PvP Balance 101

[Bazinga!]

These balancing updates have been going on long enough, and I'd rather have STS spend some time to make a bigger, better update than make several small attempts at balancing PvP.

If we really want to balance PvP, then there are two things we have to do.
1) Think from the perspective of a 3 v 3.
2) Analyse the roles of each class.

Mages:
- Heal
- Revive
- Should be the last survivor
- Occasionally nuke

Bears
- Lead
- Take all the damage
- Stun
- Move opponents (Beckon, Stomp)

Birds
- Damage
- Kill
- Use their range


Above is a list of points I came up with that each class is supposed to do, in general, ignoring the current situation. I didn't include fox and rhino but if I had to , then foxes would be similar to birds and rhinos would be similar to mages, plus the tanking factor of bears.

We've got half of it right. Now it's time to sort the other half.

Mages:
The missing abilities are the last survivor and the nuking capability. Unbuffed, a blaster does 350 damage consistently, while a drain doesn't reach 100 sometimes.
When I say high survivability, the first thing that comes inro someone's mind is armour. But I believe that the armor is alright at the moment. In fact, what's wrong is skill effectiveness. The draining power is so low that it is impossible to keep up with the damage. Max heal gets you about 250HP. Put this in comparison with the 350 auto damage of the blaster. So the way to go is to increase skill effectiveness of mages as a whole, including damage skills.

Bears:
I think bears are spot on in terms of their tanking capability with STR gear. I will address the problem about DEX bears later on.

Birds:
Believe it or not, birds are also okay. It's only mages that are lagging behind relative to the other classes.

The issue of hybrid classes.
So we've seen that bears can go DEX and mages can go DEX (and STR in the past) but birds almost never function as well with STR. Why is this so?

When birds equip STR gear, they lose their range and skill damage, and gain armor and health. You lose some, you gain some. And this is absolutely fine. The real problem lies in the over effectiveness of different gear on other classes. Mages can equip DEX gear and gain insane amount of DPS and better armour, while not really losing out on any skill effectiveness. The same goes for bears.

So the solution is to increase the dependecy of skill effectiveness on STR and INT for bears and mages respectively.

As for gear, here's how it should go:
Dodge: STR>DEX>INT
Armour: STR>INT>DEX
Crit: DEX>INT>STR
Hit: INT>DEX>STR

A quick suggestion for the devs:

Before you guys release the changes, get 6 people and have a 3 v 3 match, and see how it goes. Also, please consider this "guide" for the next fix.

[tinkertoy]

Just remove all caps and go to 76 or 77 cap less complaints then

Sent from my SM-G935P using Tapatalk

[Jilsponie]

Mages using dex gear as opposed to int gear lose skill damage and heal power... A pure int mage with intex set can do insane damage if they could survive, the problem is that they have 20% less armor then the next best set (dex).
As far as drain goes i hit for well over 500 damage, perhaps you need to level the skill higher, with buffs max damage on level 9 drain is over 1,000. What is missing from mage is the ability to survive... Bird blast+auto= death

[tasakli]

Good old 76 cap

[Bazinga!]

Mages using dex gear as opposed to int gear lose skill damage and heal power... A pure int mage with intex set can do insane damage if they could survive, the problem is that they have 20% less armor then the next best set (dex).
As far as drain goes i hit for well over 500 damage, perhaps you need to level the skill higher, with buffs max damage on level 9 drain is over 1,000. What is missing from mage is the ability to survive... Bird blast+auto= death

The damage written on the skills page doesn't match the reality. First off, I rarely hit drain, and when I do, it crits a max of 300 on a bird. That's not even enough to heal one auto from a blaster. That's what I'm trying to say. Heal gives you about 250 tops. Blaster gives 350 damage per second. Heal gives you 250 health every 3 seconds. It just doesn't add up. Instead of increasing mages' armor, it would be better to nerf blaster.