[Important][Game Arena][PvP]Restricting the amount of a class in a game

[Garnet]

As everyone playing Akram Arena knows, the meta has evolved to full ranged to a stuck meta in middle where close to nothing happen until the end.

To make it short, the problem is just that with the high amount of Clerics in one game (it can go as high as 10 clerics in one team, we already saw it) + all the Knights that themselve require multiple characters to get killed + all the Spear Champions aoe debuffing (ps that also have sacrifice but i get it this one is a sensitive subject), the situation is only going to be worse.

Basically , there is no way anyone will outdamage 5 Clerics + all Knights sacrifice + Champions aoe, at best you will see some low def/no dodge characters (dealer, mage, low dodge/no stuff raiders) dying from the few katar Raiders left that for an unknown reason are the only ones always playing in team but that's really all we can expect in the current situation.

So i see only 2 solutions, one is an obvious change with a big downside, another one require some brain and lot of testing:

- 1. Limiting to each game to 3 Clerics max, 2 Knight max - PRO: it solves everything CON: lot of player maining those classe wont be able to join AA, there is only 2 games max running at Peak time

- 2. Finding a counter to Cleric/Knight: it can be be changing how piercing defense work to counter shield block, applying a reduction on heal like it has been done on AOE damage (i don't like it personnally)... - PRO: in the best world, it solves the issue and everyone can bring the class of its choice in any game - CON: balancing is long, tricky, mistake can be made, require a lot of testing, we also don't have a test server available for now

So today i purpose solution 1 because it's the safest one, even if later we could move to solution 2:

Do you wish a limit of class (Cleric/Knight) to be applied in Game Arena PvP games?

Please let us known your opinion so we can fix the situation as soon as possible!

Note: even if it's myself purposing the idea there is unfortunally no magic, as all ideas that we have flagged "Considering" we'r still limited by our manpower, the whole team is full dedicated on the new big updates coming, but i judge the situation enough serious to push it as high priority, just not on top of everything. Thanks for understanding

[DoubleRose]

There's no way to possibly out damage those clerics who are all clustered together...

Somehow no one has any idea that a 80% heal reduction aoe is incredibly strong. Grievous wounds mechanics in most games only go up to half this value.

PVPers are either massively mentally deficient or are trying their best to preserve this meta. As you said, all raiders are katar.

Do not waste a moment of your scarce development time buffing/nerfing/restricting when PVPers can't even be bothered to read skills. This isn't the only healing reduction skill in the game. Hawkers have tons of them.

[Bobbity]

That skill in particular needs a cd reduction of 5 sec at max investment, btw ( = 10 sec cd).

[DoubleRose]

There are a bunch of these skills so I don't think a buff is even necessary. Healing reduction could give some amount of points to incentivize using it. If you wound a target and then they are healed you get points based on how much healing is prevented.

[Phish_]

47 minutes ago, Garnet said:

- 1. Limiting to each game to 3 Clerics max, 2 Knight max - PRO: it solves everything CON: lot of player maining those classe wont be able to join AA, there is only 2 games max running at Peak time

So while I do think this will make the actual AA games healthier and more inactive it does come with some issues.

 

What is the magic number to limit?

You need to differentiate between Support and Battle Cleric. NA Rose originally checked this be checking if the clear had a heal and buff skill, I would suggest checking if the cleric has the skill heavenly grace in this case now.

That also leads to an issue like a team having 1 support and 2 battle clerics and reaching the cleric quota, but is not nearly as much healing as 3 support clerics which also makes me think capping the number of clerics a 4 to be safer because limiting people who main such classes is an issue as well.

 

 

44 minutes ago, Garnet said:

- 2. Finding a counter to Cleric/Knight: it can be be changing how piercing defense work to counter shield block, applying a reduction on heal like it has been done on AOE damage (i don't like it personnally)... - PRO: in the best world, it solves the issue and everyone can bring the class of its choice in any game - CON: balancing is long, tricky, mistake can be made, require a lot of testing, we also don't have a test server available for now

So I think having more active counterplay to things is a good approach in the long run. More skills that apply wounded or reduce healpower, particularly aoe oes that can deter a team from piling up on top of eachother. 

Consider a skill that leaves behind a hazard in one spot that debuffs received healing if you stand in it. the sikuku catacombs slime already has this mechanic in game.

Another counter is some type of skill/stat that penetrates block like you said, without it necessarily being super high damage to non shield classes. The more that I think about it, you could apply the effect of pierce defense to penetrating block like this:

 

This would reduce an opponents block physical stat by 50% - 270.

The knights Block Physical stat would be lowered to 1705, the block rate would remain untouched. 

 

The pierce def/magic stat is relatively underwhelming, this also gives it more value in pvp. This does however change the dynamic of pvp as such classes with high pierce stats will do much better damage vs knights and clerics, so that can also lead to potential balancing issues. 

 

 

[Tzuno]

2 hours ago, DoubleRose said:

There's no way to possibly out damage those clerics who are all clustered together...

Somehow no one has any idea that a 80% heal reduction aoe is incredibly strong. Grievous wounds mechanics in most games only go up to half this value.

PVPers are either massively mentally deficient or are trying their best to preserve this meta. As you said, all raiders are katar.

Do not waste a moment of your scarce development time buffing/nerfing/restricting when PVPers can't even be bothered to read skills. This isn't the only healing reduction skill in the game. Hawkers have tons of them.

This is literally why we need a balancing team to see if this is viable, and then make adjustments based on testing

[Elchapow]

2 hours ago, Garnet said:

1. Limiting to each game to 3 Clerics max, 2 Knight max - PRO: it solves everything CON: lot of player maining those classe wont be able to join AA, there is only 2 games max running at Peak time

3 Cleric Max, I agree. Please differentiate A FS/Dex cleric with an offensive battle cleric. As far i know its will ruins the quota if you sets like that.
2 Knight Max, I Kinda disagree. 3, Give chances knight to get pts since the user not so mainstream, and how they get pts is tricky i would say.

 

3 hours ago, Garnet said:

2. Finding a counter to Cleric/Knight: it can be be changing how piercing defense work to counter shield block, applying a reduction on heal like it has been done on AOE damage (i don't like it personnally)... - PRO: in the best world, it solves the issue and everyone can bring the class of its choice in any game - CON: balancing is long, tricky, mistake can be made, require a lot of testing, we also don't have a test server available for now

First of all,
Wounded mechanic is different from normal debuff mechanic. You need to deal damage and land it before it proceed. This debuff is stoopid hard to land and effect atm as you need accu as main factor to land, This a pay off spamming this (too much gamba)

Counter : Healer Touch [Integrity, Integrity Party, Cure]

For raider DoT :
  

to non chances (flat amount of stacks), Example inflict 5 stacks wounded up to 20, each stack 4%. 

For melee raider :
  

add flat stacks wounded effect with chances (adjustable because all u do is melee and avoiding too OP)

For Dualsword raider :

 

increase the stacks.

For Scout :
 

how many attempt chances scout class needed to land this effectively lmao, First Miss , then if skill land need 40% to land the effect XD. Solution use default screw attack skill effect which is fair because have low cooldown.

For dev notes : as my sight, Wounded mechanic type of skill is listed on stb, STAT column with value 143 and RATIO being the %
 

3 hours ago, DoubleRose said:

PVPers are either massively mentally deficient or are trying their best to preserve this meta. As you said, all raiders are katar.

true

[HilariousFace]

I wish I could give you any insight, but I couldn't as I have played about 15-20 AA/CD on the new server and turned away as it is frustrating to fight without honor equipment, so not going to comment on the PvP side of things much.

1 hour ago, Garnet said:

- 1. Limiting to each game to 3 Clerics max, 2 Knight max - PRO: it solves everything CON: lot of player maining those classe wont be able to join AA, there is only 2 games max running at Peak time

First, you need to find a way to distinguish the Support and Battle Clerics. And then have to balance out the Support clerics equally, 2 FS cleric vs 3 FS cleric is still a huge one sided game. But, I don't know, maps are usually defender sided.

1 hour ago, Garnet said:

- 2. Finding a counter to Cleric/Knight: it can be be changing how piercing defense work to counter shield block, applying a reduction on heal like it has been done on AOE damage (i don't like it personnally)... - PRO: in the best world, it solves the issue and everyone can bring the class of its choice in any game - CON: balancing is long, tricky, mistake can be made, require a lot of testing, we also don't have a test server available for now

Changing pierce defense to counter shield blocking, would mean a nerf in PvM for those who have pierce defense as monster do not have block mechanics, so there will be some work to reimburse those classes with more damages. And there is nothing wrong with knight being unkillable, they are tanks, if they tank, then just kill someone else, knights don't need too many counter, them being problematic for 3v3 event is just unfortunate. Though, I'm not against the change from pierce defense to pierce block mechanics, as the whole "Pierce defense" offensive side of things are competing with 1) AP 2) enhance damage 3) melee AP 4) attack speed 5) Critical, it would make sense for fair distribution of game mechanics sake, to spread out some offensive stat as a counter to block mechanics instead.

And regarding Cleric's healing, I believe more mechanics like how the Gloopy poop in Sikuku Catacombs work should be added, it prevents people to pile up together bot healing etc and force them to spread out once in awhile. There are classes that are underpowered right now and they are perfect candidates for these.

But first, the way wars are fought are governed by the reward point system, you must need to redesign the reward point system, so that those people will play to win the match instead of motivated by honor point.

 

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I'm probably going entirely off-topic below, so just a friendly reminder.

The pierce defense currently have foot print in glove gem, class passives, weapon and equipment bonuses. The term "Pierce defense", to a new player it sounds like it is designed to counter players with high defense, but this is not the case, it ironically means the opposite. Pierce defense works the best on targets with low defense due to the defense curve diminishing scaling. This always give me a headache, of why a diminishing return scaling is in place for the defense curve, but I will take a wild guess, it is due to the HTK problem (hits to kill), if you plot a theoretical graph of "number of hits to kill a target with respect to a linearly growth dmg reduced by defense curve" vs. dmg reduced by defense curve. You will see the problem, the number of hits to kill a low defense target vs a high defense target, will go exponentially harder if dmg reduced by defense curve were a linearly growth relation to begin with, and this is why a diminishing return scaling is in place for the defense curve. So, just FYI nothing wrong with the diminishing returns defense curve. BUT, pierce defense on the other hand is weird because it is a mechanic that counters low defense target but not high defense target.

Even if pierce defense is changed to pierce block mechanics, for glove gem you will still want to use the Peridot Baguette 5 over anything as it gives 25% attack speed which is over-scaled IMO. Question is, who would want to leverage a pierce block mechanics glove gem when a PB5 takes care of everything? So IMO, keep those pierce block mechanics to class passive, that you know you will live with them and never have to make choices, and then may be some skills that ramp up your pierce block stat temporarily when you are met with knights/clerics, say like Artisan's Acid shot, Gun bourg's Toxic shot, because both Arti and gun bourg, they never have any skill to use but just to pew pew pew.

The CONS if we leave pierce defense behind

Another off-topic subject I would like to touch is, most of us knows that for some bosses like Dark Ranka Shaman, you should not go for a critical build, and this is when pierce defense is more favorable (If pierce defense and critical are the only options available). People ask bosses to be Critical-able, but I think this is actually a good filtering mechanics, it filter out those classes that feeds on high critical/critical dmg for DPS, and those single target classes like gunbourg/BC will shine. But here is the problem, enhance damage also act as if it is ignoring target defense anyways ... so it's not like if we leave pierce defense behind, this filtering mechanics will cease to exist.

-----------------------------

I feel like the whole pierce mechanics thingy should belong to something that you can actually pierce. For example, a character with fortified mana shield enabled. If your bullet does 1000 damage to the fortified mana shield, by equipping Platinum Baguette (5% + 220 pierce physical), you will do 1000 damage to the shield and 50+220 damage to the HP bar.

 

 

[Vile]

As mentioned earlier. Just put in dampening system with either the stack system adding healing received stacks that cannot be removed every time someone receives a heal in PvP [max like 10-15 seconds before all stacks fall off]. Or some backend system where the longer you are flagged as being in combat, the less healing you get [again only in pvp].

Your problem is healing. Debuffs, Sacri etc, only work because they can always get full value heals. Stacking up is evidence that heals and AoE heals specifically are the biggest culprit. Aint rocket science boys. These problems have been solved for over 2 decades in some other games.

Edited May 15 by Vile

[Bobbity]

I see we're coming back to Hellgate mechanics like shield penetration and shield overload. 

[Hercules]

This is Rose online not AA online, I think you just simply stop focus in current AA meta. Think about how to stop those spamming aoe (both healing & aoe damage) at mid. Players already gave you ideas how to revive AA/CD (like moving crystal..etc).

I'm a knight main so  I will only talk about knight, do you really think they're problem? Did you ever see many knights in an AA game? Even there's no (or only max 1-2) knight in AA now, you still want to nerf this class more? With all those spamming aoes (and with ranged meta earlier), knights are pretty useless.

P/S: this never ever happen in NArose before, when clerics are killable

[Phish_]

18 hours ago, HilariousFace said:

Even if pierce defense is changed to pierce block mechanics, for glove gem you will still want to use the Peridot Baguette 5 over anything as it gives 25% attack speed which is over-scaled IMO. Question is, who would want to leverage a pierce block mechanics glove gem when a PB5 takes care of everything? So IMO, keep those pierce block mechanics to class passive, that you know you will live with them and never have to make choices, and then may be some skills that ramp up your pierce block stat temporarily when you are met with knights/clerics, say like Artisan's Acid shot, Gun bourg's Toxic shot, because both Arti and gun bourg, they never have any skill to use but just to pew pew pew.

Not necessarily. You won't use a peridot on skill based classes and can consider another gem for mixed attackers (using both skills and autos) also the pierce change gives those gems more viability in pvp.

 

Regarding the initial proposal, I do think limiting the amount of clerics is necessary but I think we should cap it at 5 instead of 3. Yes 5 cleric games have alot if healing but if we're too restrictive then people will be detered from playing their class which also can lead to a lack of clerics at the same time.

[GodOfEntity]

If the heal stacking is busted in AA, it's busted in open world too.
Clerics heals should stack, but not past 2 or 3 clerics. The healing needs to get reduced at some point. 

If you make it so that the healing isn't beneficial for several clerics to be in a match, then you'll see the number of clerics in each match go down on its own naturally. 
Currently, the power is in party heals, as most clerics aren't really focused on single target heals. 

Not exactly sure of the numbers, or the reduction it should be, I just, am pretty sure the solution is to negate how powerful, several clerics healing is. 




Because I am hoping for a solution similar to this. (big brain solution) 
I voted the second option. 

I'd rather a real fix, than a band aid solution.  

But another solution may be to fix point distribution towards wins, while punishing AFK with less(to no) points. 

Currently, people are seemingly always going to abuse the fastest way to earn points, and because this is the current fastest way, they'll do it. 

If points is changed to be earned on wins, then, players will be focused towards wins. 

Edited June 6 by GodOfEntity

[Zeror]

Why not have both?

• A Seasonal version where the amount of certain classes is fixed, like max 3 or 4 of each class per team. Big/special rewards here.
• A Free for All where any combination is allowed. Smaller rewards here.

[hailoz]

Hi all! I'm a relatively new player to PVP, only played for the past 3-4 weeks on a near daily basis. Would like to offer my humble proposed solution here.

To start off, I think limiting clerics will most certainly lead to lesser games because I see about 4-7 clerics on average, just on my team alone (making it 8-14 across both attackers & defenders). Additionally, while it will certainly bring about healthier gameplay as wipes will be more common and people will have to disperse in order to play well, I think it does not solve the root of the problem. By limiting support classes like knights & clerics, the problem will then shift towards stronger offensive classes like katar raiders / scouts who can now make kills significantly easier. 

Problem: As long as there are more than 3 FS clerics on a team, almost everyone becomes unkillable. But, let's not forget that if there are only 1 or 2 FS clerics, these clerics can be focus fired and killed pretty quickly. 

Root of the problem: FS clerics are the only viable class in pvp without Honor gear. Any other class in non-honor gear will almost immediately be marked and farmed throughout the entire game, making it frustrating and nearly impossible to play. Which is why we see so many FS clerics, leading to both sides having more than 3 clerics, and when everyone is unkillable, it becomes a mid AoE spam. 

Proposed Solution: Simply put, I think a relatively simple fix is not about classes (yes, some balancing needed but that requires a lot more time & technical effort). My suggestion is to add 2 'smaller' crystals (maybe the left & right sides) in addition to the current middle one. To win as an attacker, either the 2 smaller crystals are destroyed OR the lone middle one is destroyed. Of course, crystal HP needs to be adjusted accordingly.

Rationale behind the proposed solution:

1. Not as technically complicated to implement, and will not affect PvM interactions nor will it affect participation rate (most probably!)
2. Encourages more movement, smarter play & teamwork with 3 crystals to attack/defend. 
3. It will 'force' more dispersed play, including splitting up FS clerics so there will rarely be >4 clerics healing together (which is the problem we're trying to solve)
4. it will reduce unhealthy 'farming' where geared players simply target a few weaker players the entire game to rack up kills, which is the primary reason why we see mostly Raiders or FS as most people playing other classes will simply stop playing (some will take months to farm 50k valor to get honor but majority won't). 
5. With smaller groups around crystals in general, geared characters can now take the lead and use their strength to 'carry/protect' weaker non-honor geared characters 
6. Non-honor geared players who can play smart with teamwork, have a better chance to earn honor points - incentivizing more people to play alts of different job classes (outside of just FS cleric & raiders who are everywhere in AA). 

Just my 2 cents!

Edited May 25 by hailoz

[HilariousFace]

A lot of these "Ranged meta" "Mid meta" are somewhat facilitated by the honor pts grind system, many people are here for the grinding only not for the PvP part, they do whatever it takes to maximize the pts gain instead of catering to teamplay. The champion class was suppressed by the mage class for a long time, and many players have some champions collecting dust and are honor pts hungry, so they jump in when there is an opportunity. After mages get nerfed, the champs squeezed out the dealers/mages.

And the reason mentioned by Garnet is because those class (Dealers/Mages) are non defense/dodge. So I was wondering are we implying dodge is OP? Then, I listed out the offense/defense category to see if there is any problem, whether if something is chokeholding the PvP flow of things.

Offensive stat umbrella = AP, Accuracy, Critical hits, Enhance damage, PvP/PvM offense, Weapon elements, DOT, Pierce defense/magical, Critical damage, Auto attack AP, Skill AP, Attack speed

Defensive stat umbrella = Defense/M-Defense, Dodge, Critical defense, Damage reduction, PvP/PvM defense, Armor elements, HP/HP recovery/Restore effect, Block (Physical/Magical)

The overall offense/defense category seems fairly balanced, majority of them have mutual counters except maybe Dodge counters basically everything in the offense category, and on the other hand Accuracy opens the door to everything in the offense category as well, but not a huge issue in my opinion, since we have DOT and block.

------------------------------------------

IMO, the main root cause of the current Mid meta is because AA objective being the center static crystal, you don't see mid meta happening in OCF, players are fairly spaced out, I'm gonna randomly throw a video I found on the internet. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUCbm7XcrrA )
Obviously, you have to hug the crystal to attack it, heal it, where clerics will spam several Salamander flame, which creates a dead zone outside the Sala flame ring radius, on top of that Knights are spamming sacrifice.

I know we have Taunt resistance already, but I noticed knights could still be a deciding factor of the outcome of a AA match, they spam AOE sacrifice at crystal which deflect lots of damage away from crystal, and I have witnessed many times where the attackers obviously overpowered/outnumbered the defenders yet defenders manage to win the war because the sacrifice does the magic, and I think it's unfair for attacking players who wish to go for objective and get disrupted so easily despite fact that AA already is defender sided anyways, may be implement a 30m radius around crystal disabling AOE sacrifice except single target taunt? You do not have to limit the number of knights to two if you enforce that mentioned limitation. We also have a moment where Sala flame is disabled in AA, what happened to that? I wasn't playing at that moment. But what if we disable Sala flame from receiving healings instead? Also, is no one gonna mention how these Firegon NEVER DIES?

Now, imagine if both AOE sacrifice and Sala flame receiving healings are disabled, then certainly no one will dare to go near the crystal, and we go back to ranged meta for the crystal part, where players and clerics will spread out to avoid getting nuked by launcher bourg. If no class balancing is involved, we most likely will go back to ranged meta.
And now, for Ranged meta part, I don't know about this one, it's a grey area. But I know ranged characters have huge advantage because players can shoot and tab target enemies that you can't even see on screen yourself. They also can change target easily at will and their effectiveness goes up exponentially because as the weapon attack range goes up linearly, your degrees of freedom goes up by a factor of r^2 x pi due to being a circle. Don't scream at me, but just a hypothesis, what if your ranged attacks has a chance to miss based on the following rule, if your bow weapon is 43m and you are hitting someone from 43m away, you have 21.5% chance to miss your attack (PvP multiplier only not PvM), and of course 0.5% chance to miss if enemy is 1m in front of you. This is not the same as a flat reduction of ranged character accuracy, it is an adaptive parameters. This at least won't make the lives of front-line fighters so miserable, because for a mobile open field PvP, you won't have clerics putting up several sala flame to keep you alive, all the front-line fighters will just die easily, which just means ranged meta and no champs will join again.

And the sad reality is that, the technology for preserving your buffs upon death is just simply not here yet, if we run into a PvP meta where everyone dies easily, it could be very frustrating to regroup waiting for rebuffs. High number of deaths is exciting for the killers, but not fun for the dead players who wish to regroup as quickly as possible.

It's a long tedious process to tweak if you want to move away from Mid meta and Ranged meta.

 

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[Bobbity]

if people can play in a stable stack with the same players that have the same goals / are under some overarching authority (e.g. clans), then regrouping will be less of an issue. 

The sacri issue can be ameliorated, or even slightly countered by super-ranged attack and better positioning.

 

I think Dodge itself isn't OP, dodge is problematic in that the diminishing returns on Dodge Rate don't diminish much. You can, in a teamfight, achieve a lot on a char that's stacked dodge. Based on your scenario, it looks like you want a distinction between dodge, miss and evasion.