AmadeusH
09-01-2009, 04:50 PM
<p>Avatar gear nerfs are not enough, they are a band-aid solution to what you are facing. The real problem is the base dmg and crit bonus modifiers themselves. If you analyze and graph all the combat mechanics elements you'll see most things are linear and further soft capped or hard capped. In other words, for every point you put in, you get the same proportional increase. That is not the case with base dmg and crit bonus. Just take any character and wear additional base dmg and crit bonus to experimentally verify the increases, then put it in a spreadsheet or any graphing program. This system is majorly exponential! The problem is that they are modified by everything else and each other. Any incorporation of this system is doomed to fail over and over and you will repeat the same cycle of mistake and nerf. I suggest that you remove all base dmg modifiers and crit bonus modifiers from the game and replace them with another system that has the results you desire. Really you should just not replace them, there are already too many modifiers. From a role playing perspective they are also redundant. What is base dmg, you get more, you hit harder? Isn't that Str and Int? If Str and Int were scaled appropriately, and modified dmg appropriately, it would be a much better system. The stat cap at 80 is around 1250. So scale all the bonuses such that even with the best gear on all slots, you reach 1150-1200. Make the system more linear and less meaningless. So if your target spread is 30%, then someone with all legendary at 900 Str would hit for 30% less dmg than someone with 1200 Str for example. There are many perfectly good systems available in the game that just need to be tweaked correctly to balance progression. The key to the system working is value to the player and increases from Tier to Tier without breaking or renerfing. Please consider getting the itemization devs and combat mechanics devs together for the next expansion to make a viable longterm solution.</p>