worries about the big change

I assumed it referred to the poster above if not specifically quoted. I mean, that's partially what quotes are for right?

 

If the forum user is on the viewer ignore list, the quote message is not displayed. Is kind of fun on a schizophrenic sense, because suddenly someone post a message that apparently have no relation at all with the rest of the current conversation (No, I do not think pork sausages are a valid comparative to moronga), or post several times in a row, like having a cellphone conversation when you can not heard the other half of the conversation.

Fortunately, on the bottom of the thread there is a button that tells if there is ignored content, who posted it, and to display the messages so you can read them and get the full picture.

 

I think there's a way to do this properly with a soft hand. The complexity of abilities is a bigger offender to me than the number of abilities although both are a problem. Simplifying the bigger offenders will just make current shoeboxed runes more viable and that's a good thing.

One worry I have though is that by removing too many abilities you specialize your roles more which risks throwing us back to a more rock/paper/scissors situation. Anyone remember trying to take down an ancestral avenger back in the day when magic damage wasn't so widespread or trying to counter stealth because you only had 1-2 detection champ that you would obviously only draw as rune 29-30 and you had no second rate substitutes like psyching ping, bombs, blood, etc.

So that would be the only caution I would give but as long as it's done properly it will be fine. I'm not worried.

 

I don't see how specializing can be anything but positive for the game. It opens up more rune options and puts counter play back in the game rather then having a few champs you drop that cover any situation your opponent could ever dream of throwing at you.

 

Because the game can become too draw reliant.

 

I would generally agree that specialization is a good thing but it occurs to me that if you have total specialization then you may very well end up in a situation where you have to run certain runes for the sole purpose that they counter a specific problem. I generally don't like "counter or die" problems, one of the few problems I have with Pox Nora is the presence of such things.

 

Maybe the mechanics that are counter or die need assesed. Things like stealth could be given a duration. But in return detection is removed from most champs.

Reconstitue is another one either inhibit or gib. If the ability did less the champ itself could be better.

 

Exactly. Part of the problem we have now is that there is less about the tactical aspect of what's happening on the board, and more 'Crap, he threw a round hole on the map, and all I have are square pegs.'

You include two precision units to deal with NKD, and they don't show up until runes 25 or on....and it's GG. Or you have a couple of bomb champs, but obviously, those get focused hard as your opponent ignores (with NKD) everything else to focus them down.

And I'm not implying ST is the only issue. I observed a couple games the other nigh, and Aquatics still look like they're straight ape-**** crazy to deal with. Lichs are still benefitting way too hard from surge (Sorry, fellow Wasters), but those have to do more with just how much they're being allowed to benefit from certain abilities.

I've become a huge, huge fan of late of hardcapping ability numbers. HP cannot climb above 100 (cures snowballing Leech Vitality), damage cannot exceed...25? 30?...something concrete. Though you could 'bypass' that with things like vulnerabilities, execute, or such. But the stat couldn't exceed that flat number. I think that would cure a couple of issues that exist and aren't mentioned often.

TL;DR - NERF ER'THING.......but leave my stuff alone =p

 

Things like bloodthristy blade, stealth, nora gen etc that require hard counters need to be addressed separately. We can't limit development on the game to try to make a few things ok when they should have been changed a long time ago. Permanent stealth was never a good idea and decks were made all the time to abuse that fact. If you ever look through the rune list and wonder 'why does this thing have detect?' it's because somebody made another stupid all stealth bg that was running rampant at the time and rather then change the ability to only stealth for ~4 turns they slapped a bandaid on it (same thing they did with nora gen) and said it was fixed.

 

Personally I don't want to nerf those abilities with hard caps because of how they allow to build unique BGs (referring to surge/bulwark) that lose alot of their power and awesomeness without that scaling. In my view if the enemy has deployed enough units to make surge exceed 30 or 40 then you're losing anyways. Just my 2 cents. Although capping Leech Vitality might not be a terrible idea, although if we do that we should take a second look at Imp Vixen maybe since she would then have 2 abilites that increase HP to a cap of 100, maybe one of those would be redundant.

 

the game needs strong synergistic interactions like surge so matches don't drag out for an hour. not saying lich surge is just right, only that surge as a concept is ok.

 

And I'm not saying those mechanics aren't ok. I'm saying that letting them explode into such obnoxious numbers is not.

@Authytyr I have to disagree. Not capping those things is more harmful than anything. You set up in a stall situation, and you lose not because your opponent had a stronger tactical advantage, they win because they were able to wait on escalation to build up to 'one shot' range, and your faction doesn't have that option.

And for Vixen, I wouldn't see those abilities as redundant. They would let her hit (and potentially keep hitting) that cap over and over, but it wouldn't snowball into an unwinnable state.

And I think that might be another issue, a lot of people have become so accustomed to these '****, they dropped X before turn 10.....I've lost' that we don't even bother wanting or even remembering a time when we didn't call a match over until a shrine got smashed.

Maybe my sense of fair play is getting in the way of my will to utterly dominate, I dunno. I've been wrong before.

 

Maybe my perspective is skewed. The only surge unit I've ever really played with extensively is Kl'zik. Awesome as her damage is she's hardly unanswerable, she dies all the time. If you don't manage to set up a powerturn to kill her you'll get steamrolled but it's not like she has a long range attack (She has web but it does reduced damage and has a CD). Escalation and Soul Siphon can certainly get out of control; Gloombringer, Vixen, and Soulthirster are all a little bit terrifying if things get rolling. The difference with surge is that it's dependant on the board state not how long you can turtle a single unit.

 

How can anyone be defending these runes by pretending it adds complexity?

Do you actually enjoy tales of valor?
Augur fumes spam?
Blink?
RD on fist of bastion + ride down?
AoC cheese?
Mimic god knows what onto Vindrax?
Trapper and co dropping shadowspawned relics every turn?
Kas Guide making real champs NKD spamming?


How can you be against removing a whole whole bunch of this cheesy awful meta goodstuff BS. This isn't anything positive for the game. It's a bunch of crap that you would have to be a masochist to enjoy playing against.

Heaven forbid anyone want to try and play something a little different or a theme like lonx or spiders or sand or something cause they are just going to get crushed.

This is killing BG diversity. So many things are obvious problems and instead of looking forward to fixes that would balance the game and allow for more diversity, we have people "worried about the change" because their abusive goodstuff bg might end up nerfed and they can't farm easy wins with overly efficient runes and broken unfun mechanics.

 

True, for quite a few surge units. But, imagine if K'lzik was a 3-6 range unit. With how bonkers that damage stat can get, I'd also wager that bonkers damage is the same reasoning a champion that looks like she's supposed to be up in the fray brawling with the best only has life siphon to defend herself with.

Imagine if she capped at a hard 30dmg. With Surge 2, she'd get there ridiculously fast, but then she might be able to get some kind of defensive bump, like reflexes (She's half spider...all those legs should move her pretty quick), or maybe scale armor (I don't want scale armor, but it would fit the whole 'hard shell' thing from being half spider).

Instead, she's a gimmick 'monster unit' that's only real claim to usability right now is that she'll wreck serious face if you can keep tiny spiders alive until about turn 10-15. Then she's pretty much just a wincon.

That's all I'm aiming to combat here. Decks shouldn't have to rely on wincons. And to a small extent, I'm against wincons in general (But am still a Johnny...go figure), the only valid wincon we should aim for, in my most humble opinion, is smashing shrines.

I'm also a huge fan on wins not quite being as decisive as they are right now. But that might just be ability bloat (Is very likely ability bloat), wherein you can't overcome a one font advantage for a couple of turns, you might as well just hit surrender, because it's ridiculous, at least at the moment, to get over a one champ advantage, let alone what amounts to really just a 12n defecit. (think about how crazy that is, how many matches right now are decided because of a 12n swing).

-And just to clarify, that isn't exactly all pointed at you Authrytyr, I'm pretty garbage at making a decent 'cutofff' between a reply and going back to a general 'you'. My apologies if there's any confusion.

 

Having played spiders for a few years I would disagree with the sentiment that they crutch themselves on Kl'zik. Amazing yes, necessary? Not entirely. Sure I can imagine if Kl'zik had 6 range, but she doesn't. The key is balancing these mechanics in context of the rest of the rune. Kl'zik's melee range and the massive target that gets planted on her fact and her high nora cost make her balanced. Life Siphon merely requires that you one turn her, something any competent deck should be capable of (or forces you to control her ability to deal damage, ie Hexed, Stun, Pacify, etc...). I think that surge and similar snowball mechanics need to be balanced but I don't think a hard cap is the way to do it. Partially because adding in hard caps to abilities increases the ability's complexity and partially because part of the fun of building a synergistic BG is the feeling of endless possibility (at least for me).

 

This part right here confuses me. How does hardcapping an ability make it more complex? And I'm not just saying an ability period. I meant the damage stat, period. Not that surge can only ever provide +15 damage, Surge itself could provide 100+ dmg, but the champions on the board could never exceed X amount of damage.

Now, maybe tie these things into nora cost. A champion under 50n would have lower stat caps than 51-70n. Maybe, but that's more convolution than I think is any kind of necessary.

We might just have to agree to disagree. But I want to make sure there's no confusion on the matter. If I implied (Or I might have directly said, I'll read back through) that I thought the ability should cap, no, though in theory that's kind of how it would work. That no champ should ever exceed a fixed amount of damage, or health, or defense, or whatever, with the only exception being damage modifiers like execute or vulnerabities, or damage amps.

 

Sorry, I think that was the miscommunication. I thought you meant that the amount added by the ability should be capped. We may indeed have to agree to disagree, personally I'm big into any strategy that has the ability to snowball into cool over-the-top scenarios. I think that many abilities of this sort should be toned down but through a subtler method than a hard cap.

 

I'm a fan of watching it happen to someone else (Yeah, I'm evil), but from a desire to play a balanced game, I just don't see how it's possible in the scope of fairness to allow these snowball situations to exist without breaking things somehwere. Now to me, fairness isn't exactly rock/paper/scissors. To an extent, some of these abilities do deserve to create a pretty marginal advantage to the user gambling on building them up. I just don't think 500hp Demonveins is that scope of 'reasonable advantage'

 

I think that snowballing should be just that; It starts out below par and has the ability, within the scope of an unusual playstyle, to move itself above par. Snowballing should be a risk/benefit scenario. For example, the risk for Kl'zik is that she costs 95 nora to play and if you play her poorly she'll get one turned easily or she might be a dead card in your deck if you can't get a good number of spiders out. Mainly the nora cost and melee range pull her down I think. Snowballs have to be balanced and pulled below the bar to justify their ability to rocket punch the bar into the stratosphere.