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Constructive Discussion on Shield of the Gone

Changes to Shield of the Gone  

192 members have voted

  1. 1. If Shield of the Gone is nerfed, what do you feel is an appropriate change?

    • 30% Passive Damage Reduction
      6
    • 25% Passive Damage Reduction
      30
    • 20% Passive Damage Reduction
      17
    • 15% Passive Damage Reduction
      5
    • 10% Passive Damage Reduction
      9
    • Activated Ability - Please post how long the activation period, and cooldown.
      18
    • Other
      8
    • No Change
      99


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In the latest Q&A it was pointed out that because of the large number of complaints received about Shield of the Gone it will most likely be looked at and possibly reworked. However I have not seen any public discussion about what kind of changes they want to Shield of the Gone. So in that regard I am posting this thread to give voice to everyone's opinion on the change.

 

Please keep things civil and related to constructive discussion about what changes you feel would make SotG balanced but not useless. I've included the activated ability option because I've heard many people mention this as an idea when discussing it. But I would like to point out that all other lvl 11 Meditation abilities are passive and I don't feel it would be fair to force Insanity's to be one as well. A reduction in the damage reduction percentage seems to be the best option. Originally I was going to include both 40% and 35% but someone pointed out thats hardly any change at all.

 

I've also included the 'Other' option for new ideas, but if you vote this please post a detailed accounting of what your idea is to help balance Shield of the Gone. When a change to Path of Love was proposed threads like this were a great help in assisting the developers in choosing an option so I urge you to take this seriously. In the interest of fairness I have also included the option for 'No Change' so those that think SotG is not an issue will have a voice.

 

Full Disclosure - I am on Path of Insanity on a PvP server and am only 1 meditation level away from SotG. I am currently voting on 25% because I feel like that would be a fair compromise.

 

how about anyone who has the path, if it is changed, the option to change to another path without having to wait the alloted time to advance to the same level.

 

if my sotg was taken away from me, i'd want the option to become a different path entirely and at the same level.

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Reducing the bonus at all will just cause hate (with its easily-acquired 50% damage bonus and far more useful secondary abilities) to become the dominant choice. And putting it on a timer won't do anything in most cases, because most people don't PvP frequently enough for it to matter. It's a lose-lose.

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PvP use only;  read spoiler


 


Knowledge:


4 - useless


7 - quick one time use locate for all of local, I believe this includes nolo/stealthed players


9 - useless


11 - great for training up, not really a pvp use though as with time you're equal anyway


 


Love


4 - probably the best starter ability hands down, it's incredibly useful to refill stamina in boat fights (sandwiches reduce use some, but refresh is always there and doesn't decay) or jumping out of combat range for a fast refill since you can stack it


7 - useless


9 - has its use... if you find someone you're going to fight near mobs, but for 3 minutes, useless


11 - a very powerful ability, theoretically, this can be insanely stronger than any damage reduction as long as you keep hitting.  Realistically though, LT mechanics make an incredible ability nothing more than a hit or miss  Edit:  wanted to add, double healing with cotton is so incredibly great, it's the best part of this ability


 


Power


4 - useless, nobody uses traps or expects them


7 - useless


9 - very useful, for 30 minutes this 100% blocks fa/fb weapon enchants, fire and ice pillar, any hits from hell horses that do burns, and fireheart/shard of ice.  Basically, it's a potential max of 33% damage reduction from melee wounds, while having an extra bonus.  It doesn't help much for RT, but if you're using that you're only putting yourself at a disadvantage making it easier for them to heal and most probably giving you more aosp back


11 - there's by no means any way to describe how stupidly powerful spamming cricket and other special moves are.  Cricket can pretty much keep someone stunlocked until they're dead.  No idea what the other kingdom counterparts are


 


Hate


4 - useless, it can help bash a mine door faster I guess, but it's not directly a pvp use


7 - by far the best choice for anyone with low meditating skill, 50% extra damage is a very large bonus


9 - same as love 9, dunno about that cr buff rumor, but it's 3 minutes so meh


11 - it's 50/50 useful, not many spells are used outside of boat pvp so while sometimes it's useless, sometimes it can save your life and the rest of the boat if you don't die (but of course they can just target someone else, it's all situational)


 


Insanity


4 - useless


7 - useless


9 - useless


11 - direct and to the point 50% damage reduction, a great buff for already strong accounts


 


 


To most people they just look at 50% dmg reduction as well as listen to others complain and think just by that, it's overpowered and needs to be nerfed.  The simple fact is, it's the easiest (with skill) to use ability that doesn't require player skill to use the ability.  Realistically in my own opinion, power is a better path than insanity, but I stick with gone because it's simple, its the same as sorcery buffs, I don't have to micromanage what's there and can just play and have fun.  But you can say "well, that's just because you have shield of the gone and you're hard to kill" well, it's not gone that makes a strong account just simply overpowered or too hard to kill.  It's Wurm's inherit ability to stack as many strengths as possible to your account.  For me, I have high skills/characteristics, I have king cr bonus and gear, what isn't king gear is either rare plate, or rare moon plate.  And then I have several sorcery abilities with no debuffs, I have stoneskin which blocks 3 hits.  I have rare shield, rare axe, the list goes on.  Rare glimmer armor itself makes an incredible difference, I think someone did quick math and found that that itself offers near 50% dmg reduction over normal basic plate... (70% dmg reduction vs 83%, someone can check the math.  13% at that level is a large amount though)


 


And to make a note on how LT works with gone:  It... doesn't really.  You're dealing with an even worse form of double LT than love gives, because you're trying to heal 1-3 dmg base wounds, with 0.8 dmg weapon enchant wounds, with crappy aosp wounds, or shield bashes.  Basically if you're dying with gone, LT probably is not going to help you much unless you have a few large wounds and get lucky in wound order.


 


Another note, is that gone works mostly the same as just having a lot higher body strength that gives you more damage reduction.  So if you have an account/player that dies a lot as is or is pretty weak, gone isn't really going to help that.  We killed Hellfang, which is a pretty strong account stat wise, like 4? times each time debating if he had gone or not, and he did.  Not a jab at the guy, but just an example.  It isn't an instant win ability, just like wearing moon armor doesn't make you instantly win, or getting sorcery abilities, or artifacts, etc.


 


As far as timers or reducing the % goes, Fawkes said it good enough.  Something to add though, consider power level 9, I'd think anything under 33-40% is nothing more than a joke.  If you think reducing it from 50% to 40% though will change anything, you're really mistaken.  Level 11 hate could probably use some tweaking though


 


Tl;dr:  The real issue with Wurm's "overpowered" abilities is simply the allowance of stacking as many things as possible.  I don't see a flaw with that


Edited by MrGARY
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Voted other, the problem isn't actually SoTG in and of itself.


 


At the global level the entire bonus system, right across the board sucks. It is imbalanced and promotes imbalance and no number of tweaks and adjustments will ever change that. The scale of bonuses plus the stacking creates some pretty ludicrous situations. Fixing this will not happen unless the dev team understands why it is a problem and I do not believe they do.


 


At the meditating level it still isn't THE problem because each ability is part of a package, you must look at the entire package and ask whether this whole package (power) is overpowered compared to this package (love). You have to not directly compare powers across different levels because 3 minutes / day of a power vs permanent inate hardly compare at all. So you have to accurately give a weight to each power in the path and then make comparisons.


 


All this requires information which we as players do not have. The Dev team can listen to the forum shouts that there is a problem but they should simply have said that they'll go away and investigate and then come back and deliver their verdict, not all this player driven malarky.


 


The issue I have is I doubt they have ever even played the game at a level where these higher level meditation powers come into play and simply do not understand how situational things can be. The classic example is comparing SotG and Hates spell immunity (which I have), I think I have had maybe five or ten relevant casts against me in my entire Wurm game life and I think maybe one or two were once I hit level 11......


 


The thing is this discussion won't go away, even if they cut SotG in half, in a year there will still be complaints, bad comparisions, using it as justification for being beaten or something else along these lines and if not SotG then something else will be wheeled out as the next great nerfable.


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Voted other, the problem isn't actually SoTG in and of itself.

 

At the global level the entire bonus system, right across the board sucks. It is imbalanced and promotes imbalance and no number of tweaks and adjustments will ever change that. The scale of bonuses plus the stacking creates some pretty ludicrous situations. Fixing this will not happen unless the dev team understands why it is a problem and I do not believe they do.

 

At the meditating level it still isn't THE problem because each ability is part of a package, you must look at the entire package and ask whether this whole package (power) is overpowered compared to this package (love). You have to not directly compare powers across different levels because 3 minutes / day of a power vs permanent inate hardly compare at all. So you have to accurately give a weight to each power in the path and then make comparisons.

 

All this requires information which we as players do not have. The Dev team can listen to the forum shouts that there is a problem but they should simply have said that they'll go away and investigate and then come back and deliver their verdict, not all this player driven malarky.

 

The issue I have is I doubt they have ever even played the game at a level where these higher level meditation powers come into play and simply do not understand how situational things can be. The classic example is comparing SotG and Hates spell immunity (which I have), I think I have had maybe five or ten relevant casts against me in my entire Wurm game life and I think maybe one or two were once I hit level 11......

 

The thing is this discussion won't go away, even if they cut SotG in half, in a year there will still be complaints, bad comparisions, using it as justification for being beaten or something else along these lines and if not SotG then something else will be wheeled out as the next great nerfable.

 

 

nerf shield bash stun. thats more op then sotg.

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I disagree.

 

In the Q&A it was clear to me that they decided to look at SotG only because of the large number of complaints they've received. But that they were not certain they were going to change anything because they hadn't been convinced anything was wrong. Just that it would be looked at in case a balance was needed.

 

Thats exactly why I made this thread, to give a voice to the argument besides 'Nerf This'. Given the fact we have 50% voting 'No Change' I think thats already shown its not a universal agreement that anything is wrong. The perception that you can complain about a feature in Wurm long enough and it will get changed, although not without precedent, is still inaccurate.

i hope thats the case but im afraid its more likely that they use topics like this one to say that there is disagreements and that means it should be nerfed like they usually do

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Level 11 Knowledge turns you into a supergrinder.  Level 11 Power turns you into a superworker.  Level 11 Insanity turns you into a superfighter.  Being permanent buffs that require dedication and time to reach, level 11 abilities are obviously intended to be transformative and change your character in some significant, supernatural way.  I do not see a problem with any of this, outside of Hate and Love's ultimate abilities being lackluster.


 


I would think that Hate needs a boost more than Insanity needs a nerf.  If Insanity is supposed to make you much more resilient, then perhaps Hate 11 should be retooled into a permanent offensive ability on par with Insanity 11, so that PVPers have more choice in how they want to build their characters.


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Once again, why do all the paths have to be viable and balanced in pvp?  Some are better than others and that's OK.  


 


If you don't want to get 70 meditation or you want to be on a different path than insanity for whatever reason, that is your decision to make and the game should not be balanced based on your decision.  Congrats you went against the grain, you are a snowflake, good job!


 


The only question to ask is do people with SOTG die in regular everyday combat and the answer is yes.  They might be more difficult to kill but they can and do die therefore they are not overpowered, powerful, but not overpowered.  End of discussion.


Edited by madnezz

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Its almost the same as a champs dmg reduction, its an extra health bar basically. As kagrenac stated before : it makes the gap so enormous between fresh players and veteran players that it becomes a must to have when u wanna be competitive in the long run. Epic should not turn into chaos 2.0, That Would be horrible.

The argument, u have to work hard for it so u earned it is the worst argument ever.

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Love

11 - a very powerful ability, theoretically, this can be insanely stronger than any damage reduction as long as you keep hitting.  Realistically though, LT mechanics make an incredible ability nothing more than a hit or miss  Edit:  wanted to add, double healing with cotton is so incredibly great, it's the best part of this ability

 

And to make a note on how LT works with gone:  It... doesn't really.  You're dealing with an even worse form of double LT than love gives, because you're trying to heal 1-3 dmg base wounds, with 0.8 dmg weapon enchant wounds, with crappy aosp wounds, or shield bashes.  Basically if you're dying with gone, LT probably is not going to help you much unless you have a few large wounds and get lucky in wound order.

With gone you effectively have the exact same double lt love gives, it just looks like its worse because your wounds are halved. If you are die with gone and lt, you already doubled the time you would be alive with love and lt. Saying LT and love cab be incredibly strong is just saying LT can be incredibly strong.

 

Loves level 11 double healing with cotton isn't the best part of the ability, its the only part of the ability compared to gone.

 

 

Tl;dr:  The real issue with Wurm's "overpowered" abilities is simply the allowance of stacking as many things as possible.  I don't see a flaw with that

 

And yeah, that is the issue, having gone doubles the effect of everything you have stacked on you, it doubles the effect of your body strength, doubles all your rare moonmetal armor, doubles your blocking, the affect of your cr defensivly, etc.

Whatever small amount of damage leaks through all that is automatically halved.

Edited by Kagrenac
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Its almost the same as a champs dmg reduction, its an extra health bar basically. As kagrenac stated before : it makes the gap so enormous between fresh players and veteran players that it becomes a must to have when u wanna be competitive in the long run. Epic should not turn into chaos 2.0, That Would be horrible.

The argument, u have to work hard for it so u earned it is the worst argument ever.

 

and people can be champ for 6 months... the 60pc dmg reduction should be reduced as well or the being champ reduced to only a month or something if SOTG is reduced.

besides, being sotg, is useless as it is now, if you become a champ. because its more then the sotg reduction. which means, all other paths are better then path of insanity if you're a champ.

 

so, if anything, add some changes to path of insanity so it still gets something out of being level 11 if you are a champ.

 

right now, path of insanity is severely underpowered compared to other paths as a champion. 

Edited by Horsch

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With gone you effectively have the exact same double lt love gives, it just looks like its worse because your wounds are halved. If you are die with gone and lt, you already doubled the time you would be alive with love and lt. Saying LT and love cab be incredibly strong is just saying LT can be incredibly strong.

 

Loves level 11 double healing with cotton isn't the best part of the ability, its the only part of the ability compared to gone.

 

You just said gone with lt and love with lt is the same, and then in the same sentence say that gone with lt makes you live twice as long?

 

Looking at the big picture, say you have gone and you're at 40% health, covered in tiny wounds which doesn't sound like much but people with gone/champ can go down pretty fast when focused like anyone else.  You have to hit people to get the LT working, but if you're hitting people, doesn't it make sense to do full damage rather than tiny wounds so you can heal 1-5 dmg each hit?  If you're on love, at least you can heal very large wounds if lucky and especially combined with light of fo, you can heal up pretty fast.   That's exactly what happened when I had saint, and MR died vs BL at hota once, pretty sure there's a video of it somewhere, I ended up taking like 43? or something hits before I actually died. With gone+lt and smaller wounds+lof, healing is far less effective.  Whole thing seems weird mathematically when looking at all angles, but this is what I've seen happen in game.  It's pretty much like love+lt is a matter of depending on healing luck which can be incredibly effective at times, and gone+anything is simply hoping to outlive the other guy

 

And no it isn't really the same as saying LT can be incredibly strong, when I had saint I was testing what I could heal and hitting a horse with an lt longsword was able to heal over 15 damage from one large wound.  That's not LT being strong, that is clearly double LT being strong

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You just said gone with lt and love with lt is the same, and then in the same sentence say that gone with lt makes you live twice as long?

 

Well yeah, you get the same effect but with gone, you also have 2x the effective health.

With love you take 50 damage in 3-4 wounds, and lets say you can heal each wound with 1 good hit

With gone that is 25 damage in 3-4 wounds which you could also heal in one good hit each.

So when someone with love dies, you are still at 50%.

 

 

Looking at the big picture, say you have gone and you're at 40% health, covered in tiny wounds which doesn't sound like much but people with gone/champ can go down pretty fast when focused like anyone else.  You have to hit people to get the LT working, but if you're hitting people, doesn't it make sense to do full damage rather than tiny wounds so you can heal 1-5 dmg each hit?  If you're on love, at least you can heal very large wounds if lucky and especially combined with light of fo, you can heal up pretty fast.   That's exactly what happened when I had saint, and MR died vs BL at hota once, pretty sure there's a video of it somewhere, I ended up taking like 43? or something hits before I actually died. With gone+lt and smaller wounds+lof, healing is far less effective.  Whole thing seems weird mathematically when looking at all angles, but this is what I've seen happen in game.  It's pretty much like love+lt is a matter of depending on healing luck which can be incredibly effective at times, and gone+anything is simply hoping to outlive the other guy

If you are at 40% health with gone, you already outlived someone with love. The very large wounds that someone with love could heal are the same wounds for you, but halved, and you can heal them just the same.

 

Lets say you take 5 hits that do 10 damage each, taking you to 50%. Light of fo heals those 5 wounds, taking you to 100.

With gone you take 5 hits that do 5 damage each, taking you to 75%. Light of fo heals it, taking you to 100.

 

You cant say healing is less effective because gone has smaller wounds, it is still healing the same amount of damage someone without gone would take.

 

 

And no it isn't really the same as saying LT can be incredibly strong, when I had saint I was testing what I could heal and hitting a horse with an lt longsword was able to heal over 15 damage from one large wound.  That's not LT being strong, that is clearly double LT being strong

And with gone you would have a 7.5 damage wound, which would be healed by the LT.

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kag, isn't that 15 dmg heal from double lt, meaning it would have been 7.5 dmg heal without the double lt, then you halve that if you're sotg. so it would be 3.75 dmg heal, not 7.5.


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also, you cant just create nerfs for things without implementing fixes for other things. thats unfair and stupid. 


 


everyone knows, light of fo is crazy OP. fo priest in general are op.


 


nerf'ing just sotg is just dumb. unless there is a whole load of nerfs to multiple things, it doesn't make sense.


 


i dont see them launching just a nerf to sotg just by itself. would be a bad move. people would just migrate over to a different op path. thats multiple ways to be OP in this game, people just complain about the most difficult way to be OP cause its to hard for them to get it.


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kag, isn't that 15 dmg heal from double lt, meaning it would have been 7.5 dmg heal without the double lt, then you halve that if you're sotg. so it would be 3.75 dmg heal, not 7.5.

Not sure why you are halving the heal twice, LT works the same with or without SoTG

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Not sure why you are halving the heal twice, LT works the same with or without SoTG

 

so, you're saying that LT is broken with SOTG and it doesn't do reduced healing?

 

cause with how the mechanics should work, is it should be reduced healing. and if thats the case, and also light of fo, not reducing healing, then those things need to be nerf'd/fixed. not sotg to be nerf'd because game mechanics not working properly.

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In case you haven't noticed the majority of players do not play on Pvp servers therefore my argument is very valid.  Meditation paths have a blend of PvP and PvE bonuses so the entire wurmonline playbase can enjoy them, some are better for PVE and some are better for PvP and that's still OK.


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Considering that 4 of those paths are aimed at pvpers then one should not be surprised that legitimate pvpers would seek balance in terms of the meditation paths and the ability to directly stack bonuses. In a scenario whereby you are gaining the same bonus from multiple sources there should be form of scaling for each stacked bonus beyond the highest. In such a fashion high, body well equipped players would benefit from being a different path ability to gone but it would still have some effect if they chose the path

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IMO you should be able to chose between a long term passive bonus and a short term activate bonus, so the first would be more useful for sieges and big skirms and the latter for gankings and fights that end quickly.


A 50% damage  (path of hate) activate to use bonus would balance a 25%-33% passive SoTG bonus.


Edited by Bittereinder

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I'd like the meditation abilities to be rejiggled around or some scrapped and new ones added.

I personally would prefer SoTG being an activated ability with the same timer as the damage bonus on the hate path.

If it were to be a passive ability, I would prefer it to be 5 or 10% bonus with some sort of noticeable deterrent - SoTG's main use is in PvP and 'less natural healing' in pvp is not something to draw players away from - during pvp situations very rarely does anyone rely on natural healing. This is only a deterrent for players in PvE and it's barely noticeable anyway.

These sort of passive bonuses throws things into imbalance 50% damage reduction is 200% health points ontop of any other stackable bonuses. These bonuses are why other games tweak them heavily or provide many ways of countering them. Unfortunately the nature of the game there are not many ways to counter it, other games have large amount of ways of 'debuffing' players with helps counter 'tank' situations.

I attempted to find a game which offered a similar damage reduction passive ability like we have in Wurm and I found ZERO. The closest I found was a 50% damage reduction to magical attacks which was not the main form of damage in the game. SoTG reduces all damage by 50%. The highest I saw in another game was 25% but this was FURTHER REDUCED to 17% due to imbalance.

The less 'damage bonuses' or 'damage reduction' abilities the better, unless they're very small and the developers put in a thought out process on how to prevent OP stacking or introduce an OP anti-stack. Activated abilities make for much more interesting use of tactical play.

If the SoTG ability is to stay, and offers anything higher than 10% - I would hope the developers look into changing the negative outcome of the ability such as making it 50% healing rate for all types of healing - LT, cotton, salve, healing covers, fo spells.

If the ability is to be changed, then it might be worth tweaking the obscene damage output from artifacts, SoTG and Champion buffs are the only way to last more than 2 hits vs them, and the amount of stack bonuses the game offers (including a 'next hit is critical bonus), nerfing SoTG just makes other aspects of the game even more unbalanced.

Another suggestion for SoTG is to have a scaling situation dependant on body stat or whichever one determines HP. Offer up to 50% damage reduction until the point where you have natural 50% damage reduction, with it scaling down as you increase in skill where finally it caps out at a maximum of 5% - allowing newbies to withstand damage as a long term player.

Edited by MetalDragon

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Also to clear up - level 11 love is 1.5x healing bonuses, not 2x (LT might be double tho, everything else is 1.5), I believe the level up message states "double healing" but the ingame tool tip says 1.5 and I have only experienced 1.5.

I agree the whole system needs to be looked at, level 11 hate is a bit of a joke but I never agree to 100% immunity to anything, that ability should reduce all magical attacks by 50%, and SoTG should reduce only physical damage but at a much smaller reduction.

I also agree to the comparisons of Champion bonus to SoTG bonus, one has severe penalties and will eventually come to an end, the other doesn't.

Edited by MetalDragon

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Honestly id like best if all meditation was just removed from the game (probably the only one with this opinion), creates too many stupid arguments about this being op and that being op, but then of course i also want all priest abilities removed as well, guess im just the type of person that doesn't like too much fantasy stuff. 


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Honestly id like best if all meditation was just removed from the game (probably the only one with this opinion), creates too many stupid arguments about this being op and that being op, but then of course i also want all priest abilities removed as well, guess im just the type of person that doesn't like too much fantasy stuff. 

 

i agree. lets remove all meditation paths. remove all priests abilities. and remove champions. and remove all artifacts on epic.

lets also remove hell horses and horses. they're op. 

its all pvp aspects. the pve'ers dont care about those things. 

and pvpers im sure would love it to go back to pvp without horses. :)

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i agree. lets remove all meditation paths. remove all priests abilities. and remove champions. and remove all artifacts on epic.

lets also remove hell horses and horses. they're op.

its all pvp aspects. the pve'ers dont care about those things.

and pvpers im sure would love it to go back to pvp without horses. :)

You'd be suprised

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