Fall 2021 Balance Adjustment Megathread

[Definately Not A Mimic]

It has been said in the past that there are reasons not to announce what is coming. People jumping in to make something before it is gone in hopes of keeping it the stronger version after the change was one I believe. I'm certain another was because the Devs are not on a strict time table. If they say they are going to work on X project and it never comes to be or takes months and months.. you could have played a concept by then without it being touched and get upset because you thought a change was coming that didn't.

I'm starting to ramble. In other words, there are reasons for why people do things the way they do them. No one way is going to make everyone happy. Personally I would love also advanced warning that something would be changed in the next month or two but keeping an open understanding that they can't do that is important I feel.

[MathAenya]

Might be an idea to leave a comment as to why certain changes are being made, rather than simply announcing them.

I echo this sentiment. While nerfs decisions are motivated by a philosophy and data that we players do not have access to, it would be nice to have more transparency.
Simple explanation such as "we want to encourage people to play more gnomes and hins for their lore instead of playing svirfs solely for the mechanical bonuses" or "this combination of classes is dominating PvP and we want to give other classes more chance to impact Arelith storylines".

[Party in the forest at midnight]

Things aren't announced because any time the team has tried this, people react poorly.

There was a pre-announcement that an item was going to be nerfed, the old template arrows. What did people do? They went and hoarded up existing items before it was nerfed, since old ones would be grandfathered. If items are ever announced that they're going to be changed, people will go and hoard. It's counter-productive.

Otherwise, if a nerf is going to be unpopular but is going to happen regardless, announcing it ahead of time leads to 7 page threads of absolute rage, unconstructive criticism and unnecessary sarcasm (you can see that in this thread even), and spam from people who don't understand the game mechanics but want to reply to every post in the thread.

I understand why things are the way they are- It's easier to fix things if they're broken than deal with having to deal with forum PR on top of actually trying to make changes.

[RedGiant]

Was really hoping the fall balance round update was a joke when I first read it. Then I realized, we are no where near April.

Really disappointed in the continued class tweaks...especially monk, whose changes have somehow achieved a weird, post-meme status. Hate the movement speed changes. Agnostic on the racial stuff.

There is some good humor here at least, so thanks Tarkus and Dr. B.

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

Explaining the philosophy behind the changes is very different then specifically laying out x y and z change. I am asking for the first, and I think everyone else is too.

"We want to create an environment where the hardest hitters can hit the highest ac about 20% of the time, so anything 17 and up" would be a quick an easy example of a piece of a design philosophy.

[mash]

I could find not one post on the last two pages asking for pre-announcement of balance changes. That's a strawman. It was asked to learn more, if possible, of the context of changes and the team's general plan concerning balancing and connected topics like relevels.

[Skibbles]

I relate to Watchful Glare's post a lot - especially with the idea we're headed to MOBA style 'seasons' of ever-shifting metas. There's so much cool stuff here, and I certainly don't really want it to stop, but at the same I don't even understand what is happening anymore.

Sometimes, albeit rarely, the PGCC has a higher population than some actual main Arelith servers.

It just makes me wonder if I'm playing the same game or if half of Arelith's changes are because people 'main' PGCC and character spreadsheets, putting actual game time to the side, and then adjustments are carried out according to perpetual theorycrafting instead of reality.

Yes I'm aware that theory can swiftly carry to reality, like high-visibility issues like quarterstaff, but still I hope the distinction is made.

[Its_a_jelly]

A few years ago, there was a major nerf to my main character's classes, and I walked away from Arelith in frustration.

About 6 months ago, a group of friends convinced me to come back and give it another try. Clearly, it was a mistake to come back because nothing has changed. We still have huge sweeping changes to character classes that ruin the flavor and the FUN of the game. The constant threat that another change is coming down the pike (even changes that make no sense), makes me wary about continuing to play here.

I get that there should be some balance because certain players enjoy PvP and PKing folks (I don't). However, sweeping changes, clearly, do not work and they alienate players who are just here to have RP fun and don't care about PvP. Changes need to be incremental and precise. Otherwise, you're just frustrating players and playing whack-a-mole by adding and subtracting buffs and nerfs...endlessly.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

At least commoner will never get a nerf. There's always certainty in that.

[garrbear758]

campaign to nerf cot began on the 3.0 and spilled over to the main discord.

I don’t have the time or the mental fortitude to address the rest of the comments right now, but I definitely feel like I need to address this because it couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t care about any campaign on a discord, official or unofficial. The decision to nerf cot came from me before anyone else was talking about it in any channel. Cot is something I saw as op shortly after loremageddon before I was on the dev team.

Any balance decision goes through me and irongron, and there isn’t any silly “campaign” that rules our decisions.

Builds don’t get nerfed because a dev lost to them in pvp, nor do we only care about pvp. Pve balance is just as important.

Since it seems to be a popular request right now I’ll write up a long essay for yall explaining every decision and why we did it, but I can’t promise it immediately because I have rl obligations today.

[garrbear758]

Okay. Here's the quick version.

Ab stacking, especially since loremageddon, and partially due to our decisions earlier this year to counter absurdly high ac builds (specifically divine dex) and the weakness of str build in general, went way too far. I can take the blame for this as I pushed a lot of the str build buffs earlier this year. We reached a point where div dex was no longer top dog, which was the goal, but we took it way too far and should have focused more on div dex rather than buffing everything else around them.

1. All of the ab nerfs were to revert the changes from earlier this year and get numbers back to a reasonable area. Ab should be in the low 50s at best, and we were seeing many builds pushing high 50s and even 60s. This makes both pvp and pve a joke, and causes many other builds to be effectively obsolete, such as str divine and mundane dex.

2. The barb changes were to allow more races to access barb. Due to the nerfs we just did, barb and hexblade are going to be the top builds as they were untouched. We pushed our changes for those to part 2 as we haven't decided on what to do yet, although barb will likely just lose their 4 dodge ac.

3. The IB/Rogue/Swash changes were for consistency between classes and to allow more variety.

4. Whip was nerfed because of the variable whip and +5 whips being too strong. We chose to keep those weapons as is rather than change the weapons as they are still a very solid choice for builds that don't care about crits, such as heavy rogues.

5. With the nerfing of high ab builds, divine dex builds very very clearly were going to come out of this as effectively untouchable, and for the sake of preserving pve, we chose to nerf them rather than buff everything around them again.

6. Twohand weapons went down to 1ab because we reached a point where their damage was enough to render sword n board noncompetitive against them. This was a pvp decision.

7. Minotaur was nerfed because it was absurdly overpowered. Award races shouldn't ever give a mechanical advantage.

8. Svirf was nerfed for the same reasons.

9. Drow is also very strong right now, and there have been a ton of issues of drow just blatantly running around in daylight and ignoring their racial penalties. We may need to make further adjustments to drow in the future (specifically making them choose between the 32 SR and major gift), but we are going to let them be for the time being.

10. Bless / war cry / battletide were done for the ab reasons explained in 1.

The overall goal is for ab to range from the 40s to low 50s at best, and AC to peak in the low 60s before expertise. I feel like we did a good job of reaching those ranges with these changes. I understand this stuff isn't fun for everyone, but it was a very necessary change for the overall health of the server, in pvp and pve.

As far as pvp balance being a concern. We are a server that has non-consensual pvp. That is a very important part of the server and a big contributor to our high quality of rp / storytelling. Actions should have consequences, and bad things happen to good adventurers. That part of the server is not ever going to change, and it shouldn't. With that said, anyone who played during the summer of op monks can understand why pvp balance is important. When a class/build is an outlier, they can drive the rp narrative and effectively play protagonist to their own story and no one can do anything about it. That's not what arelith is about, and on a server where death has weight in rp, and no one is a protagonist, having a somewhat level playing field is extremely important. There is never going to be perfect balance, but leaving outliers in would be doing a disservice to all of our players, as inconvenient as these changes are.

We made the decision to try to do all of the balance updates in one big update rather than a constant stream, but if the constant is preferred, we can go back to that. We haven't really done much in balance updates since the beginning of summer, and these were all updates we've been working on since then.

[garrbear758]

In part 2 of the balance update, here are some things you can expect, very much subject to change.

1. Removing the 4 dodge ac from barbarian.

2. Changing pale master's crit immunity from 100% at level 10 to 5% crit immunity per pm level.

3. Something to tone down hexblades debuff burst. Solo they are mostly fine and probably just need to come down a number or two. In groups they make it very easy to just burst down a player or boss. The most likely potential changes here will be lowering their scaling to cap at 5 instead of 6, and/or changing the hex to be a "life-steal" type effect, where instead of say -4 ac to a target with hex at lvl 20, it would be -2 to the target and +2 to the hexblade.

Again, these are very subject to change so take them with a gigantic grain of salt.

[Waldo52]

As I stated earlier I still think some of the nerfing was necessary. I'd really like someone who disagrees with me to chime in on why they thought it was fair for a rogue 25/divine something 5 to be walking around with 70+ AC and epic dodge on top of excellent debuffing, stunning and offensive capabilities.

Maybe I'm missing something but it doesn't look like divine rogues were ruined, their main defensive gimmick was just teduced from a ridiculous upgrade to a more modest side-grade. Why are people acting like the sky is falling over this one?

Maybe I'm missing something and I'm open to that possibility but it really doesn't look that bad.

[Watchful Glare]

A lot of stuff

Thank you Garr, I appreciate the effort you put into writing all that, that kind of transparency helps a lot for those not in mechanics-savvy in catching up and understanding the reasons behind the changes and the overall direction.

[MathAenya]

Thank you Garr for all the insights and explanations. As one of the people who posted here asking for more communication, and you came here and did it.
Thanks for taking the time to write it out, it makes a lot of sense.

The overall goal is for ab to range from the 40s to low 50s at best, and AC to peak in the low 60s before expertise

Is the first rule of Character building on Arelith? Would it be fair to say that, if a class combo allow for more than 60 AC or 50ish ab, then players should expect nerfs? Or are you ok with 'outliers' existing under some conditions?

Thanks again for replying to us!

[Dr. B]

I don't have any strong issues with the changes, but was it really necessary to force everyone to relevel and put them back in the entry area?

[Irongron]

I'm generally not given to anxiety, and anyone that knows what working with me is like will probably confirm that I take a very relaxed attitude towards Arelith development, and that I believe it is imperative to do so in order to maintain morale on the team.

Yet large mechanical changes can set my heart racing and, I had stated earlier in the year, particularly after the skill update, that we need to cool things down or risk alienating many of our more casual players.

I am well aware that changes like this can cause frustration to long-term players especially given that this is a Dungeons and Dragons game, and while we can, and do, diverge from the ruleset it should nevertheless at least remain recognisable.

As stated above Garrbear and the team held back on a lot of these changes to push them together as a large two-part fall update, to some extent because of my nagging on this very issue?but I do want to add a few things to his post above, and I would ask that anyone reads that before this.

I have often said that one of the key strengths of Arelith is that developers can join with the freedom to really make their imprint, unimpeded (to an extent) by an old guard over protective of changes to their previous work. It is a development philosophy we embrace, and can leave the server feeling fresh even after nearly 20 years. It also helps guard against legacy problems remaining unaddressed for years at the time.

Garrbear has been a stellar case in point; this is someone with a firm grasp of Neverwinter Nights, a positive attitude and a great imagination.

Seeing those new classes go in, so very professionally implemented, and with a team behind him making sure that all the little things such as new icons and crafted gear get covered too has been a tremendous boon to the server, a range of updates achieved with such expertise that one could be forgiven for thinking they were expansions to Neverwinter Nights itself.

But as with loremageddon any great change can throw light on already existing issues, or create new ones, and we are really lucky to have a team that follows up in this way. The ugly truth is thay whether one is dealing with an amateur server such as ourselves, or a professional game, it is common in the industry for major additions to receive next to no follow up development. From the creative standpoint it takes particular kind of character to be completist in this way, as as it is generally much more fun to move onto the next big idea that continue to address issues with the last one.

I for one am hugely grateful for all that they are doing,and and it has left the server feeling like an exciting place to start over again...and again. I understand that many of you would wish that there was more communication in advanced of of such updates but many of the discussions that lie behind them are organic and open-ended, so committing to firm changes ahead of time I'm is not always advisable.

I expect, after these changes, things will quiten down again as they did for much of the last six months, in the meantime; please keep the feedback flowing!

I considered adding a section here, once again, on why balance is just as important to PvE and PvP, and that a greater uniformity of AB and AC can make sever more enjoyable for everyone, but that essay can wait for another time...

[garrbear758]

I don't have any strong issues with the changes, but was it really necessary to force everyone to relevel and put them back in the entry area?

That shouldn’t have happened I apologize for that. I think only Minotaur was intended to have a forced relevel along with very very old characters who didn’t get migrated to the new races yet. And it didn’t happen to me so it’s not everyone but I’ll have to look into what the issue is there.

[garrbear758]

Thank you Garr for all the insights and explanations. As one of the people who posted here asking for more communication, and you came here and did it.
Thanks for taking the time to write it out, it makes a lot of sense.

The overall goal is for ab to range from the 40s to low 50s at best, and AC to peak in the low 60s before expertise

Is the first rule of Character building on Arelith? Would it be fair to say that, if a class combo allow for more than 60 AC or 50ish ab, then players should expect nerfs? Or are you ok with 'outliers' existing under some conditions?

Thanks again for replying to us!

Slight outliers are fine if they have glaring weaknesses to make up for it. If they just have everything a reasonable build has on top of super high ab/AC then yes it’ll probably get looked at and/or nerfed.

Glaring weaknesses being things like low damage, low hp, easy to dispel, massive windup, etc.

[Watchful Glare]

Also a lot of stuff

These sort of replies are very appreciated.

The main issue was the lack of an idea about the general direction or motivation behind the changes. Left without that, to those not really knowledgeable about the mechanics or not involved in balance aspect and without access to the relevant data, the changes can be felt as whimsical and random. Not that there isn't an overall design and desire, you're just not privy to it so those left guessing were... Well, guessing. On either side of the spectrum.

It's easy for those that feel alienated to either cast these changes into a bad light or make up their own assumptions about why changes were made and that negativity gets channeled into it. I think this kind of transparency will go a long way into cutting the flak around it.

Specially with what Garrbear has said, for instance, once you know what the goal is you can expect other classes and other combinations to be adjusted to meet those goals. And that reduces the uncertainty so it's no longer a surprise when it does and you know the why.

Thank you Garr for all the insights and explanations. As one of the people who posted here asking for more communication, and you came here and did it.
Thanks for taking the time to write it out, it makes a lot of sense.

The overall goal is for ab to range from the 40s to low 50s at best, and AC to peak in the low 60s before expertise

Is the first rule of Character building on Arelith? Would it be fair to say that, if a class combo allow for more than 60 AC or 50ish ab, then players should expect nerfs? Or are you ok with 'outliers' existing under some conditions?

Thanks again for replying to us!

Slight outliers are fine if they have glaring weaknesses to make up for it. If they just have everything a reasonable build has on top of super high ab/AC then yes it’ll probably get looked at and/or nerfed.

Glaring weaknesses being things like low damage, low hp, easy to dispel, massive windup, etc.

Thank you for the replies, I was also curious about that.

[Dr. B]

I don't have any strong issues with the changes, but was it really necessary to force everyone to relevel and put them back in the entry area?

That shouldn’t have happened I apologize for that. I think only Minotaur was intended to have a forced relevel along with very very old characters who didn’t get migrated to the new races yet. And it didn’t happen to me so it’s not everyone but I’ll have to look into what the issue is there.

Good to know, thanks!

[Edens_Fall]

Thank you for the clarification! I greatly enjoy the massive update over the trickle myself. Overall I understand and support the changes of Part I and Part II for what that's worth.

[mash]

Just want to say thank you to Garrbear and Irongron for explaining what the update was about. I know it is a lot of work in addition to the actual content, but hearing the thoughts behind those changes helps me understand what is going on.

[garrbear758]

We’ve been trying to explain all of our updates in the patch notes, but this one was so big and had so many people working on it over months that that portion of it got lost. I’ll try to be stricter about doing those kinds of writeups in the patch notes going forward.

[Tarkus the dog]

In part 2 of the balance update, here are some things you can expect, very much subject to change.

1. Removing the 4 dodge ac from barbarian.

2. Changing pale master's crit immunity from 100% at level 10 to 5% crit immunity per pm level.

3. Something to tone down hexblades debuff burst. Solo they are mostly fine and probably just need to come down a number or two. In groups they make it very easy to just burst down a player or boss. The most likely potential changes here will be lowering their scaling to cap at 5 instead of 6, and/or changing the hex to be a "life-steal" type effect, where instead of say -4 ac to a target with hex at lvl 20, it would be -2 to the target and +2 to the hexblade.

Again, these are very subject to change so take them with a gigantic grain of salt.

Taking away 4 ac from the barb does nothing but nerf the 1h version which is much weaker than the 2h. 2h falchion is dominating the melee scene at the moment and does not care at all if it loses 4 ac. I recommend reducing their offensive potential by lowering their damage numbers a bit or removing barb rage from being instant action, perhaps both.