Don't forget magic. It's also magic.teiloh wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 9:26 pm
When these topics are brought up, we often hear "the realms aren't the same", "it's a good thematic fit", "that's how it was in the cinematic" - yet this doesn't seem to apply to universally. For example, "the realms aren't the same" except when mirroring Pounce and Ranged KD to the Squig Herder, or say giving BW Knockdown on Flame Breath (like in the cinematic).
I hope we can nail down consistent metrics for balance work in the future, so fewer of us are just shooting in the dark.
You're doing a great job on illustrating why it's pointless to try and engage in balance conversations with the playerbase at large, and why we keep those discussions internal among a small group of people who aren't biased to one realm or the other. Clearly you have a bias in favor of Order, and that's fine. I very much support people who want to pick a side and stick to it when they're trying to maximize enjoyment and immersion. It's a bad basis to try and participate in balance discussions from, internally we don't do that. You've already made up your mind about this ability, that much is clear. There's no answer that you're going to accept, so there isn't any reason to give you one.
Here it is anyway; Run Away was already core to the class and no matter which primary spec you were using (aside from running ABM as it requires a pet active), it was worth using the last couple of mastery points to pick up. However it's not much of a shooty skill, and since the spec is focused on quick bow attacksa different ability oriented around actual shooty bow stuff would also fit there. There's only so many things you can jam into a mastery tree, we've tried. Would it make much of a functional difference to most specs if it was dropped to a core skill? No. What it did allow for was shuffling a few skills around the mastery trees so FEO could provide a finisher to the BS tree, and put RTA into the QS tree. The move wasn't so much focused on how many renown points RA theoretically used on some vague scale, but the actual functional use of the skill and where it made sense for the class. You might also note we've put a lot more emphasis on using your squigs, something RA also requires, because we're secretly planning on fixing all of the pet issues and getting rid of any loner specs. Shh, don't tell anyone.
I know it's really easy to pull in a dozen factors and try to make blanket comparisons to a dozen other factors and come out of it just more angry. Balance is not balance this class vs that class, it's balancing this class first. Is this class working well, is this class doing its job, does this class fulfill a power fantasy, is this class thematic and true to lore? We take lots of liberties to do so, even if it's just for the sake of changing something, we're going to do that too. Stale balance metas kill competitive games. We've been making changes for 5 years or so already, no sense stopping now. We are entering week 2 of a major rework for rSH (primarily), it's still early, we still have plenty to evaluate and feedback to collect. If you want to spend that time making a nuisance of yourself and causing a stink, this will probably be the last time you get a detailed response.
So provide feedback, don't waste your time setting a logic trap that we're just going to "lol magic obviously" our way out of. If you're looking for hard rules that your incredibly logical and clearly unbiased mind can grasp and create gotchas out of, we're not playing that kind of game on the forums.