Posted on 06 September 2017 - 08:24 PM

Diamond ladder (And iron too, to an extent) should be a place where you can sharpen your no speed melee and bow abilities for team based gamemodes like CTF, CTW, and so on. Diamond ladder already does this, but not to its full potential.

The main issue is that there is no reliable way to heal. In Diamond currently, you get 10 hearts and you have to regen with food. This creates an environment where once you get low, you have to run away and slowly regenerate health, doing everything you can to slow down your opponent. It's not a realistic situation for a team gamemode at all. Running isn't a long term option in a game of CTW or CTF, but the kit encourages a safer, more campy playstyle.

My recommendation would be to increase bow damage, reduce the number of arrows, and add 8 Gapples. As I mentioned earlier, my goal is to create a kit where people can go to practice their no speed melee and bow abilities for team gamemodes, and this means creating a kit where you can engage in a somewhat neutral position many times without excessive running. I'll breakdown how my changes encourage a smoother no speed practice environment:

Power 1 Bow and 16-24 arrows: Currently, the bow is normal and has 32 arrows. An individual arrow does little to no damage short term. It's main purpose at a high level to to slowly whittle down your opponent, which I think is the wrong way to go about it. In a team environment, bow is probably the most important item, and it typically does a lot of damage. Increasing bow damage would make running away a less valuable option, since you could actually end up wasting a lot of healing getting shot. Higher damage is more conducive to simulating a teams environment.


8-10 Gapples: As I mentioned earlier, healing is very difficult in Diamond ladder. There are hardly any even health engagements in Diamond's current form. Most of the match is spent with one player chasing after the other, slowly trying to break them down with arrows. In order to practice reliably and efficiently, there should be a good amount of healing so players can engage each other with relatively similar health over and over again. Players shouldn't be forced to run excessively just to survive. It creates many unhealthy habits for an actual match, and most importantly, it isn't particularly fun to play. When players are given healing, they are allowed to lose an engagement, heal, then try a similar engagement again, and this makes it easier to point out your own mistakes and improve.

Posted on 06 September 2017 - 08:35 PM

Power 1 Bow and 16-24 arrows: I would agree if it was 16 arrows power 1 bow. 24 would be way too much and you would need to be able to balance melee and bow out in diamond.

8-10 Gapples: -1 I would prefer a gap or 2 because you could chug away all the bow damage you take.

Posted on 06 September 2017 - 08:39 PM

If you chug all your gaps you'll just lose. Tanking the arrows isn't really a valid strategy if you want to win.

Posted on 06 September 2017 - 08:39 PM

I think this is a good idea and everything said in it is a good change for diamond ladder. However I think that the gapple amount should be decreased from 8-10 to about 4-6. If the arrow amount is reduced then the gapple amount has to be reduced as well.

Posted on 06 September 2017 - 09:39 PM

In a team environment, sword is the more important item. If you look at all of the tourney winners ever in conquest/ctf/etc., they were all sword heavy teams. The diamond ladder should be more sword heavy than bow. There are plenty of other ladders to practice your bow on like iron or archer or uhc. In the other hand, the only ladder where you can practice no speed sword pvp other than diamond is soup. Diamond should be the place to practice no speed sword pvp, but I do think that bow should still be part of the ladder. I disagree with the power I bow because why would you sword when you can kill your opponent if you land most of your arrows, so in that case the better bow player wins instead of the better sword player which is the way it should be.

Last edited on 06 September 2017 - 10:29 PM by FightingCloud

Yeah, a friend of mine brought to my attention that you could bow down someone while theyre healing very easily, so I was thinking that the arrow amount should be reduced even further, perhaps 8-12 arrows? or maybe 16 arrows but no power?

Posted on 06 September 2017 - 11:17 PM

Maybe even 14 arrows and no power because at the time I definitely do feel like 32 arrows is way too much.

Posted on 07 September 2017 - 05:26 AM

My opinion is:

Healing
2-3 gapples because 8-10 would probably make the fight carry on for longer than it should (even if chugging was a bad idea, someone could just keep running and chugging and waste time).

Bow and Arrows
I think a normal bow is fine because we're trying to practice non speed melee. I think that the arrow limit can be varied, but if the aim is to get non speed melee I think 8-12 arrows should be more than enough (to act like a rod).

I think that this would be enough because as you stated, this is basically the only kit to practice non speed melee in so it will be good to have to arrow limit reduced and have shorter games (1-2 mins)

Posted on 08 September 2017 - 05:13 AM

Imo since diamond is not the most popular kit atm, I find myself waiting in queue more than actually playing the ladder itself.

Healing would be pretty nice to add to the kit so it's tankier.

Posted on 08 September 2017 - 08:22 AM

I would leave diamond as it is and make it more tanky. Right now I feel that once you make 1 mistake you are done there is no way to comeback(if you are fighting a decent oponent)

Maybe leave the proj prot as it is but also add protection to the armor and have both enchants at the same time

Posted on 08 September 2017 - 09:13 AM

Wtf no

Posted on 08 September 2017 - 10:45 AM

Max 4 gaps but +1 on everything