Defense Up Needs to be Revamped
With the announcement that fortitude will be added and Advantage changed to guaranteed crits in the near future, I've been thinking.
The problem is that instead of revamping defense in this game to work properly so that the damage/health ratio doesn't balloon with level increase as it does now, they plan to instead make it worst with a guaranteed crit hit mechanic.
Instead of creating extra complication via an additional game mechanic, I believe we should instead get Defense Up revamped along with the Advantage revamp.
Instead of adding 50% additional armour rating and doing diddly squat for damage reduction, we should instead change defense up to a straight up 50% damage reduction for affected characters. This would better counterbalance Offense up. With this new proposed defense up skill, all incoming damage will first be reduced by 50%, then the remaining damage will be reduced by the % given by the base armour.
Hence, the damage will be computed as follows:
Damage dealt with defense up = Raw Damage x 0.5 from defense up x % reduction from armour
By making defense up as useful as it should be, I believe we will get a much better balance of offense and defense, creating a much better gaming experience for all without resorting to more complexity. With defense up given the effectiveness it deserves, suddenly more characters would rendered viable. For instance, Chewbacca's chance for auto defense up leadership ability would finally become as useful as it should be. Plo Koon's defense up and turn meter gain skill will become as powerful as it's supposed to be.
The problem is that instead of revamping defense in this game to work properly so that the damage/health ratio doesn't balloon with level increase as it does now, they plan to instead make it worst with a guaranteed crit hit mechanic.
Instead of creating extra complication via an additional game mechanic, I believe we should instead get Defense Up revamped along with the Advantage revamp.
Instead of adding 50% additional armour rating and doing diddly squat for damage reduction, we should instead change defense up to a straight up 50% damage reduction for affected characters. This would better counterbalance Offense up. With this new proposed defense up skill, all incoming damage will first be reduced by 50%, then the remaining damage will be reduced by the % given by the base armour.
Hence, the damage will be computed as follows:
Damage dealt with defense up = Raw Damage x 0.5 from defense up x % reduction from armour
By making defense up as useful as it should be, I believe we will get a much better balance of offense and defense, creating a much better gaming experience for all without resorting to more complexity. With defense up given the effectiveness it deserves, suddenly more characters would rendered viable. For instance, Chewbacca's chance for auto defense up leadership ability would finally become as useful as it should be. Plo Koon's defense up and turn meter gain skill will become as powerful as it's supposed to be.
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You can market a Combat Upgrade with New Game Enhacements.
What could possibly go wrong?
Brilliant!!!!
Then again EA oce made an entire expansion for star wars galaxy 3 weeks before removing half the classes, changing the entire system, then giving all expansions away for free.
There were no refunds.
What could possibly go wrong?
They should just change Armor to Armor Rating, and have it deflect a percentage of damage.
Defense up has always been in this game since release, but apparently no one bothers to use it because of its sheer ineffectiveness. In contrast, offense up easily demolishes defense up. I find it difficult to believe that anyone who is fair and rational would deem this to be an acceptable state of affairs.
Changing defense up is just one thing, another more important issue is how armour works now. As it is, your damage reduction actually goes DOWN with level increase if armour stayed equal. Yes, armour does go up along with the strength and agility increases as level goes up, but apparently it doesn't catch up with the ballooning damage.
Imagine if Magic: the Gathering Online suddenly shut down the servers, same thing here with a Star Wars CCG.
Other lessons I learned there:
Development is Dark side biased, because darksiders sell better.
They will readily lie to the player base.
They release incomplete products so you can play to beta test them.
Employees exploit the games with impunity for their own personal profit.
They change things regardless of canon.
They do not understand the difference between "quicker/easier" and "more powerful".
They prioritize style over substance.
They are happy to ignore about 90% of bugs.
They encourage exploitation with weak policies and penalties.
Damage Reduction % = (Armour) / (Armour + Level x 10) x 100
For instance, let's use CT5555 as an example:
lvl 1, gearless 3 star: Damage Reduction % = (4) / (4 + 1 x 10) x 100 = 28.57%
lvl 70 maxed out: Damage Reduction % = (292) / (292 + 70 x 10) x100 = 29.44%
As one can obviously observe from this, a maxed out character, even for one of the toughest tanks in this game, has pitiful armour, with damage reduction % not significantly better than his freshly unlocked self.
All this in an environment where damage balloons with increasing level.
Let's compare defense up vs. no defense up for a given damage, say, 4000:
No Defense Up Damage = 4000 x (1 - ((292) / (292 + 70 x 10))) = 2882
Defense Up Damage = 4000 x (1 - ((292 x 1.5) / (292 x 1.5 + 70 x 10))) = 2460
Doesn't take a math whiz to see how this is a sick joke.
Now let's do the same comparison, but with offense up giving us 4000 x 1.5 = 6000 damage:
No Defense Up Damage = 6000 x (1 - ((292) / (292 + 70 x 10))) = 29= 4234
Defense Up Damage = 6000 x (1 - ((292 x 1.5) / (292 x 1.5 + 70 x 10))) = 3690
If anyone can look at these numbers and say: "Yep, the current defense up buff works just fine"...
Ps. Thanks for the write up op.
Other than changing Defense up into a straight up damage reduction %, I would also suggest the use of a sigmoidal damage reduction % vs. armour stat curve, tuned with suitable assymptotes and curvature to ensure we don't get silly situations such as 100% damage reduction %.
Of course, if anyone can come up with a better amrour stat vs. damage reduction % curve that better matches the damage increase with level curve, I would be more than happy to listen to your suggestions.
With properly working armour and Defense up, we can easily solve so many gameplay issues and make so many characters instantly as viable as they are supposed to be without any major character nerfs and buffs. Wouldn't this beat coming up with a completely new game mechanic and re-engineering all characters to run with it? More unnecessary complexity only makes it exponentially more difficult to balance the game to ensure fun and rewarding gameplay.
Whoever came up with the idea of adding an extra layer of game mechanic complexity via Fortitude has obviously never hear of Occum's Razor: "The smplest solution that works well enough is the optimum solution (practical version)."
I just kind of assumed that meant some defense/armor tweak as well as the other changes we are getting. I could be wrong though.
There's the kicker. If they are actually fixing up Defense in this game by fixing how armour and Defense up buffs work, then why the need for an additional mechanic called fortitude? Wouldn't that make game balancing much more complex, since the tree of possibilities grows exponentially with each additional branch?
Again, Occum's Razor gets ignored.
Only problem is, it doesn't. One shotting for maxed out squads at level 30 with any squad composition is practically unheard of. At level 60, one-shotting has become common. Now at level 70, one-shotting has become the norm.
When building on top of something artificial, Occum's Razor doesn't necessarily point to the most practical approach. I agree that perhaps a defense rework and some slight tuning on speed vs. damage, might have been enough. However, the devs might have been doing a lot of play testing and haven't been quite satisfied yet, or they have other grand plans in the future where they figured fortitude would be a good idea.
This.
I like your idea, OP, and you've got the Maths to back it up! Unfortunately, the changes we can count on will involve whatever brings in the most cash, which may or may not be what is best for balanced gameplay.
I'm I slow or something?
Defense up is NOT OD. OD is offensive, it cripples the enemy. Defense up is defensive, it is guaranteed to work on your squad barring buff block by fortifying your own defense instead of forcefully crippling others.
Healers aren't that hard to tweak, there aren't many of them. Better than reworking everyone.
Healers are few, much less work than reworking everyone.
On the contrary, Occum's Razor applies particularly well to software. Adding unnecessary complexity is just begging for trouble.
Play testing? I'm sure play testing would have picked up on the fact that speed wasn't working as designed, but instead we got a defective tierred speed system not so long ago. All because some code monkey neglected to add 2 extra zeroes to the total speed units per round variable. With code so sloppily written, is it any surprise that silly problems such Dooku's 50% counter chance reduced to 5% counter chance at lvl 7 basic attack occur?
Remember the good ole days of star wars galaxy of Poe thanks to this severe speed bug? Then, they overnerfed him, removing his health when that wasn't really needed?
Newsflash, we, the players, are the only real beta testers they've got for all practical purposes.
This is a solid point, if they fix armor/ dmg reduction in the first place, they wouldn't need fortitude. So why on Earth would you do both at the same time?!?!
Just trying to illustrate a point about stats here. I know exactly what you mean, but just so you know, in your first 2 sentences, you would really want a 33.33% decrease to damage done in your argument.
Using his 4000 from above.
Offense up = 6000 hit, a 1.5:1 ratio from initial value.
So a 33% reduction in damage from that 6k would make it 4k again. (1/3 of 6k is 2k obv)
Without offense up, the damage with a 33% decrease becomes 2667, maintaining the 1.5:1 ratio to the original 4k.
Also, why are they saying they need to fix advantage when it seems obvious that offense up is the overpowered one?!
Occam* Sorry, tried to ignore it.
They have that, it's called offense down.
Turns out this concept derived from WIlliam of Ockham. Thanks.
You can reduce damage to yourself by raising shields or sabotaging your enemy's weapons, though the damage reduction might be similar, it's not the same thing.