Discussion: Final Patch of 2015

@Sokolov Thank you kind sir for bringing my armorer out of retirement.

 

That is a fair point, and I acknowledge that I started running font eruption more once you pushed PHS up to 60(!) nora. The thing is that if you are penalizing kill-enabling spells across the board you are going to end up just penalizing spells at all or just penalizing the use of spells in a specific faction (if you do not make the changes somewhat across the board).

Like if you work under the assumption that you are going to want kill enabling spells in your bg and that you are increasing the cost of kill spells across the board you basically just end up making getting kills more expensive or more expensive for specific factions. Granted you have not yet increased the cost of monsoon, but it is kind of mediocre for kill enabling. 8 physical damage is pretty weak, and even the secondary effects do not do very much to enable it. Right now it mostly seems to be run to ground Bastion so you can drown him. So you might have increased the odds of using it to enable kills, but 8 damage gives you a pretty narrow range of units you can enable kills with it. The other option is reverberating blast. Which is a very good kill enabling spell, but due to is combination of cost and targetting limitations is not something that is ever going to be a wise idea for a kill enabler; if you can't stun two units with it it just ends up being an extremely overpriced hammer strike without the ap drain.

Kill spells have not been increased in cost across the board. Most of FS's other kill enabling spells have been nerfed with font eruption, or have good reasons why they will never be used more than they are now. So I would request you either reconsider how you are going about your spell nerfing strategy or give FS some more generally useful kill-enabling spells.

 

this patch killed amp decks among others, lol. jakei shardmaster 8 dmg 32 hp and 77 nora. this is just silly. the fails never end.

wtf did they do to light of the circle? lmfao.

at least the changes(the bad ones) in this patch aren't as bad as the new battlefront game, things could have been much worse...

 

It's all good in moderation when you release 3 runes for a single faction to boost damage well that gets annoying. Speed buffs are bad in factions or themes that already have high speed. I like cheap meat, i also like indirect damage unless it's global, nora gen is fine if balanced.

I despise global abilities.

 

Having a 2 SPD component to semis makes it a weird and swing-y thing to handle in a competitive environment; that assumes there's an intention to make them a competitive theme with comparable strength on every map, which I don't really think should be a priority. Other than that, to hell with any of it being bad, just make cool stuff.

 

Balanced cool stuff please.

 

• Summon spam is bad
• Spell spam is bad
• SPD buffs should be handled with EXTREME caution
• AP buffs should be much rarer.
• Multiattack is OP, but I like it. And it's older than I am. So give it a break.
• DMG buffs are running a bit too wild.
• Indirect damage is fine.
• Global relic damage is not cool to play against or as.
• Nora gen shouldn't be a theme.
• Cheap meat is FW, and FW is IS.
• Super champs in the sense of high nora cost-titans are cool, but not in the sense of champs-I-spend-a-billion-nora-to-buff, those are not kewl
• most other things are cool

 

Great Patch! But as you are probs finding out ma3 + vivify + impatient + manic is game breaking!

 

I would rather cool stuff than balanced stuff. Balance allows a lot of different aesthetic ideas function within the strains of a competitive environment, but it's useless per se. I think the growing fetish for balance, not only in Pox but across as broader spectrum of players and designers, has constrained discussion and lead to a stagnation of ideas. Balance is one, difficult-to-use tool among many,a stylistic and formal quality of gaming; it should not be an ultimate goal for its own sake.

 

There's nothing fun about playing against cool OP Bane Shift.

Stormfeader was so fun to use and play against. I had an absolute joy

 

I think it can be, often is. Consider on what people, both in Pox and elsewhere, reflect when they take about games: the crazy, dumb, weird stuff that makes games as charming and quirky as they are. Some of the "Back in my day" reminiscing certainly comes from some nostalgia and a want to demonstrate experience, but some of that comes from a place of legitimate fondness; the old Circus environments where a turn-1 Ravager could end the whole game felt frustrating and unfair, but they were also exciting and unrestrained. If devs decided they wanted to make a rune that did a thing, it was done! Broken stuff then emerged from the friction between all these different, independent ideas, and produced a play-environment that felt hectic and living, rather than pre-planned and vacuous.

The competitive environment then puts those rune ideas within the context of other runes, and balance is important to making the ideas actually show up -- what good is a durable dragon if, within its world, it isn't actually durable? I support tweaking with the individual numbers of a rune, but damn I'd rather have imbalance than aesthetic sterility.

 

I don't know about a lot of this. I don't play enough to be able to comment on everything. What I do know, however, is that Stormreader is still broken. I would run that rune 70+ nora no question. If you want it to keep its ability (that is a passive damage ability that the community overwhelmingly hates) fine. Take away its mobility then and take away teleport. The thing is basically a 7 spd champ with paralyze and 16 passive damage a round for 62? nora in SP. It is absurd. Take away teleport or jack up the nora cost considerably if you insist on keeping its passive damage ability.

 

One of the few times I disagree with you, I believe that flavour, creativity and balance can coexist - its just tough.

One of my favourite runes is an example of this - Maxx. He's a beast, lives up to the expectations in the lore, and is balanced (I think). Strong, but balanced.

 

They absolutely can! But any work, whether a book or a film or a game, has a limited amount of space for elements within it, and many of those elements naturally work against each other. For instance, a movie about the politics of an intergalactic conflict will have a broad scope, but will also have more difficulty being personal in its approach. That doesn't mean it can't do both -- the attempts just pull in different directions. Likewise, in an RPG that attempts to be balanced above all else, the designers will have a much harder time creating weapons that feel like they come from a deity -- balance precludes obvious differences in power. None of these creative tools operate on a strict line, where a creator picks some point and says "Well, we'll have 62% balance so that we can meet our goal of 35% variety," that's just not how design works in any sense. At the same time, these creative choices don't exist in a vacuum: they operate in the context of all the other creative choices a designer makes, for better or for worse. So no, I'm not saying that these things are antithetical to each other, just that decisions with respect to each influence the others.

 

So true.

iPox is the most loved and hated pox player simultaneously.