Tank & weapon & weaponbuff balance

[woqued]

Please go back to weapon buffs granting 4 dice when cast on someone else, keep the 5 dice if selfbuffed. DB & Abyss weapons didn't deserve this. Arguably you could say the Xr weps could use a small nerf, so Abyss & DB weapons would still serve a role in the game after XR weapons are attained beyond LASH infliction source. 

DB & Abyss weapons had a nice balance - the "new and higher" tier weapon was competitive with the others, but not dwarfing. XR weapons made the others obsolete and make tank building unfun if you don't have the XR weapons to go with it once you've had a taste of having them. The weapon buff change made it worse; multiple types makes the caster buff change worse for the previous tiers and comparatively superior for XR. 

AA & Slinger buffs, attack number shift to nerf normal tanks and buff caster tanks, 2h nerfs, XR weapons already evened out the playing field. I no longer see the point of the nerf on caster buffs on teammates - it is in fact quite hard to justify. 

This is all knowing the fact that XR weapons are supposed to last until areas like Mechanus and further. 

[yune]

Abyss weapons have always been much worse than DB because you can't craft them. Dis and Min weapons were the competitors to DB. Sometimes the 2 ele 2 exo on a min wep was better than 3 and 3, plus they come as +15.

Speaking of weapons, can we have a way to make 5d12 gems so we could craft the lv50 weapons? They're already craftable, just can't make the gems to actually do it. This would be a good use for the abyss polish since I don't think 4d12 and 6d12 gems do anything at all.

[woqued]

Abyss weapons had their niche in being superior to DB when not buffed in smaller parties, or having more exo/ele elements than counterparts so potentially having higher damage potential in specific parties (i.e when you can buff all, or when vs low healer mobs). You just needed to loot tons to get the right combo.

I.e an ACES + NP , ACFS + MN, CEFS+DP were rather competitive in certain runs in the game until XRs poopiedoopied all over them. Game was also different once upon a time, when not all parties had all weapon buffs so certain combos were superior to others (due to lack of toons/players).

Max potential of DB was always higher than Abyss, granted the weapon buff change skewed things abit depending on class.

[chirality]

Yeahp. Dis and Min weren't really competitors to DB, at least not since I started playing. I'd say it was more like db and abyss were competitors, and min/50 were "competitors" as far as things to be busted out very rarely for very rare healers (if anything, more akin to tearstar than something used for significant stretches of a run, like abyss and db). As for min, even after the (huge) universal buff of +15 gmw being readily-available, +15 was still very useful in niche circumstances. I used Min quite a bit in limbo due to the damage types and the convenience of not needing to bother ask for yet another gmw. If, by competitors, we mean simply "did min, db, and abyss weaps all compete as viable choices to carry around, stick on quickbar, buff, and equip in endgame" then yes, that's definitely true.

I think at one time dis weapons were somewhat/rather popular (up to around 2007,8,9ish?), but aside from nerfs/edits/updates, it should be noted that crafting weapons was once very rare, and having a well-documented and well-organized structure (spread across more than simply in-house guild info lines) for doing so was even rarer. Things like changes to weapon buffs (I mean way back, not this recent one--and even availability of stuff like keen in parties, which was often big, or at least desired by trash-focusing nubz hue)), mob stats, areas released, and some other "update-based" factors were the primary reason for different views of different weapons. Still, what many may now take for granted regarding the commonality and ubiquity of crafted weapons was not always the case.

Along with actual code changes, it should be remembered that there was not always such a distillation of knowledge and "good practice"/"good building" habits that are now well-ingrained in most players. This isn't simply about stuff like weaponcrafting guides, but also about the ratio of casual:serious players (this ratio was very low with a very high population for a long time); the rise of HGX (and the accompanying rise in not just understanding damage types better on an intuitive level but also a rise in "stat-tracking" and competitive-ness, with 2h% sheer number mismatch making the distinction between appropriate vs subpar/bad damage types very very obvious and hard to ignore); the rise of botting; the rise of more accurate information distributed in public spaces like the wiki; the rise of more players spending more time in harder zones and having to invest some effort in understanding why there was such a chasm of performance between tanks/players that didn't understand or care much about weapon damage types and crafting, and those that were very concerned with it.

Dis weapons were always the worst of the 4 and rather useless, since my time (2010). Min weaps always had niche uses and still held up well for elite richkids, really until an assumption of limbo-derived weapons, and still hold up well for those without. The value of abyss weaps was similar to what yune mentioned as the value of min weap (aside from +15)--it's a matter of a potential combination of exo/ele in a different format than DB weaps. 4+2 db weaps are in a weird little side bubble, of course, but abyss weaps were quite desirable for a long time. (For the reasons woqued mentions, and as he points out, also requiring a large amount of abyss grinding to have any reliable payoff). In any case, as OP mentions, abyss and db weaps did have a cool "balance" relationship for quite a long period, and I think it's one of the things that's missed a bit and actually was an ingredient in a meta that felt somehow satisfying and fun in a way that has somewhat drifted off in the sunset (when taken as a whole with other package components).

Back on topic: One primary takeaway is that XR weaps + weapon buff change resulted in a meta that is a bit puzzling. I won't bother quoting since it's pretty much the entire OP. It's an uncomfortable situation that I don't think really created a meta that feels very satisfying for the reasons woqued mentions, or at least not compared to the state of tanking/weaponcrafting/buildtheorizing/blahblah before XR weaps were a thing.

[woqued]

Technically the weapon buff change helped abyss weapons over db (6d10 => 6-60 to 6d9 aka 6-54); 6d12 aka 6-72 to 5d12 aka 5-60; the gap was shortened ever so slightly. Assuming not all exos were buffed, the exotic portion of abyss weps at 6-36 compared to db 2-24 evened the playing field some. Assuming weapons such as:

6d9x3, 6d6 x3 (avg 30 x3 + 21 x3)
5d12x3, 2d12x3; avg 32,5 x3 + 13 x3)
The Abyss weapon is competitive assuming even one exo does 60%+ dmg and enemy has some modicum of ele dr/imm. The more exo vulnerabilities of the 3 the better it is. Assuming only ele dmg intake, then DB is considerably superior. The thing setting abyss weapons back is their immense rarity to get proper base+dmg types combos, and now that Abyss isn't the end-endgame farming it for weapons isn't appealing. Stellar Abyss weapons were rare even when they were farmed for, and still weren't the minmaxed optimal option ever.

The weapon buff change hurt the multi-type weapons far more than XR weapons while the XR weapons were already vastly superior. They should be more powerful don't get me wrong as endgame weapon options, but I'm here thinking it'd be cool to have alternatives or to keep the old weapon system in play somehow. To be fair, Limbo p1 weapons do a stellar job as a newer weapon type that is a very cool implementation of a weapon. Easy craftability, rewards knowledge of enemy vulnerabilities, have niche utility for their respective classes in SD and Ranger. The irking part is that the common starter classes got a pretty across the board nerf in earlier content that doesn't seem warranted.

Edit: An interesting option would be a way to upgrade DB / Abyss weapons similar to the way Limbo p1 weapons are upgraded with a gem, when found from an endgame zone you can use it on weapons from previous content to elevate them up to be side by side in power with XR weapons. Use loot from endgame zones you need XRs for to breathe life into old content without creating new weapon drops is an exciting idea to me. 

Maybe the situation is fine and nothing needs to happen to it, rendering the thread useless as the weaponbuff situation is a-ok as a metashift from previously easily top-dog classes to others - more utility, CoTs still stronk, ranged, castertanks, shiftertanks. Less CC rogues, barbs, monks, wms, fighters, non-CoT divine tanks (though ftr still popular) - and it's not like they're all terrible. They're just worse than they used to be, and top dogs are something else.

[witlak]

Aug 3, 2022 0:08:30 GMT yune said:

Speaking of weapons, can we have a way to make 5d12 gems so we could craft the lv50 weapons? They're already craftable, just can't make the gems to actually do it. This would be a good use for the abyss polish since I don't think 4d12 and 6d12 gems do anything at all.

Or a way to craft Abo weapons. That way the polish for 4d12 gems would be useful. We would need more types but Abo weapons are really cool.  

[chirality]

It is a true shame that abo weapons are so bad. Even just allowing one or two types to be crafted would dramatically increase their usefulness (which is exactly zero).

I would like to see LL weapons given the ability to craft the exotic type. These weapons are more useful than abos, but even before L50 weaps were created, they were very limited in scope, and after L50s existed, largely redundant entirely (aside from being something technically usable by a newbie, or certain cases that really just meant cheezily dragging pre-LL toons for an LL tag to use something like a uro weap at L40).

Even for a run like desert/db, filled with mobs that closely-align to the "one type best by a huge margin, rest somewhere on spectrum of ok to immune," the "megadamage" concept of both LL weaps and L50s really doesn't produce results when buffed db (or abyss) weaps still provide better dps (and less swapping, = less lost flurries) even on these classic "use this type that it's extremely vulnerable to" mobs.

At least L50s have some arguable use as being only two types--but even this is completely an issue of healing. On the other hand, LL weaps can't be crafted and are problematic both for healing as well as subpar damage combinations.

As for the old weapon buff change that basically ruined dis weaps and elevated db (and abyss) weaps to top-tier, both the way the dice were assigned as well as the original +16 nature of dis weapons always seemed strange to me. I understand that the old consumables gave a static flat buff (which I think is odd, but whatever), but I never really understood why in a game based around dice for damage on everything else, dis weapons got that instead. Again, the dice translation is underpowered, which is the real issue. It's a shame that the weapons dropping as loot from a dragon intended to max out at L55 are better than the weapons dropping from a boss in the next zone that starts at L55. Even worse, it's not just that they're better--they're way better.

Anyway, bad derail about other weapons when really the focus should be on XR weaps and the problems created (and exacerbated by the weap buff change), per OP.