"The Decoy Problem"

#1

A few years back, I made a forums post here (“The Stun Problem”) detailing what I found to be an overlooked issue at the time regarding the state of the knight class. If you read the post you will understand, but to summarize, the shield’s stun ability is either overpowered or obsolete throughout the game, without much of an in-between. Currently, I believe the knight is at a fine spot. This issue is still present, but newer shields such as Escutcheon and Buckler allow the knight to still remain useful with raw DPS or ranged aoe beams that can be placed over walls when stuns aren’t available, along with still just being a very solid tank class.

Unfortunately, in recent times I’m finding that the trickster is starting to fill in this role now, where the general community has started to master the art of decoying for the overpowered utility that it is, allowing a lot of terrifying phases all throughout the game to be a safe and easy cakewalk. Whether it be decoying all of the shots from Skull Shrines and its minions, to decoying Gemsbok during his teleport phases, or decoying Malus throughout the ending of the boss fight, decoys are crucial to some groups, whether for overall safety or efficiency. This has always been semi-balanced by the skill required to master these decoys, as well as needing consistent pet heals for upkeep or bearing with the constant risk of accidentally messing up the decoy making things more dangerous (or worse, accidentally tping on the boss). But lately, as more people get their pets leveled up, as more people acquired coins and T7 prisms, and as people start to get better at the class, we are realizing just how game breaking this ability can be.

It’s clear that Deca has noticed the strength of this ability, as the reworked Shatters blocks decoys entirely during the bossfights, and they even recently changed Gemsbok to do the exact same. I’m not saying that these changes are bad, it prevents some hefty cheese from happening and makes it so the class isn’t absolutely needed for a clean or fast run, but I’m worried that this will set a precedent for the future where the class ends up the same way as how knight once was. Unlike the knight, trickster does not have much use other than decoying, save for rushing. Rushing however is not useful in bossfights, and quite a few players choose not to embark on this playstyle. If knight can’t stun, it has access to slow, armorbreak, or plain raw damage to make up for it, while trickster only has its decoys. The only things it has for damage is the new ST one (which I still have yet to get and experience), ghostly (which is quite fun but only works at a close melee range leaving it extremely tricky for general use), and dire instability (which is extremely underrated and fun, but quite tricky to utilize outside of chase phases [seriously go into a solo halls and spam this thing on crusades it’s a drug]). As a utility class, it does not have any utility besides its decoy. The assassin ends up with much more general utility than this class if decoys are blocked. I think that if this trend continues, this may lead into an era where the class is either an overpowered god, or purely a rusher that serves little to no purpose during bossfights.

Before I get to the conclusion, I would like to use Oryx 3 as an example of how I think the class is well done. In that fight, you are essentially given a choice of how you want to use your ability. You could either easily teleport over walls or away from chase phases and trivialize the risks of the dungeon, or you could decoy certain phases that would make the group safe or allow them to get a lot of damage. Not only this, but you have to be skillful with your decoys, as it’s not only hard to aim it properly for such a hectic room with a fast moving boss, but some phases will hinder the group if decoyed (such as panic and scream, or causing him to tp to a wall during other good phases such as splendor). I think it’s well balanced enough here, as the fight remains hard with decoys, along with them being quite tricky to use and not even necessary at all. I worry that they might change this in the future though, but we will have to wait and see for that.

In regards to other dungeons or the future of the class, I do not currently have a solution to offer, but aside from pointing out what I think is a problem with this post, I would also like to gather opinions from you guys on this. Do you think I’m overreacting? Do you think that the class needs no extra utility? Do you have your own idea of what should happen? I’d like to hear your thoughts on the matter. Thanks for reading :slight_smile:

#2

It’s very good to see someone address the power of aggro redirection! I do agree that it’s unfortunate how this effective “Decoy Immunity” is becoming slightly more commonplace.

Ironically, some could say that Assassin will soon be the best dagger class, rather than the “worst”, given both Rogue and Trickster revolve around toying eith enemies’ aggro, whereas Assassin is just. Y’know. Some damage.

I’m not entirely sure if I’d agree Decoys are perfectly fine in Oryx 3’s boss fight, but I’v’n’t done any in a Discord setting to properly say anything about that.

#3

I’m actually really curious what will happen with the Assassin’s rework that was teased at a long time ago (I have some personal ideas about this that I may make a separate post about eventually). I feel like it’s been in a better state right now with the new Shatters poison, along with Trickster overall being turned less useful. It will definitely be interesting to see what happens with that, assuming it’s still scheduled to actually happen.

As for the Oryx 3 fight, I definitely think there are some issues of course, like how you can just decoy fate/gaze to be essentially a safespot phase save for beams or portal shots, among a few other things, but compared to the rest of the heavy endgame stuff right now I think it’s pretty well done for being something different than “let’s spawn instakill enemies throughout the fight so tricksters have to spam decoys”, since while that trope works, it does get old if done in too many places.

An interesting suggestion I saw besides adding cooldowns to prisms was to give decoys a health bar, and I really think this has some potential. Deca isn’t above adding meatshield mechanics to the game, considering the new Summoner ST set that’s currently being pushed out, so it would be interesting to see if they would ever do this with decoys too. It’s kind of exciting thinking about how gear would be centered around the class if this ever happened, as if the decoy health scaled with your own, you could see full tank set Tricksters out there with the sole intent of getting beefy decoys out there.

It’s definitely fun to think about.

#4

All they have to do is make decoys vulnerable. They should have a set amount of health. You shouldn’t be able to decoy Oryx 3 for the full 8 seconds with a single decoy. This way it would take a steady stream of decoys to keep a boss in a scary phase decoyed, while keeping the power of the decoy for other phases/weaker minons.

There are different ways you could implement this, but the general idea is all that matters. Decoying some weak minions? It will probably last the full duration. Decoys a boss during a shotgun phase? The decoy will be destroyed after a couple shots.

#5

I very much agree with this. It would add a new dynamic to the class and keep the same feel of it while being more balanced. Itemization would be more varied too, as you could have different UT prisms offer better stats for the decoys, etc.

#6

I also want to add

Before they buffed prisms and everyone got powerful pets, it was genuinely hard to keep a boss decoyed. You had to put all your focus on sending out decoys, and it used up a TON of mana. You had to make the most of it and save it for when it would make the biggest impact. When they introduced the brain prism, it was such a cool item. You could get a long, consistent decoy, but the price was that you had to put yourself in danger to set the decoy down. There was risk and reward to it. Now that they have buffed the hell out of the regular prisms though, brain rarely sees much use for me personally. You can be pretty braindead and just churn out a stream of decoys throughout the entire fight, and not even have to approach the boss when doing so.

If we take this approach of making decoys vulnerable, brain could once again see some use by having a particularly tanky decoy that can take a beating. As you said, itemization can become much more varied this way.

I don’t want to see decoys become useless in all future content. I don’t want some enemies to be arbitrarily immune to decoys and others not, it isn’t intuitive at all. I really hope DECA tries to be more creative with nerfing decoys in the future and takes my suggestions in consideration

#7

I completely agree with your post. When I posted this elsewhere most people that read it assumed I was preaching for decoys needing to be nerfed, and while I don’t necessarily disagree with that sentiment, that was not the purpose of the post. I was calling to attention the dangerous path being paved with decoys being made useless in newer harder content, and that it will only create more of a divide within the class throughout the game instead of fixing its core design. I think what you laid out is a good plan, and I hope it becomes the reality.

#8

I think the reason is balance. DECA have slowly been trying to rebalance the game after the introduction of pets unbalanced it.

The problem with pets is partly HP heal making it easier to shrug off damage. This has been fixed by generally ramping up difficulty and also adding various effects (Pet Stasis, Sick, In Combat) that nullify pets.

But it’s also abilities going from 2-3 uses a minute to use every 2-3 seconds. What used to be rare uses which you had to ration and strategically ration, now are so common that you e.g. maintain them indefinitely, so you can perma-stun, perma-paralyse, or perma-decoy.

So as well as general nerfs (Pet Stasis, Quiet, Silence, In Combat) enemies have been changed so they are not affected by abilities. Some get immunities to e.g. Stun. Others get movement and shot patterns that make distracting with decoys far less effective.

I.e. it’s not only a Trix but for a wide range of classes. The more gamechanging your ability, the more likely designers have repeatedly nullified it. Paralyse e.g. used to work on everything, but now it rarely works against endgame bosses. Even slow which used to be very useful against paralyse immune enemies now cannot be relied on.

All this is deliberate and I think generally the right direction for the design. It would be hard to balance otherwise if single abilities were able to affect the battle so much, without making the game generally more miserable by e.g. adding unavoidable long lasting quiet effects.

I do think though that dagger classes have been left behind by recent changes, in a few ways. First all have low VIT, and with leather armour have low DEF. This means they suffer most from the In Combat changes. Other non-raged classes have good DEF, good VIT or both – Ninja is the only similarly ranged leather armour wearer and it has excellent VIT.

Trix and Rogue can use their abilities to avoid being shot by decoying or cloaking. But this is of less and less use in endgame content, or even in some midgame dungeons such as DD, Ice Cave bosses. Assassin has no way of avoiding being shot, and I find myself simply not going in close with Assassin in many situations: it’s not worth getting in a few hundred damage to a boss if it means I won’t be able to throw 2 or 3 poisons doing thousands of area damage due to IC cooldown.

The other problem is damage. Other classes which already did more damage than dagger classes often gained more in recent updates, through abilities or weapons. Rogue + Trix are not intrinsically damage dealing, and the one obvious way of giving Trix damage dealing, via decoys that do damage, sort of became the mechanic of a new class, Summoner.

Assassin does do ability damage but it too has fallen behind. They are reportedly looking at the class though, which will hopefully address the issues for that class.

And some of these classes’ problems are addressed by STs. Vampire Rogue set boost DPS and VIT. Lost Golem set boosts VIT. Acidified Assassin boosts DEF, DPS and VIT. But none of these sets is perfect: Acidified makes the Assassin more like melee in range and speed. Golem set has far from the best DPS. Vampire set is good as long as you can stay cloaked, but anywhere that’s not possible you are very underpowered.

ST sets are not a good answer, as they are hard to obtain and limit flexibility. They also suggest the developers are aware of the problem dagger classes have with VIT. but instead of adding +20 or more VIT to seemingly every ST set, they should just add it to the three classes.

#9

I definitely agree with the sentiment of this post. I guess we as Trick players have been priveliged by how much utility we’ve had in recent years, but I would really hate to get the rogue treatment.

By this I am of course referring to years ago when rogue was pretty unanimously the best dagger class. One of if not the best classes for soloing all content in the game as well as being unquestionably the best rusher in a meta where “endgame” was tomb and OT. So even though invisibility didn’t help a lot in boss fights, rogue only needed to press space every 7 seconds or so (no pets) while rushing, making at least one a very useful contribution to any group.
But then of course 2 major changes happened, one of which mirrors the recent decoy immunity. First: pets. This made a number of classes much more viable rushers (trick, warrior, knight, and if you paid for a 100/100 pretty much anyone), basically all of whom had actually impactful abilities during boss fights. Second, and more importantly: teleport disabled in new engame content (the first example of this being Shatters). This became a pattern that was included in every further engame dungeon (with the exception of cultist hideout) that made the rogue’s one premier niche (as he was in many cases still the safest rushers if nothing else) nearly obsolete. These days rogue is largely looked down on in a dps-focused meta and you are highly discouraged from playing him (if not barred altogether) in higher-end discords.

I just really hope the decoy-immunity doesn’t start becoming more widely applied (or other classes given somewhat reliable decoys) so trick becomes nigh useless in boss fights.

#10

In the STs’ defense:

  • Golem Trix was made pre-VC, and hasn’t really been touched since apart from general dagger buffs across the board.
  • Acid Assassin was also made pre-VC (iirc), and by a UGC member with the intent to simulate a melee class.
  • Vampire Rogue was also made by a UGC member, and had its primary focus put on the special chain mechanic and balancing out its potential DPS.
#11

I hadn’t thought of that – that 2 of them are pre VC. I remember when VC came out a couple of new sets significantly boosting VIT. Vampire Rouge and Treasure Hunter Archer I think. They both also have healing. And it struck me as perverse to do it that way, rather than just give those two classes more VIT. A couple of classes did get more VIT but not those two.

VIT was often a bit wonky on older sets too. I guess it’s the stat with the least consequences when boosted, especially for players with a good pet. So VIT can be added, or even removed, without breaking the game.

#12

The ultimate problem of decoy is as you said, we have no functionality to have a boss only partially ignore decoys (we dont even have the ability for them to ignore them at all thats why they have to be removed) so anything that is aggro based, be that movement, or just aiming shots, can be completely and totally blocked by one decoy.

This hasn’t really been helped that the obvious path for making decoys better in a world with high mheal was making them even easier to place cough coin cough which makes it even easier for a player to properly lock down a boss like this.

Stun I even feel is much easier to deal with, while we don’t want most endgame bosses to be stunnable at all, we can at the very least provide nearby targets you would want to stun, be that void minions, marble towers, or even just trying to get rid of that pesky weak in O3. This cannot be done with decoys because as i said before, if the decoy exists, it works.

Ultimately the path forward is to rework how decoys can work and how enemies can respond to them, giving enemies selective aggro for decoys only allowing a portion of their attack to be distracted, or only allowing movement to be distracted while the aiming is still undisrupted, or even only allowing a boss to be decoyable in short burts, all of these could help with the issue. This would ultimately be a nerf to the class, but I do feel saving it from needing to have decoys turned off in most future endgame fights would be a valid tradeoff.

This however does come down to a greater issue as a whole, our crowd control effects are all all or nothing (dont even get me started on invisibility), we currently have no way to tweak the specifics of how much an effect can impact a certain enemy nor do we even have the ability to define the difference between a huntresses slow and the slow from anything else other than duration which is mostly a non factor by mheal. Having items have various degrees of the same effect would help a lot in defining class roles and also allow for a bit more flexibility in item design where we don’t have to assume giving an item x effect basically makes it as good as every other thing that has the same effect.

In addition to this one system I often think would be really good to have on a lot of our bosses is the Defiance Bar from guild wars 2. Effectively an hp bar for status effects wherein a group has to come together to wear it down using their effects in order to break it and have a boss get stunned, then it to recharge and repeat the process. This would give value to hitting a boss with status effects through a fight, but not result in one player being able to completely lock a boss down by themselves.

So ultimately there are a lot of ideas floating around on what can be done about some of theses issues, but until we could come to decision and potentially make what is ultimately a very large change, the bandaid for endgame bosses will have to be the aforementioned all or nothing strategy.

#13

My hopeful goal in the future is to make it worth it. I don’t intend to give Assassin any tools for avoiding damage, however I would like to turn it into the dps powerhouse within the dagger classes. In my eyes Assassin is an inherently selfish class, but it shouldn’t be in the way that it gets sb and leeching from the side, it should be in the sense that it does a lot of damage and doesn’t boost anyone else around it. In this way I have some ideas that would hopefully make it so that using both the poison and dagger together is far more effective, and while you could still likely hit sb from the side and leech, if you intend to go in and take risks you are rewarded a lot for it.

#14

I really appreciate the transparency with this message, it goes a long way. It definitely is a difficult problem, and I actually agree with pretty much everything you said here. Unfortunately this game was just not designed for pets, and considering the state of the classes when you guys picked them up, I’m genuinely quite happy with how you guys have turned it around and progressed the game since, I really am.

An interesting idea proposed here earlier that I don’t believe was mentioned in the post was to give decoys a health bar. This would still let them be targeted, but only until they die, effectively allowing more of a balance between the shotgun phases and the weaker phases.

^ This post suggests it pretty well, so I don’t want to steal their words. Of course doing this wouldn’t be a simple fix either, you’d still need to overall rework the class, potentially add cooldowns to the longer lasting decoys as even with an HP bar simply spamming the decoy would still break fights, etc, but this especially along with the defiance bar suggestion you made (which I honestly like a lot) I feel would be a much better direction then simply turning them off for now. Also imagine the potential itemization with HP bars on decoys, yum.

Of course though I understand why turning them off would be an instant fix while preparing for a much bigger change, so I understand why it would happen. Regardless, I look forward to seeing what is done with the class, I’ll surely be here to witness it and get a feel for it. Glad to hear though that there is intent for more to be done though, that’s ultimately what I wanted to make sure.

#15

Yeah, thats an idea thats been thought of as well, in my eyes the ultimate challenge with it is balancing that hp pool. Seems like it could end up pretty difficult to strike the balance between dies instantly and is around too long. That doesn’t rule it out of course it just seems like it may be a challenge.

Of course everything I say here is more affirmation that the issues are known and have been thought about. I can’t really say when we will get around to any specific issues as theres actually a lot of things in the game that could use improvement or expansion and deciding what is priority isn’t my decision alone.

#16

And that’s exactly what I was hoping to find out. Thank you for the transparency

#17

Another problem with the dagger classes, which is sort of independent of the issues here but maybe not, is they’re almost identical. Their stats are essentially the same bar one, ATT, but even that is less of a difference than it seems as the class with lowest ATT, Rogue, gains DEX from cloaks. They all wear leather armour so can gain the same bonuses there.

Two of the classes are similar in other ways: Trix and Rogue both being able to cloak or decoy to avoid shots, rush, both being able to teleport (Rogue with Plane). Assassin is the odd one out in this sense, which is perhaps why it often seems unbalanced to play now, with a fast short range attack but a slow long range ability, with In Combat often forcing you to focus on one or the other.

So anything that’s done to differentiate them more would be welcome. I don’t think any is especially OP or weak, but giving them more variety in stats could make them more interesting and varied to play.

#18

I would like to point out that classes such as trickster don’t have buff/debuff utilities due to it’s already decent core abilities and stats overall at this moment

Lets look at wizard as an example. It was created to essentially be a glass cannon, which is obvious given its highest dps stats out of any class.

But notice something odd about it’s uts? Not a single one has status effects.

If wizard had utility of any buff or debuff, it would make the other staff classes (necro, mystic), less desirable than before, which is bad for balance considering wizard is already the most used class currently, and doesn’t seem to be changing anytime in the future.

As for the future, DECA can’t really nerf the class without making it completely useless.

Lets apply this to trickster. It’s pretty much the only dagger class that’s actually viable in endgame, with higher dps stats than the assassin, whose meant to be the dps dagger class.

On top of that, it’s core ability beats out the other dagger classes, and even classes in general. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that it doesn’t have any buff/debuff uts either, for the similar reasons listed for wizard.

So I do agree that carelessly nerfing the trickster’s decoy would make it mostly useless in endgame. But I don’t think that adding more “utility”, or thirsting for more dps, would balance it out, but rather make the roles of the other classes (assassin supposedly being dps and rogue supposedly being solo) even more useless, since the trickster would excel at both of those if it was given dps or buffs/debuff uts.

In all honestly, every dagger class needs to be reworked in some way to fit the current path DECA goes for, as well for the communities mindset in the endgame. For a MMO genre, rogue has too little power in a group. Assassin can’t even fulfill it’s role as a dps class. Trickster has too much power over the boss fights. All of these small problems, not just the dagger classes that were never addressed in what used to be a simple shooter become difficult to ignore as the game and community grew.

Here are a few suggestions to change the trickster class:

  • For starters, decrease its dps stats, for god’s sake. If trickster is the so called utility class, then to balance the various utilities it will receive, nerf the dps output.
  • Give it more potential for utility. Golem brain is a great example of utility, with dazing as it’s blast effect. Have more uts and sts that share similar situational utility, instead of prisms that just increase dps output.
  • Buff the other dagger classes. Assassin’s poison is dreadful with the spam invulnerability DECA utilizes. Make it so the ability doesn’t have as much air time before it hits boss, as well as buffing the uts it currently has to fit the current game. Rogue also needs something more than just invisibility. Have it so it benefits more alone, or rework it in some way to benefit the group in its own unique way.

That’s all of my thoughts for dagger classes.

#19

I strongly disagree with reducing Trix’s damage. It’s by far the hardest dagger class to play, arguably the hardest of all classes. Prisms are hard to use, even harder to use well. This also makes it one of the most dangerous classes to play as when a decoy doesn’t work it has only its leather armour to save it. It can move fast and teleport, but that can get you into trouble as well as out of it.

So it deserves to do more damage, to fully exploit the times decoys work. or when they don’t, or are ineffective due to game design, they can get in at least a little damage before they are forced to back off due to taking damage.

And what would you reduce it to? It’s the only thing that distinguishes it from 'Sin and Rogue stat wise, so reducing ATT to 60 or 50 would just make it even less interesting to play over them. Reducing it even more to less than 50 would make it very unattractive to play.

The one that really needs fixing IMHO is Assassin, and it doesn’t just need its DPS boosting but its ability reworking.

#20

Might be biased cause I main trickster, but I disagree with this post in its entirety. Yes, I played during the knight meta. Stun was overpowered on an overpowered class, but the difference between 2013 knight and 2022 trickster is that in 2013, knights couldve tanked absolutely anything, and only had to press spacebar at a general direction and the boss wouldnt shoot anymore. A class that had a very low skill cealing in 2013. Tricksters always had an extremely high skill cealing. A trickster can either be the best class in the game, or the worst class in the game. You’re making this post as if everyone is a bona fide trickster master with access to every prism in the game. That is not true. I don’t even have a t7 prism yet. Also, tons of dumb fucks play trickster without knowing what the fuck a decoy does. And even people who often play trickster mess up a decoy once a while, causing pvp decoys or less than ideal situations where the decoy slips and the boss shotguns everyone. Just because somebody has 100 mheal doesn’t mean that they won’t be mundane. And the argument with coin is just dumb, coin isn’t even a consistent decoying prism, and any trickster with any amount of self respect would use their tiered abilities instead, as its more effective and reliable. Ever seen o3 slip off a coin during fate? yeah, I have, and I was glad I was on a staff class and not a melee because a bunch of fucking people died to a shit trickster who can’t use a normal prism.

And yes, trickster’s only “utility” is a decoy, but that’s enough for it to be considered a really good class. It has the best DPS stats out of all daggers, and TBH i wouldn’t even use any of the damaging prisms, not worth an inv space. And what does assassin have that other classes don’t? Knight has ogmur, and mystics can curse. Assassin dps is piss poor, way worse than a trickster’s, and definetly worse than a majority of classes.

IMO, deca’s decoy block is the most dogshit way they couldve handled it. They made a decoyable phase, and tricksters skilled enough should be able to decoy it. If they wanted to make a fight anti decoy, then just make bullet hell phases like celestial and not chase phases like fate. Its essentially just silence, but only for tricksters. That’s discrimination, and it’s fucking lame. Either make everyone silenced, or make a better fucking phase. The reason why decoys are strong, is that deca makes phases that can get cheesed by decoys. Just don’t fucking make phases that can get cheesed by decoys, for fucks sake.