A Hill Worth Dying On

if they removed accuracy mods, and there was no way to mitigate the evasion, do you think there would be a new meta then? is there always a new meta? is there no point of striving for game balance?

edit; my entire argument is based around the fact that there is a clear superior choice as the game exists, which is burst damage. I dare you to find people who, on their primary build, do not use all of the highly damaging modifications. In my experience, these people are exceptions that prove the rule.

edit 2; fuck, even I use the damage mods on finishing blow and knee kick (although to be fair I am limited in my modification selection with unarmed). I guarantee there is some type of game data that shows popularity of specific modifications over time and I would LOVE to see them release that data, because I believe it would articulate my point better than I ever could in words.

edit 3; and I have a problem with each skill being able to do everthing. I think each class should have a few options to select from, but I don't want to see Sword/FireMagic healers and I feel the same way about literally every single skill being able to do burst damage. That should be reserved for Fire Mages and Battle Chem and ALSO be punished with evasion.

edit 4; https://youtu.be/_FNzL5nW_u4?t=16

Honestly I kill things faster with a poison/trauma dot build since I dont have to burn armor down to use my burst. Only 50 tho so take that as you will.

Currently, the builds that can kill a mob in under 10 seconds (i.e. with 3 or 4 attacks) whether in a group or solo - to minimise rage hits /extreme regeneration rates - offer high success /survivability.
Until this alters, player build strategy will not change. Damage output will be prioritised.

Citan has employed various techniques to change player behaviour e.g. mob: evasion, resistance types, thick armour, increased health, damage reflection, health regeneration, immunity, etc. (& also reducing player health and armour).
All have had an impact and players have adapted their builds e.g. by carrying multiple sets of gear.
No single approach provides a solution as a player in Red gear (c. 27 mods) has a very different damage profile to a player in max-crafted gold gear (c. 60 mods).

Given the above (damage output is king), it is relatively unimportant whether player health and armour is at 500 or 800, whether healing is part of the build, etc.

However, as early Lab and GK demonstrated (chained hook shots - for those who remember), the longer a fight takes, the more players start defining /specialising builds into tanks /pullers, healers, crowd control, DPS, etc.
Players also start mandating aggro /damage output control, use of buffs, carrying resses and optimising builds.

Personally, I think the game is much more forgiving nowadays, money is easier to get, getting 'carried' in dungeons is very common and overall player preparation has reduced (e.g. many people running DC don't bring fire resistance pots anymore and rely upon AOE heals only. Many also don't bring a ress).

TLDR: High damage output builds provide greater rewards, survival and success rates at the moment.

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Originally Posted by Roekai

if they removed accuracy mods, and there was no way to mitigate the evasion, do you think there would be a new meta then? is there always a new meta? is there no point of striving for game balance?

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Firstly there's always a meta unless everything in the entire game is perfectly balanced, which isn't possible, even then, there would still be different metas for different situations. In this situation, cc would be devalued since you wouldn't be able to rely on it always hitting the target, same thing with debuffs if you're a sword, druid, psychology etc. player. Power would also become more important so everyone would be using cloth instead of only the majority of people. Self buffs and kiting would be unaffected so things like staff, archery and fire magic would become comparatively even stronger.
I personally think ranged already has too much of an advantage over melee in this game because of kiting, and those 3 skills are already some of the most meta skills in the game right now so I think you would just throw balance even further off and see yet more nimble geared staff/archery or staff/fire players. Also worth noting is that the harder you make content, the less viable weaker builds become and so you would probably end up pushing more people to the meta either way.

I also personally hate the idea of having rng so important in the fight, I don't mind a bit of rng but if that rng means I can miss my stun right as I need to be saved from the next enemy hit or I miss my long cooldown cc like freezing mist for battle chemistry then it would just end up being infuriating and I would feel like sometimes I was just powerless to actually win in a fight if rng was against me.

Even if it was mitigatable with accuracy, at high levels this would mean adding maybe 1 generic mod somewhere on your armour + belt and so would be insignificant, yet at low levels would be a gigantic pain in the ass. I really think the length of combat is only an issue at higher levels once people have fully optimised builds, lower levels really don't need any more pain.

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Originally Posted by Roekai

I dare you to find people who, on their primary build, do not use all of the highly damaging modifications. In my experience, these people are exceptions that prove the rule.

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I think that's just a byproduct of how the game functions, you have to get the mobs hp down to 0 in order to kill it and more damage allows you to do that faster. In the situation that the healing/mitigation mods and damage mods were perfectly balanced, most players would still pick the damage mods since that would result in shorter fights even if both had the same capabilities. I think how this is normally balanced in MMOs is by tanky/healing specs allowing you to achieve more, e.g. solo higher level or harder mobs, but at the cost of it taking longer. I think this is already somewhat true in this game but it's just a fact that it's relatively unimportant to be able to solo difficult mobs since that's not how you earn money or experience quickly. In a group it's supposed to be about filling roles and each person gets the same reward so it doesn't matter there, but much of the game is solo. This is where this game really shines to me however, since you can be a tank all you want in a group and be useful there, then switch builds to a more dps focused one for when you want to solo.

Even if you had 90% evasion on every mob, picking the damage mods would still be the best choice for the shortest fights, there just wouldn't be as much of a difference between the kill times. If you really wanted to kill burst damage, you would put damage reflecting on every mob, but then just prepare to see the new meta become dot builds or yet more people going staff for that 0 mod investment mitigation and I'm really not sure why you want to stop people from playing burst damage builds in the first place.

I think one of reasosn why people prefer high burst builds nodays is because of how deadly monsters are. This is not only because of how much damge they deal (rage crits are still devastating, even after they were nerfed), but how fragile players are. Flat mitigation is in many cases next to useless, % mitigation is still rare, and only few selected build scan make good use of evasion. Armor is nice, but its hard to maitian it in longer fight. If you don't have damage inmunity(shield/staff), or really crazy sustained healing (druid, and maybe priest? I dont know much about later) you have very little way of suriving longer fights.

Roekai - meta will always exist, there will always be builds/set ups thata re more effective than other. Now it migth be burst builds, if we introduced significat evasion, then everyeon woudl satrt adding accuracy. There would still be burst builds, its just that they would be les sbursty because they would add accuracy.

If accuracy woudl be removed - it would be really dump idea, because if there is random mechanic having significant impact on gameplay there must be soem way to build around it. If its just "spread damge over multiple skills and hope one of them hits" then its very bad desing. This might lead to dps builds, or more tanky builds becoming meta, but it would lead to a lot of frustration too.

Meta always exist (for those unaware, META measn Most Effective Tactic Aviable). If it becomes to stale, its good idea for developer to try and change it, but imo it should be through indirect menas, for example, introuducing new type of enemy that offers good rewards, but requires different tactic(manties were good example once upon a time. They dropped good rewards, but they dmg reflection prevented peopel from bringign high-burst builds).

As for balnce - it cna be strived for, but never achived. Only way to achive perfect balance woudl be to make every skill in game have identicla set of skills, with identical damage/healing, power costs and cooldowns - and I think nobody would want that.

I totally agree that there should be some specialization, and no skill shoudl be able to do eevrything. Thankfully, I don't think there is such skill in game right now. Some are better than others at certain things (Staff and Shield being primary tanking skills as far as I know), some skills, or properites are more desirable than others (fire damage, especially dot's are good to have rigth now since they make dealing with trolls much easier).

going back to burst dmage being more popular - thats normal. Mayority of peopel will always look for build with shortest kill times, if allowed. But, like I said, I don't think this si only reason such build sare so popular right now. Nerfign them, directly or indirectly, might make people migrate to other builds. This might be more dps-focused builds, or mitigation build,s or sustain builds - who knows.

But, as I said multiple times already, and will continue saying - if we want combat to last longer, not only players aveagre time-to-kill needs to go down, but time-to-die needs to go up too.

There is one more thign to consider, and that is progression. Slower killing would mean slowel leveling of combat skills(which might not be that bad of a thing), slower aqusition of certain mats (skins/organs/meat), and as aresult slower leveling of certain craftign skills (which, in certain cases, is a lot slower than leveling combat skills already).

Lysea:

I respect that you are using a poison/trauma dot build, and I hope you keep up with it. But in groups you will notice that you will not be contributing much damage, because everyone else will be bursting the mob to death before your dots can shine in terms of power cost to damage inflicted. Or at least this was my experience when I went trauma with sword. I have subsequently switched to rage control, and have found much better success, with both soloing and especially in groups.


Poulter:

I agree with every word of your last post, particularly the TLDR.


Celerity:

Under the system of evasion as I imagine it, only damage would be evaded, not spell effects. So, CC and debuffing would not be devalued, rather quite the opposite.

Power becoming more important would just mean more of a reliance on low cost, lower power skills, rather than a complete dependence on cloth. I can tell you right now that I have absolutely no problem managing my power using heavy armor, because I largely use skills that have excellent damage to power cost ratios, and further improve those with cost effective modifications. Parry, Riposte, Punch, Jab, Infuriating Blow, Finishing Blow, they all have extremely low power costs and I basically can sustain myself in combat with decent food indefinitely. So I reject the everyone wearing cloth argument.

Why do you think evasion would make kiting easier for ranged players? As far as I can tell, it would more negatively affect ranged players than melee players for 2 reasons.

One: Non-kiting players would also gain the benefit evasion; someone kiting a mob is not being hit by the mob, so they would only suffer misses on their opponent, their opponent would not suffer misses on them.

Two: Ranged players (especially players that kite) tend to focus more on DPS. And, as I think we have already established, evasion more negatively effects players who focus on DPS statistically speaking.

And, again, with regards to missing your stun you would only miss the damage associated with the stun, not the stun. Only the damage is evaded, not the magical affects of an attack. I think this clarification should squelch some of your fears about prevalence of RNG.
And as I have already stated, I would not want there to be mitigation of evasion with accuracy in any way (except possibly in the case of very specific, very sought after, very hard to obtain magic items)

Cr00cy:

A flat evasion would cut the damage of monsters by whatever percent the evasion was set at. So if we set evasion at 10%, obviously mosters would do 10% less damage. Evasion cuts damage on both sides, extending the fight. With an extended fight, you have the need for healers (who can repair both the armor and the health of their companions), crowd control (for repops and adds, since you can just burn through shit), and tanks (to keep the dps alive during the extended fights).

How can you say that accuracy being removed would be a dumb idea? The whole point of evasion being implemented is for the “mechanic to have significant impact on gameplay.” Why would you want to include a loop-hole around the mechanic designed to fix a problem. And once more, the developers consider the lack of power management and the short span of combat to be a problem; so I dont want to hear any complaning about the loss of a concept that the developers themselves are trying to eliminate.

Adding 10% evasion is not “spreading damage over multiple skills and hoping one of them hits” because statistically 9/10 of them are going to hit. To say that you would hope to get 1/10 is just not mathematically accurate in any sense.

And I don't want perfect balance, I dont want perfect balance at all; I was merely trying to show the flaws in a previous argument with my rhetorical question.

You yourself admit “burst damage being more popular” and “that its normal.” You also said “average time-to-kill needs to go down” and “time to die needs to go up.” Again, explain to me how evasion doesn't dress all of these issues?

Slower leveling could easily be adjusted by increasing experience gained by monsters or decreasing the amount of experience to level combat skills. This to me is a non-issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...ature=emb_logo

First my thought to making Hardcore mandatory:
Since it can take a long time to get all the mods you want with transmutation i´m against it. I don´t want the risk of losing a piece of gear i spent so much time (and if crafted resources) becouse i wiped with a random grp and can´t get back to the corpse.

As for evasion:
First i compare my 2 main builds in DC from my experience running the dungeon. The first build is a fire/BC AoE build where the dmg of all abilitys is similar and a lycan/psy build that uses 2/3 other abilitys to strenghten 2 abilitys that hit hard, but with barley any other sources of dmg.
For the fire/BC build it doesn´t make much difference even when 1 or 2 attacks get evaded but for the lycan/psy build it is a huge problem since the whole build is made around those 2 stong attacks with a 30 sec cooldown. So if 1 of those attacks don´t hit it is a big problem for me, since it is very hard to take mobs down without them. If there is a global evasion that build would be dead for me since the risk of not making dmg is too high. Becouse of that i like it that some enemies have evasion and others don´t since it allows different builds to shine against different opponents. So i think it is better to add evasion to some mobs like they did in FR.

As for evasion only evading dmg. I´m against it since in my oppinion the best part abbout evasion is, that you can evade effects like stuns or DoTs (or mobs evade yours). That makes the fight more interesting and can make the difference between life and death. And what about "You Were Adopted"? Since it needs the mob to be hit by "Psychoanalyze" or "Tell Me About Your Mother". Is it always counted as hit since the effect is applied or is it only counted as hit if it does dmg?

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Originally Posted by Niqesse

... And what about "You Were Adopted"? Since it needs the mob to be hit by "Psychoanalyze" or "Tell Me About Your Mother". Is it always counted as hit since the effect is applied or is it only counted as hit if it does dmg?

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What would happen would be the value of stuns would go through the roof. Players would adapt by simply dropping the monsters avoidance with stun's flat foot debuff. Builds that have 2 stuns would be viewed as great for group play as few fights would go smoothly with it.

I'm in the camp that thinks OP is judging balance with a full max enchanted yellow set as his reference, and content is aimed at the red moded group. He might have said otherwise but I honestly can't be bothered to read all of his posts because I'm so disgusted by the idea of the world becoming the Rahu Sewers. I do like when a dungeon has monsters with different vulnerabilities but I think the global-avoidance rule that is being suggested makes for interesting discussion but nothing more.

There would be no stun flat foot debuff. You admittedly said you didn't read all of what I wrote, so I'll get the pertinent text.

"And as I have already stated, I would not want there to be mitigation of evasion with accuracy in any way (except possibly in the case of very specific, very sought after, very hard to obtain magic items)"

Yes I do wear a full set of yellow level 70 gear but its not crafted and not max enchanted, and its not max level. So I'm short 14 mods and they aren't top level. But yes, I am relatively elite.

My argument is primarily based on group play, however. Really, the my ultimate fantasy would be more of an emphasis on the trinity, and I think evasion can provide that, which is why I am so stubbornly insistent on it.

What measures would you take to address the fact that, as Poulter put it, "Currently, the builds that can kill a mob in under 10 seconds (i.e. with 3 or 4 attacks) whether in a group or solo - to minimise rage hits /extreme regeneration rates - offer high success /survivability.
Until this alters, player build strategy will not change. Damage output will be prioritized" if you take evasion completely off the table?