by RageAgainstVoid » Thu Jul 01, 2010 11:39 pm
There are still a few things I have to say on stats:
The movement bonus should not be considered a kind of gem stat, but a kind of premium item stat; its worth to play has more in common with percentages of spell evasion/reflection/critical than with +25% mana regeneration or +200 life. I go so far as to say, one times +10% movement speed is worth much more than one times +15% spell evasion. Movement speed may be the most elite stat there is, and this is why there is need to better reflect that in the rank of pricing.
Which brings us to another problem: the elite stats of premium items happen to be classified in two categories of usefulness, and to make matters more complicated, this imbalance in usefulness actually shifts from one to the other with increasing stack, and the problem is that the price of admission does not dynamically shift as well to re-balance this at runtime. What I speak of is the difference of usefulness when evading/reflecting/enhancing physical melee/missile attacks, and doing so for spells, because the former have a much higher density of occurrence for statistical percentage effects to be relevant in practice: you do notice an improvement when equipping one time a +15% missile reflect or +15 critical hit; you almost never notice a one time +15% spell reflection. Yet they are priced here the same, or the one being much less reliable for notice costs even much more. A point can be made that when actually evading a spell, much more damage is prevented than reflecting a missile, but in practice the one bonus to missile reflect prevents much more, the so much higher occurrence of incoming missiles does not make those percentage comparable or balanced in use.
And then to make matters worse, when seriously stacking those categories, its usefulness for price suddenly shifts greatly to spell related percentages. There is a huge gap, a sudden jump between one and at three of those items for spell related stats; yet for phys/missile related ones it is much more linear. Even this weird difference and shift has to do with a difference of occurrence and total power of effect prevented/enhanced.
What this means is that the price of the first +15% spell reflection is way too high for what it does in practice as such; you only would commit to this if you seriously intend to stack it--and are realistically able to. But starting with second and third +15% spell reflection you acquire, the price is too low. This discrepancy even counts for normal spell cooldown reset based on percentage, like the Lesser key of Ix provides.
What this does is that spell related premium items are pretty much all or nothing. I wished this was not so. I wished that, like with phys/missile related stat effects, there would somehow be achieved a better linearity, that buying even only one such item has noticable use, for better variety in equipment.
One way to do this is giving spell related stat items an additional active component to the same passive statistic: a shared cooldowned first-time trigger, which would for example mean on Tertiary Eye, the very first spell thrown at you each 45 seconds is always evaded 100%, but within that cooldown any other incoming spell is only evaded by statistical effect of +15% meanwhile. Same for use of Spell Blade, Mirror Shield and even Lesser Key of Ix.
This bridges the huge gap of usefulness with spell related stats between non stacked and stacked in an acceptable manner, making usefulness more linear similar to phys/missile, and this gives the player the option that even a one time admission of such item can still be worth the price, enabling him to keep his inventory more diverse if he chooses so, while not falling off an utility edge. The items could be made even more expensive for that, and still be worth that, which at the same time would better price-balance the late possibility of stack.
Had we a tech tree for items, we could even turn things around, make one +15% passive on cooldown a later upgrade path to this at first only active item.
Nein, nein, nein! Do not be so little! When I say answer it, I mean respond to it, to Them.
Give the keeps Protoss plasma shields.
