Its crazy how most nerfs make me like plants more, like how eletric blueberry went from a boring broken plant to more fun in eclise. Also most nerfs imo make plants more fair

Pvz1 modding takes the exact opposite approach. (As a viewer of RCCH I've seen brutal mode, brutal mode EX, and brutal mode EX+). The buffs for plants are HEAVILY compensated by the extreme buffs given to zombies. Since the game has a much more limited set of plants and mechanics, people had to be very creative.

I've been thinking a lot, and I figured out the best option for everyone. It's a win-win solution that I'm surprised no one has thought of. buff only the plants I like

“ 8:30 Mods are played by people familiar with the base game” Me, who has never played the base game but has tried multiple mods because I don’t like the existence of premium plants:

While I agree that super strong plants like Winter Melon need nerfs in mods, I feel like sometimes it just gets taken way too far, to the point where the plant becomes useless and you might as well not have it in the game at all.

One thing I don't like about this kind of balancing is the price, if you are going to make it expensive its because you know its strong enough to be worth the price, if you're going to keep the original/cheaper price, you must nerf it so isn't just broken due to being strong and cheap, but if you are making it expensive and nerf it you are making the plant bad and not worth it Edit: with some exceptions

It's hard to say what should or shouldn't be buffed or nerfed and it comes down to the way the creators wish to make something and what people enjoy. The binding of isaac had many changes to a bunch of different items in repentance and they are still being changed. I think it comes down to what the creator wants the game to be like and what the players enjoy. The best way to go about it is just communicating to find out what should be changed.

Even PvZ1 mods nerf plants too. Scaredy Shroom and partially Jalapeño got slightly nerfed in Hard Mode. Scaredy Shrooms are no longer vulnerable when hiding, and Jalapeño’s damage was slightly decreased. Those “nerfs” can actually have their advantages. A major example of a nerf in a PvZ1 mod with absolutely no advantage is Puff Shroom and Sea Shroom in PvZ Brutal Mode. They disappear after a while, and cannot be replenished unlike PvZ2. Although they can drop sun upon dying.

It's easier to nerf 5 plants than buff 105.

As someone working on a mod team; it’s so much simpler for people. You recognize why say in third strike, for an example of a very unbalanced game, why Chun li having a kick that’s incontestable, unpunishable and combos into a super that does half your health while being able to have 2 of those supers ready is op. But if you literally delete her from the game then you’re still not making anyone pick Sean more who’s so bad you can combo him when he hits you. It’s a lot easier to say what’s not allowed to have in a game than what you can, but the problem is most of the time the problem is the bottom tiers. The klobbs always gonna be atrocious even if you could quad wield it, bowser in melee has 3 moves that aren’t considered atrocious while being way too slow etc. When a game is very imbalanced its 9/10 the lower half. And usually if you’re to cut them from the select screen you’d get a very balanced game. Melee realistically has 14 viable characters out of 23 for example. So that’s…bad. Only about half the roster is viable. But if the bad characters didn’t exist you’d just have a roster of 14 with one guy lingering in viability. Which that’s a very good statistic. People just see the common stuff and want it to be less common and the less common stuff to be more common. But it’s so much better to find someone or something in the top 5 and draw the line there and ensure everything is at least around that level. That way you’re ok with something being a little better than average or worse but won’t deal with something really bad or op. People will make the underdogs popular if they’re under picked if they’re at least viable.

I feel like the simple truth about nerfs are that they usually feel bad. If there’s a thing you really like using, that’s really powerful, and you can’t use it anymore, a player that still wants to use that option is going to be disappointed by it. Not to say that nerfs are bad, but that players complaining about them simply don’t like their favorites being made worse.

Also if you have to buff 70+ plants instead of nerfing 9 to 5 plants it lessens the workload.

It's more tolerable when a mod nerfs a plant you don't want nerfed than if the devs do it since it is a lot easier to just ignore a mod you don't like,

Poor little Timmy, dude. He just wanted to use wintermelons

God I love playing Reflourished so much, but some of the nerfs darn make some plants just seem really not... worth using. Being someone who's not the most expert-y at the game (I'm more into PvZ1), It's pretty weird to have Winter Melon have a slower recharge and attack speed, alongside the cost raise, making it way less reliable to use for chill damage, and honestly kinda outclassed by Cold Snapdragon (Haven't reached Snow Pea, but I've heard it was buffed from PvZ1 to have spread chill).

i'm not opposed to most nerfs but one trend i've noticed(personally i have only played altverz but this seems to be present in other mods as well) is when plants get a significant price increase while the sun meta changes to 25 sun without significant changes anywhere else. i feel like a big victim of this is altverz laser bean, which i have kind of just never used. it's just too expensive and does too little unless there is a huge number of zombies, which there usually isn't. and since one laser bean alone can barely handle a regular zombie, i just prefer to use bloomerang. it's faster to get on the field and does more in the early game while usually doing well enough in the late game.

I'm pretty casual, I'd say, and to me, levels are most fun when I don't need to run the perfect strategy. That's why Eclise alienates me, when there are levels where you need to *bait* Octos into throwing their ammo just to *dig up* the plant at the right moment, things are not fun anymore, at least IMO.

Something worth saying is that mods not only generally have longer levels than vanilla, but also expect you to use at MINIMUM 2 columns of sun. That's why mods often have some plants "nerfed" to have crazy high plant costs. They're there by necessity. If this wasn't the case you could easily plant the most expensive plants within the first quarter of each level, and every level would have to be insanely spammy to compensate.

Rest In Peace little timmy 😔 Press F to pay respects

I would say to nerf AND buff, because nerfing alone isn't gonna make me wanna use garbage plants like pea-nut. Also nerfing everything to the ground (like making banana launcher cost 1000) isn't gonna make me creative either. It's gonna make me pick the most boring option (that being repeater) because it's consistent. plants that needs buffs are for an example grave buster, and peanut (which's both a bad wall *and* a bad attacker.) Also the issue isn't with the sun producers, it's with the sun costs. There are plants, which are WAY to cheap for what they do like witch hazel. (Like literally how is witch hazel and hocus crocus even in the same league?)

I actually thinked that reflourished Primal Sunflower is much better than Vanilla Primal Sunflower, since I can use the plant as a semi wall nut in the early game, even tho it cost 25+ more to place xd

I think Doom Shroom should return in pvz 2 but with some changes, like 250 sun cost, extremely long recharge, and keeping the mechanic of making craters where your unable to place plants for awhile, also having it be excluded from any/all boss fights

i think it's as simple as buff the bad plants, nerf the overpowered plants

For most mods it's 'because balancing is complex and nerfing some things is healthy for the overall state of the game' But for Eclise it's 'Because I hate fun, I hate good game design, and I hate you' like pretty much all of Eclise.

what are you talking about that’s the BEST intro you’ve ever done

There is actually a very simple reason for this and it isn't just mods. In shooters if you just buff everything either every gun becomes a sniper or you buff player health as part of this leading to everything but 1 item getting a buff which is no different then that single nerf as the world changes in the exact same way.

The problem is when all they do is nerf plants and make them cost more than the usual price but the OP zombies are still OP and the spam BS is still not modified

"You should buff more than you should nerf" is not exclusively a multiplayer/vs. concept. From what I've seen and tested, the fundamental reason why people often favor this idea is the simple truth that nerfs often make something just feel worse to use. Nobody's denying that Winter Melon is powerful, but seeing it cost 650 sun in a 25 sun meta is basically instant encouragement to never use it. Furthermore, mod creators often have a tendency to go totally overboard with nerfs, like making Dandelion cost a ridiculous 475 sun in AltverZ, while not giving it any substantial boost to damage output to compensate. In my own playthrough I came to the conclusion that this plant was kind of terrible after noticing just how little it actually contributed for the cost, which was just a bad feeling. It didn't make the game feel more balanced or fun, it just seemed like they had a vendetta against this one plant.

First time you actually mentioned Reflourished in one of these videos

I think reflourished primal sun teaches players to use it as a sun produczr and a wall which will encourage players to get better at pvz2 mostly because reflourisheds player base are not particularly good at the game

F in the chat for Gloom Vine and Missile Toe on RFL

as long as they are left as fun, then it doesn't matter if they are nerfed or buffed, unless that nerf or buff makes the plant absolutely broken and bad for the game, but a fun plant usually is just a really good niche instead of a sweep plant

500 sun cost is already enough to scare me away from winter melon most the time. I'm better off using cheaper plants.

I agree with the video, but on a side note, I really don't like Reflourished's Shine vine nerf. It take 3 cycle to MATCH its price, where ever other sun producer EXCEEDS their own in just 2. It also takes forever to recharge. Seems no reason to run it when you can just put down another sunflower. It requires on space being a heavy problem, but Sunbean and Gold Bloom are better in that regard

When I first saw and tried Winter Melon in Reflourished, I felt the plant wasn't worthy. Increased in sun cost and recharge, lower firing rate and shorter chill time, well, at first glance the plant isn't worth to bring out. However, the developers decided to give Winter Melon his splash buffs, and that overally increases the plant's effectiveness. Maybe some people don't know, Winter Melon's main power lies beneath his splash ability, this differs him from high, concentrated damage plants like Citron. Nerfing the chill time and firing rate will force the players to plant more of them instead of just 2 in the 2nd and 4th row; or pair the plant with the others instead of using the plant as the only attacker in order to creat a defense with least weaknesses possible. Nerfing the sun cost and recharge time will make the users more appreciate the plant, that it is very expensive to replant, that it is hard to restore once lost. That the whole point of a tower defense game, that everything needs to work together to form a good defense with no weaknesses, to make players think and creative; be challenging while fun to play at the same time. Overall, the Plants vs Zombies 2 itself used to be a fun game, but the amount of overwhelming-powerful plants added really makes the game no different than just-place-down-and-win game rather than a tower defense game. Some mods are doing a good job in balancing the plants, but some just not very good at it. And balancing isn't an easy work to do, it takes a lot of time to consider which one should be changed and should be kept, or if it's changed, then how so.

An interesting way to rework Winter Melon into a high-Sun Support would be to make his AoE temporarily Freeze enemies, so players get a feeling of "Daaamn, that's a high-cost, high-power Support!" It'd feel similar to Kingdom Rush's DWAARP, in a way: Relatively heavy hits with brief/guaranteed Stunning, but not so much of either that your other Towers no longer need to exist. Kingdom Rush gets away with awesome designs like the DWAARP costing +1000 Gold because every Stun/CC in that game is gonna cost you that much anyways. Imagine if we got a Tier 2 Archer that HALVES THE SPEED OF ENEMIES for only 300 Gold! That's what Snow Peashooter is to most mods, and it's kinda unfair.

I do understand why most mods are harder than the base game because most people that play mods have probably played PVZ1, PVZ2 and PVZ3 for dozens of hours many for probably hundreds of hours. But I do think that some easier overpowered mods should exist. Not only because it can be fun in short bursts to just feel unstoppable or be able to turn off your brain and not think for a bit. But also to help introduce people to mods that might not otherwise want to try them because they are too hard or challenging. If you look at other games that are heavily modified like Minecraft. Pretty much every Bethesda game, factorio and many other games you will see that all though there are plenty of mods that make the game harder or more difficult there are also mods that add things that are silly or overpowered or just ridiculous just because they can. I remember my first Minecraft mods were TMI (to many items) basically a recipe and item spawning mod, clay soldiers. A really funny mod were you made little clay people and you could give them stuff to use as equipment and they would fight each other. And a mod called rainbow ore. It added a ore that looked like iron or gold but it was all rainbow colored. It was like 3 times stronger than diamond so really OP and it was only about as rare as diamond. But I remember that I had really fun with these mods. I didn’t care that some stuff was OP I just was fascinated by the fact I even could mod Minecraft at all. My point with this example is that not every mod has to mod for a more pro audience. Not every mod needs to be a challenge or needs to be difficult. Sometimes just silly fun and messing around is all you really need. I already have a couple of ideas for PVZ2 mods that could be easy and not very challenging but still fun. Hell even a simple mod that basically is just the original game but make all the micro transactions available for purchase with coins and rework some of the more bullshit levels and change to order you unlock worlds and plants and that is pretty much it. Yea it will probably be easy and could be easily exploited but the point of easy mods like this would be to act as a bridge between people that have never used a mod and people that play a lot of mods. Like I said with my Minecraft mods. If the only mods that exist for Minecraft were mods that made the game hard and more challenging I probably wouldn’t have gotten into mods until many years later and i would most likely have gotten frustrated with many mods feeling unfairly difficult or challenging. Easy and simple mods should exist to allow for different play styles and skill level. Sometimes you just want to turn your brain off for a while and not really need to think.

Again solid video, just needs subtitles. Its often hard to hear the words you say at different sections of the video

This is why I like Reflourished mod more than Eclise, because it still makes plants still familiar to use while being reworked/changed unlike Eclise reworks plants for the sake of making them balanced (Still don't like how Starfruits projectile is slower, Lightning Reeds very slow recharge, and what the heck does Red Stinger is)

The intro is the thing I would pay to see in an out of context compilation

Ngl,Reflourished/Altverz Winter is the only reason I ever use him because if I try to use Vanilla Winter,I would fall asleep before finishing a level because of how boring it is.

A lesson in game design on what deserves a nerf, be it singleplayer or multiplayer I’ve learned: the Telescience clause. Context: there’s an obscure little game I used to play called Space Station 13. Think Among Us with Dwarf Fortress levels of detail. In a particular server, there’s telescience, a room with a teleporter, that if you know some basic math, can teleport anything to and from the machine given some coordinates. And I mean *anything*. Valuables, weapons, bombs, people, nerve gas grenades, all of it. This opens up a lot of options for an aspiring “impostor”. Remote bombing, remote theft, remote kidnapping, remote arson, remote murder. However, it was starting to become a problem for the server, so the admins made a promise. It was okay for teleporter shenanigans to happen once in a while, as it was great for chaos and unpredictability, but should it happen every round, the teleporter would be nerfed or even removed. Since then there’s been a silent pact to not abuse the teleporter, at least not too often. What to learn from this is that if player strategies start to become homogeneous, IE winter melons, puff shrooms, and gloom shrooms, it’s time for a nerf.

So I watched the video. And i have faced the balance issues in my own modding experience. I like to buff weak plants, nerf the strongest plants, and generally change things. I’ve also buffed and nerfed and overall changed several zombies as well. There’s not many plants that feel unfairly broken. I still need to fix sling pea tho. I tried but no one was able to help me make it knot target one lane.

Yooo!! Potion Craft gameplay!! So hype to watch.

Altverz is actually epic, the nerfs and other changes have made the game so much more fun to me

Let’s just say the game is balanced around peashooter and not winter melon or pokra. If someone decides to make peashooter as powerful as winter melon or pokra, then what’s the point in using those plants in the first place? And since peashooter is so strong it could 1 shot everything, it raises the problem that you need to buff the zombie to match his power, and it’s not just 1, but EVERY zombies in the game. So just by buffing a plant because you think its weak, you accidentally create more problems for yourself, meanwhile nerfing some specific plants would save you more time.

The problem is some if not most casual players prefer to install mods so they can play the plants they want without having to buy them using real money, So saying that they should go back to base game is gatekeeping and just inconsiderate

I wanna say that the one Seedium that I feel really works in base game is Dazey Chain which the only reason I’m okay with it is because it half-carried me through the entire game Along with Cherry Bomb

Give me that game you used, that has you crushing ingredients and putting it in a cauldron, NOW

2:18i don't agree cuz then you get games where every weapon kills you so fast due to multiple buffs and becomes a game of who sees the other first, but there are some cases like medic from tf2 where all of his primaries except 1 are bad and instead of making the good weapon worse(nerf) they should make the bad weapons better(buff) 2:45while this is true it forces players and lessens fun and playability, just like sniper in tf2 he's broken and the best way to counter him is to play sniper and be better,but that would mean I have to stop my fun and play style just to counter someone on the other team and that sucks the fun out of the experience

I think a problem with nerfs in mods not just for PvZ, but in general, is the rest of the game isn't adjusted to compensate for the nerf. Sometimes, that's not necessary, but other times, it makes a drastic change to the difficulty that makes so many things far harder. Pikmin 2 mods are a good example of this. Most nerf the extremely powerful Purple Pikmin, but they don't adjust much about the games combat, and since the games combat is balanced around the Purple Pikmin, it makes normal encounters with enemies as hard as some bosses. Some things do need nerfs, but if a game is designed around something being as powerful as it is, the game needs adjusting as well.

The balance changes in Reflourished are fairly balanced.

Great video!

I was like most of what this video said tbh. I didnt like that op plants from 2 was nerfed, and it made me not want to play eclise. Then I tried some of the plants, and damn I kinda like the changes and nerfed plants so much more then the non nerfed version due to just how muhc more fun it is to spend 1350 for a calipower rather then like 250. and it not being broken makes me find value in plants more. I also like the idea of plant reworks in general, as plants like peanut are made more fun. Too bad reworks also make plants like lighting reed just unusable. eitherway good vid and I agree

I started playing Reflourished after I got a little bored with the worlds in vanilla PVZ2. I wanted to check out the new and unique plants and worlds offered by the mod, but when I installed the mod I found the increase in difficulty to make the levels overall less enjoyable. Sure a casual game can be hard, but when the later stages of the game became a slog of nightmare level after nightmare level the game ceased being fun for me. I wish there was a mod for PVZ2 that introduced MORE broken plants and new worlds whilst maintaining the base games difficulty (or lack thereof)

Before watching the video, some of the Plants of the original PvZ2 we're straight up overpowered, just because they sold them in the Real money shop, one of the best examples might be the Apple Mortar, 250 Sun cost, Hits 3 lanes at once and an additional stun on the enemy. I also felt like that later plants are power creep the older once, so you have more incentive to use them.

14:20 "... people just not understanding things. That's fine and human." Creeps spitting philosophy I was unprepared for xD

Winter melon definitely needed nerfed but not nearly as much as it was in Reflourished. Now it is complete garbage.

i'm developing my own minecraft modpack and imma say... player nerfs or enemy buffs are much more common than the opposite like finding a way to make flight actually balanced is just pain

5:50 Okay can we talk about the disgusting garbage going on over on the zombie's side there? Who at Popcap/EA okayed that?

I love how eclise rework plants because they don't feel like better versions of other plant what is great

I love watching these videos while I eat food, they hit that perfect part in my head in a way I can't explain with words

btw, killing infinite zombie is quite a hard thing to pull off if the plant will get distracted constantly let's say by tons of wizards not even on the map or gargs from far future.(iirc they can't be hit for a while) killing infinite zombie is very simple on some endless because of lack of strong ranged. so that would mean you need strong plant or boosted just to have a chance against them. I feel like if a consistent aoe plant gets too good to a point where it can clear so much of the game, it would cause the regular game that to be quite boring because you would spam them without thinking. if you play pvz2 vanilla a lot, some of the broken plants might not even seem broken to you because of how unbalanced the game is.

For me, I play mods for just more of the base game, with some twists to spice it up. Most mods balance the plants by changing how the plant should be played entirely, and that I think is an issue. For people like me, we aren't exactly trying to play a new game, more like an extension of a base game. This is why I think reflourished does a good job of plant balancing. The roles of the plants aren't changed, instead how effective they are at the role they are given is changed. I don't have to relearn how a plant works, it still can be used the same.

I'm still sad that Lightning Reed was Nerfed in PVZ 2 Reflourished, that plant was pretty middle of the road.

a good developer should balance out his arsenal of nerfs buffs and reworks to what you have a plant too weak to play? buff it a plant too strong to stay as is? nerf it the plant is completely and utterly fucking useless or nonsensical? rework it

8:49 uh... Ever heard of theory of relativity?

Nerfs don't really matter to me, because if I can still manage to make my strategy to work, then I feel it's good. (and it being using Twin Sunflowers and instas to save up for Winter Melons. Yes it worked in Reflourished last time I checked.)

5:15 I actually did do the whole adventure with pokra, (rent a plant and got enough packets to unlock it) and honestly, it just felt like not much was there to see. I got so used to my main plants being so busted that when a conveyor or locked and loaded level came on, it felt a lot harder because I wasn’t used to the plants of the world. While pokra is extremely overpowered for adventure, I would not recommend using her the whole way through as everything just seems to fly by. I could complete an entire world, mind you, without losing a single level, in less than a day.

I've seen a lot of folks say "just buff the zombies too" and the thing is, that just takes more effort for what's largely the same end result for a whole lot more work. So let's buff every plant to be as good as what it does as Winter Melon is. Well now you can steamroll the game with no difficulty and no one's having fun. So now let's buff all the zombies to keep up with the new plant power. What did we accomplish in the end? Winter Melon is now on par with every other plant, but by changing 99% of the game instead of 1%. And if I were a professional programmer, let alone a modder doing this for fun, I would certainly choose the option that changes less for the same expected value.

In such single player game mods, where you dont have any multiplayer interactions, most plants should be balanced around game progression, maybe with an opportunity to later make your favorite plants on the same power level than your main ones. For example, you REALLY like peashooter, so why not making it deal same damage as other towers for the cost of a special item you get after certain levels. I dont know how it would be played, but its certainly sounds pretty interesting in my opinion, since it can make some older beloved plants much more useful in the late game. Balancing stuff around game progression is a bit easier than balancing all plants around pvp's. Terraria has a very good game progression where weapons become stronger the further you progress, but it also has some oddballs that receive buffs based on where exactly on the progress line you are, like Abigael's Flower (i think thats the name) that increases speed and damage of your summon after you enter hardmode.

Personally, I think a PvZ roguelike would be very fun and could have a valid excuse to buff certain plants. With a general roguelike format, you beat a room/level and then get a reward. Here, you could buff certain plants that would otherwise suck to receive as your reward. I haven't touched PvZ2 and the community in god knows how long so idk if this already exists but yeah

Very solid intro

About wmp, I didn't even know that it was nerfed when I played reflorished, I played the PvZ 2 vanilla and never once used it intentionally, but in the mod decided to use it and really liked it

I Think That The Easiest Way To Balance A Game Is To Make Everything You Have Broken And Then Make The Enemies More Broken For More Consistent Results. Also Enemies That Counter Stuff In Unique Ways As Theirs A Lot Of Ways To Make Instas Not Kill A Zombie Without Them Having Resistances And While Having That Zombie Still Contribute More Than Just That.

I think it's impossible to make blanket statement as to "you should only nerd", or "you should only buff". Sometimes things need buffed while other things need nerfed. Using TF2, for example, you have weapons like the Medic's needle guns which are bad and need a buff, but those buffs aren't solely based on the fact that the crossbow completely outclasses them, so in this case one weapon needs nerfed while other weapons need buffed to put them on equal levels. In the case of PVZ2 (and mostly reflourished because that's what I primarily play), I now understand your argument for why wintermelon was nerfed, however as someone who isn't a pro MLG, 24/7 pvz ultra master, I honestly never thought of stacking wintermelons and cherry bombs, so to me it's gone from a plant that I never used much to a plant that seems worthless to me. I guess what I'm saying is, is that it all depends and maybe the real nerfs were the friends we made along the way. Thank you for coming to my TEDtalk

I did it, I found the perfect KZfaq intro

If you buff everything else to match, the game becomes easy, buff the enemies and suddenly it just looks like the op stuff is nerfed. You cannot buff everything, or else it is literally not changing a thing

I liked that kernel pult is useable in altverz I liked using it a lot

it's the difference between buffing 60% of plants fairly carefully, and then buffing all the zombies even more carefully, and nerfing 20% of plants maybe a little haphazardly. From a game design point of view, both have merits and demerits. From a modder's point of view, one is *strictly less work* for *close enough* results

Reflourished: "Lets make all good plants trash and like 5 weak plants slightly more decent

Playing the game originally is about adapting to learn the game. Installing a mod is about fixing the flaws the original game had or to play more of that game. They are fundamentally completely different experiences. Balance changes should not be seen as nerfs or buffs. They should be seen as rebalancing. Nerfs are almost always the right direction because fixing what is madly op generally allows more strategies to be played. Versatility = Fun. It also depends on the game. RPGS generally need both because they are more complex. Like Diablo 2 about half the skills in the game are useless because they never scale to be useful in end game. Which is fundamentally against what the game was designed to be. Every skill in the game is supposed to be good and that used to be the case in 1.09. Beyond that version is when Blizzard took over and basically created a mod in 1.10 and above. Now all of the strongest strategies and builds are what they buffed in 1.10. Which kinda made the game boring for those who like skills that got nerfed in 1.10. Since that resulted in less Versatility the fun was eliminated for certain people. Thus a Mods goal is always to make the game more Versatile than it used to be. More choices that didn't exist before. More new paths that now exist.

I want to address a few things in the video: 1. Powercreep Plants aren't always the nerf targets. In your first point, you talk about how newer plants tend to be overpowered compared to the older plants, but this doesn't really excuse nerfing a plant like Winter Melon, which was already in the game when it first came out. I'll discuss this more in a later point, but I think for plants like Winter Melon, there are better ways to balance them for mods. That being said, overpowered new plants definitely need to be toned down, sometimes immensely, to work in a mod. So no disagreements there. 2. Nerfs sometimes go too far I'm gonna use Winter Melon in Reflourished as an example here. I played Reflourished during the time where Steam Ages was a brand new zone, and Winter Melon: Costs more sun, fires slower, deals less damage, doesn't have a good uptime on chill This... is a little overkill. Expensive Plants are already questionable to use at some of the more challenging parts of Reflourished, but, I won't deny base Winter Melon's power. So how would I fix it? Make Winter Melon an upgrade plant again. Seed Slots are an expensive commodity in PVZ2 in general, so if you make Winter Melon cost a ton, and require Melon Pult as a base upgrade, now you have to sacrifice a good earlygame and two seed slots for a potentially strong lategame. You can also bring back Winter Melon's long recharge time this way, there's a reason people didn't use it in every level in PVZ1. 3. Sun Economy is key If you balance the sun economy well enough, certain plants don't need to be nerfed to oblivion to become on par with more standard plants. If you aren't making enough Sun to get your Winter Melons up in time, for example, then you'll have to consider a cheaper alternative. But levels with more flags could be slowed down at the earlygame, to give plants like Winter Melon their time to shine. Simply put: prevent the player from having too easy a time making sun, increase recharge times and sun costs of stronger plants, and you've got a challenging mod.

The greatest intro to a video ever made

shuttle: "am i a joke to you"

The fundamental problem with the nerf vs buff debate is that you go in circles. "Why not buff everything else?" "Then the zombies are weak" "Then buff the zombies" congratulations, you have fixed the game in exponentially more work than needed to be done without changing the core experience. If one thing is a problem, you do not buff everything else in the game around it, you nerf that thing to be in line with the game. This is true in singleplayer and multiplayer games. Let's take an extreme example, say there was a peashooter variant that dealt 10 billion damage and otherwise behaves like a normal pea shooter. Why would you use anything other than that? You have two options now, allow this plant to centralize the game completely and make everything else play catch up to it, or nerf it down to a reasonable level. By nerfing it, you allow other strategies to shine through. By buffing everything else, you would need to either tweak every other aspect of the game and effectively have nerfed that peashooter, or make everything else essentially just a carbon copy of it in a different color.

Creeps the detective So, little Timmy is now dead, but we have to realize why he died.

14:30 yo I love this guy!

Wow... 1:59 Someone finally using potion craft in a video

I to, spontaneously combust upon failure in PVZ2 0:22

That intro is something else.

How I feel about it: Buffing compared to nerfing allows devs to work with higher stats, which helps them find the perfect balance easier as they can make (percent-wise) smaller tweaks to make everything they want. However: this forces everything to be perfectly balanced to do everything they are designed to. Issue here: it becomes "have problem, use solution" and the game becomes easy. Things need to be proportionately unbalanced in order to achieve balance. It also encourages diversity and allows for weaker units to still be viable by allowing strong units alone to be less usable. Look at pvzh, generally low stats and a horrid stat growth compared to sun (4 stats for 1 "mana", 5 for 2, and 6 for 3, usually +2 per mana afterwards). Now this does bring a lot of imbalance to the game (cowboy... *cough cough*), but it also makes it so you arent just running cards to counter play, but youre running what you want to do and reacting how you must, it forces the game to be... consistently fresh in a way that makes it fun. I think this is a great concept for multiplayer games like pvzh, but other games suffer from this like fps games, as you can only be one character at a time and its tough to be a weak support unit without feeling left out. Despite this, base pvz2 does a great job of handing you the right tools for the job throughout your adventure... ok primal potato mine should lose like 1/3 of its dps and be reworked to be an aoe damager to weaken, but not kill, zombies.

One note about balance from a Warhammer 40K/Kill Team player and ex-magic player. If you only buff you will have eventually the problem of powercreep and the dominant strategies will become more uniform. That's what happened in 9ed and what is happening with magic and Yu-Gi-Oh.

9:28 35 seconds? Im sure its at least a minute...

I wonder if any mod has ever tried balancing instant plants (or aoe attacks in general) the way btd6 does it by having pierce caps.

Honestly the fact it's single players make buffs even better as an options. You can add bullshit in the game. If it's fun and enjoyable for a long emperiod of time (so deep enouth) then it just work. Except if something is way too good. You should buff some enemies to make that option less brain dead or buff other things to bring it to the same lvl. It's not really power creap because you never uped the best power possible. You just made it more Intresting because now you need or you can use more things in different ways. Nerfing here is just a loss to the player. And a win for nobody because you are alone against an AI. sometimes it make stuff more fun to nerf a stupid strategy. But except if it bypass the best challenges, stupid starts are a healthy thing for a solo game to have. You should more empheqise the fact it will not carry you very far and give more challenges to the player to compare themselves to others. And the best scores and achievement are done without using a stupid strat. And if you really don't want to powercreap at all then do the buff in reverse. Instead of making it stronger you can either (as I already said) make a new enemy that has new property. Or reduce the amount of condition to get it. Ex here reduce the cost to match what people are willing to spend to use it. And if you really gotta nerf something do it intelligently. WHY? is it good. Too much damage? Is that it's main purpose? Well maybe you can lower it and give it another utility. Or make him do damage in a different way that is not fit for every situation while maybe making him even better in some others. Balancing a game is really tricky. And how players perceive and understand thoses is probably the hardest part. A game that does it perfectly is bloon td 6. Or a game that does it in a fun way. Just mixing the meta from time to time would be paladins (but they have their fair share of op characters but instead of taking stuff away they change the condition. This perk is bad nobody pick it, and this feature is to broken. They delete the perk and change it to have this broken feature behind it. Now they gotta chose.)

just noticed you used a bug fables clip and just wanted to say based

The intro alone made me like. It caught me do off guard when he said I died and im in the ground😂😂

When u call a frame perfect challenge "casual" because theres only one button to press

Buffing pvz2 plants is like giving steroids to a bodybuilder