lol best misclick ever lets try this again. Following your post it seems the cost comes from other factors and that makes my statement, redundant. glad to know hp costs more.
Hm, can't make any super accurate estimates yet, but I would guess HP went from 8/10 nora-point to 8/9 nora-point, and DEF went from HP/12 to HP/20? Guessing that RNG values have remained mostly constant since old-old formula.
The vast majority don't, but many do have modifiers in the -2 to -5 range. The Heroes all have one (or they'd all cost 90 or 100+ probably), and I think this is fairly necessary for champs of this type of be runnable.
Yea, that's fairly close, DEF is /18. The HP side is a bit... more complex than that since it uses a LOG curve, but yea.
That's good to know, thanks. Log scale for HP sounds smart, actually. When trying to make an improved costing formula a while back, less linear approaches felt like they worked better.
Well we've found the problem. A 1:1 hp to nora ratio on top of getting 3 extra def for free is insane and any unit with stats similar to that is going to be hyper efficient so long as it isn't bogged down with half a million sandbags. Why not increase the cost of basic stats and lower the cost of abilities across the board? Stuff like muck dragon (as is) will always get run over things like swamp guard crusher because the extra benefit you're getting from the abilities simply isn't worth the extra cost. With the exception of very few abilities I don't normally look at a unit and think 'oh crap how am i going to get around scale armor' because it's normally 'holy Bane Shift why does he have that much hp at 58 nora.' I think that was one of the few things that made the corpse era of pox fun was that the units with really cool abilities and a 75+ nora cost were actually common because you got what you paid for (and usually much more). In this meta the only way something over 70 nora goes into my deck is if it is broken or hard counters something I can't deal with otherwise. Edit: Basically I'm saying you could shrink the gap between 'normal' units and vanilla meat sacks by making the normal units pay more for their stats and less for their goodies.
So this is exactly what happened with this formula update and ability costs have been coming down in general. So we are on the same page largely.
So if anyone remembers the original formula, HP was linear and much closer to a 1:1 ratio. What happened? Well, it meant that champions like Carrion Colossus costed 122 nora. Muck Dragon was a 69 nora SPD 5 unit. Basically, anything with more than 50 HP or so costed a ton of nora and was largely unplayable. Same with any champions that had more than a couple of abilities. It's untenable. ~ Ask yourself this. How much does the following cost: 0 DMG, 0 SPD, 0 DEF, 60 HP champion - 60 nora because 1:1 ratio? Ok, now let's add some DEF: 0 DMG, 0 SPD, 3 DEF, 60 HP champion - now it is 70 nora. A 70 nora champion with no abilities, 0 SPD and 0 DMG is what we'd be talking about. Add any basic amount of DMG and SPD and we are surely close to or over nora already. This is absurd. The game would be totally broken with this kind of costing. I am not suggesting the current situation is perfect by any means, but let's not go backwards here to solutions that have already been tried and proven not to work. ~ Also, let's recall that Stat Bonus - Health abilities also aren't costed 1:1 and weren't auto upgrades when they were available. In fact, people largely wanted ABILITIES instead of HP (or other stats) in those scenarios.
You mentioned a -10 nora manual modifier for Muck Dragon. I suspect that was probably done to counter the high cost of its HP, and possibly a remainder of the 2x2 discount. Did you or do you have plans to go through the champs that have manual modifiers to see how the algorithm change would effect them?
Mostly the fact that it was a 70 nora 5 SPD unit, so considered unrunnable, but yes, nora modifiers now need to be reviewed.
This just showcases why it's taken so long for an update. And why this update to the system still doesn't address the silly.
Splitting this off from the earlier reply because it got long: I don't disagree, and as I said, this is largely the direction we have been moving in and is more or less what happened with this patch (and especially if you combine it with the cost reduction of many abilities in previous patches). However, I would note that any cost adjustment to stats also impacts higher cost units, and any ability cost reductions also reduces the cost of cheap units. In other words, such changes always affects both sides, and the efficiency variable is not entirely solvable through these methods. At the very least you have to recognize that the impact is less apparent than it would otherwise be, because if a unit with 50 HP is going to increase by 4 nora, let's say - it's going to do that regardless of whether it is a 50 nora unit or a 70 nora one. Any attempt to make the lower cost units more inefficient ALSO makes units with higher costs more inefficient by definition.
Thanks for your responses, Sok. I was just wondering though why so many Moga have sandbag abilities if this is the design philosophy. As they are currently, there's no way something like Moga Trigger, Moga Zealot or Moga Netter will ever see play. Their abilities aren't worth the same amount as they would be for champs with higher stats already, since they die in 2-3 hits/spells, and then on top of that they're given things like Surge: G'hern (which shouldn't even exist), Berserk Attack and Sentry. It seems like their efficiency has been reined in by the new formula but the sandbags were just never removed. I would check Trigger for a manual modifier as well. I remember him getting one back in the day because CorpsE wanted to mess with hashinshin. Another problem is the existence of Moga like the Chef who has decent abilities but can't be run because his base stats can't justify his cost. Why does he have Disease Eater and Omnivore, for example? Buckethead/Reckless Spellhack are in this category as well. I think the devs are headed in the right direction, but as you said outliers still need to be examined as they work differently from the "standard" champ.
Comparative efficiency still increases because a +4 nora modifier hurts a 50 nora champ more than a 70 nora champ. Tiny margin, but that's what efficiency is all about.
Basically, in Corpse Era, most abilities were free. Thus, things were either OP or unrunnable largely on the basis of how much free stuff they got. It's pretty hard to compare that kind of costing with a costing system that tries to accurately reflect value.
