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| Author | Barbarian Talent Wheel |
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I feel the talent point cost of the barbarian talent wheel is slightly wrong:
I of course agree that offensive talents should be the cheapest for barbarian, because that simply is their style.
But for the same reason, i think that defensive skills should not be their second cheapest. instead, i would switch the talent costs of the leadership part and the defense part to really match the style that i, at least, feel as appropriate for a barbarian faction.
Skills like Barrier and Stand Your Ground simply are not what i believe fitting for an barbarian army, because which barbarian just lets his troops defend? Barbs are made for charging, that's why i say innate swiftness and rally are way more befitting of a barbarian army. Innate swiftness to charge the enemy, and rally because barbarian armies usually are pictured as teeming masses of creatures who usually die quickly because they wear no armor, again speaking against defense as second cheapest and reflecting the attack/defense values of the barbarian troops.
Discussion welcome. | | I think the values are selected to be like that for balance reasons. It would be maybe too powerful to have quite cheap morale in addition to cheap offense for a barbarian ( or at least the developers would think so ). You can see similar cases in other talent wheels. I will bring the wizard ( that I play ) as an example: Holy magic talent tree cost for us is cheaper than Chaos magic, and yet you see many more wizards cast lightning and arrow, rather than bless :) | No, i think Holy Magic being cheaper than Chaos Magic for Wizards is indeed in the style of them as they are portrayed in the HoMM series, because they are a "good" faction like knights, while Chaos Magic traditionally belongs to the "evil" factions of Dark Elves, Demons and, to a lesser extent, Necromancers.
In HoMM 3, where the barbarians as they are playable in this game originated, there were 3 "good" factions: Knights, Elves and Wizards, 3 "evil" factions: Demons, Dark Elves and Necromancers, as well as 2 (3 with Conflux) "neutral" factions: Barbarians and Swampdwellers.
Those last two factions were antipodes in the playstyle, with Barbs being attackers and Swampdwellers defenders, which showed in the respective skills of the different heroes as well as the troop values. That's why barbarians weren't really meant for defensive playing, we had Swampdwellers for that ;)
As for Balance reasons: look at the talent wheel of the knights, they have defense AND leadership portions of the wheel at only 7 points cost as well as holy magic, and a 5 point cost central skill. That is what i call imbalanced, because a knight has almost as many portions of his talent wheel at the cost of 7 skill point as the talent wheel of barbs has overall portions!
I believe this is somewhat skewed, too, because if barbarians don't get magic at all but a natural resistance to it (which is of little use except in PvP), they could get a little advantage in talents, or at least should be amongst the ones most favoured by the talent wheels, but i can't see that now. Stunning Blow and (probably) circle blow at lvl 10 are very nice, but di, in my view, not fully compensate having no magic at all. Again, in HoMM3, Barbarians had the ability to build mage guilds, but only the first 2 levels. | In the HoMM series Wizards - Tower/Academy were always casting a lot of chaos/destructive magic spells and almost never had a focus on holy spells. Attacking spells got nothing to do with good/evil axis in any game, the school that belongs to "evil" factions is the Dark magic one. I've been playing a lot of HoMM from the days of HoMM2 but a lot more after HoMM3 and Wizards were always ( along with Dark Elves to a lesser extent ) completely based on destructive magic when it came to spellcasting.
Anyway comparing this game to HoMM3 is not going to lead anywhere, since this game is based on HoMM5, so the deductions should be made based on that. Barbarians in HoMM5 had no magic, they had rage instead, and so it's natural not to have magic here either. Wizards on the other hand along with dark elves were the 2 factions completely based in destructive magic, so from a flavor point of view Chaos magic for wizards should cost a lot less than holy magic.
About balance now. First of all I never said the game is balanced simply because I am not experienced enough yet to state something like that. However a quick look through the standings of the tournaments on the .ru server ( which is much more developed and can give a lot better conclusions than this one ) shows that in all levels there are good amounts of every class in the top spots. So at least in PvP the game seems rather balanced with X faction having an advantage vs A,B,C factions and disadvantage vs D,E,F faction.
About the knight faction you mentioned specifically, the point cost might seem too low on 1st sight, but when you think about it better you will see that all this gives the knight around 1 more talent on the levels the game is played at the moment. The low talent costs knights have at the moment could cause problems if we had level 20 characters, but right now it's not a big deal. The knight simply has a few more options regarding his playstyle, he can't just get all those cheap stuff.
I can agree barbarians should get something more when fighting neutrals since magic resistance is more or less useless there, but a direct bonus to the tribe affecting the creatures in PvP also, could make it quite imbalanced. Same goes for dark elves, their racial ability is quite weak, especially considering most of them go for melee style rather than spellcasting. | Sorry to contradict again, but the barbarians as I play them here are way different from HoMM5 and a lot more close to HoMM3. Just have a look at the troops:
HoMM5:
Goblins
Centaur
Warrior
Shaman
Slyer
Wyvern
Cyclops
HoMM3:
Goblins
Wolf Riders
Orcs
Ogres
Rocs
Cyclops
Behemoth
Now, after which HoMM are the barbarians formed here, do you think?
And i guess that is a part of the problem, because one faction is inserted from another instance of the game, and in the face of that the makers of this game did a remarkably good job, i think we can agree on that. | Yeah you are right about barbarians troops coming from HoMM3, but in HoMM3 there were no talents in this form ( like a wheel ) you just had 8 skills that you could get 3 ranks on each. The talents as used here, come from the HoMM5 version of the game.
Barbarians in this game also have a very good bonus that is not written anywhere directly, but does exist: The synergy between rocs + ogres after level 8. The transportation ability means the barbarian's melee troops will all reach the other side together ( since wolf/roc got roughly double initiative than ogre ), and in many occasions that thing offers decisive advantage. This synergy along with the quality of creatures themselves makes up for a very powerful team. | That's exactly the thing i'm trying to say... HoMM3 didn't have the "secondary" talents, but this barb faction here comes from HoMM3. Thus, it probably is pretty hard to create the secondary talents for them from a scratch, and the choice is pretty good. Yet, I still think Leadership is more appropriate of Barbarians then Defense. Just like in the HoMM-series, where the probability of getting certain talents was higher than getting others for each faction. As barbarian (in HoMM3) it was less likely to be offered magic talents like wisdom (or defense, for that matter) on level ups than for, let's say wizard, who would rather seldom be offered Offense on level-up, just like a knight would get a point of defense on level up much more probable than spell power, which in turn would be the main gain of Dungeon and so on. I can't find the percentages anymore on the web, but i believe it was like 50% of the respective favored skill for the first 10 levels, and becoming closer after that, but is was weighted already, primary stats as well as skills.
Based on that, i say leadership and defense should change cost, for reasons given from my first post until now. I mean, why to implement a talent like retribution when leadership, which is partly needed to make that talent really plausible is so expensive?
P.S.:
Guess why i have 12 ogres and 6 rocs ;) | Feels exactly the same for wizards actually with chaos magic. Currently it's not a real problem because you don't need the talent to learn the spells but imagine how hard it will be to cast higher than 3 level spells when/if we get to that stage, with talents of the tree costing 12 points each... And of course the second-tier talents in the tree are way too expensive for their costs. We can get nature magic for 8 points holy for 10 and chaos for 12, it feels totally wrong also. But there are other things in the faction that compensate for that.
Currently it feels wizard has 2 useful talent trees out of the 5 in the wheel, keep that in mind :P
The thing is all classes got problems and things to complain about, you can see it all over the forum, elves whine about low hp, dark elves/barbarians about rather useless special ability compared to others etc etc. I can start complaining about the crazy costs of mini-arts, very bad creature quality on low levels blablabla :P
There are many things that can be improved, all we can do for now is wait and do our best with what we got.
I just hope this server gets some proper attention and development soon, it's running ok as it is now, but without any new stuff to do for long time people will get bored and move ahead to other games soon. | I agree.
I also hope that that improvements are made to this server soon, even though there are few real problems apart from balancing. The server is rather stable (much more so than in the beginning when i started here) and the game is a very enjoyable adaption of a game series I love. Still, everyone can contribute her/his ideas and suggestions, that is what this forum was created.
And I thank you for discussing one of my ideas with me. I can see now that cheap leadership might cause balancing problems, but seeing different factions talent wheels, the system is not very balanced yet for most factions. So changing the barb wheel about the way i propose, it would get closer in its power to the knights talents, while most other talent wheels need a more general boost, i believe, although i can't say for sure because i didn't play the other factions (yet), only against them ;) | The thing is that knights troops got quite low average initiative compared to barbarian and therefore they kinda need the morale more to become competitive.
For barbarian on the other hand it would be much better since initiative % bonuses are better for faster units as a general principle. Not to mention how devastating it would be for wolves to get morale all the time getting to hit 3 more times :P
Changes are needed for sure but it takes a lot of consideration before doing so. |
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