The recent PTR change to Mortal Empowerment, which would allow kills to refresh the duration of existing stacks, is a massive step backward.
It enables Muskets (and Bows and Mages to a lesser extent) to snowball as they do in the Live game, which is what allows them to dominate PVP game modes with little to no risk. This trend has been very corrosive to the game’s PVP scene as a whole, since it encourages people to prey on the weak in the most non-interactive way possible.
Ranged snowballing is difficult to counter, not fun, and anti-educational. It pushes people out of roles like healer, and it also discourages new and solo players from practicing PVP in game modes like OPR by instilling a sense of learned futility in them.
If your goal is to soften the nerf, either one of these changes would have been better:
- Increase the duration of each stack to 4 minutes
- Keep the duration at 2 minutes, but increase the Empower to 3% and raise the cap to 12%.
But please do not continue allowing ME to snowball. It was a bad idea from the start, and there is no shame in admitting that and moving the game past it.
3 Likes
Gotta disagree here. Personally i don’t play the ring but they took a step back from destroying a perk to simply nerfing it. Now they can wait and see if the nerf was enough or if they have to make it even weaker soon.
This balance approach is a step in the right direction.
2 Likes
Yeah even if it takes 5 months to rebalance it. Lol
Lol, 2 minutes with a max of 10 stacks (20%) is fine.
It’s how it should have been released to begin with.
It actually discourages the slower play style that so many have become accustomed to. Can’t just endlessly run anymore and can’t avoid fights.
It encourages players to be more aggressive to maintain stacks.
Change for the time to refresh is fine.
2 Likes
This would make sense if they did biweekly balance patches. However, they don’t. I would err on the side of just not having any snowballing in the game.
If this rolling empower stack is coming back. They need to modify it so it also applies a self-rend to offset the empower.
Should be: each kills gets you a rolling 2% empower / 2% rend that each cap at 10% to increase the risk / reward that wears off in 2 mins without a fresh kill.
No Snowball Stats that last forever.
