[Races] Lets discuss races and the ideas behind it.

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Hemmingfish wrote:

The purpose of having different mods such as added damage on races is to force people to change their strategies. You can't play an Emberwake the same way you would a 1 hour solo, or a Lethal, or an Ancestral and that makes it interesting.

It's not that innovative, we've had Turbo Immolation before and the strategy is pretty similar but it's something at least.

As for stress, it's only as stressful as you let it be. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a tense 1h or whatever and so I try to push for rank, other times I just want to shoot stuff so I take it easy - my rank ends up somewhere in the nether regions beyond 20th in class, but I still earn points from levelling and have a good time.

I think you give a good point... for a normal race. Sometimes i want to go for #1, sometimes i just want to have fun.

Edit: On the point of different strategies, its actually not that linear. Ask Marauders if they would do a different strategy if the sig was vanilla instead of emberwake. I think the answer is no, fire trap + flame totem is still the fastest, it just happens to be the safest aswell.
Most of the time these 'strategies' are actually false choices. The truth is, most ppl do the exact same they would do in vanilla because its the fastest (and because you are going for the record, not just an individual run) and just hope it works out. Thats also why these arguments apply differently when talking about a sig.

The problem is when you apply this to the signature race. The signature race is meant to be competitive. The players interested and invested in it, do it to try and get #1 or at least to constantly beat their personal bests.

Some people might like harder races, arguing that if a race is too easy, it somehow diminuishes its skill level. I disagree with this.
I think having a race that is too hard (like the one we have right now for certain classes) is terrible.

Its terrible because of how the system works, you won't go to town every time you reach a lvl to upgrade your pots, you won't go to town everytime you might want a res ring or a coral, or certain pieces of gear, you won't overlevel a zone just to make a fight easier, etc.
You will go hard and fast every single time and you will live maybe 50% of the time and you pray that one of those 50% you have the rng and the skills to break a record.

For me personally, i work full time, i can only attend maybe 14 of the 28 sigs.
If i die in half of those races, i realistically only have 7 chances to set a record (with the added frustration of me wasting a sig and dieing to overtuned damage). One of those races i have to both not make many mistakes and get the rng needed for a record.

I would rather have a normal sig. A sig that i can practice and a sig where my chance to die isnt through the roof so i have more chances, because imho, there's plenty of oportunities in a race to test yours skills. Not getting bad evasion rolls on brutus or getting critted for 80% hp doesnt have to be one of them.

For other races that aren't the sig, sure. You can add a lot of variance to make it different and fun.

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Hemmingfish wrote:

The purpose of having different mods such as added damage on races is to force people to change their strategies. You can't play an Emberwake the same way you would a 1 hour solo, or a Lethal, or an Ancestral and that makes it interesting.

This is you during a formula 1 race.



"Them damn drivers need to change up their strategies and use steel wheels"

or a more accurate analogy would be you can't race the monaco gran prix the same way you can melbourne...

-HeaT

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HeaT1 wrote:

or a more accurate analogy would be you can't race the monaco gran prix the same way you can melbourne...

-HeaT

Says the guy playing caster. Get outta here.

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Hemmingfish wrote:

The purpose of having different mods such as added damage on races is to force people to change their strategies. You can't play an Emberwake the same way you would a 1 hour solo, or a Lethal, or an Ancestral and that makes it interesting.

This is the misconception though. Nothing changes in the optimal strategy for a Vanilla race vs this signature, all that changes is your chance of dying goes up a huge, huge amount because the game really is pretty finely tuned low level.


Brutus and Merv (her adds, not her really) are bonkers in this sig. There is no extra skill to beating them, its not like there is a mechanical element to avoiding the damage when its totally random what order the bosses do what skills in.

In fact its a million times easier to deal with most bosses as ranged, because they have a few set abilities.

Especially playing a class with very, very bad attack speed in general, utilizing really slow animations put you in dangerous situations that you sometimes have no way to get out of.

All that said, I guess we need to have a feedback thread with all compiled information and opinions from racers that we can try to put together for GGG.

I'll make another thread in the other section later this week but I'll get it started.

1. Resist rings at level 9, or 10/
2. Low level weapons level requirements all lowered by 1 or 2 levels.
3. Re-examination of low level skills for "weapon" based characters. The fact that flame totem + fire trap is best for all classes to level 10 is insane to me.
3a. Accuracy at low levels. Why can't accuracy work on a system like resists, with no penalty in normal, or to level 20, or anything, to compensate for the nature of how spells work.

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Morsexier wrote:

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Hemmingfish wrote:

The purpose of having different mods such as added damage on races is to force people to change their strategies. You can't play an Emberwake the same way you would a 1 hour solo, or a Lethal, or an Ancestral and that makes it interesting.

1. Resist rings at level 9, or 10/
2. Low level weapons level requirements all lowered by 1 or 2 levels.
3. Re-examination of low level skills for "weapon" based characters. The fact that flame totem + fire trap is best for all classes to level 10 is insane to me.
3a. Accuracy at low levels. Why can't accuracy work on a system like resists, with no penalty in normal, or to level 20, or anything, to compensate for the nature of how spells work.

i agree with resist rings being reduced in lvl requirement. personally i think 10 is a better spot.

not specifically race related but, i personally think stun mechanics/calculations need to be reworked given the global damage increase (not specifically emberwake, but the game on the whole). im getting stunned by white mobs with 6 endurance charges, IR and 30k armor at lvl92, just saying. sometimes i think it even happens when i have all the aforementioned + fortify up. like...what?

however, the more i think about it emberwake wouldn't be as ridiculous if stun duration and frequency wasn't so pronounced.

-HeaT

More generally monster crit damage should be reworked aswell, especially when it comes to lightning damage and physical damage.

Theoretically lightning damage (and to a lesser extent phys damage) can range anywhere from 1 (no crit, low roll) to 100 (crit, high roll) making it way too unpredictable.

I'm just gonna say that I don't think monsters should be able to crit period, providing for a more consistent gameplay experience. There is no skill element to being crit for 5x the average damage in some cases.

But then PVE content would be too easy. GGG added crit hit only monsters because they believe they are difficult.

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HeaT1 wrote:

i agree with resist rings being reduced in lvl requirement. personally i think 10 is a better spot.

not specifically race related but, i personally think stun mechanics/calculations need to be reworked given the global damage increase (not specifically emberwake, but the game on the whole). im getting stunned by white mobs with 6 endurance charges, IR and 30k armor at lvl92, just saying. sometimes i think it even happens when i have all the aforementioned + fortify up. like...what?

however, the more i think about it emberwake wouldn't be as ridiculous if stun duration and frequency wasn't so pronounced.

-HeaT

You can have a ton of mitigation, but if you don't also have the high health to back it up you are gonna get stunned a lot. Especially when you are a 2H melee build that doesn't get stun immunity while attacking with cyclone or block/stun recovery from shield nodes. You need to compensate by shooting for 7k+ HP endgame.

In non-descent races this season we begin to feel the pain of not having the option to buy a Coral Ring after Hillock. Why that option was quietly removed during Beta I don't really understand. So much for strategic decisions.

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Hilbert wrote:

But then PVE content would be too easy. GGG added crit hit only monsters because they believe they are difficult.

Well, randomly getting hit for 10x the average damage isn't really "difficult" in any sense of the word, it's bullshit.