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Why is Balance even a thing?

ReziRezi
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edited August 22, 2017 in General Discussion
I've played Vindi and Mabi off and on for years. For some reason, my Vindi chars are gone and the forums got reset at some point...but I've been playing Mabi since, I believe, Chapter 2, and I was playing Vindi back when it was nothing but a Lannfest.

So while I never mastered either of the games, I have had constant experience with both and I understand their mechanics.


In Mabinogi, Balance made sense to me. It referred to the character's body's natural balance, and on weapons it referred to how balanced that weapon was in a manner that determined how much of the character's balance would be needed to properly wield it without any problems. Basically, stronger, heavier weapons tended to have less balance, which required the player to make up for it; while weaker, lighter weapons had more balance, requiring less from the player.

In function, this resulted in weaker, lighter weapons being able to deal out more of their potential damage over time, while stronger, heavier weapons dealt less of their potential damage over time, making it so that both weapon types functioned almost equally and therefore all weapon types were viable in a classless, all-weapon game. That made some good, logical sense to me.


In Vindictus, however, every single weapon/class starts out with terrible Balance. Balance still makes slower, heavier (but not necessarily stronger) weapons do less potential damage, but it also does this to faster, lighter weapons, either making the curve more harsh for faster weapons or atleast resulting in equal damage overall in comparison to slower, heavier weapons. Since faster classes benefit less from the attack speed stat anyway, Balance doesn't really make up for anything since the rest of the stats in the game and the skill balance already balance the weapons/classes.

Balance ends up doing moot to contribute to actually balancing the weapons, it fails to fulfill the reasoning given to it from Mabi and honestly just becomes this gimmick stat that everyone is forced to put points into, which takes away from putting points into other stats that actually benefit the character in some way.


If I'm missing something here, let me know. :)
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Comments

  • SirRFISirRFI
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    Vindictus was aimed towards reality way more back in the days. There were different type of armors, which varied in several ways (weight, main stat, def↔offense tradeoff, etc.), so did weapon length/reach. With time they started to standardise things and removed some of the features, so they can balance them out more easily. I think balance stat is one of these old concepts, which nowdays is just another stat to max out. You can still trade it for attack speed (Fast ES and alike), so "you attack faster but less precisely".
    Rezi
  • ReziRezi
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    I just think it's useless now. Though I did dislike the weight system to a point (it was a bit too harsh imo), I loved the length thing on weapons. But even back then, Balance didn't make a lick of sense. Even the notion of attacking precisely is covered by Crit (hitting fatal points on an enemy), while Balance is like a negative Crit system that everyone's forced to waste points in.
  • SirRFISirRFI
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    It's not useless by damage output terms if that's what You meant.
  • ReziRezi
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    How? Can you honestly say that if Balance was removed and everyone basically did the potential damage of their weapons, anything would break? Maybe the game would become even easier but I doubt any actual balance between the classes would change.
  • HonokaHonoka
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    edited August 22, 2017
    If balance wasn't a thing, how are you gonna stop players who speed-stack with fast on everything. Potential 120+ speed characters with nothing holding them back.

    This does ruin character balance too since some characters would benefit a great deal more from having that high-speed opposed to others.
    DokkunQuinque
  • YulaYula
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    Hmmm, wasn't balance equal to the amount of times you hit the hardest? Let's say a certain Fiona has amaranth kicks ranging from 10k to 30k. With low balance, she will mostly hit 10-15k, high balance will allow her to frequently hit close to 30k.

    Am I correct? If not why am I spending money on getting high balance ._.
  • HonokaHonoka
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    Yula wrote: »
    Hmmm, wasn't balance equal to the amount of times you hit the hardest? Let's say a certain Fiona has amaranth kicks ranging from 10k to 30k. With low balance, she will mostly hit 10-15k, high balance will allow her to frequently hit close to 30k.

    Am I correct? If not why am I spending money on getting high balance ._.

    Yeah, balance tightens the range of numbers your hits range from. If the highest an attack will hit for is 100k, then with 90 balance it will average 95k. But with 30 balance, the attack will average 65k.

    That's why if balance wasn't a thing, players would speed stack without taking a hit to their balance and everyone would hit fast and hit hard.
    Quinque
  • lumix345lumix345
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    I believe WAAAAYYYY back in like the very first closed beta, balance actually did not factor into the attacks and the game ran fine as usual. An optimistic take on why this was implemented and still is implemented is to say that the developers wanted to add more depth and realism to the game, kind of like how every swing of a stick we do in real life will have varying degrees of force behind it.

    A pessimistic take on why balance is still a thing, is that the developers wanted to hide another aspect of the game behind RNG to force players to improve their characters, sometimes to reach the same level of damage they had before an update. An example of this, when in one of the more recent updates, they made Additional Damage be affected by balance. After this update I was noticing my damage was hitting between 2.5k-5k less than before, which isn't really horrible compared to the insane amounts of damage our characters are currently doing, but it just kind of rubbed me the wrong way that I had to essentially get more Additional Damage (which meant entering into that RNG bonanza of a system we call enhancement) to hit the same amount of damage I was doing before.
  • ReziRezi
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    Honoka wrote: »
    If balance wasn't a thing, how are you gonna stop players who speed-stack with fast on everything. Potential 120+ speed characters with nothing holding them back.

    This does ruin character balance too since some characters would benefit a great deal more from having that high-speed opposed to others.

    This is wholly incorrect, as each character already has their speed balanced by some characters benefiting less from attack speed compared to others.

    Characters like Arisha which are naturally super fast only get a notable increase in their speed every 100 atk spd, while characters like Delia which are naturally super slow get a notable increase every 10 atk speed. So the game already makes sure that speed stacking doesn't overly benefit fast characters.
    Yula wrote: »
    Hmmm, wasn't balance equal to the amount of times you hit the hardest? Let's say a certain Fiona has amaranth kicks ranging from 10k to 30k. With low balance, she will mostly hit 10-15k, high balance will allow her to frequently hit close to 30k.

    Am I correct? If not why am I spending money on getting high balance ._.

    That's the problem. You should be constantly hitting 30k, since the game is already balanced based on potential damage, not Balance damage, which is why Balance already means nothing at endgame where most (good) players have 80 or so Balance so they're already hitting close to their potential.

    The game is balanced based on potential damage, not the mitigation of potential damage, so any characters that don't need to buff stats outside of Balance are a huge advantage over characters that do need to tailor other stats to be useful. Balance was already the meta, and from what I'm hearing about Add Dmg, it's even more the meta now; it's a gimmick meta stat that favors no-life whales over casual free players (and in some cases, casual whales over no-life free players, which is just plain wrong).
    lumix345 wrote: »
    A pessimistic take on why balance is still a thing, is that the developers wanted to hide another aspect of the game behind RNG to force players to improve their characters, sometimes to reach the same level of damage they had before an update. An example of this, when in one of the more recent updates, they made Additional Damage be affected by balance. After this update I was noticing my damage was hitting between 2.5k-5k less than before, which isn't really horrible compared to the insane amounts of damage our characters are currently doing, but it just kind of rubbed me the wrong way that I had to essentially get more Additional Damage (which meant entering into that RNG bonanza of a system we call enhancement) to hit the same amount of damage I was doing before.

    Which is exactly what I'm saying. I know there were some good arguments for Pre over XE, but Rise Pre is just ridiculous. If they were going to implement this, they could atleast have made it part of Rise XE so player skill would matter somewhat when faced against the whale-friendly RNG statfest.
  • GoofSpGoofSp
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    Rezi wrote: »
    Characters like Arisha which are naturally super fast only get a notable increase in their speed every 100 atk spd, while characters like Delia which are naturally super slow get a notable increase every 10 atk speed. So the game already makes sure that speed stacking doesn't overly benefit fast characters.

    That's what they exactly meant. Going from 50 speed to 120 won't benefit Arisha as much as it will benefit Delia, therefore getting to higher and higher attack speeds isn't balanced.
  • HonokaHonoka
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    GoofSp wrote: »
    Rezi wrote: »
    Characters like Arisha which are naturally super fast only get a notable increase in their speed every 100 atk spd, while characters like Delia which are naturally super slow get a notable increase every 10 atk speed. So the game already makes sure that speed stacking doesn't overly benefit fast characters.

    That's what they exactly meant. Going from 50 speed to 120 won't benefit Arisha as much as it will benefit Delia, therefore getting to higher and higher attack speeds isn't balanced.

    yup, exactly what I meant. A 120 speed delia without bad balance would be a monster, whereas an arisha or kai at 120 speed wouldn't be as powerful because they are still limited by cooldowns and mana. Thus it ruins the character balance.
    Quinque
  • ReziRezi
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    edited August 22, 2017
    Honoka wrote: »
    yup, exactly what I meant. A 120 speed delia without bad balance would be a monster, whereas an arisha or kai at 120 speed wouldn't be as powerful because they are still limited by cooldowns and mana. Thus it ruins the character balance.

    That makes no sense, as Delia is a VERY SLOW character by default, which means she's completely useless until later in the game when 90+ atk speed makes her even somewhat capable of dealing combos.

    High attack speed on Delia and other slow characters isn't overpowered; it's just the bare minimum speed she needs to do anything.

    And even if attack speed happened to create an unfair advantage without Balance on some characters, the devs just have to change values on those characters to balance it. It's literally just changing the values in their formulas.
  • PuppymanPuppyman
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    edited August 22, 2017
    Rezi wrote: »
    And even if attack speed happened to create an unfair advantage without Balance on some characters, the devs just have to change values on those characters to balance it. It's literally just changing the values in their formulas.

    Or they could leave it as is and not go through all that trouble. It's Nexon we're talking about here.
    Nexon took ages to rid of weight system which was made wholesomely irrelevant for a good long while.

    No need to fix something that isn't broken. Sure balance is tedious and annoying sometimes but it is far from being broken.

    And there's little point to trying to explain stats in games, especially in Vindy.
    Balance also became heavily irrelevant in Mabi too for a long time before I stopped playing. I don't actually remember that well the last time I worried about balance in Mabi.
  • HallyHally
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    Rezi wrote: »
    Honoka wrote: »
    yup, exactly what I meant. A 120 speed delia without bad balance would be a monster, whereas an arisha or kai at 120 speed wouldn't be as powerful because they are still limited by cooldowns and mana. Thus it ruins the character balance.

    That makes no sense, as Delia is a VERY SLOW character by default, which means she's completely useless until later in the game when 90+ atk speed makes her even somewhat capable of dealing combos.

    High attack speed on Delia and other slow characters isn't overpowered; it's just the bare minimum speed she needs to do anything.

    And even if attack speed happened to create an unfair advantage without Balance on some characters, the devs just have to change values on those characters to balance it. It's literally just changing the values in their formulas.

    You don't need 90 speed to do something with delia. She works just fine at 60 speed. She still scale well with attack speed when you increase from 60 to 90.
    For a character like xgun kai, who is mainly limited by cooldowns; there is very little (if any) increase going from 60 to 90 speed. You can't make xgun kai scale with attack speed effectively without breaking his fundamental mechanics.


    Different characters scale at different rates to attack speed due to character mechanics. It is flat out impossible to have all characters scale to attack speed at the same rate. Thereby it is impossible to make characters "balanced" for all attack speed ranges.


    At this point, with how stupidly broken AD is post rise.... forget character balance, forget your stats, just play what you consider fun :)
    Anner
  • RadeRade
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    edited August 22, 2017
    The point of balance is to make the game more interesting. It's more interesting to have 3 supplementary stats to play around with and build around than having just two, especially when they each have their own unique interactions for where their thresholds are. Speed has no inherent cap, so more speed always has approximately the same benefit to your character. Balance has a hard cap, so you have a specific point to aim for by endgame, and you can sacrifice anything that goes above that. Crit has a varying cap, so how high you need to go depends on how effective you want to be in different content; more crit results in more damage than more balance, but only if you're fighting stuff that you're not already crit capped against. Without balance, there'd only be speed and crit, and the interactions between the different character stats would be a lot less interesting.
    Balance also makes the gameplay more interesting, as having variance in how much damage your attacks do makes the results of your actions less predictable and forces you to accommodate for those different results. As much as people don't like RNG, the reason it's always been in games and always will be is because having at least some degree of unpredictability makes things more interesting.
  • ReziRezi
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    edited August 22, 2017
    Rade wrote: »
    It's more interesting to have 3 supplementary stats to play around with and build around than having just two, especially when they each have their own unique interactions for where their thresholds are

    Balance also makes the gameplay more interesting, as having variance in how much damage your attacks do makes the results of your actions less predictable and forces you to accommodate for those different results.

    Then why not replace it with Attack Distance - you know, that thing that used to be affected by weapons and is still somewhat affected by height but literally nothing else? I know for a fact that Arisha benefits from attack distance immensely, and since she has little benefit from attack speed, she would actually have a good stat to put things into. Kai would also benefit from attack distance, while characters like Delia don't have to worry about it and can keep putting points into attack speed for days while non-AS characters are balanced due to having the AD that benefits them greatly. (Heck, we could even make AD variable like Balance so no one would complain about Kai/Arisha constantly having too much range through the whole game; and you'd get some form of variation, albeit not damage variation.)

    And as for damage variation, we used to have it in XE with the combo system, but that got removed. Yes, it was a bit too easy to activate combos, but if it was re-implemented as harder to activate and it replaced Add Dmg, you'd get that variation without needing to rely on RNG.