PoD vs. VQ vs. Liches (was: Blood Arco mod)

[PvK]

Seems to me that VQ doesn't make much sense for Ermor to have thematically (as well as for balance reasons) because with a killer dominion, the prospects for good blood drinking are few.

VQ seemed to have too little cost for all the abilities she had, compared to other gods. The patch increased her costs, without reducing her abilities. So she wasn't nerfed, so much as given an appropriate price tag.

Seems all good to me.

Other changes also include new abilities and tweaked values. Pangaea and Desert Tombs players got some new goodies.

PvK

[PvK]

Originally posted by Bayushi Tasogare:
On the VQ issue, I fall more in line with Norfleet: there's actually very little reason to use the VQ now.

Is there any reason why we shouldn't read that an overstatement from the perspective of a narrow selection process? She's still a good immortal fighting chassis with a huge list of build-in abilities. Looks good to me.

And trying to argue that an Undead Pretender is non-thematic for Ermor is really pushing it. After all, you DO have Broken Empire as the base.

Good point about Broken Empire, but they'd have to change the god selection UI to eliminate it only from the Ashen and SG themes. Seems to me there are good thematic and logical reasons from taking from them, and the perhaps unnecessary hit to Broken Empire doesn't seem to me like a big deal.

Personally, I'd rather have an unclear reason for an omitted pretender choice, than a couple of pretender choices that don't make a lot of sense (vampire queen with murderous dominion exterminating her blood sources).

Basically, the VQ changes, in the main, were aimed at the way Norfleet (and only Norfleet) plays.

Oh? What about the chorus of whines that everyone was copying Norfleet's strategy?

I'm going to be trying to find a 'better balance' with everything through the modding. If I find anything that seems to lead to better games in the main, I'll be sure to post it. ...

Cool - looking forward to it!

PvK

[Yossar]

Originally posted by Bayushi Tasogare:
Finally, an issue about the Prince of Death. I think, with the changes to the VQ, that the PoD is going to emerge as a new contender for her crown. While he's neither ethereal nor immortal, he has twice the base hit points, a much better Fear effect, a good base protection, a much less base cost (100 points goes a long way), and no superfluous magic (I've never heard of anyone using a SC VQ for her Blood magic).

Prince of Death is good, but a poor choice for Arco (if you leave them with priestesses). They're going to pick up afflictions and the only way to fix that is with Gift of Health or a Chalice. Pick any living commander and you don't have to worry about that.

[Yossar]

Originally posted by PvK:

quote:

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Basically, the VQ changes, in the main, were aimed at the way Norfleet (and only Norfleet) plays.

Oh? What about the chorus of whines that everyone was copying Norfleet's strategy?

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I've still never heard of anyone besides Norfleet successfully using his strategies.

[ June 11, 2004, 03:47: Message edited by: Yossar ]

[Blitz]

That's usually the case when a knee-jerk reaction occurs as a result of a public outcry of whining. This is why I feel that whenever somebody calls for a nerfing of anything, that somebody should generally be ignored. Now the VQ is a more or less completely unusable chassis by any nation that doesn't have a huge number of points to burn...and isn't available to the most noteworthy, and perhaps appropriate, of them: Ermor. Meanwhile, other options are no more attractive than they were before. Instead of more and better options, we have less. To top that off, the new patch didn't really give us anything new, contentwise. Bleh.

She's still very good for races who have some "free" heat/cold picks. For example, with Jotunheim I like her because she can summon ice devils without needing Water 4 or construction 6.

You can have Order 2, Sloth 1, Cold 2, Misfortune 1 with AA WWW EEE DDD BBB and dominion 5 on a Vampire Queen. For that I get an immortal, flying, erthreal, regenerating, poison and cold resistant pretender who can realisticly summon her first ice devil on turn 15-20. So she's not the hands down champ anymore? So what. There's at least 20-25 pretenders that are worse. Now she's more of a niche choice rather than a default selection. Good on the developers.

[johan osterman]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
That's usually the case when a knee-jerk reaction occurs as a result of a public outcry of whining. This is why I feel that whenever somebody calls for a nerfing of anything, that somebody should generally be ignored. Now the VQ is a more or less completely unusable chassis by any nation that doesn't have a huge number of points to burn...and isn't available to the most noteworthy, and perhaps appropriate, of them: Ermor. Meanwhile, other options are no more attractive than they were before. Instead of more and better options, we have less. To top that off, the new patch didn't really give us anything new, contentwise. Bleh.

The intention was to price the VQ so that she would be as (un)viable as the liches. If you compared their costs before the VQ was a better choice than the standard- or Saurolich in almost every conceivable situation. Perhaps Liches are not very popular but they have been priced this way since dom 1 days and the VQ was added for dom 2, so our feeling was that the VQ was the pretender that was priced wrong rather than the liches. It was not a knee jerk reaction, especially since the VQ complaints emerged well before the previous patch, it was a measured response, and we didn't start fiddling with the VQ until we one day compared the lich with the VQ point by point, that was the reason for the change not the whining. We are not pavlov dogs. The removal of the VQ from Ermor is the sole instance where I might concede some part of your point, but even there it was mainly done for thematic reasons.

[Scott Hebert]

Originally posted by PvK:
Is there any reason why we shouldn't read that an overstatement from the perspective of a narrow selection process? She's still a good immortal fighting chassis with a huge list of build-in abilities. Looks good to me.

Well, the way I see it, the best comparison is with the Prince of Death. The base differences between the two post-patch is:

1) 100 points in favor of the Prince of Death.
2) 2 base Dominion in favor of the Prince of Death.
3) DDD (PoD) as opposed to DBB (VQ). If you are talking about an SC build for them, this is a point in favor of the PoD. I've never heard of an SC using Blood magic in combat.
4) The PoD has about a 2-3 pt. edge in every fighting statistic over a VQ. He also enjoys twice the base HPs of a VQ.

Now, balanced against this, you have the VQs Etherealness, Immortality, and Regeneration (there's also the Life Drain attack). If you think that's balanced, that's fine. I, personally, do not, especially since everything but the Immortality that the VQ possesses, the PoD can attain through items or spells.

As a test, I took a VQ and a PoD, and bought them up to the same level. The amount of points that took for each was:

VQ: 195
PoD: 116

Also, any further increase to Dominion (which is currently a 3) or to Death magic will favor the PoD, while an increase in Blood magic (which, for an SC, is suboptimal) favors the VQ.

Good point about Broken Empire, but they'd have to change the god selection UI to eliminate it only from the Ashen and SG themes. Seems to me there are good thematic and logical reasons from taking from them, and the perhaps unnecessary hit to Broken Empire doesn't seem to me like a big deal.

Personally, I'd rather have an unclear reason for an omitted pretender choice, than a couple of pretender choices that don't make a lot of sense (vampire queen with murderous dominion exterminating her blood sources).

True, but beware of where that path leads you. Why should Jotunheim get non-giant pretenders? Sure, there's Utgard, but that's only one theme. Same for C'tis and non-lizards. Etc.

Then there's the question of why it was removed from ONLY Ermor. If it had been restricted farther, I'd actually have less of a problem with it. But the 'only Ermor' removal smacks of silver bulleting, which is generally not a good way to enhance game balance.

Oh? What about the chorus of whines that everyone was copying Norfleet's strategy?

As Yossar said, I've not seen a single report of anyone but Norfleet able to win with the strategy Norfleet used.

Cool - looking forward to it!

Mm. Be careful of what you wish for.

Scott