Well what do you think would work for themes? As an older developer do you see it as shared mechanics or more about play style? What is more realistic to build around for development?
As a designer, I am far more in favor of developing an identify and a playstyle for themes, rather than using one or two "racials" and slapping it on everything across the board. Some of you might specifically remember the arguments I made in this regard towards Vampires. So Minotaurs was something along these lines that I wanted to accomplish. They had the Dimension Door and the champion that deploys it, but there wasn't really a single ability that goes across them all, and the Door specifically was more along the lines of their being "mobile" in an indirect way (Battlemage has Swap. Culler has Dragging Attack. Fury had Phantom Dash. Gladiator had Charge. Insurgent had Crushing Charge). But the reality is that Racials are a quick and low cost way to develop identify for a group, and is actually much more akin to the MtG style of design where typically most of the cards of a particular group in a set will all have the same or a variation of the same ability. Example would be the en-Kor, who all had the ability to redirect damage.
Interesting. I hope DOG follows that line of thinking and from what has been shown it seems that they are trying to do similar things. Edit: Though your minotaur example is still set on race. Do you think race is where themes should focus or is it better to have themes where each race brings its own racial flavor to the themes whole? I guess a simpler way to ask it is, is there room in minotaurs for deep elfs, demons, etc to fit theme wise?
And then there were the themes spells. The obvious ones are the ones that specifically mention a particular race. But that's actually a bit of a "cheap" way of doing it. A more interesting way is to actively key off the mechanics or circumstances that the theme excel at, and provide a spell that triggers or augments that. So these are things like Blizzard Cloak (which has it in 2 parts, one has attacks missing, which are obviously better on champions with counterattack abilities, plus the snow/ice trigger). Unfortunately the reality is that efficiency is the name of the game and many of these kinds of spells typically just don't have the efficiency or the general purpose usefulness to make it into decks.
With the proposed revamps focus on making sure each champion has a role and we see less generally powerful/utility champs, isn't now the time to maybe focus each race to have strong and weak points with in the faction? What if Minotaurs were fundamentally different from Bok and deep elfs so that they each had a reason to exist in UD with out too much cross over in purpose? Would that provide reason enough to have each race excel at particular types of mechanics compared to its allies and exist with in set themes to provide different options of play? Hopefully would give those theme spells/equipment/relics would then have a higher chance to see play by having increased synergy with a particular theme variation...or am I just dreaming?
I'm not impressed with this preview either, as ONLY stated earlier, why can't you just remove the CP and upgrade system altogether and balance the game accordingly? Mini Skill Tree system is what this new system is and skill trees have been a plague in the gaming industry for the last decade or two, it's never easy to balance these things. What is your projected time allocation in this big revamp and balancing process? Do you project 6 months? Can you afford 6 months of chaos? You should be making the game simpler and balancing asap, not arbitrarily creating another system with just as much complexity, disrupting game balance once again and not giving players a chance with even experiment around because of these these ridiculous rune prices. The condensing of various abilities into a 'bundled ability' is just a way to conceal the number of abilities, in the end you get the same results and now you have a problem of deciding what to bundle and what to leave out. This whole thing is a mess. Sounds negative? I give it a month before the rest of the forums catch on.
Boozha if you're going to ignore me as you've been claiming for the past month or two, grow a pair of balls and do it already, don't troll. In fact I will find the ignore button
And then there are the ones that are so effective that they get used outside their theme (Skeezicks Quicken) The solution in those case should be easy to fix though. Adding a high up front cost with a reasonable refund for the theme should do the trick. On the other end of the spectrum Haunting Grip is the example of one of the spells that is to expensive (or has to low a refund) to be worth using even inside its intended theme.
Let's just get greens to give our trolls appropriate forum title so that new players now whet they are about and leave them be, they make forum so much more interesting
Or even better once a person is on 10 different peoples Ignore list the posts will not be shown for anyone
the problem with vampires was that they DIDNT have a clearly defined racial, so the theme developed around greater vampirism and life siphon (argueably not a vampire centric theme at all). If people were wanting life siphon to be the vampire raical ability and for all vampyres to have it, I agree with your resistance to that idea. The vampire racial should have been blood ball centric. each vampire heals when it captures a blood ball (THAT is the vampire racial ability and they DO all have it). Its that trait that makes having race vampire actually mean something in game. The theme should have been developed more around blood balls and less around life siphon, iow greater vampirism should affected blood balls (perhaps the amount they heal/dmg for) rather than affecting life siphon. I think the underlying problem here is the mtg vs tbs mindset. mtg players seem to want every card to be a unique snowflake and for themes to be almost 'accidental'. Oh you found synergy? Youre such a smart player. turn based strategy gamers on the other hand expect their army sets to be designed to work together. Pox is a tbs game first. Not an mtg clone. Its been the curse of pox since forever that its devs are mtg players and so that is the mindset they bring to its design. But tbs is a different creature. themes developed in spite of the effort to make pox as fast paced a card flip game as they could make it.
Damn it Ragic, you post all this dreg all of the time, and then you post this and go and make me respect your opinion.
I don't see why the two can't coexist. Looking at MTG there's certainly an emphasis on individuality but there's also defined themes. A notable recent example is probably the guilds of Ravnica. Admittedly not all of them were designed to work together but a good example of one that is is Simic. Looking at PoxNora we certainly have the defined themes but we also have individualized runes designed to work well with anything and on their own. In both cases incidental synergy isn't hard to find. I see no reason why both can't coexist and both benefit the game. "Smart" and "Agreeing with Ragic" aren't the same thing.
"Smart" and "Agreeing with anyone" aren't synonymous. No one's ideas are perfect and there's always room for improvement. I'm not saying your ideas are bad, I am saying that the self-righteous attitude in your previous comment was ridiculous. To align everything you say as correct and everything anyone else thinks as wrong implies a ridiculous lack of perspective.
