Item Balance

I'm working on a spreadsheet that helps balance our item prices. In doing so, there's a general price that can be measured for each component of an item.

Then we can factor in the stage of the game, the level of growth for the item, and the usability of the additional ability the item provides in order to balance the final price of the item.

The spreadsheet relies on basic prices per unit in order to work. Currently, my thinking is the following:

85 gold per pt strength
70 gold per pt intelligence
70 gold per pt agility
50 gold per dmg/%attackspeed
120 gold per armor

Given the new proposed income of 6 every 4 seconds, that means every minute you will gain 90 gold. Let me know how you guys feel about these stats.

I would say armor is overpriced in that system. Maybe make it 100/105 per armor point. Also, agi should be a little more than int. Maybe 80/70/85 agi/int/str.

hmm.

any reasoning behind that?

Armor is too highly priced, in my opinion, because while damage reduction is important to a hero's EHP, it isn't going to make you kill people. I agree with the high pricing, but only to an extent; armor can help you win late game battles, but under your system you could buy at least 2 damage for every 1 armor. I also feel that armor isn't going to really unbalance the game much; I mean, for the vast majority of the game, the primary way you kill heroes is through harassing their shields down to nothing, and then spamming them with as many abilities as you can, and extra armor isn't going to help you against lots and lots of spells. Plus, if you look at the rate at which armor increases your EHP, you'd almost be better off just buying items to increase shields/HP, and let your armor increase from every 6 points of agility as you level up/buy agility based items. I personally would lower armor by a significant amount, but I could be wrong, so I compromised by saying to lower it to around 105.

As far as agi being more than int, I feel this way because of the late-game potential for huuuuge DPS by agi heroes, that I believe just can't be matched by an intelligence hero. I understand why you have str priced the way you do, but I think if you match agi/int, int will become very bad late game choices, with a few possible exceptions (like Disruptor or something). This might just be overcautious of me, though, since the current agi items are pretty broken, and I have found just through personal experience that building an int hero is pointless when you have somebody like the Elven Ranger on the other team.

I'm not strongly opinionated on this, so if you end up discarding those tweaks, I'm fine with that too. I think only time spent playing the game will tell for sure.

Kaznes wrote:Armor is too highly priced, in my opinion, because while damage reduction is important to a hero's EHP, it isn't going to make you kill people. I agree with the high pricing, but only to an extent; armor can help you win late game battles, but under your system you could buy at least 2 damage for every 1 armor. I also feel that armor isn't going to really unbalance the game much; I mean, for the vast majority of the game, the primary way you kill heroes is through harassing their shields down to nothing, and then spamming them with as many abilities as you can, and extra armor isn't going to help you against lots and lots of spells. Plus, if you look at the rate at which armor increases your EHP, you'd almost be better off just buying items to increase shields/HP, and let your armor increase from every 6 points of agility as you level up/buy agility based items. I personally would lower armor by a significant amount, but I could be wrong, so I compromised by saying to lower it to around 105.

As far as agi being more than int, I feel this way because of the late-game potential for huuuuge DPS by agi heroes, that I believe just can't be matched by an intelligence hero. I understand why you have str priced the way you do, but I think if you match agi/int, int will become very bad late game choices, with a few possible exceptions (like Disruptor or something). This might just be overcautious of me, though, since the current agi items are pretty broken, and I have found just through personal experience that building an int hero is pointless when you have somebody like the Elven Ranger on the other team.

I'm not strongly opinionated on this, so if you end up discarding those tweaks, I'm fine with that too. I think only time spent playing the game will tell for sure.

Good post.

I think you're underestimating the worth of armor. Armor applies to both shield and HP, therefor it makes you a bit tankier in both respects.

As for int being lower than agility, you have said it yourself. With the new income changes, heroes are not goign to be able to stack the mad dps they used to. Getting HP/INT is vital to surviving the basic nuke combos that everyone will be pulling off.

Thoughts?