I have a question for the devs. In the days of EQ, there was occasionally the need to adjust the power of items (referred to as a nerf) because they wound up being overpowered if used in conjunction with other things such as haste etc. (remember the moss covered twig?) This would also happen to class abilities or spells at times. This often resulted in hurt feelings by the player base who felt they were being unfairly hit with the adjustments. Will there be steps taken to avoid these types of things in Pantheon? I always felt that the best way to validate an item before it went live was to have everything in a database which could combine the item stats with class abilities, buffs, etc. to see what the max effectiveness of the item would be. There could be a numerical output and sorting algorithm to highlight potential issues. This helps to ensure that there would not be overpowered items or spells introduced which would require a rollback of the stats.
This doesn't take into account the ingenuity of players who often can figure out how to do things which devs and QA didn't think of but it should help reduce the need to nerf items in the game. Having a solid plan for future levels, items, abilities etc. also helps to mitigate this. The plans mentioned by devs in various streams relating to powerful items and buffs scaling based upon the level and skill levels by the player can help with this as well since tings like damage, delay etc are not a simple hard number.
From Aradune:
"Agreed -- by no means would [we] make an item with the intention to nerf it later.
But, as some others have mentioned, MMOs are complex, we are only human, and we will make mistakes. We don't want to nerf, we know people don't enjoy nerfs, but we also know this: leaving something broken or seriously imbalanced in the game hurts the integrity of the entire game and makes a worse game for everyone. I would rather upset a few people who got a broken item then leave it in and eventually negatively impact the fun of the entire community... If we find something broken, and it's severe, we'll bring down the servers and fix it. If it's not as severe, we may wait for a scheduled update or something."
(Source: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2544/nerf-day )
Bazgrim said:From Aradune:
"Agreed -- by no means would [we] make an item with the intention to nerf it later.
But, as some others have mentioned, MMOs are complex, we are only human, and we will make mistakes. We don't want to nerf, we know people don't enjoy nerfs, but we also know this: leaving something broken or seriously imbalanced in the game hurts the integrity of the entire game and makes a worse game for everyone. I would rather upset a few people who got a broken item then leave it in and eventually negatively impact the fun of the entire community... If we find something broken, and it's severe, we'll bring down the servers and fix it. If it's not as severe, we may wait for a scheduled update or something."
(Source: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2544/nerf-day )
Thank you, Baz!
Closing this thread so people can continue the discussion in the already active thread if they wish. :)