DoT/HoT Snapshotting - yay or nay

Snapshotting is a game mechanic where you can buff yourself up and in the short duration of having all the buffs you unleash all of your damage over time(dot) skills on your enemy and those dots are buffed for their whole duration even though the buffs ended a short time after the dots long before those dots finish doing dmg.

example:

your bleed ticks for 20dmg every 2s for 14s total (7ticks in total= 140dmg), but you have a short duration buff that increases your damage by 50% for 5 seconds. which makes the bleed tick for 30dmg instead for 20dmg. Snapshotting makes the bleed uneffected if you use the cooldown after applying the bleed, but if you use the bleed while you have the buff active then all 7 ticks are going to do 30dmg (210dmg total)

Since Ashes wants to have giant mass pvp battles I think they will have snapshotting in the game, because the alternative is to recalculate the damage based on the casters current amount of stats every time the dot makes dmg.

But what is your opinion on this skillbased "hidden" mechanic where players are rewarded for using their skills in the right order at the right time.

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Comments

Tragnar

@PlagueMonk

I don't like the argument that snapshotting makes it harder to balance classes. It is totally ok to balance the dot class in such a way that when you don't snapshot you are automatically the worst dps class. However if you do snapshot then you can barely be above the rest.

In my honest opinion the wow dev team reasoning for removing snapshotting is false in its core. They literally tried to strip any kind of complexity from the game to the point where in bfa every class was just looking for the strongest random proc and the characters output was literally a roullette regardless of the players input ( people doing literally triple damage of others if they were lucky for more than 1 proc.

Introducing skillful mechanics and taking them into account when balancing them is the right way to go. If you want to play a class that is really good in skilled hands than dont cry when you suck and try to get better.

PlagueMonk

Caeryl wrote: »

PlagueMonk wrote: »

Caeryl wrote: »

PlagueMonk wrote: »

A simple solution (but one people will probably not like) would be to make any applicable buffs much less extreme. So instead of having a buff that boosts your damage x3 for 10 secs, make it x1.5 for 15 mins.

You just halve the effectiveness of buffs for no reason then. Buff uptime is key for skilled players, and there’s no need to balance for the lowest common denominator.

I TOLD you, you wouldn't like it.

As our Mod above, Wandering Mist mentioned,, snapshotting is much more difficult to balance against other classes that don't have it.

So w/o it there is absolutely NO skill required to play any class? Snapshotting is the defining ability, otherwise you are just pushing a single button and remaining stationary??? Or maybe, just maybe, you can find other ways to be skillful with your class.

Across literally every game that has them, your ability to keep buffs up continuously is a major expressions of player skill. Where in the world did you come up with the conclusion that anyone said buff uptime is the only expression of skill?

The only issue you presented was the faulty code that treated recasts as refreshes rather than recasts. If your code isn’t spaghetti, every DoT calculates at initial cast every time.

I didn't, YOU did by saying it a "KEY" for skillful players. That statement implicitly implies that's where all the skill is. The sad thing about this statement is, you can run a macro that will AUTO refresh your buffs as soon as they become available which isn't all that skillful to me (yes I'm aware AoC will not be allowing 3rd party addons, just an example of what you can do in other games). I was also trying to point out that there are PLENTY of other ways that a player can show how skillful they are with their class without snapshotting.

Would it really be the end of the world if a certain class didn't have this though? It's just a mechanic and the Devs can do something ELSE to define a particular class, it will not make or break the game or even a class.

Caeryl

PlagueMonk wrote: »

Caeryl wrote: »

PlagueMonk wrote: »

Caeryl wrote: »

PlagueMonk wrote: »

A simple solution (but one people will probably not like) would be to make any applicable buffs much less extreme. So instead of having a buff that boosts your damage x3 for 10 secs, make it x1.5 for 15 mins.

You just halve the effectiveness of buffs for no reason then. Buff uptime is key for skilled players, and there’s no need to balance for the lowest common denominator.

I TOLD you, you wouldn't like it.

As our Mod above, Wandering Mist mentioned,, snapshotting is much more difficult to balance against other classes that don't have it.

So w/o it there is absolutely NO skill required to play any class? Snapshotting is the defining ability, otherwise you are just pushing a single button and remaining stationary??? Or maybe, just maybe, you can find other ways to be skillful with your class.

Across literally every game that has them, your ability to keep buffs up continuously is a major expressions of player skill. Where in the world did you come up with the conclusion that anyone said buff uptime is the only expression of skill?

The only issue you presented was the faulty code that treated recasts as refreshes rather than recasts. If your code isn’t spaghetti, every DoT calculates at initial cast every time.

I didn't, YOU did by saying it a "KEY" for skillful players. That statement implicitly implies that's where all the skill is. The sad thing about this statement is, you can run a macro that will AUTO refresh your buffs as soon as they become available which isn't all that skillful to me (yes I'm aware AoC will not be allowing 3rd party addons, just an example of what you can do in other games). I was also trying to point out that there are PLENTY of other ways that a player can show how skillful they are with their class without snapshotting.

Would it really be the end of the world if a certain class didn't have this though? It's just a mechanic and the Devs can do something ELSE to define a particular class, it will not make or break the game or even a class.

So you misunderstood one word and blew it out of proportion, good to know. For a DoT class, buff and DoT uptime are the most important ways they express skill. Pre-buffing is another way to express skill especially in PvP encounters. Literally never said or implied uptimes were the only ways to express skill.

Snapshotting doesn’t even have anything to do with balance anyway, but sheer technical stability.

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