User:Raine Valen/Mass Balance/Ranger/Skills/Archive

Preparations and why they were a bad idea in the first place
Ever wonder why bows are the slowest weapons? The slowest bow has a refire rate of 2.7 seconds and the fastest bows are 2.0 seconds, slower than a spear. Considering that a spear is faster than a bow and can be used with a shield, that's quite unfair.

Guess what? Bows are slow because of preparations. Preparations add a constant bonus to each arrow, so the faster a bow fires, the more effective a preparation is. So unless you're using broken 1s or 1/2s bow attacks, a hornbow gets the least benefit of preparations while flatbows and shortbows will excel. That's also broken and needs to be fixed.

Furthermore, preparations promote range spike. Quick attack skills that don't do much bonus damage by themselves become powerful engines for spikes, as +15 damage bonuses from Kindle Arrows add up quite quickly with Dual Shot and Forked Arrow. That's why Dual Shot is broken. It sucks, but if it's buffed, preparations will be OP with it.

Consider an example: Fastbow and Heavybow (These don't exist and are merely hypothetical.). Fastbow: 2 second refire rate, 10-30 damage (20 average). Heavybow: 2.3 second refire rate, 20-30 damage (25 average). Both have the same flight time, arc, and range.

Heavybow has 15% more refire time and 25% more average damage. Is the Heavybow better? NO.

Add a preparation. In this case, let's use Read the Wind (my favorite preparation before the nerf) at level 14 marksmanship. In addition, let's ignore the effects of critical hits since they have the same critical damage. This is a constant +10 damage bonus.

With the damage calculations, the fastbow should do roughly 14-42 damage at 14 marksmanship while the heavybow should do about 28-42 (To make things simple I just assumed that 14 marksmanship = 140% of base damage listed). Now add the +10 damage from the preparation:

Fastbow: 24-52 damage, 2 second refire = 12-26 damage per second, no attack skills, vs 60 armor level. Heavybow: 28-52 damage, 2.3 second refire = 12.1739-22.6087 damage per second, no attack skills, vs 60 armor level.

Even though the fastbow had less base damage, the preparation now gives it MORE base damage than the heavybow! To add insult to injury, 10 of it is armor ignoring, so the fastbow is even more effective against heavy armor. -

All bows in Build Wars have the same damage, but some are slow and some are fast. That's why (before the nerf) flatbows were awesome with read the wind and hornbows suck. - Furthermore, the same logic applies to any "damage buff on attack" skill, including Strength of Honor, Conjures, Orders, etc.

Okay, so I'm done complaining, time to fix this!
Solution 1: Remove preparations as a game mechanic. Increase fire rate of bows or increase their damage, and convert all existing preparations into bow attacks.


 * Pros


 * Removing game mechanics that are inherently broken is a step toward good balancing
 * Shoves range spike into a garbage can
 * Rangers can be buffed now that the gimmicks are in the trash.
 * This solution requires relatively little time to implement.
 * Cons


 * Removing a game mechanic is lame.
 * Some players may have a hard time adapting.
 * The damage increases may be difficult to balance

Solution 2: How to fix the problem, nerf rangespike into the trash, and fix other stuff while you're at it

First of all, make damage bonuses a percent of damage done with any skill taken into consideration. Here's an example of a fixed skill:

Glass Arrows "Elite Preparation. For 10...26...30 seconds, your arrows do an additional 10...30...34% after all other bonuses and penalties and cause Bleeding for 10...22...25 seconds if blocked."

Suppose I use this at 15 marksmanship and score a critical hit with Prepared Shot (because having two elites is FTW). That's 61 base damage plus 25 damage due to Prepared Shot, or 86 damage total). I'm using 12 expertise, so that's an additional 30% damage, or (25.8). 26 damage is added for a grand total of 112 damage, which is why two-elite combinations should not exist.

Time for an example of this nerfing Range Spike.

Suppose the same character with 15 marksmanship and 12 expertise uses Glass Arrows with Dual Shot in a range spike. Assume all arrows critical because the random number generator is broken.

With the old glass arrows, that's 45+45 damage(base damage of both arrows * .75) plus 34 damage(+17 damage from glass arrows at 12 expertise).

With the new glass arrows, that's an additional +27 damage from glass arrows, or 7 less than the old (and currently broken version).

This is also the reason why conjure's/orders/buffs are broken when used with double strikes, and part of the reason why daggers suck. If they were viable, they would cause a major balancing headache three times the size of Mallyx.

And this isn't just limited to preparations.

Tired of losing to Conjure-Scythes? Here's the new conjures: Conjure Element "Enchantment. For 60 seconds your attacks of the corresponding element do additional damage equivalent to 70...118...130% of your weapon's minimum damage."

And a Strength of Honor to go with your nerfed Conjure Scythe: Strength of Honor "Enchantment. While you maintain it, target ally's attacks do additional damage equivalent to 30...60...68% of a random number in that ally's weapon's damage range, excluding criticals." If this is hard to understand, here's an example. You use it with a scythe because scythes are broken, and skill level 0 because people love to use skills that don't require attribute investment. A random number is generated between 9 and 41 inclusive (NO CRITICAL DAMAGE), and 30% of this number is added to your damage.

Let's fix Order of Pain so it isn't broken:

(10% health sac) "Enchantment. For 5...10...11 seconds, all allies within earshot do +5...15...17% physical damage."

71.174.22.127 17:24, 13 March 2009 (UTC)