Jump to content

An open letter to Bioware about how to balance this game


Hoppinswtor

Recommended Posts

I'm not even gonna address utilities here. This is strictly about numbers. I'm gonna come at you very plainly and very succinctly and speak to you as if you were a buddy in discord.

 

When 248 gear came out, most classes were parsing around 10k. Some specs lagged behind at 9500; others were close to 11k. Even the weakest specs were over-performing in high-end pve, relative to boss health pools and dps checks. In PvP, time to kill (TTK) was a bit too high even before factoring in utilities (the increase in player health pools between 4.0 and 5.0 was proportionately higher than the increase in DPS). In other words, people were already living too long. Nevertheless, some classes had really nice killing power and were satisfying to play (arsenal, deception, etc.).

 

So you had a problem on your hands: top-tier pve content was becoming too easy, and some burst specs were doing too much damage relative to other specs (and vice versa with some sustained specs). Now, your target DPS model is quite good; I agree that melee should do 5 percent more damage than ranged due the difference in uptime. Most of your classifications for specs were on point. I do feel that you should take rotation difficulty into account as well, but nobody is perfect. Your balancing model is fine as long as it's executed properly.

 

Bioware, you are not executing properly.

 

You decided on a target DPS that was LOWER than what virtually all specs were already doing. In other words, you wanted to nerf everyone except the bottom 2 or 3 specs. Everyone would get shafted so that they would be forced to gear up to clear pve content. You didn't want to touch the health pools in pve content for whatever reason.

 

If I played Final Fantasy VII and my characters were suddenly doing less damage as they leveled up, I'd be pretty upset. I would've expected enemies to get harder and have higher health pools instead. RPGs are about progression, not regression. We like to see our numbers increase over time to reflect our characters' mastery of their craft (as well as our own).

 

Furthermore, you foolishly decided to "smooth out" bursty specs like lightning (today) and virulence (a couple months ago), further decreasing killing power in PvP. Burst specs should have low valleys and high peaks by design. The whole idea behind a burst spec is to take someone by surprise (in PvP), or burn down adds and clear tight DPS checks (in PvE). You don't smooth out burst specs, especially when your TTK is already too high in pvp. It defies all logic.

 

Simply put, nerfing DPS:

 

(1) Increases the time to kill (TTK) in pvp, which was already too high before the widespread nerfs. People last way too long in pvp, and tanks/heals make too much of a difference. Ranked has become boring and tanks suck the fun out of PvP when most classes already lack true killing power. Regs are just a cleavefest. True globals (full kills in the span of a single GCD) are a rarity and almost a mathematical impossibility now. As a result, the skill cap is laughably low and livelord classes reign supreme.

 

(2) Takes the fun out of the game for the players. It's not satisfying to see your performance decrease massively, especially after you've finished min-maxing your gear and have taken the time to learn the intricacies of a spec. Yes, sometimes you need to make minor adjustments of a couple percent here and there, but when you are nerfing more than half of the specs by 5-10 percent because of a laughably low Target DPS figure, then EVERYONE feels a sense of loss! Including you, hence the mass player exodus you are currently witnessing. When you have paying customers, your goal is to upset as few of them as possible.

 

There is a better way to fix things.

 

Instead of adjusting everything DOWNWARD, you should adjust UPWARD and focus more on rebalancing the content. Make the target DPS ~10,250, instead of ~9750, so that very few classes end up getting nerfed. Some classes would get major buffs and players of those classes will become very happy pandas and eager to experiment. Arsenal would've been lowered to 9800 instead of 9300. Lightning would get a buff! Marksman would get a buff! Lethality would only get a slight nerf! Nobody is truly angry.

 

The best part is that TTK would go down in pvp and NOBODY would be upset about that. Nobody. It would push people to get better, especially healers and tanks, who are currently on easy street in PvP.

 

The only issue would be the DPS checks in top content. These checks would be a little easier since some classes would be getting significant buffs. Skilled players would be able to clear nightmare content in 242 gear if the target dps was 10,250 and no changes were made to health pools. This kills gear progression a bit, admittedly. So what do you do? Simply increase boss health pools in top content. The DPS checks will still be as challenging as they are now, yet most class changes will be in a positive direction, AND people will actually die faster in PvP. Players will now have to obtain 248 gear due to the higher health pools in nightmare content, but I know prog raiders and they are PERFECTLY fine with having slightly harder content. Everybody wins!

 

When you have to rebalance a game, you should balance upward to avoid upsetting people. We want to see our characters do better, not worse, even if it means our enemies have more health. That's just how RPGs work. We like big numbers in pve and we like to kill our buddies in PVP, and we like to do it in style with nice outfits and cool weapons. Regression sucks; at least give people the illusion of progress.

 

TL;DR: Your balancing approach has failed because you adjusted downward, not upward. Adjusting upward makes more people happy than not (because fewer classes get nerfed), and you can always adjust health pools to keep DPS checks high. And, most importantly, an increase in Target DPS will make PvP way more engaging due to the lower TTK. You see, you could've killed two birds with one stone. Pretty soon there will be no birds to kill at all.

Edited by Hoppinswtor
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The balancing approach should have been to increase the target DPS and buff all classes to match this and instead buff HP, Damage dealt and so on by mechanics and bosses, that way it would have had the same effect in practice, but people who feel the world is ruined if they do 9.3k DPS instead of 9.5 wouldn't be rioting.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The balancing approach should have been to increase the target DPS and buff all classes to match this and instead buff HP, Damage dealt and so on by mechanics and bosses, that way it would have had the same effect in practice, but people who feel the world is ruined if they do 9.3k DPS instead of 9.5 wouldn't be rioting.

 

Yeah, that's exactly what I suggested. It would please everyone and perhaps keep people more engaged. People are more likely to resub and experiment with classes after buffs, not nerfs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Honostly though what happened is that Patch 5 the max gear level was probably always planned as 242 and everything in PvE was designed around those numbers.

 

Look it it from the perspective of the game devs:

Option A: scale down overall dps while rebalancing over and under- achieving classes to get overall PvE balance right again after 248 gear messed it up for fixed 5.0 calculations. (kill two birds with one stone)

Option B: scale everyone's dps up - at least the lowest classes AND re-tune every PvE encounter for a new higher target number.

 

Which option requires less work?

 

I agree though that ttk in PvP is kind of high right now, it is because health pools vs ability damage has been scaled out of whack with every expansion. And 2/3 healer classes are still not adjusted.

 

I personally don't care if say I do less dps after an overhaul say on my marksman, lightning or anni etc as long as everything around is balanced - which is not -that has been frustrating - but I would say that is a problem of DcDs and utilities rather than raw dps.

Edited by ottffsse
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Amen @ OP.

 

I really don't get the massive generalized series of nerfs lately. They chose the lazy route.

 

The people who made this decision are not only angering the player base, they also end up hurting their bottom line. The latest changes to this game show terrible gaming decisions and poor business sense.

Edited by Eriamea
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm not even gonna address utilities here. This is strictly about numbers. I'm gonna come at you very plainly and very succinctly and speak to you as if you were a buddy in discord.

 

When 248 gear came out, most classes were parsing around 10k. Some specs lagged behind at 9500; others were close to 11k. Even the weakest specs were over-performing in high-end pve, relative to boss health pools and dps checks. In PvP, time to kill (TTK) was a bit too high even before factoring in utilities (the increase in player health pools between 4.0 and 5.0 was proportionately higher than the increase in DPS). In other words, people were already living too long. Nevertheless, some classes had really nice killing power and were satisfying to play (arsenal, deception, etc.).

 

i stopped reading here.

 

Arsenal was broken in dps and still is in utilities.

 

Fun to play FOTM classes - kappa

 

Perhaps Arsenal was one of the most broken specs ever in this game, as far as i can recall

Link to comment
Share on other sites

i stopped reading here.

 

Arsenal was broken in dps and still is in utilities.

 

Fun to play FOTM classes - kappa

 

Perhaps Arsenal was one of the most broken specs ever in this game, as far as i can recall

 

I believe the reason he chose to not address utilities is because for the last few months when we complain a class is not over performing due to dps but because of utility, we are told they aren't messing with utilities until 5.6. Even ignoring the elephant in the room he has a point. I myself have been saying that they seem to be nerfing basically everyone, which would seem to imply they need to reexamine their target dps. That said, the op point about 248 gear resulting in higher dps where content was designed with probably 242 gear in mind is perfectly sound reason to me.

 

In a nutshell, I agree with op, rather than the blanket nerf hammer an up on content difficulty would have been nice. But that requires more work apparently than blanket nerfs to each class.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For a while,I have not read a more satisfying thread and an actual idea how to turn back and start walking on the right path. Good job OP.

For a while now,most threads were of people canceling subs because they dont like the changes,and who can blame them?

The main problems are nerfing classes which were already nerfed a lot and nerfing classes which were exactly where they supposed to be.This has to be turned arround to buffs and stalemates (Not touching a specific class which perfmors well)

 

/Signed

Edited by RevorteX
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't PvE so I won't comment on that.... Honestly I don't care about the numbers that I pull in PvP, what I care about is balance and the enjoyment of the process. High TTK is fun in my opinion since you have to learn to survive and think more, when you downing a player in seconds its not thinking, its button mushing which require less skill, with high TTK you MUST learn how to plan your moves more, since just blowing all your cool downs at once won't work to kill a player. You say "we", don't include me there, excuse me but f*ck the numbers....:rak_04::rak_01::rak_04:
Link to comment
Share on other sites

You decided on a target DPS that was LOWER than what virtually all specs were already doing. In other words, you wanted to nerf everyone except the bottom 2 or 3 specs. Everyone would get shafted so that they would be forced to gear up to clear pve content. You didn't want to touch the health pools in pve content for whatever reason.

 

[..] I would've expected enemies to get harder and have higher health pools instead. RPGs are about progression, not regression.

That's simply wrong. Three reasons: mathematics, relativity and practicabillity.

 

Mathematics:

There's no infinite progression. Percentages do have well defined boundaries... and SWTOR is based on percentages. 110% damage reduction doesn't make much sense, right? Even worse, the impression of progression is lost long before that. An increase from 86% to 87% doesn't feel like a game-changing progression.

 

So a common trick is to fake progression by introducing a 'windmill' system. The game tries to hide the fact that the resulting percentages stay the same by focusing on the numeric values of arbitary quotients instead, i.e. both the dividend and the divisor scale up the same way. Instead of 1/10, the players get something like 500k//5m. Mathematically the same, but using higher numbers looks like there's a progression. And in most cases, this illusion is achieved by implementing an automatically increasing divisor, players has to counter by achieving a higher dividend.

 

This gets problematic however, as soon as a game (not just SWTOR but other games like Diablo 3 as well) ignore these automatic 'nerfs' for some reasons. In case of SWTOR, it happened when BioWare introduced the Galactic Command System... a progression system that doesn't rely on character levels anymore. On the positive side, BioWare didn't have to feel obligued to implement new active skills, passives, etc. But on the downside, every new tier of gear bypasses the original nerf due to a higher class level and therefore brings the game closer to a mathematical cap.

 

To sum it up: Your request to buff classes isn't logical now that SWTOR has abandonned the original level system.

 

Relativity:

 

The latest chenges don't just raise or lower the overall effectiveness, they changes the effectiveness of one skill/class relative towards another. And if you want to achieve such a skill-to-skill or class-to-class balance, you have to stay within the same context. I.e. you can't really fix that by changing the environment (the hitpoints of a boss, etc.).

 

Two examples:

The first one - crit. damage bonus a.k.a. surge. The impact of this bonus depends on the crit. chance of the character. And that's what got out of control. BioWare first implemented a system that gives characters a benefit, should they achieve more than 100% crit. chance and then, they introduced a system that bypasses the automatic crit.chance 'nerf'. And that made crit. damage too powerful. What BioWare tries now is to undo this (at least partially) by lowering other existing crit. damage bonuses.

 

The second example - heal skills. Due to the fact that their effectiveness affected by all the stuff that keeps damaging skills in check (opposing defenses & damage reduction, but also the boss-level), there's no simple way to fix overly powerful heal skills by buffing the environment (hitpoints of bosses, etc.) either.

If BioWare would boost the DPS of every class to counter overly powerful heals, they would change the number of strikes needed to defeat a target that doesn't receive any heals. I.e. they would have fixed one problem by creating another one.

 

Of course, BioWare could then go on fixing any follow-up problem as welll, f.e. by increasing the hitpoints of every class, but that might cause more problems... a potentially endless reaction. Which brings me to the next point:

 

Practicabillity:

 

To put it short. It's about choosing the way that requires the least effort to achieve a goal. Adjusting the PvE content (higher hitpoints for all bosses & mobs) wouldn't be the a practicable one, because it won't fix any PvP inbalances. And likeswise, to increase the DPS score of every class isn't the most practicable one either, as it would break the 'time-to-kill' ratio.

 

If BioWare would have done what you've suggested and would have buffed every class, they would have had to make classes at least as powerful as Arsenal mercs were. Nerfing them doesnn't fulfill your 'it's all about progression' premise. Put to the extreme, it would mean every class has to have it's own version of Trauma Regulators.

 

But let's focus solely on the DPS score a bit. Increasing it for every class wouldn't be that hard. More problematic would be to keep all the other existing (in)balances intact. If you increase the DPS score however, you would also break the balance between percentual damage reduction and flat numeric damage-absorb shileds / heal-based defensive skills... and that means you would have to boost the latter as well. Not only that, you would have to increase the hitpoints of every class to make sure that the 'time to kill' ratio won't change, but the number of hitpoints a character has is determined by the gear he wears, so you would have to fix that as well.....

 

Likewise, if you don't want to lower the critical damage bonuses - which of course doesn't feel like a progression - BioWare would have to improve it for every class that didn't get that much of a benefit. That however would break the game by making combat dependant on lucky crits...

 

And unlike what you've stated, BioWare wouldn't be able to increase the HP scores of every PvE boss & monster. That would be an indirect nerf for every team constellation that would contain some of the least buffed classes. Making it worse for these team constallations would feel like regression and wouldn't be any different than nerfing certain classes. In other words, the game would have to become easier.

 

But back to the practicability issues:

 

What most players seem to dislke is the fact that BioWare chose the 'proper' approach and defined an overall goal to be able to measure their balance fixes against it. This 'goal' however made it obvious that there were other existing inbalances and BioWare then chose to address them as well and did so in the most practical way => by altering these classes/skills directly. IMO, that's what causes the displeasure. So let's have a look at these 'additional changes'.

 

Previous patch fixes to crit. chance, crit. damage and heals were too good and affected certain classes more than others. So what happens when we assume that reverting this either partly or completely is no valid option? Well, the first question that comes into my mind is "what to use as a benchmark then?".

 

These changes were made a long time ago. Should BioWare use some ancient metrics to see how the 'surge' changes affected each class? And how should they handle all the changes that were added later on? Extrapolate their benefit, applying that to the old metrics and somehow calculate how the game would look today?

 

Changes to crit. damage f.e. made the end-game content (NIM operations) easier. But that's also true for all the defensive / heal utilities BioWare added later on. So whst to use as a base difficulty for the calculation? The number of players that managed to defeat NIM bosses during 4.x? Or did players got used to all the improvements that made NIM easier, which would mean the 'easiest' situation ought to be used as the base!

 

All in all, it would be a lot of work and would have a high margin of error.... in other words, simply impractical !

 

A more suitable approach is to assume what would be an ideal state today and apply only the most recent data. And that's what BioWare did. They calculated a DPS score they believe fits to the current character hitpoints & defenses and adjusted all the classes to match the calculated score, taking only their current performance into consideration. A much lower margin of error, especially in regard of class-to-class and skill-to-skill balance.

 

So to sum things up:

I'm not a fan of the latest changes either, but for a different reason. Both developers and players failed to convince me that there's any significant drawback for sustained classes and/or melee classes. I've yet to see a PvE fight in which a sustained melee class loses every 11th attack on average (because that's what an inherent 10% DPS advantage actually means).

 

But although I disagree with BioWare's goal, I still believe that their approach is the only way to go. Even if some PvE fights become more difficult - especially the newly added ones, 'nerfing' classes is still the better and more practical long-term sttrategy... far better than to buff everything else.

Edited by realleaftea
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't PvE so I won't comment on that.... Honestly I don't care about the numbers that I pull in PvP, what I care about is balance and the enjoyment of the process. High TTK is fun in my opinion since you have to learn to survive and think more, when you downing a player in seconds its not thinking, its button mushing which require less skill, with high TTK you MUST learn how to plan your moves more, since just blowing all your cool downs at once won't work to kill a player. You say "we", don't include me there, excuse me but f*ck the numbers....:rak_04::rak_01::rak_04:

 

I disagree that people have to focus more on survivability in a high-TTK meta. On the contrary; it's easier to survive because you have a higher margin of error in the form of extra defenses and health. It's important to remember that the enemy can down you in seconds just as you can down them. When TTK was lower, people had to be far better at positioning, survivability, and cooldown management If your cooldown use sucked, you could get globalled. If your awareness sucked, you'd get destroyed. If you overextended, you were punished for it. You had to be aware of all the heavy hitters in the game and how to handle them. Now, you can eat an autocrit ambush and barely feel a tickle when you have a tank and two healers on your back.

 

Hardswaps in this meta are indeed tough to pull off, but that's mostly just because of the amount of defenses and the health pools (and now the lack of real burst for some specs). You can play it perfectly and still fall short of the mark a lot of the time. If anything, PvP in the current meta is a lot like PvE - teams parsing on each other until one team gets worn down. With a lower TTK, you are rewarded much more consistently for good hardswaps and the like.

Edited by Hoppinswtor
Link to comment
Share on other sites

That's simply wrong.

 

I appreciate the in-depth response, though I don't really have the time right now to go through your points. I do agree with a lot of your logic, but I think you missed the point on some things and I'll get to that when I have a chance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

It's getting late and I don't have all the time in the world to answer every of your point, however I'll just give a quick look at why the class balance wasn't done properly imo.

 

Practicabillity:

 

To put it short. It's about choosing the way that requires the least effort to achieve a goal. Adjusting the PvE content (higher hitpoints for all bosses & mobs) wouldn't be the a practicable one, because it won't fix any PvP inbalances. And likeswise, to increase the DPS score of every class isn't the most practicable one either, as it would break the 'time-to-kill' ratio.

 

This is the point where I disagree the most, because the main PvP inbalance wheren't about damage output in the first place. At the start of 5.0, and even now, the damage output was never a problem. The only one that where really an issue were Virulence/Engineering sniper, also maybe a bit of Immortal Jugg (Piercing Chill, fixed in 5.5).

The issue about TTK was from some defensive ability who are way beyond what is needed. This is what everybody asked BW to fix first, because solving this issue would have solved almost every pvp imbalance.

 

Mercenary only needed Responsive Safeguard in order to be viable. I don't know why the class balance guy (again, it's only one person in charge of this, not a team, this is also important to say because it explain a lot) thought it would be a practical idea to give a 70% heal and a heal-to-full shield on a class that only needed the reflect ability. The same could apply to the heal given on a sniper's ballistic shield, to only quote those.

 

Those ability makes absolutely no sense for any player with a bit of common sense. And that's what BW's balance really lack in fact. The issue isn't "why nerf over buff ?". The issue is that this balance isn't made by a player, someone who knows the game or understand its mechanics. The guy in charge of the balance don't play the game, because the change the balance made weren't "smart", they aren't "player friendly". Sure, they work, that's a fact, nearly every spec of the game is brought in line with the intended target dps.

 

I want to take a moment to observe Carnage Marauder for example, which is a spec that isn't brought in line with its target dps. Do you know why ? Because the main dps increase (clipping through the ferocity window) isn't taken into consideration. Still, it's a major thing that every decent carnage player knows. And yet, the dev team haven't figured that out, because their knowledge of the class is only based of theory, not real practice or test. Carnage was overperforming before, it is still overperforming now because of this clipping ability.

 

Another class as an example : Corruption Sorcerer, and how it became so unfriendly for everyone.

Everybody agreed that the hps input of the sorcerer was way too much. A nerf was expected on this side, sure. Still, the way those nerfs where handled is basically "remove the speed of the sorcerer. Then remove the low-cost of those spells, and then nerf every ability in terms of hps". Sure, the hps target was reached, that's a fact. However the class became horrible to play with.

You get from a fast, strong and on-demand burst healing to a slow, not so strong and costly "burst" healing. Sure, good players can still play the class correctly, however, none of the interesting things of playing sorcerer heal is still there.

 

This is why I was talking about nerfs that weren't "player friendly". Because they aren't thought for the player, they are thought about theorical values. A player isn't a machine. It won't do an endless "correct" rotation and call it an "optimal parse", a player must feel that a class is enjoyable to play, which is no longer the case for Corruption Sorcerer. There are other things rather than dps and hps target that are more important to fix first, because they also have an impact on the hps and dps of a class. You don't nerf the playability of a class in order to balance its output, this is wrong and don't lead to a possible "balanced game".

 

This is why the nerfs to mercenary healers seems strange, out of the three healers, I didn't expect this class to be the target of a nerf, because in pvp for example, 5% of the hps made by a healer merc is made with the healing granted by the overpowered utility points + reflect. Still, it seems like those 5% where too much, and thus the class rough hps was nerfed while the broken ability stayed intact.

 

It's also the same for Operative healer, who got a decreased TA gain, and no improvement to burst healing at all (in fact, it is almost worst now, due to the high reliability on cast, without any interrupt immunity). I don't know if you've followed the post and discussion about operative healers change, but everyone was litteraly begging for an interrupt immunity if they received a nerf. They got the nerf, without any noticeable improvement to burst healing and without any sort of interrupt immunity.

 

This is why in a sense those nerfs aren't "practical". Because they don't take into consideration the game, just theorical, parse values. The goal of a nerf is to tune down a surefficient output. Not tune down the playability or interest of a class for everyone (I also use the term "interest" because in some case like Deception Assassin, the class isn't interesting anymore for most group, because what it had to offer -raw dps and nothing else- isn't there anymore).

 

Besides, you stated that adjusting the hit points of a boss wouldn't be the way to go... Still, I recall there is some boss (like Styrak HM) who demands way, way more than the regular "hard mode" content. Those where already difficult to beat for most players with 248 gear, in fact, they were nearly impossible to defeat for players that weren't extraordinary good with the first intended gear set (236). So yeah, I think that increasing the hit points/damage dealt by a boss and buffing some class to meet the newer dps check could have been a way to go, possibly more viable than what we actually have. The work weren't that difficult honestly, some boss where already hard, you just had to bring the other in line. In fact, this would have maybe helped solving some of the issues or bug still present in some operations by the way.

Furthermore, I doubt this would require to "buff" every mob on every planet. They aren't that hard to defeat, they still aren't after the nerf and aren't also if you buff some class. The initial game (lvl 1 to 50, maybe even further) has been way too simplified. A buff for some class wouldn't change the "leveling content" by much.

 

Again, we're not arguing about if these nerfs don't bring a class to its target dps/hps. Instead we're trying to look at the whole game to judge them, something that the class balance guy hasn't been able to do, even when he worked on "balancing" said class for the 5.0 release.

 

That's all for me tonight, I'll see if there is some other point that I could discuss with you, but not today. :rak_03:

Cya laters folks :)

Edited by supertimtaf
Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...