Counterintuitive to the current clear speed meta: Slow the Game Back Down
" Oh good god, you made me remember when I ran into one of those people who told me, a week before Skyrim came out that they were cranking the difficulty straight to the max like I was but they were working with a forum group on some website to figure out the most unbalanced features of skills and such to each the end of the main quest asap the moment the game came out just to brag that they beat it at that difficulty within hours. Seriously a wtf moment for me. "It's all clearer now
And I hear her now And I'm nearer to The Salvation Code" |
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"did you use trickster or blademaster ? |
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" cleave can be super fast right now with the slayer +40% AOE |
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The speed of the game and the attack mechanics already taking a firm hold on everything, is the first sign that skating uphill will be accepted as the norm.
(That means two things) Last edited by degraga#2839 on Aug 18, 2016, 4:03:19 AM
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" I do enjoy how ice crash and earthquake both appeared to be attempts to slow attacks down so at the very least skills were not so spammy even if they had the same kill speed and instead even these skills, particularly earthquake were still brute forced by the meta community to utilize the skill attack speed to be as fast as possible. Would it have hurt GGG to make earthquake a skill that gained damage based on how long it took before triggering the quake portion? The skill would have met extremely poor reception from the clear speed meta but it could have at least been attempted to actually have slow ass skills as long as the kill speed still matched. "It's all clearer now And I hear her now And I'm nearer to The Salvation Code" Last edited by PleiadesBlackstar#6327 on Aug 18, 2016, 4:13:48 AM
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"1. No matter how well balanced a game is, the meta people will narrow standards and identify a very small number of builds as top builds based off community consensus. For example, you start with two builds, A and E, where E is weaker than A but still considered Tier 1... now add builds B, C and D, all weaker than A but more powerful than E, and suddenly E is Tier 2 despite no changes to it whatsoever. 2. Bad skills should exist. Two reasons: a) if all answers are correct, questions are meaningless; and b) some players get fun specifically out of making bad skills work. However, because of b) it's pretty important that every skill have exclusive synergy vectors, so you can actually build around a bad skill instead of merely equipping suck. Additionally, after factoring in the special synergy options, the bad option still needs to look close enough to a good option to fool people at least temporarily; there needs to be hope at some point. 3. Most importantly, balance is literally an illusion. With infinite data, even the tiniest difference between options is clear and choice relegated to a spreadsheet problem. Balance only exists in the hypothetical, before the experiential data is collected and hypotheses confirmed or disconfirmed. This means: balance decays as player knowledge grows. So you're totally right to pick on old skills which haven't been overhauled - these are known quantities! When GGG releases a new batch of skills, we might wonder about meta status of the old top-of-meta skills, but we certainly aren't wondering about any other old skills, unless they receive changes. Frequent change is necessary to reset player knowledge and force revaluations, or the meta becomes stagnant. (Note that the "best balanced" games normally put some facet of content creation in the hands of the community to maintain long-term balance, ex: StarCraft 1 mapmakers. Unsure how to implement in ARPG though.) When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on Aug 18, 2016, 5:18:44 AM
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" Me too, replayed it recently :) Looking forward to Bloodstained? Wish the armchair developers would go back to developing armchairs.
◄[www.moddb.com/mods/balancedux]► ◄[www.moddb.com/mods/one-vision1]► |
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" I completely disagree with this : - Given the complexity of PoE, there will always be bad "answers" everywhere, no need to have some skills being additional bad answers. PoE's customization system is rich enough not to need to use that kind of nonsense to justify the bad balance regarding some ( or many ) skills. - Some skills ( like movement, or supporting, or whatever that is not supposed to be only a dps skill ) might be adapted to work in a way that they are not supposed to, that would be your b). " Nop, let's take the Starcraft exemple then : http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/ladder/grandmaster/legacy-of-the-void From this table, we can see : 68 Zerg players = 35% 55 Protoss players = 36% 70 Terran players = 28% There is one player missing ( researched through the dom with the class names of the race icons, did not bother doing more ) and the numbers are rounded up. Although it is a small sample, this is the top of the ladder, so it does have a meaning. We can see that even though Protoss is a little bit lower than the other, the repartition is pretty well done, it could tend more to 33/33/33 but players also have their preferences and nothing is perfect anyway. This is a good balance, all 3 races have about equal chances. All races have pros and cons also, which is another element of a good balance. This is not an illusion, this is a competitive game, and a very delicate balance that gets a lot of attention. This is just on the topic of pure balance there. Now, GGG obviously wants to create hype by releasing new content ( I'm talking about skill and abilities here ), and that new content has to be good enough, so of course lots of it is done on purpose. But balance is not something hypothetical, neither utopic, it can be done, it is difficult, but it should be what GGG is aiming for ( they can release "hyping" skill without letting some of the old ones under the dust ). SSF is not and will never be a standard for balance, it is not for people entitled to getting more without trading.
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" I don't think Starcraft is a very good example, it has only three options after all. Balance, sadly, isn't the only thing to keep in mind, the available choices should also be different enough and that gets harder as your build roster grows and PoE has a monstrous build roster even if we count just mid-map-capable builds. Starcraft isn't really a good comparison then, we could say strategy games are among the easier ones to balance, PoE is probably closer to a fighting game and tier list in fighting games usually looks something like this.  A lot of mid tiers, less high tiers and lows, some god tiers and some garbage, very similar to PoE actually. And it would be a good argument for PoE balance if shape was the only concern, however there's also the relative difference in power, in a well balanced fighting game the gap is low enough to allow a good player with low tier char to beat an average one with a high tier one, in PoE the gap is so high we can't even compare low and high tier builds with player skill factor being too insignificant to close it. There's one thing that makes balancing PoE much easier than fighting games - there are no matchups because it's a PvE game, you don't have to worry how a certain build performs versus the other because PvE and PvP in ARPGs are separate. So the only thing to keep in mind is the overall power level of the build, granted, PoE has a lot of moving parts but I don't feel the whole thing is that hard. So it's either incompetence or lack of trying and my money is on the latter, unlike a strategy or a fighting game, PoE doesn't depend on perfect balance to be entertaining, it would be nice to have but it isn't absolutely necessary - that's all there is to it. Wish the armchair developers would go back to developing armchairs. ◄[www.moddb.com/mods/balancedux]► ◄[www.moddb.com/mods/one-vision1]► Last edited by raics#7540 on Aug 18, 2016, 6:49:47 AM
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I think that Starcraft is a good example is the sense that the balance seem simple because there are only 3 races (the inner balance of each race being a very complicated and delicate thing though ), and that is my point : a state of balance or almost balance is not impossible, neither it is something bad for the game.
And it works. I wanted to bring the fact that PoE is a PvE game but you did it already. However, there still is a ladder, and there are races, and it matters about this. I think that even though the balance is a little bit less important than in PvP game, GGG needs to aim for it. Build diversity is partly a lie if there is no skill/passive balance behind it, there needs to be one, and atm it's not in a very great shape. I do blame the fact that GGG wants powerful new skill/abilities to attract people again, but it's far from being the only reason : many pther things could use some attention. SSF is not and will never be a standard for balance, it is not for people entitled to getting more without trading. Last edited by Fruz#6137 on Aug 18, 2016, 7:04:35 AM
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