ~2k damage at most from an ability spike you need snares and stun to be able to take an opponent down.
If you want health stacking to remain the only real option for half the toons, then keep things the way they are, but I really don't think it makes for an interesting game where nearly everyone on the field has the same items simply because the offensive choices are poor. The "gibfest" you are describing is exactly the result of changing the items to allow a more offensive build that can compete with a defensive one, the offensive player may be able to take out a health stacker without much problem but the health stacker on the other hand can kill the offensive player becuase he has less HP.
You can do it with passives instead of actives if you like, make all the + dmg items about 5 times as strong as they are now and HP stacking would be useless while everyone buys gloves, but I think it would be a lot more interesting to do it with activatables. Add some more strategy to when you activate things (conserve/front-load) and coordinating pushes with your team-mates in synch with your item cooldowns etc.
Do all that with activated items and you don't stop HP stacking at all, you just provide alternate means to increase damage, aka winners pull ahead that much harder. Currently once a player loads up on gear the only real use for gold is citadel upgrades and artifacts. Add in an item that lets a UB snare or silence a player and you'll just see UBs who get a few early kills dominating for the rest of the game. Some characters will thrive, especially melee ones if you want to see things like the Orb of Veiled Storms and inherently fragile DGs like Regulus will falter.
If they add new items that do these things I'm not going to complain, but I strongly disagree with your sentiment that of all the things possible improvements that could be made decreasing player longevity should be near the top of the list. Currently even 7k health can be blown through in two rounds of attacks in a 3v3.
Add in an item that lets a UB snare or silence a player and you'll just see UBs who get a few early kills dominating for the rest of the game.
They do anyway, since the gold advantage currently means they'll have a thousand or so more HP and more armor/mana because of nimoths/unbreakable boots. Activatables aren't going to change the slippery slope of the game.
Currently once a player loads up on gear the only real use for gold is citadel upgrades and artifacts.
Theres a period where artifacts are too expensive but you already have all the good ~2000 gold items, I'd like to see something worth buying in that 2 - 5k bracket that isn't narmoth's ring and I think activatables would fit in there nicely. If the only real use for gold at that point is cit upgrades it's not a very deep game mechanic. Offering players an alternative to just buying creeps could open up new options and strategies.
I don't agree it disadvantages Regulus players, it advantages them since it gives them good offensive options to compliment the usual speed stacking. So instead of buying crap +attack and +dmg items he can have access to an additional snare or something else that can really make the difference in smaller fights.
Yes you can blow through 7k HP with 3 players all focusing on a single target, but is that really what you want? Running around the map in a big gank squad being the only way to get kills?
I think we just like different games I'd like some more stuff to do in combat...
Reduce the cost on the Parasite egg. Its not really much better than the warlord's punisher and also seems to have a really odd bug that makes you stand still if you don't activate it successfully and not be able to move at all until after someone kills you..
Making it cost 3k is a reasonable amount to counter generals priests
In a group encounter with multiple snare items being able to snare one opponent yourself is not going to enable a new style of defensive play, it's going to guarantee you're snared and the enemy reaches you. I wouldn't bet my first born on it, but I'm pretty certain adding more snares wouldn't benefit regulus overall and it wouldn't be too kind to TB either.
Seriously though I don't see why adding in item diversity needs to equal shortening DGs' lifespans. You could do tons of things to broaden item usage, you could easily put more regen/armor/health/mana on the gloves to get them into play. If it's more activated effects you want then you can add activated defenses, hell you could even have drawbacks to make it really interesting, like reducing damage taken and received for a few moments, or you could have short-duration damage shields which require you to take damage to work. I mean afterall they're still pieces of armor it's not like there's any thematic reason why gauntlets can't improve your durability a bit, it is what they were made to do in real life and plenty of gauntlets currently give regen or minion health, so clearly it doesn't clash with the concept behind those items.
You seem to be using two disparate, argument-proof lines of reasoning to get the game changed to what you want it to be. By argument proof I mean they're along the lines of "support the troops," "country first," that sort of thing. You take these two common themes that everyone seems to agree on, the first being that there should be more variety in equipment usage, and the second being that proc items should be made more interesting. Seriously, who doesn't like interesting stuff, how can anyone argue against either of those?
But the problem is that the proc items, aka wyrmskin handguards and journeyman treads do actually get quite a bit of usage while still being a departure from the standard set of item choices. I would even say that groffling isn't a standard pick due to its price, it's used only by the most extreme defense stackers while many other people would gladly spend a bit more on a mageslayer or snag narmoth's ring.
There's no real evaluation of what makes those proc items picked, just the argument that they should be made into on-use items to improve the game, and no extrapolation beyond my rough guess of what those items would look like if they were converted and no guarantee that they wouldn't become part of the new cookie cutter item setup.
Also there's a major issue of DG homogenization when the tricks that dictate success or defeat shift more to item usage than ability usage. Now don't get me wrong, an unartful DG like UB would benefit from requiring more complexity to succeed and I f'ing love the orb of defiance, but adding in more snares, stuns, and other effects push obtaining victory towards reducing control over the opposing player's character and that really just doesn't appeal to me. That, to me, is World of Warcraft, and I'm done with that game.
I didn't conciously notice the time difference until you said so. I did notice, that TB stops moving when switching from ice to fire but keeps on walking uninterrupted when he switches from fire to ice. I reacted to that by making fire mode my default form when playing hybrid TB. I do a ring of fire, switch, then shower the crowds with ice.
This even makes sense with the aura effects: While in fire mode you get the speed buff aura. After stopping to fight in ice mode, you get the speed debuff aura.
I can live with the current TB switch speed.
However, I object to how form switching stops QoT in her tracks. When switching from closed to open she walks on. When switching from open to close, she stops in her tracks. Her animation doesn't justify this (as opposed to TB's animation sequence).
PS: QoT walk-stop might just be the other way around ... I have to recheck.
@Obscenitor & @Woppin
I agree that it's a bit sad that the most effective shopping-strategy pinnacles in HP-stacking. It's a bit boring and indicates, that the main focus on this game is not-to-die as opposed to reach certain other objectives. I don't think wielding the nerf hammer on hp-items is the solution, though. I think, the solution is: The FREE MARKET.
While the unregulated free market doctrine failed miserably in real life, it could still benefit Demigod by introducing supply-and-demand mechanics:
Just an idea. Might be interesting enough to discuss in a seperate thread.
While I've had a bunch of thoughts on these issues, I'm going to abandon a lot of them and just put up a couple of things.
1. (for me the biggest issue) Qot, when changing forms, will sometimes stop to change forms, even though usually she keeps going. This is a problem especially during a retreat, having her stop to change forms has cost me more lives than I think I can count. It seems to happen when there is a lot going happening on the screen, as if it were related to CPU load, or the peer to peer mini network. My issue is that it should at least be consistent, she should always change forms in one way or the other either she always changes form and it doesn't affect her forward motion, or she always changes forms and she stops to do it, I'm not sure which they intended, but as it stands it's unpredictable and needs to be fixed. Honestly if the Devs are at a loss for whether to choose her being mobile for her change in form or not, my opinion is that she probably has to be mobile, primarily to make retreat possible. If she has to stop to change forms you might make retreat situations impossible.
2. Erebus should spend a skill point to get nightwalkers, and have to cast conversion aura. I think one of the things that is wrong with Erebus is that he probably can't go out and get into fights, without getting some night walkers. Whereas all other generals have to cast, use mana and skill points to facilitate it. When in combat, because of this, since he makes no effort to get them, you can easily have to fight off a small horde of the things (not that they're too much of a threat, no more so than oaks spirits, but there are usually a lot of them and can be fairly tough, if erebus has spent some skill points on them)
4. Mist should cost Erebus Health...like back during beta, or what I think is better would be if it costs both health and mana, but at about 60% of the rate it costs now.
4. The Horn of battle issue that was brought up to me by SoFFacet: Yeah, it seems like it having an unlimited range is a problem, perhaps having it's effect drop off with their distance from the general would be effective, or perhaps simply a finite range.
I agree there's no need to nerf HP items, I think it should remain a viable strategy, but at the moment the offensive options are far too limited to compete with it. Not sure if a free market would be any better, certainly in PUG I can see people not liking it at all (like in CSS)
On a side note I like the mix of favor items, the active ones like cloak of night, heaven's wrath, horn of battle etc. are the type of thing I'd be interested in seeing more of at the shop.
Seriously though I don't see why adding in item diversity needs to equal shortening DGs' lifespans.
You're right, I was focusing on offensive items since they are the most obvious counter to +HP builds, but that is a separate problem to the other half of the item shop being mostly unused. I'd just like more options, and given how much fun it is playing with cloak of night vs BotF my experience is that active items are more interesting and fun to play with than passive ones. I'd like the active/passive ratio in the item shop to at least be in the same ballpark as the artifact shop and the favor options.
At the moment the only real strategy is: Not die, cap flags, upgrade creeps. The only way you can really stack your DG into a godly position and actually win is if your opponents feed you enough gold to get artifacts like mageslayer and ashkandor, far faster is the option of simply upgrading creeps to giants and sticking with the same stalemate tactics as the rest of the game. What if we made items more powerful, allowing kills to become more common in skilled matchups where one team decided to forego creep upgrades and instead buy a bunch of items to make them offensive powerhouses? At the moment going items over creeps simply means you'll need to retreat more often, but it rarely actually means you'll die (ime).
We have a wand of speed. That is the exact type of thing I'm talking about. I'd like items that buffed a bunch of other stats (attack speed, damage, armor, blanket resistence, regen) in the same manner (high buff, short duration, long cooldown). Even having tradoff ones...you become very slow but your attack speed goes up a lot, your armor is decreased but you gain extra damage...could be interesting.
Also there's a major issue of DG homogenization when the tricks that dictate success or defeat shift more to item usage than ability usage.
DGs have the abilities on 5-10 second cooldowns mostly, I was thinking of cooldowns in the 30 - 45 second range for items. I don't think they would dictate play with that long a cooldown but they could prove decisive in the key battles that occur throughout the game. But I do see what you're getting at, and I agree it's a risk once items start having DG-esque abilities.
I'll stop derailing your thread now Aroddo, and thanks for keeping the OP up-to-date
I thnik the glovres are just too weak, compared too hp items. That must be changed. also thetime QoT and TB need to switch there form should be much shorter. and bufff Sednas Yetis. Also make spit and Regs mines close combat - I think then the game would be much more balanced.
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