Combat "balance pass"

PvE is not the issue. The issue is that people will load-up on artifacts that maximize their chance of getting a critical and give them the most damage possible and then one-shot other players. Then Chris determines that certain skills are dong too much damage and nerfs them.

 

Edit......Get rid of artifacts and make crafted armor great again, and how about a PvP skill tree that will give +/- bonuses to skills. Kind of like Dark Age of Camelot with Realm Skills.

 

You are totally correct Elrond. Here is my question, from a development standpoint, how difficult are these changes? I don't know anything at all about coding or programing , so I really don't know. Is it possible that these types of changes can be truly effected to make PVP its own animal? I assume WOW had that built in from Jump street, so they didn't have to go back and tinker with their original game to make resilience. This game is really starting to come to critical mass in the attrition of player base. If @Chris asked me , I would say, go back and un-nerf all the crap you nerfed, blades, pole arms , archery whatever and let the players play. This game is DYING. @Chris is making bad choices and killing the game. Is it the worst thing in the world if the 200 players who still really play this game have a good time and are happy? If the masses ever do come back, they can start to adjust the damage again and reign it in. The choice here is to appease the last remaining players or stick to your guns and go out of business.

PVP, well I just dont see any way it will be made successful, unless something like what you suggest takes place, but I dont know if Chris can actually do that.

 

At this stage of the game usualy a nerf is mostly a fix, something to put the school in par with the others, so you shouldn't be forced to respec if your school is competitive as the others.
Maybe the main problem is that still combat isn't Balanced in both the istances ( pvp and pve) and even with all the nerf and boost there are still classes much better than other. Refering to the specifical nerf of uncounterable ignore defense skills is not something that affects pve a lot, it is mostly something needed for pvp since at the moment there is not so much you can do to defend yourself from 1200 dmg piercing shot or puncture. Maybe adding a cap to the dr ignored might be a solution.

Even if you all are screaming at Pvper seems like atos prefer to nerf and fix those kind of thing ( that are important of course ) than nerf those fucking fire mages in pve and giving everyone the chance to be competitive at the same way in pve

 

The problem is in the word ..what you perceive as a fix an average/casual player sees it as a nerf . Over the years these ''fixes'' have created a negative aura for the game .... If you go back through the patch notes , youll see year after year , month after month , the countless attempts at '' fixing '' things that caused major uproars in the community . If you were to make a poll with the players that left us over the years , at the top of their list as the reason why they quit will probably be these '' fixes '' . Nothing enrages a player more then having his progress wiped out in a single patch .

Thats why i think we should move away ( at least until we get a decent playerbase ) from doing things that cause players to quit . The new motto for adding features/''fixes'' to the game should be ... Will this cost us players ? ..If yes we wont do it .

To conclude, as i stated in my previous post, if a tree is too op bring others on par to match it ....its a much healthier policy long term ...

 

Given that this player base is older and probably played a few MMOs before, I am shocked by people's reactions regarding nerds. Every one I have played which is most have constantly gone through nerfs, skill reworks, and skill deletions. This very same discussion takes place on all those game forums as well. The problem is some players need to feel powerful all the time. I applaud Chris for constantly looking at balance issues. I have have played an archer, mage, and tank characters. Each of those builds have been OP and have been nerfed over the years. None of them is unplayable they may take a bit more effort but completing hard content is a lot more fun to me then making everything a cake walk.

 

Exactly.

 

Unfortunately, SotA nerfs tend toward "small" changes with dramatic effects. As @Barugon noted, he (and I as well) lost around a year of progress because of a few "fixes." I don't need to feel powerful all the time, I need to feel like I am getting more powerful all the time. SotA doesn't do that very well to begin with, and then being hit with setback after setback doesn't help.

Additionally... some of us don't want to play other builds. I am always an archer, whether it's good or not. If the game's attitude toward nerfs is, "well, find a new build" then... no. It's find a new game.

 

A subtle balance is expected, however going in a completely gutting 12-18 months worth of progress in order to try once again to balance PVP and PVE is to say the least, disappointing, to say it more strongly, VERY FRUSTRATING. Its not about players who need to feel very powerful, its about players who have invested 5+ years and countless hours of grinding XP, SHOULD be powerful. I don't play a game to feel like crap, I play it to have fun. If you want to be a Chris Fanboi, be my guest, but applauding his diligence in the quest for balance is like applauding the deck hands on the Titanic for making sure the deck chairs were evenly spaced out after they hit the iceberg. At the end of the day, every player has to ask him or herself, Is this still fun? If the answer is NO, they leave. LOTS more people have left this game for no reason other than the combat Nerfs and guess what, after 6 years of doing those population killing nerfs, the game is still wildly unbalanced and people are still leaving. Let the players who have stayed with you, have fun.

 

When the game was near to Balanced they added tons of New artifacts and new enchants/masterwork, so the work of balancing had to be done again and here come more nerfs.
The same patch that death shield got nerfed, bandit set was added, so any kind of melee/archer was more powerful in pvp cause of death shield nerf, maybe could be Balanced, but they added bandit set so unbalanced again.
I want to add also that people progress, discover new builds and combination generating new build maybe more powerful, so here come the balancing again. We can't pretend anything different for a game that has almost no internal testing before release stuffs, and hasn't a team of tester that constantly test mobs, builds, skills and provide feedbacks about combat balancing: here those tester is us player.

 

Actually I think they should nerf the bludgeon stuns. They are making bosses immobile for the entire fight. Sorry @Arkah EMPstrike

 

I believe all future “balance passes” should be done in the Q&A prior to dropping them on the general populace. We are paying the price of the idea of a classless system. Best way to move forward and try to tame this beast is not nerfs but boosts to other skill trees instead.

I am dual wield swords and after reaching 160 in bladed combat with Thrust, Double Slash, Rend and Offhand attack at 149 on way to 150 feel that I could have made another build and accomplished far more.

Bottom line is that the most important resource we have is time and when the nerf stick hits hard as it usually does people think why bother. So here is my suggestion when it comes to blades which by the way is not OP as many claim.

1) Give us a crafted equivalent to the bandit armor, make body slam drop the victim in front of me not a half block away, reduce damage to weapon and armor from body slam and give thrust an armor pierce like puncture and piercing shot. The fact is I as a swordsman have to engage an enemy, get in its face and destroy it while in its reach not while running away like a pansy.

Don’t nerf, Boost where it is needed it will keep people from leaving.

R/Boris/El Pirata

 

They need to frame it with some in game lore, blame it on the Cabalists, and give you someone to take your anger out on:

 

I have been here since the beginning, with thousands of hours in the game and I am not a Chris fanboi. I have played 3 different builds which all have been nerfed and all were popular builds where a group of players quit or threatened to quit about. All three of my builds with minor changes are still very strong today.

Does my heavy armor guy take zero damage like it use too nope but he still can handle several mobs at once. Is my archer as strong as it was nope but it still does high dps single target. I will hand it to this team that even when they meet big they will readjust. I know other large dev teams that have not adjusted something they broke for months if not years.

 

OR the items need to be infused with the skulls of players and the higher the level, the better the stat

 

I think that kind of points to why you dont mind as much. You have 3 different characters that you play and have leveled up . In the time it took you to level up those 3 characters, I have played ONE. One character. The character I WANT to play. I dont want to be a fire mage or whatever the OP character of the month is. I dont want to be forced to diversify and respec because thats my options as far as Chris is concerned. How many times as he said to us, "If you dont like it, go and take your XP out of Archery/ Blades/ Moon tree/ Etc. and start over again? Talk about a serious FU to your player base. If mediocrity is cool with you, then fine. I am happy you are happy. It isnt what I am looking for. I have been playing the same character for 5 years and expect him to be better than just adequate. I literally went from being able to have a 15 or 20 minute solo fight with the Aether dragon or the spider queen and if I kept moving and kept my buffs up and nothing went wrong, I could kill them one day, to I am having trouble clearing the Mage room the next. I dont lay down a ring of fire and go hide somewhere, I am exposed and fighting a tough mob. I am having to keep 6 or 7 short term buffs up while keeping my DPS at a level that exceeds their regen. NOT an easy fight, but possible. POOF gone on a whim and a hearty FU from the devs for my efforts.

NOT fun to go back to grinding elves after 6 months of really having a good time .

 

The fact you can solo a rather dragon and spider queen is the problem those are designed as group content. Everyone wants to solo everything. Can players do trials solo in ESO, raids in WoW or FFXIV. The answer is no and there are suppose to be things that are not soloable in this game.

 

Because a lot of us were sold (and therefore spent heavily when buying in) on the game being a selective multiplayer experience, that we could choose to play solo. I can only speak for ESO as it's the only other online game I've played, but there is plenty of endgame level content available aside from Trials and Dungeons to keep me occupied. SotA's endgame content is nearly all effectively group content to casual players.

 

I think we disagree on that as well. It is a sandbox game and I can do what I want to. If I want to solo an Aether Dragon, I should be able to. I disagree with you that there are things that should not be solo able. I disagree that there are MOUNTAINS THAT CANNOT BE CLIMBED AND GOALS THAT CANT BE REACHED! I agree that they should be difficult and that its not like UT where you just go stand there semi afk and collect the XP. As to raids that cannot be soloed on WOW ( the only game on your list I played), The Aether dragon and spider queen are not Raid bosses, they are intended for a standard group of 4 or 5 players. Why cant I solo them? If I posses the skill and the ability to take on these bosses and win (Most of the time) why should some massive nerf be the answer? Why not make something stronger for me to try other than making me weaker?

 

Group content and soloable content aren't mutually exclusive things. It's not necessary for something to be impossible or inaccessible individually for it to be worthwhile for a group. Imo, the lack of gated/impossible content is one of the best things about SotA.