Median XL 2016 Announced

As always thank you for the development updates Marco - tbh an interesting wall of text can be better than a picture in my opinion. Anyway, making the passive easier to activate is definitely better than buffing individual spells. That being said I also feel like increasing Bacchanalia's activation threshold, for example to 2/3, is a more elegant solution rather than allowing the character to reach 40k hp.

So Food is right, but not for the reasons he gave. There are two problems with allowing the blood zon's life to overflow.

1) The life available to the amazon who wants to enable her passive. If you play by getting ~30k hp for example, then focus on dmg, an active Bacchanalia gives you 20k effective hp pool. If you play by overflowing your HP then you have a 32.7k + effective hp pool.

2) Allowing life to overflow dumbs down the playstyle of the build. The reason for this is that it is harder to keep your current life at a set fraction of your max, than at max. You have to cast Balefire and get just enough life after each kill that will enable you to stay as close to 2/3 of your total life pool as possible. The closer you are to two thirds, without going over, the better you are at playing the build.

On the other hand, by playing the life overflow strat you essentially remove this gameplay mechanic. You don't have to manage your life after each kill stat based on your max hp pool - you just get as much of it as possible. Not to mention that if you overflow and are close to the 32.7k threshold it would be optimal to stop using Balefire all together. Only after you have a decent buffer above the overflow value, for example having 40k hp, can you start efficiently using Balefire again without risking losing the passive bonuses.

Thus I don't see the merit of increasing Bacchanalia max life bonuses and enabling the overflow playstyle. Because if it is in the game, then after the character reaches 120 we might as well rewrite the text on the passive to: "Blood magic - when you overflow your life". The overflow playstyle is clearly superior to "keeping the life under some fraction X" playstyle.

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Mana cost increases could be an interesting way to give powerful abilities downsides. This one is hard to analyse without playing the game, so I am looking forward to seeing how it works out in practice.

a balance pass for skills was sorely needed, 2016 patch is definitely going in the right direction

I guess the plan is to also do a balance pass on items? there's billions of SUs and most of them are useless :wall:

I think this mod keeps getting sicker and sicker, pushing the envelope and exceeding boundaries we didn't even think we're possible. I think we should let Marco do what he has to do before we theory craft on how his ideas might not work. Let's wait for early stage testing before we judge.

suchbalance wrote:As always thank you for the development updates Marco - tbh an interesting wall of text can be better than a picture in my opinion. Anyway, making the passive easier to activate is definitely better than buffing individual spells. That being said I also feel like increasing Bacchanalia's activation threshold, for example to 2/3, is a more elegant solution rather than allowing the character to reach 40k hp.

So Food is right, but not for the reasons he gave. There are two problems with allowing the blood zon's life to overflow.

1) The life available to the amazon who wants to enable her passive. If you play by getting ~30k hp for example, then focus on dmg, an active Bacchanalia gives you 20k effective hp pool. If you play by overflowing your HP then you have a 32.7k + effective hp pool.

2) Allowing life to overflow dumbs down the playstyle of the build. The reason for this is that it is harder to keep your current life at a set fraction of your max, than at max. You have to cast Balefire and get just enough life after each kill that will enable you to stay as close to 2/3 of your total life pool as possible. The closer you are to two thirds, without going over, the better you are at playing the build.

On the other hand, by playing the life overflow strat you essentially remove this gameplay mechanic. You don't have to manage your life after each kill stat based on your max hp pool - you just get as much of it as possible. Not to mention that if you overflow and are close to the 32.7k threshold it would be optimal to stop using Balefire all together. Only after you have a decent buffer above the overflow value, for example having 40k hp, can you start efficiently using Balefire again without risking losing the passive bonuses.

Thus I don't see the merit of increasing Bacchanalia max life bonuses and enabling the overflow playstyle. Because if it is in the game, then after the character reaches 120 we might as well rewrite the text on the passive to: "Blood magic - when you overflow your life". The overflow playstyle is clearly superior to "keeping the life under some fraction X" playstyle.

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Mana cost increases could be an interesting way to give powerful abilities downsides. This one is hard to analyse without playing the game, so I am looking forward to seeing how it works out in practice.

Solid point ! i guess i was way too hyped after i read the proposed fix. Also buffing the % life too much wouldnt be in the consensus of reducing the overall numbers of the mod. The solution just sounded so out of the box that i initially liked it.

suchbalance wrote:Thus I don't see the merit of increasing Bacchanalia max life bonuses and enabling the overflow playstyle. Because if it is in the game, then after the character reaches 120 we might as well rewrite the text on the passive to: "Blood magic - when you overflow your life". The overflow playstyle is clearly superior to "keeping the life under some fraction X" playstyle.

Ok, there is a misunderstanding here. The overflowing is not a "solution", it's just a unintended side-effect, not something that is being added intentionally. Let's be clear here:

1) Going over 32k health, considering the weakened charms, will be very, very tricky. I'm thinking full investment into vitality and paragon will be required to achieve this. I know my post might have sounded like "new meta bloodzon", but reality is, the standard bloodzon will not reach 32k health.

2) I don't quite agree with your statement that rolling over life cap "removes this gameplay mechanic". Actually it does exactly the opposite in my eyes. Currently no one plays the build, so we can't say the mechanic is here at all. However, the rolling over will give people something to look forward to, and it will promote playing this build. So yes, rolling over health will eventually nullify this mechanic, but to get there, enough dedication and time playing the build will be required. Leads me next point..

3) In median, all builds get 'dumbed down' when strong enough. In fact, this speaks well about the build. Builds that don't get dumbed down are slow by nature (because they require some skill combination to work - see Batstrike for example) and thus are unattractive. Fact is, ama wdm builds are way over the top - rainbow bowzon, tanky javazon, superfast spearzon. Enabling bloodzon to go super-saiyan is the only way to make the build competitive in the end, even if it requires the build to become dumbed down.

And this has always been a problem in median, I've seen it forever. Some builds have a punishing nature and don't provide something in exchange. Sure, they are cool to play and mess around if you know what it's about. But someone who is new to the mod and goes play a batsin, bloodzon, deva king paladin, or any build that is not "straight forward" will end in frustration. Cool game mechanics are always nice to have but if they don't play out in the userbase as they are supposed to, they don't really add anything to the mod.

Uhmmm, sorry to maybe, pop a bubble here, but I'm going to clarify something here. The life overflow is client-only. Skills (other than description and graphics) are handled server-side only. In other words, the server sees your full life even if your client displays 42 remaining life, and the skill on the server will take the server full value into account to make it's calculations.

So all in all, all this does is making the LCS an even worse liar.

Unless bachannalia formula checks for health over 32k. :mrgreen:

Marco wrote:Unless bachannalia formula checks for health over 32k.

Well, in that case that works of course. But the way you were talking you seemed to suggest it worked from the life overflowing, effectively putting you under the 1/3 threshold on the client. Although wouldn't that cause mistakes in the displays? (unless the skill desc is coded differently from the skill's calcs I guess)

Not necessarily, you just add a check to the calc to check if over 32k health OR under 1/3 and return the buff if one of the conditions is met

Okay yeah, gotcha now. But like I said, you seemed to count on the fact overflowing your life effectively activated the 1/3 threshold. But what you're really doing in reality here, is giving extra benefit to amazons that put massive investment into vitality (allowing them to get the 1/3 bonus at full life).