The psychology of gaming
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how do you nerf frost to bring it in line with other schools? The idea to freeze enemies will be huge, like Mei in Overwatch.
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@jetah Besides just nerfing cc duration, you can indirectly nerf something by buffing its counters. Presumably armor will be suited to different climates for survival mechanics. Those armors will probably be strong against corresponding damage types; so armor fitting for cold climates might be resistant to freeze/slow effects, desert armor strong against heat, etc. If cold effects become strong, you can buff cold resistant armor.
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so you're changing armor to counter one school? (aside from the CC duration).
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Many ways to nerf abilities from just one school. Just take those abilities, reduce their damage and/or increase their cool down and/or decrease their up time period and/or ...
As for your example "nerf the frost": reduce the time targets remain frozen, increase CD on casting freeze, add bigger chance for freeze effect to break on receiving damage,...
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now your frost school sucks and fire is beating it.
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@jetah said in The psychology of gaming:
now your frost school sucks and fire is beating it.
Not if you balanced it right. If you see you nerfed too much you reduce the nerf done. Until it's just right.
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Problems with balancing comes usually not from a single skill, but from a combination of skills.
For instance from vanilla WoW, the Polymorph + Pyroblast combo. Both skills by themselves aren't so powerful, but when used together, it's almost always a 1 hit kill.
And it's tricky to nerf combo's as it often results in a skill or spell to become useless. Just look at Hearthstone, when they nerf a card to kill off an OP combo of cards, it pretty much always ends up the nerfed card to never be used again and often cards that worked nice with it too.
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The best thing like usually is nerfing/balancing spell by spell but this is really hard considering how many mixed builds you can create. Balancing schools is no point since you may have lots of useless abilities and few overpowerd in the same school. The balancing must be done ability by ability. That's what I say.
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It is correct that I could pick from 8 different schools 1 ability each, right? So balacing Warfare vs Marksmanship isn't gonna solve anything, unless running a full Marksmanship build is the FOTM
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My favorite type of game, when looking at MMOs, is the type where you don’t have to rely on other players, but instead other players can be just as much a threat as the other enemies. It’s fun to have games where lying and deception is involved, knowing anyone you trust can backstab in the blink of an eye, forcing you to analyze every person you meet and choose who to trust. Unfortunately, not many MMOs are styled this way, so I’d love to see more like it in the future.
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@benseine said in The psychology of gaming:
It is correct that I could pick from 8 different schools 1 ability each, right? So balacing Warfare vs Marksmanship isn't gonna solve anything, unless running a full Marksmanship build is the FOTM
Yeah but chosing 1 ability from each school will not make you OP due to you not having attributes to make all these abilities perform at their maximum.
If you make your attributes set for archery for example, and then you take fireballs from magic, some buff song from "Bardism" ( not sure anymore what all schools are called
) then your fireball and the song you took will perform quite poor due to your lack of attributes they need to function better (even if they would be OP for someone who took affiliated attributes for one of those, for you it will not be).If you spread your attributes in a equal way across all stats, then all those skills will function in mediocre level so again not OP.
Only the one school you buffed with your attributes will function fully effectively.
And in this case it is enough to balance only particular school that is OP compared to other schools.
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@gothix said in The psychology of gaming:
@benseine said in The psychology of gaming:
It is correct that I could pick from 8 different schools 1 ability each, right? So balacing Warfare vs Marksmanship isn't gonna solve anything, unless running a full Marksmanship build is the FOTM
Yeah but chosing 1 ability from each school will not make you OP due to you not having attributes to make all these abilities perform at their maximum.
If you make your attributes set for archery for example, and then you take fireballs from magic, some buff song from "Bardism" ( not sure anymore what all schools are called
) then your fireball and the song you took will perform quite poor due to your lack of attributes they need to function better (even if they would be OP for someone who took affiliated attributes for one of those, for you it will not be).If you spread your attributes in a equal way across all stats, then all those skills will function in mediocre level so again not OP.
Only the one school you buffed with your attributes will function fully effectively.
And in this case it is enough to balance only particular school that is OP compared to other schools.
Assumption, you don't know that yet. Look how many schools need Intelligence. So if you pick INT and STR or INT and DEX as your main attributes, you can easily get skills from 8 schools. I tried making some characters with those stats and it's easily doable, even with a 3rd stat pretty high, and without having tried it with attributes below 10.
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We don't know all the skills, perhaps one magic school that is based around support and healing will have a spell that gives you a boon that makes the next spell cast instant (designed to do a big instant heal for that school). But you can also use that boon to instant cast a powerful attack aka Pyroblast that usually takes a few seconds to cast, but with that boon, you can cast it instantly.
Impossible to predict what people come up with.
