I’m going to bring back up an old concept I thought of, but hardly wrote on, called the nothings fair. A calamity of balance I saw occurring. Where players would scream at each other saying stuff is unbalanced. In other words “nothing’s fair.” As some abilities are always better than others, leading to a point where everything gets nerfed and you're left with a Nothing Fair. A Fair like carnival where players comically rub each other because they have no damage. I’ve seen part of the Fair manifest and we all did with the tank meta. The following solution provided by zos was nerf healing across the board, messing with many builds. It hasn’t been as bad as I thought it could be, but the Nothing’s fair is looming in my mind as I see them bring out sweeping nerfs to AoEs.
First it was class by class single target damage abilities, which were mathematically balanced to Dots. Then it was dots, which were originally the counter to Hots. Then It was healing, which generally counters damage. Now, AoEs which were at one point significantly inferior to single target became better via comparison, to the point Arrow Spray is viable.
What happens as the game continues this cycle downwards is you get timed fights based on resources. Every button does less and you have to cast more until you run out of resources. This is no new concept (Smite early game) and eso has emerging metas to replace it. The proc meta as it called won’t require abilities, but if followed will be the slap fest I forewarned about. You’ll either have squishy people running the downsides of proc sets, reduced ability efficiency and healing, or you’ll have people running
this build by
Isth3reno1else rubbing each other in the worst way possible… A Nothing’s Fair. Not to say one man's build will be the whole meta. But can his build kill typical damage builds, yes. Can it kill itself, no. Through nerfs to the potency of abilities whether it be healing or otherwise, you‘ve discouraged stat based playstyles. Glass cannons are no longer cannons. Not to say they don’t have a decent efficiency, but things don’t go boom like they used to.
There’s a couple of jokes about this new AoE performance solution. One being they tried to fix the five second skill delay, by adding a five second skill delay,,, Working as Intended?
No, even more there was the whole speculation around APM and trying to lower and slow down combat for a few reasons, and make the game more like WoW. To that I say keep ESO like ESO, and WoW like WoW. If you're trying to adopt their servers and finding incompatibility with your combat system, design your own server system.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Next topic: Kinda related to the Nothing’s Fair Cycle is the give and take between 1vX and Zergs.
It’s not an absolute postulate, but if you nerf the 1vX you buff the zerg. If you buff the 1vX you nerf the zerg.
Where and how does this apply and happen? Mainly with single & self target abilities. Do zerglings heal themselves, not really they stack heals. If there was a tipping of the scale vs self reliance and zerg reliance you’d get a better result. If single target abilities had more luster, and puglings could kill outside a zerg things would be different. If 1vXers are allowed to roam free without being penalized by nerfs, guess what? You’ve allowed people to venture out, have fun, and solve the AoE problem because single target would be vastly superior. Zerglings would venture out with a buddy and have a chance at killing 1vXers because their stats would be throttled. It's easier for most to work by themselves than with a team. In encouraging independence you lower the success of role builds by making them more susceptible to the efficiency of plain builds. Allowing a ball group to be dissected rather than blown up.
Pinja for
Dual Wands.
Pinja's three server solutions: