Shaloren supremacy... should something be about done it?

[Mex]

I mean you realise the Draconic Will nerf is not that relevant, you can always extend Providence and run a slightly different rotation. Archmage for example can play with a 5 turn window due to stone wall, so this won't impact that class at all.

Shalore is the best race, I think it's agreed. Shalore has 3 abilities that are all useful.

Global speed scales up to 60%, compare that to the Yeek which is only 15%...

The critical hit/chance means an increase in damage and also a greater ability to reach 100% crit rate for reliable abuse.

Timeless is going to be amazing regardless of how you try and nerf it, it is fundamentally an ability that breaks the game. I think it's been mentioned before why for example Draconic Will is so strong: it allows you to ignore limitations to your character that the game poses to you, in that case ignoring status effects.

Timeless allows you to ignore 3 things at once.

Firstly the status removal, which it isn't used for really but is a thing early game (a point to make here, this is already very strong but the ability is so good it doesn't even get used for that...).

Secondly the 5 turn cooldown reduction. This is more or less equivalent to gaining 5 turns. Being able to ignore a balancing factor of abilites (ie they have a cooldown for a reason) is why this is so strong. The fact that it has a 30 turn cooldown allows you to abuse it with several abilites.

Thirdly, extending effects by 5 turns. Again this is more or less like gaining 5 turns, it breaks fundamentally the balancing factor of an ability that it lasts for x turns.

Of course if you actually gained 10 turns you would be able to attack etc, but if you're playing a class that relies on spell cooldowns Timeless is effectively as described.

I mean I don't even want to compare Shalore to other classes because it's pretty sad. Shalore is even better than a Higher at abusing Hidden Resources...

Other races really need something good about them, but even then Timeless isn't even a speciality it's a catch all ability that just straight up improves whatever class you're playing.

Once more I need to reinforce that it's fundamentally a broken ability, much like Draconic Will and similar things.

A couple of thoughts:

Just because something is "sleeper op" because "the noobs don't know it's good" doesn't make it balanced or "smart because I know it's good". For example me writing a guide on how Archmage is OP dosn't mean that it was fine that it was OP before because most people didn't think so and conversely just because I wrote a guide on it doesn't make it OP. This would matter if we were playing a game that had a metagame and involved human vs human, we are not, hence this doesn't apply.

[donkatsu]

Timeless is going to be amazing regardless of how you try and nerf it, it is fundamentally an ability that breaks the game.

Nah. "Increase the duration of up to [TL] randomly chosen effects (beneficial or detrimental) by 1." No cooldown adjustment. There, game not broken. There are countless other ways you can nerf it to make it not broken.

Just because something is "sleeper op" because "the noobs don't know it's good" doesn't make it balanced or "smart because I know it's good". For example me writing a guide on how Archmage is OP dosn't mean that it was fine that it was OP before because most people didn't think so and conversely just because I wrote a guide on it doesn't make it OP. This would matter if we were playing a game that had a metagame and involved human vs human, we are not, hence this doesn't apply.

Archmages, or more specifically the Aegis tree, has been identified as broken for as long as I can remember. It was well-known before your guide, way back in the early beta stage. However, Darkgod has never meaningfully nerfed it. The reasoning was that Archmages don't have a higher win rate than other classes. I too, disagree with that reasoning, but if that's what we're working with here, then by the very same logic, Timeless doesn't need to be nerfed.

[Red]

I think what you're seeing there, donkatsu, is because of the same reason this thread exists. ToME players, by and large, want to win fairly. We only resort to outright abuse when the game forces us to-i.e. Madness. On a normal game, you or I are going to be avoiding abusing Timeless or Aegis in most cases because it's just not as fun as winning with, say, a trap based Rogue. Shalore and Archmage have similar win rates because players stop playing them once they learn how broken they are. It's a faulty line of reasoning to not balance it-players aren't abusing it, so I don't need to fix it. The better response is that since players aren't abusing it, I should make it so it isn't so open to abuse.

As for your Timeless fix, I do think it should still be increase for positive and decrease for detrimental. Otherwise it becomes a really, really weak ability-you could gain one turn on Unstoppable, sure, but you might also double your one-turn stun. When it's a single turn either way, no reason to make it possibly hurt you.

[donkatsu]

That wasn't a serious proposal, just a rebuttal to the statement that Timeless is going to be amazing regardless of how you try and nerf it.

[Atarlost]

Is Timeless the real culprit here? Shalore weren't the top race when I came back to ToME and I don't think they've been directly buffed apart from IIRC swapping XP penalties with the Thalore. Prodigies have been introduced and some broken talents like Unstoppable, but the dev branch has made the problematic prodigies no longer interact with Timeless and the same can be done for any other broken talents, though any talent so powerful that extending it is game breaking is probably too powerful to not warp the class that gets it around itself even on other races.

[Red]

In a word? Yes.

They have good other racials, but Timeless is really the broken one, the one that makes them the no-questions-asked best race for nine out of eight builds. With 1.3 on the way, though, that might get fixed, but even then it's still probably going to be too powerful. There may not be the absolutely broken DW combo, but if you extend five buffs and cure five debuffs with a single instant, that's still crazy powerful.

Really, Timeless just needs a reasonable nerf. Donkatsu's joke suggestion doesn't actually seem like a bad place to start, though I feel it'd nerf it a bit too hard. I think a reasonable nerf would be this: Timeless affects 1-5 random buffs or debuffs, and extends buffs/shortens debuffs by 1-3 turns. In addition, it has a blacklist of real broken abilities, including but not limited to all prodigies and Unstoppable.

[cctobias]

More often than not "balancing" a game tends to make the game worse, usually resulting in more boring choices.

This is not a shared environment game, like an MMO, I think balancing stuff is a low priority. Its not like the various classes are at all comparable anyway.

I see people say this a lot. I think what they're missing is that for a lot of people, part of the fun comes from looking at a vast array of choices, and trying to figure out which would be the strongest. If that's a no-brainer, then, well, it's not very fun. It's debatable how many people this is, but given ToME's relative complexity, I would say that the number of people who want choices to be brain dead simple are probably not as high.

The specific case of Shaloren, by the way, is far from a no-brainer option. Not because they're not stronger than the other races by leaps and bounds, but because it's not obvious to new players. My evidence is the number of threads where the popular vote decided that Shaloren were too weak, and called for buffs, when they have actually been one of the strongest races for years.

I want to make it clear that I don't think that "balance" is a bad goal. I am just making a practical point that when I have seen RPG systems balanced it has often resulted in more boring things.

I agree that a large panopoly of interesting choices which you need to put some brain power into figuring out which fits what you want to do in an effective manner is part of the draw of a game like TOME4.

And to be clear a wildly out of balance game tends to be really boring as well, since by definition it means many choices are crap and can be disregarded.

The fact is that "balancing" things is hard and to some extent not entirely even possible, strictly speaking. I say not entirely possible in a strict sense because it is an imperfect science to assign some sort of equivalence function when comparing various effects, at what level are +movement speed equivalent to +damage? There is not really a good answer to this.

So what you see in games like MMOs since balance becomes essentially a "social" issue is they dumb down the game so that they CAN make these equivalence functions at least somewhat trackable.

In general I would prefer that games try to present a wide array of interesting choices and not worry so much about balance. Balance is important on that affects the former, but it is only important in a single player game in so far as it affects whether or not there are many choices and whether they are interesting.

You see many effects in MMOs simply denied existence because they are too hard to deal with, this makes them even more boring than they already are (because by and large MMOs are usually really badly made RPGs as well). This is what happens when balance becomes primary rather something that happens as a result of creating interesting choices. MMOs make balance primary because of social concerns, and this cause them to become more boring. But if you made a single player game where almost all (highly unlikely but a good goal) choices were interesting and fairly close in effectiveness there would be little concern about "balance". And conversely if only a few choices where actually close in effectiveness your game would have little replayability or interesting choices and it would suck.

Anyway what this boils down to is that coming at this from an idea of "balance" is a recent thing that has more to do with social concerns than anything else. Those of us who have played CRPGs since the beginning or there abouts, i.e. about 1982 for me, there has always been an idea that some skill or class was subpar in many games. It is almost always the case that a few things are just not that effective and the designers probably screwed up some. But this thing about "balance" is new, its some thing that came out due to social things. Its an MMO/MUD thing. Alot of it is concerns like why play a "druid" if I will be replaced by a "priest" whenever I try to group up even though a "druid" can do all content fine. Therefore "druid" and "priest" must be made to be mathematically the same to achieve "balance".

The idea of what is "better" of how to min/max this has always been around CRPGs. And that is fine, I like the exercise of min/maxing. But this idea of all "classes" or "builds", depending on system, all being required to perform essentially the same this is a new-ish thing, brought about by the social gaming things. Previous to this the answer to such a concern was more like "yeah I mean that is a nice ideal, but the two things play too different to make that a practical things so leave it as it is". In the MMO-era things have gone a different direction, if they cannot achieve roughly similar gameply in a very narrow set of metrics (DPS,HPS, mitigation etc) they will throw out gameplay things. This is bad.

We must understand that past a certain point "balance" is going to be done by eyeballing it not by metrics, although some things can be metricized. And that some things just won't fit. Or even that various classes are simply made by different devs who can't go through every single class and do a comparison. Thus as long as you are within a reasonable range of performance its better to allow some freedom in the types of effects rather than trying to get everything to line up performance-wise. This allows more creative and interesting things to crop up at the expense of a less regular and nice "balance".

In the end some kind of balance will necessarily happens. Its unavoidable. Its like natural law. It has to happen by definition. So "balance" is always a concern. Having a mania for making everything exactly equal though, this usually leads to really boring and simplistic game mechanics.

There is a reason most MMOs severely limit movement speeds, its because they have come realize they simply can't balance them well. So what has been the trend? Throw this out completely or nerf it to being a really boring effect. Now of course certain key MMOs don't do this, for example Asheron's Call, but by and large the trend, especially the EQ-lineage games is to severely limit and dumb down movement speed. Its simply too hard for them to get a handle on.

I would urge this is exactly backwards. Instead of removing things because you cannot quantify your "balance" function for it and make it perfect. You should instead realize perfect balance is not the be all end all and is actually more like chasing a unicorn. That removing interesting effects because you realize the problems is sticky is exactly the wrong answer. These things that are sticky are almost certainly some the MOST interesting things to have in the game.

Don't allow balance to instill in you a fear of powerful features. It is better to try to get something reasonable and fail but still have an interesting effect than to simply kill it. At least in a single player game.

None of this is meant to say that Timeless is not OP. Its pretty OP. And the idea of OP things has always existed in CRPGs and I think we all know that something that is too OP trivializes other parts of the game. But that should be the main concern. Not mythical unicorn chasing "balance". Does Timeless do this? I dunno, maybe, its pretty good. I am on the fence on whether it goes past the line. Is Shaloren the best race? Yes. But I don't play shaloren all the time. I don't even play them 50% of the time. So while it is clearly not "balanced" there are still many interesting choices. Although to be fair when I don't play shalore its often because I am playing cornac.

I don't want to say the various species couldn't have some work done on them. I am just saying that the idea of "balance" does not help much and has caused a lot of harm. Rather we should strive to not trivialize the panoply of choices. Some people will say this is the same thing. But go back to my movement speed in MMOs example above and they are not really the same.

Don't turn your game into a Kurt Vonnegut story.

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

[donkatsu]

See, in general, that is an intelligent point. One that especially holds true for MMOs, which I don't have much experience with, but also competitive eSports, which I do have experience with. But the culture is completely different here. ToME is far closer to the "trivialized choices" end of the spectrum than the "slavishly nixing potentially interesting mechanics in the name of our one true god, Balance" end of the spectrum. And it always has been. Maybe one day, years from now, it'll work its way up to the point where I'll go back and quote your sermon and say "Look, this is exactly what cctobias warned us about!" But for now, we have our Aegises. Our Unstoppables. Our Fast Metabolisms. We have people constantly making excuses for boring, OP things by saying that balance doesn't matter at all because it's not a competitive game, and that is not healthy or productive.

Even now, you can see that no one has suggested removing Timeless completely, or giving Timeless to every race, thus homogenizing builds and making the game less interesting, which is the danger you're warning against. ToME has never been dumbed down for the sake of balance and I doubt it ever will be.

[comrade raoul]

I feel like Timeless is a creative, mechanically nifty ability and too much fun to nerf. Echoing others, it is okay to trade balance for fun in a single-player game.

But other nerfs are reasonable. Shaloren don't need the crit ability, for instance: off-hand, it might be cool to swap it to Highers in exchange for Born Into Magic. And there's no reason why other races shouldn't be improved.

[pizdabol]

I myself don't mind "OP" things at all, It's just Timeless being unanimously superior to all other things that bothers me. I'd like to see other cool "OP" options, even if it's just a niche thing (i.e. only usable with that one class, that one build, whereas Timeless has numerous abusive applications). Though I guess that's bound to sooner or later come naturally with development (before it gets naturally struck by the nerf hammer).

Off the top of my head example: you can currently stack infinite plus Lightning damage via Static Net as long as you have the gems to keep Psi up (Stone Alchemy anyone?). Though that's a Class only "flaw" - things like Timeless might make it better, but are not a necessity. And it's still not nearly as reliable as Timeless, though potentially more powerful.

[HousePet]

Enemies also get racial talents, so its not as simple as saying its okay for the player to be unbalanced, because the npcs will also be unbalanced.

[Red]

Timeless is a poor example of that, because its main strength is synergistic, and to pull that off, you have to be smart. In the same way new players think Shalore is the worst, to enemies it is one of the worse races because they're too stupid to use it properly. Reckless Strikes, from Doombringers, is a better example of an NPC unbalanced ability, though that's unbalanced for rather seperate reasons.

Unless there comes a racial that is overpowered no matter how stupidly you play it, NPC balance isn't a major concern with it. A Yeek rare that has 10 levels in Quickened and a global speed of 200%, that's OP. If a Shalore rare has 10 levels in Timeless and pops it the instant it has a CD, status buff, or status debuff, that's potential OPness cancelled by NPC idiocy.

Whether or not enemies should be smarter is another discussion entirely, but for now they've the tactical skill of carrots.

[Atarlost]

I would be very sad to see MotE go away. I consider it probably the most interesting passive racial because it interacts with everything crit related and is useful to any class. I wouldn't mind seeing it move to Highers, but losing it entirely would be sad.