Stat/Armor potions

[sotora]

The problem is not the effect of these potions in and of themselves, it's how they interfere with and mask class abilities. If armor pots are mandatory to keep the meta going, then look at the Light armor class and whether it's performing appropriately, and tweak AoE effects (auras / covenants / prayers) approriately. Don't use the threat of short-term issues (which is very real, but will be dealt with) to justify doing nothing.

Sometimes you need a 2 or 3 stage balance pass. This is such an example.

I doubt many people here are against pot system change, me included. I am just of strong opinion that making them short duration&cooldown pots is very wrong direction and I haven't saw any arguments from OP or further posts that would convince me otherwise.

Let's see from practical point of view of those proposals:

30 s duration & 5 min cooldown - That is making people to stack those pots and place them near heal pots on ability bar to pop them along them when they are pushed/focused. So instead of drinking up to 2 pots when attacking /defending people will drink 4. It just increase amount of clicking and amount of grind to get all stose stacks in your inventroy rather than modifying gameplay in any interesting way.

Akalukz proposition - 30 s duration & 1 minute cooldown - well that is even more crazy than above. It is like attempt to make a situation in which people go through stacks of pots to be buffed for 50% of the time in competetive situations.


I think we need to ask ourselves such questions as:

1. Do we need pots in game?

2. What do we need them for?

3. What kind of pots will allow us to achieve this?

Rather than thinking what is exactly wrong with current pots lets think why potions as game mechanic should (or should not) be in game and what they should bring.

Maybe it is a change from armor/stat pots to utility pots, or maybe it is decrease in amount of stats with or without pots stacking with buffs/auras or maybe it is diffrent stats being buffed than currently, maybe we change how and with what they stack? Last but not least maybe we dont need pots at all?

Keeping armor/stat pots in game but making them short duration&cd seems like worst option by far of any changes I can think of in terms of potions.

Just my 2 cents. I will try to think of some proposals myself on the pots topic & will try to be active in discussion on other proposals.

[sabat80]

The Issue
Stat/armor potions are too effective in this game.

These stat/armor potions are must have's and have a affect on the overall balance of the game.

How something that everyone, literally everyone got unlimited access to is damaging balance? Pots are the simplest and easiest things to do, gather and manufacture on mass.

Every class can have a potion which increases their main dps stat, every class can have a defensive pot.

If you want to do any changes allow 1 pot only - risk vs reward -> or I increase my offensive stat or my defensive but personally I do not have any issue with the pots at all - its not an armour or genesis set which takes time to get - it is a pot which is available as soon you hit certain rank.

PS.

Talismans are also very effective... I can put up to 8 talismans into my gear and they are also must have

[Penril]

@Raelag, let me put it in other words: Balance changes are not made with solo/1v1 in mind, according to the Balance Forum rules.

[saupreusse]

The Issue
Stat/armor potions are too effective in this game.

These stat/armor potions are must have's and have a affect on the overall balance of the game.

How something that everyone, literally everyone got unlimited access to is damaging balance? Pots are the simplest and easiest things to do, gather and manufacture on mass.

Every class can have a potion which increases their main dps stat, every class can have a defensive pot.

If you want to do any changes allow 1 pot only - risk vs reward -> or I increase my offensive stat or my defensive but personally I do not have any issue with the pots at all - its not an armour or genesis set which takes time to get - it is a pot which is available as soon you hit certain rank.

The main problem is that because of pots a lot of class abilities are useless. IB armor buff is weaker than an armor pot > IB ability is useless.

[Vicera]

I feel solution 3 would be the same as solution 1, in PvP you can not drink a potion every 30s, even the 5 min ones we have now are (for what i can see) not used a lot.
Another side effect would be to put a lot of stress over potions makers, it sure would depend on the size of the guild but that would require at least a stack of potions per characters and per evening.

Won't it be better to nerf potion so they are less powerfull than abilities? So let's say armor potion being 500 ish and stat to a little less than whatever abalities give.
This way when you don't have enought people to line every class then you can fallback on a lesser bonus via potion.

The thing is anyway some abilities will stay useless as only the max from any ability will be added and not a sum of them. If you have an IB and a WP then you have a duplicate as they both have some way to buff armor. I may be wrong but I think that there always will be some abilities that are useless, due mostly to the fact that there is more than one way to aquire a distinct buff in the first place.

[Gachimuchi]

Spoiler:

People who put in the extra time to do something should be rewarded... as is every MMORPG. All of the solutions presented in OP might as well just remove stat/armor potions from the game. Nerfing potions in such a manner would relegate it to only making heal/pots AP pots. Nobody is going to bother using a 30s duration potion that will provide a buff already covered by classes in your group.

As other have said, it will just place further emphasis on group compositions that do have access to those buffs and groups without will be at a severe disadvantage. If the core issue is that they render some basic buffs provided by classes useless then either
1. Make them stack(kinda like saupreusses idea)
or
2. Change the effect

If a nerf like one suggested in OP did actually go through, there's really no reason not to nerf the effectiveness of talismans as well. The devs have said they want to implement a crafting system for gear(seems kind of silly to me since its such a stark divergence from how the game originally was) so can't have one trade discipline being much more useful than the other. But it seems to me OP just doesn't want to put in the effort to get potions and wants to level the playing field in his favor.

Edit: Both realms have access to potions -> they cannot be 'too effective'.

Don't ignore the issue stated in the OP. If you think there is no issue, explain why. "I think you don't want to put effort in getting potions" is not a valid argument - Penril.

[Stortz]

I agree that the system has its flaws, and a lot of potions mask a lot of abilities in a way that they become obsolete.
And i have an additional suggestion: Make all stat/armor potions increase the characters attributes not by a fixed amount, but use a percental value for the calulation: this way, a SW cant get as much strength out of it as a choppa, or a DOK cant get as much armor as a tank.

so change absolute values to percentages

armor pots would work on tanks to a good extent
medium armor + pot if stacked with talismans would have a big impact
that way you can complement a stack, plus you can work your build differently, with a monetary cost behind it

[zumos2]

I think the problem raised by the OP consists of two parts. 1) Pots influence how specs are made and or more or less part of the spec. 2) Pots mask or counteract abilities from classes.

Starting with point 1 as I heavily disagree here. I believe pots and possibly also liniments are part of specs and there is nothing wrong with that. Stats potions gives you more options to tweak your spec in terms of stats. This together with choice of gear, talismans and renown trainer gives you the ability to influence your stats in any way you like. There is no argument given for why it is wrong to be able to influence all this and I’m afraid that I guess this is more of personal preference than something you can objectively say is good or bad. I like to be able to have as much influence and choice as possible to get an as optimal spec as possible.

What you can talk about being good or bad is the fact that many buffs of classes are masked by potions. There is no denying that this is true. As someone playing a lot of tanks I personally do not necessarily view this is negative to me in a way I would have more fun if it wasn’t the case. Generally not having to use the buff abilities means I can use more superior abilities in terms of damage. That being said, I do understand that the buff abilities being useless is not how it is supposed to work. I think it is easy to blame potions only, but I believe to solve this we need a combination of changes in terms of potions, but also in terms of these buff abilities. In that sense a thread only talking about changes to potions is doomed to fail in a sense that it is a too narrow view and will result into a narrow solution.

Solution 1 is right out bad, putting up a big massive middle finger against anyone doing apothecary. This comes from the view of pots that should not be able to influence a spec. As I’ve said there is no reasoning why that would be bad and if anyone argues that it is bad, please explain to me why renown trainer should be able to influence your spec, why talismans should be able to influence your spec, etc …

Solution 2 makes sense in the way that you remove the fact that potions mask buffs, but you reduce the power of potions enormously making them practically useless. I think it is a too simple solution and still a small middle finger to our apothecary friends.

Solution 3 introduces more long cooldowns into the game which I think would be negative. I already have issues with renown abilities like Resolute Defense and Cleansing Winds. The same would be true for making strong temporary effects on potions with long cooldowns. Giving everyone several “get out of jail for free” cards reduces skill so much. “Whoops, I **** up my positioning … Let’s pop Resolute Defense winds”. “**** my healers failed to cleanse … Lets pop Cleansing Winds”. Adding even more of these “whoopsy” skills/pots into the game would be very bad imo. (btw same could be said for current healing pots)

Now not everything is perfect in terms of stat potions. In my eyes two problems are there: 1) there is no incentive to not use armor potions. 2) Abilities are still masked by potions.

For me the solution lies in making potions have more unique attributes and possibly bringing in (nerfed) versions of liniments. What is nice about liniments is that they give bonuses like magic/ranged/melee power which buffs are not masked by. Same goes for crit chance increase/decrease etc. By having liniments give unique bonuses in a balanced way (balanced against each other), you make using those + buffs from classes the best option to go for. In addition, especially single target buffs could be increased. That has to be looked upon for every individual class what would make sense, also in the light of the current strength of the class. I think there is a lot of freedom to make a lot of different potions that do not interfere with classes, but are useful buffs.

Next is the problem of armor potions being in 100% of the cases the to go for defensive pot. I think it would be interesting the make the resistances pot stack and possibly make them give 2 resistances in either equal amounts or a ratio of like 2:1. Because just having a Knight/Chosen (and to a lesser degree AM/shaman and even lesser degree RP/ZL) there is no reason to use a resistance pot. Actually having the option to go for resistances against certain groups I think would benefit the game, though increasing overall defensive of every group. A slight nerf in the resistances buffs of Knight and Chosen (and possibly AM/Shammy/ZL/RP) could be a way to tweak it back, but by no means the only way.

Single target abilities that provide armor could be buffed above the pot amount and I would suggest removing the AoE armor buffs from DoK/WP because I feel like whatever you do, they will become the problem. If you remove pots all together, everyone is just gonna run the armor buff from WP/DoK so all you have achieved is lowering damage of groups because WP/DoK cannot run dps proc. If you keep armor pots in any way, shape or form the AoE armor buff becomes useless.

Another interesting idea would be to make armor and resistance pots stack and be based around a percentage of your current armor/resistances (from Saupreusse). In addition to this every armor and resistance buff should be nerfed to a balanced amount. I would say that sounds like a good alternative.

[Raelag]

Well then why not enter the top pots 5% crt 60 Wunds. Make it ofensiv and defensive like on live. and everyone will be sure to use them. And buffs Ib will be needed and other class too and agriculture and herbalist alsowill be happy)

[geraldtarrant]

Spoiler:

it seems to me OP just doesn't want to put in the effort to get potions and wants to level the playing field in his favor.

My toughts exactly.

Tbh i see totally no reason to alter/remove pots from game. As it was said they can be used not only for pure buff of main stat but as well for supporting alternative spec/playstyle. Decreasing duration is worst idea ever , it promotes grind and favourises one crafting discipline way over others. Idea with changing their effect to %value instead of standard stat increase will promote classes stacking only one stat over the others.
Imo pot system doesnt need any changes atm.

Did you just quote a moderated post to basically say "+1"? Read the forum rules - Penril