Recently, there have been more and more friends talking about Tomb Raider OL in the forum, and I came to join in the fun. To be honest, when I was first dragged into the pit, I thought it was a pure PVE adventure game. However, later in the game, I discovered that the competitive nature of this game is much deeper than imagined. Especially in the major version update two weeks ago, many lineup ideas were directly shuffled. Today I want to talk to you about several balance issues I observed.
Let's talk about PVP first. The current mainstream arena environment is almost dominated by the "Blood Corpse Flow". The core idea is to rely on the high counter-injury of the Blood Corpse and the silent control of the Forbidden Woman. I have used this set to reach a high rank myself, and the strength is indeed online, but the problem is also obvious - once the opponent brings a dispersing magic weapon, such as the purification effect of the black crystal amulet, the blood corpse flow feels a bit suppressed. This situation of "a single set of paths is too strong and a single means of restraint" is actually quite dangerous, as it forces everyone to either join in or bring special countermeasures equipment.
Let's talk about the racing gameplay of team adventure. This gameplay is actually the part with the most e-sports potential in the game. What matters is the grasp of the output window and the connection of the skill chain. But the current balance has a big flaw: the critical strike growth curve of physical professions is too smooth, while the magic profession has an obvious weak period in the mid-term. Our land reclamation team played in the king-level forbidden area last week. The warlock in the team has an equipment rating that is more than 2,000 higher than my gold-touching captain, but the damage per second is a big difference. It's not that Warlock is unplayable, but the benefits are unequal with the same investment, which can easily cause players to feel frustrated, especially for new players, who may form the stereotype of a “son of a physics major.”
Regarding version updates, the official recently redesigned the AI mechanism of the Ghost King boss. I think this change deserves praise. In the past, fighting the Ghost King was all about standing still and outputting, competing to see who had the higher DPS. Now, you need to arrange professions to take turns to attract hatred and deal with summons. The tactical depth is suddenly increased. However, at the same time, the pressure on the healing profession has also soared, causing the "double wet nurse" lineup to become almost standard in high-end games. As a result, the team's output will inevitably be in short supply, which in turn reduces the playing space for assassin-type characters. I suggest that the planners can appropriately increase the basic value of the healing treasure, or add an armor-breaking effect to the assassin profession to make the lineup more diverse.
Finally, let's talk about equipment balance. The equipment entries in this game are very random, but the rules for the "penetration" entries are particularly strange. Physical penetration and spell penetration have similar values in the early stage, but once they are strengthened to above +15, the benefits of physical penetration will increase exponentially. This leads to the fact that in later PVP, pure armor stacking is not as good as stacking damage reduction, and stacking damage reduction cannot beat high penetration. To put it bluntly, there is a gap in the current defense numerical model. I've seen a lot of panel screenshots posted by players. Basically, they have more than 5,000 attack points and about 3,000 defense points. This shows that everyone is pursuing the ultimate output, and the defense attributes are somewhat abandoned by the version.
In general, the competitive framework of Tomb Raider OL is good and the tactics are diverse, but the balance still needs to be polished. Especially the underlying logic of career growth curves and equipment entries, I hope to see more targeted adjustments. Of course, I also understand that game planning must take into account the difficulty of both PVE and PVP, and it is impossible to achieve it in one step. But at least in this version, I will still go online and play a few arenas every day, look at the ban selection interface, and wait to decide whether the opponent will be a blood zombie flow or a dispersal team. This feeling is really overwhelming 😂