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Telcontar Arvedui I -> Miscellaneous Items have different Standards, and this needs to change (7/1/2024 4:26:11)
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Please read this OP before participating in the discussion, it may help the dev team gauge community response more effectively.
If you are a player, and if you think misc items are fine as is, if you disagree with the thread title, you don't have to read further. Feel free to skip this discussion.
I hoped that the purpose of this thread is to gauge community feedback on whether miscs require re-balancing. If you disagree, all you have to do is to not post any response to this thread. Your silence should be deafening enough. If you agree, then the following points may help you structure your response.
Do you think misc items should absolutely adhere to the basic turn model and the principle of conservation of %Melee, or do you think there can be an arbitrary middle ground of balance that will be easier/better on devs and players alike?
Assuming a re-balancing strategy has been agreed upon, how do you hope the devs approach already-released misc items, in terms of scheduling?
Whether or not things change, do you agree that information on the standards of misc effects should be made public? If so, how and where?
* * * SECTION BREAK * * *
At the time of writing this post, it is obvious that misc items do not follow the basic 20-turn model. Assuming all items are L150, examples include:
+50 to a stat costs 17 SP/turn on a misc, but requires 34 SP/turn to toggle in a shield like Old Glory, Celtic, or Chieftain's Ironthorn.
*0.5 damage reduction to a single element costs 44 SP/turn on a misc, while a one-turn, *0.5 Elemental Shield status (auto-inflict, no save rolls) would cost 274 SP, using the fruity Shieldcakes as reference.
+10 Player BtH normally costs ~10 SP/turn on a misc, while +8.5 player BtH amounts to 39 SP (10 %Melee) cost/turn by the basic model. +10 BtH would've cost 46 SP/turn.
+20% player damage normally costs 15 SP/turn on a misc, but if we follow the principle of conservation of %Melee (a.k.a. basic model), it would've cost ~78 SP/turn.
The costs on misc item effects above are what a group of players have managed to deduce via trawling through infosubs, comparing items of different effects, and calculating individual effect's costs via elimination. Fortunately, at least for contemporary/recently-released miscs, the standards are consistent. If it costs 17 SP/turn for a misc to offer a +50 STR buff, then it will cost 34 SP/turn for another to provide +50 INT and +50 CHA buffs altogether, for example. However, we've also had Lovestruck Scope and Moontide Bracer releases, two non-elemental miscs, with the former getting a 1.2x cost penalty, the latter a 0.9x effect penalty - just to name misc items released in 2024 with design inconsistency. Personally, I find this problem to be particularly prominent during the donation sets' design suggestion contest, as budding designers/submitters have to do more research to figure out how the misc should work according to their intentions. Either that, or they risk their suggestions being adapted by the devs in a direction they may not like.
Therefore, I put forward this forums thread partly as a request for dev response, w.r.t. the following points:
- What is the dev team's design intention/philosophy behind miscellaneous items having a separate set of standards?
- Is it in the cards to eventually address this issue and re-balance misc items?
- If #2 above is deemed impossible, then can the current misc-specific design/balance standards (in terms of %Melee costs/benefits) be made public for players' reference?
For point 1, I'd be totally fine if the answer was along the lines of "misc standards were somewhat decided upon decades back and it just stuck". AQC is an old game after all, and the dev team's size meant that we couldn't possibly have a meticulously planned-and-executed construction of game standards from the get-go. But, I do think that misc items should fully adhere to the turn model and the principle of conservation of %Melee. However, such a change does not need to happen overnight. My proposed outcome would be for the devs to fully agree to the bolded text above, clarify a few more aspects of the standards through a couple of GBI/Suggestions threads - or even internal discussions - and then act on it by changing and re-releasing a few items per week. The majority, if not all, of the misc item changes should only involve increasing the cost to match the provided benefits, and the whole project could be completed over the span of 18 to 24 months. This would impose a long-term, but low-intensity workload on the devs, AND give players enough time to adapt their playstyles as they won't have to face the prospect of completely overhauling their misc item loadout all at once (a minor evolving-metagame phenomenon, if you will). One of the effects of this outcome will be that END may gradually become much more attractive as a "resource bank" stat, in tandem with resource conversion miscs - since the increased costs of misc items raises the difficulty of upkeep (whether this is an acceptable outcome for devs/players regarding END's identity...... is a topic for another thread). I am even willing to suggest a possible compromise - ONLY misc items that cost more than 10 (or 15!) %Melee per turn are affected by this re-balance effort. This way, amongst already-released miscs, low-cost miscs will retain the extremely-efficient cost-benefit ratio at the expense of already being limited in their output budget; the "multiple-big-attractive-effects-in-one-package" miscs get balanced to align with other categories of equipment; and the devs can, at their discretion, balance mid-cost misc items by lowering the output to align with their original costs instead, thus allowing players to retain the choice of misc items across all levels of costs.
By the end of this discussion, I hope to achieve one of the following outcomes,
The playerbase feedback reaches critical mass, and devs agree with and commit to what I outlined in the paragraph above. This would hopefully be a healthy indication that player-dev expectations are aligned, and the game streamlines its balance standards instead of having separate models for different item categories.
The devs decide to only partially rebalance the misc item standards - be it a portion of the miscs that fulfil a certain criteria, or a few aspects of misc item benefits, etc. etc. This is due to reasons, which may include playerbase feedback not reaching critical mass, or simply being judged as an unfeasible project after internal assessment. During the early-stages of the partial-rebalance project, information regarding the post-project standards are made public, so that players can expect those changes and make plans to adjust their playstyles accordingly.
The devs disagree with what I'd outlined in bold above, again due to reasons, but agree to make public the information regarding misc standards. While not ideal, this outcome will at least go a long way towards aligning player-dev expectations about the game balance standards, which the players can use to potentially help reduce dev workload by playtesting miscs post-release, and/or designing miscs that adhere to such standards during donation-set-suggestions' contests.
As you can see, the common theme amongst all outcomes above is that misc standards, whether changed or not, become public information. This is because I believe that aligning expectations is one the most effective ways to achieve a non-hostile, professionally/rationally-driven relationship between players and devs. And as someone who has enjoyed this game (albeit on-and-off throughout the decades), I'm willing to be that someone to make such a request.
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