mathematically speaking we do have a balance problem

[billyk]

I've won city with pugs before, by your logic pugging is fine.
You really need to realize that isolated cases are not the norm.

[Sulorie]

I've won city with pugs before, by your logic pugging is fine.
You really need to realize that isolated cases are not the norm.

No, it just means that pugging has a higher chance of losing.
Look at a smaller scale e.g. scenario.
You will have player A topping the charts and player B with same class and similar rank and gear performing worse for multiple reasons.
Now zoom out and look at wb vs wb fights e.g. city siege.
The warband with more B players will lose, even if it is build with class balance in mind like proper 2-2-2.

[martholomew]

Everyone keeps dancing around the fact that Destro characters just look better/cooler/more rugged and badass and appeal more to the general pool of players. And that's pretty much all there is to it. It's what destroyed live, in my opinion, and it's what this iteration is gonna be going forward, though hopefully it won't die out.

I CERTAINLY don't think the Devs have this hidden "hey lets **** all over order" agenda. That's silly.

[Earthcake]

Everyone keeps dancing around the fact that Destro characters just look better/cooler/more rugged and badass and appeal more to the general pool of players. And that's pretty much all there is to it. It's what destroyed live, in my opinion, and it's what this iteration is gonna be going forward, though hopefully it won't die out.

I CERTAINLY don't think the Devs have this hidden "hey lets **** all over order" agenda. That's silly.

I don't think that's the problem.
Everytime a class is buffed, it's played by A TON of people, and they immediatly stop playing that class as soon as it's nerfed to a more reasonable state.

Make a class stronger and more people will play it, period.

[Sundowner]

Everyone keeps dancing around the fact that Destro characters just look better/cooler/more rugged and badass and appeal more to the general pool of players. And that's pretty much all there is to it. It's what destroyed live, in my opinion, and it's what this iteration is gonna be going forward, though hopefully it won't die out.

I CERTAINLY don't think the Devs have this hidden "hey lets **** all over order" agenda. That's silly.

Of course devs don't have that agenda. Balance is fluid, metas change. Posts like this exist to pin-point where issues might occur so devs can test and assess them and if necessary make changes.

[Noslock]

our guild+ally (23man coz crash yay) vs PNP (one of the best Destro warband guilds) in Altdorf yesterday


I find Slayer a boring class to play but its absurdly strong as it is now, IMO (the things we do for our royal grind...).
Also our setup was missing a WH/ASW and 1 RP and 1 AM and 2h knight, so we might have done better with better comp.

Order is anything but weak, when played with good team+setup. If anything, top tier Destro setups will have hard time competing against a top tier Order setup.

I dont see any dps in their setup but probably cause they got oneshotted too easily

[Opethian]

I think we all know that the black orc / chosen M4 spam is not balanced in its current state and I think the Devs know it as well and I fully expect it's going to get nerfed. Its use is certainly proliferating to very, very common use. During the city I was in last night for example, against a combination of P&P and FMJ, tank M4 was popped somewhere in the region of 50-60+ times.

When each black orc or chosen can self-pump to m4 in 40 seconds versus 3 minutes for non-pump classes and pop an m4 every minute with an 8 tank set up you could fully protect a warband with -75% damage for 20 seconds in every minute (one third of the time). It definitely feels a bit off. In the best fights, which I feel are enjoyable brawls amongst good competition, it can take time to get your side into a killing position. If this is entirely blunted by the ready use of Immaculate Defence on demand, I feel it leads the game into unbalanced territory.

The usual response is to morale drain, of course, and you would be right. This depends on the Shadow Warriors or Witch Hunters hitting with their drains and of course if it's blocked it just adds to the pump because they're not undefendable. The alternative is to have an Archmage do almost nothing but pump a Knight to Solar Flare, but this requires the Knight to spec into it (which I imagine they would anyway, but the point is a build choice has to be made to defeat something that Destro have by default), ther Archmage to be left alone (which will never happen) and Solar Flare only hits 9 targets.

No-one wants to lose their toys and I get that, I wouldn't want to either, but it'd be nice for the field to be a little more level.

[Bobbiom]

I think we all know that the black orc / chosen M4 spam is not balanced in its current state and I think the Devs know it as well and I fully expect it's going to get nerfed. Its use is certainly proliferating to very, very common use. During the city I was in last night for example, against a combination of P&P and FMJ, tank M4 was popped somewhere in the region of 50-60+ times.

When each black orc or chosen can self-pump to m4 in 40 seconds versus 3 minutes for non-pump classes and pop an m4 every minute with an 8 tank set up you could fully protect a warband with -75% damage for 20 seconds in every minute (one third of the time). It definitely feels a bit off. In the best fights, which I feel are enjoyable brawls amongst good competition, it can take time to get your side into a killing position. If this is entirely blunted by the ready use of Immaculate Defence on demand, I feel it leads the game into unbalanced territory.

The usual response is to morale drain, of course, and you would be right. This depends on the Shadow Warriors or Witch Hunters hitting with their drains and of course if it's blocked it just adds to the pump because they're not undefendable. The alternative is to have an Archmage do almost nothing but pump a Knight to Solar Flare, but this requires the Knight to spec into it (which I imagine they would anyway, but the point is a build choice has to be made to defeat something that Destro have by default), ther Archmage to be left alone (which will never happen) and Solar Flare only hits 9 targets.

No-one wants to lose their toys and I get that, I wouldn't want to either, but it'd be nice for the field to be a little more level.

I will argue that The present m2 Distracting Bellow is superior to use in wb vs wb.
The simple reason is that m2 bellow covers your whole warband in a 50% damage reduction taken from the enemies, assuming it debuffs all or the majority of enemy dps.
Even though m4 Immaculate defense with its 75% DR is good, it only covers 1 party of the warband.
Six tanks can take turns using bellow to maintain a 100% uptime of bellows, on paper having 60s of Distracting bellow is vastly better than 20s of m4 ID.

[Skullgrin]

How many variations of this thread could there be?

Well, there have consistently been threads like this for the past 5 years. So if the server stays up for another 20 years, I'm guessing 25 years worth of them. Y'know, mathematically speaking.

[emiliorv]

I think we all know that the black orc / chosen M4 spam is not balanced in its current state and I think the Devs know it as well and I fully expect it's going to get nerfed. Its use is certainly proliferating to very, very common use. During the city I was in last night for example, against a combination of P&P and FMJ, tank M4 was popped somewhere in the region of 50-60+ times.

When each black orc or chosen can self-pump to m4 in 40 seconds versus 3 minutes for non-pump classes and pop an m4 every minute with an 8 tank set up you could fully protect a warband with -75% damage for 20 seconds in every minute (one third of the time). It definitely feels a bit off. In the best fights, which I feel are enjoyable brawls amongst good competition, it can take time to get your side into a killing position. If this is entirely blunted by the ready use of Immaculate Defence on demand, I feel it leads the game into unbalanced territory.

The usual response is to morale drain, of course, and you would be right. This depends on the Shadow Warriors or Witch Hunters hitting with their drains and of course if it's blocked it just adds to the pump because they're not undefendable. The alternative is to have an Archmage do almost nothing but pump a Knight to Solar Flare, but this requires the Knight to spec into it (which I imagine they would anyway, but the point is a build choice has to be made to defeat something that Destro have by default), ther Archmage to be left alone (which will never happen) and Solar Flare only hits 9 targets.

No-one wants to lose their toys and I get that, I wouldn't want to either, but it'd be nice for the field to be a little more level.

I will argue that The present m2 Distracting Bellow is superior to use in wb vs wb.
The simple reason is that m2 bellow covers your whole warband in a 50% damage reduction taken from the enemies, assuming it debuffs all or the majority of enemy dps.
Even though m4 Immaculate defense with its 75% DR is good, it only covers 1 party of the warband.
Six tanks can take turns using bellow to maintain a 100% uptime of bellows, on paper having 60s of Distracting bellow is vastly better than 20s of m4 ID.

Totally this => rotating DBs is a perma -50% dps on enemy blob...PERMA-50% on enemy dps blob is better than -75% inc dmg reduction 33% uptime

Question: its balanced that 1 dps have access to 33% uptime undefendable dmg?? 33% of time destro tanks are nothing to 1 order dps...maybe that 33% uptime M4 is to deal with it...