To have this addressed so we can leave it behind us,Kenji wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 1:30 pmThe point remains:fulminea wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 4:17 pmI've lost a handful of characters very dear to me to nerfs. The character you are referring to I do not consider "lost", but I do understand that from your personal point of view that seems to refer to this character. That particular character was salvagable, I'm just not playing it due to her entire "community" rolling or disappearing after the nerfs to orog specific gear/classes and race probably added up to a signifant loss of powah. But the char itself is okay.
Those characters are lost as a personal choice in the end unless you can answer a later question with a “No”. (See the bullet points below)
I don’t mean to sound callous, but this is also a large overreaction to the Orog community’s part that points out the need to address this even more.
The majority (not all) of the Orog builds lost 2 AC, 1 uni save, and 1 dmg but gained 30hp from the adjustment - very much justified. Two specific types of build lost something slightly more:
- 24 Str/Cha CoT Orog smiter builds: had to become 22/24 split, so it lost 1 more AB and dmg
- Cha caster such as FS or Sorc: lost 1 DC if it doesn’t have between 12 to 14 str at start. They get grandfathered otherwise
But at no point does any of the changes invalidate any build to the point where the character will require a rebuild.
So why did an entire community of Orog decided to stop playing after losing 2 AC? Are mechanical numbers that central and integral to the roleplay? (This is a rhetorical question)
Let’s now go back to your lost characters: have you truly exhausted every rebuild option or spoke to anyone to look for an alternative build? Or did the build had to be built a certain way to cater to the RP at hand?
If the answer is the latter, then we’re about to delve into a whole rabbit hole of how Roleplay and Mechanics exist on a different axis that may or may not be independent of each other. But before that -
The few times I can think of how certain concepts are truly changed due to adjustments are take this one particular case for example:
Death Knight RP: with PM 10 crit immune changed to 15, a barb 16 bard 4 PM 10 build (with terrifying rage and mighty rage and EDR) can not be rebuilt into anything remotely similar.
Now, I felt the loss for that one concept and was actively looking for ways to adjust Palemasters further to enable such a cool concept again. And this is after communicating with certain players and receiving feedback from them.
If all of the “characters lost” to adjustments can be explained with the following:Only if one can answer point 4 with a resounding “No” can they truly say the character being lost is not their choice.
- Character Concept
- Initial Spread
- Adjustment that makes that spread no longer viable
- Any recourse from other spreads to justify the concept
I’d otherwise be inclined to believe that the players who “lost their characters due to adjustments” didn’t exhaust their option of looking for more options to build their character. There are so many resources out there, all one needed to do was to simply ask.
Yes, the characters are 'lost' as a personal choice.
Yes, most of the builds were not invalidated by the changes and mostly lost what you said above (plus a round less of Divine Might / Shield duration if they didn't swap 2 STR for 2 CHA which is what is assumed).
What it comes down to, to me is this:
What made Orog mechanically attractive as a race was,
- +1 AC over most other races.
- Being able to start off with +4 STR and +2 CHA, something no other race could do.
- Having truly exclusive, powerful Orog weapons no other race could use (they were not bypassable by UMD).
After the adjustments,
- The AC was removed.
- They can either start off with +4 STR +2 CON or +2 STR +2 CON +2 CHA, as far as Divine Builds go. If you go human you essentially trade 30 HP for 34 skillpoints. I would argue an extra maxed skill is worth the 30HP hit when you consider building on one race or the other.
- Their weapons were nerfed and the racial restriction was made bypassable by UMD.
I have already gone into great detail about Orogs and their weapons in another post under the 'Winter Balance Adjustment' thread so I will not do this again here. I commented on the +2 CON Orogs got since then above. The other change was a further -2 WIS dropping them down to -4, which just made Orog the worst race to build a WIS based class on.
The pre-nerf Orog has been what players have known and built around for many years. This is also the first time a forced stat redistribution like this has ever been done on any race, as far as I know. If we assume most Orogs were Div/Str builds, this was essentially a retroactive nerf in one of the main build attributes of the majority of the race.
Why was this necessary? I can only assume the main reason being Orog in its Divine Build variants had +1 AB, AC and Damage over Humans. The argument of Orogs having access to powerful racial weapons is invalid in any build that has access to UMD, and I don't consider adjusting racial stats based around the weapons a race can craft but everyone with UMD can use logical to begin with. Was this so game breaking that required this drastic change? Apparently, it was.
Imagine if all elves suddenly lost 2 DEX and replaced with +30HP. One could say all this change did was give them -1 AB and AC and, in most cases, doesn't invalidate their builds anyway. Despite this I would still expect many would quit, roll, or shelve their characters and move on, simply because the new forced racial characteristics are not what they had in mind when they decided to make their build around that race.
In the above case I would also expect a huge Forum / Discord backlash, considering the number of players who play them, something that is not true for Orogs since their playerbase is much smaller. A good example of this is when Humans were briefly moved up to ECL +1, a change that was reverted immediately likely due to the forum outrage it caused, despite not affecting existing characters.
So no, I don't consider this reaction to be for any RP aspects of a specific build either. It is all about the mechanical aspects of the race and its gear that was suddenly changed after players have built around it for years.
I don't consider most of these 'balance' changes to be implemented for the sake of RP in the first place, except in some rare cases like with Dragonshapers.
As was mentioned, the team wanted to expand Orog into DEX and Weapon Master Builds too, but in doing this they no longer make superior Divine Builds compared to Human or make the best Weapon Masters either (greater detail about this in my previous post too).
For the reasons above, Orog doesn't feel that special anymore, at least not to my eyes. It is not invalidated as a race, but it is not what it used to be either. If the Orog community has truly decided to stop playing as a whole, as is mentioned above, I imagine most just moved on to play something else. With this easy levelling they can make any character with any build in a few weeks anyway, as long as it doesn't require 3 stat gear to function.
Perhaps the next generation of Orog will know and love it for what it is now.