The Problem: Revisited

—Written by Teishi

When we arrived on Lakshmi, it felt like diorama was won through careful planning and meticulous teamwork.  I still believe it did and it does, but what we faced when we got here..

Revitalizers… can you remember when getting one in an OM was amazing?  Can you remember even getting one at all in serious diorama?  And now they seem to be a necessary component of any winner’s repertoire.

There was a night about 4 months ago when Lily and Mrrng went so ridiculously Revitalizer-happy, I almost lost my mind.  Very uncouthly I told them both off, insisting their strength came from items alone.  And while that’s obviously not true, it felt so wrong, for all my experience, to have something so alien occur.  Countless diorama matches with the highest of the high level Japanese players, and yet I hadn’t seen anything even close to this kind of quarry power.

Time passed, and I went through the full cycle.  Hating the idea of winning solely through the power of your items, coming to terms with it(use it or be extinct), learning the strategy, and returning to head-to-head against the inventors of it.  Heart said no, mind said yes.

Let’s review the strategy.  Fairly simply, as you would if we were doing one of our “5 minutes left on the reserve, let’s try to quarry a revitalizer for the next match” games, die one to three times, and quarry near the rook.  Using your abilities (the more abilities down the better) seems to be a common addition, as well as your team losing in petra.  I’ve heard using the petra shovel (ballista key item) is necessary as well, but I’ve always used it so I can’t make a comparison.  Although this seems very easy, incorporating it into your usual match play is what makes the difference.

In the last week, both Irvine and Selt have posted on this issue on their respective blogs, revealing to any that didn’t know about the problem (I’ll call it a problem, for some it’s a lifeline).  And whether that alone triggered it, it was triggered either way, and now reports of people dying on purpose in OM have been popping up all over.

There are plenty of unsavory tactics to employ in ballista, let’s be completely honest.  NIN/RDM is about as cheesy as you can get, very easy to gear, very easy to be strong with.  Rabbit pies cause all sorts of balance problems, we all know about the Galka invasion, etc.  But these issues can be overcome.  In diorama, only one of those three issues is present, and in OM facing a Galka and/or rabbit pie’d and/or tonnin opponent just gives you more pride when you win.  Work as a team and these problems are just speed bumps…

The real issue with this new strategy is that it changes how people feel about the game.  Intentionally dying and spamming revitalizers just doesn’t feel right.  The passion is sucked out of the game.  Real balance issues arise, like which jobs can fully take advantage of a revitalizer.  SAM and RNG for example are incredibly powerful with a full JA menu, and jobs like DRK and NIN gain very little.  Newer JP players to the diorama scene seem to try to focus on the item strategy before even learning the original ways that have been honed for years.  It’s a sad devolution of play.

After quite some time of playing with this strategy, along with the recent outbreak of newer players trying to use it due to the JP blog posts, quite a few players have voiced their concerns.  Most players find themselves bored and feel the game loses its luster when 2-hour abilities are used as often as Souleater or Berserk.  The days on Siren seem even more perfect now.

A friend suggested an easy fix would be for SE to limit quarrying revitalizers to one per match.  I think that would even the field job-wise, and games in diorama would return to their usual style; using abilities as intelligently as possible, rather than using them as often as possible.  But SE doing something about ballista?  Funny.

Because of its power, I don’t see this strategy going away.  I can only hope that the players I truly respect will stick around, push through and find a way to deal with it.