This idea that content not tested in the PTS shouldn't be called in to question after it goes live is ridiculous. I was one of the few who tried to get matches during the PTS patch, but for whatever reason, if people don't test the patches, that doesn't mean potential problems shouldn't be addressed.

This is the same problem I have with playing with my brother , Monster Bait, My Flaming Buddy and Chill Bill all on the screen at once. It becomes near impossible to click on an enemy in that case. Because all these things that you can click on and do nothing with are in the way.

Maybe remove the ability to click on Friendly targets for now. This way you would click on the enemy instead. Put it back in if we ever need it to target are own stuff , like with "Heal others , Not Self".

For people who complain the PTS is too large to download: Stephen posted a way to get the PTS without having to download anything, and the process takes only a few seconds. Go try it.

So, in conclusion: It's not overpowered and to make the Flaming Bud's die with the caster would solve all issues? Great news to me, I love Flaming Buddy as it is.

Hmmm, I was on the pts everyday that it was testing this last heave (chunk, chunklet, whatever) all anyone would have had to do is ask and I would have tested pvp with you (even though i don't pvp, I still wouldn't have minded trying it out) Seems noone ever talked while on pvp which (as in a lot of cases) when there were only 3 peeps on, it seems kind of hard to figure out what everyone is doing at the time.

So, in summary, next time pts is open with something new to try out and you see me on (usually Diannadora) give me a tell and we will try new stuff out

hey people, i havnt had a chance to test this out or anything i dont play anymore.

but something tells me if it an update thats caused an argument like this stephen and the crew need their heads looking out. the box was the only good thing to happen to DR and months.

it seems with every update DR gets half of the population dies...

something comes out in PVE and it fucks up PVP so the PvPers quit. they try to fix it to stop more people leaving... it fucks up PVE so they quit cos there annoyed.

and now without wreker here to have his ass plugged by stephens pixelated cock stephen has to possibly make his own descissions about pvp and it seems there always wrong.

good fight PVP again.

for every mrember we lose we gain 3 more. And for every 3 that join, 1 stays. I havent seen a number difference, just less people I know. Raged half the population didn't leave, just half the people you knew. You can't do anything about it other than move on or, make new friends. I choose to make new friends.

Very well said. As long as the majority of us have that attitude, this game is going to stick around and the community will hopefully continue to grow.

Frankly, 65% of people who leave are usually trolls or ego-inflated PvPers anyway, so I'd say we're better off without them (obviously, this doesn't apply to the 35% who are great people... miss you all).

Here is my opinion, Skills should never be changed because of PVP, The players should just find way to defeat or weaken that skill. Change your armour and jewelry around, i am sure you will find something. " Again just my opinion "

I agree bruno. You can't ask them to nerf something everytime your strategy doesn't work. Thats what Ive been saying all along. I swear theres always people bitching when new skills come out.

I am no PVP expert by far, but why not experiment on new builds instead of whining that someone found a build that beats 'em dowm.

Quit crying and try something new.

I know your PVP ratings are important to you(not targeting any specific player) "you" means any pvp'er that won't try something new. If you can adapt your rating will increase. That's one thing a rating should reflect-how well you react to new builds and attack methods.

What pissed me off the worst was getting time lost on 1 and 2 hand swivel arm..... DAMN YOU crybaby pvp'ers.

and thank you other pvp'ers for making the wimps cry ;-)

While I believe this is generally true, there are times when a new skill comes along that needs tweaking simply because when it's put into action it doesn't come across as intended (whether that be it's too strong, too weak or whatever; and not everyone can get on the PTS to judge it). Just like there are bugs or glitches with other items in the game, so to can it be with skills; so just because the critique or what-not comes from a PvPer should not mean it should automatically be discounted. Those PvPers who give positive feedback about something help create and possibly make things better for us all who play.

Vs.

So you don't bitch about new skills, just new boss encounters? Perhaps you need to take a step back and re-evaluate your perspective, since it appears that you have some anger management issues and are adamantly opposed to anything that has the potential to affect you negatively, even if it might be better for the game, overall.

BTW, it's not bitching - it's providing feedback, at least for me. I spend a ton of time testing new skills, game mechanics, quests, items, etc... on the PTS and I provide feedback based on my experience and perspective. I'm not always right, but at least I open up dialog on the subject so that it can be discussed, which is really the point. That's why I started at least 14 new threads in the PTS Discussion forum for this last build, including the PVP tweaks thread that you immediately attacked.

The reality is that not very many players use the PTS, which means the first chance they have to test new content is when it's already gone live. This is why it's critical to get as many people testing new content as early in the process as possible. Every time there's a new build on the PTS, I world hop, announce it and try to recruit people to test it. I even login to the PVP world and try to recruit there, since I believe PVPer feedback is essential to changes on the PTS. Unfortunately, nobody ever seems to care...

The way I see it, another good reason to go to the PTS and test things out is so the devs can get all the changes out of the way before releasing the patch, and then be able to move on to new projects. Every week the devs have to spend working on chunk 4 from here on out, is a week that they could have spent preparing chunk 5.

The sooner the devs can put a patch behind them and move on to create new content, the better for all of us. To me, that is one of the most important functions of the PTS.

Dude Lol GET THE HELL OFF MY BACK. Jesus christ dude you find fault with everyone. Your not perfect yourself you know that right? And btw I posted this a few days ago before I really tested the monster. It did seem overpowered to me. Now I have realized and been told by a few VERY respected members its meant to be a group thing which is understandable. Yes I did think it was overpowered, but I don't think so now. But even if I did, just because I don't think the new skills need tweaking I shouldn't be allowed to think the boss needs tweaking? Dude seriously if you aren't going to contribute anything but insults then how bout just destroy your keyboard.

And I attacked that BS thread because you were whining about ranger this and ranger that.

This is what I'm talking about when I say "anger management issues". You also completely miss the point. I'm not insulting you. I'm trying to get you to evaluate how you reply/react in your posts, since it's pretty hard to take you seriously. I know you have something valuable to contribute, but it's tough to filter through your BS, just like it took over a 1/2 hour of chatting with you in game for you to be able to make your point to me about rangers in PVP.

In one thread you attack players by saying they're bitching, you just attacked me for "whining" in a PTS Discussion forum thread (that entire forum exists as a place to discuss new content, btw, which is exactly what I was doing), but you state how you have the right to complain about the new boss? How is that different than the bitching or whining you accuse me and others of? How is that different than you telling everybody else they have to "adapt", but that same mantra doesn't seem to apply to you, based your posts? That's the point you fail to grasp. This isn't KoC's game, it's everybody's game. Everybody has the right to provide "feedback" without being attacked for it.

I never said I was perfect, nor do I find fault with "everyone". In fact, I specifically refute the "perfect" comment in my last post by stating "I'm not always right, but at least I open up dialog on the subject so that it can be discussed, which is really the point".

Grow up.

Well... to get back on topic... I think MFB is fine...

EXCEPT one thing.

I think its attack rating needs to be lowered in PvP. MFB hits TONS, and I have 47,000+ defence and no acidic blight on me. The actual person hits me 1/10 shots... MFB hits
8/10-9/10 of the time.

I wish that were true for me clone. I can only get it to work 2/10 times if Im lucky. Adjust folks, get fire resist it eliminates a bulk of the problem.

I Have FIRE RESIST 800+ and 47,000 defence. I am not talking about SUMMONING the buddy I am talking about an actual buddies ATTK RATING. The buddies, when summoned, gets WAY too many hits in, especially when I have 47,000 defence (which is supposed to (idk) DECREASE the chance to be hit by someone...)

DEF is only good against attacks that require AR. I don't know if MFB's sword attacks are based on AR or magic. If they're based on AR and you have that high of a defense, they should have difficulty hitting you. If they're based on magic, then you might need higher fire resist. According to Stephen:

So, even if you had 1300 Fire resist, MFB would still get in 1/4 shots, assuming they were based on magic, not AR.

Yeah I like Cheezy Poofs.

When im fighter with wasa i have like 1000 fire resistance ,but when i fight fighters with mfb its still a close match no matter the resistance.

Lol ripper. I think your missing the point. I believe some things are open up for discussion and when I was speaking about MMM it was not for myself as I found the boss difficult as my mage also. I was providing feedback. And you made me mad because you are only speaking from a rangers perspective. Put yourself in others shoes.

Ok I can't edit so I take back my previous statements. Im done arguing ripper since you will clearly never get what I am trying to say. Im finished arguing.

You're wrong about my perspective, but it doesn't really matter. There's hardly anybody left who knows me.

KoC, if you bothered to check out any of Ripper's numerous helpful posts from the past and present, you'd realize that he has a good, knowledgeable perspective on a lot of things in respect to game play and game mechanics.

KoC, perhaps you should try to be a little less aggressive and take things less personally. You seem to get into an irrational rage whenever you begin debating (most notably with Ripper). No one had insulted you, any offense you percieve in these debates are your own imagination... be a little bit more open-minded, and not close yourself to any opinion other than your own (if you choose to cling to that, why do you bother debating...). Obviously we all want our own opinions to be right, but being more accepting of other's views isn't a bad thing to do, even if you still don't agree with them...

I'm not going to read the preceding 48 posts but I will reply to the original post:

After doing some PvP today I'd have to say that 1 Flaming Buddy is very overpowered, and 2, Chill Bill is nurfed beyond usability unless you heal him constantly.

Also something really needs to be done about Holy Roller, it lets fighters fly around the map, when you get hit with it you 'lag' in place for about 3 seconds and to top it off you then have a speed debuff.
As a mage I have a very low chance of surviving a successful Holy Roller.

Do you mean the spell that heals Bill or to actually use ice to heal him? Because if you have Bill....use the heal spell.

Except now Bill melts at 1% per second. Snow Globe is no longer quite enough to keep Bill alive if he's also taking damage.

Ok In my Personel Opinion MFB takes away too much mana to be overpowered.
Holy Roller allows fighters to catch kiters and runners, althoiugh I have fellvictim to this infamous "lag" caused by holy roller so I agree it sucks but I think that they should change the debuff to only when holy roller connects.

And bill does seem to melt a bit fast.

I agree, Roller is fine in concept but Long range activation + 'lagging' + double (or higher) speed debuffs + Monster molasses is just to much.

A few days ago i spent nearly 2 hours working on a post about this, explaining the problem and so on, only to have the time out screw me. I had thought that I copied the text, but only 1 word from the post pasted. Bah

Well there was a lot of good information in there, and there is no way i'm going to be able to reproduce it to my satisfaction, so i'm just going to skip the sage wisdom and get to the suggestions.

It is overpowered, to an extent. Its not overly severe, but just think about how much damage the little buggers do. They do just as much damage per hit as the user, while they are slower, 1 isn't a huge issue, but with 2 active buddies, its like taking damage from 2 of the same fighters, effectively doubling damage dealt by the user. Add in the fact that there are now 2 more bodies to get in the way of ranged shots, and take damage, things get ugly vs MFB.

Its also become the dominate strategy for fighters, this is something devs wanted to avoid.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want another DC, that was handled poorly and is now virtually useless.

This needs finesse to fix, a quick bandaid as fast as possible isn't the answer. We can wait for the next patch for the fix, so it can be tested(hopefully devs can get it on the pts so we can test it for pvp and pve before it goes live). I'll do what i can to rally up some people to test it, if we can get it on the pts.

Now for the fixes, i'm suggesting a compound of a few things applied to the skill.

1 - Reduce the buddies attack rating.
2 - Reduce damage dealt.
3 - Make it a little easier to resist.
4 - Reduce the spawn rate of the buddies
5 - Reduce the health of the buddies
6 - Reduce the Life(durration) of the buddies
7 - Increase the cool down of the skill, its really short.
8 - Decrease the max movement speed of the buddies.

Of coarse I don't mean use all of these, just a combination of 2-4 of these, maybe 5 or 6 to a lesser degree. 4 and 7 are almost interchangeable, either would have about the same result.

Mobs generally don't have as high a defense or resistance as pvpers will/can. Also, mobs will do less damage and have lower health than pvpers.

The trick with this, is to make slight adjustments to a few different attributes, bring it down to where its still decently effective against mobs, and not totally dominating in pvp. There are a few ways to go about doing this. You can drop all the attributes of the skill down by 50% and work up in small increments and using different combinations of the different attributes, and differing degrees. Or you can slowly reduce the attributes from the base its at right now.

Test in both areas and make sure it works well in both areas without completely dominating.

What happened with Dark Conniption made it almost useless in pve, and barely useful in pvp. I really don't want that to happen again with this awesome skill.

amen cysira! =D

I had ~2000 fire resist, ~15K def, and ~60K health as a mage, and I was dead in about 4 seconds against a fighter with flaming buddy raping me.

No offense cy....but ffs why not just delete him? Thats enough nerfs to make that skill completely useless.

I believe she said:

I really hope the devs are going to look at this, because it's getting tiresome beating people soundly, they put on fb or fb + dc and all of the sudden it's a completely different story- even with good resists.

Those who don't pvp like to cry foul when pvp'ers find something wrong with their skills, but imagine, pve'ers, every boss you fight suddenly being nearly unbeatable because they were given a new skill...I bet there would be plenty of outcry then.

Personally I think that when logging into the pvp server, the skills that need to be nerfed only get nerfed when logging into the pvp server, and are left alone for pve.

Cause if you notice there are more PvE'rs than PvP'ers, im not saying to ignore the PvPers that would be unjust. But like I said have skills work differently when playing in that server, cause I dont want to see what happened to DC happen to FB which I use off and on PvE, where it seems to be balanced.

Yeah, only 5-10% of the players is regular PvP'ers (or so it looks like of how many is on) and frankly, I'm tired of skills getting nerfed in favor of PvP when most of us PvE. Thus I haven't done so much to HDoL.eu lately (more than reporting news), I'm waiting to see where Dungeon Runners will go. Hopefully they can work out a way to seperate PvP from the game completely so that skills there will be different from PvE. It's kinda tiresom getting new skills every other patch we love and enjoy and a few weeks later they get nerfed into useless.

Well, it's possible that skills are simply overpowered (not just in terms of pvp), but I would have no problem with certain skill adjustments applying only to pvp. Although, since you can pve on w5, there would have to be some Pwnston only barrier- maybe an icon.

That's why you group with people before taking on bosses, or switch skills and gear for the more difficult ones... I kind of see your point, but since I don't think you can gang up on a single player in PvP I'm not sure how valid the comparison is.

You'd be more sure if you weren't thinking about the comparison technically, it was just a hypothetical to illustrate the frustration of dealing with an imbalance in your opponent's favor.

Maybe because if there is a boss I can't run in PvE, I just go run another one instead.

PvE offers a lot more options to deal with frustrating situations over-all, which is why I disagree with your comparison as not being entirely valid. In PvP you can't group against a single enemy. You can't just leave in mid-fight to go fight something else, and you can't run off in mid-fight to stock up on potions or to heal.

In PvP, once you've started on something, you're stuck on it until you finish it, which in itself creates a bit more frustration than PvE situations where at any given time you can just drop a scroll and get out of there. Now granted, most people don't, but the ability to do it, combined with the lack of penalties if you die, makes PvE a bit more casual and relaxed.

Grouping isn't a valid argument. If there is any boss that a great deal of people are unable to beat solo, then the boss is to strong. This game isn't heavily weighted in grouping, and no one should have to group just to be able to beat a boss. Thats one thing that would take away from the simplicity of the game. Its meant to be able to solo the game 100% of the time, its the foundation of the game to be able to play for short periods of time, and that includes and entails solo play.

Granted, just because, YOU, or one person or another has to group to beat a boss, doesn't mean its over powered, its a majority. I my self couldn't solo sissirat with mage until i had it at lvl 17, but that was a long long time ago, in the first couple weeks I played.

I don't want another DC, but I don't want pvp ruined because the issue is ignored.

I'd love it if they would/could, made the major "nerfs" and balance issues that are relevant to pvp, stay in pvp. But thats not likely to happen. Even so, MFB is still a bit overpowered all around, pvp just shows a greater extent of the issue, exagerating it slightly, the largest problem is it's a summon type spell that brings in another character with health and attack power, its the same issue pvp has with chill bill. While chill bill is less of an issue now with him melting, but it still not a big improvement to balancing it for pvp. But what was done with bill, won't work for MFB, for obvious reasons.

In addition to Cy's post, you're still missing my point. It has nothing to do with the particulars of pve vs. pvp. My goal, in using the comparison, is not to equate one situation with another. I'm simply trying to convey what it's like to play against the imbalance in terms that someone who doesn't pvp might understand...nothing more.

Grouping, the PvP version.

So maybe remove summons then? However, it's been stated over and over from the developers that is not going to happen, so there is no point bringing that up at all. Maybe what we need is simply more posts on the subject like Cysira's. Constructive and detailed, and a very far cry from what unfortunately sounded lot like "waaaah, my favorite tactic isn't working anymore" when Chunk 4 first came out.



Edited by Khazandra (10/20/08 11:04 PM) — reason: elaborated

Nit pick time :P

While I, would love it if summons were removed from pvp. I still think bill is to unbalanced for pvp, and likely impossible to do so without making him suck, for many reasons, I hate bill for pvp, love him(sometimes) for pve. Sorry I just don't like fighting 2 players without some rebalancing, you probably would want to fight 2 Balzacks at the same time, well 1 and another half moron that mostly gets in the way, but still hits you with a stick. But like you said, it isn't going to happen, so i've moved on. I was simply comparing part of the MFB issue with one of the major chill bill problems.

The rest of the post, cool, thank you.




PS: My opinion and philosophy on chill bill is rather complicated and very difficult to really explain. While he can be a minor annoyance depending on the user, he can also be a royal pain in the ass with another, and really be the deciding factor. And that is the root of the issue, one skill should not decide the outcome of a match, its how you use that skill, and all other skills in conjunction with it, that should. How you use what is available to you, not just using a shortcut dominate strategy/skill to get a cheap win. If you suck, using chill bill, or whatever bug, imbalance or anything else, wont change that, and can really show how much you suck.

OK now, i know what some of you are thinking "gear, gear, blah blah gear, power yada yada" I say and :P. While a lot of the time someone with better gear/power/whatever, will beat someone with lower power/not so good gear. HOWEVER, as you get closer in power ratings, skill becomes more of a factor. While myself, with power 98.xx% power, can beat others with 101.xx% power. I can also beat people up to 95% power with my little 82% and 83% power no rb ranger and mage. You can't tell me that's gear, and not skill, considering both of them are non member characters. I just happen to be good at building and i'm also a rather good tactician. Gear means nothing if you can't back it up with playing skill, and proper building. I've skunked 100 and 101% power lvl 100s, with A- Poor pvp build and B- Inefficient skills/tactics, stemming from in experience.



Ok sorry, I kind of went off on a bit of a tangent there and started rambling. But I'm really trying to put things into perspective for everyone, on a lot of different issues. So yes, I've already given rebuttals for some of your arguments to my staments :P.

That can probably be applied to PvE as well as PvP. If any one skill worked as effectively everywhere on everything in PvE, that would be a problem, mainly because the game would get kind of boring after a while. In PvP, that kind of imbalance would be even more gratingly obvious, and more problematic.

So if I understand you right, it's perfectly fine to summon the flaming guy and literally toast your opponent in PvP, as long as MFB isn't the only reason you're winning?

I just think that such an overpowered skill (MFB that is) then they should at least un-nurf Chill Bill so non-fighters would have a way to counter MFB.
Even then I think MFB would still be way overpowered, a level 100 Flaming Buddy can kill me in 3 hits in PvP, tell me thats not a bit much.

Oh and they don't miss much ether.