[MAINT] SERVER MAINTENANCE 07/02/19 (Complete)

Ok I'll bite.

1) gear. (duh)

2) skill (actually also important. I know some very talented, super-geared people, but also a few people who seem to have bubble wrap where their brain cells should be. They don't position themselves well in mass pvp, they panic-use genie unnecessarily, and generally have unexciting and reptitive combos that are easy to outmaneuver.)

Now for some more interesting ones.

3) good computer. Oh, yes. The ability to turn up that distance to max in mass pvp is HUGE. You can see groups of enemies coming from a long way, and you can see the outcomes of battles in the distance, giving you crucial seconds of warning before, say, a swarm of enemies arrives. Those of us playing on limited distance and low graphics are missing a lot of this vital information, and we sometimes pay the price for it.

4) low ping. Ooooh boy yes. This game is less reliant on low ping than, say, a first person shooter. But it is still very very important. I was having some fights against db the other day. The db was good, but every db combo has a few tiny holes. But my ping is often just a little too high to do anything with the 200-300ms gaps in the locks. I see the stun disappear, but even when I'm spam-clicking apoth or something at like 7 times a second, it doesn't matter, because the action of me clicking apoth is delayed long enough that the db next cc arrives first. Very frusturating. Meanwhile, I have fought people whose ping is sub 50ms, and if I leave even the tiniest of gap between, say, an sog and a sleep, they've tele-stunned me, or double sparked, or used immune apoth. Unbelievably OP.

... yeah gotta address the elephant in the room.

5) class selection. This is PWI. Heck, in any game, not all classes are made perfectly equal. Try as you might, not all classes have the same impact. Some classes tend to have more impact on more situations than others.

6) how many of your class there are in a squad/faction

And in particular, some classes have more impact the more of them there are, while other classes have LESS impact the more of them there are. Here's a simple situation for you. We are comparing several squads and how they would be able to function fighting a regular fight in TW. Squad A has: 1 cleric, 1 mystic, 1 veno, 1 bm, 1 barb, 1 seeker, 1 db, 1 archer, 1 stormbringer, and 1 wizard. A nice, beautiful rainbow squad. Squad B has: 4 clerics, 1 veno, 1 bm, 1 barb, 1 seeker, 1 db, and 1 stormbringer. Did the squad get stronger or weaker? It obviously got very much weaker. When there are 1 or 2 clerics in a squad, they are very important and have HIGH impact, because through aoe heals and rez, they can support a whole squad of people capable of doing lots of cc and lots of dmg. But when you have 4 healers instead of 2, your may have good survival but it has much lower cc and dmg output, and will have a hard time making an impact. Compare this to Squad C: 1 cleric, 1 mystic, 2 venos, 2 bms, 1 db, 2 stormbringers, and 1 barb. Holy mother of gosh, what a horrifically powerful squad. Massive, massive cc output! What a nightmare it would be to fight a squad of this composition. With that much purge and cc and debuffs, you don't need as many raw dmg dealers like your archers and psychics and wizards etc. And finally Squad D; 1 cleric, 1 mystic, 1 veno, 3 archers, 3 wizard, 1 seeker, and 1 psychic. Well shoot, lots of raw dmg, but not much purge, and, oh damn, where's the cc? Where are the front-line tanks? The absence of the bm and db and barb will be sorely missed. This squad is possibly just as weak as the 4-cleric squad, which at least still had cc and tanks.

I have a fun mental exercise I do, which is to imagine a particular pvp situation where you have all of one class pitted against a normal faction composition.

Exhibit A: TW with All Clerics vs Normal. Verdict: Clerics get roflstomped.
Exhibit B: TW with All Archers vs Normal. Verdict. Archers get roflstomped.
Exhibit C: TW with all Bms vs Normal. Now this is more interesting. With that many bms, you can certainly delay the enemy for a very long time. But who will pull your catas? Normal probably still wins. Bms are tanky buggers but they do not have 70s faith or invoke. However, in Dragon's Conquest, the all-bm team might do quite well. assuming they split up properly to cc many enemies simultaneously. With permanent hf and glacial spike on the dragon, and some of the bms triple sparking, you could imagine bms getting lots of fast 3mil hits off, while at home base some bms just stick around to keep enemy cced enough for your bms to kill their dragon. Tossup.
Exhibit D; TW with all Barb vs Normal. Verdict. Barbs roflstomp Normal. Bahahaha how are you going to stop 80 barbs from passing the cata back and forth between them? Every time you manage to kill a cata, the next barb steps up, faith for 70s, and pick up cata. Invoke. Frequent triple spark. Solid shield. Massive hp pool and defenses. Good luck stopping this. Meanwhile, if enough barbs work at it, those barbs can kill *your* barbs, and eventually you run out of alive-barbs to carry cata while all-barbs team always has another ready to go. All-barb team can pretty much permanently prevent your healers from flying with the aoe that prevents flying, so a few barbs can run in and crash those healers while others roflpile your barbs and drop armas like its World War 3. Note: all-barb gets roflstomped in DC, because dmg on dragon is capped at 3mil per hit, and they'll be lacking quite a few debuffs on dragon, and I'm skeptical barbs could provide enough debuffs for all of them to be hitting 3mil a hit, barb is less of a dps class and more of a dph class. Only need a couple barbs to tank dragon anyways, not 60.

cheers