Why poison is fundamental for balance (and the PVP spectrum)

[cinos]

I think it's important to make a whole new thread because of how different the other one is. I've had several experiments done, before and after poison zone became a forum topic, that needed to be split into several threads. Ignore all the other ones for now, since this dwelves into a fundamental triangle of PVP balance for the game, which I feel needs to be discussed. Essentially compared to either hating or praising zone, I want to explain the funamentals for why things are the way they are, and perhaps admit some falsehoods. Note, not the ones you'd think.

Poison exists to purely take away HP, and so it does not rely on defense at all. This is why it exists, it counters hard defense and high HP builds, ala Warrior, but also other things that have practically unbeatable defense, like Wizard bubble. Albeit it's probably a tad bit weak rn due to the HP not having been updated, not any elemental buffs or nerfs existing for it, but alas this is what poison counters now. Every class benefits from it, which is why it was the first rune implemented, and why it is the earliest, it's just that a fast or instantaneous rpm is more effective (Gunman, Archer, Mage melee sometimes, Note how gunman requires more zone due to the lack of soft, plus the addition of rune resistances).

Soft damage does depend on defense, which is how it counters High HP builds for classes of lower defense. Whipmaster and Gunman mainly, since they are builds that primarily focus on either high damage or high consistency of fire. They can hypothetically be countered by ice, but the rune resistances kind of make ice itself negligent, since it only does like an 8% dent. This is because it was definitely supposed to be the new "balance rune", and placed even earlier on the map, but the whole concept of rune defense made lowering one's defense a non-skill, since everyone has i5 on everything they wear. It practically barely does anything against players, though it does help with the peak damages.

also fire is really fvcking good on two handed weapons due to the multiplier being singular??? It's really good?!?!??!

Both of these counter High damage and low Vitality builds, aka low defense and low HP for the significant damage boost. These are primarily archer based, though basically any class other than Gunman or Wizard can effectively use these. The caveat is that this type of build can hypothetically also fight back against both, a complete glass cannon with no true weakness, due to everything being equally dangerous. This is why they are primarily also effective in grinding.

Okay but why though?
In a very standard MMO, I'm talking from oldschool to new shovelware, builds are as basic as "you are a higher level, you are stronger, you have more defense and attack". This makes it easy to program, but absolutely impossible to actually balance without unique skills. This is obviously where runes come in place. Poison exists to widen the gap with players, which means it won't be as simple as "I am ten levels below, I am completely fvcked". No, it is "I have less stat points, I am weaker, but I can use my weaponry and skills to my advantage". This is how warrior is the least versatile, since his whole concept is raw strength, completely. He depends on maximum defense and strength, and he is actively made slower to increase those so he can dodge less. It is sacrificing versatility for raw performance. Whipmaster is almost the opposite of this, as he requires extreme precision. Sure, you can sacrifice defense, but that just proves the point that it's a class fully built on maneuverability and creative usage of skill combos. Notice which one of these classes uses more poison.

Gunman is similar in this sense, you are faster, you essentially rely on poison for major damage in pvp, and everything is a trap that requires extreme precision (zone, clamps, grenades themselves). You are faster, therefore weaker, but if you are creative enough, you can out maneuver the enemy and persist. Archer is very much the opposite of this, slower, more focused on raw power with less setup besides homing arrows which do the job for you, bounce arrow is shιτ, it is a class that mostly uses soft damage, though obviously with some focus on technique and less sacrifice in there.

Warriors will require poison to kill, and gunmen will require soft damage to kill. Whipmasters require soft damage, archers will require poison, or just both. It essentially means that the weaker the class physically, the stronger it is setup wise.wink wink, zone takes a while to set up.

What lead me to this conclusion?
Well, I've tried a lot of classes, obviously. Currently I have tried both a completely softless gunman poison build, and a decent fire warrior build. Both of these lent me opposite weaknesses. The gunman build was bound to get overshadowed in numbers easily due to the fixed number, and every enemy was equally as tough to execute. The warrior build is very good with crowds, but it physically cannot go beyond the limits of it's power. I tried it without poison, and while basically able to easily kill any technique class if properly approached, a warrior vs warrior fight depends mostly on critical hits and the ability to stun people, which is impossible with the shield. The caveat for a shield is lesser damage, but it essentially means warrior can't beat another warrior with higher defense and HP without some kind of timing out or...you guessed it, poison. I equipped poison smash and added some poison to the two handed sword, and I went from doing little damage to zero's build, to 200 by default smash. The hardest skill to execute, without any ability to combo due to his shield, but thanks to poison, you can 100% beat it.

Without the poison, it would practically be impossible to counter this as a warrior. A complete inability to reliably attack the enemy, and not so reliable damage (only crits really show something, which is not that good when you are physically unable to attack close most of the time). These kinds of builds cannot be killed by weaker builds of the same manner, thanks to the inability to ever stun them by getting a good close hit, while they can still stun you.

Poison Smash gives you a large enough radius to attack and bypass defense, and alongside the normal sword poison it becomes a significant balancing tool, that sends it from basically barely able to win, to ehhhhh possibly if you try hard enough you'll win.

This is where zone comes in, and this is where other skills that SHOULD get implemented lie. The reason Wizard sucks rn is because it has NO poison outside of the predictable and again, non stunning to shield users melee. Personally I think magic breathe should have some kind of poisonous buff, not the cloud breath, but the main one. This is to legitimize it's usage as anything other than a worse option than melee.

TL;DR?

Poison is required to stop defense builds from conquering the game, and soft damage is required to stop weaker poison builds from doing the same thing. Why do I come to this conclusion? Well, I can reliably kill archers, warriors, and mages alike when using poison gunman weapons like pellet spitter, but I can also reliably stop entire troops of poison spitter gunners by slashing once in close proximity.

and glass cannons so both because they are freaks.

This is a two way dance, and it's required imo. I personally cannot even see the problem with poison as the class who supposedly "can't beat it", really, other def builds are more effective against me rn, and it's why all classes have poison, but some use it more.
The claim that it allows lower level players to beat you with cheaper gear is a frankly misconstrued comment. If you want, go recommend a dual minigun that does double a pellet's rpm, that is only available to the top players. It would be practically unbeatable by lower leveled players, is that what you want really?. Personally, I don't.
Oh and "no artillery" is not an argument because the poison is weaker than any soft damage, for all the defense and HP gained, damage is practically sacrificed. If your concern is the actual classes using it, they gain more damage (personally some impostant damage), but they have a lot less defense and HP. it is the natural cycle of sacrificing certain stats for others, and to pretend it is invalid is intentionally setting the game on a more rigid path. I suppose builds that do god damage with no defense are also broken then, or builds with like 5k HP because poison can't kill it. Please...

plus I'd argue it's overrated, most people who use it aren't that strong against anything with soft damage. It really does require viligant effort to win with exclusively poison guns.

Also I gotta admit, it was probably not a bright idea to call the hoard broken without i5 armor. I still consider rain overkill and probably a better replacement for bounce arrow with different benefits, but that is more due to bounce arrow being a waste of a skill, and it's replacement being probably a versatile opening into archer combos...still not using it though, archer is boring, I'm sorry.

Also shields need a major fvckign rework since I can hypothetically reflect any crit tornado and win by spamming heals. Hello?? Warriors can be completely unstoppable against other warriors if they use a shield??? Personally I can recommend reworks for the shield that make it both more effective, but also more punishing to fail with. It is a discussion for another day, but I don't think complete RNG should determine shields, since all it means is that it will never reflect when you want it, but it WILL always feel cheap to do or be done to. Pretty sure this has been a discussion since reflect got added, and personally I would prefer to see literal nubs outskill my moves, rather than me just standing there, healing, and having a crit slash kill the enemy with no input from me needed.

ya know, make it more like zone? More setup (zone needs grenades), more weaknesses (you also get hurt inside zone), and more satisfying proper usage (W).

That, feel free to talk about it. Personally I wanted a highly detailed thread about the entire pvp spectrum, rather than really basic threads that devolve later on. If you somehow still think poison is bad and that soft damage should be the only true benefactor, well, I can't convince you to make Wizard good either then, because, gee, what IS he missing besides that?

[mike]

oh my god

[cinos]

oh my god

I'd appreciate a less vague answer.

I argue why soft is important too btw, I've not gone mad.

[mike]

I'd appreciate a less vague answer.

I argue why soft is important too btw, I've not gone mad.

nah i meant 'oh my god' as in this is uhh,,, reeally long

[cinos]

I'd appreciate a less vague answer.

I argue why soft is important too btw, I've not gone mad.

nah i meant 'oh my god' as in this is uhh,,, reeally long

Oh okay. I mean, it's long because it is literally an analysis of the counterbalanced nature of pvp builds, and how it can bring some understanding for balancing other classes (Wizard), since literally nobody has any ideas other than "give it more soft damage".

[TheWood]

When poison is a tool that prevents warriors with a lot of defense from being unkillable it's a good thing. But with the poison zone, if you get more than 1k hp and 200+ defense you become a serious tank, maybe a warrior can kill it quickly, but for other classes it is very difficult.
And resistances simply deprive the runes of the sense for which they were added.

[Flashlight237]

First of all, it is not "soft" damage, it's base damage. No gamer would ever call base damage "soft".

Second, this is basically like saying Dragon Rage or Sonic Boom are balancing tools in Pokemon (when quite frankly, I legit never seen a single Smogon-recommended build that lists either move; I've seen many of them and even outright tried building a competitive Forretress after breeding a perfect-IV Pineco). They really aren't. Balance is something that involves looking at everything available, and if a fixed-damage deal is as big of a deal as it is made out to be here, chances are the everything else in the equation needs to be modified to balance things out.

Now, as a warrior myself, unlike other classes, warriors actually have control over their mobility from the core of their class. With how I am right now, outright refusing to touch the Stone Man branch and other speed-reduction skills but going full-in on Fitness, I am essentially the fastest a player can be, even if I am missing out on being a stone wall more or less. This would in turn allow me to outrun players trying to get close to me and more easily catch up to others when need be (even though in my case, it's more like me trying to shoot the breeze than smack them with a Death Bringer unless if it's a mount since I've always been a PvE guy). Yeah, I don't have the experience as a player I used to, but how I built my guy is largely the same. Also, Poison Smash is the way you said it was because it had explosion range boosts tacked on to it. If that explosion range boost were instead tethered onto Explosive Smash or Lava Smash, it'd be a different story. Yes, I get your concerns on warrior attacking range, which is why I was with Zero on improving the range of Power Smash (not the explosions; that wasn't mentioned by Zero or me) and had my own idea of slightly increasing the range of the warrior's base attack in general.

And also, wizards being iffy have nothing to do with Poison; in fact, I'd rather have a wizard chime in on the matter than go on about this. I do, however, definitely recall a time when Storm Cloud was a great nuisance on players poison or no poison because of how purely On/Off player stun is. In Eliatopia, either you get knocked down or you don't even with a measly 1 point of damage; there is no in-between. Removing the ability to knock people down with Storm Cloud made it become a pure PvE skill because, quite frankly, legit anyone can just hear a Storm Cloud being activated and just learn to stay out of that general area whereas the AI is just stupid.

Really, the best way to make Storm Cloud viable for PvP, maybe, is to focus on getting player stun reworked so it wouldn't be as On/Off as it is currently. Many people forget that players can get knocked down, but I didn't! Oh no I didn't!

I've played a fairly obscure single player RPG called Epic Battle Fantasy 5. In that game, the player characters reacted to damage based on how much damage they took in a single hit. Light hits made the characters react a bit, medium hits generally astonished the characters, and hard hits sent them flying off-screen. This is all based on how much damage a player took based on their maximum HP. What I'm saying based on the example is instead of making Storm Cloud the biggest PvP nuisance of all time with stun being on, or completely useless with the stun being off, have it be fairly tolerable by having it to where a player's maximum HP determines whether they get stunned or not. Like, for example, my HP is 204, so if a Storm Cloud manages to do 20 HP of damage on me, I would be stunned, whereas if I get hit with any less, I wouldn't be stunned at all. It's damage without the annoying stun-lock (which, by the way, CAN soft-lock a player in PvE if cornered by multiple monsters). Stunning can be triggered at 5% Max HP worth of damage, 10% Max HP worth of damage, whatever so long as it's fair for everyone.

Before you ask, no I ain't making the 1-artillery excuse here. I would know; equipment stat points into a player's attack power work just like player stat points with how the damage formula is set up. Basically if I have full Ancient gear and 1 strength point, I would essentially have an equivalent of 43 strength points instead. Bump my base strength to 100 instead and it would instead feel like I have 143 strength points (which is only 3.32x more power). I don't have any gunman armor, but frankly, with how few differences there are in offensive stat boosts for each set tier (minus Wizard vs everyone else), why would I bother?

And before you go off at me, yes, I do want Poison Zone nerfed due to many others' RPM concerns, but I also wanted base poison damage to be buffed back to 5 damage per stage in order to balance out poison resistance on players (which by the way, I was a proponent of solely for mobs), noting that a full P4 player could tank P5 weapons altogether. Besides, with every nerf I bring up, like the highly-controversial Expertise Nerf that brought crit chance down to 20% from 100%, I see opportunities in in exchange, like how Clamp Traps and Vicious Crits serve as crit-skills. I would know; the last gunman skill I got killed by in the PvP area is a Clamp Trap in the KotH area near the south exit.

I'm purely saying this based on what I've seen in the forums over the years (which I visit far more regularly than the game), every skill that gets added in seems to have this "cycle" more or less where they're always completely fine in PvE, with players having to goad Robby into making the skills more PvP-friendly. It just felt that way every time.

But, Tl;dr, yes, balancing concerns exist, but I sincerely don't think holding one mechanic as an end-all be-all is a good way to go about balancing things out in basically any respect. There's just many mechanics than just poison to look at that even an inept player like me can't ignore.

[cinos]

When poison is a tool that prevents warriors with a lot of defense from being unkillable it's a good thing. But with the poison zone, if you get more than 1k xp and 200+ defense you become a serious tank, maybe a warrior can kill it quickly, but for other classes it is very difficult.
And resistances simply deprive the runes of the sense for which they were added.

Correct, rune resistance is the worst thing to ever happen.

Though personally I find zone builds to be overhyped and over....considered OP? Really everyone who tried fighting me with zone today had a pretty tough time (which is expected, I have a hard time killing some warriors too, especially artemis somehow), and would get shredded like tissue paper with one slash almost all the time. There is a reason people mix it with defense, the zone damage itself requires longevity, and personally I'd even say it's not easy to use against someone with good soft damage and healing speed, if you're not able to dodge and properly position yourself outside the zone.
There is a very obvious sacrifice made to soft damage, to put every opponent on the exact same playing field, you will always have to set them up, keep them set up, and if they run away you basically need to repeat it, and good luck doing that with crowds (unless you're a fallout fan). The catch? More vitality, but you have to put it to good use for the poison to count, unlike the main gunman which has extremely low vitality, but the soft damage is...SUPPOSEDLY useful, I never felt like it was, even when I had a glass build it was basically the p3 that did the work, which is why I still insist it is the gunman rune, and the soft damage basically only becomes most noticeable during grinding.

Today, only one person killed me with spitter zone in a 1v1 scenario, that was runecollector...and even that was actually a quite clever switchup of shield and spitter, knowing shields are actual horseshιτ that will reflect randomly (I insist we make shields an actual mechanic and not rng, I should not be able to kill someone by JUMPING into a tornado!). Basically, the only moment he really could surpass my healing was when I was slashing, and obviously that's fine, someone outheals? They outheal, simple as that. But I think it puts into attention that....you know, they're not as overpowered as you'd think, nor am I going to pretend that giving gunman some insignificant soft damage is ever going to make him able to fight warrior without zone in the current meta. And before you ask about more poison based builds being non useful outside pvp, as if that makes them invalid, pretty sure a shield has little to no use in grinding compared to the other sword setups, and even when it does, it's when you equip it for two seconds and unequip it to escape something.

It's overrated, I love it, but it's not this unkillable monstrocity people make it out to be, it's just a gimmick that I find fun to use because of my specific desires in pvp, and I'd argue it'd be just as infamous as a fully p5 whip with no finesse. Sure, there probably isn't even a point to that, but it'd be a possible alternate playstyle that focuses on snakes and trapping, while losing some of the best tools of the whipmaster, the whirl and the tippers (yes, they work, lol). Personally I think it's the people who play it that make zone gunman infamous, like me or ZERO, he put up a good fight and I'm so actually annoyed that he can't take a loss without twisting it into zone being the problem, since I could also argue Warrior is "boring", and that it needs to get immediately nerfed to the ground...which no, not really, I think warrior is fine and should be this force of destruction, shields need a major rework though, just in general.

Seriously btw, segway, if ZERO replies to this thread, can you stop being so mad? There was a time when you won and didn't stir up a scene, what happened that made you angry at the sight of winning? This isn't some smug retort or something, I'm genuinely kind of concerned.

[cinos]

First of all, it is not "soft" damage, it's base damage. No gamer would ever call base damage "soft".

Okay but there's this thing called unique slang and Helmet Games have a lot of it. It's just what we started calling it for some reason, so we're sticking to it, since base damage can also mean "non-multiplied" damage, when, uh oh, almost all damage in the game gets multiplied now.

Anyhow we've been over this dude and I recommend only dwelving into subjects you're actually educated with, PVP being the one thing you've agreed with me you have basically no connection with. Suggesting that we should bring back Wizard stun isntead of giving magic breathe poison is probably one of the worst ideas since it implies shields right now are balanced and don't trample over some gameplay styles completely (note: yours, you physically are not able to kill anyone with a shield in pvp since you aren't using one iirc)...

so, you know, maybe don't bring up EFB5 again for a system you barely interract with dude. Seriously, you want poison to stay pve because you only play pve man.

[Flashlight237]

Suggesting that we should bring back Wizard stun isntead of giving magic breathe poison is probably one of the worst ideas since it implies shields right now are balanced and don't trample over some gameplay styles completely (note: yours, you physically are not able to kill anyone with a shield in pvp since you aren't using one iirc)...

I wasn't implying that shields are balanced, nor am I outright saying bring back wizard stun (that's only half-true, there are caveats which I'm writing all about in a suggestion thread as we speak). I'm saying more so that player stun should be fixed as a whole due to how badly implemented it is as a whole. Doesn't matter if it's a wizard pre-nerf doing that or if it's a Grunt doing it. And as a little sneak peek, yes, I wrote about iFrames (invincibility frames), the one thing Eliatopia doesn't have.

Seriously, you want poison to stay pve because you only play pve man.

Ifthat were true, I wouldn't want base poison damage buffed back to its original 5 damage per stage.