If not the stick, then how about the carrot?
Keep everything the same (3 weapon slots/spirit slots) but Oracle and Warrior would get a 4th slot. Would accomplish the same thing - keeping the action economy among non-savants similar between each other - but would literally only change Warrior and Oracle.
This is a good point, actually. Spirit weapons on Knight would be less usable than Weapons, because only the latter will actually have an imbue to strengthen them.
And no, it’s not a suggestion. Not nearly condensed of an idea to be one, I was hoping to hear other people’s ideas.
I’ve heard “just use less skills or weapons, ez.” a lot, so just going to reply to yours: “Power budget” in any game takes into account how many options you have. More skills = less power given to each of those skills.
If Knight or Savant are balanced around using all of their skills, and you don’t use them all, you can’t PvP. You’ll just be weaker than a simpler class. This is a necessary evil though, if you balance Knight/Savant around people using… say, 70% of the skillset (Like for an average player), pros who can use 100% will dominate non-Savant/Knights in pro-level PvP.
Thank you. This could take many forms, it doesn’t have to be the idea I floated around. You could have everyone get 3 default slots like it is ATM, but add a 4th slot to Oracles and Warriors.
debatable
What do you mean debatable? When you make a game with complex classes as well as simple classes, you have two options for balancing:
1: You balance the complex classes around the best players, the ones who use 100% of that class kit. This is the norm for most games, because it keeps higher skill play fair for everyone. Pros will use 100% of any class kit, so to keep pro fights fair you must balance around that. Average ppl will not use 100% of Savant or Knight, so it is a weak class in their hands.
2: You balance the complex classes around the average player, the ones who use only some of that class kit. If this were to happen, you would be right. But this is a very bad idea, because it creates a complex class meta in higher skill play. If a noob Savant could beat a noob Warrior with only half of its skills, then a pro Savant in Elysium using all of their skills would be Tier 0 broken.
Actually, there’s another concept I think is important to discuss. It was brought up in a TF2 comment, but here’s the most important part of it.
Item effectiveness should scale well with skill - not exponentially like the BASE Jumper where it’s suicidal for a newbie but invincible for an expert, and it shouldn’t be the minor scaling of “walking at people with Phlog” vs “sneaking up on people with Phlog and decent map knowledge”.
Link to the full comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1p42KtZOCw&lc=UgzfQYhqtTIr3BB0q6R4AaABAg
Another important excerpt, this time from a Guilty Gear subreddit:
Imagine if they added a character where at round start you have to play a full game of DDR and if you miss a single note you explode; but if you win you get an unblockable instant kill. There’s no level of “execution difficulty” you could make that DDR game that would make it fun to play against, because you don’t play against it. You’re just there to collect your win if the guy fails his minigame.
The problem isn’t that stuff is balanced around the average player, it’s that people can bypass counters to their loadout just by getting better. There should never be a non-generalist loadout that can defeat its counters simply by getting better at the game.
Well i mean yeah, it doesn’t really change much other than a buff to both of them (warrior/oracle), which i hope comes for 2nd awakening
wouldn’t mind a 4th weapon slot for either class but tbh it’d feel stale if both of them had it as an 2nd awakening
I’m not really sure how to explain this well but I think having 3 slots is one of the pros to spirit weapons.
They have quite a lot of cons already (high stat requirement, semi-limited customization, less damage inflicting skills, attacks use health) which shouldn’t be added to.
Jugg and Paladin are fine as they only have keys 1-4, I don’t think Knight will be that bad either (see Knight Prediction). Savant is kind of an outlier as from what i’ve seen most people are either, A just going for the spirit imbue synergies or B good enough to use keys 1- 8.
I imagine most Knight’s are weapon focused so, assuming they put the max amount of points into weapons (enough to stay hybrid) the remaining points will not be enough for all skills on 2 spirit weapons let alone 3.
This eliminates the need to reach over to the 6th key due to only having 1 or less useable skill on the spirit weapon in the 3rd slot. Instead most likely keeping it for the imbue synergies.
Spirit weapons do not have high stat requirements, they have less skills/items so it feels more expensive because its attempting to cater to: Low investment hybrids; High Investment Hybrids; and Oracle (remember, we’re getting more levels with full release).
They have the same amount of customization as weapons too, they just also have more unique skills, which is meant to be their main difference from weapons. If we actually had a variety of spirit weapons, this wouldn’t be as much of an issue.
Which again, brings the point that they only have less damaging skills because there is less weapons (notice the pattern yet?), Spirit items having a ton of utility skills is actually a major benefit, as most other classes dont have many options like that either.
finally, the self damage is being removed full release