[CuteYellowCrabby]

Okay, so this is a point I've been making for some time now, and I feel like writing it down here would be good as well to see other people's opinions. Generally, I feel that with the way things are, there are currently only a handful amount of builds with a handful amount of weapons and equipment that are considered viable for PvE and even PvP. This is a result of all of the nerfs that have been seen throughout the months, letting certain playstyles thrive while others are dead in the gutter i.e. STR critters and daggers.

I do not think that nerfing something that is considered powerful should be a thing, I would much rather that classes- especially older ones- are put on the same playing field as the newer classes.

There is a certain monotony that's taking hold where you see the same classes over and over again, because that is what is currently viable and anything else they'd do with a similar feel would get them destroyed because it just doesn't work in this current meta.

This is especially true in the PvP meta. If you don't have a particular setup, you are going to lose 100% of the time- and even outside of that, some class combos or particular interactions just straight up kill you before you even get the chance to do anything. That just isn't fun.

Even in PvE, the new dungeons or dungeons with buffed monsters have once again prevented build viability. If you don't have a particular build ready, then you might as well just never grind there.

For the health of the game overall, I feel like buffs to classes should ultimately be focused on more than nerfs. Buffs create viability and creativity, nerfs just destroy it and bring nothing but the same builds that are becoming- or will become- stale.

[pilcrow]

Nerfs *are* kind of necessary for some things, but only to prune down oppressive mechanics and combinations. Besides that, yeah, we've been seeing a lot of excessive, sudden, and often mistargeted nerfs that have by and large only made the divide between the bottom and top end worse and worse, and may persist for all intents and purposes indefinitely.
Honestly, the manner in which the nerfs are conducted is more core to the problem than it *just* being nerfs, but we are also seeing very few buffs.

Egregious examples include the eternally-bleeding wound-in-my-side solsphere change that finally emptied every Flash of Light player out of the playerbase, the recent changes to GUI and Deadly Arms that took a struggling weapon type and made it largely unusable, and historically the changes to Hikage & Tsukikage that applied every suggested nerf at once and rendered them footnotes that I don't think anyone has used since.

These are pretty well characterised by being multiple heavy changes with no adjustment or review afterwards, and I can only assume were made with only surface-level information about the actual problem that had been gleaned from glances at discussion about it. Notably, the solsphere change was almost WORSE until I somehow managed to argue it down from being 'solsphere deleted when it decays' at which point any further input was ignored. That was SEVEN MONTHS ago - the actual problem child Speed of Light was almost completely unimpacted by it and continues to be a problem, and there are no Flash players.

I have no idea how long ago Hikage & Tsukikage were. It's safe to assume they're never getting another change.
There is no telling how long the GUI changes will last, or if daggers or guns will ever be positively adjusted at ALL.

Those three factors - the immutability of the changes, the severity, and them just mercurially happening - makes it actually agonizing to deal with when struck by them, and even keeping your mouth firmly SHUT about something isn't enough to protect it - the Deadly Arms change came straight from nowhere, nobody was discussing it and nobody thought it was a problem.

The design ethos behind these adjustments HAS to change, and it's not just by nerfing less things and buffing more.

[CuteYellowCrabby]

I do agree, yeah. The amount of buffs compared to nerfs is a really low number, and while some combinations do get their nerfs deservedly, it still ends up in a situation of where something else ends up getting hit as a result that might have used a particular part that made the other setup strong. A good example would be how you mentioned Speed and Flash Solsphere.

[zericosmic]

I have no idea how long ago Hikage & Tsukikage were. It's safe to assume they're never getting another change.
There is no telling how long the GUI changes will last, or if daggers or guns will ever be positively adjusted at ALL.

Part of why I've been feeling pretty doomer post 3.0, builds and items get nerfed, never to be touched again. Usually when items get buffed, they're items that are -really bad- and they do not get buffed meaningfully enough to compete with already good items.

The GUI change feels like ass, the fact that people are turning their backs ICly to evade better has just been an absolute joke, especially for a Roleplay game, but with how the game has gone, I'm not really expecting things to get better.

[PossumParty]

I agree with everything stated above. I'll say some things but take them with a grain of salt- I love PVP but I'm honestly not that smart and other big PVPheads understand the going ons a lot better than I do.

As someone that's been playing for awhile, if sporadically, I hop in at different points of the game's life and see how things have changed abruptly. In the past, it used to be that if you built Hit, you'd be fine and dandy. My character has 250ish Hit, which I think is pretty good especially on these poor 80 accuracy weapons. If your weapon does not have big hit or some big passives to prop it up, I am praying for you right now. But even with all that Hit, I'm consistently glancing on enemies in PVP and PVE. For PVP I usually am sitting at about 60% to hit, taking my 300-400 damage hit down to 60 damage with a glance because I didn't roll my dice well enough on two checks, and what did the other person have to do to get that much evade? Either nothing, or a singular buff. For the PVE side of things, 250ish hit fighting monsters and glancing on them seriously sucks, especially after the guile changes. I did one single battle in the Mino Labyrinth and had to walk back out to heal after landing 0 crits because all higher level monsters have giga Crit Evade now, and the stinky mushroom was glancing on every single shot I threw at it. So among all the other things you have to build for, you have to play a certain class or use a certain weapon that can go past this threshold. And this is just 250 hit with the enemy evade capping with either no buffs or a single buff, that's not even them debuffing your hit during fights with Kenki or darkness or smoke screens, etc. And as for critting on some of these PVE enemies, I have about 120 crit (which is, unfortunately, literally as high as it can go on my build, like the hit, without sacrifing EVERYTHING else, just like Hit, and basically making my build unviable). On some PvE enemies I have -1% crit. Yes, -1. To even have a 50% chance to crit I would need 170 crit, 220 even to be at 100%. I would say if you're at 170 crit you are very privileged. Can gun users even get anywhere this high, without a sniper? So those 80-100 stats you put into luck and guile to crit? Meh, worthless. Tack on Skill too if you're also getting glanced or evaded on. I spent an entire week and getting help from multiple people to try and make this work and am just left feeling dissatisfied in PVE and PVP.

As for classes, whens the last time someone's seen a Curate that isn't just healbotting? (not you druids pat pat). Has anyone seen a Lantern Bearer in years? And I don't think I've even seen any Rogues as of late, and it seems like its because daggers have fallen to the wayside. And I can't even tell you the last time I've seen someone repping an Archer class. And if they are, I wonder what they're running- oh, it's HOWLING HANDSHOT ITS ALWAYS HOWLING HANDSHOT. Has anyone even seen a Ranger ever?? I haven't seen someone using guns in a long while too.

For weapons, there are literally entire groups just not being used, and I'm not talking about the exceptions. Yes, people are using Fellgrant, they're using Ymir, HoTG, Fenri, Howling Handshot, Toyatori. The game primarily seems to just be swords and tomes, but maybe that's just me. I love my stupid gimmick weapons but a viable Yin Yang build is never gonna see the light of day.

So that is mostly my thoughts on the matter. Getting an actual solution is a problem. Dev is one person and constantly going through balance changes, having a incredibly deep understanding of PVP while crafting and working on new lore and updates and x y z part of the game while also living their life, it's just never going to happen. I would really love for them to get a small group of trusted members of the community to help them out here. Those people can work on the balancing side of the game, even work on getting some face lifts and changes to classes and weapons that barely see the light of day, working on the PVP side of things that I don't think Dev even enjoys or likes touching at all- they get to work on the rest of the game for quicker and more filled content updates without worrying and having to crack down on these things (and sometimes missing the mark). The players get more varied and faster balance changes to enjoy PVP more, seems like a win win to me.

I don't think Dev would do such a thing though, even though I sincerely hope they do - I really think it would be for the best. So at the end of the day, what can we really do about it? I just don't know.

[caliaca]

I think there's been something that I've been thinking about a lot when it comes to balance lately. In most games, when things are moved around or nerfed and buffed, it's just that. Numbers. It's just numbers, it's a class or a character that isn't the player's one. Take league of legends for example- while people do get invested in their champion mains, they generally aren't writing stories about them, caring for them for years, putting their time, heart and soul in to them.

When we talk about Sigrogana Legends 2, that isn't the reality here. These aren't just numbers or classes, these are characters that people have fallen in love with, put pieces of themselves into them. Often times, they're something deep and meaningful to the player involved, and I honestly can't say I know a person who hasn't deeply, deeply connected with at least one of these characters. When things are being nerfed in SL2, it isn't just a champion that you can easily hop onto another and still have fun, these are stories that people have written about, immersed themselves in for **years**. It's deeply impactful to the people involved, and if their character fantasy is just no longer viable or possible, it can be really killer and demoralizing for the player involved.

I'll use an example of my own. I have a character named Filia that has gone through a lot in the two and a half or three years she's been around. She's developed amazing friendships and relationships, really made a name for herself where she's from, carved out a path that went far, far beyond how she was originally intended. She's also a dagger user, and currently so utterly miserable to play that I don't even log on her. With how often the game's story and progression involves events that have combat, this *does* make them hard to play, it does make them hard to find motivation for. It's like the character itself has been tainted, not just the build.

I don't believe that we should only buff and never nerf. That's a clear way to get power creep, and for the damage race to continue, and is a flaw in game design period, but I still agree with the topic as a whole. The ~way~ that nerfs are done in this game is, in my opinion, out of touch with the reality of how much we care and love these characters. We have these massive, overarching nerfs that aren't tested, that can completely kill certain builds and not just bring them in line but make them miserable to play. Axe critters this patch got six individual nerfs, some that affected characters that weren't even benefitting from the overpowered issues (see: lantern bearers, tome priests, tome AQ). Hayabusa got MULTIPLE nerfs when just one or two was suggested. Guile was completely murdered. It often feels like the players who are grinding out pvp matches, making pve encounters, that sort of thing are trusted to accurately identify the issue but then any smaller sized nerf they suggest is completely discarded.

This game would be so much better balance wise if only maybe 1 or 2 small nerfs happened at once and then were iterated on, or if we saw things that were crushed be brought back up sooner rather than later. Why did we need to hit six things at once? Why didn't we just hit viper wrap and lower range on wolf howl/remove it's damage numbers? Why didn't we try similar smaller things for Solphere? For Hayabusa? For flanking? Look at ghost ranger going from no cd on flip shot, snake shot, pulling shot to large cds on all three. Why are we balancing like this?

Even those 'cold, unfeeling' games like league of legends know better, they're small, incremental changes to gain more data, it isn't shooting something in both knees. Player dissatisfaction is generally proven to be more severe when the numbers are more severe, and right now I really don't think these changes are hitting right.

I might design more mobs than any other member of the EM team, and possibly run more combat events than any other, I watch and participate in pvp daily and these changes and how they're implemented have been devastating for both those communities.

[Fern]

As for classes, whens the last time someone's seen a Curate that isn't just healbotting? (not you druids pat pat). Has anyone seen a Lantern Bearer in years? And I don't think I've even seen any Rogues as of late, and it seems like its because daggers have fallen to the wayside. And I can't even tell you the last time I've seen someone repping an Archer class. And if they are, I wonder what they're running- oh, it's HOWLING HANDSHOT ITS ALWAYS HOWLING HANDSHOT. Has anyone even seen a Ranger ever?? I haven't seen someone using guns in a long while too.

jesus christ i am being so attacked right now
(also excuse you i use a mutated yukijin not a howling handshot okay thanks)

Rant alert.
---
Anyway, I (and many old players) feel that part of the problem is the transition from old evasion to making most things a true hit check. 60-62 scaled SKI and high hit rate weapons being mandatory in almost every build basically railroads what you can/can't run, because otherwise you're pretty useless against evade (at least in PVP I can't speak for PVE) and sometimes end up having to pray for the 5%'s.

The way old hit vs evade worked was that if you failed a hit check on "specials" (back then called autohits), the dodgie would get damage reduction based on armor type. 30% on unarmored, 15% on light armor, and none on heavy armor.

This meant that if you built no SKI, you'd proc Evasion! damage reduction on dodgies forever, but skill effects still went through and what not. However, it also meant you wouldn't be completely useless if you didn't build SKI.

The problem at the time was that tanks were a lot more power housey than dodgies (this was a time when DEF/RES gave full reduction per scaled point) and tanking was very absurd with very accessible setups. Part of this was supported by being able to skip out on SKI, the old meta tank strat was relying purely on autohits and pumping the heck out of DEF/RES.

I don't remember the exact reasons for the current system becoming the way it is, but I think they were related to how tanks could skip out on SKI like that and dodgies constantly complaining that they didn't feel like dodge did anything outside of basic attacking matchups.

Regardless of the reasoning, the current system gives you a big stat tax that you need on NEARLY EVERY BUILD, and that by itself heavily limits what you can run. This is part of why you don't often see the more gimmicky or "thematic" weapons such as SAN scaling weapons (barring Handkerchief) outside of people just trying to be cool/have fun.

With old system you could unironically run things like Spirit Sword and STILL be very efficient, now the stat spread is pretty iffy because you need some kind of defensive stat to live and a race that justifies the SAN investment at all, on top of having to get hit rate to be at least 240%. I bet you someone could probably unironically run a Morimayer tome with the old evasion system because you wouldn't have to think too hard about hit rate.

This is what a generic Spirit Sword Ghost/BK Phenex build with mars badge and some random heavy armor and torso and thieving enchant would look like in current day. Is it unusable? No, but it's definitely much worse than several things. Keep in mind people generally want minimum 230-240 hit before buffs as well.


This is what it would've looked like BEFORE the new evasion system. (We didn't have Thieving giving +5 Guile so that's why you see Fireheart, and people usually ran Avalon instead. Stamps as well.)


QUICK NOTE: We also had Prayer tools in G6 that gave stats dependent on prayer so that did also help fill out some 'gaps', as well as stat stamps. We don't have that in Korvara.

TL;DR I'm not saying old evasion system was objectively better, it had its own problems, but in the days of "60 scaled SKI isn't a mandatory stat tax" that really helped with not getting railroaded into specific builds just to be decently effective.

(I've literally seen Iggy lose his mind over not being able to run thematics without being bottom tier for 4 hours straight.)

[Poruku]

Time and time again I've helped people make builds for the game, and it feels bad to see many new players struggle so much. I mean back in the day you could make a middling build and be mediocre. Nowadays if you make a mediocre build, you're completely useless in most lategame scenarios.

GR2 aside, the nerfs and buffs definitely seem quite random. They kind of come in a few different flavors

- Something people are complaining about gets nuked into obsolesence (Hayabusa combo)
- Something nobody's complaining about gets nerfed, and gets used even less (deadly arms, divine eyes)
- Something extremely weak gets a buff, but it's not enough (Like that guiding light change, or giving potentials to old, weak weapons, anything special strikes...)

And the targeting of these changes seems very arbitrary, in the sense that some old, weak things are kind of left behind for years and forgotten about.

I think Dev would make a much more engaging game if he focused a bit more on making the current classes and items (and races) feel strong and balanced, before going on to add new content. I like the new content, and I love the new classes, but I feel he underestimates how good it is for the game to make frequent, healthy changes to balance.

However, one issue I feel is that Dev doesn't have much data to really make those educated decisions. All he can do is happen to run into a certain build while playing, or reading the balance forums. Yet it seems the balance fu forum is also often ignored. For instance, we've been talking about ruler being weak for what, has it been over a year? It seems everyone agrees it's weak, and there's been countless suggestions for buffs. But other things are changed instead. And overall we only sometimes see a change that was talked about in balance fu. This begs the question of, how are these decisions made? Rangers and druids getting the nerfs was something talked about extensively, but other things were omitted, and requests for buffs (removing mutation -5 hit for instance) go unanswered for very long periods of time even if seemingly the whole playerbase is in agreement. And indeed, sometimes the most frustrating part is a nerf being too much, yet never being reverted.

Overall, it's leaving us in the dark, wondering what's going to be the next change. Maybe special strikes are gonna get +5% chance, maybe sear is gonna get nerfed, who knows? To someone like me who cycles through characters and builds often, it's not a huge deal. But to those who hold specific characters and their builds dearly, it's a somewhat disheartening and stressful situation.

I think Fern's got the right idea. The source of all these issues is GR2. If the game didn't require such a narrow, optimized setup for a build to be good, then mid-tier builds wouldn't feel terrible. And then the balancing wouldn't be as big of a deal; you'd be able to do fine with your katana+pistol build. If the noob (lvl 60) could bring the optimized evadie down to 60% health before dying, instead of doing 0 damage, it wouldn't feel so oppressive.

[Nekojinn]

I 100% agree with the idea that it was a lot of nerfs at once, and that making nerfs come out slower to see their effects would probably be good!

I do think that flanking was a bit OP, but that was just on builds that could abuse it (See: Druid with it's summons or anything that could easily get full flanking.), as an example, I have a Firebird/Engineer, who could Jetpack > Summon a Bot and then still have 3m for a basic with +70 hit due to flanking. However, while some builds did use flanking to these absurd degrees, some did not, some in fact relied on flanking to get any good hit at all (See: Daggers.)

The thread that was made about flanking suggested that it'd be made into BONUS HIT, which would've trimmed the top and not really affected the lower side of Hit, I won't say that I absolutely hate the new flanking changes, but I do think it affected the lower-end of Hit way too much, when that is already the side of hit that suffers the most. (At least we got 5% min hit, which is nice IMO.)

As someone who has been playing for about 2 years now, I actually didn't know about how evade worked before, ty for explaining! That actually sounds rather fun in my opinion. Current evade is, without a doubt, the strongest form of DR in the game, it can make both magical and physical damage deal 0dmg on top of negating any other effects such as on-hits, which tanks NEED be a BK with steel aura to do. Having said that: Evade did suffer against high-hit (generally I believe having 40+ hit against an evadie is already a big advantage.), but I do believe there is a balance between making it so evade isn't opressive nor is too opressed, rn I think anyone using daggers would say it is very much opressive. (And people who don't know how to stack hit will say so too, I was one of them when I started playing.)

I had never seen old-evade, but honestly, perhaps while still keeping the current 60% DR on glancing, allowing glancing to become the new 'full evade' on top of letting sub-effects (such as on-hits or inflictions) to exist on full evade could be worthwhile to TEST FIRST to see how it would exist in the current meta? Evade not being able to essentially erase all your damage to 0 would be generally healthy to the low-end of hit, I feel. And would allow people to build low hit without feeling completely opressed by evade.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure what system could work better than the other, but I do generally agree that a focus on substantial buffs instead of substantial nerfs would be fun, while being aware of powercreep, of course. We're in a state where the difference between good and bad items or classes is very substantial. Lantern Bearer, while functional, is overshadowed in all that it does by other classes. Druid for example took away Lantern Bearer's last two best uses: Answers to KD and Interference.

Anyway, guile scaling weapons should get +0.5 flanking per scaled guile.  

[Trexmaster]

We should get a free race change fruit whenever a race gets nerfed.

Rest in peace Oracle.

Seriously though, a lot of things get bricked but a whole race getting bricked is the one thing you cannot adjust around. Your whole save/character is bricked at that point if you aren't a race that has access to a transformation. You're now just worse permanently and can only wait for an update that fixes you (which will likely never come).

It's extremely rare if ever that we get items/classes/races buffed to a point of being brought into the meta from obscurity, rather we get entirely new items/classes/races that may or may not get nerfed so hard they're never seen again. This is where we've seen the gradual power creep, in all aspects of what a single variable is capable of doing. Creating whole new status effects to circumvent past immunities/resistances is but one of many ways newly introduced concepts have overtaken the old as they're left to rot or worse, actively nerfed into the dirt.

The Hayabusa set is especially sad since Dev adjusted them again last update (3.00). They give you Shinobi elemental marks now. Yet they're still never going to be seen now that daggers are even further in the dirt as a whole let alone the sad state Hikage/Tsukikage were left in before.

I've already spoken about post GR2 Evade plenty and it hasn't fundamentally changed since aside from getting a 5% minimum hit chance that's only really relevant to getting RNG'd to death in PvE. We only keep getting more things changed to Great Accuracy, further exacerbating the need for builds to have copious amounts of hit to bypass Evade or be relegated to near uselessness. Thus neither party is happy since it ends in an arms race to see who can invalidate the other's investment due to how the 'new' system is designed to be all or nothing.

While nerfs are important for keeping things in line where that line is has become increasingly dubious as the years go by and new additions push the limits. I've tried to come up with a way to more clearly define the objective strength of things but I haven't dedicated much time to refining it since its conception. Without such a way to define the strength of what's subject to balance beyond community reception or the thoughts of the developer alone, it's difficult to say what's deserving of a nerf.

How many answers should a single class/race/item be able to provide? How much damage should they be able to do? How much damage amplification should one thing offer? Mobility? Evade? Hit? Range? There's a vague pattern to be found for some of these things in how they've been designed though we've seen the limits gradually be pushed as new things are introduced.

I think the game would be a lot more fun for everyone if there was more PvE focus. This could be accomplished by having more clear divides between PvP and PvE balance, so entire builds don't need to be canned because of their over performance in PvP. There is a reason many games have clear distinctions between how things work in PvP and PvE. Even if it often isn't 100% balanced, it allows for adjustments to be made exclusively to cater to balance concerns between players rather than gutting the entire setup for use even in events and standard grinding.