The rez problem.

Galt

Since coming back, I've noticed that it's now common for someone to die 3-4 times in a fight. They Starburst, they ink a new one, they rush back with using a piece of onyx or an idol, a spirit beacon, etc. 

It's ridiculous, it exacerbates differences in tanking ability in 1v1s and teams and it favours certain professions over others. There seem to be a few root causes to this:

- Starburst protects against xp loss on death, and isn't a 'real' kill anymore, so it's become much more popular
- Starburst can be re-inked during a fight and touched as soon as it's off cooldown, and disrupting them inking is difficult.
- Bosses drop an item that can rez you faster, which means people who can tank those bosses are less likely to stay dead, as are people who can dump credits into onyx.
- There are multiple promo items that rez yourself or an ally. Angel idols, spirit beacons, etc. 
- Some professions build momentum by building up a resource, which persists if their target starbursts, whilst some rely on an on-target resource which starburst wipes

Inhume seems to be the only worthwhile counter to these tactics, and it doesn't deal with all of them. It's also a power particular to a single aspect, and it takes 4 monoliths to unlock. There's an earring to block starburst, but it has a 12 hour cooldown for one kill, and that's when linked or stacked.

My view is this: Nuke starburst, or make it only work in PVE and repurpose onyx entirely. Angel idols have a significant cooldown, but they'd need changing too because they'd be too valuable once starburst changed. Spirit beacons would, similarly, need altering.

Swale

I agree, at least on the onyx.  I'm not sold on getting rid of starburst, but I'd actually like to see inhume go away.  I think inhume was probably conceived as a way to even up fights that were skewed.  In practice, I think it tends to skew those sorts of fights even more.  You definitely always want to have all of the inhumes on hand that you can possibly get, and that will always be true for as long as inhume exists.  The only reason you'll ever hold back on inhumes is when you're already winning a low stakes engagement and you don't want the other side to outright quit.     

The problem with onyx is pretty much the ability to boss farm in a way that I'm pretty sure would be impossible in any of the other games.  That in itself isn't bad, especially with our current tanking requirements.  I like that our game isn't super stingy with boss rewards, and people kind of need those temp arties (for example) to not blow up.  But people (like me) do have stockpiles of onyx from promo market.  If you are fighting a team that has agreed "we are using the crap out of onyx for this", it can definitely be a huge gamechanger.  And if a team feels they have enough onyx to do it for day to day engagements (as in, most of the team using onyx, or key players using it), then it becomes a near constant factor.     

Oystir

Starburst has its own CD. I need to survive 30 seconds before I can touch another one, and it takes me 10 seconds stationary to ink a new one - so I'm standing in an active battle unable to flee or I am out of a fight for that amount of time. I'd be okay to see it take a little longer to ink a starburst, or even see it be a little sensitive to autocuring to the point where you -have- to be out of the fight to ink a new one, but I think anything more than that is a bit much. Other than crystal, starburst is really the only way for barely-artifacted me to have a fighting chance against raw damage. 

Edit: And a world where crystal is my best chance against damage is a world where I die 5 seconds after regaining equilibrium anyway ;; 

Onyx limits sound fine. I have almost 200 resurrections just on the fly. An hour CD or something would handle that easily. 

Gjarrus

There is no xp loss on death aside from guards. The ress promo items are all long cooldowns or consumables, so they're rough but not major shifters in gameplay. Onyx is unbalancing, but the drop in wraithlord output means eventually that'll be less of a concern outside of those sitting on 100+ revives.

I really just would rather have starburst get deleted or massively changed. My old idea was a delayed rezz in council/area after dropping from the sky in a literal starburst. You'd be able to get into the fight faster than if you died the True Death (Ssssooookehhh), but it'd be about a minute if you wanted to restarburst before going in. A 30s-1m timeout from a fight for dying sounds reasonable, IMO, especially since it's far lower than eating the Dis debuff.

For normal resurrection skills, require a decent channel (10-20s). Not opposed to some kind of onyx cooldown.

Also: Yeah, raw damage is annoying in team fights, but starburst doesn't fix that. You're not really supposed to survive being targeted by that, and starburst doubles the difference. That's why 95% of the game starbursts and just dies again. A druid who knows how to leap may escape, but that's neither guaranteed nor a good argument for starburst.

Naruj

Here are my general thoughts:

Even in a world where death is meaningless, Starburst and Inhume serve an interesting purpose. The idea of prioritizing down a high value target needs to be balanced around their ability to get back into a fight, and that's sort of intriguing. However, it's too prevalent, the cooldowns are too low, and it's too easy to get back. I will tackle each of these problems individually.

Starburst/Redemption/Combustion - When killed by a player, the cooldowns on these skills should be fairly long and restrictive, because they grant a 100% mana/health restore and cure all afflictions on death. This can completely swing the balance of a team fight, and it should, but it's very easy to overbalance around these sort of effects and diminish the value of good prioritization and actually killing people early. I would probably set the cooldown to 3-5 minutes on Starburst, so that they're useful but restrictive. Redemption is harder because it's a centerpiece of Devotion, so I'd probably reduce that cooldown by a minute or two compared to Starburst.

Onyx - There are a few problems with Onyx that are not directly related to the resurrection component. The first is that our movement rate is too high, so players can get back into a fight from anywhere before it ends. The second is that there's no real opportunity cost to Onyx because the death penalty is lackluster in team fights. But given that the first of these is nearly impossible to solve, I'd probably just limit Onyx to once per day and hope that solves the problem. This is not a great solution, but without entirely redesigning things it might be the best.

Combat Resurrections- This is probably the big one. The ability to resurrect in combat used to be a very rare skill, and these people were often prioritized in combat as a result. However, that is no longer the case, and people are often being resurrected 3-4 times a fight with no diminishing returns. But rather than limit who can use resurrections, which would be hard given the bredth of classes and promotion items that now give the ability to, I would change the mechanic of resurrection itself to be less of a repeated advantage during combat. My thought is to set resurrection as a Charon location. When you are resurrected by any effect, you can 'REQUEST PASSAGE TO BODY' and return to the game where your corpse is located without having to travel to it. However, to maintain death as a meaningful constraint, this would have the same restrictions as any other Charon request.

There's a tug of war between 'burst damage needs to be good' and 'players should be able to contribute to fights without immediately dying', and we need to find a spot somewhere between those two with some degree of balance.

Oystir

Yes. I'm the 5% druid who leaps. Having an opportunity to burst then get away after the inevitable 2-3 engage is my only option to leave the room after I am targetted. Otherwise I am out of the fight after three combos. That's huge for picking off mid and lowbies. I'd rather let every beefcake walk around with an extra life than take it away completely. More caveats is fine, but I don't see the advantages outweighing the disadvantages because the things I want are most important.

Moreover, every person in the game has this option with starburst, which levels the playing field for all, especially when only one circle has unconditional access to resurrection. If most people are dying again immediately anyway, I do not see why it is a bad thing to keep that available, considering it does make a difference if used intelligently, and if not, free PK xp, whoo.

Naruj

Oystir said:

Moreover, every person in the game has this option with starburst, which levels the playing field for all, especially when only one circle has unconditional access to resurrection.

Every circle has unconditional access to resurrection, because every circle has 3-4 classes that can resurrect. If you meant to write 'access to Redemption', I'll agree with you that it's an argument to keeping some version of Starburst in the game.

Cassius

Naruj said:

Starburst/Redemption/Combustion - When killed by a player, the cooldowns on these skills should be fairly long and restrictive, because they grant a 100% mana/health restore and cure all afflictions on death. This can completely swing the balance of a team fight, and it should, but it's very easy to overbalance around these sort of effects and diminish the value of good prioritization and actually killing people early. I would probably set the cooldown to 3-5 minutes on Starburst, so that they're useful but restrictive. Redemption is harder because it's a centerpiece of Devotion, so I'd probably reduce that cooldown by a minute or two compared to Starburst.

On a common CD so no stacking. 

Naruj

The other option, if you wanted to slow down the viability of people returning to fights at full strength, would be to return to the system of defences stripping on death.

You might hate it, but it's mechanically advantageous at slowing down the pace of reinforcements and adding trade offs to decision making. People have to commit to either rushing back quickly (without full defences) or coming back more slowly with everything lined up to fight at full strength.

Galt

Starburst makes the difference in tanking ability even more pronounced, though. 

If someone has 600hp, and I have 500hp, I have to burn through 1200 to actually kill them, and they have to burn through 1000 to kill me, with just one starburst. It inflates HP differences, which is bad.

Putting it on a decently long cooldown - shared with idols, etc - might solve the problem, but it wouldn't fix it entirely.

Gjarrus

Extending the starburst cooldown (5m or something near that) is probably the sane place to start, even if I would rather it got Stavenned.

E: Along with a nerf to inhume.

Naruj

Galt said:

Starburst makes the difference in tanking ability even more pronounced, though. 

If someone has 600hp, and I have 500hp, I have to burn through 1200 to actually kill them, and they have to burn through 1000 to kill me, with just one starburst. It inflates HP differences, which is bad.

Putting it on a decently long cooldown - shared with idols, etc - might solve the problem, but it wouldn't fix it entirely.

It's still the same effective percentage. He has 20% more health than you at both 600 and 1200 in your scenario. However, you are also balancing EHP against 'literally the first target in every team fight that never gets to do anything but die immediately'.

Starburst situationally gives people more ability to counterplay targeting priorities, and that is also important.

Galt

Perhaps. It feels like if the focus fire is going to work, starburst doesn't help all that much, though.

Oystir

Naruj said:

Oystir said:

Moreover, every person in the game has this option with starburst, which levels the playing field for all, especially when only one circle has unconditional access to resurrection.

Every circle has unconditional access to resurrection, because every circle has 3-4 classes that can resurrect. If you meant to write 'access to Redemption', I'll agree with you that it's an argument to keeping some version of Starburst in the game.

I can think of Aryana aspect rez (conditional to monoliths) and whatever promotional item/s they made for it. I am talking about priest resurrection? I may be missing something. I actually only know enough to give my own opinion about these things, and I did, so carry on without me. 

Gjarrus

Voice Nartae, DK Animate, Shamanism Resurrect, Devotion Resurrection

Sarrius

Oystir said:

Naruj said:

Oystir said:

Moreover, every person in the game has this option with starburst, which levels the playing field for all, especially when only one circle has unconditional access to resurrection.

Every circle has unconditional access to resurrection, because every circle has 3-4 classes that can resurrect. If you meant to write 'access to Redemption', I'll agree with you that it's an argument to keeping some version of Starburst in the game.

I can think of Aryana aspect rez (conditional to monoliths) and whatever promotional item/s they made for it. I am talking about priest resurrection? I may be missing something. I actually only know enough to give my own opinion about these things, and I did, so carry on without me. 

Magick has these rezz abilities:

Bard Rezz

Demonic has these rezz abilities:

DK Reanimate

AntiMagick has these rezz abilities:

Priest Rezz
Templar Rezz

All circles have these rezz abilities:

Supremacy Revive
Shamanism Rezz
Devil salts
Aryana aspect

EDIT: The ubiquity in rezz is slightly higher in AM, because two circle specific profs have it and they now have access to two profs originally fulfilling the role of that second circle specific rezz for Demonic and Magick.

Galt

So, a prime example of the starburst meta being really unfair depending on class:

A bard loses all their defensive songs when they die. That's a long list of defs that it would take a long time to put back up mid fight, or SING ALL would cost 13~ seconds of equilibrium and get the bard killed anyway. Contrast this to classes that don't have such defences, and you see why this situation sucks.

Naruj

Galt said:

So, a prime example of the starburst meta being really unfair depending on class:

A bard loses all their defensive songs when they die. That's a long list of defs that it would take a long time to put back up mid fight, or SING ALL would cost 13~ seconds of equilibrium and get the bard killed anyway. Contrast this to classes that don't have such defences, and you see why this situation sucks.

I am sincerely okay with the idea of adding def strip back to Starburst. You can keep it disabled for normal death if you want, but I have no problem with the idea of disadvantaging people somewhat after Starburst.

Swale

If adding full def strip back to starburst gets to the point of serious consideration, I kind of hope they just remove it entirely.  I'd rather starburst stick around, and make the effects of starburst more consistent across classes if that is an issue (it sounds like it is, and it also sounds like that might be a holdover from the days of full def strip).

I've experienced full def strip just enough to know I simply didn't find it much fun (although I'd probably still run starburst just for the sake of any boost to my team, and I imagine many people would).  

Full def strip would make most people into nothing but a meatshield post burst, I think.  There are some rare exceptions, and these are the sorts of people who have specific offenses and defenses for every class in the game, but for the most part, it turns you into a true meatshield after the burst.  Most players have to be a meatshield from time to time, for sure, and we all accept that, but building it right into the game just isn't fun (imo).

Theophilus