Svartmetall
Great Unclean One
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2004
- Messages
- 2,467
(n.b. the observations in this post were largely inspired by observing the state of RvR last night, but have been brewing for a long time)
The RvR part of this game is WAY more broken than any PvE imbalances and issues that exist (and there are a lot of those), purely because any imbalance one way or the other directly impacts on another player. So here are a few things I reckon might make RvR more fun, more fair, and generally better for all (I'm not going to talk about specific classes here, by and large, but what I perceive as general RvR issues).
1: Ever since TOA, the balance in RvR has been swinging towards caster god mode again. NF centring a large proportion of the action around keeps, where ranged damage and CC are absolute rulers of the battlefield, has thrown this imbalance between ranged damage classes and melees into painfully sharp relief. Give heavy tanks a much, much higher innate resistance to magic damage and chance to resist individual spells. Give light tanks the higher chance to resist, but not the innate resists.
2: On a related note, remove /assist from archers and casters, it's utterly ridiculous around keeps these days. Getting hit by 5-7 arrows from different archers and thusly dying within two seconds of stepping outside a tower to rez someone is broken beyond my capacity to express. Getting nuked for ~2,000 damage in two seconds at most by one caster, at range, is equally farcical. Casters go "oh but you can interrupt us!" whilst failing to take into account the fact that nowadays, you're dead so fast to a caster that you can't even see the bugger who's killing you before you're a pair of smoking boots. Ranged damage being that powerful makes keeptakes pure torture for anyone without ranged damage/abilities; the Scout /assistzerg in particular (because of the Scouts' unbalanced extra range) is insanely overpowering in a keeptake situation. Spell damage should decrease as the cast speed increases, just like melee damage decreases as the hit speed increases.
3: Massively nerf all CC effects in RvR, especially ranged and insta ones. Dying after losing a fight where you at least get some licks in is one thing. Dying after standing there helpless while other people farm you completely sucks. Far, far too much RvR is determined by who gets CC off first - once CC lands, forget it. Fight's over, particularly for low RRs and after NF made the useful versions of Purge extremely expensive. Does a mez actually need to last 70+ seconds in RvR...? Of course not, CC is very overpowered across the board, for everyone, and needs some serious fixing.
4: All RR5 "free" RAs to be normalised across all classes - the Sorc RR5 RA is a classic example of a broken, "I WIN" RA, and it needs to go. Compare the Sorc RR5 RA to, say, the Runemaster one or the Armsman one and it makes it very plain that the playing field needs to be levelled. I would suggest giving all classes across the board a choice from two RR5 RAs, one to improve their offence, one to improve their defence. Homogenising the classes across the realms so the RvR part of the game basically becomes Green Team vs. Blue Team vs. Red Team would suck enormously - you'd just have Quake Team Deathmatch (with Red Team having way more players than anyone else); but adding to the existing class-induced imbalances by having uneven RAs doesn't help anyone.
5: Normalise archery range across all 3 realms. There are already enough class-defining differences between the archer classes; no one class should be given more range than anyone else and slower (i.e. harder-hitting) bows than anyone else as well. It's just too much, particularly (again) in keeptakes, where ranged damage is king. The archery playing field needs to be levelled; kind of crappy to have your equivalent class shooting you at a range at which you simply cannot fire back.
6: The vast, yawning gap between low and high RRs is one of the worst things in RvR these days, so get rid of all the damn "I WIN" active RAs (TWF, ST, whatever - you know, the expensive ones that high RRs can afford and low RRs cannot) so fights get decided by skill - not one group member having the uber-instakill-we-win button. RAs should be limited primarily to passive ones like the aug stats (with better return at lower levels than we get now) and stuff like AoM and the Mastery-type RAs (MOPain, MOBlock, Wild Power etc). Purge would be an OK active RA to keep, but at a cost where it's affordable for all. Being rewarded for the time and effort you've put into lots and lots of RvRing? Yes, of course. Making you effectively unkillable by lower RRs? No.
7: Introduce a Mastery Of Melee RA, since casters get Mastery Of Magery but at present there is no equivalent RA for melees. Which is unfair.
8: Introduce an Aug Resist passive RA - 5 points gets +2% to all resists, another 10 points gets +5% to all resists, and another 15 points gets +10% to all resists. This to be available to all classes.
9: Massively increase the RP rewards for...well...everything. Last night we took a Hib tower, and got 1 RP for it. Insulting. Make it 500 RPs at the very least and then you're talking. And a couple of thousand RPs at the very least for taking a keep; taking a keep now is a hell of a lot harder than it was in OF, and the RP reward should reflect that. Since RvR is meant to be just that - Realm vs. Realm, not individual e-peen strokeage - then encouraging people to actually do things beneficial to the realm would definitely be the way forward.
10: Remove stacking RvR res sickness. It was an extremely stupid idea when it was introduced, and it's still an extremely stupid idea now.
...
The RvR part of this game is WAY more broken than any PvE imbalances and issues that exist (and there are a lot of those), purely because any imbalance one way or the other directly impacts on another player. So here are a few things I reckon might make RvR more fun, more fair, and generally better for all (I'm not going to talk about specific classes here, by and large, but what I perceive as general RvR issues).
1: Ever since TOA, the balance in RvR has been swinging towards caster god mode again. NF centring a large proportion of the action around keeps, where ranged damage and CC are absolute rulers of the battlefield, has thrown this imbalance between ranged damage classes and melees into painfully sharp relief. Give heavy tanks a much, much higher innate resistance to magic damage and chance to resist individual spells. Give light tanks the higher chance to resist, but not the innate resists.
2: On a related note, remove /assist from archers and casters, it's utterly ridiculous around keeps these days. Getting hit by 5-7 arrows from different archers and thusly dying within two seconds of stepping outside a tower to rez someone is broken beyond my capacity to express. Getting nuked for ~2,000 damage in two seconds at most by one caster, at range, is equally farcical. Casters go "oh but you can interrupt us!" whilst failing to take into account the fact that nowadays, you're dead so fast to a caster that you can't even see the bugger who's killing you before you're a pair of smoking boots. Ranged damage being that powerful makes keeptakes pure torture for anyone without ranged damage/abilities; the Scout /assistzerg in particular (because of the Scouts' unbalanced extra range) is insanely overpowering in a keeptake situation. Spell damage should decrease as the cast speed increases, just like melee damage decreases as the hit speed increases.
3: Massively nerf all CC effects in RvR, especially ranged and insta ones. Dying after losing a fight where you at least get some licks in is one thing. Dying after standing there helpless while other people farm you completely sucks. Far, far too much RvR is determined by who gets CC off first - once CC lands, forget it. Fight's over, particularly for low RRs and after NF made the useful versions of Purge extremely expensive. Does a mez actually need to last 70+ seconds in RvR...? Of course not, CC is very overpowered across the board, for everyone, and needs some serious fixing.
4: All RR5 "free" RAs to be normalised across all classes - the Sorc RR5 RA is a classic example of a broken, "I WIN" RA, and it needs to go. Compare the Sorc RR5 RA to, say, the Runemaster one or the Armsman one and it makes it very plain that the playing field needs to be levelled. I would suggest giving all classes across the board a choice from two RR5 RAs, one to improve their offence, one to improve their defence. Homogenising the classes across the realms so the RvR part of the game basically becomes Green Team vs. Blue Team vs. Red Team would suck enormously - you'd just have Quake Team Deathmatch (with Red Team having way more players than anyone else); but adding to the existing class-induced imbalances by having uneven RAs doesn't help anyone.
5: Normalise archery range across all 3 realms. There are already enough class-defining differences between the archer classes; no one class should be given more range than anyone else and slower (i.e. harder-hitting) bows than anyone else as well. It's just too much, particularly (again) in keeptakes, where ranged damage is king. The archery playing field needs to be levelled; kind of crappy to have your equivalent class shooting you at a range at which you simply cannot fire back.
6: The vast, yawning gap between low and high RRs is one of the worst things in RvR these days, so get rid of all the damn "I WIN" active RAs (TWF, ST, whatever - you know, the expensive ones that high RRs can afford and low RRs cannot) so fights get decided by skill - not one group member having the uber-instakill-we-win button. RAs should be limited primarily to passive ones like the aug stats (with better return at lower levels than we get now) and stuff like AoM and the Mastery-type RAs (MOPain, MOBlock, Wild Power etc). Purge would be an OK active RA to keep, but at a cost where it's affordable for all. Being rewarded for the time and effort you've put into lots and lots of RvRing? Yes, of course. Making you effectively unkillable by lower RRs? No.
7: Introduce a Mastery Of Melee RA, since casters get Mastery Of Magery but at present there is no equivalent RA for melees. Which is unfair.
8: Introduce an Aug Resist passive RA - 5 points gets +2% to all resists, another 10 points gets +5% to all resists, and another 15 points gets +10% to all resists. This to be available to all classes.
9: Massively increase the RP rewards for...well...everything. Last night we took a Hib tower, and got 1 RP for it. Insulting. Make it 500 RPs at the very least and then you're talking. And a couple of thousand RPs at the very least for taking a keep; taking a keep now is a hell of a lot harder than it was in OF, and the RP reward should reflect that. Since RvR is meant to be just that - Realm vs. Realm, not individual e-peen strokeage - then encouraging people to actually do things beneficial to the realm would definitely be the way forward.
10: Remove stacking RvR res sickness. It was an extremely stupid idea when it was introduced, and it's still an extremely stupid idea now.
...