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Preface
So while I have not been here long, or long enough to have an extended grasp of the deepest mechanics of the game, I did originally think it was best that I did not try to suggest any changes or comment on any balancing. However, I did talk to Miller and they encouraged me after I pestered Hated about the various mechanical things he knew about the game. My conclusion is that some problems with balancing revolve around some base design choices that have been made.
While Glykin -- and I'll agree there -- are strong because of their immunity to poison, it isn't the race's fault, actually. I can get people arguing for a San scaling immunity etc, but at the bottom line, poison is overtuned.
Overview
Currently, poison has a 10% max health cap w/ damage depending on the Poison Level.
If average health is 800-900, Poison Level 30 will kill a char that can't get rid of in 10 turns of being poisoned.
It'd take a 1000 health person a bit longer, however.
Now, while normally a good fix to this issue is to cleanse it or lower it, those options aren't readily open to people. Poison can be inflicted as many times as it wants to be inflicted. Poison -- even when reduced or cleansed the turn before -- can be inflicted for its level again the next turn, wasting 3m of people who try to fight back against it.
A hexer will make you unable to get rid of it, increase the damage by 1.5x, and can easily stick the duration of 10 turns. These builds can therefore just delete characters with no immunity, no resistance, or little resistance.
Now, the easiest counter here is: well just build resistance, immunity or status resist.
While that is a simple answer, it isn't as easy as it seems at least on Korvara, which is mostly what I've been playing. Your options for resistance are snakefang materials or the snake amulet. As for status resist, with the norm being a 200 hit meta they are building skill and if they are focusing down poison they are building will, which can, with a talent get their inflict up to upwards of 121~131%.
An issue with this defense is that the answer for a problematic design is to: just deal with it. If you are making a character the choices that you have to make -- if you think about it -- for dealing with poison is to either A: make a glykin, B: somehow manage to build res/immune/status resist, or C: Silence them/Kill them faster
I don't think it is healthy to just force certain things to be options going into characters because it narrows options a lot, lest you want to just concede a fight if you ever fight a poison or evade user. Evade is another subject though, one that I'll probably post about later.
My suggestion
So my suggestion for changing poison is rather simple and has a list of pros and cons.
Firstly, change Poison and make it deal (Poison LV * 0.2)% max Health per turn.
Secondly, make it so Poison can't be inflicted or reinflicted 1-2 turns after it has been reduced or cleansed. I suppose Hexer could avoid this, however. (And Bow of the green forest. Probably add a limit to how high green forest can get up to, otherwise, it'd just be really strong)
Pros:
Given the damage scales off Poison LV and not a % maxHealth, presumably with the max being 36-40, it could only ever do (maxHealth * (LV / 500)) to somebody. Meaning PCs can only reach 7.2-8% maxHealth per turn. But that also means that depending on how Poison LV is limited it can be anywhere from 0.2-100%(1-500).
With Poison being unable to be inflicted again, it will give people a chance to react to it and properly have engagement with the poison being inflicted to them, whilst also making Poison less of a 'i just do this on you as an additional dps' and more of a niche.
This way of doing it doesn't auto kill a mob(w/ no res) in 10 turns.
Cons:
If Poison LV can be stacked it can cause some issues.
It's a big change to a system I assume has been here a while.
Poison deals less damage overall. (but 0.2 per is adjustable)
There's no 'real' limit to the damage poison can do.
i didn't ask people for what the cons would be, and I cant think of any more, but I'm sure people will comment to show them.
Alternative
All in all, it is more of a formula adjustment to tune it, and with a formula change, the tuning can be adjusted rather finely. 0.1 can change to any number, while poison LV can as well, making the flexibility much higher. Currently, poison will always flatline somewhere, and always kill somebody somewhere since there's a hard 10% maxHP limit.
An alternative in the case that this is impossible/unfeasible is to just make the max hp 5%. Would do something kinda similar
Sheets/Math
tbh I made a chart because I figured out you could in sheets and I've used sheets 3 times for anything with forumals.
currentPoison is Poison as it is now. suggestedPoison is what I'm suggesting. chartPoison is Charts.
All calcs are done with 0 res in mind, however, if you are math savvy you can just calculate what they'd be with res.
Base Health is 800/900/1000, I asked what a good average was, I was told 800-900.
I've been playing mostly Korvara, so I have that in mind while doing all of this, so keep that in mind.
Multiple common poison levels are in colors.
Math:
0.2% Max Health per Poison Lv
maxHealth * (LV/500)
as for formulas used in the sheets you can just check
SPREADSHEET OF CURRENT / SUGGESTED POISON / CHARTS
tl;dr: read it. look at the sheet or the chart.
change poison, remove % max health limit, lower damage.
make poison unable to be inflicted directly after removal/nerfs
thanks:
Hated for sending me info on common poison levels, things I didn't know / resistance options, etc
Miller for also assisting in some suggestions in discord and agreeing with me
(notes: i don't know everything about this game, i might be wrong somewhere, but i think my math checks out(?)
i didn't account for hexer 1.5x dmg because it'd make the sheet too large. same for res%, I'm not a real SHEETS gamer, but if its wanted that bad, i can program something with variable inputs to display the information requested.)
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