Fixing boring unbalanced scenarios

[th3gatekeeper]

Now that we are referencing neverwinter online. How hard would it be to add a "Damage taken" to the SC scoreboard? As it stands, healers get to be like BRO YOU SEE THOSE HEELZ, DPS get to brag about DB's and Damage, but tanks are like... hey, hey dude, you remember that one time I *gets cut off by slayer yelling about how he is number one DPS*
.

Best solution here would be a "guard damage" taken. Basically its the amount of damage you saved a teammate from taking.

This would be a cool metric and probably create increased QOL for people as tanks would have a "metric" in which they can see their impact in the end.

Also might get less tanks wanting to DPS and more of them realizing guard > all.

[footpatrol2]

(Opinion)
I think the scoreboard is destructive. People focus on how much damage they deal or how much they can heal.

The best scoreboard looks like this in my opinion. Very little damage. Very little healing. A stupid amount of Death blows.

How much damage you deal and how much you heal is (Opinion) meaningless and just shows how uncoordinated or unorganized the teams are in the SC. By having that scoreboard it lets players think they did good when in (my opinion) they did not.

Damage done and healing done should in my opinion should be taken away and just Deathblows and maybe add points earned by SC objectives.

Having a metric for guard damage would be nice thou. But the point of Guard is you parry/block most of the damage so you don't actually see the damage taken. Maybe a metric on incoming damage prior to a parry/block? Maybe a different metric on how many attacks were actually avoided by parry/block/disrupt/dodge? This as the poster said above me would at least get players thinking on guarding.

[Idrinth]

I don't think that objectives will solve the main issue with scs, just because there is a very limited amount of scs you need to gear up - afterwards wins are not really needed.
I would love to have scenario statistics here on the website btw, like: top 10 players quened with, damage prevented, damage taken, damage done, kills(not deathblows), heal, rezzes - would be a nice addition to the Armory.

But back to the topic, we all seem to agree, that the main reason of spawncamps is people being overrun too fast. I see a few options there:
- increase the time to die by a bit(Wounds x10 to Wounds x11 for health maybe?)
- decrease the gear differences by a lot
- give individual incentives to play classes that are lacking(small gold, renown, xp boost?)

This would at least help equaling out the power differences between sides a bit - if people feel as if they can kill someone they usually retry and surviving a bit longer might help as much as having less of a claim of "overpowered gear".
Would you see another option of equaling out the chances beforehand, Penril?

I am by the way not a fan of solo-queues, it is an easy way out of working together and learning more than the most damaging ability the current chracter has.

[footpatrol2]

I said this before and a dev yelled at me about it and the idea got shut down quicklly. There really shouldn't be a massive gear divide in a pvp centric game. Aesthetic's should dominate not actual stats. If there is a divide it should be small and easily attainable quickly.

When you stack up gear + coordination + group composition + Player skill level vs pug its basically just two different games. imo this game wasn't suppose to be for the faint of heart nor its main focus be about pug's.

Opinion (suggestion)
Make SC's about Locking zones like they used to be or Straight get rid of SC's. Or only open specific SC's after a zone was locked so you have a limited window to participate with some type of carrot attached. Making SC's about gear thou... creates a problem.

Game should be about bragging rights and cool lookin stuff not stats specifically.

The Time to kill (TTK) or Time to Death (TTD) in this game is about right. If you have a good well oiled premade vs another its almost impossible to kill each other. The real problem is unbalanced groups AND tanks that don't use guard or know how to reduce damage and work off each other. Guard is a fundamental part of the game that depends on a player to understand how valuable it is and its completely unrewarded.

(guess)
Players that die a lot probably make tanks thinking, hey i'll just dps as a tank and survive longer without guarding anyone or even realizing how important guard is. The Guard mechanic is a selfless act thats negative to you as a player. If your playing pug style why should you guard?

I'll passively watch tanks past level 10 in sc's/anywhere and almost never do they stay next to their guarded target. Half don't even guard anyone. Extremely few can switch guard correctly. Most are challenge shouting healers. I mean its a Hot Mess man.

[freshour]

Yeah I get that it isn't about stats. And that removing the scoreboard or certain things from it is a big big issue that would probably have to be voted on and I doubt the staff would want to remove it from SC's as a lotta people use it gauge things like oh I swapped this build up and have the same comp, oh I did this amount of healing and such. Idk sure its not the best way, but sometimes you can evaluate quite a few things from the scoreboard for instance playstyles. Why did so and so get so many KB's with such low damage? you ask him. Find out.

I only mentioned the tank thing because when the match is over. DPS says ohhh check that out. Healers say ohhhhh call me JESUS BABY!!! But tanks are like... Hi...

Incoming damage, or damage mitigated, or damage parried idk... something like that to give tanks a reason to want to be tanks. You'd have to be blind to think DPS AM's don't go straight the to scoreboard to justify themselves lol. I mean imagine if tanks were bragging about damage intercepted or mitigated. It'd give tanks something to talk about... I'd even go as far to say that people would to want to intercept more damage if it had some visual on the scoreboard.

Is that wrong? Idk.... Would it get more tanks tanking? I'd like to think so. I sure as heck no playing on my IB was pretty boring as the game got over... and I was like cool.... lets see what I did... hmmm guess I'll just say I punted really well. But if it said I intercepted like 200k damage or blocked 500k damage or something, now that would be kinda cool.

[tomato]

War was always about killing stuff, not tapping flags. If you want to play an objective based game play a shooter or gw2 (here you also got your same gear lvl for everyone).

whole synergy between classes is here to fight, not to hold flags or what ever.
Otherwise play 3tanks 3 healer and just stand at the flag... Welcome, best way to "play the objective" in caledor woods.

footpatrol2, I think you're playing the wrong game. Not meant as an insult, but war always had gear differences etc..

[th3gatekeeper]

I said this before and a dev yelled at me about it and the idea got shut down quicklly. There really shouldn't be a massive gear divide in a pvp centric game. Aesthetic's should dominate not actual stats. If there is a divide it should be small and easily attainable quickly.

When you stack up gear + coordination + group composition + Player skill level vs pug its basically just two different games. imo this game wasn't suppose to be for the faint of heart nor its main focus be about pug's.

Opinion (suggestion)
Make SC's about Locking zones like they used to be or Straight get rid of SC's. Or only open specific SC's after a zone was locked so you have a limited window to participate with some type of carrot attached. Making SC's about gear thou... creates a problem.

Game should be about bragging rights and cool lookin stuff not stats specifically.

The Time to kill (TTK) or Time to Death (TTD) in this game is about right. If you have a good well oiled premade vs another its almost impossible to kill each other. The real problem is unbalanced groups AND tanks that don't use guard or know how to reduce damage and work off each other. Guard is a fundamental part of the game that depends on a player to understand how valuable it is and its completely unrewarded.

(guess)
Players that die a lot probably make tanks thinking, hey i'll just dps as a tank and survive longer without guarding anyone or even realizing how important guard is. I'll passively watch tanks past level 10 in sc's/anywhere and almost never do they stay next to their guarded target.

All fair points I think. I personally feel the current "gear gap" is small. Its not that hard to get stalkers + a good weapon (epic quest?) and then buy some crappy +16 talis to put in gear. You are more or less 80% of the same if not more than the BIS guys running +22s etc...

So I think gear gap is a small problem that doesnt need to be fixed. The REAL "gap" comes from communication more than anything.

I do think you have hit PART of the nail right on the head. Ill tell you right now you just explained ME the first 2-3 weeks of this game. I had NO clue how short guard distance was until I added an add on that showed how 30 feet was... I was SHOCKED thinking I was guarding players this whole time... Yeah I know... L2P, I was bad....

I think having a "guarded Damage" column to show really how much damage a tank DID guard off someone would be a worthy addition. It would tell tanks they are not doing their job, it would help full defensive tanks SEE their value and I think actually promote more people to play tanks rather than DPS tanks since they could SEE their impact of taking "65k" guard damage in 1 game versus another tank who only took say 30k....

This, to me, would be a worthy investment of time that WOULD (I think) boost the ability for PUGs to play more coordinated. Then you will have tanks being judged on damage guarded rather than DPS or w.e - which is all they can try and measure right now.

[footpatrol2]

I agree freshour with you. I think there should be a scoreboard reward on tanking. I think a lot of the pug problems comes from players not understanding how guard works.

@tomato
I really don't care about the gear divide tbh. I never had a problem with the gear divide personally. I was just thinking for purely pug players and taking away an argument that they like to hide behind sometimes. I generally try not to pug but do it when my friends are not online.

@tomato
I also beg to differ. WAR has always been about taking BO's and keep defense/offense in ORvR. Entire playstyles are built around this.

@gatekeeper
Some players never realise the short distance of guard or even use guard at all. If your pugging why should you decrease anyone else's damage to them and give it to yourself? From a completely selfish point of view there is no point. Even if we add a column for tanking on the scoreboard it still doesn't mean people will do it. It will just be a little more encouraged. I mean it does help for sure though but doesn't solve the problem.

Please note I'm also talking from my experience in live. I'm not crazy familiar with the gear divide in RoR. So the gear divide now might not be as bad.

[Scambug]

The way I see it there are two issues that lead to these "bad" scenario matches that OP describes:

1) Match starts with more players on one side. Easy fix: force equal sided teams. If one side has 5 queued and other side has 9 queued, only 5 of those 9 get to join the SC. Then if 1 new player joins the first team, allow one of the second team on waiting list to enter as well.
Such an easy fix I have a hard time believing Mythic never implemented it. I hope you guys will.

2) One team has more healers than the other. In PUG vs PUG, the team with the most healers usually pwns the other team, the bigger diff in healer number the more pwn.
Not much can be done about this short of adding some sort of team builder, most probably not worth the effort.

But 1) I really feel should be fixed. I know nothing about programming but I can't see it being too hard to do.

[Nameless]

It sounds like your dreams will come true if they reintroduce Thunder Valley sc (best sc map eveeeer)