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The Evade fallacy
#1
It’s no secret that the meta for a while has been autohitters that use as few stats as possible while still getting large amounts of SWA and being able extremely tanky. It’s a no brainer. You will always mitigate damage. You don’t have to proc evasion, you don’t pass any hit checks. Your mitigation is always there. 

Let’s look at basic attacks next. These can get just as much damage as auto hits if not more. Volcanic basic attack builds can dish out absurd amounts of damage currently. However, that damage is inconsistent. If you come across someone that eclipses your hit, that damage source is nullified. That’s when you fall back to auto hits.

Finally, there’s evade. You can avoid those devastating basic attacks, but in exchange you’re given Evasion! which is a fixed DR against auto hits if you surpass their hit chance. 

Now, both basic attacks and evading have one big thing in common: inconsistency. Your basic attacks can be dodged. You can be hit without enough evade... etc.

Auto hits and tanking also have one thing in common and it’s the opposite of that: consistency. You will always tank damage (outside of armor or defense shred obviously) and your auto hits will always land (outside of cobra). So, obviously the consistent choice will be the most optimal.

The current compromise for evade strategies is giving them Evasion! Which is a DR associated with your armor type that procs when you would evade an auto hit. This is flawed, because it’s just tanking with extra steps. Rather than taking 30 def and res, you’re building enough evade stats that you can proc Evasion! for that same value. And that proc isn’t guaranteed either. It’s diminished by 15 if you’re knocked down. Some skills ignore it entirely or with charge weapon effects, and sometimes honestly autohitters can get enough hit through skill stack, magnetize and other means to just hit you anyway.

Things like Verglas “solve” this by offering ways to enhance your Evasion! DR but again, it’s just an inelegant solution because at the end of the day players are doing the same thing with different stats, except one is inconsistent and the other isn’t.

On the other hand, if you allow evade strategies to actually dodge everything, that just makes them the best thing in the game. Negating damage is always better than mitigating it. The game would come down to what build can stack the most evade to dodge all incoming attacks and whatever builds can manage enough hit to actually connect any damage.

So my suggestion comes down to a couple of different changes. The first being to delete evade and evasion outright. Spicy take, I know, but hear me out.

Balancing for one form of defense is easier than balancing for two, especially when those two are always inherently going to be unequal. Also, in addition to this change, it is also suggested that you get rid of all form of offensive scaling from defensive stats. 

Now look at my current proposed design. There’s no evade stat. However, those stacking 60 def and res aren’t getting any damage. Earth attack would no longer be something received just from taking defense. There would be no defense or vitality or res scaling on weapons. So looking at these tanks in this game state, they have the same level of tankiness you see now but with none of the damage. If you move previously defensive scaling things such as earth damage, water damage, vitality scaling weapons etc. to other things that imposes a choice on players.

Do you want to be a doom wall so badly that you’re willing to have negligible damage? Sure, your mitigation may be as oppressive as it is now but you don’t have those devastating auto hits behind it.

On the other hand, stacking up that kind of damage comes with the sacrifice of taking less defense and resistance or vitality because these things no longer contribute to anything that would provide you damage. I think this also gives room to different play styles. You can have tanky supports, either in the form of healers or those using utility skills such as those from tactician. 

Ideally speaking, elemental attacks in general would no longer simply scale off corresponding stats. Instead, there should be an offensive stat that gives you an allotment of points to spend toward your choice of elemental attacks. There would be diminishing returns here of course. For example, every scaled point of strength would also give you separate points to spend on elemental attacks to raise them at the user’s discretion. 

This is a vast and sweeping change, but I think that it’s a lot better for balance as a whole. There would be kinks to work out and growing pains, but if you build off the foundation of this idea I think we can come forward with a more balanced game.
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#2
If you take away hit and evade, you likely take away crits as well. As flawed as they are, they are my favorite builds and any reason I have to play the mechanical side of the game would be gone. For the sake of fun, I'd have to argue heavily against this suggestion.
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#3
There's no reason crits would be gone. Crit evade would still be a stat.
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#4
Evasion and other % chance based effects have been a tumor festering inside SL2 for way, way too long. At the very least, the current implementation has and will continue to grossly favor those that are able to consistently mitigate damage rather than those that occasionally negate damage. ESPECIALLY when occasionally negating damage takes more stat investment.

I don't think the suggested solution here is the right fix, but we should seriously have a dialogue about the state of evade and how cancerous it will be for the future of the game. Seriously. All this design space taken up by a diceroll 'pray to not die' system that doesn't even fulfill the power-fantasy it sets out to represent. I can't even be a hyper-evasive squishy glass-cannon (what evasion seems to be going for!!) because I quite simply can't evade shit but other poor bastards who got tricked into thinking basic attacks were a good build and did less math than me to stack my number higher than their number. It's stupid and I don't like it. Dev pls fix.
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#5
I.E is it nigh time for Evasion to have a small CEL-based chance to completely negate damage?
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#6
(11-28-2020, 09:56 AM)Snake Wrote: I.E is it nigh time for Evasion to have a small CEL-based chance to completely negate damage?
no. this just compounds the problem of evasion being % chance to not die with heavier stat investment than tanks. completely negating damage is way way stronger than negating a portion of damage dealt, there's no way to implement a universal dodge wtihout it being too low of a chance to actually rely on or too high of a chance that battles become even more RNG/Math based rather than actual tactical decision making. cobra works in part because everyone (should) understand the circumstances in which it works and in which it won't and are able to play around it accordingly.

if an evasion overhaul is going to be successful, imo, it needs a way for both players to actively interact with it each turn. there should be ways for evasion characters to actively work around their opponents moves and a way for their aggressor to limit their options/have meaningful counterplay. 

other than 'just give everyone cobra lol' the first thing that comes to mind is some kind of 'posture' / 'flow' system whereby characters are encouraged to make precise, thoughtful moves that conserve their momentum/movement tiles in order to focus more on dodging incoming attacks, and disruptive/disorientating techniques can be used to 'throw them off balance' as it were.
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#7
All of SL2's combat is positively fucked and you wont make any progress fixing it if you focus on one under-performing area at a time.
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