Im Flur
First of all, I want to thank the Devs for what they do in their own time for free, if I had any skill in Coding(?) I would offer my assistance, but alas, I don’t, my apologies. So thank you. I have zero idea how some of the things im about to say will happen/can happen via coding. I also realize there will some things that are game changers with QQs about retemplating etc. To those I say, grow up, it’s a game, its progression, if you thought the game was over once you reached 50 in OG DAoC, then SI came out, thought you were done again, then ToA, then…. You get it.
Secondly, Ill probably be able to count on one hand the people that will know who I am, I don’t really care. This will be a long post, read it all, read parts of it, I also don’t care. I will try and keep it somewhat entertaining with limited rambling, BUT if there is something I say, and you don’t agree don’t be a troll and just comment something, offer criticism AND a solution, if you can’t, don’t waste other people’s time.
Thirdly, take some of the things/stats I say with a couple grains of salt. The point of this isn’t to dispute raw had “facts”, its to start the ball rolling on some theoretical solutions to not have such a drastic left wing / right wing POV. For example, if I say the fastest Celtic Spear on hib for peeling would be the 3.Xspeed 15.Xdps one. Don’t go all Epeen and say well the 4.X 16.5 spear with 17%haste and exactly 176.4625 quickness will be the same as the 3.X spear…. OMG calm your tatas okay? We on the same page? Cool. Lets get started.
I personally believe this type of game should have many key factors, one of which being Risk V Reward, a lot of my POV will take this into consideration. I will scatter some of the big topics throughout this post so maybe yall will read the while novel which I will type.
REALM SWITCH TIMER
Ill Start off with a banger. I see the theory behind the 12hr timer, I get it BUT things change. Some people can play more then others, some people get bored, some people make and break friends, so I think this should be looked at. My solution is to have a passive 12hr timer. Meaning, yes you can log onto a different realm while you are still counting down your personal 12hrs. You will be able to make a character, you will be able to PvE AND PvP, but there should be a risk. What about a negative % gain until your 12hrs is up? Something like 25% reduction to XP. This would have the same logic for PvP, but a little more drastic in my opinion, something closer to the 75%reduction mark. I Can still farm plats, play with my friends in both RvR and PvE, but I hopped realms, so ill take my medicine and have the Debuff.
Erhmerhgerhd this is brilliant! But Flur, what about all the people that got banned for bypassing the timer?! SUCKS TO SUCK.
Think of it this way. You are driving 1hr away on the hiway to your parents place for a family gathering like you have done countless times before. Speed limit is 100kph (im Canadian). But there’s construction, sign says slow to 40kph. You take a look, no flashing yellow lights, no workers, no equipment, so you say screw it, and continue along at 110kph, cause who really follows the speed limit anyways. Next thing you know, blue and red lights behind you and you get pulled over, but its not just a ticket, your car is actually getting towed away cause you were doing more than double the posted limit. SUCKS TO SUCK. So you call your parents to come grab you, take you to their place, have dinner and now someone has to drive you 1hr back home. On the way home, all the Damn construction signs are gone! Do you get your car back and don’t have to pay that ticket? Im a blue collar dude, I don’t know the answer to that question, my opinion is no, because you were doing something stupid. (*Beta – Live – My proposal* for those who didn’t catch it)
BUFF POTIONS & CHARGES
Two Perfectly identical SBs Duel, Same Starting stats, Same Template, Same race, Same spec, Same RR. They are fully buffed with +155 shaman buffs. Who wins? It will be random yeah? The roll of the dice for who gets evade, who misses, who crits, this will determine the outcome of the battle yeah? Maybe a little has to do with individual player skill, swapping weapons at the right time, some strafe action, but as I said before at the start of the post, I going the more theoretical approach, the classic /stick duel. Both of these SBs duel again, this time with the Pheonix Pot Buffs, then again with zero Buffs. The outcomes will ultimately be decided with the roll of the dice, just like being fully buffed, the only difference is the POTENTIAL Time to Kill (TTK). Im not going to math the WS vs HP vs Evade vs WepHaste vs AF, the outcome in a duel scenario will be the same.
Lets try again with a Caster Vs a Tank. (YES I REALIZE THERE ARE UNLIMITED COMBOS RELAX). Starting at the engaging distance of most casters spell range of 1500 fully buffed (+155) the caster will have the advantage. He gets bonus cast speed and damage from the buffs, the tank for the first 1500 gets bonus hp. With Pheonix pots, the caster gets less casting speed and damage, the tanks HP is also less, BUT less affected then the casters liner cast speed IMHO, this result now slides toward the favour of the tank, how much? I have no clue, but the tank now has a better chance. Try again with zero buffs, that tank is closing that 1500 distance in the same amount of time for all three duels but the caster is doing way less damage in that 1500 range, again sliding the scale back towards the tank.
Do I really have to type the whole thing out again with a SelfBuffing class vs a NonBuffing class? Didn’t think so.
I think we should remove Buff Potions entirely (Everyone gets mad at this point). I think we should keep the instant and overtime potions, Heal endo mana, have them useable when not doing an action (sheathed weapon / not casting) but lower the CD to approx. 45seconds. I think we should increase the charges equal to 0%bonus yellow conc buffs BUT have them AND all other charges only be used when equipped, and drop said bonus when in inventory then also have the duration increased to same as self buffs approx. 20min, also removing the use delay on buff charges. If you can blast all charges, go for it, its ultimately a QOL item, so then someone doesn’t have to “waste” X time waiting for all buffs.
What are alchemists going to do now? I don’t have the answer to that at this moment in time. Will you have to template? Maybe. Will Flur have to retemplate? Yup. This will end up being a buff to any selfbuffing class who has been in a weird place, Friars, Hunters, Rangers, Champs and Thanes (I think). This will drastically change the Risk when doing Smallman / Solo, Is that a Friar or a Wiz? Thane or Warrior? Melee Ranger or BM? Allowing for some more “Off meta” selections in the character screen IMO. How much affect will this have on the TTK? I also don’t know the answer to that, if I would venture a guess it would make the fights longer, increasing the chances for adds, at the same time increasing the time to make ninja plays. I think we have to keep the endo pots (sorry pallys), yes it will get pallys more groups if we take away regen over time pots, but it will nerf the “average” alb group. Hib atm, need typically Druid, Druid, Bard, Warden. Mids need Healer, Healer, Skald, Sham. Albs need Cleric, Cleric, Sorc, Minst. If we take away or nerf Endo over time, I believe it will do too much harm to albion.
HIB AMNESIA
I don’t even know if I spelt that correctly. You cant simply take it away from the bards without giving them anything UNIQUE in return. Cant nerf the range without nerfing the range of ALL instants. There is one thing that people keep saying about this game that I hate, and that is “its how it worked on live, they never changed it, so its as per design/ its been like that for 20 yrs” (or something along those lines). Gamers have a niche of bending the intent and design of something almost to exploitation in almost every game. Boosting to see over walls in CS, wall riding in racing games, landing near impossible side stuns/snares on DAoC. Was it intended? We will never know. Did it get fixed? Why not? Not enuf time, knowledge, maybe thought it was a cool aspect of the game.
From what I know, amnesia resets the cast animation hence denying the spell to land aka, you forgot what you were doing. In my honest opinion, that should be the only thing it should do. If you are running as a armsman with a minstrel duo partner, and the armsman gets hit with amnesia, nothing should happen, you arnt the one playing the song and you arnt going to forget you are running. If it hits the minstrel, the song should drop next tick unless you requeue the song. This is how I think it should work. I am not going to get into resist the effect, that will be a later topic on itself.
Now will this change, probably not, is it strong, yup, is it OP, no. (people get mad again). I Believe that clip range is 5500, its gotta be a couple seconds to close 3000 units at speed 12, and if you cant spin that fast, not the bards problem. Now if you do get hit with amnesia, it takes anywhere from 3 to 7 seconds to drop speed. The goal for most hib groups is to create a speed differential in order to gain position control (I might be wrong but #ishwa), so that’s the amount of time you have to spread, form your front line and engage, weather you sos or not is your call. With NF now there prlly arnt going to be too many head on engagements, personally im curios to see how it plays out. Moral of this rant is I think it should be changed to something like I mentioned above, but if it doesn’t unfortunately it’s a little bit of L2P. The solution for sure isn’t just simply taking it away.
RVR TASKS + MISC
Again I get the theory of this, get some people in a semi chaotic scenario and have them fight in the same area, cool. The amount of rr9+ people on this server already is crazy cool, the silly fact is sometimes up to 50% of the rps gained is not through defeating someone of a different realm, and that’s where that sucks. I believe the intent of the task system was to also help out the casual players close the gap between some of the higher RR ones. Personally, I cannot play as much as I used to when the game came out, RealLife has a damper on the E world sometimes, that being said some people can spend many more hours into the game and I’m really jealous of that. So now they are simply getting more “ticks” of rps per session of game time they can play, which as a result can factor into widening the gap. I believe the ticks for participation should start at lvl 45 and end at rr6, no matter the level of the toon. People will still flock to the zones to fight, but this will slowly close that gap.
For the keeps / towers attack / defence / participation I think it should all boil down to a multiplier, and that multiplier should only work vs Realm points earned via Player kills. Now to get the next level of multiplier one would have to participate kinda like how they have it for PvE at the moment. Someone would get something like 0.10 per 100 guards killed, 0.25 for every lord/captain killed, 0.75 per 100 Enemies killed while in the keep/tower area. Something along those lines. Keep in mind I propose to eliminate the actual RP tick, so someone would have to cash in these rewards by actually killing players. So yeah a zerg can go take 3 keep and 9 towers and have an overall multiplier of 3.0 (for example), but it means nothing unless they engage in actual Player vs Player comba. So if you are LFG or waiting for your guildies to log on, go join the raid BG, get that multiplier then go PvP. There will however need to be a reduction of multiplier per hour of some sort, something like 0.5 per hour and have it NOT reset if someone went LD or needed to relog.
SLAM
This is a cool one, and I think I got the solution. Keeping with the Risk V Reward motto, cant just nerf slam on light tanks to 5 seconds. Ive seen enuf valewalkers land side and back stuns all day, every day. So simply nerfing slam to 5 will just have the light tanks go lower in shield, raising their actual DPS, and landing shield/melee positional styles for stuns. What I am going to propose will affect every class except Scouts, sorry scouts I know you are in a weird place right now but my fingers are getting sore and I think some people are getting tired of reading this novel, so ill think about yalls later. I propose on any shield style EXCEPT REACTIONARIES, the stun duration is a % of delve pending size of shield used at that moment in time. Heavy tanks can now choose to run a massive endo eating fridge door large shield and have 100% of delve stun value, a medium for (throwing random numbers for theory purposes) 80% of delve or a small for 50% of delve. This would inturn be a small playstyle nerf to light tanks, (who IMHO are a little on the strong side / Heavy tanks need some love, however you want to look at it) because I believe they max out at a medium shield.
DETERIMNATION
Im going to make sooo many people mad on this one. I think there needs to be some sort of reduction on DET for everyone except Light and Heavy tanks. Sorry to the VW, Skalds, Reavers, Wardens, Pallys, Friars, Thanes and Champs, ( I think that is all of them) but its boarderline out of control. I want to dabble into buffing zerkers, one of the ways to do this would be to slightly nerf their closest competition and add savages into this category as I personaly don’t think they should get stoicism to begin with. I propose to have the “Hybrid” Det max out at lvl 7 (38% reduction at a 20point investment). I would rather see this than have the full lvl 9 for 34points and then a %reduction, allowing the hybrds to potentially spend the points on purge for the same RR. Again I do think savages should be in this category as they have “spells” that can be used for frequently then their original Light Tank counterparts.
Ill stop here for now, some of the other things I have queued up include: Relics, Water movement speed, Plusing Charm, Feathers/Bps/Skins. We will see how much hate I get for round 1 before I event attempt to dabble in a release of round 2.
First of all, I want to thank the Devs for what they do in their own time for free, if I had any skill in Coding(?) I would offer my assistance, but alas, I don’t, my apologies. So thank you. I have zero idea how some of the things im about to say will happen/can happen via coding. I also realize there will some things that are game changers with QQs about retemplating etc. To those I say, grow up, it’s a game, its progression, if you thought the game was over once you reached 50 in OG DAoC, then SI came out, thought you were done again, then ToA, then…. You get it.
Secondly, Ill probably be able to count on one hand the people that will know who I am, I don’t really care. This will be a long post, read it all, read parts of it, I also don’t care. I will try and keep it somewhat entertaining with limited rambling, BUT if there is something I say, and you don’t agree don’t be a troll and just comment something, offer criticism AND a solution, if you can’t, don’t waste other people’s time.
Thirdly, take some of the things/stats I say with a couple grains of salt. The point of this isn’t to dispute raw had “facts”, its to start the ball rolling on some theoretical solutions to not have such a drastic left wing / right wing POV. For example, if I say the fastest Celtic Spear on hib for peeling would be the 3.Xspeed 15.Xdps one. Don’t go all Epeen and say well the 4.X 16.5 spear with 17%haste and exactly 176.4625 quickness will be the same as the 3.X spear…. OMG calm your tatas okay? We on the same page? Cool. Lets get started.
I personally believe this type of game should have many key factors, one of which being Risk V Reward, a lot of my POV will take this into consideration. I will scatter some of the big topics throughout this post so maybe yall will read the while novel which I will type.
REALM SWITCH TIMER
Ill Start off with a banger. I see the theory behind the 12hr timer, I get it BUT things change. Some people can play more then others, some people get bored, some people make and break friends, so I think this should be looked at. My solution is to have a passive 12hr timer. Meaning, yes you can log onto a different realm while you are still counting down your personal 12hrs. You will be able to make a character, you will be able to PvE AND PvP, but there should be a risk. What about a negative % gain until your 12hrs is up? Something like 25% reduction to XP. This would have the same logic for PvP, but a little more drastic in my opinion, something closer to the 75%reduction mark. I Can still farm plats, play with my friends in both RvR and PvE, but I hopped realms, so ill take my medicine and have the Debuff.
Erhmerhgerhd this is brilliant! But Flur, what about all the people that got banned for bypassing the timer?! SUCKS TO SUCK.
Think of it this way. You are driving 1hr away on the hiway to your parents place for a family gathering like you have done countless times before. Speed limit is 100kph (im Canadian). But there’s construction, sign says slow to 40kph. You take a look, no flashing yellow lights, no workers, no equipment, so you say screw it, and continue along at 110kph, cause who really follows the speed limit anyways. Next thing you know, blue and red lights behind you and you get pulled over, but its not just a ticket, your car is actually getting towed away cause you were doing more than double the posted limit. SUCKS TO SUCK. So you call your parents to come grab you, take you to their place, have dinner and now someone has to drive you 1hr back home. On the way home, all the Damn construction signs are gone! Do you get your car back and don’t have to pay that ticket? Im a blue collar dude, I don’t know the answer to that question, my opinion is no, because you were doing something stupid. (*Beta – Live – My proposal* for those who didn’t catch it)
BUFF POTIONS & CHARGES
Two Perfectly identical SBs Duel, Same Starting stats, Same Template, Same race, Same spec, Same RR. They are fully buffed with +155 shaman buffs. Who wins? It will be random yeah? The roll of the dice for who gets evade, who misses, who crits, this will determine the outcome of the battle yeah? Maybe a little has to do with individual player skill, swapping weapons at the right time, some strafe action, but as I said before at the start of the post, I going the more theoretical approach, the classic /stick duel. Both of these SBs duel again, this time with the Pheonix Pot Buffs, then again with zero Buffs. The outcomes will ultimately be decided with the roll of the dice, just like being fully buffed, the only difference is the POTENTIAL Time to Kill (TTK). Im not going to math the WS vs HP vs Evade vs WepHaste vs AF, the outcome in a duel scenario will be the same.
Lets try again with a Caster Vs a Tank. (YES I REALIZE THERE ARE UNLIMITED COMBOS RELAX). Starting at the engaging distance of most casters spell range of 1500 fully buffed (+155) the caster will have the advantage. He gets bonus cast speed and damage from the buffs, the tank for the first 1500 gets bonus hp. With Pheonix pots, the caster gets less casting speed and damage, the tanks HP is also less, BUT less affected then the casters liner cast speed IMHO, this result now slides toward the favour of the tank, how much? I have no clue, but the tank now has a better chance. Try again with zero buffs, that tank is closing that 1500 distance in the same amount of time for all three duels but the caster is doing way less damage in that 1500 range, again sliding the scale back towards the tank.
Do I really have to type the whole thing out again with a SelfBuffing class vs a NonBuffing class? Didn’t think so.
I think we should remove Buff Potions entirely (Everyone gets mad at this point). I think we should keep the instant and overtime potions, Heal endo mana, have them useable when not doing an action (sheathed weapon / not casting) but lower the CD to approx. 45seconds. I think we should increase the charges equal to 0%bonus yellow conc buffs BUT have them AND all other charges only be used when equipped, and drop said bonus when in inventory then also have the duration increased to same as self buffs approx. 20min, also removing the use delay on buff charges. If you can blast all charges, go for it, its ultimately a QOL item, so then someone doesn’t have to “waste” X time waiting for all buffs.
What are alchemists going to do now? I don’t have the answer to that at this moment in time. Will you have to template? Maybe. Will Flur have to retemplate? Yup. This will end up being a buff to any selfbuffing class who has been in a weird place, Friars, Hunters, Rangers, Champs and Thanes (I think). This will drastically change the Risk when doing Smallman / Solo, Is that a Friar or a Wiz? Thane or Warrior? Melee Ranger or BM? Allowing for some more “Off meta” selections in the character screen IMO. How much affect will this have on the TTK? I also don’t know the answer to that, if I would venture a guess it would make the fights longer, increasing the chances for adds, at the same time increasing the time to make ninja plays. I think we have to keep the endo pots (sorry pallys), yes it will get pallys more groups if we take away regen over time pots, but it will nerf the “average” alb group. Hib atm, need typically Druid, Druid, Bard, Warden. Mids need Healer, Healer, Skald, Sham. Albs need Cleric, Cleric, Sorc, Minst. If we take away or nerf Endo over time, I believe it will do too much harm to albion.
HIB AMNESIA
I don’t even know if I spelt that correctly. You cant simply take it away from the bards without giving them anything UNIQUE in return. Cant nerf the range without nerfing the range of ALL instants. There is one thing that people keep saying about this game that I hate, and that is “its how it worked on live, they never changed it, so its as per design/ its been like that for 20 yrs” (or something along those lines). Gamers have a niche of bending the intent and design of something almost to exploitation in almost every game. Boosting to see over walls in CS, wall riding in racing games, landing near impossible side stuns/snares on DAoC. Was it intended? We will never know. Did it get fixed? Why not? Not enuf time, knowledge, maybe thought it was a cool aspect of the game.
From what I know, amnesia resets the cast animation hence denying the spell to land aka, you forgot what you were doing. In my honest opinion, that should be the only thing it should do. If you are running as a armsman with a minstrel duo partner, and the armsman gets hit with amnesia, nothing should happen, you arnt the one playing the song and you arnt going to forget you are running. If it hits the minstrel, the song should drop next tick unless you requeue the song. This is how I think it should work. I am not going to get into resist the effect, that will be a later topic on itself.
Now will this change, probably not, is it strong, yup, is it OP, no. (people get mad again). I Believe that clip range is 5500, its gotta be a couple seconds to close 3000 units at speed 12, and if you cant spin that fast, not the bards problem. Now if you do get hit with amnesia, it takes anywhere from 3 to 7 seconds to drop speed. The goal for most hib groups is to create a speed differential in order to gain position control (I might be wrong but #ishwa), so that’s the amount of time you have to spread, form your front line and engage, weather you sos or not is your call. With NF now there prlly arnt going to be too many head on engagements, personally im curios to see how it plays out. Moral of this rant is I think it should be changed to something like I mentioned above, but if it doesn’t unfortunately it’s a little bit of L2P. The solution for sure isn’t just simply taking it away.
RVR TASKS + MISC
Again I get the theory of this, get some people in a semi chaotic scenario and have them fight in the same area, cool. The amount of rr9+ people on this server already is crazy cool, the silly fact is sometimes up to 50% of the rps gained is not through defeating someone of a different realm, and that’s where that sucks. I believe the intent of the task system was to also help out the casual players close the gap between some of the higher RR ones. Personally, I cannot play as much as I used to when the game came out, RealLife has a damper on the E world sometimes, that being said some people can spend many more hours into the game and I’m really jealous of that. So now they are simply getting more “ticks” of rps per session of game time they can play, which as a result can factor into widening the gap. I believe the ticks for participation should start at lvl 45 and end at rr6, no matter the level of the toon. People will still flock to the zones to fight, but this will slowly close that gap.
For the keeps / towers attack / defence / participation I think it should all boil down to a multiplier, and that multiplier should only work vs Realm points earned via Player kills. Now to get the next level of multiplier one would have to participate kinda like how they have it for PvE at the moment. Someone would get something like 0.10 per 100 guards killed, 0.25 for every lord/captain killed, 0.75 per 100 Enemies killed while in the keep/tower area. Something along those lines. Keep in mind I propose to eliminate the actual RP tick, so someone would have to cash in these rewards by actually killing players. So yeah a zerg can go take 3 keep and 9 towers and have an overall multiplier of 3.0 (for example), but it means nothing unless they engage in actual Player vs Player comba. So if you are LFG or waiting for your guildies to log on, go join the raid BG, get that multiplier then go PvP. There will however need to be a reduction of multiplier per hour of some sort, something like 0.5 per hour and have it NOT reset if someone went LD or needed to relog.
SLAM
This is a cool one, and I think I got the solution. Keeping with the Risk V Reward motto, cant just nerf slam on light tanks to 5 seconds. Ive seen enuf valewalkers land side and back stuns all day, every day. So simply nerfing slam to 5 will just have the light tanks go lower in shield, raising their actual DPS, and landing shield/melee positional styles for stuns. What I am going to propose will affect every class except Scouts, sorry scouts I know you are in a weird place right now but my fingers are getting sore and I think some people are getting tired of reading this novel, so ill think about yalls later. I propose on any shield style EXCEPT REACTIONARIES, the stun duration is a % of delve pending size of shield used at that moment in time. Heavy tanks can now choose to run a massive endo eating fridge door large shield and have 100% of delve stun value, a medium for (throwing random numbers for theory purposes) 80% of delve or a small for 50% of delve. This would inturn be a small playstyle nerf to light tanks, (who IMHO are a little on the strong side / Heavy tanks need some love, however you want to look at it) because I believe they max out at a medium shield.
DETERIMNATION
Im going to make sooo many people mad on this one. I think there needs to be some sort of reduction on DET for everyone except Light and Heavy tanks. Sorry to the VW, Skalds, Reavers, Wardens, Pallys, Friars, Thanes and Champs, ( I think that is all of them) but its boarderline out of control. I want to dabble into buffing zerkers, one of the ways to do this would be to slightly nerf their closest competition and add savages into this category as I personaly don’t think they should get stoicism to begin with. I propose to have the “Hybrid” Det max out at lvl 7 (38% reduction at a 20point investment). I would rather see this than have the full lvl 9 for 34points and then a %reduction, allowing the hybrds to potentially spend the points on purge for the same RR. Again I do think savages should be in this category as they have “spells” that can be used for frequently then their original Light Tank counterparts.
Ill stop here for now, some of the other things I have queued up include: Relics, Water movement speed, Plusing Charm, Feathers/Bps/Skins. We will see how much hate I get for round 1 before I event attempt to dabble in a release of round 2.