by Driven » Thu Jan 09, 2020 2:37 pm
Thanks for replying, Gorka. You clearly think things through, and that's quite welcome. If I think about the game as a whole, I like to think of it in terms of trade-offs, and I believe there are two essential trade-offs when you are playing solo, which I believe apply to all of D&D:
- Offense vs. defense
- Burst damage vs. sustained damage
By calling them a trade-off, I'm effectively declaring that they *should* be trade-offs. Game designers can screw these up, as it's perfectly possible to give high offense *and* high defense, but the game designer will have screwed up, because they have violated the entire notion of a trade-off.
- The more offense you receive, your more your defense should go down. Conversely, the more defense you receive, the more your offense should go down.
- The more burst you receive, the less sustained your damage should be. Conversely, the more sustained damage you receive, the more your burst should go down.
There is a third aspect that comes into play, but it is not a trade-off, per-se, because you can't have both ends of the spectrum at the same time, and that's reliability of damage, or risk. In other words, you can't have both high risk and low risk at the same time... it's a logical contradiction. In that way, game designers can't really screw risk up in the same way that they can screw up the trade off of offense vs. defense. It would be irresponsible, though, to create a class that has 100% burst, 100% offense, and 0% risk. Game designers also have the additional responsibility to make sure classes don't fall into the weird corners of this matrix. For example, having bursty, low offense would be useless.
From the perspective of "how true D&D should be" (i.e., not what Sloth actually is), I would place the classes into the following place within the matrix:
- Warriors are 100% defense, 50% offense, 0% burst, 100% sustained, 0% risk.
- Monks are 50% defense, 75% offense, 75% burst, 75% sustained, 50% risk.
- Thieves are 25% defense, 100% offense, 100% burst, 25% sustained, 75% risk.
- Mage are 50% defense, 100% offense, 0% burst, 100% sustained, 25% risk.
Feel free to quibble with the precise values of those numbers, but I believe this to be the general theory behind these classes. The general portrait I have painted is more important than the individual brush strokes. I have left out the other 4 classes because they borrow so heavily from these 4 in solo that the lines become almost indistinguishable. One of the difficulties of Sloth is that the story as I have described it is not as simple as this. Subclasses, while cool, amazing, and quite necessary, throw a wrench into it. Subclasses alleviate weaknesses of the prime class. For example, thief primes often choose mage as a secondary class because the player wants to move the 25% sustained damage closer to something like 75%. Conversely, thief primes sometimes choose warrior as a secondary class because the player wants to move the 25% defense closer to something like 75%. The entire point of doing this is to mitigate the risk value of the thief, and it works. Subclasses are, in fact, are a good thing. It's what makes thief and warrior playable, for example. Warriors need to mitigate their 0% burst, so they take on thief or monk styles to get their burst up. Unfortunately, mages pay a fairly hefty price for their 100% offense and 100% sustained damage in that the game prevents them from mitigating their 0% burst by preventing mirrors from being cast after a grip or stab. I still feel rather strongly that they need some form of burst. Again, the exact numbers are not the point, but I'm using them merely to paint the picture.
Now consider risk in the context of the arena. Thieves, for example, have such high risk, that bad luck can ruin an arena run real quick. Monks run into this in spades with wraithtouch and to a lesser extent with deathgrip. Deathtouch doesn't have this problem nearly as much, which is one of the reasons why monks are rising in the ranks. The length of an arena run forces risk to be a significant factor. The more a prime class assumes the risk of a subclass, the more exposed that player is to risk. For example, Gorka is more exposed to risk in the arena than Driven is, because Gorka relies on backstab, and deathtouch has much lower risk than backstab. This is why people get upset so much when warriors appear to land stabs at such high rates, because it appears that somehow a warrior has received the benefit of the thief's burst while somehow, mysteriously, they didn't assume the risk that should have come with it. All of this translates directly to the arena.
The arena is such an odd beast. At the lower ranks, sustained damage is rewarded, because a thief or monk's damage output from backstab/grip at those levels don't put a big enough dent in the mobs to matter as much as spellsaves and spelldamage. At the upper ranks, the burst damage matters a lot more, because they make a much bigger dent in the mob. This is less a function of the scalability of the classes themselves, but rather the hitpoints of the mobs at the upper levels. It would be incorrect to draw the conclusion that mages, for example, need to be beefed up simply because they can't do the burst damage that a monk or thief can. The mage was never intended to be bursty and so if you are measuring the ability to burst, then yea, the mage isn't going to win. You don't change the pitch of your floor just because your level is broken. Mage's strengths are in their high damage output that is sustained, not their burst damage. The problem with the higher levels of arena is that they are far too skewed to rewarding burst damage, and by doing so, people suddenly start drawing incorrect conclusions about the *actual value* of burst damage.
I used to watch Surfnazi solo 30mil mobs in the desert with relative ease, using mirrors and massive amounts of damage, and he wasn't even a rebirth. Driven had very little hope of doing that until 9x40 rebirth where my overall power curve exceeded Surfnazi's. I simply can't do as much damage as a mage over the same period of time, and that's ok. I simply can't stand toe-to-toe with 50M mobs like Gorka can, and that's ok. Can a monk burst more reliably that a warrior? Yes, and that's ok. Does this mean that monks are the new cocaine? It depends entirely on what kind of mobs you want to kill. If you filled the arena with 50 mil mobs such that warriors were the only ones who could survive the fight to begin with, would warriors and druids become the new cocaine? No, the arena would be broken, because it would be too skewed towards rewarding the strength of those classes over the other classes. To make the arena properly balanced, you need the proper mix of mobs that play to the strengths of each class. Monks are rising to the top because the mobs die after a deathtouch and 1 round of fighting and their reliability is higher. If you increase the hitpoints on most of the mobs to extend beyond the burst, particularly the ether mobs, I think we'll see a very different mix in the leaderboards, like we do at the lower levels.