Class Revamp #2

[iHazBryn]

Do you guys think a slight overall buff to health is in order? Or lower the damage on melee attacks overall?

 

[Delfofthebla]

Do you guys think a slight overall buff to health is in order? Or lower the damage on melee attacks overall?

I think large health increases across the board are in order. I also think that this needs to be accompanied by a larger mana pool for most classes, and increased mana regen for others.

 

[iHazBryn]

I think large health increases across the board are in order. I also think that this needs to be accompanied by a larger mana pool for most classes, and increased mana regen for others.

What about stam? I personally have always though that stam regen was a bit low, do you think that with these changes a slight stam regen buff, or stam costs buff would be needed?

 

[Delfofthebla]

What about stam? I personally have always though that stam regen was a bit low, do you think that with these changes a slight stam regen buff, or stam costs buff would be needed?

I currently don't think that it should be altered.

 

[Haunted9899]

What about stam? I personally have always though that stam regen was a bit low, do you think that with these changes a slight stam regen buff, or stam costs buff would be needed?

Unfortunately I think buffing stamina would have an opposite effect than what we are looking for atm. If we are looking to slow combat down, increasing the regen of stamina would certainly speed combat up for those classes that rely heavily on it.

 

[iHazBryn]

Unfortunately I think buffing stamina would have an opposite effect than what we are looking for atm. If we are looking to slow combat down, increasing the regen of stamina would certainly speed combat up for those classes that rely heavily on it.

If stamina costs were lower we would of course then also need to be balanced that out with lower damages. But...

Think of it this way. In a 5 second long fight (current PVP) a 2 second stun is ridiculous, so the high stam costs are in order. But if we began the process of slowing down fights and fights lengthen out to 15-25 seconds, a 2 second stun is not as game breaking, and having to use half your stamina to stun for only a very small portion of the fight becomes extremely unrealistic.

Lowering stamina costs gives much more variation, and in my opinion, makes PVP a lot more interesting. With these high stam costs, skill usage becomes pretty cookie cutter and sparse. It gets to the point where you can basically call out when someone will use the next skill.

TL;DR I think lowered stamina costs will make combat more interesting, and balance out slower combat with more chances to use skills effectively.

 

[victim130]

If stamina costs were lower we would of course then also need to be balanced that out with lower damages. But...

Think of it this way. In a 5 second long fight (current PVP) a 2 second stun is ridiculous, so the high stam costs are in order. But if we began the process of slowing down fights and fights lengthen out to 15-25 seconds, a 2 second stun is not as game breaking, and having to use half your stamina to stun for only a very small portion of the fight becomes extremely unrealistic.

Lowering stamina costs gives much more variation, and in my opinion, makes PVP a lot more interesting. With these high stam costs, skill usage becomes pretty cookie cutter and sparse. It gets to the point where you can basically call out when someone will use the next skill.

TL;DR I think lowered stamina costs will make combat more interesting, and balance out slower combat with more chances to use skills effectively.

I actually really like the reasoning behind this. Not too sure how well it would work out, but in writing it sounds great.

 

[Haunted9899]

If stamina costs were lower we would of course then also need to be balanced that out with lower damages. But...

Think of it this way. In a 5 second long fight (current PVP) a 2 second stun is ridiculous, so the high stam costs are in order. But if we began the process of slowing down fights and fights lengthen out to 15-25 seconds, a 2 second stun is not as game breaking, and having to use half your stamina to stun for only a very small portion of the fight becomes extremely unrealistic.

Lowering stamina costs gives much more variation, and in my opinion, makes PVP a lot more interesting. With these high stam costs, skill usage becomes pretty cookie cutter and sparse. It gets to the point where you can basically call out when someone will use the next skill.

TL;DR I think lowered stamina costs will make combat more interesting, and balance out slower combat with more chances to use skills effectively.

Well now you are saying two different things. I was replying to the post you made about adjusting stamina regen, and you replied to it talking about stamina costs. If we are aiming for longer combat I believe Delfofthebla has already touched on this, but we are looking at: More health, lower damaging abilities, and of course lower costs for abilities. Whether or not stamina regen will need to be tweaked remains to be seen, but as it is right now, it inherently slows down battle by running you low on stamina. I don't know how much Kainzo and Delfofthebla are planning on increasing combat (time wise) but if we are talking a few seconds, then stamina may be fine as is.

 

[leftovers5]

I currently don't think that it should be altered.

Agreed. Just in the sense that stamina are flat values and skills derive set amounts from them. Their regeneration should be constant because of that. That factor really sets apart stamina from mana as resources.

 

[Kainzo]

The amount of stamina regen isnt looked at being changed, it is already quite fast.

 

[Delfofthebla]

Balance Team

I'll be implementing the discussed changes over the next couple of days. After the warmups/ranges have been changed, I will make a very drastic number change on every classes health / mana pools.

I will need the help of the balance team to extensively test these changes throughout the week. If possible, I will be trying to get some other towns online to do some larger scale fights (5-10 people) to test the changes. The test server isn't exactly made to hold this many people fighting, but hopefully we will still be able to get a general idea of how things will play out on live.

Currently, it is capable for the following fight times to occur.
1v1 have the potential to last around 5-10 seconds.
That increases to about 6-12 seconds in 2v2's and 3v3's.
5v5's to 10v10's tend to last a maximum of 30 seconds unless the teams are heavily spread out.

This is insanely fast, and because of Herocraft's mechanics, teamfights are veeerry one-sided. There is little room for error, and there is little room for recovery. I am (hoping) that increasing combat time will give more wiggle room for players, but it isn't guaranteed to actually accomplish this. At the very least, it should make "getting ganked" less painful for the attacked player / team.

The largest reasons for these time frames occuring, is that all classes have very high left click damage and high damaging abilities. The hit invuln timer reset mechanic combined with these large damages is causing classes to deal way more burst damage than originally intended. While we could address this directly, the easiest way to solve the problem is to increase health numbers.

I am hoping to increase combat time by around 50 to 100%. A full "clusterfuck teamfight" should have the potential to last up to 45 seconds, and preferably a minute. A more "spread out" fight should definitely last a couple minutes. 1v1's however, should be increased to at least 15-20 seconds, but I'm not too sure we can scale this by such a large amount without affecting teamfights much more than intended.

In the end, it'll all be pushed through testing. We're gonna need everyone on this, tossing ideas back and forth and tweaking numbers as we go along. We only have until Friday to get something that is "somewhat" balanced, so let's not go slacking on this one, eh?

 

[victim130]

When I get on tomorrow, I "Shouldn't" be doing anything all day. If anything is pushed, I'll be up for testing when ever I got free time.

 

[Delfofthebla]

Balance Team

So, last night I pushed through the health changes for us to experiment with. The change was simple--a 25% increase to each of the class's health pools. Everything was good to go for testing.

The balance team members that were around at the time hopped on, and we started experimenting. Not all members of the team were able to participate, (mostly because I was busy today and didn't make a post about it sooner) but we got a lot of other players from other towns on to help test things out, and had a few clusterfuck murderfests. The plan here was to test the waters and see what we needed to change over the next 2 days to get things running smoothly.

That was the plan anyways. However, the effects of the health increase were much more drastic than originally intended. The result was complete destruction of all class Balance. It was, to put it simply, total madness. Fights were indeed longer, but Herocraft as we knew it ceased to exist. Class counters, teamfight roles, class weaknesses, it was all thrown out the window.

On one hand, the longer fights were a little more enjoyable, but on the other, everything had become totally distorted and imbalanced. Some melee classes were having issues performing against other classes it could previously beat, casters had varying levels of mana and health issues, healers weren't quite working right, and it was just, in general, a mess. It was a mere 25% health increase, but somehow it had changed everything--and not in a good way.

While we agreed it would be possible to re-balance everything from scratch with the new numbers, we also agreed that it just wasn't feasible to do so in such a short time frame. We all concluded that it would take far more than the 2 days we have remaining to properly re-balance the classes with these health values in place.

Because of this, I have reverted the health changes to their previous numbers. For now, I suggest that we instead focus on balancing the classes based on their current health values. Our goal is still to lower combat time, but we should do so through other means.

Last night's testing also revealed something to me. While many of the Herocraft fights are really short, it's due to a few select abilities / attack damages that this is the case. By simply scaling down the effectiveness of these more powerful aspects, we can still achieve our goal. Kainzo originally wished for health increases over nerfs, but I believe that that is a much longer road that isn't quite worth the effort right now. Naturally, warmup increases / range increases are going to factor into this, but we will need to do a bit more than just that.

Here are the current changes that have been applied to the test server. I will EDIT this post as changes are made. If you wish to see a change made, post it in this thread with the reasoning and we'll see if it's worth pushing to test. (Keep in mind that the below changes are not finalized, and must still pass through Kainzo before being pushed to the live server.)

Casters/Healers:
Scan will no longer target the caster.
 
Rogue:
Fixed Envenom proccing on itself. It now only procs on sword attacks.
Improved Envenom tooltip to be more accurate.
 
Runeblade:
 
Fixed tooltip color on Runeword curse usage.
Altered tooltip for all runes to be more descriptive.
 
Removed weapon dependencies on all abilities so that players can still use item-binds if they desire.
Altered internal cooldown to be unique to each target rather than unique to the Runeblade Player himself.
 
Re-added Scan ability.
 
Duskblade damage reduced to 100 (from 120).
Duskblade health multiplier changed to 0.9 from 0.75. (Overall healing value remains the same.)
 
IceRune no longer interrupts skills when applied.
IceRune no longer deals damage.
IceRune cooldown reduced to 8 seconds (from 10).
 
Runeword range has been increased to 10 blocks (from 8).
Runeword now has a 1 second warmup.
 
The mana costs and regeneration values for Runeblade have been overhauled to be closer to the other classes
Reduced maximum mana pool size by 0.1 per level.
Reduced mana regeneration to 9 (from 14).
 
Lower mana cost of ToxicRune to 15 (from 20).
Lower mana cost of FireRune to 20 (from 25).
Lower mana cost of IceRune to 15 (from 30).
Lower mana cost of VoidRune to 25 (from 30).
 
Pyromancer:
Increase maximum mana pool by 0.1 per level.
Increase mana regeneration to 10 (from 7).
 
You can no longer spam Inferno until you hit a target. (It will put the ability on cooldown if you miss your target.)
 
Necromancer:
Increase mana gain on Dark Ritual to 30 (from 15).
 
You can no longer spam Despair until you hit a target. (It will put the ability on cooldown if you miss your target.)
 
Add a 0.5 second warmup to Poison.
Add a 1 second warmup to Plague.
Add a 1 second warmup to Blight.
 
Corrected warmup on Harmshield to be 0.5 seconds.
 
Removed the warmup from Web.
Removed the warmup from DarkRitual.
 
Beguiler:
PlagueBomb cooldown increased to 13 seconds (from 10).
You can no longer spam MassPiggify until you hit a target. (It will put the ability on cooldown if you miss your target.)
 
Samurai:
Increase stamina cost of AsuraSlash to 8 (from 4).
Decrease stamina cost of MortalWound to 6 (from 8).
 
Dragoon:
LunarLance now works on monsters.
 
Increase cooldown on LunarLance to 12 seconds (from 8).
Increase mana cost on LunarLance to 20 (from 5).
Increase stamina cost on LunarLance to 6 (from 5).
 
Dreadknight:
Fixed exploit with Shadowstep.
 
Increase range of Shadowstep to 7 blocks (from 5).
Increase range of Harrow to 4 blocks (from 3.25).
 
Paladin:
Increase cooldown on ShieldReflect to 12 seconds.
Increase stamina cost on ShieldReflect to 5 (from 3).
 
You can no longer spam Reckoning until you hit a target. (It will put the ability on cooldown if you miss your target.)
 
Disciple:
 
Rework QuiveringPalm.
New ability does physical damage and adds a debuff to the target. Debuff lasts 6 seconds, and increases melee damage by 25%.
 
Reduce range of Chakra to 5 blocks (from 10).

Changes that are planned but not yet pushed to test:

Wizards:
Longer warmups, farther ranges.
 
Pyromancer:
Increase warmup on Inferno maybe?
 
Runeblade:
Increase FireRune cooldown maybe?
 
Disciple:
Rework QuiveringPalm.
New ability does physical damage and adds a debuff to the target. Debuff lasts 6 seconds, and increases melee damage by 25%.
 
Wizard:
Fix Root.

-----
There's a lot more work that could be done with healers, and when I get around to do, I'll be going over Eldrylars's healer post to hopefully address some of the issues. However, I do want to state that a large overhaul of the healer role is not a goal for this next update, so a large amount of changes to healers is unlikely.

 

[Licksterboy]

Sorry for my recent inactivity, these changes and ideas are looking really great, I'll be able to help test whenever this coming week. I'll try to get back on to make a post with my ideas about healer included, if you need something really urgent, message me via forum.

 

[leftovers5]

Sorry for my recent inactivity, these changes and ideas are looking really great, I'll be able to help test whenever this coming week. I'll try to get back on to make a post with my ideas about healer included, if you need something really urgent, message me via forum.

Same goes for me. I actually can barely play minecraft with the current ~5 fps I get on it. My laptop fan broke and I've been forced to place bags of ice under it so things aren't entirely frozen. Hard to PvP with that.

 

[Warmachinexp]

I played a bit with the health increased and 1v1's lasted loads longer, but seemed like more sword damage ended up winning because stamina running out. It was alot longer combat just didn't feel like Herocraft like Delf said.

 

[Kainzo]

Wizards:
Longer warmups, farther ranges.
 
Pyromancer:
Increase warmup on Inferno maybe?
 
Runeblade:
Increase FireRune cooldown maybe?
 
Disciple:
Rework QuiveringPalm.
New ability does physical damage and adds a debuff to the target. Debuff lasts 6 seconds, and increases melee damage by 25%.
 
Wizard:
Fix Root.

Need exacts here Delfofthebla

 

[yoIyo]

The mana costs and regeneration values for Runeblade have been overhauled to be closer to the other classes
Reduced maximum mana pool size by 0.1 per level.
Reduced mana regeneration to 10 (from 14).

Lower mana cost of ToxicRune to 15 (from).
Lower mana cost of FireRune to 20 (from).
Lower mana cost of IceRune to 10 (from).
Lower mana cost of VoidRune to 25 (from).




What were the costs of the skills before?

 

[Delfofthebla]

Wizards:
Longer warmups, farther ranges.
 
Pyromancer:
Increase warmup on Inferno maybe?
 
Runeblade:
Increase FireRune cooldown maybe?
 
Disciple:
Rework QuiveringPalm.
New ability does physical damage and adds a debuff to the target. Debuff lasts 6 seconds, and increases melee damage by 25%.
 
Wizard:
Fix Root.

Need exacts here Delfofthebla

These are just snippits of ideas for now. I'll have real numbers in today.

The mana costs and regeneration values for Runeblade have been overhauled to be closer to the other classes
Reduced maximum mana pool size by 0.1 per level.
Reduced mana regeneration to 10 (from 14).

Lower mana cost of ToxicRune to 15 (from).
Lower mana cost of FireRune to 20 (from).
Lower mana cost of IceRune to 10 (from).
Lower mana cost of VoidRune to 25 (from).




What were the costs of the skills before?

Whoops. I'll edit those in. (Still playing with these btw)

 

[yoIyo]

Delfofthebla with the Mana pool being increased, Do you really need to change the manacost of skills? And I say keep duskblade with the old Healing amount of .75 and see how it plays out.