Phase One (Guard Captain + Guards) Balance Discussion (long read with proposals)

Amth

Greetings,

So I have noticed that people are less inclined to do P1, simply because it is tougher to pull big numbers for the majority of the players simply due to class comp. I will outline a few of the issues that make this tough:

• The inherent issue, is that the reward system is calculated off damage delt to boss mobs, and different phases are much more advantageous than others.
• Damage to the guards isn't calculated into your final damage. Therefore a player with lower dps could spend almost the entire time attacking guards and never get hits on the Captain. The result of this is that players shy away from actually doing P1.
• Class comp plays a huge part here. If you cannot remove taunts, and cannot dispel deathmark effectively, you end up again, your DPS uptime on the Captain is very low.

A few notes:

• The Tier 6 Captain in P1 has 6 million health
• The Tier 6 Rancor, I believe, 6 million health in some phases and I believe 10 million in others. Please correct me if I am wrong

Now we'll get into a few numbers. Lets say the "average" player doing P1, does maybe 100k (this is a rough estimate for the sake of this example) in their first run through. If they die and leave the guards in a poor position, then their subsequent teams will most likely falter. But the key number here, is that the average player probably does 100k in a run through before being defeated or escaping. Obviously, my numbers are probably off, but at least for the sake of this explanation, let's make this assumption.

In P2 above 50%, I would say the average player, assuming they can drop the gate, would burst 200k on the rancor. Again, this is the average player. Obviously there are ways to really crank out massive damage in both phases, but when considering a change to an encounter, you want to benefit the majority of the playerbase while at the same time not breaking the game for the top 1%. Making the P1 more attractive to participate in while not "breaking" the phase overall, is ideal.

So the major point so far is this:

• An average player will do 100k in P1 while that exact same team will do 200k in P2. This is not exact, but I think for the majority of the players that have experienced at least T6, they will find this to be the case

I stress the word average, as this doesn't include folks with almost full 7* rosters. So what I would propose are the following possible scenarios:

Proposed Change A: Damage Transfer

• Damage Transfer - Any single target damage delt to the guards is transfered to the Captain. This damage may or may not include "assists" from special attacks. If it is to be included or not depends on the final numbers. If it is gamebreaking, then assists wouldn't be included. If it balances fine, then they would be included.

Proposed Change B: Percent based damage (called Demoralization) done to the Captain on Killing Blow

• Demoralization - Anytime a Guard is defeated, the Guard Captain loses X% of his health. For the time being, let's call this .25% (one quarter percent, which is equal to 15,000 damage in T6 raids). This also causes the Guard Captain to gain X, which stacks. For the time being, X will be the following
• Guard Captain's Damage increased by 25% which stacks. This lasts until the end of the encounter.
• Obviously the affix "Damage increase by X which stacks" could be anything that says to the player: Ok kill the guard, but I'm eventually going to be overwhelmed because by killing the guard, I do get credit for some damage, but it does make the Captain that much more dangerous. This prevents long farm sessions of guards, because eventually the Captain will one shot because his stacks are so high
• Additionally for balance purposes, the base cooldown of Rally the Guards could be increased backend by 1 turn. So instead of 5 turns, its now 6. But each time you defeat a guard, not only does it trigger Demoralization, it ALSO lowers the cooldown of Rally the Guards by 1 turn.

Proposed Change C: Susceptibility

• Upon defeating the a Guard, the Captain is debuffed for Z turns with susceptibility (which will increase his damage taken. Additionally depending on balance purposes, the Captain may or may not be buffed in some way. Think of it as berserk. He does X more damage, takes Y more damage for Z turns. This could be he takes 50% more damage, deals 50% more damage for 1 turn.

So to better balance P1 and make it more attractive, I have the following aforementioned scenarios. When reading these, please understand that these proposed changes are more principles than hard numbers. 50% could easily be 25% based off tuning. So while I do have numbers listed, again, understand these are design principles and not hard numbers.

Last bullet point:

Buff the Captain's Health after making one of the above changes

• Now the last part of this proposal is a possible health buff for the Captain. This change only needs to be instituted if one of the above is enacted to keep balance. Because of the proposed damage transfers/shared health pools and other mechanics previously proposed, the overall health of the Captain has to be balanced to keep the P1 encounter as challenging as it currently is. Here's rough math. If it currently takes 50 players to get through 6 million health (it doesn't, but this is for the sake of this example, it should still take those same 50 players to get through his adjusted health pool. So maybe his health goes to 10 million.

What this means: So if previously everyone was getting 120k for doing P1 (6 million divided by 50 players), they are getting 200k for doing P1 now (10 million divided by 50).

Thanks for reading.

HershBathens

I like the concepts. Thanks for putting this out.

Akiraine

well I beg to differ. p1 is insanely easy to put up high dps numbers if you know what you are doing/understand the mechanics of the fight