Update Discussion: September 20, 2019

[Sims]

The update notes are here: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2264-Update-Notes-September-20-2019

Discussion is in this thread! But please remember to report any bugs through the in-game reporting system so we can track them.

[Gortomo]

Liking the review of combat refresh and how the different armors work. I was just yesterday looking for a list of sidebar abilities to figure out the combat skill ones also. Thanks for the instant gratification!

[Yaffy]

The upgraded combat refresh is very nice. I didn't really think combat refreshes were too weak honestly, but the buff is quite dramatic (Especially for leather). I don't think it's worth going out of your way to build specifically to upgrade your combat refresh, but it certainly makes it more important/useful to use a combat refresh each 15 seconds. I don't think it'll be super useful in higher level combat but it will certainly makes things much easier for lower level players. At high levels it's still nice since it's like having another firstaid/armor patch (And a much better one at that) but combat is too fast for it to matter too much outside of heavy stalling.

The armor sets are an interesting idea, but a little disappointing since they just seem like another combat refresh (Or a buff to combat refresh). I think it would have been an interesting opportunity for a more passive effect that fit each armor type. Something that seems a bit off too is that both leather and metal's set effects are related to survivability, but the leather effect seems significantly better than metal's. I could see metal's being more useful if the player had a very small max armor pool compared to their health pool (So it would be easy to have no armor but still have a lot of health), but metal armor gives you the most armor points! I don't really think it's a big deal, but I think it would have made more sense if leather's set bonus was related to damage dealing or maybe evasion while metal's was focused on survivability via regeneration or mitigation.

Some of the new generic mods are pretty neat. I can see that there's a little push for some sort of "Combat refresh" centered build by combining organic armor's set bonus with the combat refresh mods, but I can't see it being terribly useful without heavy mitigation to back it up. The mod that causes basic attacks to restore power could potentially be quite helpful in the right hands. The mod that reduces enemy rage attack damage is pretty hilarious and would be really nice support for groups on builds with an AoE nice attack. There's quite a lot of mods for healers which is really interesting, the ones that give armor regeneration and damage reduction to minor healing look especially useful! I would definitely like to see some healing builds with some generic mods splashed in. I know a lot of people are allergic to generic mods, but for healers I think this is worth the effort.

[Dibbuk]

Fist aid has been fubared. Amazing and astounding kits (the only two recipes in first aid) now require that you learn all precious first aid kit recipes in toolcrafting, but then, does not recognize either the Master first aid kit recipe (toolcradting level 35), nor any of the master first aid kits made with the master first aid kit recipe.

Bug reports filed before yesterday's patch, but no fix implemented, so the bug still exists.

Oops

[Daguin]

golden acorns

:confused:

[Ranperre]

Combat refresh is nice. Helps fix some power issues that crept up last patch and extends fights a bit since it's sometimes better to hit your combat refresh earlier (lessening your immediate damage) in order to be able to use it a second time during a pull/fight.

Would be nice if flowers (single flowers + bouquets) got a slight boost to make up for this though.

[Ranperre]

Ok so I might have given Jack some bad information in game. Necro and priest gear drops aren't fixed after your hotfix Sunday morning. I could have sworn that I got a drop (on priest/fire, with priest mods) earlier in the day, but just went through 2 hourlong gk runs on necro/knife with absolutely no necro mods on gear. Priest/druid in my group had a similar issue re: priest gear/mods.

EDIT: Priest drops are now working, can't confirm necro but they should be.

The generic mods are really increasing the opportunity cost associated with shamanic armor. These mods are kinda 1/3-1/2 of the power of a normal mod, but it's great to have the option, esp on pieces that don't have good shamanic options (weapon slot with core attack damage in particular).

Hassium availability feels about right. It's not a tulip/fae mysotis situation, they're still quite rare, but if you spend enough time in gaz you'll find a few (speaking of, giff level 80 winter set). I believe that the barter isn't intended to be used regularly, but 7 per hassium is really, really bad. At the "worst of times" glowy yellows go for 1k each, and you're barely going to get 7k profit after hunting down that motherlode. That makes these things a net loss, unless metal awesome and above starts selling for 200% value price. I don't think your average joe or even a wealthy person skilling will want to pay 600c per awesome slab in the long term. 5 crystals per hassium would be much more appropriate.

The set bonuses are great, but there might be an issue related to getting more than one combat refresh. I've had situations where I received three in a row. I'm sorry I can't provide more information than that, but if anyone else is experiencing this please confirm. It's been happening on all three sets I used regularly this weekend.

Motherlode physics is wonderful!!! I did 150 motherlodes in Ilmari this weekend and not a single one got stuck in a hill, and I never died after mining one (this happened when you got stuck in it). I'll do Kur sometime this week and try to get the motherlodes stuck in mountains.

Thanks for the ice magic ring... ice magic kind of needed some love.

[Mbaums]

I only tested the cloth set combat refresh boost out so far, and it feels great.

Eventually I'll test organic armor with tanking. I hope as levels go up it remains possible to obtain each type of armor via drops. I do agree that this buff makes the flower effect weaker, and I'm not sure how I feel about the bard song that increases armor from combat refresh. On one hand, more combat refreshes will be used, on another before it's effect was like a full set of plate on the player, now its like... just the armor from an organic set, oozing with snail slime in song form.

As far as the new endurance mods go-- I really like them and some of my builds will need to change to add them in.

But onto mentalism. Phrenology, to me, is something roughly as hard as unlocking Battle Chem and it opens up more options for Psych and Ment. It takes the psych/ment combo and makes it something very powerful, assuming the player is willing to put in the time to grind out the skill (elf being the hardest). The biggest downside is running into something that resist psych, and then you are just in trouble which I think is good.

The phrenology and critical heals are neat, and if I'm reading it correctly, heals here refers to power, health and armor, which is rad. It's hard for me to notice these things working because I don't use a dedicated healer setup, my build is more like... side healer who is really a DPS. If the critical damage mod gets renamed to critical ability, that miiight clear up some things.


Phrenology, psych, and ment at a very high level becoming too powerful is tricky. I can't agree or disagree with that. I like the idea of skills that requires a lot of work but have a good pay off (but not like Lycan!) A lot of people see psych/ment, try and it and the cool downs make it an absolute struggle, and it's abandoned before its perfected. Or I've seen people get frustrated how their damage goes from a god to nothing depending on the mob-type. I think the niche and randomness is good. You can't fully rely on the ability to blow things away. In a group though, the cool downs make careful pulling (or careful rounding up every mob) a boon where it melts faces with a huge cool down.

But I'm judging phrenology at a cap of 50, and not 80. I don't know at which point it becomes too much, but a mob can only be so-dead and it's not like psych and ment have a lot of AOEs to make it an OP farming build. But it is awesome at single targets. Is it the frequency or size of the crits that are a problem? Going to spit ball some ideas: A forced critical cool-down would be bad and un-fun. Having phrenology govern the crit rate critical hit damage might be too simple, because it would feel like the player just stumbled onto the setup vs sought it out. If something must be done, making player critical damage an echo effect that triggers after 5-seconds could be a good middle ground. The player would likely still get the same damage dealt on bosses, but would not be able to solo elites. I think best overall solution would be via content-- just make sure you mix properly resistant mobs throughout humanoid-populations.

[Yaffy]

Just as a note about Mentalism/Psychology crits, I think a simple idea that could make psychology/mentalism a bit more fun for beginners and avoid scaling too high would be to give all players a base crit chance without phrenology, but to reduce the amount of crit chance you gain from phrenology.

One iffy problem I've noticed is that some beginners get confused about crits with mentalism/psychology and ask things like "What's my crit chance" or "How do I crit?", because it's implied that there should be some base critical hit chance when there is none. What causes this confusion is that you can get mods to boost critical damage on mentalism and psychology at very low levels, far before players should even have phrenology. If players started with some crit chance then these mods would make much more sense at low levels and alleviate some of the early frustration with the skills. To compensate phrenology would give less crit chance, but then this would allow for the skill's cap to be raised.

[Citan]

cozycats - Aggro didn't change in Kur at all (or anywhere else, except possibly some tweaks in the Fae Realm), so I don't really know what that's going on there. Respawns likewise haven't been changed, so I'll need more information to try to figure out what's wrong.

If you're being surprised by spawns, do you have the recipe that gives you spawn premonitions? It sounds like that may help. (And will also help us tell if the problem is from extreme respawns or extreme monster aggro.)

RE: app focus: here I have some bad news -- I promise that the game isn't the one changing your app focus. (The Unity engine doesn't really even give me the programmatic ability to change focus, probably because of Unity's multi-platform nature. I could write special focus-changing code that's specific to your OS, but I definitely didn't.)

It does sound like something's interfering with the game's focus, but it's not caused by the game. It could be caused by software that came with a new peripheral, for instance... it's not really something I can debug from here, but try the usual things: shut down everything you can, temporarily disable virus protection, etc., and see if you can isolate the cause.

[Celerity]

We've had a bit more time to try out the fae realm and make lvl 80 sets so I've come up with a few more things to say:

Firstly, I'd like to take back what I said about the midge barters locking gifting being annoying. I still think there are a lot of non-worthwhile barters such as the phoenix feather one, phoenix beaks, pixie dust and a few others I'm probably forgetting but I don't mind it as a mechanic so much anymore. Probably partly because there's new stuff to be unlocked with royal jelly so I have a reason to do them again, but also the initial rush has worn off and fewer honeycomb runs are happening. Before I would call you crazy if you wanted to farm bees for the hour or so it would take to get all the stingers for 1 barter compared to getting 10+ royal jelly in a honeycomb run in a similar amount of time, but with fewer runs happening it's not as realistic to use them as your only source of jelly anymore.

Secondly, I think damage scales too well from lvl 70 to 80 with the high damage skills such as fire magic, archery and hammer as well as the epic attack damage from skills such as druid, psychology and mentalism. Essentially the combination of increase in base damage, multipliers, flat additives etc all combined is too much for the dps skills but also the increase in base damage especially with the epic attacks is significant.

To be more specific, I'll talk about my build, hammer/mentalism, which I have focused to be an almost entirely pure dps build. At lvl 70, using max-enchanted yellow gear I could manage to hit roughly 4.5k with my pound to slag ability, using adrenaline wave with extra crushing damage mod, discharging strike and latent charge beforehand with the +epic attack damage mods and the extra damage to enemies with 66% or over rage too.

Now at lvl 80 with the same mods but a higher lvl and still missing the boots, which have a pound to slag damage mod, I'm able to hit 8k. The problem is that the fae realm elites for the most part have around 20k hp which is about the same as some of the mobs in gk, yet I can now deal 3.5k more damage with a single skill. When I group for the bounties, I feel lucky if I manage to get 3 abilities off on a single elite before it dies. I know this is because they're probably designed for groups of 3-4 so I'm not asking for every mob in the fae realm to have 40k hp, but in reality if a group can fill to 3 or 4, it normally fills all the way to 6 since the first few players are the hardest to get. The only exception to this is maybe the phoenixes since with 16k hp they can be relatively easily duoed and I would say they should be easy since they essentially gate fire magic research for 70+. The honeycomb mobs with 40k hp are much more reasonable and I think for the mobs in the new dungeon this is a good number OR player damage should be retuned a little bit.

Specifically to hammer too, you will nearly always benefit from the extra damage when the rage meter is 66% filled. Even my lowest damage skill - leaping smash with 1000 damage is enough to completely fill an enemy's rage meter and that's with only 1 of the mods that increases the rage I generate.

This is not a universal problem, my other main build ice magic/battle chemistry doesn't have unfair scaling in my opinion, but it also has no epic attacks and few damage combos and I think it only becomes a problem when it's everything combined.

I think elite damage is actually well balanced now with the new combat refresh. I use leather armour and the full heal helps improve survivalability a lot on my dps-focused build, without being op and allowing me to solo elites like they're nothing. I tried to do something similar a while ago by modding reconstruct and throwing it into my build as a single heal, but I generally found that modding it wasn't worthwhile since it could only heal for a bit over what I would take from 1 attack anyway. The combat refresh used to be the same as this but now I would say it is very useful and just what was needed.

I still have power problems, but I also don't use cloth armour, partly because fae mollusc slime is too difficult to gather in large quantities compared to the ease of leather but also because I already made my leather set before this update and I'm not going to make another entire set. I wouldn't say the power problems are game-breaking for me though, rather I see them just as the tradeoff for hammer's dps, which all-in-all means it's probably in a good spot right now.

[Dibbuk]

Citan, I too have noticed more spawns closer to the fires at Jace Sorel and Lamashu, and with a larger agro range. There is still the problem with stun spamming by wolves, Yeti, and Orc to the point where if you get stun spammed, you simply cannot do anything but stand there while you die, but that is nothing new.

My ping rates are consistent around 60 fps, and then the game freezes and I am disconnected. Relogging gets me the "player already in world" message, with the suggestion to exit and relog. Usually, by the time I can get back in, i am dead.

[Ranperre]

Let's talk about snail slime a little bit. Right now, two slimes turn into 1.2 fae silk, meaning in the long run, you'll return 2.4 fae silk per hour on snails. There is currently no other way to get it that I know of. Honestly, it's a workable system for "end game" gear at the moment.

The problem comes in the future, when we're leveling tailoring past 80 and doing astounding tailoring work orders. Collecting slimes is such a PITA that it only makes sense to make cloth pieces that are max enchanted. You can get 2.4 fae silk per hour and 13.2 vervadium per day, I posit that one glowy crystal run is easier than 5-6+ fae silk runs (remember, many pieces require two fae silk). Should fae silk really be as much of a limiting factor as vervadium? The large value loss when making astounding leather gear (about 1k per piece) is absolutely nothing compared to the fae silk requirement.

Suggested changes:
- More snails/milkings with a longer cooldown. So instead of 4 snails every hour, 8-12 snails every six hours or allow us to milk each snail 2-3 times.
- Halve the ingredients for the fae silk recipe. So 1 snail slime turns into 1 fae silk with a 20% chance at a second.
- Make snail slime droppable by something farmable.
- Reduce the fae silk requirement to 1 per piece - some would remain unchanged, but no piece would require two.

I enjoy the grinding in Gorgon. However, with the current system, I will never be doing astounding tailoring work orders and I'll be leveling tailoring to 100 on great/amazing, even with the changes to xp based on level difference. I hope some changes will be made to the currently implemented slime system.