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Balance Changes: General Direction - Feedback Thread
nitocris83
Member, Cryptic Developer, Administrator Posts: 4,498Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Greetings!
Today we published a blog on the general direction of balance changes. This thread is available for the community to provide feedback or discussions on this topic.
Please keep discourse civil and focused on general balance changes. While you may use Band of Air as an example, specific BoA feedback should be posted on its respective thread.
Today we published a blog on the general direction of balance changes. This thread is available for the community to provide feedback or discussions on this topic.
Please keep discourse civil and focused on general balance changes. While you may use Band of Air as an example, specific BoA feedback should be posted on its respective thread.
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For example...
1. Shield glitch
2. Warlords inspiration broken
3. Hindering strike missing constantly.
4. The three classes that only have one role and they aren't even close to being the best at that role.
5. All the collection bugs.
6. The workshop eating resources.
7. Falling off platforms when doing dailies.
8. Jagged Dancing Blade costing players millions of AD.
9. All the Crown bugs.
10. Fixing the Dreadring dungeons reset glitch.
All 3 of those would perform at exactly whatever desired power level you wanted. Instead it is still class AND build specific? 😐🤨
As far as the rest goes, bugs will get fixed over time based on importance and ease of the fix. Some things, like the dying while block is active is hard to reproduce for the devs.
Game design is an art, not a science, and the fact that--at this point--you're tweaking one mega-powerful item (after tweaking just one other mega-powerful item, the Rib Cage), indicates that you're track record is pretty impressive for an artist trying to please a large, demanding audience.
The combat rework brought a lot of things into alignment and balance. I remember the days leading up to the rework, and by comparison, the game is in a much better place. Perfect? You only have to read the first response on this thread to, predictably, find that nothing is perfect.
But the most important thing is this - THANK YOU for coming forward to us, the fans, with your thoughts and reasoning. A lot of the grief that I've experienced since coming to this game clearly stems from the long period of silence or poor communication in the game's past. I'm glad that does seem to be the past.
I work in a very different design field, but design is design in some ways. What you're describing is considered best practices in my world, and I'm glad to see you adopting this approach. (I'm sure that the folks on the new Rewards Council weren't looking for another job responsibility...thank you to everyone doing it.)
You have removed this ring from the game, it is no longer even viable, using it will be wasting a slot, the damage it does now is less than 1/8 of what it used to be.
Maybe fix the procks and leave the prock damage as it was, it doesnt need more nerfs than that, destroying it so hard is just disrespecful to all the work that some pepole put into it.
No longer will anyone grind the long hours it takes to get the endgame gear, knowing damm well that it will get nerfed to the ground as it has happened time and time again.
As a tank, this makes my roll seem irrelivant if a rogue runs off and kills everything before i can even get a hit in. Please consider some class re balancing for tanks to accommodate the item creep.
▂▃▄▅▆▇█▓▒░ Drac ░▒▓█▇▆▅▄▃▂
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<div align="center">AKA Draconis of Luskan</div>
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> Number 4-You mean the one class that is being actively worked on? The Wizard. Rogues ARE the best DPS, and rangers are doing fairly well, though not as well as Rogues and Warlocks granted.
>
> As far as the rest goes, bugs will get fixed over time based on importance and ease of the fix. Some things, like the dying while block is active is hard to reproduce for the devs.
Sorry, you're mistaken. They are currently the 4th best DPS class at endgame. The do wonderful in low tier content, though.
Every time I've seen balance talk, the result has been to COMPLETE DESTORY the thing that was only a little out of balance.
Take Xuna as an example. It was a decent companion. It was near the top in the list of companion damages, and some felt it was too good. (So was the Abyssal Chicken at the time). Instead of reducing it a bit, so it was in the top 25% instead of "very good" it is now in the BOTTOM 5%. People (like me) spent a lot on getting it, upgrading it, matching our builds - LOST!!
STOP OVER REACTING!!!!!!
"Balance" is NOT just NERFing anything good.
Like look at Tiamat and CoD. Who is farming these exactly? None of the rewards are really worth getting for the trouble. So this is the counter argument. If the rewards aren't there, group content will just end up as dead code or forced on unlucky pugs in the random queues.
Do you guys realize that there might be players here that played this game for more than one week? You have some reputation to overcome. You have your own statements to overcome. For a year BoA performance and drop rate was completely fine from your standpoint - and it is not too long since Brett personally assured everyone that BoA will remain on the top... and here we go: new MOD is getting finishing touches, so lets rewrite the rhetoric, turn it upside down.
BoA needed a fix. For a year. The bait and switch tactics needs to go. For many years now. And I have absolutely no idea how anyone can take any statements made by this company seriously. Reward Council? Was that supposed to be a joke, like with the campaign "look, here is a QA department"?
Brett wasnt the boss when BoA was released, maybe things will change in the future... but I have to see that with my eyes.
Caturday Survivor
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Mod20 Combat rework Survivor
Mod22 Refinement rework Survivor
Neverwitner online have looong history of it, when players found x glitch, or broken item, they do not report, they preserve it, try portrait as small scale issue, irrelevant thing and etc. And once it get in live sever, then put to use in maximum capacity. And after few months say, uh yeah it's problematic.
So this Band of Air, Giant Toad issues, was is possible to avoid? Oh yeah. I am 100% sure it was possible to avoid.
Someone here above mentioned class issues..
Take Rogue. Get group of enemies, use stealth> roll behind them, cast The Path of The blades encounter..
You hit all hits as crits, even with ~40% crit chance. And while This encounter is still up, any second ability used will land as crit by 100% assurance. Daily ? Crit. Encounter - Crit. At will - crit.
If you simply approach enemy group with stealth and cast The Path of the blades it will not work in such way.
The condition is simply, you hit in enemies back. And in AoE case if at least one enemy have turned back to you, this condition apply and AoE hit will land crit to all.
With warlock you can do like.
Use at wills or hellfire ring encounter to get their attention, when enemies rush to fight you.
You cast Fiery bolt encounter, but not to the enenmy who run in front of you. You aim to onenes who are behind him or way in back in group.
This apply condition( hit to enemies back) and make Fiery bolt encounter land crit hit, also next encounter/at will also will land crit hit too. If casted Hellfire ring encounter, which have two hits, Innitial And DoT( burning) both will crit. Now Hellfire ring encounter burning ( dot) have 280 manitude. Now imagine it also crit.
Also instead using fiery bolt you cast Hellfire ring and cause this crit fiesta? It will end up as Rogues The path of the blades, while its active any second power used will crit too.. Now add demogorgon set in this equation. After 5 crit hits it does 150 mag hit.
Lets not forget companion as passive> Grung Instinct - at mythic rank, when you do crit hit, 10% chance to do additional 220 magnitude hit.
This make Band of Air look silly.
You can also pull out similar trcks with other classes, but with some are harder to do it..
And here you have class disbalance issue. The glitch which where not addressed.
So if there is at least some intention to solve game issues, the first thing is need to quit tolerate gltich explotation and start some serious game testings before puting new stuffs in live server.
Also as I wrote many times, devs, QA and players, sit lets talk then do work on things.
There is no things which can't be fixed, the only matter is will. Is there will to take actions, is there will to actually fix issues, instead just try hide under rug.
There is Collaborative Development Program, ( CDP), Chriss Whiteside did not invented it, neither Guild Wars 2 where first ones who used such thing.
Similar like methology was used in asian games years before Guild wars 2 where developed.
Sure there is hard to manage debates here in forum, CDP proved that, but this is still the best way to communicate with playerbase..
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
Gustave Le Bon.
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Yeah sure maybe this BoA nerf is justified, maybe it's not. Who cares. It's the fact that devs knew about this for a year and deliberately decided to not do something about it that stinks the most. Because you know what? Nobody would have mounted the crazy farming for this version of BoA. I still believe it's more carelessness and reckless than intentional, but either way the result is that this nerf/change comes way too late for it to be reasonable, even if it's justified.
Learning is that the devs should never let a glaring issue linger for such a long time. Acknowledge the issue, deactivate the item or the content from where it drops, immediately assign a dev, and fix it within a couple weeks. Not sure this is because of the constant dev turnaround or leadership. But Julia for example is here long enough to know the history. She's also the one that should monitor the forum and community and know about stuff. Anyway, SOMEBODY needs to point out such issues in whatever daily meeting they have and tell, look guys, this is exactly the type of issue that will blow up in our face in case we don't deal with it IMMEDIATELY. Apparently that's not the case, so internal processes need to be re-evaluated by whoever is responsible for it.
Maybe the rewards council is the result of this evaluation, but Cryptic hasn't earned any goodwill at this point. So I believe it when I see it. In the meantime I'd be interested in a blog post that outlines the history of the BoA issue and what internal processes and oversights led to it being ignored for over a year. Or if it was intentionally ignored or postponed, what the logic behind these decisions was. The current blog posts merely states the obvious, but doesn't shed any light on why this keeps happening over and over and over and over again.
"Balance changes will not generally lead to makegoods, but we might make exceptions in certain cases involving big power decreases for items people had to directly pay cash for — we want to emphasize that it is NEVER our intention to grab cash from some deliberately too-strong item and then lower its power level, so a makegood can be called for in those cases."
To say when "balance" happens, and that it wasn't intentional to make that said item significantly worse, is not accurate or truthful. The band of air wasn't a sellable item on zen store, but the changes made were intentional, to the point that alternatives will now be considered, and before no DPS that had band of air was going to take it off. Now some DPS will spend on more rings. To deny that "balance" is used to generate more sales, and the changes are usually severe enough to force it, is just garbage.
I'm sure cryptic didn't mean to make the BoA overpowered to entice people to power through that grind or anything.
Yes cryptic, we believe you THIS time. We believe you finally have a handle on things after all these years and it's finally going to get better for realz this time.
Please excuse me, I need to jump in line behind that carrot of hope like a good sheep. Or is it sheeple? Sheople? I dunno...
"Another key area for us is communication with our community. We are looking at additional ways to show our progress or create direct lines of communication back to our players whether it be through additional dev blogs or in-game activities. We will be working on a way to give the community a clearer picture of what we are working on and what we understand the top issues to be."
That was in 2016. Sound familiar?
They should have fixed the ring (or the rng) a long time ago rather than making end game content harder to match it. The fact that they adjusted the difficulty of content shows they knew it OP. But why fix the problem when you can change everything else then nerf it after people spent months in some casing getting it?
I still don't have the legendary +ranged dmg ring from the end chest Julia. Can I at least trade my boa for it? You took away 4 rerolls a run for a chance at better rewards (mostly refinement points it turns out) but I still don't have the one thing I wanted from the launch of New Sharandar two years ago.
I agree that BOA should never have been released as it was...but there are new devs now, we can't blame the current devs unless we specifically know that they are still with the team. We can't blame art devs for system problems, nor should we expect them to fix bugs unless it's specifically related to the art.
If the studio isn't able to set up processes that prevent these issues even though there is other stuff to do and even though the dev that originally balanced the BoA might not be there a couple months later then that's unprofessional and not an excuse. Maybe the current devs aren't the right targets to assign blame to, but Cryptic as a company is either unorganized or overwhelmed and certainly lacks leadership. There is not reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Cryptic's Neverwinter team HAS had several leadership changes since BoA has released. We had Chris Whiteside, then Matt Powers, and now Brett Norton for EPs. We also have a new systems lead developer, who's been hard at work reworking Bard, then this BoA, and now Wizards...plus everything else that's coming with M24.