Discuss: UB's noob factor, needs balance

all demigods require a low amount of skill imo.

Explain

Clicking to join a game and pick a demigod requires low amount of skill.

Doing anything significant after that point, probably not quite so.

P.S. I'm sure if you work on your skill you will greatly improve your stats

i know this does sound arrogant but, their are alot of games with people feeding 10 kills to the other team(unfortunately this doesnt show up it pantheon), plus i do like helping them learn to play. then there are ofc connection issues.

anyway, the reason i say every demigod requires a low amount of skill is because the game was designed for new players to be able to jump right into the game and play.

mastering those skills however, is a different story...

Short version: Learn to play newb.

Long version: Unclean Beast can be either a very high damage melee fighter or a very good hit and run antagonizer. It's not a very hardy fighter though and can't easily outlast a tough enemy. Unclean Beast also has limited ranged options and can be whittled down at a distance.

The player's build makes all the difference. Ooze specialized builds are useless against ranged attacks but can stand up to melee damage much better. That might help against demigods out in the open but it generally makes it harder to push through towers. If you don't max out Spit you'll be much weaker against buildings in the long run. Gods like Regulus and Torchbearer can hassle you effectively.

Spit specialized builds on the other hand should be great at hit and run, less limited against ranged attacks, and decent against buildings. But now you're vulnerable against a solid melee fighter with army support. Oak, Sedna, and Erebus can combat you effectively. Creeps may also become problematic in the long run.

The bottom line is that if you think it's all the same then you have no freaking clue about what you are talking about. LTPN.

Speaking as an Ooze player, two things piss me off more than nything in the world: Ice TB, and Regulus with Maims and MArks and Mines and Wyrmskins (and sometimes Posioned Dagger... SO. SLOW.). 95% of people running Ooze do not get speed items outside Inner Beast and a Wand of Speed, making us incredibly vulnerable to slows. That's how you kill an Ooze UB. Sedna and Oak can also beat him at his own game and play to outlast and drive him off... and when his slow ass tries to run, you Pounce/Pent him into oblivion. When you fight as an Ooze UB, you need to be extremely aware of when to cut and run and when to commit yourself because escaping generally isn't as easy as it is with a Spit UB that's pobably running Swift, Speed Boots and a Wand of Speed. Trying to toe to toe an UB, especially if you're autoattack based (like Angelic Fury Reg, if he catches you) is generall suicide.

I don't play Spit UB so I won't poke my head in that argument.

oh and btw,

sludge slinger throws poo at dps demigods for 7 seconds.

its fine l2p. 

Oak and Rook can both compete in melee. Regs and TB can both kill him from range with minimal personal danger. UB doesn't stand out as heads and shoulders better than any other DG, he's pretty much in line with everything else. 

the argument presented by the OP is no argument at all. you can't justify a nerf-call by saying "personally i find this strategy to be simplistic so therefore its overpowered." no. just no. power level comparisons must be made on an objective basis with data to back up any conclusions drawn. thats the only way to even attempt to keep the game relatively well balanced. 

Well I've made the reward-player-skill argument many times in several different games so I do have some sympathy for the OP. Basically how the argument goes is that while there are no arbitrary rules of honor or minimum-required-skill for the players, an ideal game should be balanced in a way that in general, simple strategies have a lower maximum potential than complicated ones. But achieving that is totally the responsibility of the game designers. 

However, I personally don't think of Beast as much simpler than any other DG. The simple fact is that most effective builds play as 1234 spammers or right-click-whores. Its just the nature of the game. Most of the "skill" in this game is displayed in how you position yourself, how you coordinate with your teammates, etc, and every DG is capable of that.  

The one thing that I do find possibly OP about Beast is that he is so strong early and late. He is one of (if not the) best end-game AA hero, so you'd think a good strategy would be to dominate him early to prevent him from getting to that point. But his natural stats and powerful early spells make him almost unstoppable in the early game as well. There are just very few builds that can match the beginning-to-end power that Beast has.  

But why should complicated strategies be explicitely rewarded? That lowers depth; if you arbitrarily make something "more complicated" better than something "less complicated" then everybody just does the more complicated strategy. The game designers should A: make the fun and B: make the game as balanced as possible. They shouldn't intentionally try to create some strategies to be better than others, because then some things will just be left out.

@ Milskidasith

Actually no, if everybody tries to use the more complicated strategy then lesser players will fail to execute it properly, allowing the more talented players to distinguish themselves, which is the whole point of competitive gaming. I really don't intend to argue that reward-player-skill should apply to DG as 1) its not a major cybersport and 2) the game mechanics of DG generally don't lend themselves to R-P-S the way other games do. I was just mentioning it to point out that the OP might have some traction if DG were different than it is.

Also, I just finished last week with a very long and draining argument regarding R-P-S with some fellows on the guildwarsguru forum, so I would really, really appreciate not having to go through any of that again so soon. So please, please, let it drop. 

Giving you complicated strategies gives you a sense of accomplishment and definitely will make a difference between the noobs and the decent players. You need to be able to advance to SOMEWHERE. Unless you play with friends over comms you have NO WHERE TO ADVANCE TO in this game and this is a bad design flaw. The learning curve is too simple. I would have to say that the learning curve for UB is the simplest of all demigods and I would like this changed. For instance, some demigods are weak in their first five levels (Oak, Sedna, Erebus...) while some are weaker in end game (QoT...). Like SoFFacet said, UB is strong throughout the whole game and scales very, very well. Either buff up the other demigods so they are balanced from level 1 till 20 or give UB an achilles' heal. Just make him a bit more interesting instead of him having 2 cookie cutter builds.

Using execution barriers as a substitute for an actually deep game is a sign of bad game design in almost all cases, and necessity in the few that aren't.

The whole point of competitive gaming is to show who's best at the game, not who is best and doing arbitrarily complicated tasks in order to play the game. To use an example from a game designer (David Sirlin, author of Playing to Win) imagine if you had to juggle while playing chess, to make it more complicated. It is no longer about chess, but about who is a better juggler.

There is a big difference between rewarding player skill and rewarding a player's ability to execute complicated tasks. The game already rewards the first one; rewarding the second is not a good idea. Also, it doesn't have to be a major cybersport to be well balanced; in fact, the opposite is true. Things only become major cybersports BECAUSE they are well balanced and designed.

If demigod had arbitrary execution barriers it would be a different and much worse game.

Yeah, they don't lend themselves to R-P-S. That's kind of a good thing, though; if one demigod hard countered the other, it would be bad. Since your choices in the game are set in stone after you make them (you can't readjust skill points) having hard counters with R-P-S would be very hard to implement well in a game like Demigod; it would require a complete reworking of the skill system or else people would have to accept that if they picked P early game, they would lose if their opponent picked S no matter what.

R-P-S is unfortunately the acronym for both Reward Player Skill and Rock Paper Scissors. Ironically, those concepts are often conflict with one another. I usually mean Reward-Player-Skill.

Malskidasith: I never said anything about execution barriers. I think we would both agree that requiring people to juggle batons while pressing buttons with their toes is stupid. As you said, the game should show who is better at playing the game. I agree, and suggest that the game should include (mentally) challenging strategies requiring judgements about how and when and where to use abilities, and favor these strategies slightly above ones that simply consist of pressing a button every time it is recharged. If the best strategy in the game was allowed to be so simple, everyone would be forced to use it, and everyone would be almost equally effective at it because of its simplicity. This makes for the most shallow and undesirable type of game.

But as I said, R-P-S was not the important part of my first post in this thread, and I don't plan to argue about it, so please forget that I brought it up. If you still have questions, you can pm me, as I feel we've already dragged things off topic enough. 

See everyone wants balance, and everyone wants each DG to be unique.  To keep things fun and to keep skill invovled the DG's can't be 100% equal all the time.  This is where you learn to pick your battles.  And really... almost every DG has two cookie cutter builds.

Symbol of purity and/or competent play resolve this situation.

OP is completely correct.  To spit, UB should need to perform a 'hadoken' with his d-pad, and then left click. In fact, this should be the only way to perform the move, and have it be undocumented, something to 'learn' by playing.

Grab should be done by pressing CTRL + SPACE and then left clicking.  Ooze should be activated by doing a full round on the number pad, and deactivated in the same way.

Honestly, the real flaw in the above logic is that "I am more experienced, therefore I should easily beat anyone." Which is of course wrong, the actual argument is "I am a superior player, therefore I should be those worse than I, most of the time."

Experience doesn't equal skill.  Adding in confounding factors just makes someone have a larger, mandatory learning curve, without changing the actual strategic knowledge required to play.

To sum up: L2P, the noobs you think can pull off this strategy aren't that much worse than you are.

i'd even go so far as to argue that DG's that on their face appear to have more simplistic gameplay mechanics are not easier to play. it requires you to think more about how to apply your limited scope abilities. a good UB player is far more concerned with map position and getting an accurate read on his opponent's defensive abilities than he with trying to figure out how/when/where to spit.

i mean, we can keep going with examples from DG or even examples from other games. here's one.

Starcraft is relatively simple from a strategic perspective. units tend to have hard counters in a very RPS matrix sort of way. the most relevant things are scouting (so you known which counter to build) and macro-economy (build more stuff = win). the strategy is simple enough to the point that top level gameplay isn't distinguished by it at all but is instead entirely dependent on manual dexterity. the best Starcraft pros in South Korea are the ones who have the fastest reaction time and are the best at pushing buttons on their keyboard. its very much the equivalent of playing chess while juggling.

and i hate that about high level Starcraft. i don't want to play chess while juggling. i just want to play chess. i want a game with strategic depth not a game about twitch factor, reaction time, multi-tasking, etc.

another example in competitive gaming. SF4 is a better competitive game than MvC2 explicitly because it is slower and simpler. this leads to more contemplation of strategy and matchups and less concentration on twitch, infinite combo, and exploits (which is what high level MvC2 is all about).

so ya, complexity in its own right is not desirable. simplicity is better by default. strategic depth can be achieved even in simple systems. this is the model of elegance and makes for good gameplay.

There is a significant amount of tactical knowledge in UB and knowing precisely WHEN to go ALL IN and when to play cat and mouse...

It can be really depressing when you experiment in your strategy early and go against your grain and find yourself facing someone that went the way YOU should have without monkeying around and then not having the ability to even cat and mouse anymore...(me this morning I set a new personal record for deaths and Zeb reaped the rewards )

:p

I play UB all the time, and he isnt the ultimate melee fighter, even at the start and end of the game. I am continually outlasted by sedna and oak, but usually I heavily invest in speed so I can get away. Regulus and TB tend to be fairly easy kills at the beginning so rock paper scissors seems to be working ok. A well played erebus usually gets the better of me.

At late game I usually find myself much weaker than oak, and sedna can still be a major problem. As usual a well played erebus is nigh impossible to kill.

As a last comment for all these people who continually regurgitate this nerf UB stuff, if you think he's so wonderful why dont you play him. Then if you think he's still OP come back and post and you will have a little more credibility. I dont want to see this game go the way many other mmo's have gone with everything getting nerfed at the request of the players, and being left with a load of bland skills, and various characters taking turns in being flavor of the month as skills are forever "adjusted"

From my experience a health stacked UB can be out-lasted by Oak and Sedna and maybe Erebus as well.  Ooze UB struggles against tower rook and the ranged heroes early game without early speed items but if you have those then you're not really health stacking.  I've also found that players making use of slowing skills/abilities/items can often cause problems for a health stacking ooze build.

jump in roundhouse....HADOUKEN!!!

Dammit, should have Shoryuken'd....