Exe here. Exe there. There is actually Kruber Careers that dont have access to a passive that increases cleave and a Talent that adds extra dodge range. The changes to Halberd make it feel great on Knight. Linesman into Heavy Linesman hits are sent by Sigmar. M&S changes also add Linesman to heavies and increase its overall damage, which again makes it much more enjoyable to play on Knight and Huntsman.
I very much wish for FS to put some thought into their weapons again.
Gâday @astroVB apologies for only responding now (time zones are fun).
so when it comes to comparing executioner and halberd I would have to say the main thing that Hally has up on Exec is that halberd is much more versatile in terms of options for attack chains and maintains a higher range and an extra dodge. You wonât straight one shot a Stormvermin with Halberd like you would with Executioner but executioner is also much weaker into monsters and is also not as safe under pressure.
Basically Executioner can only handle pressure for as long as youâre able to kill everything in your path outright, if things get overwhelming or thereâs too much armor attacking you, youâll be in for a rough time. Halberd can handle these situations much better since you can maintain a degree of safety with the L1->block->L1 combo, and when thereâs room the L1->H1(sweep) which has much higher cleave and armor sliding now will be able to cleave more than executioner would, allowing you to clear more reliably than executioner.
In terms of Single targets Iâd say Halberd performs about even in killing Chaos Warriors and Bestigors (assuming you donât have the breakpoint on Executioner) while Executioner does better at killing Stormvermin and Plague Monks/Savages.
tl;dr: Halberd is better into mixed hordes/elites, high pressure situations and monsters. Executioner is better into low pressure, naked hordes, berserkers and ambient elites
I hope this answers your question and Iâm happy to discuss further 
I donât think thatâs necessarilly true. People who tested this or played this mod are just intrested in other players balance ideas. You can also have players who are happy with balance but still took their time to play the mod. You can test something and disagree after testing, even if you are happy with the current balance. Like for example: when fatshark decided to add a new faction, i was happy with how things were before, yet i still tested the beta becuase i was curious. I do see your point tho i just donât agree with the extreme conclusion. I would rather say people who fill this out are people who care, not automatically people who agree with everything.
Also ofcourse fatshark knows what to base their balance on, we can make feedback post after feedback post and fatshark is still gonna be like " euhmm let us see the data for 3 months", so why is everyone so scared, itâs not like fs is gonna copy past these changes made in this mod.
I do agree about ur poll opinions, itâs hard to make polls 
Also how is dps not a niche? Or do you mean general dps and consider armour dps a niche?
Well i donât believe itâs true that thatâs the only way to correct imbalance. I think the mod is a good example of that. Almost all the weapons feel pretty balanced with not another. Our balance point was slightly below the power of the current meta weapons. I know you think thatâs too strong. Thatâs fine.
Iâve read your opinions on each weapon having a niche and being bad in other areas to enforce team play. I think itâs a horrible design and I find it unlikely FS will ever to that route so I donât have any interest in working on a mod to do so. However, I learned to write the lua script in just a couple hours with no modding experience and with the help of some modders, learned to create mods and solve some more difficult problems. So if you think itâs something people would actually enjoy playing, I encourage you to take a whack at it. That way you could actually feel what that would be like.
Ye! Thanks for the advice, I know it⌠only that, personally, I would gladly âââexchangeâââ it for more penetration⌠probably we are talking about personal opinions but, normally, I shoot as soon as the full charged arrow is ready⌠I donât feel the need to move around with the charged arrow.
SURE, I understand itâs useful, but this âtechâ doesnât help to shoot sooner⌠and this is the point: more penetration would be an appreciated reward for the long delay to charge the arrow.
I REALLY love these words and I think they perfectly explain the role Exe/Halberd should fulfill⌠BUT, to reach that goal, IMHO Halberd still needs a very little love.
For example:
You said that, when you are surrounded, you can create more space (using Halberd) with L1>block>L1 combo. But I donât feel that this combo creates much more space than Exeâs light attacks.
Exeâs light combo has similar values of cleave, stagger and damage⌠moreover it has TANK modifier, wich helps a lot.
Sure, Halberdâs L1 comes sooner, but Exe chains its attacks faster (than L1>block>L1, I mean).
Or I canât understand because Halberdâs L1>H should have more control and efficiency vs armors⌠also in this case, Exeâs light combo has similar values, but itâs faster and it has TANK modifier.
I have some ideas:
, a really interesting discussion, thanks!
THIS! I have always thought that âstrongest weaponsâ (in the base game) are so popular only because there isnât any choice. Now that you helped the bad weapons, I feel that every weapon has its space and none prevails the others.
Sure, there are âjack of all tradesâ weapons and âfocused (and stronger) in one only jobâ ones⌠but I find it legit.
I think your preferences are valid. On the point of X-sword vs. Halberd, I think itâs good that some people would find each weapon better based off personal preference. Thatâs a good sign that some semblance of balance exists.
As premise. I understand that we have a different baseline and approach and I agree that this is completely okay, fine and necessary for a forum. But as I sat out the original thread I want to use this one here to present Fatshark my opinion. I donât think your approach is necessarily wrong, just not the one I would consider better (also I will skip quotations, you should be intelligent enough to get everything from the context).
I still consider using data as the superior choice. Sure, there are different reasons but they would average out over the sheer sum of data. Letâs take your example of sub-optimal builds which are fun and apply just two balance criteria. First one is how often the weapon is chosen relative to other weapons and the second how high/low the success quota is with it:
Scenario 1: The weapon is so weak that it is only used for fun reasons. Result will be that it is used less often than other weapons and has poor succes quota.
Scenario 2: The weapon is weak but only chosen by skilled players so it has a high success quota. Result will be that the data will be insignificant to the rest. It will not be chosen often (due to the relation of playership to skilled playership) which will show on the low percentage of picked.
Scenario 3: Despite being supoptimal the weapon is hitting the averages both for number of times chosen and success rate. Result will be that the weapon may not be as sub-optimal as we think.
I could describe probably other scenarios. But the end result will always be that the reason why someone plays certain weapons will not influence this form of weapon balancing. You just need enough data to average it out. Considering that we have an active playership of at least 50k-100k over a timeframe of two weeks, this condition is given. Letâs use the lower number of 50k. 50 k players each using only one character and playing 1 hour over the course of two weeks. Means we have about 100000 games in two weeks, meaning 20000 for each character. Sum this up over three months and you can see the sheer amount of available data. And this is among the most conservative estimations possible. You could argue that balance is only important for Cataclysm and as such we have far lower numbers. Which is kinda true. Then again, the usual Cataclysm player is far more invested into the game, has far higher hours and uses usual more than just one character. As such he produces far more data then the general player. You will again end with enough data to average different reasons for usage easily out of the equation. Data doesnât lie.
As for making an own mod and FS not going that route, I think I can aswer together. First off, as you have seen yourself mods have restriction, in your case it was shared damage profiles over different weapons. I do fear that I have changes in mind which I would like to test which can not be adjusted by mods.
Secondly, I donât think it is necessary because Fatshark has the same or similar idea of teamplay as I have. They donât go that route? They have done it before but had to backtrack because they overstepped. Remember the first Beta for Combat 2.0 where staggered enemies received 200 % damage more and had far more health. It was a more stark approach to divide team roles in crowd controller and damage dealer, simplified. They backtracked like I said but the idea was there and it still actually is. There is even a chance they borderling stepped over on purpose in Beta 1 so that their actual goal of the stagger buff in Beta 2 seemed more reasonable. And while it only comes to frutition on Cataclysm+ the role idea is still present. It is also shown in the reworked talent trees which for several careers can be split in Offense Choice, Defense Choice, Support Choice.
Every change about 2.0 was to get away from the even more DPS orientated gameplay which we had before. And while they were succesful to a certain degree, we see a fall back to pre-2.0 behaviour in recent times. Mainly because they did not adjust some weapons correctly for the changes they made to gameplay and talent trees which left them overly strong. Question is if they want to act on it.
I say arguing DPS as niche is to broad to be considered a niche. More than other balance criteria, DPS has certain âbreak pointsâ where it starts to make other gameplay elements less needed. Consider an extreme scenario where a weapon would kill every enemy with one hit in the range of 5 meters. You donât need stagger, health, blocking/stamina, dodging at all. Granted such a weapon does not exist but you donât need this extreme of a scenarion to see similar effects. And this is the problem of the Jack of all Trades weapons. They are not average in everything, they are good to excellent in everything and are defended by a DPS argument. Why does it matter that I have poor dodging when I can control and kill the enemies with my DPS? It doesnât.
As for the overwhelming positive. I would consider everything from 8-10 (0-2 depending on the question) as overwhelming positive. So, it may be a difference in definition. I stand to the point that I think that âdissentingâ players mostly skipped over the whole discussion. I understand your example, but you should also understand that there is a difference between a FS Beta (meaning there is a high chance these changes will be implemented) versus a Beta by someone else (meaning there is a low chance these changes will be implemented).
Thatâs true, but insufficient or incomplete data leads to inaccurate conclusions. Youâre completely missing the possibility that in the current state of QP, one decent player can carry a whole team, regardless of the build choices other players make. So the idea that there will be a 1 to 1 or even a high correlation between strong weapons and success rate isnât really accurate. Success rate is much more closely linked to player skill. As in, skilled players will have higher success rates even with meme builds. Lower skilled players will have lower success rates regardless of the strength of their builds . To properly analyze that data, you would have to compare each playerâs success rate individually, account for hours played with a given build (for example I never play shade so I suck at it but that doesnât mean itâs bad), account for number of good players in the runs, etc. There are far too many variables to say bad weapon = lose and good weapon = win.
Remember when everyone hated the Beta and they had to backtrack on those changes? Also, there were still strong do-everything weapons in the beta. And they were still the most popular weapons. There has never been a time in this game where there hasnât been a handful of strong weapons that perform every role adequately. It has just never existed. Even in your 2.0 example, we had DD, Bill Hook, Super strong T-spear, etc. That all still existed.
No, I do consider this possibility. But what is the likehood of getting a skilled player regularly which carries the team? This is again, just a matter of the amount of data. For everytime you get a skilled player which carries you, you will have equal times where you get players which drag you down. For each times you got lucky with rng, you will have a time where rng which hail down on you with spiritual hate. For each skilled player evelating weaponâs success rate, you will have less skilled players downing it. I donât need to look at each player individually, I just need to look at each difficulty individually (but also need to consider overall). All these variations are averaged out over the amount of data. And again, we have more than enough data. Taking a less conservative approach of 50k players doing four games per week, we have about 2.4 million games just in the last three months (more since the last major balance changes). There are issues with bias in the evaluation of the data or the complexity due to interacting variables. I do not disagree here. But these issues are with every kind of balance approach as they are dependent on the weakest link. Your balance mod has the same issues (not saying that you made faults, just that as you are humans you are not free from errors or bias).
Like I said, there is a chance they went that way on purpose. Wouldnât really surprise me. If you do it right, you can play gamers like a fiddle. And I noted in my last post that they didnât adjust several weapons during 2.0 (actually in both directions, to strong or to weak). I am aware that these weapons exist and I have expressed my dissatisfaction with them a few times. But what I canât say is if this is a deliberate decision to keep these overly strong weapons in the game or just a miscalculation. I really canât. A lot of changes in the game and especially for Combat 2.0 does go towards the more specialized roles direction. Worst situation could be that you have inside FS the same situation we have in the forum with two factions being on two sides of balancing approaches (and in in even more worse case working on different parts of the game). It would explain some things.
And since 2.0 you also see more players taking on more of certain roles instead of the can-do-all. Does not mean the can-do-all is still the obvious meta. But players feel less bound to it as before 2.0.
But youâre still assuming a correlation between weapon strength and success rate that may or may not exist. Just going to bullet point some outside factors:
Host having overloaded PC
A particularly strong player
7 other weapons in the run in addition to weapon in question
talent/career/build choices
strength of teammates
Time in run with bots instead of other players
Type of monster spawned/no monster at all
Map selection
Average completion rate at the given difficulty
Average completion rate of the individuals in the group
For instance, if you have a wiz mace in a given run, you may also have 7 other weapons that are meta and 7 builds that are meta. The mace could be used for nothing more than blocking attacks, but you still have a successful run. You happen to have an experienced Zealot with Bill Hook and Xbow who gets every green circle and carries the run. What information could you possibly learn from this run? And without accounting for all of the factors, how many runs could be marred with these other variables, rendering bits of data incomplete. I see what youâre saying about accounting for these in meta data, but even in meta data, it will be impossible to know the correlation of variables to success rate unless you find a way to account for them. Without that information, you cannot gauge the strength of a weapon using frequency/success rate data.
Basically, it boils down to the scientific method. If you want to know the effect of a certain variable, you have to account for all other variables. Otherwise, the information will not be accurate.
Conversely, you can measure the actual characteristics of weapons against each other. Animations, range, dps, stagger strength/cleave, damage cleave, push block angle, push strength, etc etc. That is hard data that you can actually compare. Granted, it isnât perfect because the relative strength of each trait is subjective, but at least the data is real.
Data or not, balance stays subjective. You can make more accurate decisions the more data you have, this data includes telemetric data, feedback data, poll data, everything should be taken into account.
Even if the data shows âxâ, the solution is still subjective. Itâs also not as simple as âjust look at dataâ as i doubt their data shows every variable, as is again a very hard thing to do for a subjective thing such as balance.
All of the points are existent. But what you seem to overlook is that these variations also account for every other weapon. There is a saying that nothing is as universal as a bell curve. And for statistics this is absolutely true if you just have enough data.
Let us take the sample of getting a particularly strong player. I play with weapon x one thousand times and I get such a player xx % of the time. If you average over enough games it will be the same for weapon y. If I play with weapon y also one thousand time I will get such a player equally xx % of the time. Third party influences are consistent over all games. As such their influence while existing averages out. This is how statistics works. The same foes for the strength of the team mates, for the map selection, for the talent/career choices. All these parameters are consistent between the different weapons. And as such I can gauge the strength of the weapon this way. And also, this was just a simplified example. You can obviously take more information into account to increase the precision.
The interesting part and where the largest errors lies (as Mattie also said) is to determine how the inequality came into existence and how to correct it. But as I said before, the same applies to every balance approach. If you just compare the weapon characteristics, you evaluate each stat on a personal basis, the whole system basically stands and falls on where you set personal preferences and where you set the baseline power. And one point you have to compare these stats but it is only after identifying the imbalance.
The overall telemetric data tell you where the imbalance lies.
The weapon characteristics tell you how it came into existence.
If you start with the second phase you risk to correct something which isnât incorrect to begin with.
While i agree with what ur saying, i donât know what it has to do with this poll? This is just a poll made by the mod makers to quickly get the mod testers opinion. The poll isnât perfect (no poll is ever perfect), but this is just another feedback source for fatshark, they also probably read the feedback thread of this mod. And yes itâs subjective, yes itâs balanced according to the mod makers balance ideas. Even if fatshark has entirly differenât balance ideas, there might be a solution in here which fs didnât consider yet.
The great thing is that itâs atleast possible and maybe in the future made easier by modders to test ideas and see how they play. Immediatly get an idea of what someone is suggesting instead of reading and imagining it. Someone could define âlots of controlâ differently then others, and this mod can only make it easier to really see where that players baseline lies. Even if itâs still the beginning i think this can become great. Imagine we could just post our balance ideas of weapons and add a line of code that players can copy paste and everyone can test it inside modded realm, would be great imo.
Hm, good question. I started with saying that I think a different approach as the one chosen is better and from there it has gone back and forth. I just wanted to voice my opinon for Fatshark to be visible (although I am halfway sure that they do it like this already). The only alternative would have been to make an own thread which seemed excessive or discussing it in the original thread which would have disturbed the detail discussion.
But you are right. I have said what I wanted to say and there is not much to gain by further explaining how statistics and data evaluation work, so I will refrain from further pestering on the matter. If someone still has questions there are PMs for such things.
The idea for a balance modification mod (for lazy or technical inabled people) sounds interesting. Although I am sure that there are some kind of limitations at work. One would be the shared damage profiles although it is less a problem if you just want to test one weapon. But there are changes i would like to test which most likely can not be adjusted by mods.
Oh itâs mybad i forgot your first post, i sometimes lose track of discussions. Well i agree that statistics should be used mostly but not exclusively, we also dont know the amount of data fs collects.
I didnât mean it in such a way that you were cluttering the thread, as i am guilty of doing that myself and this was not really oftopic, and was honestly asking.
And yes there are limitations, adding new stuff is not really into our control, maybe for big brain modders who know code idk. Iâm just more exited about the framework.
For me, I do like the work made in this mod, mostly (even if I donât agree with all choices, but we discussed it already, that stays kinda minor).
The only issue I have is that I think the work on balance should be a bit more deep than this when it comes to offering new options.
I would really like to tackle properties & traits BEFORE a âhuge weapon rebalanceâ, as it can shake everything. (or weâll have 2 âbig balanceâ patchs, instead of 1 to make).
For analysis, itâs good to see how you approached things though. And I hope to see some sort of collaboration with Fatshark on this, as it can help them being a bit faster when it comes to patch things up.
Of course, they will still be the âone in chargeâ, and if they disagree with a thing, we donât push it needlessly.
This is quite likely something that is slowing or downright stopping any FS balance for weapons, if there is a lot of work done on traits and talents then it makes absolute sense to get the weapons to a workable state(which on the whole I think they are) and hold it there while talents and traits are done. Iâm kind of hoping this is the case.
We actually made our own damage profiles for many weapons in later iterations. And we can adjust existing ones as well. The only limitation really comes with making new animations.
Wish I understood the damage profiles, been doing my own version of this mod for fun but only really combo and speed changes
No, what I meant is shared damage profiles. Like the damage profile for some Axe hits is also applied to Axe&Falchion hits. Or did you solve that problem?
What about Bleed? I remember that you have adjusted special properties like Linesman etc. But canât remember you have done something with Bleed. What about elements currently not in the game like using a certain weapon would damage the user of it? What about friendly fire values? What about precision of ranged weapons?
Just to clarify. I am not saying you canât this. I just want to know if it would be possible to get an understanding of the flexibility of the mods.