Patch Notes 08/SEP/16 Combat Updates

[Anothernoob 102]

It doesn't let me edit so I'll add this here.

 

We will end up hearing the term "PvP support " and think of a non-priest toon because "main fighter" will become a synonym of "priest"(priesthood will become the new meta), unless combat spells get watered down so much that they become useless. Neither of these outcomes seems good to me.

Edited September 9, 2016 by Anothernoob

[MisterTeddy 284]

47 minutes ago, Anothernoob said:

@SmeJack

 

You misunderstood my point so let me explain.

 

I think that priests in PVP were supposed to have support roles and I think that such used to be the plan for wurm. I personally don't want to see the opposite happening but I'm afraid that there is actually such a trend.

Why is this trend already a thing? Because for the last 2+ years all the changes* related to priests have been actually buffing their PvP related capabilities despite the fact that they were already just as good as they needed to be to fill a support role. The main fighters tend to convert  themselves to priests and as a result we ended up needing ridiculously long resistances(there were too many fireworks in the battlefield), and we even reached a point at which some folks complained that the outcome of a battle could be predicted by the number of area-healers available to each side(which in turn brought the need for healing resistance). Yeah, they still can't imp or do he job of a combat/siege/fortress engineer but these 2 limitations didn't prevent the number of pvp priests to swell to the point that the devs had to intervene to rebalance things. Why would anyone believe that the removal of the characteristic nerf (something that tended to make long term priesthood come at the cost of the character's DR and physical damage output) is not going to push the priest/follower ratio further up? We all like fireworks (=casting spells), have attacks that don't miss and not having to rely on others to heal even the worst infected wound but isn't it going to be ridiculous if priesting becomes the new meta?

* enabling archery,lockpicking locate and no locate for all priests, bringing in the broken spell lists of player gods and let a healer have good attack spells etc.

TL;DR version: Priests were already fine. If they were not there wouldn't be that many pvp priests out there. If there were not too many pvp priests already there wouldn't be a need for such crazy-long spell resistances. Removing the nerf can only raise the already high priest/follower ratio on PvP servers as it will make long-term priesthood having no effect on the progress of the character's DR and damage output.

 

Priests are much more common now, aside from the obvious increase in power in PvP, because their PvP restrictions were removed. Their restrictions are now almost entirely in PvE, which can simply be bypassed using alts. Previously, players had to decide whether to give up certain powers to gain others. Now, they don't

 

As an example, Fo priests used to be unable to use archery without taking a 0.1 faith hit per shot. At the time, people saw this as an overwhelming drawback. As a result, there were few Fo priests. This meant less Light of Fo spam, which made the inherent imbalances with Light of Fo and Heal less obvious (and unnoticeable, in a lot of cases). Players decided that Fo was too difficult to main in PvP because of this drawback, thus they suggested that all priests be able to use archery without penalty because it is a vital part of PvP. The developers listened. As a result, Fo no longer had any meaningful drawbacks to prevent playing a Fo main in PvP. At this point, many players became Fo priests. This is when the inherent balance issues became noticeable and overwhelmingly detrimental to PvP. Because of the proliferation (in contrast to the previous scarcity) of Fo priests, powerful healing spells could be spammed much more easily, thus leading to many of the issues that have plagued PvP for a couple years now.

 

As a side note, shield bashing was much easier then, and damage reduction buffs were much less common. As a result, it was much easier to interrupt an enemy's cast as an effective counter, either through shield bashing or by causing enough damage to interrupt the action.

 

Lesson to be learned: proliferation causes or acts as a catalyst to many otherwise unnoticeable issues. This can be observed in many instances in the game, including priests, meditation, the rarity system, dragon armor, etc.