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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted February 14, 2012 02:16 PM |
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You're wrong. Just, mathematically wrong.
Our Inferno player with Destiny's Chosen 3 has a Destiny of 17. That is costed the same as 17 points of attack. 17 points of attack gives an across the board increase of 48% to damage.
I don't understand this statement. What are these 17 Attack points that you are referring to, where does this number come from?
I have the fealing that we are talking past each other or don't understand what the other person talks about. As I see it, there are two things we compare:
1) On level up, Heroes can get 1 attribute point, which can go into (Might) Attack or Luck (let's forget the others). This means that one point in each of these need to be comparable. If JJ's numbers are true, and one point of Attack is roughly 2.5 times a point in Luck, my suggestion is to add two points of Luck (with a little extra damage) or conversely, make one point of Luck count for 2 %.
2) When picking skills, you have the choice between Assailant and Destiny's Chosen. These skills add similar amounts of points to either (Might) Attack or Luck. Again, with reference to the numbers discussed in this thread, it seems DC should add ~ double the amount of points that Assailant adds.
With that being said, if you read my previous posts, I'm not pleading for a fixed 50 % damage bonus - quite on the contrary, I long ago suggested increasing this to somewhere between +65 and +75 % (or +77 %). Furthermore, I'm all for adding secondary unique effects to Luck that are not just damage - like I said above, having Lucky Attacks not suffer retaliations could be a great benefit; stunning the target would be another option. And they killed the idea of perks with the new skill system, but I would be all for Luck perks that add special effects like reduced mana cost (Erratic Magic), Warlock's Luck, Magic Resistance and what-not we had in Heroes 5 which fleshed out the skill and favored specialization, something they have completely neglected in this build.
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I feel like we're talking a bit in circles at this point, especially given the bolded sentence.
Skyrocketing damage or trigger chance IS the only way to make Luck points equal to Attack in effective value (short of introducing entirely new bonuses to Luck that are unrelated to damage); that's precisely the point.
As JJ and I have shown above, Might/Magic points are worth approximately 3 times as much as Luck. Since Luck is simply about damage, this means that Luck somehow needs to amount to three times as much damage as it currently does in order to raise its "effective value" to that of Might/Magic points
Maybe I'm stupid, but I just don't understand it. Why couldn't it be done? If Luck points contribute more chance each, but you get less of them overall, that balances out. No-one says that because you get 10 Luck points at level 30 now, you need to get 10 Luck points at level 30 if they are worth more. Make it so that you only get Luck points every 6th level instead of every 3rd, for instance, and put the other ones in Attack or something else if you're afraid Luck goes too high. That will not make Luck trigger more often. It will not make Luck do more damage. But it will effectively mean that Inferno wastes less attribute points by putting them into Luck to get where they are, thus making them more competitive with Necropolis for instance.
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What will happen now?
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DoubleDeck
Promising
Legendary Hero
Look into my eyes...
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posted February 14, 2012 02:41 PM |
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Best way to deal with this Luck catastrophy:
Raise the Luck damage to 75% - 125% (instead of 50%).
Somewhere between there. My opinion.
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted February 14, 2012 03:20 PM |
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Edited by Zenofex at 15:23, 14 Feb 2012.
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The whole Luck discussion is overly-ridiculous already and is getting more and more so with every next post. If someone who knows little or nothing about the game reads this topic, he'll probably decide that the Luck issues are more than half of the balance problems of the game - while in reality they are less than 1%. Stop it already! It's both unnecessary and going nowhere.
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ChaosWielder
Tavern Dweller
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posted February 14, 2012 04:06 PM |
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I know. You would have thought that blatant points would have already been cleared up rather than, let's face it, bickering over such a minor point as this. There's a problem. Yes. Now, will BH do anything about it? *That* is the issue. We need some way to let them know that Archliches, not various math formulas(and what they might be suggesting), occupy our deepest nightmares.
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seingeist
Promising
Adventuring Hero
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posted February 14, 2012 04:12 PM |
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Quote:
Our Inferno player with Destiny's Chosen 3 has a Destiny of 17. That is costed the same as 17 points of attack. 17 points of attack gives an across the board increase of 48% to damage. If you insist on balancing lucky strikes at a 50% increase in damage, then 17 points of Destiny would have to increase your chance of landing one by about 96%. Not 96% proportional, 96 absolute percent. Since troops come into existence with a greater than 4% chance of scoring a critical, that is not even possible.
You can't balance Destiny at a mere 50% damage boost, because you can't divide a one hundred percent chance of getting such a small bonus finely enough for such a stat to exist. Stats go up to about forty in actual campaigns, and one fortieth of a 50% damage boost is never going to be big enough to make anyone give a crap.
Your basic point is sound, but your numbers are too high because of the conflation of two separate stats under your usage of "Attack" (i.e. Might/Magic).
That is, you say "17 points of attack gives an across the board increase of 48% damage," but that's not true because the increase actually isn't across the board. It only applies to Might damage or Magic damage, unlike Luck, which applies to both and therefore is "across the board."
(This is not always a small distinction: a fully fortified week's worth of Necropolis troops using Fate Weaver archers will do close to 50/50 Might/Magic damage, so it does make a difference.)
Therefore, damage-wise, Luck only has to be half as effective as Might or Magic individually since it applies to both types of damage ("doubling" its potential). To go with your example above, then, 17 points of Destiny would have to increase your critical chance to 48% to roughly equal 17 points of Might, not 96%. This is consistent with the 3x value now long established (17 points of Might = ~51 (48) points of Luck).
Nevertheless, of course, your point is completely valid. With all of the current hero, ability, artifact, and creature values, you'd still be smacking into that 100% crit frequency ceiling if you attempted to make Luck equivalent to Might/Magic while keeping the damage bonus at 50% (in other words, it is impossible without changes to MANY other stats).
To put it differently, the game's current damage potential through Might/Magic is simply too high for Luck to keep up at a mere 50%. A Level 30 Stronghold Might Blood Hero with Assailant III will be 3 points shy of a persistent +100% bonus to Might damage - throw in a couple stat-up dwellings or major artifact and he's effectively already over the potential damage threshold of a persistent 100 Luck. Game over, Destiny.
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Maybe I'm stupid, but I just don't understand it. Why couldn't it be done? If Luck points contribute more chance each, but you get less of them overall, that balances out. No-one says that because you get 10 Luck points at level 30 now, you need to get 10 Luck points at level 30 if they are worth more. Make it so that you only get Luck points every 6th level instead of every 3rd, for instance, and put the other ones in Attack or something else if you're afraid Luck goes too high. That will not make Luck trigger more often. It will not make Luck do more damage. But it will effectively mean that Inferno wastes less attribute points by putting them into Luck to get where they are, thus making them more competitive with Necropolis for instance.
Please accept my apology if it seemed at all like I meant to indicate that you're stupid - I don't think so at all. It turns out that this issue is actually unbelievably labyrinthine when you get into it because of wildly differing damage formulas and a variety of sources for stats, so I'm doing my level best trying not to confuse myself.
You're right that increasing the trigger chance while simultaneously reducing the amount of Luck that the Hero earns overall from level-ups would balance out. The problem is that Luck is tied into a great deal more than simply the Hero's stats at level up (indeed, this is nowhere near the most significant source). It's tied into artifacts, creature stats, passive abilities, active abilities, etc.
Let's say that we wanted to maintain the game's current potential crit frequency balance and buff Luck to Might/Magic equivalence by making it a 3% trigger chance. We would have to reduce all Luck stats, not simply the Hero's, to 1/3 of their current value.
However, this would effectively ruin and imbalance all of these individual elements relative to their Might/Magic counterparts, insofar as the devs have balanced most of these already on the 1-to-1 assumption. Destiny's Chosen would be reduced to 1/3 of its current value (lol), but then it would no longer be balanced with its Might counterpart, Assailant, and would accordingly never be a viable choice. The same is true of various artifacts and active abilities. The balance would be destroyed and they would all become garbage.
To come at it from a different angle, Heroes do not need the various Level 30 quantities of their stats to be roughly similar - they can have 21 Might and 3 Luck and 8 Magic, whatever, no problem. This makes it very easy to raise the trigger chance and lower the total points of Luck earned by the Hero to maintain the same crit chance balance. HOWEVER, most other Luck-related elements--passives, abilities, skills--do need to be similar to their Might/Magic counterparts in order to be balanced.
This inevitably results in skyrocketing crit chance (still assuming that we boost it to the properly balanced 3% per point), for the reasons that I relate above about the overall damage potential of various Might/Magic abilities.
I can give an illustration of this point that completely leaves out Hero level-up stats.
Amulet of Jaguar +4 Might, Assailant III +8 Might, Mass Inner Fire ~+8 Might. A major artifact, a passive tree, and a Damage-boosting spell amount to +20 Might points. If the Luck counterparts for each of these items (Four Leaf Clover, Destiny's Chosen, Mass Heroism) are to be balanced, they need to provide close to the same bonus: +20 Luck points. However, at the properly balanced 3% trigger chance, this means 60% trigger chance of critical for your units (and this is before you factor in Hero and unit Luck). In other words, skyrocketing crit chance.
The only way to avoid this problem is to nerf the Might/Magic stats of all of these counterpart elements of Luck as well (which would be an awful mess and create new problems), or simply get rid of those Luck elements entirely, i.e. simply delete Four Leaf Clover, Destiny's Chosen, etc., from the game. Obviously, that's not really a very desirable solution either.
IN ANY CASE
You say above that you are not averse to raising the crit damage of Luck to +77% as well as the trigger chance to 2%. As I said in my previous post, this is indeed a viable balancing solution damage-wise (it amounts to x3), and the crit-frequency balance would mercifully not need to skyrocket quite as much. It would almost unavoidably still have the potential to reach levels that I find quite cheesy (e.g. >60%), even after decreasing the unit and Hero Luck quantities, but it would be a lot better than things currently stand, at least. 
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seingeist
Promising
Adventuring Hero
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posted February 14, 2012 04:28 PM |
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The whole Luck discussion is overly-ridiculous already and is getting more and more so with every next post. If someone who knows little or nothing about the game reads this topic, he'll probably decide that the Luck issues are more than half of the balance problems of the game - while in reality they are less than 1%. Stop it already! It's both unnecessary and going nowhere.
To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing coercing you to read this discussion. If it causes you any anguish or discomfort, you are welcome (and advised) not to participate. 
Moreover, as unfortunate as it may seem to you, the gravity or significance of an issue is not directly proportional to its complexity. I don't think that "Luck" is the most significant balance problem in the game either (although 1% is a rather gross understatement), but that has no bearing on the potential nuance within its discussion.
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I know. You would have thought that blatant points would have already been cleared up rather than, let's face it, bickering over such a minor point as this. There's a problem. Yes. Now, will BH do anything about it? *That* is the issue. We need some way to let them know that Archliches, not various math formulas(and what they might be suggesting), occupy our deepest nightmares.
Bickering? I think that I've maintained a civil tone, as have the rest of the posters here, with a few unfortunate exceptions.
I see no reason that a detailed and lengthy discussion about the pros and cons of various ways to balance Luck should be off the table. If it's not to your taste, you may join Zenofex and avoid the discussion.
On a side note, if it weren't for this thread, there would be practically ZERO activity on this board right now.
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted February 14, 2012 04:41 PM |
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Edited by Zenofex at 16:43, 14 Feb 2012.
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I'm not reading it for quite some time now and until you keep up with your attempts to prove (to someone important I guess, probably to yourselves) that you are exquisite mathematicians, I'll keep ignoring it. This however does not mean that I should approve that some of you have hijacked the topic which is about the balance in general and turned it into "how bad the Luck attribute is implemented this time". You are overdoing it and since the mods have no reasons to interfere - because you are not off-topic, strictly speaking - I think someone should remind you about the purpose of the whole thing. I guess I've just done it. Heroes VI has much worse balance problems that need to be addressed.
A suggestion to the mods: move the Luck mechanics part to a separate topic and keep this one for general discussion on the balance issues.
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2012 05:17 PM |
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I would like to add, that the HOW to change is not ours to decide anyway - so solutions are not our problem.
The PROBLEMS are ours to show. 
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted February 14, 2012 05:33 PM |
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I know the discussion is rather lengthy, but it's hardly off topic, and since I can't split topics, it's a little late to take it to a new thread. I'll try to keep it short.
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Please accept my apology if it seemed at all like I meant to indicate that you're stupid - I don't think so at all. (...)
Let's say that we wanted to maintain the game's current potential crit frequency balance and buff Luck to Might/Magic equivalence by making it a 3% trigger chance. We would have to reduce all Luck stats, not simply the Hero's, to 1/3 of their current value.
However, this would effectively ruin and imbalance all of these individual elements relative to their Might/Magic counterparts, insofar as the devs have balanced most of these already on the 1-to-1 assumption. Destiny's Chosen would be reduced to 1/3 of its current value (lol), but then it would no longer be balanced with its Might counterpart, Assailant, and would accordingly never be a viable choice. The same is true of various artifacts and active abilities. The balance would be destroyed and they would all become garbage.
No, I didn't read any indications that I was stupid, I felt stupid for not understanding. 
Anyway, just wanna say: If creatures are balanced with, say, 4 Attack and 9 Luck (each giving 1%), wouldn't they be equally balanced with 4 Attack and 3 Luck (each giving 3%)? True, if we increase Luck damage also, they will no longer be balanced, but as long as change is minor, it will hardly throw balance completely away - but true, there is an issue there.
And with regard to Destiny's Chosen vs. Assailant, those skills are not even remotely balanced as it is now, are they? I mean, 2 Luck vs. 2 Might Attack, isn't that grossly imbalanced? So wouldn't boosting Luck not work to balance these, rather than contrary, or do I miss something?
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2012 05:51 PM |
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Against my own advice, but anyway:
The problem with moral and luck is that makes sense only within a certain range of trigger probability. I would set this range at 15-35% or 20-35, with everything else being too low or too high.
So the EASY way out FOR LUCK was to have a FIXED (except for some exceptions) trigger probability of, for example 25%, with Luck POINTS determining DAMAGE PLUS. This would simply mean that 1 point of Luck would add TWICE the amount of LUCK damage that a regular attack point adds.
This would mean, green heroes had a 25% trigger ability for Luck, and the first Luck point would add 5% damage.
There might STILL be ways to change trigger probability (up to +/- 10%), via INFERNO skills.
This might make Luck too good in the end, but that would have to be seen.
EDIT: as it is, the AMOUNT of luck is fixed, and you can add to the FREQUENCY of Luck occuring or how OFTEN you are lucky
With the sketched way the frequency was fixed with the exception of certain special skills, while heroes would add to the amount of luck, that is, how BIG your luck is when it strikes.
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted February 14, 2012 06:07 PM |
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That's an interesting proposition. That would deffinitely turn around the way Luck works. Would you have it the same for Morale?
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 14, 2012 07:46 PM |
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With Luck it's easy, with Morale it's not, because you cannot divide an action in any number of increments.
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted February 14, 2012 09:02 PM |
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With Luck it's easy, with Morale it's not, because you cannot divide an action in any number of increments.
No, not since they abandoned the ATB-system ...
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seingeist
Promising
Adventuring Hero
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posted February 15, 2012 02:45 AM |
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Anyway, just wanna say: If creatures are balanced with, say, 4 Attack and 9 Luck (each giving 1%), wouldn't they be equally balanced with 4 Attack and 3 Luck (each giving 3%)?
Yes, those two quantities would be equivalent; as with Hero stats, since creatures don't have to have level stats across the board, lowering or raising the Luck value of creatures does not pose any problem in itself, so long as its overall damage potential remains the same/balanced (e.g. doubling trigger chance but halving the number).
The only difficulty about the Luck stat of the creatures is that I'm not sure if the devs balanced it according to the average damage bonus from the trigger chance (in which case the balance would remain if we maintained the same trigger chance), or from the false assumption of its equivalence with Might/Magic (in which case creatures that have higher Luck stats are currently underpowered and require a greater trigger chance or more damage to be balanced).
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And with regard to Destiny's Chosen vs. Assailant, those skills are not even remotely balanced as it is now, are they? I mean, 2 Luck vs. 2 Might Attack, isn't that grossly imbalanced? So wouldn't boosting Luck not work to balance these, rather than contrary, or do I miss something?
No no, you're right there, you didn't miss something; they're not currently balanced, but they were assumed to be by the devs as they were balancing everything else, and that's precisely the problem. I wasn't saying that boosting trigger chance throws off the balance between, say, Destiny's Chosen and Assailant--on the contrary, it restores it--but rather the balance between Destiny's Chosen and MMH6's original intended crit frequencies (which don't climb much higher than 40% or so).
Destiny's Chosen tree currently gives 7 (?), but let's round it up to 8 for the sake of simpler comparison to Assailant tree, which gives 8 as well. Currently, Destiny's Chosen is only 1/3 as powerful. If we raise trigger chance to 3%, Destiny's Chosen is balanced with Assailant at 8 points apiece.
However, what originally gave an 8% chance to crit now gives a 24% chance to crit, which is how high it needs to be in order to be balanced with Assailant. Combined with similar balancing in artifact and ability bonuses (+12% chance from Four Leaf Clover is necessary to be as powerful as +4 Might Gauntlets or Amulet, etc.), the cumulative potential crit chance of an army skyrockets into cheese territory (60-90%, etc.), and possibly even bumps into the 100% ceiling.
My point above was that if you want to make a Luck point equal in effectiveness to a Might/Magic point by raising the trigger chance (while maintaining the 50% damage bonus of crits), without any change to the game's original intended attainable crit frequencies, you would have to change (decrease) not only the Heroes'/creatures' Luck stats, but every other source of Luck in the game as well.. This means that every such source that is currently balanced with the assumption of 1-to-1 equivalence with Might/Magic (such as artifact bonuses, Destiny's Chosen/Assailant, etc.) would now be thrown out of balance once again (vis-a-vis their Might/Magic counterparts) in order to maintain their original +trigger chance%.
And because potential damage bonuses via Might/Magic through abilities/passives/artifacts are extremely high, a Luck stat fixed at a lowly +50% crit damage HAS TO reach astronomical, silly crit chance levels (via its counterpart abilities/passives/artifacts) in order to remain balanced with it.
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Miru
Supreme Hero
A leaf in the river of time
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posted February 15, 2012 05:08 AM |
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Edited by Miru at 05:08, 15 Feb 2012.
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I can't even think of what to say. Did no one read my proposal of luck boosting both chance to crit, as well as damage done by crits? I mean really? Like this whole last page of arguments just confounds me. "YOU MUST BOOST LUCK INTO A RANGE THAT IT CANT MOAR BOLD TEXT MATH YOU WRONG, ITALICS!!!!"
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I wish I were employed by a stupendous paragraph, with capitalized English words and expressions.
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DoubleDeck
Promising
Legendary Hero
Look into my eyes...
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posted February 15, 2012 08:23 AM |
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With Luck it's easy, with Morale it's not, because you cannot divide an action in any number of increments.
I like your proposition as well re luck...
With morale, maybe it could work determining how much damage you cause for the morale triggered turn (increment) and determine the length of speed too (with the morale turn the stack's speed is at 50% but could increase from 75% to 100%)....
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feluniozbunio
Promising
Supreme Hero
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posted February 15, 2012 08:38 AM |
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How about increasing luck/morale effectiveness to 100%, increase d chance to 10% per point and lower the skills to 1 point and remove those skill stat from creatures, problem solved 
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted February 15, 2012 09:05 AM |
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I can't even think of what to say. Did no one read my proposal of luck boosting both chance to crit, as well as damage done by crits?
I'm not sure I did, I think perhaps I might have misunderstood what you wrote, and ment a suggestion about increasing both Luck chance and damage?
Anyway, if you mean that Luck stat inherently should boost both of these in the game, I'm against it. Problem with that suggestion is that you'll end up with a system where Heroes with low Luck will have both low chance to trigger and low benefit, whereas Heroes with high Luck will have both high chance to trigger and high benefit. This will end up as a very polarized scenario, either Luck is completely useless, or you have to go all-in on it and it's very powerful. Personally, I prefer a more linear scenario, where even with low scores, there's something useful about it - be that either a reasonable chance to trigger (cf. JJ's proposal) or a reasonable benefit (current and previous versions).
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seingeist
Promising
Adventuring Hero
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posted February 15, 2012 01:13 PM |
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Personally, I prefer a more linear scenario, where even with low scores, there's something useful about it - be that either a reasonable chance to trigger (cf. JJ's proposal) or a reasonable benefit (current and previous versions).
Currently, the possible attainable crit frequencies are pretty reasonable, and not too far outside the ranges that JJ suggested above.
Endgame heroes that put nothing into Luck at all will be around 11-12% (with their creatures), whereas Inferno heroes that do almost everything they can to raise Luck won't get much higher than 40%.
The only thing that prevents it from providing a "reasonable benefit" is its woefully low average damage relative to the other stats, hence...
Vote 150% Critical 2012.
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted February 15, 2012 03:32 PM |
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Personally, I don't mind Luck probability going up to 50 %, but I agree much higher than that makes it cheesy, unless it's some advanced effect that's hard to get. Personally, I'd like the distribution to be something like:
Skills (DC I/II/III): 20-25 % (I'd say 8 % for each skill level, but could be 6 % or 7 % also)
Creature inherent value: 5-10 %
Hero inherent value: 10-15 % at level 30
Artifacts: 5 % / 10 % / 15 % (minor/major/relic)
I would cap the probability at 50 %, meaning that any Luck beyond 50 is wasted (like previously). Obviously, that means maxing out Hero AND Skills and then furthermore equipping Relic will be pointless, but I don't see a problem in that, it was also this way in previous games, and there's a point in this - aquiring the Relic still lets you save the skillpoints you would otherwise have put into Luck.
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This thread is pages long: 
