2H styles suffering. What are people's thoughts?

[Pit Lord]

I see SOTC has spoken and the discussion has ended.

Seriously, how is it possible that one manager - no, make that one team - has the top theatrics, the top war, and the top rage in Blood Gods? (And the top defensive theatrics, too)

Kudos to you, SOTC

There is not much competition for top spots (money factor). The stables are to a larger extent tiered.

[Narol]

B***shit, we all want top spots but he's doing it right so far and he's the best currently...

About the question of strenght-based weapons and agility-based weapons, I think too that agility is overpowered since the system changed. Maybe things would be more balanced if the damage bonus of agility-based weapons still depended for 50% of strenght and only for 50% of Agility. My 2 cents...

[Alba Kebab]

B***shit, we all want top spots but he's doing it right so far and he's the best currently...

hehe

[Zakusho]

After reading all of the stuff written within this topic I decided to give it a go on a Rage. What I can say is that currently my main gladiator is pretty damn strong. Dealing heavy hits constantly before the enemy has a chance to riposte and defensive Wars couldn't resist as well so I'd say 2h is quite worth the shot. One more thing to add. I run my glad on max activity and bloodlust and I also aim for the head while defending my own head. (to avoid getting knocked out and/or stunned + the amount of armour ain't that big there so it felt natural for me to try to defend the head while also going for it on the attack)
Skills wise I simply stopped at rank 5 (the chances for me to continue to train is too low for me to waste points so I'd figure it would be better to invest in something else before maxing out say 2h weapon skill. Example of my current skills: 2h weapon skill at rank 5 | Devastating Power at rank 5 | Blood Drunk at rank 3 (almost 4). Naturally I'll grab Sunder Armour and Brute Force afterwards.

[Apoca1ypse]

About the question of strenght-based weapons and agility-based weapons, I think too that agility is overpowered since the system changed. Maybe things would be more balanced if the damage bonus of agility-based weapons still depended for 50% of strenght and only for 50% of Agility. My 2 cents...

I'm totally OK with agility taking less of a role in damage output. Bruce runs too much str in the current engine (132 str, 248agil when using achievements)

[Sotc]

Have to prep for a business trip (won't have a chance to post much for the next two weeks) so I'll keep this shorter than I'd like:

Some quick points:
1. The 50/50 Strength vs Agility suggestion is way too broad. We have tons of build archetypes in this game (power theatrics, speed rage, tank war, etc). Does it make really sense for a power theatrics counterattacker to go 50/50 with a speed theatrics for example (currently the speed theatrics usually gets thrashed)? Builds have always had favorable matchups and unfavorable matchups. Asking for a blanket 50/50 doesn't really make sense because it doesn't take the build vs build variability into account.

2. I agree that agility based offensive glads are very effective right now. I don't believe it is mainly because of the damage. If it were just simply about pure raw damage you would see speed rages performing much better. In very general terms, in a fight with an initiative gap, the faster fighter and the slower fighter each have goals that they must meet to increase their chance to win.

* A much faster fighter must be able to stem the impending beatdown to increase his chance to win through actively attacking: delivering crit effects, hamstring, adrenaline rush, sig move, stacking presence etc.
* A much slower fighter must be able to stem the incoming beatdown to increase his chance to win through passively defending: tank, parry, high armor, block rank, armor rank, create distance, resisting crit effects, etc.

As you can see, When fighters get closer in initiative things quickly become more complex (and interesting) as these factors begin interacting with each other and managers start needing to balance goal priorities and manage gearing strategies (ex. 10 more strength or 70 block rank?).

Nate has many options to address this (should be careful not to turn the dial too much, or too many dials):
1. Decrease the initiative gap by making the initiative scaling with attributes taper off.
2. Wait for glads to gear up better (many of the slower fighter's goals can only be achieved on orange gear).
3. Adjusting crit effects. (add more later)
4. Etc

3. Aligning your glad's gear with your big picture strategy for them seems to make the biggest impact on performance. I've turned around some of my glads completely around (war pirate and shield pirate for example) after I changed up their overall strategy and stuck with it long enough to get the gear to run it (even through all the frustrating losses). Even afterwards you need to constantly fine tune gear to adjust to the shifting metagame.

Good luck in the Pits!

[Kreegan]

Sotc, good points but you have to admit that at the moment one Agility gladiator needs much less maintenance than a Strength gladiator to be competitive. Who will hit first has always been very important in this game and right now the Agility builds enjoy the luxury not only to hit first but also to hit quite hard, dealing a lot of damage before the response comes and usually triggering at least 1 nasty critical effect. Tanks that soak the damage get dropped by bleeding. We had a similar situation with the old system, some 2 years ago or so, where a speed Rage wielding green weapons could drop a War in full purple heavy armour with an uninterrupted sequence of attacks in no more than 2 rounds. This was mitigated when Nate reduced the armour-piercing power of the light blades. The speed Rages remained fairly good but not so overwhelmingly good as before. I'm not saying that we need the same thing at the moment but something certainly needs to be done.

One notable thing about the most efficient speed builds is that they are all Elaars. Perhaps the armour-penetrating power of their attacks is a bit over the top. The other races also perform fairly well as speed gladiators but don't score such overwhelming victories as the Elaars and are somewhat beatable even by slow fighters. So maybe the Elaarian racial bonus needs some tweaking before something else is done.

[Sotc]

Good point about the Elaaran bonus, I had overlooked that. A change to crit effects in general would be tough to do well because often they are so game changing. Not sure what to suggest with regards to that, but a careful balance would have to be struck.

[Adoede]

So, the agility builds are easier for the low to mid-tier blood gods game, but the strength builds are more than competitive at the very top of the game when fully geared.

The main problem I see is that it takes so long to properly gear up and since the low to mid-tier game favors the agility builds, strength builds don't get access to the best gear of their choosing for a looong time...maybe never. I think there is enough a manager can do with gear, choosing races, hybrid builds, strategies, stacking rankings, etc. that many different builds can be competitive, but perhaps a more equitable way to access that top gear would help balance the scales a bit. Or perhaps the option to ultimately "design" your own gear It would be lame if all this discussion really boiled down to a matter of better and worse gear as the primary determining factor.

As the game now stands, the only option I see for gearing my glads to be competitive enough to get to a 1000/2000 Rating and have access to the best gear is to spam the gauntlets or conquests and hope for lucky orange drops that fit my build philosophy. Maybe that's what was intended, but perhaps a better alternative could be imagined?

Bottom line - Strength builds need near-complete gear build-up to be competitive at the upper levels of blood gods. Agility builds can be competitive with just a few pieces of agility boosting gear. Agility builds keep strength builds depressed in the rankings. A vicious cycle emerges.

[Nate]

Because everyone was so loving and kind in this thread I went ahead and crunched some data. The results were very interesting. I won't be sharing the details of the data because I'm a big fat meanie, but here is what I will tell you.

If we assume a specialty plus a weapon type they can use equals a "build" (e.g. rage + blade, war + pole arm, etc) we get 12 builds. Two handed rage enjoys the 3rd best win ratio in Blood Gods when matched up against the other 11 builds. Agility based weapons and strength based weapons both have 3 spots in the top 6 and no, agility based weapons don't hold the top 3. There are a couple of builds that could use a small nudge, but they aren't any of the ones that have been mentioned as being lacking. I hate it when data contradicts casual observations!

Good luck in the Pit!

-Nate-