Baron Dante
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quote:
They are also massive grindfests, which dont appeal to everyone, and can and has caused players to burn out. As a result we have been doing our best to spread them out more, for our health and the players'.
I want to specifically vouch on the burnout thing here, because I can pretty much feel the argument for "just don't play it then" coming.
Because while that is true, it's also true that wars are built in a way where they encourage players to put in a lot of time for the wars.
We had this with DM grinding (Something that is finite at least), but that was partially fixed by lowering most of the DM requirements.
However, there's also the good ol' war wave tracker on your Character Page. This is something that encourages players to do up to 10k waves in every single war (The recent Mini-war not included, I'm actually not completely sure if the change to 2k was just for that, or meant to be the norm from now on).
There's a lot to be said about protecting players from themselves. Even if it's not the intent, this is a tangible "goal" the game gives you, and if the goal promotes unhealthy amounts of grinding within a short amount of time, I think considerations should be taken about not having it be like that.
The above can also be applied to stuff like nerfs, as we've seen here. Players have a tendency to gravitate towards the "strongest" setups, and that makes sense. However, there are times when doing just that promotes blatantly un-fun gameplay. the players might not even realize it themselves. DmK v1 is a good example of this. Sure, it stomps anything and everything. While the "power fantasy" or whatever might be fun (And hey, if someone enjoys that, that's fine, I'm not talking on behalf of everyone here), it also ignores pretty much any gameplay that could occur. If the players will naturally gravitate toward a strategy that ignores mechanics entirely, there's either no point in the mechanics existing, or the players are missing on the (subjective) fun of figuring them out.
I can't speak for this particular change that occurred today, since I haven't had the time to see how much it actually changes, but what Verly said above,
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This also helps me in enemy design. Instead of having to make res checks for certain elements that a boss may thematically use, since damage can always be relatively threatening now, more interesting mechanics can have space to shine rather than simply being ignored due to near invincibility.
is pretty much exactly what I wrote. Damage is no longer this bottleneck for mechanics, and that is, at least in theory, a good thing.
I will say though, that there is a fine balance that needs to be hit here. Players generally don't like nerfs, because they feel bad. Buffing things instead would be preferred (Although understandably, in certain cases, especially the res change here, that's not always an option), but more importantly, I think some caution should be taken with nerfing specific interactions.
The change to DeathKnight's resistances kind of hits this criteria. I understand why it's done that way, again to curb the res stacking aspect, but this was an inherent advantage the class had built into it. It's an incentive to use DK in certain fights over other classes, which gives more variety to the way you can tackle fights. (Mind that this is not something the fights should necessarily be balanced around. Don't expect people to walk in with DK against Light/Darkness fights, treat it more as an unintended interaction that can give an edge to the class) I would say the same thing applies to something like DragonSlayer vs. Dragons, but we reach the v1 level of "this fight no longer matters."
If every such match-up gets nerfed for the sake of balance, you reach a point where every class starts to feel more and more similar. Players should be rewarded for finding unexpected strategies, not get punished by the strategy getting deleted off the face of the earth.
...I didn't mean to make this post nearly as long, and as usual, like half of it is probably unnecessarily incoherent, but there you go.
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