Originally Posted by
Sindhol
That is such a disingenous thing to say. As if we haven't been to the tent and as if we haven't compared the blessings and corruptions we have now to the corruptions we had before. We have, and blessings suck. It feels like you assigned stats based on your idea of what fits thematically, rather than what people actually used, want, or need. In short: you did a bad job and you should own it.
There are three things that I think are really wrong.
First problem: The less-important administrative point: the interface sucks, the information you provide sucks, and the system is overall less clear than what we had. The blessing quests don't explain what you're getting out of a blessing. You have accept each of the blessings, detach their respective tooltips, and put them side-by-side on your screen to run a comparison. It's annoying to change corruptions and blessings around simultaneously. Also, freeps can see what blessing you're running and that's honestly a bit stupid. And to top it off, the duration is stupid, too.
Quick Fix: Turn blessings into corruptions. Maybe borrow an "appearance" trait slot, because I don't think all three appearance slots get used anyway.
Second problem: Blessings provide wrong stats, creeps stat totals are too low (still!), and blessings are boring and same-y--they don't change the way you play the game at all.
Most obviously, the blessing of the Ongburz provides no mastery! How could you ever think that running without mastery was a good idea? Likewise for all the blessings that don't provide mitigations or finesse. Those are not optional stats. Nobody is a "tank" in the Moors--everyone needs to have some damage and some defense and some healing. And finesse, because your skills need to connect to matter.
The second is the issue of theming. It's pretty obvious that you just designed one blessing per creep class, rather than designing blessings according to different ways to play. That is, in itself, not a good approach. If you wanted that, you should've added stats to the creep "attributes" (damage/health/power/armour/avoidance/resistance).
Why does the spider blessing suck for spiders? (I mean, it sucks for everyone, but notably for spiders.) You realize that spiders have a slow, strangling approach to combat, and rely on a combination of crowd control, power drain (nerfed to the point of uselessness, as well), BPE (via Catch Prey and, until this update, pmit corruptions) and mitigations (via Born of Shadow and corruptions) to survive long enough for their damage-over-time to actually work? Spiders have no KO ability (you can time Lethal Kiss and Virulent Poison to go off at the same time, but you still need to maintain CC for 10+ seconds to prevent freeps from healing back up) and need to stay in the fight for a long time to get kills. Meanwhile, the spider blessing has no BPE and virtually no mitigations! It's actually suited for a glass cannon DPS build, which is a really bad idea in the Moors! So even as a "themed" blessing, intended primarily for the spider play-style, it's a failure.
Quick Fix: Add baseline stats to creep attributes, equal to roughly 10% of the cap per pip (assuming the attribute does nothing else, adjusted for less-valuable stats (BPE, resist, crit def), and treating BPE and mastery as one stat each), replacing the percentage bonuses you get from those. (So five pips in "Avoidance" gets you enough rating to hit 50% of the block/parry/evade caps. It is currently about 1.7% per pip.) Replace Power with Finesse. Damage pips provides both masteries and critical rating. Morale pips also provide incoming healing rating.
Return corruptions to what they were (see below).
Buff racial traits so that they provide roughly 30% of the cap each (assuming the trait does nothing else, adjusted for less-valuable stats (BPE, resist, crit def), and treating BPE and mastery as one stat each). For example, the spider trait "Ancient as the Stars", which provides two stats, would provide 15% of the pmit cap (about 150k) and 20% of the crit def cap (about 250k, valued at 3/4 because critical defence is less useful), which is about 50k and 100k more respectively than it currently grants. Also, add some percentage bonuses to racial traits, because rating bonuses can't help define a character very much (you can only get as much crit def as anyone else if you're only getting +rating).
Blessings provide percentage bonuses to damage, morale, defences, and especially induction duration, attack speed, AoE targets, range, initial damage/damage over time, and so on, so they actually define your role (and they should be based on role, not class). Or just remove blessings, that's also fine.
Third problem: Corruptions make up less than 10% of your total stats now. That's far too little to have a significant impact. Some stats can't be obtained at all, now--block/parry/evade, for example. Corruptions are also still a bit boring, and there are a lot of bonuses that don't make sense (any of the power-boosting corruptions). Also, why does finesse grant +%maximum power as set bonus? Not only does it not make any sense, it's an outright insult to give anyone max power at this point. Power is not a stat. Just pretend it doesn't exist.
Quick fix: Return corruptions to what they were (especially the set bonus magnitudes), but with the set bonuses moved to 2 and 4 traits, instead of 3 and 6. Remove the trade-off corruptions and add morale+incoming healing corruptions in their stead. (The morale-for-stuff ones are the only ones worth using, so the trade-off corruptions are functionally morale corruptions anyway.) Slightly buff corruptions so that each corruption provides roughly 20% of a stat cap each (assuming the corruption does nothing else, adjusted for less-valuable stats (BPE, resist, crit def), and treating BPE and mastery as one stat each). For example, a critical rating corruption should provide about 250k critical rating, and a physical mitigation corruption should provide about 150k physical mitigation (15% of ~1m) and 150k each of BPE (10% of 1.5m, valued at about 1/2 because BPE isn't that useful).
To sum up: You'd end up with a system where the ~20 attribute pips you get provide about 2 full caps worth of stats, 12 corruptions provide about 2.4 full caps worth of stats, class/race traits provide about 1 full cap assuming you choose to slot them, and blessing are added on top of that.
I currently have (using the White Hand blessing, which offers the most stats) about 2/3 mastery + 1/3 crit + 1/2 resist + 1/2 finesse + 1 pmit + 1 tmit + 1/4 BPE = 4.25 stat caps worth of stats, with three spider stat traits slotted (Ancient as the Stars, Enemies of the First Children, Increased Armour + improved hatchlings). With the system outlined above, I'd get about another stat cap's worth of stats (1-1.5m points of rating extra, plus additional BPE and resist because those would be treated as less valuable), plus the percentage bonuses from blessings and racial traits on top. That'd be a neat buff, but not an outrageous one.
P.S. The troll session play is perfect, but it needs a bit more health regeneration. An extra ~3m in-combat morale regen would be good (morale regen is per minute, so 3m regen is only about 50k healing per second, which basically any freep can out-damage).
