With [Re:Build] Gemstone Feud has seen some huge shifts in how it feels and how it is played. Here are some observations about the current state of the mode and how I or some people I know feel about it.
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It’s awfully laggy! This is the most apparent issue right now. I’m sure that IMC is always working on improving the servers/netcode, but it’s worth pointing this out.
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Damage on neutral objectives is really weirdly tuned. Small crystals die in a few basic attacks while monsters and big crystals take a bit more work. The boss can die within 5 seconds with the appropriate setup. It’s unusual that small crystals should take less work to kill than monsters, especially since they drop ten times as many gems. It is nice that crystals and monsters are easy to kill, since that allows weaker players to participate and farm gems. Having these things be generally weak is also nice because I can save skills for actual fighting. It is bad that the boss that spawns at 5-minutes dies so quickly since it makes it so that there isn’t really anything to fight over.
- My suggestion is to make the boss tankier, or have his tankiness scale with the size of the match. Further, make the crystals a little bit tougher compared to the small monsters. Alternatively, the small monsters could be made weaker than the crystals.
- The team NPC are far too weak. The NPC where players turn in their gems die far too easily. They can die in a single attack, making point accumulation extremely frustrating. Points are constantly being lost by the NPC dying and there are long stretches of time during which players must wait for the NPC to respawn. This is further exacerbated by extremely fast and/or invisible classes. Gemstone feud as it is now, it is just playing tower defense against a flock of suicide bombers, while your tower always has only 1 HP. Scouts are particularly annoying when defending since they are very difficult to detect. Schwartzer Reiters are particularly annoying since they are so fast and can go invisible.
- At the very least, make the NPC tankier. Optionally, consider adding something besides damage to deter attackers. Perhaps a slow or cloak detection could be added so that attackers are more susceptible to counterattack when they make an attempt on the NPC.
- Clerics seem to be overbearing. There isn’t enough damage and clerics seem to have every tool to counter so-called counters to clerics. With revive and heals, a lot of damage is required to beat a cleric. With the new damage tuning, it feels far too difficult to basically kill a cleric twice. One would think that assassin’s heart piercer would be a counter to clerics’ healing, but plague doctor’s beak mask nullifies that. This leads me to the next point.
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Plague doctor’s beak mask is near-impossible to play around when combined with clerics’ many other options. Beak mask makes plague doctors nearly unstoppable. With a 60-second duration and 10-second cooldown, plague doctors can maintain perpetual debuff immunity. While some stuns (Pied Piper’s Dissonanz and Assassin’s Instant Acceleration) can stop plague doctors, plague doctors also happen to have a crazy speed boost in modafinil. There are tools to catch plague doctors, but they’re extremely difficult to hit with their high movement speed. I’ve heard that beak mask could be removed using brick break with swell hands, but I think it’s unreasonable that two different classes to put two classes together in one build just to deal with beak mask. And even if we could force beak mask off, its unreasonably short cooldown means it could easily be re-equipped.
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Clerics being unstoppable and unkillable healers might not be so unreasonable if they were just healers, but they also have considerable kill pressure. Inquisitors seem to do huge amounts of damage without depending on other classes to boost that damage. With the boost in base attack across the board, wizards are obliterated by Malleus Maleficarum, God Smash makes light work of players’ armor, and Ripper is amazing for capturing targets to setup for everything else. Oracle’s Twist of Fate combined with Prophecy and Death Sentence means having a skill that can kill anyone under 50%, even a tank. And this is without any weapon investment or needing synergies with other classes. Clerics seem to get amazing offensive options without seriously sacrificing defensive or support options.
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Give us more counterplay against beak mask. If beak mask weren’t so strong then everything else about PvP clerics wouldn’t be so glaring. They wouldn’t be able to go anywhere they want, heal whenever they want, or attack whenever they want. If plague doctor could be disabled, then they wouldn’t be able to heal and would get killed. If an inquisitor could be disabled, they wouldn’t be able to take advantage of their unreasonable amounts of damage. Giving beak mask a shorter duration, longer cooldown, or just generally less effectivenss would make it less obnoxious. Alternatively, we could give more or easier options against beak mask. Perhaps let Murmillo’s Headbutt take off helmets. Maybe make Assassin’s Brick Smash not require swell hands while giving the swell hands interaction some other effect.
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Reduce the part of Malleus Maleficarum that deals damage based on the target’s magic attack. The scaling ratio feels like it is more suitable for pre-rebuild attack numbers.
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Make Twist of Fate depend on current HP instead of max HP, and maybe just for PvP. Or maybe add a time delay on the damage so that its reliability is reduced. I argued that ToF is a sure-kill on any target below a certain threshold, but that’s only an issue if enemies can reach that threshold. An oracle on its own probably won’t have the damage to make that happen. However, in a team setting, just having that skill is a huge threat against their opposition.