DRK - Excessive "Conditional" Effects

[EuronTribal]

This is the basis of almost all skillgap balance, though. Unless you wish to remove the lowest skill-cap jobs from any serious content, complexity can only award control of one's throughput dynamics, not throughput overall.

And even that is enough to potentially bar certain areas of fight design, such as burst phases that time particularly well with x high-control job, or certain spreads and timings of AoE | Cleave | ST requirements, lest one or a few jobs become "required" in kind.

Crater said it better than me , but I’m not saying remove the lowest skill cap class from the game. I’m saying the punishment drks have for say, a badly timed tbn or, not dealing with ld properly are too punishing for what they offer in return. Increase the reward or if they’re too scared to throw balance off lower the punishment.

[Shurrikhan]

Crater said it better than me , but I’m not saying remove the lowest skill cap class from the game. I’m saying the punishment drks have for say, a badly timed tbn or, not dealing with ld properly are too punishing for what they offer in return. Increase the reward or if they’re too scared to throw balance off lower the punishment.

And all I'm saying is that, once achieving an external balance acceptable to SE (relative to its alternative jobs), any tuning of the rewards for complexity, when trying to establish internal balance, ought not to affect DRK's overall viability.

Now, we're not externally balanced yet, so that leaves us more flexibility with which to set internal balance right, but never will our simply being harder to play make us stronger overall.

Thus, we may be able to see faint, faint increases to reward to "complex" play, but I figure our best bet lies with reducing the punishment, reducing the significance of idiosyncrasies where they did not previously contribute to choice.

For instance:

• Delirium now requires that either BW or BP is active before being usable, OR, when neither BW nor BP are active, it causes Delirium to instead embonus the next use of either (beginning its cooldown upon applying the bonus).
• TBN now restores half its % consumption as Blood. It can therefore reward any proportionate amount to a maximum of Blood.
• Living Dead now requires only 75% of the target's maximum HP to be restored and shows a graphical indicator both of the remaining %HP on its HP bar that must be restored before Walking Dead expires (and Doom completes) and of the time remaining to remove Walking Dead, as a 3D graphic above the Dark Knight's head. The Doom effect is now separate from the Walking Dead effect; the death immunity granted by Walking Dead is no longer cancelled when the Doom component is removed.

[Crater]

And all I'm saying is that, once achieving an external balance acceptable to SE (relative to its alternative jobs), any tuning of the rewards for complexity, when trying to establish internal balance, ought not to affect DRK's overall viability.

They definitely ought to. Doing twice the work for the same results is never a viable way to design a fun game, while designing a straightforward baseline-viable 'easy' option and a more effective 'hard' option is proven to work.

And SE's attempts to "reduce punishment" for playing hard classes poorly, along with their attempts to "close the gaps" between skill floors and skill ceilings, have been almost universally disastrous for every class they've tried it on, and have almost always required additional changes just to walk back the damage they've caused (typically by widening the skill gap again).


They've broken their own design "rules" in worse and more egregious ways than this before, so there's really no reason to expect this to be the one line they refuse to cross.

[Shurrikhan]

They definitely ought to. Doing twice the work for the same results is never a viable way to design a fun game, while designing a straightforward baseline-viable 'easy' option and a more effective 'hard' option is proven to work.

When has it ever been proven to work? I've seen plenty of examples of the opposite, be it in WoW, Rift, League, Overwatch, or so forth, but I have yet to see it "work". The closest examples I can think of are player-customization choices within a given class that amounted to very, very little throughput variance, not usually of linear correlation to their increased skill requirements (similar to price vs. quality curves).

Why would any skilled player play a class that requires less skill if they will be noticeably penalized in overall and by-event throughput for that reduced requirement? You would end up with non-choices at each end. And while that might work for a moba with a vast set of class options, that would continue to be met with uproar if classes were effectively pruned from serious content. And when a game is entirely slated towards raiding what is the point of having an easier leveling or dungeon experience on a job that will be significantly disadvantaged thereafter? By that point, you've essentially decided, knowingly or unknowingly, that you will never be good enough for a class with stronger theoretical output to be useful to you. You have chosen to be of lower tier.

The largest aim in class design shouldn't be to have the high skill setups have higher rewards and the lower skills setups lower potential, and so forth: it should be to create enjoyable, balanced classes. If that means offering traditionally "easier" classes more means of control around which to be balanced, then so be it. The only absolute "rule" should be to never confuse convolution with complexity. Players should be rewarded for their understanding and skillful execution of class mechanics with the ability to adapt and control those tools, not merely for maintaining mind-numbing rotations despite artificial difficulty. If it does not provide choice, it does not provide complexity.

:: Also, SE's own stated purposes for design shifts are so tremendously self-contradicting that they really cannot stand as precedent for any of particular design philosophy. There is not a single goal they alleged that has not been made worse in some way, and more importantly, there has never been any thorough attempt on their part to explain and reconcile their decisions. Their alleged goals may as well be considered spattered words divorced from any of the actual content of their changes, promises that got lost early into production.