Grandmaster Resubmission

In your microtansaction tab, there's currently another token available for you to use to submit your character when you're ready. There's no set time frame on when they need to be submitted by.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Couldn't just leave them snapshotted and thus even more of a threat to current players, could you, GGG?

The Grandmasters don't work in such a way that that's possible or even necessarily desirable. Stats are snapshot, skills use the player equivalents.

For example, the leech changes mean there is now the concept of a maximum leech rate, that existing Grandmasters do not have because they snapshotted the stats that the grandmaster had on export. As such, it defaults to 0 for them, so they can't leech until we manually give it to them.

What you want would require manually replacing their skills and mechanics with legacy versions every time there is a change, no matter how subtle, and maintaining every version of them no matter how often things are changed.

Not everyone will want this to be the case, particularly if their Grandmasters' skills were buffed, or if a mechanic is now more favourable for their build.

We would have to also prevent any new interactions, preserving the single unique map in a horrible patchwork of new and old code, and various mods to pick which ones applied to which Grandmaster, that only gets worse with time.

Like I said in the message though, we can try to modify your existing Grandmaster if you prefer. That's basically us approximating what you're asking for as well as we can, within the limits of how the game works.

We'll get it behaving as closely to how it was as possible, then put it back in the hall if that is what you prefer.

The purpose of the resubmission is to give people the option of either keeping their Grandmaster and having us do what we can to make them work, or submitting a new one the way they want it.

It's their characters, and so should be their decision.

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RagnarokChu wrote:

To be honest I have no actual idea they couldn't snapshot or keep a version of the that exile in the game as a rogue exile type of mod.

Grandmasters actually work almost the opposite way to Rogue Exiles because they're monsters, and not AI-controlled players.

Their stats are created when the monster is created, but they have their own versions of skills, which can be balanced separately from player skills. They're still not immune to mechanical changes (like leech, or War Cry triggering), but neither are other monsters.

This isn't intended to set a precedent that Grandmasters will be able to be resubmitted every time a balance change happens.

By and large that is not intended to be the case. For the Awakening it seemed to be an exceptional enough circumstance as to justify doing so.

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PaladinSMD wrote:

Ya my char never even made it in to the map and now I have to resubmit him just to wait and never see him in that map again with 2.0 and then 2.1 hits I can do the progress all over again? just to never see my char in that map? I'm kinda meh about it.

Apologies for the delay. Your character was in one of the two completed wings that were intended to go in with The Awakening, before the majority of the balance changes happened, and before the resubmit was decided on.

I'll have to double-check tomorrow, but based on my notes it would be one of the easier ones to adjust if you prefer not to resubmit.

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blubbber wrote:

Will we need to inform you guys if we intend to re-submit or will that token just remain in our mtx stash even if our original submission eventually gets added in a broken state?

Letting us know is appreciated, but not required - I'll just work on whatever's submitted if I don't hear otherwise. Depending on how your entry was affected by the Awakening balance changes it may not be broken at all, or it may be easily fixable and nothing that you need to worry about.

I should emphasise that this isn't a mandatory resubmission - we do have a lot of tools for balancing or altering grandmasters, even taking into account the mechanical changes of 2.0.

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blubbber wrote:

Any info if there will be a deadline on this or not, and how soon that may be as I really cannot make up my mind right now whether to bother with this again or not, I find levelling alts a lot more interesting than just playing one character to a proper high level...

There's no deadline planned, just as there wasn't with the previous submissions. If for whatever reason we do decide a deadline is required, then people will be notified well ahead of time.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Look, I'll just submit some other bullshit Standard character I have who will just be another blip on a crowded, messy radar. Fine. You win. You guys always win. You got my money and that, friends and Romans, is that.

And the next supporter packs will probably be awesome enough to get me to support again.

You have yourself a bona fide cow to milk. Docile, complicit, but ultimately unhappy.

Congratufuckinglations.

This whole resubmission process is an optional, extra thing I wanted to do for our Grandmaster supporters, in case they were unhappy with the idea of their Grandmasters being adjusted without their input.

Frost wall received a massive damage buff in 2.0, so I could give your Grandmaster a way to bypass the cooldown, thus making her deadlier than ever. I could also go the extra, extra mile and nerf her damage to a pre-2.0 state if that's what you really care about.

But ultimately, your grandmaster is still functional, and requires no work on my part to use all her skills as well as she can.

If you take such exception to me doing additional work on your behalf, than that's fine - it's your right to reject the rebalance offer as well. I am happy to dedicate the time I would have spent rebalancing her to other Grandmasters.

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Jerle wrote:

While you had alluded to the point that you can try to maintain the spirit of supporter submissions following the awakening changes, but your clarifications also suggest that existing submissions with modification on your end may not completely maintain the viability of existing builds. This compels supporters who cares about their submission to want to resubmit something that they know WOULD work in the Awakening but they may not have the time and ability to do so. It's this issue that leaves some of us fustrated and concerned.

I can definitely see how clarifications like this might give that impression.

While many grandmasters are affected by these changes, for the vast majority the effects are minor - such as not being able to automatically trigger Enduring Cry on damage taken.

These characters can still trigger Immortal call, and achieve the same effect, with slightly reduced duration, they can also be made to self-cast Enduring Cry, which will probably just make them more defensive. In this case the viability of the build itself is unaffected, it just uses one of its tools slightly differently.

Other cases may be that a CI character can no longer sustain Blood Rage. Most of those builds still do plenty of damage without it and your grandmaster doesn't have a clear speed to be perceptibly affected. The frenzy charges gained on kill are also somewhat irrelevant in a PVP setting, outside of fighting summoners.

Stats like leech can be provided, auras can have mana reservation reduced to fit - there are many powerful tools available, even if the final numbers aren't identical.

Charan's Grandmaster is a case where the changes directly impacted the build, but that puts it in the minority.