Looking at the Isida Nerf Through Design

[OneeSama 86]

Personally, I'm quite pleased by the upcoming Isida nerfs. Based on personal experiences in Tanki as well as in other games with similar "Healer/Self Heal" elements, gutting Isida's healing as well as self-heal ratios is a step in the right direction.

 

Evaluating the Status Quo: What's Wrong?

 

The Isida turret has the design many other similar PvP games contain: a way to counteract damage dealt, and this gameplay element is necessary to balance other turrets. For example, if Isida's don't exist, chunking people with Shaft and Railgun damage would be hands down the best way to play the game due to the absurd range of those two guns and consistent damage (no range based damage fall-off). Most guns such as Hammer, Firebird, and Freeze would be subpar when on the vast majority of maps minus maybe Gravity. The presence of a tank that can keep everyone healthy is in itself a balance measure.

 

So what happened with Isida so that the game developers would want to deploy the nerf gun? Let's draw some comparisons with two other PvP games:

 

1. StarCraft: Regeneration and healing are built into every race of the franchise. Zerg players don't expand creep for the looks: the global regeneration buff from having creep everywhere makes every unit the player produce much more durable and thus more efficient. Terrans have their medics, so it's pretty straightforward what they do. Protoss has regenerative shields outside of their HP pool. While they do not regenerate their HP back after taking damage, the shield does come back a while after not taking damage and allows the player to get a lot out of the unit if played correctly.

 

What Tanki is doing differently: While Tanki's healing theme is similar to StarCraft's "get-the-most-out-of-each-spawn" approach, Tanki failed to keep the healing universal. Only Isida players have access to healing abilities instead of letting all players regenerate passively. This results in a world where damage won't "stick" on the Isida player, but every other turret in the game will still take damage as normal.

 

2. League of Legends: While all champions (aka playable characters) have access to passive regeneration, straight-up healing is mostly relying on the support player (I'm simplifying the team dynamic a lot here). They are the ones who can generate massive value out of your other players by applying shields, heals, and buffs over time; they can essentially win the game for the team if the team incorporates the support characters better than the opposition.The drawback, you guessed it, they are extremely weak on their own. Most support champions will die to anyone in a 1v1 situation since they do not do enough damage out of their abilities since most of them are heals and shields. In order to let supports do their work, the team has to protect them. 

 

What Tanki is doing differently: Isida is probably the best dueling turret in the game with high DPS and self-heal ratio, able to win most 1v1's if the enemy tank doesn't have enough HP to live through one full discharge of the Isida turret. I think the reason why Tanki did this is due to the lack of "utility" in the game. Since the theme of Tanki is "Damage", it is difficult to come up with interesting effects for Isida while having it remain competitive. For example, lowering Isida's damage but allowing it to speed up allied tanks would not make the gun attractive to play since Isida players would feel useless when playing on their own due to the lack of damage.

 

What these factors generate is an extremely oppressive play style for Isida. The oppression here is different from being one-shot by Shafts or Railguns because at least there is a chance for you to hit back. Isida's oppression is different. It often gives the opposing team the feeling of not being able to counter the Isida as whittling down an Isida bit by bit is difficult or outright impossible, and one-shot/burst damage kills are challenging to pull off as Isida turret can be combined with hulls with high HP pool as well as double armor. This is a textbook design mistake if there ever is one.

 

Nerfing Isida: How it's Done

 

While this nerf will probably not bring the perfect balance, it does answer the key issues raised above in the following ways:

1. Isida will not have as much dueling/sustain potential. This directly lowers the oppressiveness the Isida bring to the table in terms of damage dealing. Now Isida players would need to think carefully about taking damage as it would be more difficult to be healed back without another Isida backing it up.
2. Isida's healing on other tanks will be much slower, forcing them sacrificing their potential damage if they want to heal. For example, currently, a wasp can be brought back to full health in about 3 seconds (using fully Micro Upgraded M3 stats); after the nerf, it would take about 4 seconds. Time spent healing is time spent not doing damage, and thus, not regaining its own health. The time difference would be larger when healing heavier tanks as well, further limiting Isida's options.
3. Isida still retains its identity as the premiere healer in the game. Isida will still yield great value in team battles and still counteract long range chip damage. Isida will continue to impact team battles but in the way it is designed to.

 

What About the Others: Implications

Nerfing the only natural healing component in the game would definitely bring changes to rest of the players as well as cause further implications down the road:

1. How bold can players play: currently, players can charge into the enemy base and rely on Isida's healing to keep them alive, resulting in extremely bold behavior. A tank running into the enemy base to capture a flag without giving it a second thought due to the Isida heal is a commonplace occurrence. Now, a little more thought is going to be put into decision making: when to go in, when to get out. Players are now forced to play around reload timing a bit more, which would make the game a tad more skill based than it is right now.
2. Team Compositions: while I'm nowhere close to being a clan player and haven't watched any e-sport matches, I think this point would still apply. In order to maintain a nice cycle of healing, more Isidas must be in a team than before as Isida is now more vulnerable to damage, deals less damage, and heals less. When deciding which guns to use, a team might now have to think about the trade-off between having more damage or having more healing. Having players to make this kind of decision is almost always beneficial to any game, increasing gameplay diversity.
3. EXP Rate for Isida: Isida's exp gain will definitely take a hit. Less damage means a lower amount kills, and less heal would also mean less EXP. While Isida did get buffed in the respect that less energy is consumed per second, the reload nerf on the fully Micro Upgraded M3 as well asheer shear amount of reduction on the healing stat would still be more impactful factors. Math here for anyone who wants to see it (25% loss in potential EXP!):

 

 

Assuming the Wasp example:

Pre Nerf:

M3+ Wasp: 180 HP                              M3+ Isida: 66 HP/sec

Time to heal one wasp: 2.727 seconds

Seconds spent healing per full discharge (max energy/consumption): 1000/144 = 7.042 seconds

Points gained per full discharge: 25.82

Length of reload cycle (discharge time + reload time): 7.042 + 9 = 16.042 seconds

Max estimated potential point gained from a 15 minute match: 1448.573

 

Post Nerf:

M3+ Wasp: 200 HP                              M3+ Isida: 50.4 HP/sec

Time to heal one wasp: 3.968 seconds

Seconds spent healing per full discharge (max energy/consumption): 1000/111 = 9.009 seconds

Points gained per full discharge: 22.70

Length of reload cycle (discharge time + reload time): 9.009 + 10 = 19.009 seconds

Max estimated potential point gained from a 15 minute match: 1074.754

 

EXP Gained Percent Decrease: 25.74 %

 

 

 

Conclusion

The Isida nerf is overall beneficial for the Tanki community; however, for all you passionate Isida players out there, you won't be having as much fun after the nerf since the EXP rate as well as dueling potential has been reduced. Isida is a sacrifice for the goal of establishing more balance in the game, and I genuinely hope that Tanki developers would also take a look at other games when designing new gameplay elements so significant design mistakes such as this one will not happen again.

Edited October 11, 2016 by Quarks

[Quarks 2,255]

Edits:

Spelling 

Grammar

[ToHoYoNTaDa 1,147]

Well...

[Blackdrakon30 2,943]

Well...

Why even post this? It isn't helpful or providing any real thoughts/feeback.  :mellow:

 

On the other hand, nicely done article. It might have been nice to have some pictures to break up the large text blocks, but is fairly pleasant other than that.

[AkiliW 210]

My only M2's are isida and hornet, and I was a bit miffed with the Isida nerf (I know I'm a low rank, tis ok, I have feelings too). Thinking over it when reading this article and I'm a bit less miffed. I'm still going to switch to railgun as my primary weapon tho. Sorry isida. I'll miss you. 

[OneeSama 86]

 (I know I'm a low rank, tis ok, I have feelings too).

Speaking of being low rank.

 

Low ranks' opinions matter. I can imagine if I played this game for years and Isida just got gutted like that I would be upset no matter what turret I main since the change is simply overwhelming. A lot of times you can tell how a game is balanced by asking the new players' perspectives; a lot of the responses will be quite interesting as well as helpful for the developers.

[Jwimmer 2,835]

Well-written article. Easy to read, but still sophisticated. I would suggest tweaking the title a bit, because I was a bit unsure on what it meant. Also, check out @Night-Sisters guide on formatting in the most recent issue of the newspaper- this article would be taken up a notch by tweaking the formatting a bit.

 

Otherwise, keep it up!

[Hex 11,520]

Nice article. Good job!

[TTK_229 1,080]

I just hate isida m3s raiding battles I join and being impossible to kill.

[NERF836 202]

Sorry guys I guess I made oasis worse :( ;)

Edited December 6, 2016 by NERF836

[Spit_Fyre 334]

I missed this when it came up, directed here from issue#60.

 

+1

You've covered the design aspects and overall implications well! Something a lot of people don't immediately see whe looking at the weapon indvidually. It's regretful that tanki had to pay the price of a design flaw with "dashed expectations" and "purposeful misleading" which I think is not the whole picture.