So, I've been thinking (a dangerous thing).
I'm going to try to break this posts up a little so they're not just a wall of text.
I think the general consensus on balance in this game is that it is, bluntly, skewed badly towards hitting first, for as hard as you can.
I'm going to ignore the speed issue for now. I'm not sure how the changes I'm going to lay out would affect it precisely, but I suspect it would solve 80% of speed issues (possibly including Poe).
The goal is not to make all characters homogeneous, but to make some characters from all types usable and useful in a team composition.
3 main points:
1.Health
2.Damage
3.Armor and Resistance
Health:
Currently, the gap between tank-ish characters, and glass cannons is between 50-80% at max level and gear (Think 10k Health on Leia, Rey, etc. vs 18k Health on Ben or Barriss) in the most extreme cases. In many cases, there is NO difference, or as low as 10% (Think GS vs Han). This limits effective health (A combination of health and damage reduction for those unfamiliar with the term).
In comparison, high damage attackers damage potential ranges from 400% (A 15k critical vs a 3k critical) at maximum to around 100% (6k vs 3k)
Health also limits effective healing for Healers, because all healing is based off either the life of the healed, or the healer. What is the point of healing for 40% of 10,000 health when 1 turn from 1 character deals 6,000 damage?
The first fix should be to increase health gained per point of Strength by 25% from 18 to 24.
This would provide STR based characters with the highest benefit, obviously, but it would raise overall health on every character, taking most out of the OHK range.
It would also make Healing more effective, yielding much larger numbers from standard healers,
and would also rebuff Barriss to usable levels. Healers could potentially become part of the metric in Arena again.
The result at current levels would raise STR based characters health by between 3150 and 3570 (3360 for 8 stat gain characters)
Most other characters gain between 5.3 and 5.9 STR/lvl, and would receive between 2226 and 2478 Health.
More important is the fix for Armor in Tank marked characters below. The Health increase is to move the marker slightly away from OHKs in combination with slightly lowered damage.
Damage:
A lot of discussion centers around lowering damage at a flat rate across the board, In combination with the health increase, damage should be lowered, but should also be targeted. Again, the goal is not to become homogeneous, but to slightly tone down overall damage and also slightly close the gap between damage done and health per character.
First, the Physical and Special Damage modifiers on The Primary stat and INT should be lowered from 1.4d/point to 1.2d/p (Possibly leaving Special from INT at 1.4/p, to account for the cooldowns on abilities that use SD). This is a reduction of about 15% across the board in base physical damage, but only from stats.
Most high damage attackers also have large amounts of Physical Damage from gear. The most efficient way to further tone them down without completely gimping non-Attacker damage is to remove 10-15%% damage from abilities from leveling abilities through Ability Materials.
This will further lower the chances of unbuffed, 1st turn OHKs, while still allowing for large hits from buffed, augmented abilities by Attackers. They should remain far more dangerous than the other classes, but require some set-up to hit for staggering amounts.
Again, homogeneous characters are not desirable.
Armor/Resistance:
Are currently near-useless stats, and require the greatest amount of focus.
I'm gonna make a separate post for it.
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Simply put are currently useless, because there isn't enough of it.
But Armor and Resistance ought to separate Tanks from every other class, to varying degrees. Support characters might have a reasonable amount, but Attackers and Healers probably both belong right about where they are now, where they gain some but it makes little impact on their Effective Health.
The simplest way I can see to change this without requiring a gigantic overhaul of the way damage is calculated is to add an additional modifier on Armor and Resistance gained from Gear. To wit:
Armor per STR is currently 0.15
Armor per AGI is currently 0.07
Armor from gear adds a flat armor amount.
Damage done is calculated by taking the amount of damage from an ability and the armor of the attacked character, reducing the armor by the attackers Armor Reduction, and then subtracting the armor value from the damage done to calculate total damage done.
So Attacker Character A(40 Armor Pen, 3500 damage) hits Tank Character B (120 armor from stats, 180 from gear, 300 total) for 3260 damage, total reduction of about 7%.
As another example, Attacker Character A(40 Armor Pen, 3500 damage) hits Healer Character B (120 armor from stats, 20 from gear, 140 total) for 3400 damage, total reduction of about 3%.
Which is laughable. It both negates the purpose of Armor/Resistance in Gear as an effective stat, Defense Up as a buff, Armor Penetration as a buff, and the term "Tank" in general
I propose that Armor and Resistance from Gear add an additional increase of 1% per point to the total Armor of a character after adding Armor from Stats and Gear together.
Taking the above example again:
Attacker Character A(40 Armor Pen, 3500 damage) hits Tank Character B (120 armor from stats, 180 from gear, 180% increase from Gear, 840 total) for 2700 damage, total reduction of about 23%.
Attacker Character A(40 Armor Pen, 3500 damage) hits Healer Character B (120 armor from stats, 20 from gear, 20% increase from Gear Armor, 168 total) for 3372 damage, total reduction of about 4%.
Big difference, huh?
In addition, the order of reduction for critical strikes should be
Damage>+ArP>-Armor>XCrit Multiplier
Currently, it looks to be calculated as
Damage>XCritMulti>+ArP>-Armor
But it's difficult to tell, with such low Armor values, and such high variance on base damage and critical strikes.
It won't fix everything...but It's a good first step.
If anything is to be adjusted, I think it should be speed. If the high damage characters were as slow as most tanks, then you would have several character turns to prep for the big hitters. To me, this sounds more strategic than making everyone have more hp/ less dmg. Characters like R Piolet have never been complained about, because he can't drop a character before they've had a chance to move. My 2 cents anyway
If you look at what I'm suggesting, and the actual amount of damage done by high- damage attackers, triple heal teams will still struggle against high damage teams.
Rey, as an extreme example, will still land criticals over 10k with O Up, and high damage assists with O Up will land over 10k.
Health pools will be around 13k - 20k, reducing 1st round OHK chance, and Multi-AoE Round 1 teamwipes
Normal Healers will heal for about 5-6k, making Healing Immunity a valuable debuff, but not necessary if you're bringing enough pain to land a kill with focus, or have ability block to prevent the heal.
Tanks will take far less damage from Attackers, making Armor Penetration buffs valuable and Taunts more effective.
Obviously, everything requires rebalancing from character to character occasionally. Poe and Han especially would benefit from Armor changes by having Armor in their gear (both gain about +40 Armor from Gear right now. Shows how useful of a stat it is.)
But overall, I think this metric would allow for actual team diversity, especially if you will be able to view team comp in the upcoming patch.
See a team with 3 Healers? Bring Block or Heal Immune, but then you know at the most you have 2 high damage attackers, so plan accordingly.
See a team of 4 Tanks? Bring characters with Defense Pen buff.
3 Attackers? Bring a Tank and a healer to cover your attackers, or Support to stun.
Sounds way more fun to me than Star Wars: Arena of Cannons.
That's the whole high damage meta in a nutshell.
I don't get mad when Rey dies in 1-2 hits, but I do get mad when Poe, Han, or anyone marked "tank" does.
But I dont think it will happen. They will go the same route as the film: blow up one planet is not enough? Let's destroy a whole solar system. I bet the new toon will one shot at least three characters
I once played a MUD and when I started, like most people, I went to the chat channel and asked "what is a good class to play?" The response I got was "doesn't matter, they all have pros and cons, play what you like". And I was like "no, really, which are the more and less powerful types?" And every single person said the same thing: play whatever you think is fun, they are all about the same power. Not the same playstyles, not the same abilities, but roughly the same power.
That's the sign of a balanced game.
Someone with 15 7* characters should have a very tough decision to make whenever they put a squad together. They should be able to tinker and try new combinations and synergies. And these should include defensive options.
Sadly, right now what we have is "Galaxy of Poe+DPS". Even more sadly, people who have come from CG's other game say it is the same there, so this apparently is what they want: 71 characters, of which 1/6 are used a lot, 1/6 are used a little, 1/3 are used rarely and 1/3 are never seen.
Have said so múltiple times. When I invest in a glass cannon, I expect him to be made of glass. When I invest in a tank, I expect him NOT be made of glass. Han can be oneshot in the proper setup. That's bad for a tank.
Good points, all.
The hard part is in those games agi heroes are better late game , while int heroes do more damage from spells early game. In this game, there is no late/early and no mana cost so it's hard to find that balance as everyone progresses from lvl 1-70. I kinda feel like only int heroes should have aoe abilities and heals and little phys damage. Agi should have single target bursts while str has disables, taunts, buffs, etc. Too many heroes have a complete kit. The team of 5 should complete the kit instead of piling on damage with no repercussions. I'm sure this is much easier said than done though.
Seems like a good idea. People like diversity.
Having to thibk about what comp to use can benifit the game.
Take myself as an exemple; I've been refusing to farm Poe (don't like him from the movie, tho I hate Finn even more lol) but slowly can't compete in top 10 anymore, so I bit a bullet and I'm working on Poe now to have a better shot at winning battles. When a game has soooooooo many chars (seriously, a lot of different chars) you should not be "forced" to farm one single char to compete.
One thought on the armor part. Trying to calculate the percentage increase based on gear will be confusing to the players (i.e. it will be difficult to track what percentage of the total armor value is derived from gear). Hence, why not make it simpler by (armor - armor penetration)/10 and apply that as a percentage reduction to damage?
Taking your example:
Character A: Armor pen 40, Damage 3500
Character B: Armor 300
Damage reduction= (300 - 40)/10 = 26%
Damage = 3500 * (1 - 0.26) = 2590
Character C: Armor 140
Damage reduction = (140 - 40)/10 = 10%
Damage = 3500 * (1 - 0.10) = 3150
Critical or any offense buff should be applied after the initial damage calculation.
So if Character A hits Character C with critical and offense up, then
Final damage = 3150 * 150% * 125% = 5906
This deserves more attention.
Possibly, I'm just not sure that's how it would play our. People will gravitate towards the most viable strategy no matter which way you pitch it, unless the game is so close to perfectly balanced that there is no best strategy. With nearly an infinite number of team compositions to choose from, I don't think the balancing will ever be that good. That's just how these games usually go.
Imo, there are quite a number of teams compositions that still work. Which is pretty good.
I know many were thinking of this coming update as the "do or die" for them and when they read the release notes, they weren't pleased.
Let's hope that interesting content comes quickly and often from here forward because in the end of the day, EA/CG will do as it chooses regardless of what we say and I've given up speaking about it mostly since I feel it's wasted energy. It's clear they have their ideas for how the game should be, we'll know in the end if they were the right decisions....
The key is to make sure they know about it (that may mean some occasional whining, but if it works it works). They've seemed to have learned a good lesson from the past and although they are far from perfect, they're making good steps.
With regard to the OP, that system seems like it would be a good fix, notwithstanding a full overhaul, which will inevitably be filled with mixed reviews and will most certainly be time costly. Hopefully the devs will look at his thread and be inspired. And add more Tuskens (I'm probably the only one that wants more Tuskens).
Another good way of doing things, but % scaling is going to favor non-tanks more that way. Both ways would be a significant improvement over the current scaling.
I bought the dark side starter pack and the Barriss pack so I was able to level competitively and place highly in my shards arena (currently lvl 51 and I place around rank 4 to 9 at payout time). It's pretty telling to see that every team in arena runs all damage or all damage and a Poe. There's basically no variance at all. Even Poe isn't really a tank, he's a 1 turn shield and a meter debuff. He's a support in this system. I run Phasma, Sid, QGJ, GS and Lumi, which is 4 attackers and a support as well, and I can't really change or experiment if I want to keep my rank (Phasma, because I don't have or want Poe). The characters other players run may change superficially, maybe droids, maybe some chromium only characters, but its always 4 attackers and 1 support or just another attacker.
As I got a bit more involved in the game I started looking at the numbers to see how things worked. You already detailed it out so it doesn't bear repeating, but armor is the next best thing to useless, which in turn makes armor pen and advantage equally useless. That's a truly befuddling design decision. I don't know if your armor solution is the absolute best, but its certainly better than whats in place and much easier to implement than an entire overhaul of how damage/armor works.
The health and damage changes seem like no brainers and good increments to start with for a change. Should make a much wider variety of characters and squad archetypes playable, great post!