Ancient Hatred skills

It is planned to change this skills anytime soon? Or have you planned to maintain them?

Im asking because I personally feel that this creates unfair situations for both the hater and the hated and I ve seen several people feeling uncomfortable with this skill too in bot sides.

Im gonna copy a post from kongregate to expalin my point (yes, again, Im a lazy bitch xD)

Quote :

This topic is to discuss about Ancient Hatred skills that I found to be a great unbalance.

I play undead, so Im not even affected by this but still seems a bit silly to me. Maybe you have antoher point of view and you are free to share it here with us.

Here its mine:

Ancient hatred is a passive effect that greatly increase the melee stat of a unit when is fighting an specific race. Saying it short, they do a lot mroe of damage against any unit for that race.

The problem I see its that this unbalances the game in two ways.

First, when you are fighting against any race different for the hatred one you have a noticeable disadvanatge as you have a skill that is useless while the enemy is using theirs (and skills do really a great impact in battles, arent minor things).

In the other hand, when you are facing the hatred class you are getting a greatly bigger boost than the enemy very difficult to overcome by the opponent.

In both cases we have the situation where a palyer has a noticeable advantage and if he plays decently theres no much his opponent can do to overcome it. Even playing tactically better he would have a hard time winning.

For me it doesnt seem fair.

Also antoher problem it may appear its that with the buff to dwraves HI and the introduction of the new unit we could see ironhands virtually disappearing.
Now with the buff HI can do everything that ironsmiths do and do it better.

The only reason to keep them would be to cover the 40% requirement and not bringing too much gunners to the fight. But the new units would be able to cover that 40% too and it actually covers a role the dwarves lack right now (flanker,chaser, anti -archer) due to their special "chavalry"

So I think most people would cover that 40% with this new unit+gunners and take the rest of HI or Ironforts that does better the job than Ironsmiths.

A different passive maybe can help that apart form the poitn to change it I stated before.

It is really up to the player. Our "job" is to offer as many synergies as possible so players can create as many possible army compositions as possible.

Do you want to use the new DPS unit instead of your LI? Sure..go ahead, but make sure to aim for a quick battle, because without armor they won't last too long in a prolonged engagement... They are fast though and they could outflank the enemy if placed and maneuvered correctly. What if a player is a "turtle" General, opting for heavily armored units saying to the opponent..."Come and get me big guy...." ?

Too many possibilities...

Lots of choices is a good thing for sure.

Any sneak peeks at new abilities from any of the new Light Assault units? We've seen Rage so far.

Please don't lose sight of the original point: Ancient Hatred abilities are silly. (I was about to post a suggestion to this effect.) It doesn't make sense, and is imbalanced, that dwarves (for instance) should have an ability that only works when fighting orcs. A more sensible ability for dwarves would be unbreakability, like undead; or perhaps damage soaking; depending whether you want to emphasize mental or physical stalwartness. (Damage soaking for elves doesn't make sense to me, either, but that's a separate point.)

You could get at the idea of racial enmity by having abilities that cancel one another out. For instance, you could give orcs an ability that lowers enemy morale when they charge, but then make dwarves unbreakable, so the orc ability is negated.

Yup, I don't really like the "hatred" ability... On one hand it give a good flavour to the army, on the other hand, it's too situational and too powerfull...

Maybe give them the same immunity to fear than the human HI could be a good choice...

I think the devs have these abilities because they are thinking ahead to larger scale battles. Right now, sure it might feel like those abilities are imbalanced in 1v1, but they want the game to have unique and interesting choices for 3v3 and perhaps larger battles than 3v3. The hatred abilities bring a unique role to team battles and that can be quite valuable from a team composition point of view.

Initially, I was also not a huge fan of hatred abilities, but that was when only 1 unit choice was available to new players, and only 1 melee choice for quite a long while. When that was true, it really made the ability feel too important. That magnified the pros/cons to the point it felt imbalanced.

Removal isnt the only way to make asymmetric abilities like hatred fit well into the game. Now that it is only an option instead of a requirement, hatred abilities turn into an additional interesting way to build an army instead of a forced imposition of what makes your army effective. The more light units that are made available to players, the more this will be true.

Latexlord wrote:

Yup, I don't really like the "hatred" ability... On one hand it give a good flavour to the army, on the other hand, it's too situational and too powerfull...

Maybe give them the same immunity to fear than the human HI could be a good choice...

With more units available, and more abilities available, I like the idea of counter abilities like Bravery vs Fear.

I also wouldnt mind seeing some abilities that are a little more fluid / interchangeable among our units. It would be a pretty big feature to add to the game, and not something I'd push for over the other great features coming out soon.

The basic idea would be to have the 3rd ability slot be a player-chosen ability from a limited pool of abilities based on race and/or unit type. As the unit gains experience with that 3rd ability selected, he levels it up. The player would be able to switch that 3rd ability between battles to fit slightly different roles on the battlefield.

If the ability was an active ability instead of the passive abilities? That would be huge. Either way though, it would add a lot of choice to army building. In that environment, skills like Hatred would become great additions to an army's arsenal.

Hegorn wrote:

I also wouldnt mind seeing some abilities that are a little more fluid / interchangeable among our units. It would be a pretty big feature to add to the game, and not something I'd push for over the other great features coming out soon.

The basic idea would be to have the 3rd ability slot be a player-chosen ability from a limited pool of abilities based on race and/or unit type. As the unit gains experience with that 3rd ability selected, he levels it up. The player would be able to switch that 3rd ability between battles to fit slightly different roles on the battlefield.

An easy way to achieve that would be to give hero's artifacts random ability instead of stats. Which ability is automaticly given to the unit he joins.

With the runesmith lvl 18 prerequisite for hero's artifact, it will only be an "endgame" feature, and thus won't be confusing for beginners. Surely heroes don't need more stats than they already got... or if they need them, give them a "banner slot", and the magic flag for heroes would be powerfull item.

Latexlord wrote:

An easy way to achieve that would be to give hero's artifacts random ability instead of stats. Which ability is automaticly given to the unit he joins.

With the runesmith lvl 18 prerequisite for hero's artifact, it will only be an "endgame" feature, and thus won't be confusing for beginners. Surely heroes don't need more stats than they already got... or if they need them, give them a "banner slot", and the magic flag for heroes would be powerfull item.

Interesting idea. I do think its really cool for hero banners to be something "more" than just be a stat buff for the hero. Lots of good lore / immersion around that idea.

That said, I would argue against giving players the capability to essentially mix&match any unit with any ability. The downside is that it becomes very difficult to balance all abilities in a complete free-for-all environment like that.

Why? Well, all abilities would have to be balanced based on the best synergies available through every combination of unit types, static abilities, and dynamic abilities. Thats a lot of combinations! It would lead to a few combinations that are top-tier viable and relegates the majority of the other ability to black-sheep status to rarely be used. Subsequently, this is bad for the players, because they have less real choice. It is bad for the game devs because the majority of their hard work isnt being used. All the players will only use the best combos.

So the balancing act for the devs/designers to manage is to restrict what pools of abilities are accessible to each battlefield role and/or unit type. That might seem like it would limit player choice - and there is that risk - but if done right, it makes the player's choices more interesting because there are multiple equally viable combinations to build.

Anyway, this conversation is rather academic and derails the original topic a bit, but hopefully it is interesting for others to read / jump in on.