Erebus Nerf

RegnorVex

Join Date 04/2009

+12

Erebus Nerf

From Frogboy:

Well, we have on deck another update for tomorrow fresh from GPG:

· Lord Erebus: Bite's Mana Cost increased, Damage decreased, Armor Reduction decreased

Erebus was the only DG that I felt was OP'd. All the rest seem fairly well balanced, all things considered. Looks like the devs agreed.

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Quoting Zechnophobe,

reply 24

Quoting RegnorVex,
reply 7

If any one skill has a benefit that so obviously outweights its cost that every user will take it and thereby forgo other skills in the tree, then by definition it's not balanced.

So if Erebus had only two abilities, Mistform and Morale, would you have to neuter mistform until it was as bad as morale?

I think you cannot exclude an ability as 'too good' compared to other abilities, but rather can say that an ability is 'too weak'.

If an ability is so weak that it is never(or an approximation thereof) a better choice than a different ability, it is inherently unbalanced (on the weak side).

I'm not a big fan of nerfs, I typically prefer the "buff up the others" approach, although I realize that's rarely practical and nerfing is an institution that isn't going away. But the problem with your approach is that you can't assess the two skills vs. each other in a vacuum, you have to take into account other character skills. And the devs (who are in the best position to know this) stated that the mana cost of Bite was not in line with other similar generals. Why they decided to go beyond fixing that and add in the other two nerfs is a question you'll have to pose to them.

My statement isn't really controversial, it's been a truism in MMO development since forever. Whenever there is a skill, a spell, a talent, an ability that every build of that class includes to the exclusion of others they could take, then it is by definition not balanced because the scales are obviously tipped too far in its favor. I wouldn't apply this rule to class-defining skills like Heal for a healer or Aggro-management for a tank, those are class defining. If Erebus were a Biting monster and Bite was class defining, that would explain why everyone takes Bite. But if the data suggests that Bite is taken by every build of the class because of the damage that it does to other players, and not because it's class defining, then I think the rule applies.

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So, your theory divides Demigods into two groups:

1. Demigods who have a "class-defining skill", such as healer or tank. Demigods from this group are allowed exclusive right to include their "class-defining skill" into every build.

2. Demigods who do not belong to the first category. If there is a situation where every single build (for the same Demigod) from this group uses a same skill (Bite for Erebus), it's a sign of imbalance and should be fixed.

If you think about it for a just a short time, you'll see it's flawed.

Quoting RegnorVex,

If Erebus were a Biting monster and Bite was class defining, that would explain why everyone takes Bite.

Why couldn't he be a "Biting monster"? How do you make a difference between those two groups, anyway? My guess is that you've seen tanks and healers in many other games (it's obvious you played WoW), so you have an a posteriori idea of a class, and you are trying - unsuccessfully - to apply it to Demigod.

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Are vampires not, by definition, "biting monsters"?

I have seen a large number of highly disingenuous arguments in favor of the Erebus nerf that begin from ludicrous "should" assumptions with no rational grounding and proceed as if these assumptions were a proven axiom. The two most common examples:

- "A general shouldn't be great at killing other demigods"

- "No one skill should always be preferred within a class"

This is becoming tiresome, people. These are terrible, cynical arguments which have nothing to do with game balancing. It's beginning to sound like a bunch of munchkins twirling around singing "Ding Dong, the witch is dead!" around here. Besides the fact that the above arguments proceed from nothing more than assumptions (matters of opinion), they are patently inconsistent, and therefore incomplete at best, hypocritical at worst. Oak is also great at killing other demigods, and yet no one is calling for an Oak nerf that I know of.

As far as class defining skills, I can count quite a few: Penitence (Oak), Bite (Erebus), Heal (Sedna), Bramble Shield (QoT), Spit (UB), Towers (Rook). That's not to say that every player of the above classes takes the skill, but damn near 100% of the successful players do so because the skills listed above are easily the strongest in the respective DGs' skill trees. In fact, the only two DGs whose skill trees are internally balanced to the point that there is no true uberskill are Torchbearer and Regulus. In the case of Regulus, that's only because some people (somewhat foolishly, in my opinion) prefer a high-DPS lategame build and then can't decide between snipe and mines with what they've got left. In the case of Torchbearer, it's because he kind of sucks in general, and none of his skill combos are all that great, largely because of the switching problem, which should be eliminated completely, IMO (also for QoT).

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When I say "class defining", I don't mean that the skill is the "primary skill" or the "favored skill" of the class, that would be circular logic. What I mean by "class defining" is that, whether the skill is good or not, it provides the function that the character is designed to perform and without which he isn't that character. The heals might be lousy, but they are the skills that provide that thing that a healer does. A healer can't heal without a heal spell. That's a class defining skill.

Erebus is a character that can do many things and isn't preordained to do anything in particular, he really has no "class defining" skills in the sense that I'm using that term. The reason I make this distinction is because if I found that every healer is choosing the Heal spell, it wouldn't lead me to the conclusion that healers are unbalanced. Heal isn't chosen by every healer because it's so powerful, it's chosen because you can't be a healer without it.

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