#Thorns Rework Suggestion

37 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

edgy plank
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As it stands right now, thorn as a stat is poor design.

All damage in the game is currently takes skills to land (insert joke about playing kitsu takes no skills here), so having a stat that rewards you when you fail does fit.

Every stat still need you to land something to reward you, whether it is so you can hit harder (Atk), more often (Atk spd/CD) or more access (Spd/HP to survive approach). Thorn remains the one stat that rewards you for failing (taking damage), leaving no counterplay for the enemy since the only way to beat it is to not hit you, but not hitting you means they can't win.

What I pitch is for thorns to convert thorns into Rage fire or Rage Burst:

Every time you take damage from a character, you gain a rage stack up to 5 stacks.

Rage fire causes a fire burst around you every time you are hit, based on the amount of stacks. This rewards the high survivability of tanks and the longer they stick around an enemy, the more damage they do. This gives counterplay by rewarding those who properly keep distance or spaces out their attacks via hit and run.

Rage burst would do bonus damage on your next skill hit based on the amount of stacks. This allows you to feel like getting hit on the way towards an enemy is only charging you up for your engage. Counterplay is even simpler since all enemies have to do is dodge skills from the tank (which is what players are doing anyways).

This also weeds out the item for assassins unless they build tank as well since they wouldn't be able to take 5 hits and still engage unlike tanks with their high base health. Assassins don't stick around long enough to benefit from rage fire and goes for multiple skill hits quickly so they can't space out their skills for rage burst.

Visually, you can have the character get more red and have more 💢 on them the more stacks they have, letting everyone know the threat is growing.

There's probably more that rage could be used for, but for now, these 2 are decent ways forward.

slim jolt
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Although I completely agree on thorns being poor design, not so sure I agree with the rage concept

edgy plank
slim jolt
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I disagree

edgy plank
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Overruled

slim jolt
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rage fire and rage burst 2 diff separate concepts?

edgy plank
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Yup. One is a bit more active, one is a bit more passive. Goal is the same, which is to give some reward for getting hit (tank's goal) but to make the reward not free (either have to stay close to enemy or land skills)

kindred sun
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This seems like an interesting idea but not quite in line with other items this feels more like a passive ability than an item since most items just buff numbers.

edgy plank
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But that's a whole rework =P. For now, throwing some interesting tank items is important to give tanks back their fantasy.

dense yoke
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I would rather thorns be an activated item with higher reflected damage to keep it simple. That way it has some skill involved and some counterplay. (similar to counters in battlerite)

But I'm not too bent out of shape with current version.

fickle vine
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I definitely agree with reworking thorns, it's not interesting and has poor counterplay as you mentioned.
I think it would be totally fine to detach the item from the "do something when getting hit", and instead rework it into something else that may fit tanks (since they are the target class).
I like the rage fire idea you mentioned, but just make it passively deal damage all the time instead of on being hit. This keeps the fantasy and usage the same (survive while being near opponents), but keeps counterplay a little cleaner. While ranged characters can still run away and kite, assassin-bursty characters can also now quickly use their full spell rotation (what they want) and then dip, taking damage based on how long they were around the enemy and not how many hits their spell rotation has.
Should also note that while this version doesn't have the anti-assassin "they can take less hits therefore worse effectiveness", assassins also should spend less time around their target, and the damage should be much smaller for them in comparison to just getting the damage item anyway, and also they have more damage from other sources making this damage source much less significant.

kindred sun
kindred sun
edgy plank
# fickle vine I definitely agree with reworking thorns, it's not interesting and has poor coun...

For sure, my initial thought was to have flat fire damage as well without rage. My only worry is that adding flat stats will always be awkward for tanks because currently, nothing scales better for them.

In league, adc have good scaling with AD due to auto attacks, mage have good scaling with AP due to AP scaling on spells and tanks have good scaling with HP due to resistances.

In BAPBAP, without resistances, HP is as good on an assassin as a tank, so giving tanks something to scale with their "take hits" persona would help specialize it. We can always make the fire damage skill to scale with HP maybe, but it might just further push assassins into stacking HP + fire damage.

fickle vine
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True, I think scaling damage with HP should be fine. I don't recall how exactly bapbap character ability damage scaling works, but I imagine it's the expected flat + % of the damage stat?
I think if we're afraid of assassin characters building full tank, then that's a fundamental problem that I feel would be kind of independent of this specific item design choice. They could already be itemizing as such already with the thorns items, since the damage from burning should be similar to thorns damage overall (adjusted for counterplay and such). I see that in theory yes, assassins could abuse their mobility to stay close to enemies and keep burning them, but that should still output much lower damage than a damage build, and tanks should still have a better utilisation of it than assassins would.
Also what makes tanks "tanks" in this game? Which things tanks do better than other classes kit-wise, and which they do worse? Is it crowd control, or maybe other things? What is the bapbap tank fantasy to you?

edgy plank
# fickle vine True, I think scaling damage with HP should be fine. I don't recall how exactly ...

Assassins have been building tank for a while yeah. Thorns itself swings between good and bad just based on numbers whether both assassins and tanks pick it up or not.
Tanks should fill these roles: Take the most hits by far at the expense of mobility and/or damage. Likely to initiate after team pokes or initiate just to burn cooldowns. Can protect allies when needed to help mitigate damage.
As it stands, BAPBAP has 2 tanks, but the difference between chuck and froggy is very minimal so really we only have 1 tank. Problem is that sashimi, while having more base hp, doesn't have any mitigation or scaling. This means that once damage dealers scale up for late game, all sashimi can do is stack flat HP, which is the same effectiveness on her vs a froggy.

slim jolt
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well sash does have both mitigation and scaling in the ult

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but not much

fickle vine
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Well it sounds like indeed tank doesn't need a damage item at all, rather something that could amplify their utility.

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Since their fantasy seems to be so team reliant

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Though yeah, making something scaling off HP would be really nice.

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Also maybe the solution to assassins going tanks is to lower their flat damage to force them to build more damage? Is this even a possiblity?

edgy plank
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Problem is that it's a battle royale, so there's some base needs as well. Being able to do something alone is a need, but they shouldn't out burst assassins/dps. They have to do more damage over time instead due to their higher survivability.

edgy plank
# fickle vine Also maybe the solution to assassins going tanks is to lower their flat damage t...

Assassins lower flat damage -> Forces them into damage -> They need base HP buff since they aren't allowed to build hp -> Makes them too close to tanks -> Tanks need base HP buff -> Health item needs nerf -> Tanks are less reliant on health items -> Tanks start building damage/CD instead, making them closer to assassins.
We're missing the key parameter of tank scaling, which makes it way harder to tweak.

fickle vine
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Agreed that everything scaling flat is definitely not helping

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I imagine for assassins it's cd * damage and for dps it's attack speed * damage, for some multiplicativity on their side?

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So tanks are the only ones with a 1 linearly scaling stat?

edgy plank
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Assassins are mostly just damage since you burst with 1 rotation anyways, which is similar to league as well. In league there's an extra system of armor vs armor pen, which is what assassins and tanks focus on.

fickle vine
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Yeah, but you'd say that in bapbap assassins scale linearly as well then?

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Also how do they utilize the tank builds then? Do they go for multiple spell rotations or just cling to their target and aa them to death?

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I'm sorry for asking all these things, I'm really curious and I didn't get to play the game enough to get a feel for or understanding on how things work on a proper level.

edgy plank
fickle vine
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I also just got the ideas, could "regenerate % hp passively" or "regenerate % hp over time after getting hit" work, or does this not make sense at all in bapbap tank context?

edgy plank
fickle vine
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Fair

coarse karma
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I do agree with you that at the moment thorns is unbalanced and has little counterplay. But I think your solutions work better as individual character passives rather than interchangeable items. The scaling would be extremely difficult to balance on top of that if they were to be made into items.