Slime Squisher
Posts: 365
Joined: Monday, 7th January 2013, 08:22
My final thoughts on WJC, and moving on.
Yesterday, a couple changes were made to the god that I have strongly argued against. Whether this makes the god altogether better or worse, I have to admit I'm not experienced enough to say. What I can do is point out at the end of this post the potential issues I perceive with those changes (since I've tried variations of these in the past) and hope that, in case these predictions come true, they can be solved somewhat scientifically.
My real reasons to withdraw are that I've found working on a feature like this to be extremely time consuming. Those who saw the commit count of my initial PR will tell you that I've easily put between one and two hundred hours in tweaking and redesigning the god since its initial inception. Since the god made it to trunk, that time has transformed in time spent discussing it, which is exhausting in a different way. While I don't mind any of this, my wake up call came yesterday when I realized that changes had been made without me realizing at all (I was checking !messages in ##crawl-dev every day since I live on a different timezone, and nobody sent me a ping before this patch). Again, I'm not trying to express anger at the devs for not "respecting my design", which would be a shit attitude to have, but realizing that no matter how much time I spend, and how strongly I argue, I don't have control over the idea anymore, and on the flipside no responsibility for watching over it with the same degree of involvement. If I had been asked before these changes were made, maybe I would've felt compelled to remain in the conversation, but at the moment I don't feel like I can keep up, especially when I'm asleep through most of the live discussion. I wish I could, because it's a lot of fun to discuss the design with the devs and to gather feedback from Webtiles!
I've always admitted that I'm not a very experienced crawl player. The only reason why I could be of value in these conversations lately is because I have a disproportionate amount of experience with WJC in particular, for obvious reasons. This means that even though my mechanical knowledge is lacking, I have seen dozens of variations of the god mechanics fail in funny (and enlightening ways). However, as the design moves away from the original, my advantage is going to disappear, since I'm going to be as inexperienced with the new mechanics as everyone else, and my input will become less valuable. This is another reason why I'm going to let go of it.
So as a last point, I'm going to at least leave my prediction of what issues the new mechanics are going to cause, and hopefully some pointers that will help fix them in the future.
With the current changes to the way martial attacks work, the dependency between the three has been broken. Before, the efficiency of lunge was a consequence of having used the other two. Now there's no such dependency, so the optimal way to play the god will degenerate to retreating until lunge is available, or failing that, constant swapping with a summon to apply the damage bonus from lunge repeteadly. The god will now be optimal in corridors. I have seen this happen in two or three iterations of the god. The natural consequence will be to nerf the Lunge damage bonus, but this will not help. Without a dependency between the moves, for any given game lunge will either be optimal, and degenerate in the ways I explained, or not be worth it at all, in which case players will completely forgo lunge and instead wait and tab, which is tactically superior. I believe it is essential for lunge to depend on the other two moves and I've expressed it multiple times, so I'm planting this flag early so that, in case these issues manifest (and I hope I'm wrong) this can serve as a starting point.
Without the defensive use of wall jump, it is not justifiable to use any of the two AoE attacks (whirlwind and wall jump) against multiple enemies except by high mitigation characters. Low HP/AC characters will have no incentive to attack in AoE without a sufficiently strong escape tool. This is going to compound the previous issue making worshippers stick to corridors again. This restriction to wall jump is going to make the god significantly less fun and I'm certain we're going to see that reflected in the immediate feedback. Just a sample from a SA post:
Wu Jian is definitely the most fun god in the entire game, holy shit. It was looking for a while like 0.20 might be mostly a sidegrade compared to 0.19 but now I can kite hydras with a polearm by kickflipping off walls
I'm not being controversial if I say these posts will stop coming up, because they are mostly due to defensive wall jump. How much that weights compared to game balance is not my decision to make.
By making wall jump unusable as an escape tool, Serpent's Lash is hurt indirectly, since most creative uses of it go out of the window. A few players were starting to pick up on the advanced ways to use it as an escape, which often involved moving towards enemies first. With these changes, Serpent's Lash will strictly be saved to walk away, and no good player will ever use it together with martial attacks. With wall jump gone, Serpent's Lash is best saved as a way to gain those extra two tiles towards the stairs. Altogether, these new changes will make the player use the kit less as the danger increases.
In case these predictions manifest, here's how I think the god should have evolved instead: The damaging parts of whirlwind and wall jump would be reduced (if necessary, to the extreme of taking whirlwind damage down to 70% and removing the damage part of wall jump altogether). The AUT expenditure on wall jump would be increased, and a conduct added to reduce the efficiency of high mitigation, either through noise associated to encumbrance level, or a drop in AC and SH. This would reduce tedium by making tab viable for easy fights while augmenting the connection between the moves, forcing the player to be creative with the kit to survive.
Now, you can debate any of the points I brought up, but I won't reply. This isn't meant to start a discussion, I already did with the "Balancing the Council God" thread. This is just a summary of my thoughts, on what I personally believe will happen, and only time and player feedback will be able to prove that. I know (and I'm not saying it ironically) that I'm leaving the god's future in good hands, but in case the problems I discussed appear, I hope someone in the dev team will remember this post and consider that I am saying this not out of a desire to protect "my baby", because I've never been like that, but because I have direct experience in seeing variations of this new design fail.
I hope I'm wrong, and in any case enjoy WJC!
- For this message the author Steel Neuron has received thanks: 6
- bananaken, Brannock, Heia, NhorianScum, Wolfechu, Xenobreeder