If they actually want to create a balanced meta game...

homeinvasion

They should hire a mathematician to come up with a scale, that everything else works off and rework the whole mess. They can always follow the League of Legends model of release an overpowered character and wait till the sales ease off then nerf him about 4 weeks later.

Unknown

homeinvasion wrote:

They should hire a mathematician to come up with a scale, that everything else works off and rework the whole mess. They can always follow the League of Legends model of release an overpowered character and wait till the sales ease off then nerf him about 4 weeks later.

They have a budget model if that's what you're talking about. I remember during the Wolverine/Thor rebalance they mention how according to their scale Feral Claws should've cost 15 AP instead of 3 AP for the damage it does, so they have a model. It just doesn't look like they even pay attention to their own model.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

They have a budget model if that's what you're talking about. I remember during the Wolverine/Thor rebalance they mention how according to their scale Feral Claws should've cost 15 AP instead of 3 AP for the damage it does, so they have a model. It just doesn't look like they even pay attention to their own model.

The problem is that their model likely was only useful for characters like wolverine who only do damage. As the number of characters has ballooned the complexities of their interactions have likely rendered that model only useful as a guideline. The other problem is that it's likely just wrong. if I had to guess it likely does a terrible job balancing drawbacks against overpowered abilities, hence Aries and sentry being way too strong. How does their model account for ap producing abilities? Or ap generating ones, or abilities that are basically useless when the AI is using them? How do you value falcons blue? damage models just aren't a replacement for someone actually designing a set of characters that are fun to play together.

Unknown

TyDobbs wrote:

Phantron wrote:

They have a budget model if that's what you're talking about. I remember during the Wolverine/Thor rebalance they mention how according to their scale Feral Claws should've cost 15 AP instead of 3 AP for the damage it does, so they have a model. It just doesn't look like they even pay attention to their own model.

The problem is that their model likely was only useful for characters like wolverine who only do damage. As the number of characters has ballooned the complexities of their interactions have likely rendered that model only useful as a guideline. The other problem is that it's likely just wrong. if I had to guess it likely does a terrible job balancing drawbacks against overpowered abilities, hence Aries and sentry being way too strong. How does their model account for ap producing abilities? Or ap generating ones, or abilities that are basically useless when the AI is using them? How do you value falcons blue? damage models just aren't a replacement for someone actually designing a set of characters that are fun to play together.

The complexity of this game is pretty darn trivial, though that didn't stop players or devs from using that as an excuse.

Ignoring stuff that are very intangible like single target stuns or Falcon's Redwing, the hardest ability to figure out would be strike tiles. If you assume you only get 10 hits out of each strike tile because you're too stupid to think of anything else clever to go with them and you don't even know how to setup good chains (10 turns X 2 X ~3 tiles a turn = 60 tiles destroyed, roughly enough to clear the board), then something like Judgment does 3660 damage for 8 green plus it's a decently strong cascade and randomly useful tile destruction. From this you can figure that Punisher does about 450 damage per green AP. Compare this to Thor, which is (2259X4)/14 = 645 damage per green. Except that there is obviously a higher modifier for the fact that Call the Storm is a 5 match ability versus Judgment which is a 3 match ability, or that this literally assumes you're too stupid to even combo Judgment into a Molotov which would get you considerably better than 10 hits on average per strike tile. Of course that result should not surprise you. Everyone knows Judgment is very good. 450 damage per green is a very low ball estimate of what Judgment does. And using the same math we get that Daken gets (68X2X10)/3 = 453 damage per green AP, although in reality it's more like double because you get those strike tile even if the other side matched them, and you don't even have to spend the AP. Again this result should hardly surprise anyone who used Daken because we all know Phermone Rage is awesome. Yes damage later (strike tile) is not quite as good as damage now (direct damage) but when you average about 900 damage per green AP, you'll easily make up the non-immediate nature of strike tiles.

And once you figure all that stuff out you can easily figure out what things like AP steal does. If you stole only 4 green AP with Aggressive Recon and they have Thor and so do you, then you get 645*8 = 5160 damage for the 8 AP turnaround, which is higher than what Magnetic Translocation is expected to do in most cases, and that's just on one color. Of course if you work out all the math you get some ridiculous number for Dormammu and Aggressive Recon which is why players never want to talk about it, and I think since it does require a decent modeling of the likely game state that's why devs never talk about it either and just say something vague like "We found Aggressive Recon to be balanced in play testing (when testing against Sentry+Daken)". By the way, if you apply the same math for stuff like Bewilder or Reprieve you'll find that they still suck, so it's not like this methodology overestimates certain abilities.

Math can't tell you everything but there really aren't that many intangible things in this game that math cannot tell. Calculate the damage World Rupture does with Daken or Hood, and you're always going to get a rather insane number.

Unknown

That is a pretty good model however even it only works in simple cases like you describe where both players have a maxed out Thor and your opponent actually has 4 green to steal. In the wild sometimes your opponent doesn't have four of each color or isn't using that char etc. you would have to average it out vs every other possible opponent team's green damage potential and every team you could have's damage potential and even then the model would not be truly accurate because as we all know, the odds of facing every enemy combo are far from even. Also each ap stolen does not have the same value, stealing the 12th and 13th green ap doesnt mean anything if your Thor is downed before you hit the last one.

That being said, ap stealing effects are definitely overpowered and under costed right now. I actually wish they had more ap destruction abilities like she hulk's instead of the steals.

Pylgrim

I think the most worrying thing is that they seem to believe these "nerfs" and "buffs" are secondary stuff that should be done in the holes left between "exciting new features" such as Team-Ups. What they don't understand is that they are game-fixing necessities that will make the game more solid and will, then, provide a good foundation to whatever new exciting feature they come up in the feature. The way they are doing it, only serves to further betray the holes in the cores as they put additional weight on the structure. (see for example, they having to specifically remove Sentry from defensive T-Us, which wouldn't have been necessary if they had balanced him already.)

Unknown

Pylgrim wrote:

I think the most worrying thing is that they seem to believe these "nerfs" and "buffs" are secondary stuff that should be done in the holes left between "exciting new features" such as Team-Ups. What they don't understand is that they are game-fixing necessities that will make the game more solid and will, then, provide a good foundation to whatever new exciting feature they come up in the feature. The way they are doing it, only serves to further betray the holes in the cores as they put additional weight on the structure. (see for example, they having to specifically remove Sentry from defensive T-Us, which wouldn't have been necessary if they had balanced him already.)

The way they approach balance in this game reminds me of WoW where they randomly increase a skill by 5% and then decrease it by 5% 3 months later so that it feels like someone's working on your class. Of course, WoW starts out reasonably balanced for most of its existence so it's okay to do this number shuffling exercise. As far as I can tell MPQ has never been remotely balanced in all of its existence and yet they change stuff as if it was balanced. For example I remember Psylocke had Bewilder cost changed from 8 blue AP to 10 blue AP before she went live. If you have time to do stuff like that, you might want to look into Aggressive Recon and Dormammu's Aid instead. Not saying the change to Bewilder was good or bad, but there are definitely more pressing issues to look at.

Phaserhawk

It's funny how players know more about the game than the creators. I have my own little chart on characters that need balance. I have them broken up into overcosted (too high AP) undercosted (too low AP, overpowered(too much dmg) underpowered(too little dmg). I rate each skill unto itself, then do an eval of the character. If a character hits all 4 categories there is a serious design issue. As Phantron has said, Punisher and Black Panther are probably the most balanced characters in the game, they are almost too good, but not quite, so using them as models you can see how the rest line up.

Iron Man 40

Unibeam: Overcosted and Underpowered. for how much AP this costs it does wayyy to little dmg
Balistic Salve: Overcosted and Underpowerd same as Unibeam
Recharge: Overcosted, while AP generation can be overpowered, the cost limtis this.

Overall IM40 is a vastly Overcosted and largely underpowered character who literally does nothing but tank in PvP's or PvE's where you are forced to use him.


L.Thor
Mjolnir's Might: slightly overcosted and slightly underpowered, but creates yellow which has added value

Thunderstrike: Undercosted and overpowered. The amount of dmg this does for the AP on paper is fine and balanced but when you factor in the 9 green tiles which powers you into Call of the Storm and the cascades this does, this skill is wayyy too good.

Call of the Storm: Fairly costed and slighlty overpowered unto itself, but factoring in Thunderstrike this is Undercosted.

Overall Thor is slightly undercosted and slightly overpowered, which he really is. Of the Big 5, he and Patch are probably the closest to being balanced. Thor either needs to see Thunderstrike go up in cost, down in dmg or see less green tiles created. I think if you could balance Thunderstrike the other two skills would be fine. My suggestion would either be a dmg reduction to Thunderstrike or to remove 1 green tile created. I think the green tile would actually be the best. Only do 1 at first, if this isn't enough the go to 7.

Anyway, these are examples and all the characters have them, but again using Punisher or BP as a baseline you can really see where characters are at, and this game is in serious need of balancing. But, if League of Legends is any indication, it took them almost a year before they really started to focus on character balance as the first 1-2 years was about content. So I still have faith that D3 will begin to work on balance.

The League of Legends model which is one more F2P games need to adopt is truly free to play, but pay to enhance, not pay to win. LoL offers skins, special icons in addition you can purchase things to fast forward your gameplay, but it's not going to win you games, it just shaves off time of having to build up enough of the ingame currency to get things. How many players would pay $5 so their Patch could have a different skin, maybe looking like old school wolverine with the brown and burnt yellow coloring, and imagine all the skins you could sell of IronMan, especially if he was decent. There are things D3 can do other than turning out content only, and I"m going to give them the faith that they will. the game is not quite a year old yet, and it's had its ups and downs. Sure there was the true healing issue, but many forget the respec issue, when you couldn't upgrade your character, this was an improvement everyone loved. So D3 does listen, just not when we always want them too. If by this time in the next 6-12 months, there have not been enough changes, then I will probably start distancing myself from the game, as it will be clear by then it's all about how much $ they can make is a short amount of time.

Unknown

LoreNYC wrote:

IF characters were truly balanced then there'd be less motivation for people to buy the new guy that's just as good as the old guy but in a slightly different way.

The only motivation would be having a second "A" team to replace the first one when you ran out of health packs. If there is no "power creep" lots of people would not invest in the new characters and we all know D3 is all about the money.

Unknown

Assuming you have a balanced game that is relatively slow (no World Rupture instant wins) having a diverse roster would be a considerable advantage even in PvP. We'll also assume a balanced world means no team is especially bad at defense so that you don't get lit up for switching characters. If characters are relatively balanced, then attrition becomes a very large factor to winning. If you ever used The Hood, you'll know that starting the next game with 3000 HP (which is only 2K damage taken on The Hood) is dangerous. Currently you'd just either take the chance or use a health pack on Hood because he is very powerful and there are no obvious substitute. For the sake of argument let's just say there are now Hood 2-5 that are completely interchangeable with Hood (but not the same person) then you'd obviously want to use Hood 2 in the next game, and then Hood 3 the game after, and so on because you want to keep a low HP character like Hood out of the 3K range. If characters are sufficiently balanced there might be more interesting character interaction. For example Psylocke is always quite good against low HP character, but she's weak enough that it's almost never worth it to use her in PvP, and this is partly due to Daken being just as good on low HP character if not better with none of the weaknesses. On the other hand Deadpool is designed to be good against high HP characters, but again you don't sub him in against Thor or Sentry because he's just not strong enough compared to those guys so even though it's a favorable matchup in theory, you're still way behind after factoring character power. Maybe you'd want to use Captain Marvel to fight Falcon or Spiderman if using these characters doesn't result in a drastic drop in your team's competiveness.

Sure even in a balanced world people would likely stick to the 5-10 teams they're comfortable with, but there would at least be some room for experimentation. Right now experimenting with any non top tier character just means you're going to get lit up on defense and win a lot slower, if not outright losing games you should've won.