Update Discussion: October 15, 2020

[Sims]

The update notes are here: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2693-Update-Notes-October-15-2020

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

[Glythe]

I have always been a huge fan of the live events for this game as they add a great deal of charm. It's really cool that you have added some 'end game' items to buy with those tokens.

That being said I would like to ask you to reconsider the RNG aspect of gaining tokens (as explained briefly by Jack yesterday in game who said it was a chance event). I can understand the desire to limit how many tokens people get so that everyone doesn't have the two really cool items in a few months.


Suggestion: Limit the events so they have an invisible buff cooldown? Change the reward pool so that if I go to the event and complete it then I get a token (assuming I have not gotten one recently before the cooldown for that event has refreshed).

Question : Do you think the event would be more fun or less fun if the Treasure chest appeared for some people but not for others?

[Ranperre]

Suggestion added in game too: Make bouquets useful. When you increased the stats recovered by combat refreshes (it was on the order of 2-3, right?), you didn't increase the combat refresh power bonus from flower bouquets. In order to give us a workaround for your power increases, please consider doubling or tripling the power refresh of bouquets.

[Celerity]

Finished the halloween event now and really enjoyed it, had a lot of fun and formed lots of different groups to do all the different tasks, which I always prefer to solo content. Of course, the solo stuff was good too and the rewards felt worthwhile even for an end game player.

Especially liked the hearts, the 5th heart felt like the first real challenging boss in the game, although I'm sure with a meta group it would still feel easy. Was a welcome surprise that the casual group we had with only 5 players, 2 of which were bats without gear, didn't just completely steamroll everything already. Instead we had to actually meditate/do calligraphy, buff up, unbat and get a 6th player which was nice to actually have some challenge for a change.

The number of quests felt a bit overwhelming at first, but in the end I was glad there was so much to do. Not sure if/where it will stop but I could see it reaching a point in the future where there may be almost too many quests to do, at least, too many given at one time. I think it would be ok if there were longer quest chains.


The new reusable storage box and portable fox vendor from the live event token vendor seem like really cool concepts. I often wondered what would have to be introduced to get my interest as an end game player, but these definitely have!


I appreciate the faster boss respawns, too many times on the daily quests I would end up waiting ages for the respawns.


I don't know how I feel about the increased power costs entirely, it's only minor for hammer but for mentalism the power is way up on the epic attack and even the normal attacks have comparable power usage to hammer now. Makes me feel 2 negative things:

1. Almost seems pointless to go for low damage skill lines like mentalism now if the power usages are the same as the high damage skill lines
2. I'm worried everyone is just forced into cloth armour at this point

I already made the switch over to cloth myself after being an advocate of leather for years. Spring fairy was better for my build for damage, but also it just reached the point, even before the last patch that it simply wasn't viable to use leather for hammer at least, even when using flowers, the best food in the game, pineal juice, cranium lotion, max power mods and digestifs. In my opinion it's just not viable to use anything other than cloth anymore, except maybe if you're playing a pure support or pure tank role. But why a support would want anything other than cloth I'm not sure, so it could just be tanks. Of course you could always go for the power cost mods on your gear, but I think the difference between cloth and leather/metal/organic armour isn't anywhere near as significant as the difference between damage mods and power cost mods.

I think it has impacted my damage a bit, but honestly not to any significant amount, especially on a 1 mob pull. I think it also has more of an impact in weaker groups. Strong groups have enough damage to nuke down however many mobs before running out of power and it's just slightly raised the damage threshold needed to do that, while making it worse for groups below the threshold. It has slowed down combat marginally though and maybe increased the need for flower or other max power buffs.

[Citan]

I've talked about this before, but to catch people up, here's some background on where we are with high level balance.

I'm moving small pieces of the balance equation around to try to make the game work better, like tweaking Power curves to help reinforce ability roles. Ultimately, though, the elephant in the room is that players can have way, WAY too many offensive treasure mods at once. Until I fix that problem, these other fixes will seem weird, because they aren't fixing the core problem.

The core problem from a player's POV can be summed up as "I don't need to defend myself if I can finish combat in 4.1 seconds". This playstyle means you are more than willing to drop defense in order to hit the magic DPS level where everything is trivial. And if something is higher, you just die.

This is very poor game design that gets worse and worse at high level, and I have to fix it, but I don't know the precise way to fix it. That's why I'm fixing small parts of the equation, seeing how it affects things, and trying to figure out the best approach. Ultimately the change will be a severe nerf, and I would like to get it right the first time.

My knee-jerk idea was to just reduce the total number of treasure mods you can have on at once. But now I'm thinking maybe a new mechanic that forces players to take a certain % of defensive mods. (Say 40%.) I don't have a mechanic for that in mind, but one easy approach would be to make all the mods on certain slots (say chest, legs, necklace) be defense/survival. That's awkward for pure DPS skills, though, because their defense/survival mods would be crappy. But maybe that's fine. Actually that's probably for the best.

Anyway, I realize nobody likes being nerfed, but I really don't have the ability to present fun and exciting battles to high-level players right now. I can present fun and exciting battles to the top 5% of players, sure. But everybody else will get wrecked, because the top few percent of players can deal, what, maybe 500% more damage than the average player with crap mods? That's really fun for advancement as a player because you can slowly see yourself getting MUCH more powerful. But it's just too big of a power differential for us to create content for, and you will quickly find the game un-fun because nothing is challenging. (Or else it would be un-fun up until the end, because everything would be balanced to be too hard until you finished your 70-mod treasure set.)

It's my fault for letting the balance problem get out of hand, but I do have to fix it, and I will. Expect to see more small nerfs as I work things out, as well as at least one major nerf as I restructure the game to allow it to be balanceable and fun.

There will be more info about that nerf before it comes, so you won't be blindsided by it. I'm not sure when it will happen because I don't know what it is. So far I haven't found an approach that makes me go "aha, that's it!" The closest solution I have is forcing certain slots to be defense/support mods, but that will be very weird for some combat skills. I'm still hopeful that there's a cleverer solution.

(And, of course, rebalancing players means rebalancing monsters. Monster rebalancing is much, much easier than player rebalancing, though -- since monsters don't use mods! Monster balance can be changed around as much as needed to fit where player DPS ultimately ends up.)

[Aionlasting]

I've talked about this before, but to catch people up, here's some background on where we are with high level balance.

I'm moving small pieces of the balance equation around to try to make the game work better, like tweaking Power curves to help reinforce ability roles. Ultimately, though, the elephant in the room is that players can have way, WAY too many offensive treasure mods at once. Until I fix that problem, these other fixes will seem weird, because they aren't fixing the core problem.

The core problem from a player's POV can be summed up as "I don't need to defend myself if I can finish combat in 4.1 seconds". This playstyle means you are more than willing to drop defense in order to hit the magic DPS level where everything is trivial. And if something is higher, you just die.

This is very poor game design that gets worse and worse at high level, and I have to fix it, but I don't know the precise way to fix it. That's why I'm fixing small parts of the equation, seeing how it affects things, and trying to figure out the best approach. Ultimately the change will be a severe nerf, and I would like to get it right the first time.

My knee-jerk idea was to just reduce the total number of treasure mods you can have on at once. But now I'm thinking maybe a new mechanic that forces players to take a certain % of defensive mods. (Say 40%.) I don't have a mechanic for that in mind, but one easy approach would be to make all the mods on certain slots (say chest, legs, necklace) be defense/survival. That's awkward for pure DPS skills, though, because their defense/survival mods would be crappy. But maybe that's fine. Actually that's probably for the best.

Anyway, I realize nobody likes being nerfed, but I really don't have the ability to present fun and exciting battles to high-level players right now. I can present fun and exciting battles to the top 5% of players, sure. But everybody else will get wrecked, because the top few percent of players can deal, what, maybe 500% more damage than the average player with crap mods? That's really fun for advancement as a player because you can slowly see yourself getting MUCH more powerful. But it's just too big of a power differential for us to create content for, and you will quickly find the game un-fun because nothing is challenging. (Or else it would be un-fun up until the end, because everything would be balanced to be too hard until you finished your 70-mod treasure set.)

It's my fault for letting the balance problem get out of hand, but I do have to fix it, and I will. Expect to see more small nerfs as I work things out, as well as at least one major nerf as I restructure the game to allow it to be balanceable and fun.

(And, of course, rebalancing players means rebalancing monsters. Monster rebalancing is much, much easier than player rebalancing, though -- since monsters don't use mods! Monster balance can be changed around as much as needed to fit where player DPS ultimately ends up.)

With all do respect sir...

Why don't you start by fixing that atrocious idea that damage mitigation is based on CURRENT armor instead of MAXIMUM armor? That would eliminate that jerkiness in combat that occurs after the first or second hit when half your armor is gone and suddenly you're taking way more damage to your health because your ability to mitigate has been erased and also because half of the damage you take goes right to your health anyway (and now alot more as you're mitigating so much less due to half your armor being gone too).

Your way to calculate how players take damage is absolutely strange. You need a constant mitigation not one that varies widely based on players current armor. Look at your shield mods too, the one that lowers the break point for mitigation, that one which states that instead of 25 armor points is 1 point of damage mitigated it gives you 20 points of armor mitigates 1 point of damage. That's a great mod but if you read it closely it states that its based on CURRENT armor ... and so current armor in combat fluctuates drastically and so tanks cannot be tanks and if health goes from full to 0 in 2.4 seconds.

THEN once TANKS can actually BE TANKS, you can double or triple ELITE mob HP so combat can LAST and you don't have to worry about ridiculous nuke damage killing your group mobs instantly because now you have tanks who can take hits, healers who can heal, and dps that has to dps through alot more HP. If you just buff elite mob hp to make combat last longer, there is no tank who can survive the incoming damage long enough because of how wacky your mitigation formula is.

Love the game citan.... but can you address this? Thanks.

[Citan]

Aionlasting - yeah, that's another smallish part of the equation I can work on. But I don't think it will ultimately prevent players from making ultra-death-nukes. It will just mean you need a really good tank in order to group up, and everybody else will be a paper-thin nuker. I don't think that fixes the fundamental issue of too much DPS.

Same with other combat mechanics like Rage management. They need fixing, but they seem a little bit ancillary to the core issue.

[Niph]

It seems to me the fix would be to change the rarity of power-improving mechanics. If it takes 100h to get that 10% improvement (say, a yellow item that gives one more mod), then 5% of the population will have enough play time to get it and you have that problem. If the rarity is changed, say to 10h of play, a large percentage of the population can get it, and problem fixed. You balance for them.

Problem is, of course, that very active players get bored since they can reach perfection pretty quickly, relatively speaking. You could keep them happy with more content, but that's probably not an option.

My suggestion would be to reduce the number of mods, say to 4 top instead of the 6/7 you can get today (depending on slots), and make that goal reachable for most players. Then add these rare drops with a nice color on them (yellow!) that don't give one more mod, but a fixed boost. Make it 1% universal damage on main hand, and 1% to all healing on legs, whatever.

Very active players can still hope for a set better than average, but don't throw away the balance too much.

Being an extremely active player myself, I realize this would make the game less interesting, however you could compensate that by giving extra perks to these rare stuff. For example, the ability to dye them, or something different but cosmetic only. Or +1 inventory slot. Possibilities!

[Celerity]

My point was that a minor power change, such as in this patch just forces people into the meta more (glass cannon dps with cloth) since the meta groups are completely unaffected by the change since they kill things too quickly for the power change to matter whilst non-meta groups are punished.

I agree that something major needs to be changed if balance is something you want to care about. I'm just worried that the nerf might be too severe because some of the content can be challenging already in weaker groups, it's only when you have meta groups that everything is a breeze.

[Aionlasting]

It seems to me the fix would be to change the rarity of power-improving mechanics. If it takes 100h to get that 10% improvement (say, a yellow item that gives one more mod), then 5% of the population will have enough play time to get it and you have that problem. If the rarity is changed, say to 10h of play, a large percentage of the population can get it, and problem fixed. You balance for them.

Problem is, of course, that very active players get bored since they can reach perfection pretty quickly, relatively speaking. You could keep them happy with more content, but that's probably not an option.

My suggestion would be to reduce the number of mods, say to 4 top instead of the 6/7 you can get today (depending on slots), and make that goal reachable for most players. Then add these rare drops with a nice color on them (yellow!) that don't give one more mod, but a fixed boost. Make it 1% universal damage on main hand, and 1% to all healing on legs, whatever.

Very active players can still hope for a set better than average, but don't throw away the balance too much.

Being an extremely active player myself, I realize this would make the game less interesting, however you could compensate that by giving extra perks to these rare stuff. For example, the ability to dye them, or something different but cosmetic only. Or +1 inventory slot. Possibilities!

I'm in favor of something to this extent.

Yellow items could have unique affixes not present on any other quality type item. These could be randomly generated as well as with other mods, but again, only attainable on a legendary item drop.

For example,

A support class legendary affix not acquirable on any other rarity level could be something like "Increases all party members vigor by 50." (or w/e appropriate amount for the level range of the legendary item).

Maybe a tank affix could be something like, "Reflect 2% of incoming damage back at the attacker."

One for damage could be something like "All attacks have a 2% chance to critically hit."

You could get really creative with affixes like these and since they can only be generated on legendary items and legendary items would be very rare , they wouldn't break game balance and also you could make it so that they are only a slight power increase but unique and interesting enough that players covet them and want to keep the hunt on for that perfect item.

[Aionlasting]

Aionlasting - yeah, that's another smallish part of the equation I can work on. But I don't think it will ultimately prevent players from making ultra-death-nukes. It will just mean you need a really good tank in order to group up, and everybody else will be a paper-thin nuker. I don't think that fixes the fundamental issue of too much DPS.

Same with other combat mechanics like Rage management. They need fixing, but they seem a little bit ancillary to the core issue.

Thank you sir. I appreciate the response. I can tell you as one whose played your game for five years now or more, this has always been a problem. Whether I was playing as a tank, or playing as a support class trying to heal a tank. The damage is just absolutely wonkey, there's no predictability or consistency to it, you're either dead or alive, and when the game is in that kind of state, why go for anything other than damage? Kill them within 3 seconds before you die yourself. If you offer players incentives to need tanks, support, and make monsters reflect those needs (atleast as far as group content goes), then its at least reasonable to surmise that players will begin to fill those roles and group content will be more than just nuke everything down or die.

Either way, I wish you luck sir.

[Yaffy]

My knee-jerk idea was to just reduce the total number of treasure mods you can have on at once. But now I'm thinking maybe a new mechanic that forces players to take a certain % of defensive mods. (Say 40%.) I don't have a mechanic for that in mind, but one easy approach would be to make all the mods on certain slots (say chest, legs, necklace) be defense/survival. That's awkward for pure DPS skills, though, because their defense/survival mods would be crappy. But maybe that's fine. Actually that's probably for the best.


There is something in the game that can push defensive properties onto players: The base properties on white gear.
After all, everyone has some armor whether they like it or not.

Speaking as a tank player who tries to stack defensive mods rather than offensive ones, one of the strangest things about tank best in slot gear is that many pieces are lower level, simply because of their defensive base stats being superior to treasure effects. For example, the Hunter's Breastplate is one of the best tank chest pieces because it gives 10% fire and cold resistance which is incredibly good. It's impossible to get a level 80 hunter's breastplate in the game and therefore you'll have weaker treasure effects, but it doesn't matter because as a tank it's worth sacrificing the bonus damage from higher level mods because the elemental resist is so valuable and limited.

So if you want to try and push defensive effects onto players, my suggestion is this: Weaken the effects of random treasure effects, but improve the base effects of equipment, primarily defensively.

By doing so you will:
1. Weaken the maximum amount of damage players can do.
2. Push defensive bonuses onto players.
3. Shrink the power difference between poorly geared players and well geared players.
4. Improve the flexibility players have with defensive gear choices and tanking

The easiest way to do this would be to crank up armor numbers on player equipment across the board, but I think there is a lot of potential in equipment base stats. I would love it if the majority of equipment pieces had additional non-offensive bonuses to them, similar to the Hunter's Breastplate's resistances. For example, metal armor pieces could generally lower physical damage while cloth pieces could provide magical resistance. You could have inherent bonuses on armor for healing, damage reduction, regeneration, evasion, power regeneration, taunt, etc. which would give players lots of decisions to make on which piece of base equipment they want to have.

One big problem I have with some of the other suggestions (Like lowering the maximum number of mods on gear) is that it kind of takes away part of the fun with Project Gorgon. Yes the power difference between full yellows and reds is too much, but yellows are a goal that people want to work towards so they play more, and having more mods lets us be more flexible with our builds which is also a lot of fun. I think a suggestion like mine will make the game more fun by offering more choices to players to customize their build, while also giving a good excuse to nerf treasure effects so player damage is overall weaker.

[Ranperre]

The core problem from a player's POV can be summed up as "I don't need to defend myself if I can finish combat in 4.1 seconds". This playstyle means you are more than willing to drop defense in order to hit the magic DPS level where everything is trivial. And if something is higher, you just die.

On elites:

The reason we don't build defense is because we can't in most situations. Even if I didn't want to get 3-4 shot, or stunned for 4 straight seconds, (or stunned for 4 seconds and killed in 3-4 shots from full health, it happens), I'm not given the ability to by the game. Consider adding % mitigation to dps skills (something like two 10% mods to physical/elemental mitigation would be worth considering, note that finishing blade mod).

Could this game handle a Status_resistance (https://dota2.gamepedia.com/Status_resistance) stat? That would be nice to deal with the crazy stuns these days. I'm not a programmer, but you could give players stun handicaps, so if you have a +4 stun handicap and a mob stuns you, it's like you were stunned for the fifth time (and give mob stuns diminishing returns like you did players). Speaking of, could you increase the minimum stun length on mobs? After you've used 3-4 stuns, they tend to be useless. I used to use stun to "evade" rage attacks (stun > big damage > kill mob / decrease rage), but you can't do that anymore because you don't know how long that stun will last.

[Yaffy]

On elites:

The reason we don't build defense is because we can't in most situations. Even if I didn't want to get 3-4 shot, or stunned for 4 straight seconds, (or stunned for 4 seconds and killed in 3-4 shots from full health, it happens), I'm not given the ability to by the game.

Seconding this. Trying to build "Tanky" in this game isn't an option for the vast majority of skill combinations. End game enemies simply do too much damage while most skill lines don't have proper mitigation options to handle it even if the player wanted to build pure defense in the first place. Even some skills like Cow can't tank properly at end game despite having a lot of defensive options simply because a lot of their options aren't good enough.

[Lyramis]

Nerfing damage and adding regen and/or mitigation to the existing damage mods without changing the number of mods could be fun and it could also make the fights longer without more deaths. Maybe core/nice attacks add mitigation, normal attacks restore armor/hp etc... Making builds with much fewer damage mod slots sounds so much less fun to me. Could even add things like stun and knockback resist to the nerfed damage mods.

First, we had to add basic attacks to the lineup, then we had to have an even(ish) number of mods from both skill sets on our gear. Now, removing damage mods off 3 pieces of gear seems overly restrictive.

[ErDrick]

Protection from armor being sporadic at best and completely unreliable is something I talked about at length in older posts ( as well as suggestions of how to combat that). I even specifically mentioned how almost everyone would end up wearing cloth armor.

Same goes for speed of combat, aka monsters kill you so quickly that your only option in most cases is to build for extreme damage.

If it is easier to adjust ELITE monster stats then it is to nerf players, then please reconsider lowering their ( "their" being elites) damage by at least 30% ( but honestly I'd say more like half) and increase their health by a large margin( by large I mean like 500-1000%). For non-elites this doesn't really need to be done but still might make the game more interesting.

Throwing 15 monsters at a person or party at once just makes these issues even more insane, if you are dead set on that ( and to a lesser extent still keeping the multi-respawn mechanic) then consider using non-elite monsters that aren't each capable of 3 shotting a max geared player.

There will be very little build diversity until monsters stop being 3 hit killing machines. Being stunned for 20 seconds straight by trash is the same situation btw, if they hit you, you basically stand there and die. ( meaning the best way to combat this is to kill them before they can hit you, which works but isn't really fun).

You may want to re-read my essay length posts from the past on this subject. I haven't played in I think about a year now though I'm unsure exactly, but I still loved this game and still read the forums.

if you actually did this, I might even download it again ... but in the end it's your game, if i was so smart I'd have made my own right ... but I do still want to help, so take that how you will.

At the end of the day I'd like to see a game that can still be fun without being forced into meta damage or bust builds. My original builds were NOT damage builds btw, they were sustain ( sustain was FUN btw )... the increase to incoming damage made sustain nearly impossible though , and took away the fun. ( to be clear this increase to which I refer isn't just limited to single mob hits, it's also the amount of mobs you fight at once in most cases).

Anyways, rant over. How have you folks been? I miss this community.

[ProfessorCat]

Some great points and observations have already been made on the topic of rebalancing.

I wanted to echo the idea that building defensively doesn't reward a player compared to building offensively. When I make a build and sacrifice damage mods to become tanky, I will go from surviving 5 hits to surviving 8 hits. As the current system stands, that means surviving from 5 seconds to 8 seconds.

The issue lies that with a build that is sacrificing mods for defense, I die within 8 seconds. The fix (albeit not what is wanted from a development standpoint) is to max a DPS build capable of killing everything in 4.1 seconds, and taking my chances that the 5th mob hit wont kill me before I kill them.

This system is set up on almost a rock paper scissor method of battle, and as solo play is concerned, it's not that fun. The current tactic that works in all situations is to be ranged, and never let the monster get close enough to hit you, while modding out for max DPS. The current "tactics" for handing big groups, and high level elites as a solo player is to sort of exploit the existing limitation on how you can AVOID taking damage altogether, by running, using evasion, and sometimes rage management.

Nobody wants to be nerfed, and I do not believe that the current system is without merits.

The things this system does RIGHT are the rewards of crafting, and rolling max enchanted gear. When you do get the build you want, it feels rewarding, and it's fun to talk shop about the whole process with other players.

I believe mitigating the mods available on gear isn't the solution. Some people WANT to play straight DPS, or at least have the option for one of their builds to do that, and I would hate to see dps builds Pidgeon-holed to one or two combinations because of mod limitations based on best in slot for chest. That would feel like taking away toys, and in my opinion, would remove some of the best parts about the current combat system.

Top Damage combinations are completely contested. There are powerful builds, and knowledgeable players, but I have never seen a consensus on what is top DPS/Meta. Fire/Ice is a very strong combination, and I've seen it played at least 5 different, very effective ways. I've seen Fire/Staff rival it, I've seen Fox/Priest, Warden/Mentalism, Bard/Druid, Sword/Psych, Archery/Ment all do similar feats. It is very very rare in my experience to see a game reach a balance like this. I understand this is not the balance in question, the concern is how strong that top tier is. I hope a solution is found that keeps the best of all options available.

-Suggested Solution
What I have seen mentioned in this thread, in previous threads, and thoughts for balance I have had myself; is to extend the length of combat. A lot has to go into the balance of it all, but the low hanging fruit is Extending mob HP, by a LOT, and reducing the damage mobs deal. Perhaps lengthening the combat refresh to 45 seconds would balance this concept. It would force players to rely on heals, or healing mods, and overall would give a lot more gameplay hours to leveling up, farming for gear, resources, etc. Perhaps even encourage more group-play for efficiency sake.

I trust the development decisions. I love this game, and I understand this is a discussion, and I am grateful that Citan asks for and considers the opinion of the players.

[Celerity]

I've thought about it a bit more and reread the posts carefully. The biggest issue I think actually is just the lack of ability to tank. Only a couple of skills even have access to any level of % based mitigation that actually allows you to survive monster attacks. The base problem comes more down to the fact that flat mitigation as well as player hp/armour scales linearly while mob damage, mob hp/armour and player damage all scale exponentially. % mitigation and evasion are the only tanking things that scale well enough. This means your options for tanking are incredibly limited. I actually think that right now, groups with a good tank are better than all dps groups. The biggest issue is that a tank is not useful until they have a completed build AND it's required that they use a very specific set of skills in order to be useful. If they lack any one element then it doesn't matter if they can get 99% of the aggro of a dps player, if it's not over 100% they're useless and just function as a worse dps player. Similarly even if they can get aggro, if they don't have all their damage mitigation, they will just die too quickly for it to be worthwhile. Additionally, a good tank is much less useful to a weak group than a good dps, so players are naturally drawn to dps. This then extends even further to support, where a good support is only valuable if there's a good tank, and the good tank is only valuable if there's good dps. This is what causes most of the groups to become dps only, even when actually I think the optimally constructed group right now is 1 tank, 1 support and 4 dps. Most players in the process of making a tank or support build find themselves to be useless in groups while they still develop their builds and so end up switching or quitting.

Rather than add % mitigation to more skills (or in addition), how about % max hp or % armour mods. Currently it is possible to achieve stats such as 1300 hp and 1500 armour as a player, but it requires you to commit your entire build to it in order to achieve it, meaning you then lack the mitigation required to go alongside it. With this, player hp/armour would be able to scale much better and make tanking more viable. Making tanking easier means a player wouldn't have to go to Yaffy level dedication to their build before they become useful to a group. This then extends to more groups with tanks and thus more supports feeling useful too. Another option is to make the flat mitigation scale better too, or even the flat max hp provided by skill level and such.

I still think a large nerf is necessary to the damage mod numbers in general, but put it alongside providing more tanking options and it might just work. I don't so much like the idea of being forced into certain mod choices and I don't think all dps groups being able to do content is a bad thing either.

[Mbaums]

I liked the heart mobs. I went in thinking the last one was going to be as hard as Zuke and was pleased that he dominated my unsuspecting group. This happened because his HP was so big refresh timers meant something.

To the balance topic:
Warden is a good example of a skill set where every offensive skill competes for the same slots. When making a build with warden, I kind of find that frustrating. It’s as if there is damage left on the table but I know that’s not the case.

I’m in favor of the solution where elite mobs get rebalanced to have 10x the HP. I think this could also be met with major armor changes. I’ve heard player complaints that armor does not really matter even if you have ~1500 armor and 800 hp, and they’re mostly right. Maybe for every ~200 armor the hp depletion ratio changes? Right now, my understanding is, if you have 800 armor and are hit for 400 damage (after mitigation), 200 goes to health and 200 to HP. I think changing this law with higher armor values and increasing the armor value of leathers and plate could help. The idea is that the HP:armor ratio of cloth users at 80 is the same (roughly 4 health for 3 armor), leather could be the same, and plate should be around 1 health to 3 armor or 4(so at 80, someone with 800 hp would have 2400 armor, and the make believe 800-post mitigation damage might deal like 50 health: 750 armor or something). Massively higher armor values would also make armor heals more significant.

I also agree that a lot of changes need to happen to the white stats of gear. What’s so hard is you don’t want the 95% type of groups to just be unable to compete content. Nerfing damage mods and buffing support should happen but the “how” is where everyone is going to disagree. I’d like more debuff options and healers probably need a reactive(you get hit + heal for X amount) /rune/ward type of heals.

Another method I think could work would be to add universal mods to gear, and every skill can roll “signature support does X” on ring, or “first aid and armor patching is less likely to consume materials” etc and make gear more likely to drop (but not roll) with these mods. For example, lets say I’m running sword and shield and something yellow drops, they see there is are tons of these universal mods on it but its named like “Universal Mod Shield: Signature Support bla bla bla” . I think this would push the player in the direction of transmuting in general because that’s what really divides the top players. The idea behind the universal mods is that the pure support builds don’t add enough compared to the high damage dealers, and this could close the gap.

Immunity wise—this has not been mentioned yet, but I’m in favor of some changes. I am on board with demons being immune to physical and any immunity on individual and optional bosses. I don’t think I like how common trash is immune to cold in WT, which makes the people running ice magic feel like they’re being carried through half of the dungeon. To be clear, I’m fine with ~60% immunities on trash, and 100% on named but not trash totally immune to elemental damage.

[Chilton]

I like to offer the following series of wild proposals (I specialise in those). I propose the following as a thought experiment, if all these proposed systems are implemented in game, how do you guys think it will work? How do you predict the players will behave in game (both hardcore and casual players)? What intricacies of the game have I overlooked? Feel free to offer your thoughts/criticisms.

Warning, epic wall of text incoming.

Of course all the numbers I offer below is purely a blind stab in the dark and subject to balancing adjustments.

Gist of the proposals

It has been stated by Citan that the aim is to have three mods per piece of equipment, lets just make it so that all equipments pieces have three skill mods, regardless of colour/rarity. The colour/rarity will instead increase the effect of the mods. So for example, a white/normal tier item will have 50% of the effectiveness of a gold/legendary tier item, a green tier item 60%, a blue tier item 70%, red tier item 80% and purple tier 90%. Max enchanted items will offer additional effectiveness, say 10% extra for a total of 110% for a gold item, instead of an additional mod. Equipments will automatically have a generic mod and an endurance mod, and those will scale according to the rarity of the item in the same way as skill modifiers.

This will mean that a level 10 gold tier item will have perfect damage modifiers, why would anyone upgrade their equipment? That leads us to my second proposal. The level requirement of items will instead increase the intrinsic properties of the item. For example, an full suit of armour with level requirement of 10 will give only 100 total points of armour, and only gives very slight amount of combat refresh. A full suit of armour with level requirement of 80 will give 800 points of armour and combat refresh appropriate for a level 80 character.

Amulets and rings, main hand and off hand items will all need to have equivalent upgrades accordingly. So for example a level 10 sword might only offer +10% increased slashing damage, but a level 80 sword has + 24% increases slashing damage. There are already amulets in game that gives increasing stat that are divided into tiers, for example the amulet of max health +10 is the first in a series that goes up to +30. What I propose is that for example, the level 10 version of amulet of max health gives +10 health, but the level 80 version gives +80 health.

I further propose that we add more intrinsic stats to armour pieces to differentiate between metal/organic/leather/cloth armour pieces. The current system is that the different armour pieces have relatively small differences in absolute armour value (in my opinion), but a big difference in combat refresh values. I propose that we add another stat to the armour pieces, metal armours grant extra taunt, leather armour grant evasion, cloth armour grant negative taunt, and organic armour grant reflect damage. These all exist in game currently in some form but I propose they are made uniform so that all metal armour grant bonus to taunt, all leather armour grant evasion, etc. An alternative which can be combined with the above suggestion is to make the full set boni (bonuses) stronger. So wearing three pieces of metal armour will grant + 50% taunt, to incentivise wearing mostly one type of armour to fulfill a particular role.

Augmentation will still exist and remain a way of adding an additional skill modifier onto equipments, so that you can get a maximum of 4 mods. The effectiveness of the mod you apply through augmentation will match the tier of the item you extracted it from, rather than the tier of the item you applied it to. So to extract a full 100% effectiveness mod you have to sacrifice a gold item to get it, and to make a best in slot max enchanted 4 mod piece of equipment with maximum effect on all the mods (110%), you have to extract the mod from another max enchanted gold item.

Transmutation will also still exist in game as it does now, and you can obviously use it to roll non-gold tier items to get the mods you want.

I have an even wilder proposal to make, recently Citan tried the idea of allowing us to upgrade a lower tier item to the max level. I didnt get the chance to try this feature but the idea is incredibly appealing to me. I somewhat dislike the idea of everyone at level 80 looking the same because they are wearing the same armour. There are so many interesting art assets in the game that it is a shame that so many of them are not seen at higher levels (I personally love the aesthetics of the knight armour and helm). There is also the issue of many low level items with excellent intrinsic mods, armour pieces with good elemental resistance, and low level amulets with excellent damage modifiers. I once found an amulet in yeti cave that added 10% to electricity damage, which would be best in slot for particular builds except it only spawned with level 40 mods.

I propose we introduce the ability to upgrade an item to the next level (in 5 level increments) using the breakdown product of augmentation. For example, you can upgrade a level 50 sword to level 55 using a recipe that consumes 100 medium main hand beads. But to upgrade it from level 60 to 65 will consume 100 large main hand beads. Taking it a step further, potentially we can upgrade item tiers as well for phlogs. For example we can upgrade a blue tier level 80 sword to red tier by paying 200 quality phlogistons, but upgrading a red tier to purple will cost 500 phlogistons and upgrading a purple tier item to gold will cost 1000 phlogiston. This allows an alternative way to getting gold tier items for players who do a lot of soloing, but it is less efficient than just straight up farming and getting it as a drop.

These are my predictions on how such system will affect player in game behaviour and decision making.

Pure DPS and support character that has reached level 80 for the first time will try to continue using their level 70 gear, which they have invested time an resources into transmuting/augmenting. It will provide them with equivalent damage and healing as level 80 gear, but it will not give as much survivability or sustainability (due to lower combat refresh). There is still the incentive to replace what they have with level 80 gear, but only once they found level 80 gear that matches the rarity of what they have.

Tanking characters by contrast, will try to upgrade to level 80 gear as soon as possible for the greater survivability. They are willing to use red/purple tier gear because it provides them with acceptable damage output to hold aggro (because they are wearing metal armour and have a bonus to taunt, and they possibly also have mods that grant extra taunt), but they will still try to get level 80 gold tier gear to provide extra damage.

Players who have builds that allow a degree of flexibility (like me!) have an incentive to have multiple sets of gear. I might have a unoptimised set of level 80 gear that allows me to be a tank, I can hold aggro well because of the bonus to taunt I can get from metal armour; but I still have my level 70 perfectly rolled gold tier gear. If I don't feel like being the tank today, I can just slap on my old level 70 gear, I can do top tier damage but I have to be careful that I don't outdamage the tank and draw aggro from the tank. I can still contribute to the team in my old level 70 gear and have a good time.

A player who first hit level 80 area after grinding his way through level 70 content will face some hard choices when upgrading their gear. Lets say they have perfectly rolled and augmented level 70 gold equipment, that are not max enchanted. They find a purple level 80 chest piece, it provides more armour and combat refresh than their existing equipment, but it does less damage (assuming you invested the phlogistons into rerolling it) and it has one less mod, so it is not an upgrade and it is placed into storage. They eventually find a level 80 gold chest piece. They spend the phlogistons to reroll it until they get all three mods to be the ones they want, and they dig out the old purple chest piece they rejected earlier, extract a mod from it, and apply it to the gold chest piece. But the mod extracted is only at 90% effectiveness because it came from a purple item, so they will need to get another gold chest piece, so that they can upgrade that final mod to 100% effectiveness. They can sacrifice their old level 70 gold chest piece to get that augmentation if that particular mod they need exists on it, but there is a chance that that particular mod is one of two mods for that skill (remember you have three mods on all items, two for one skill and one for the other) so there is only a 50% chance of extracting the correct mod in that case. A hard decision has to be made as to whether you want to risk destroying your old level 70 gold chest piece for 50% chance of upgrading your new level 80 chest piece.

Players will start hoarding gold items regardless of level for the purpose of potentially using them for future augmentation. In the example given above, if they don't already have a gold chest piece they can readily sacrifice, instead of farming level 80 areas for a second gold chest piece, they might consider farming Sebule Crypts, get a level 30 gold chest piece, then use crude phlogiston on it until it rolls the mod you want to extract, then extract it using small main hand beads. Much more economical option but more importantly it is something you can do solo, instead of having to find a level 80 group to do The Wintertide.

There will be less equipment sold to vendors, as everyone will be breaking down a lot of items to get as much beads, baubles, ornaments, contraptions and phlogistons as possible to fuel their upgrading needs. This will probably end up removing a bunch of councils from the economy, which I view as a positive.

Examples of pathway to get the best in game items.

To get the best in slot chest item, it will be an epic journey:
1) You have to craft max enchanted gear until you hit an gold item
2) You may have to keep crafting if the item doesn't have a favorable distribution of mods (say for example you prefer two mods for skill A and one mod for skill B, but unfortunately the item you rolled has one mod for skill A and two for skill B).
3) You reroll the mods on your max enchanted gold item until you get three mods you want.
4) You keep crafting max enchanted item until you get a second gold item.
5) You reroll a single mod until you get that elusive fourth mod you want.
6) You extract that mod (taking the risk that if in this case there are two mods of the skill you want, you have only 50% chance of getting the one you want).
7( Enjoy your best in slot item. Now repeat for other slots.

Alternative way to get best in slot item without max enchanting
1) Farm low level areas until you get the drop you want (for example farming Sunvale until you get a knight armour drop)
2) Farm a lot of crude phlogistons to serially upgrade it to gold tier (lets say you need 50 to upgrade to green, 100 to upgrade to blue, 200 to upgrade to red, 500 to upgrade to purple and 1000 to upgrade to gold, for a total of 1850 crude phlogistons)
3) Farm a lot of medium and large chest baubles to upgrade it to level 80 (it will take 100 medium chest baubles to upgrade from 40-45, 45-50, 50-55, 55-60 and it will take 100 large chest baubles to upgrade from 60-65, 65-70, 70-75 and 75-80. So you need 400 medium chest baubles and 400 large chest baubles in total)
4) Enjoy your best in slot item. Now repeat for other slots.

Advantages of my proposals

I believe my proposals strike a decent balance between catering to casual players, who can find red and purple items relatively easily (assuming no dramatic changes to current drop rates), and be able to get 80-90% of the damage output of a player who is decked out in all gold tier items. Truly hardcore players will have an epic grind to get the truly best in slot items, they can either go down the crafting route, hoping for two max enchanted items before they can get the best item; or they can get a low level item, then farm for a lot of phlogiston to upgrade it to gold tier, then farm for a lot of beads/baubles/ornaments/contraptions to upgrade it to level 80.

I think the ability to upgrade equipment to level 80 will be welcomed by many players, both those who want more options in terms of ways to obtain high level equipment independent of finding high level parties to run The Wintertide; and those who are keen for a greater range of aesthetics and want a greater range of armour arts to be available at late game.

Predicted challenges

There will be extensive combat rebalancing required, Citan have stated that balancing mob difficulty is not as difficult and I will have to take his word on it.

There will be a requirement to add more "utility skills" to some skills sets. With only three mods available to boost your damage, we will have a greater incentive to take on skills that do not have a strong damage modifier but a good innate effect. For example for my current build of Sword/Shield, I take on multiple range reduction skills plus stun, plus some support skills from shield. I predict a lot of players will start bringing more of these "utility skills" like those, and it is quite likely that some skills will need to be retuned so that they offer more utility. The only example I can think of is that Fire Magic is mostly damage skills and there isn't many "utility skills".

I have written all of the above from the point of view of a player transitioning from level 70 to level 80 gear, but ignored the leveling process. To be honest I have't played at low level for a while and I honestly don't remember enough of the leveling experience to make any useful suggestions/predictions on the leveling process.

Proposed implementation
Like Citan have alluded to, implementing such a large number of changes at once will break the game and probably make a lot of people angry. I suggest the following stepwise plan of implementing these changes:

1) Add more armour types, one of the underlying assumptions is that there has to be an valid option for metal/leather/organic/cloth armour at different levels and there will have to be a lot of extra items created, with armour art assets to go with it.
2) Add armoursmithing to the game, and complete the crafting system so that all these new items can either be found or crafted, and there has to be a way of crafting all the equipment types in the game. For example currently we cannot craft metal armour, we cannot craft level 80 organic armour, and most main hand and off hand items are not craftable.
3) Change the intrinsic stats of the armours/equipments to my proposed system. There will have to be a way of converting old items to the new items, potentially using the legacy item golems.
4) Enable the upgrading of equipment level through use of beads/baubles/ornaments/contraptions.
5) Enable to upgrading of equipment tier through use of phlogistons
6) Bite the bullet and change all items to have three mods. The method of converting old items to new ones will have to be done carefully to avoid breaking everyone's carefully optimised gears. I propose that people wearing gold gear should be able to choose what three mods they get to keep, and maybe those wearing purple gets to pick two mods they get to keep. Keeping their existing augmentation will be contentious and I would advocate we should lose our augmentation to force us to hunt for new augmentations

That is a long essay.... writing this has given me an appreciation of how difficult it is to make any changes. Every change will have ripple effect onto other parts of the game and what started as a single idea actually turned into many many proposed changes in order to make it work...

Is that wild enough for ya all?

Chilton

[Yaffy]

I have a few problems with the changes you're proposing.

1. Reducing the number of mods on equipment to 3 is something me and other players say we don't want, because it would lower the amount of customization we would have with our gear. Less slots means less build freedom.

2. By making higher rarity gear have stronger mods, you're defeating the purpose of limiting mods to three. There will still be a power difference between people with fully maxed out gear vs those with sub-optimal gear. That said, the way you're suggesting it scales numerically would shrink the power difference heavily, but mostly by buffing people in white, green or blue gear.

3. I dislike the idea of EVERY piece of gear having 3 mods, because it will make "Normal" items bloated. As an example this means that within the first 3-5 minutes of starting up the game, new players will have to wrap their head around dozens of mods because every white item they pick up has three random modifiers. Not only that, but the bonus from higher rarity items will be confusing. We still have players asking about which item rarities are better despite higher rarity items having different mod counts.

4. Now I don't know if I'm missing something, but are level 10 players going to have the same potential mod strength as level 80 players? That's going to throw balancing damage completely out of whack because you'll have level 10 players with mods that add hundreds of flat damage. You would have to do an absolutely major mod rework and damage scaling rework for the entire game to account for this.

5. The numbers you're suggesting for armor scaling are basically what they are right now. A level 10 player having about 100 armor and a level 80 player having around 800 armor sounds completely normal, unless if you're suggesting that cloth armor should have about 800 armor like metal does. The current way that player armor scales will not be very strong encouragement to replace player's lower level gear, as several full DPS sets at end game already get by with 400-500 armor, which would be level 40-50 in your example. Not only that, but if the amount of armor scaling is about the same, then your suggestion boils down to nerfing players by 3 mod slots for the most part, while Citan wants to encourage people to sacrafice damage for survivability.

6. Making every kind of armor from the same armor class give a bonus like the ones you're suggesting forces people into certain roles which I heavily dislike. For example, it's very likely you'll pick up at least 3 metal pieces of armor in goblin dungeon when leveling, but with your system that would give people +50% extra taunt which would basically force them to always take aggro from there. It's highly likely someone will be forced to accept one of your armor set bonuses even when they don't want to, since negative taunt or positive taunt can be undesirable. It's not a good idea to assume that everyone wearing 3 metal armor pieces wants to be a tank. In fact, as a tank player I would say the evasion bonus from leather sounds way more appealing than the taunt bonus.

7. For tanks, getting extra armor/health is not that important, at least outside of the early game. You suggested that tanks would want to use higher level gear as soon as possible for the armor/health for better survivability, but that is not the case even now, despite higher level gear typically giving more armor. Even right now several BiS tank equips are not level 80, and several of them aren't even metal armor, because sacrificing hundreds of points of armor is worth the resistances they give. In fact, a big reason why tanks can get away with lower level equipment is not because they don't care about getting good mods, it's because there's so few good mods for tanking that the level penalty to your equipment doesn't matter as much. For example, on Unarmed/Shield there is ONE mod on the chest that is worth getting for tanking (Physical resistance from unarmed) while everything else just gives damage, very minor bonuses, or don't really scale that much (Ex. Generic poison resist/accuracy). That one mod is really good and you want it to be level 80, so you augment it to 80, and the level of the other mods isn't very relevant since they don't contribute to your survivability nearly as much. Your suggestion wouldn't change this because even if the chest was limited to three slots, you still would only care about having that one mod while the other ones are just damage bonuses.

[Mikhaila]

A point: Nimble armor. This has an effect on builds. It's so good that a lot more people are moving to clothe to simply avoid some damage. It also gives the power for dps builds. It encourages high damage dps builds. Something to think about with armor types. If the best tank gear is clothe, something is off :)

[PGSly]

I've talked about this before, but to catch people up, here's some background on where we are with high level balance.

I'm moving small pieces of the balance equation around to try to make the game work better, like tweaking Power curves to help reinforce ability roles. Ultimately, though, the elephant in the room is that players can have way, WAY too many offensive treasure mods at once. Until I fix that problem, these other fixes will seem weird, because they aren't fixing the core problem.

The core problem from a player's POV can be summed up as "I don't need to defend myself if I can finish combat in 4.1 seconds". This playstyle means you are more than willing to drop defense in order to hit the magic DPS level where everything is trivial. And if something is higher, you just die.

This is very poor game design that gets worse and worse at high level, and I have to fix it, but I don't know the precise way to fix it. That's why I'm fixing small parts of the equation, seeing how it affects things, and trying to figure out the best approach. Ultimately the change will be a severe nerf, and I would like to get it right the first time.

My knee-jerk idea was to just reduce the total number of treasure mods you can have on at once. But now I'm thinking maybe a new mechanic that forces players to take a certain % of defensive mods. (Say 40%.) I don't have a mechanic for that in mind, but one easy approach would be to make all the mods on certain slots (say chest, legs, necklace) be defense/survival. That's awkward for pure DPS skills, though, because their defense/survival mods would be crappy. But maybe that's fine. Actually that's probably for the best.

Anyway, I realize nobody likes being nerfed, but I really don't have the ability to present fun and exciting battles to high-level players right now. I can present fun and exciting battles to the top 5% of players, sure. But everybody else will get wrecked, because the top few percent of players can deal, what, maybe 500% more damage than the average player with crap mods? That's really fun for advancement as a player because you can slowly see yourself getting MUCH more powerful. But it's just too big of a power differential for us to create content for, and you will quickly find the game un-fun because nothing is challenging. (Or else it would be un-fun up until the end, because everything would be balanced to be too hard until you finished your 70-mod treasure set.)

It's my fault for letting the balance problem get out of hand, but I do have to fix it, and I will. Expect to see more small nerfs as I work things out, as well as at least one major nerf as I restructure the game to allow it to be balanceable and fun.

There will be more info about that nerf before it comes, so you won't be blindsided by it. I'm not sure when it will happen because I don't know what it is. So far I haven't found an approach that makes me go "aha, that's it!" The closest solution I have is forcing certain slots to be defense/support mods, but that will be very weird for some combat skills. I'm still hopeful that there's a cleverer solution.

(And, of course, rebalancing players means rebalancing monsters. Monster rebalancing is much, much easier than player rebalancing, though -- since monsters don't use mods! Monster balance can be changed around as much as needed to fit where player DPS ultimately ends up.)

So this is what transparency looks like.

[Silkt]

I've talked about this before, but to catch people up, here's some background on where we are with high level balance.

I'm moving small pieces of the balance equation around to try to make the game work better, like tweaking Power curves to help reinforce ability roles. Ultimately, though, the elephant in the room is that players can have way, WAY too many offensive treasure mods at once. Until I fix that problem, these other fixes will seem weird, because they aren't fixing the core problem.

The core problem from a player's POV can be summed up as "I don't need to defend myself if I can finish combat in 4.1 seconds". This playstyle means you are more than willing to drop defense in order to hit the magic DPS level where everything is trivial. And if something is higher, you just die.



(And, of course, rebalancing players means rebalancing monsters. Monster rebalancing is much, much easier than player rebalancing, though -- since monsters don't use mods! Monster balance can be changed around as much as needed to fit where player DPS ultimately ends up.)

As someone who isn't an end game player, I feel this also affects the solo style more casual player. Other design elements force this high DPS playstle on to all players and they are spawn density and respawn rate.

As an example with the current halloween event, many players are outside their normal builds with spider, bat and necro mixes and one of the quest trains wants ghouls followed by Maligno which can be achieved sequentially in the yeti/ice caves. This dungeon is described as a lvl 40ish solo style dungeon on the daily quest giver text. My assumption is these players will have very quickly put together gear sets mainly from loot drops or use of lower level reward keys but more than likely a set with 3 to 4 mods per piece as desired above, I know I did. They will struggle to actually make to the dungeon entrance when its not the current daily purely because of spawn density and mobs respawning on their arse if they don't or can't kill fast enough. If you wish to extend the duration of fights, then the entire mob sequence timing has to increase, as in mob spawns > player completes the fight > player loots and harvests the mob > moves to the next mob and hopefully gets to repeat before the previous mob respawns right behind them.

Very few areas in this game allow for a player at minimum gear level for a location to take a slow and steady approach to progression through an area of mobs, so the entire game from Serbule Hills onwards is forcing players into a fast kill > loot > move on mentality.

So as stated by some of the other posters, increase the difficulty of the mobs but decrease the number actually hitting the player at once will go along way to improving build flexibility which is one of the greatest if not the greatest attraction this game has. I love it that this game truly has no meta build but reducing choices of mods will start to force it.

In short when planning the mobs and mob placement with aggro radius etc. give quality over quantity.

[Architecht]

Howdy all;

This is actually going to be my first forum post, even though I've been a chronic and unregistered forum-lurker for some time. I joined back in Alpha, lost my account, and recently came back with a fresh account for Beta.

After following this thread for a bit, and reading about the different thoughts on gearing and balancing gear mods, I was curious if there might be room to borrow a system from a game which had / has a similar issue. They have a solution in the pipeline for their problem, and I think it might work here as well.

The similar game is Path of Exile. For those not familiar, gear in Path of Exile has random attributes and mods, but also has an inherit trait called 'gem sockets'. Those sockets are where you get your abilities from, as you can place gems into them that grant abilities. This system is great, in that you can custom build skills and effects throughout the game, giving you massive freedom in how you play.

The downside is that this system punishes you for wanting to upgrade your base armor. Did you just get a new item, with way better implicit attributes? Hopefully it has the same number of sockets as your current item, or you might be looking at a downgrade as you have to choose between the gem sockets and the item's implicit traits and mods.

I feel like it's a similar issue with the current gearing system in Project Gorgon. Mods feel very random, and I'm often tempted into hanging onto older, better rolled gear rather than sacrifice it to gain gear which has better implicit traits (such as armor, combat refresh mods, etc.) while leveling.

A partial solution for Path of Exile was that they decoupled those gem sockets from gear, in their planned V2 update. Instead, the gems are incorporated into a set number of slots that exist solely separate from gear, but still related to the item slot. If you change your helmet, the number of sockets your helmet has doesn't change -- neither do the mods that you chose or placed within it. They simply migrate to the new piece of gear, and leave the old piece of gear. It preserves the uniqueness of both systems, but removes the friction between them.

Perhaps a similar system might benefit Project Gorgon? Gear rarity might still determine how many random modifiers an item can have, but you can also craft or collect mods which will always apply to gear in a slot: regardless of what you place into it. That could help provide some ways in which to preserve the uniqueness of random mods, but also help allow players to have a little more control over their gear and build.

[Citan]

Thanks for everyone's ideas! I am taking some notes and I hope people feel free to continue to talk about this topic. It's a very valuable discussion here.

I think my next step will be to do another round of "make combat last longer" changes. This includes both group and solo combat. I've been extremely cautious about doing this in the past, because it will most heavily impact players with weak gear sets. (If you have tremendous burst DPS, you'd still probably be able to burst-kill solo creatures even if they had twice as much health/armor as they do now.) In the short term, that's awkward, because it reinforces the "rich get richer" problem with DPS. But I think I need to make those broader combat-duration changes first, before I start hacking on mods and skill systems.

My plan will be to make players generally more tanky, and to offer new mechanisms to increase survivability. I have a handful of ideas, from mods to new game mechanics... and I'll probably throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. We'll iterate quickly and do weekly updates to try to massage everything.

After that, we can come back to the "too many DPS mods" problem with a different vantage point.

[Mikhaila]

My plan will be to make players generally more tanky, and to offer new mechanisms to increase survivability. I have a handful of ideas, from mods to new game mechanics... and I'll probably throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. We'll iterate quickly and do weekly updates to try to massage everything.

After that, we can come back to the "too many DPS mods" problem with a different vantage point.

Make it an event! Announce the patch and give out the patch notes with lots of combat changes. Give a large bonus to experience and encourage people to go kill things for a week. Ask for specific feedback from people, giving us details on what to test. What type of armor sets, what skills, what mobs, etc. Then change things back, digest the feedback, and hit us with more changes and a similar event.

[Niph]

My plan will be to make players generally more tanky

On the subject of tanky builds, I would like to add that I used to have one, based on high Armor and heavy Armor regeneration, so heavy that I could sustain healing throughout long fights. With it, when level was capped to 70, I was able to solo all elites and bosses before GK, including manticores, Claudia, Pask and other hard hitters. It was clearly overpowered of course (I guess you're not supposed to solo them with only 10 levels difference).

Since then, several changes in the game made this build completely ineffective: mobs can crit, regenerate, heal on rage attacks, and I'm probably forgetting other changes.

One possible avenue to make players more tanky could be to increase the max Armor and Armor regen provided by gear and abilities. In fact, if you want to increase the duration of fights, it's probably mandatory.

[Chilton]

Thanks Yaffy for taking the time to read through my wall of text, and taking the time to respond. I would like to address your comments. I am using sword skill as an illustrative example because I have the most experience in it, but I appreciate that the mod distribution and usefulness can vary between skills.

Warning, another wall of text coming :D

1. Reducing the number of mods on equipment to 3 is something me and other players say we don't want, because it would lower the amount of customization we would have with our gear. Less slots means less build freedom.

I agree that reducing the number of mods available per piece of equipment to 3 will reduce the amount of customisation, but I think that will promote build diversity, rather than inhibit it.

As things currently stand, for a single skill (using sword as illustrative example) you can pick between 27 mods (3 mods x 9 pieces of equipment) to 36 mods (4 mods x 9 pieces of equipment). Looking through the list of sword skills (http://wiki.projectgorgon.com/wiki/Sword/Treasure_Effects:By_Ability) there is a total of 96 mods in the game for sword. I feel it is relatively easy to work out which are the top 27 or top 36 mods to pick. A large number of mods are underpowered compared to others or they are for skill that are extremely situational.

If we are however, forced to pick only 18 mods, I will genuinely struggle to pick between them when planning my build. I can choose to heavily stack one particular skill (say pick every single mod that affects precision pierce, plus one other skill) or I can try to pick a spread of mods, making sure that each of the 6 combat abilities I use in battle is supported by a few mods). There are mods that buff all abilities (like the +40% base damage and +70 sword damage mods) that will be picked no matter what, but beyond those four mods, I think different players will pick different mods according to their own philosophy and ability picks. I think this will in fact contribute to build freedom rather than constrict it.

2. By making higher rarity gear have stronger mods, you're defeating the purpose of limiting mods to three. There will still be a power difference between people with fully maxed out gear vs those with sub-optimal gear. That said, the way you're suggesting it scales numerically would shrink the power difference heavily, but mostly by buffing people in white, green or blue gear.

You are completely right that under my proposes system there will still be a power difference between players wearing all red armour versus all max enchanted gold armour, and I think there has to be a power differential for there for there to be an incentive to upgrade your gear. The intention is not to eliminate the power difference, but the intention is, pure and simple, to limit the number of mods to three as the underlying premise of the proposal.

As things stand currently, there is a rapid increase in power of players as they increase the tier of the equipment at the lower end of the spectrum, that reach a situation of diminishing return. Going from wearing all white armour to all all green armour results in a HUGE increase in your combat effectiveness (not that it will help, you will still get your arse handed to you by trash mob if you run around in all green armour), and going from all green green armour to all blue armour likewise increase your effectiveness greatly. Going from all gold armour to all max enchanted gold armour however, you do still get stronger, but the incremental increase is not as significant as it was when you were at lower tiers. I guestimate the amount increase to be about 10% going from all purple to all gold armour, and that is where I derived the 10% incremental increase from in my proposal.

The fact that I am increasing the effectiveness of players wearing all green and blue armour is not intentional, but I say given the current drop rate in game, I doubt there will be many players running around in all green and blue equipment.

3. I dislike the idea of EVERY piece of gear having 3 mods, because it will make "Normal" items bloated. As an example this means that within the first 3-5 minutes of starting up the game, new players will have to wrap their head around dozens of mods because every white item they pick up has three random modifiers. Not only that, but the bonus from higher rarity items will be confusing. We still have players asking about which item rarities are better despite higher rarity items having different mod counts.

I must admit this is a very strong argument against my proposal. It has been a while since I started playing but I do remember how difficult it was to wrap my head around the all the modifiers and working out which ones are good and which ones are bad. Introducing new players to this topic too early is not desirable when they are struggling to learn the other systems of the game.

One alternative I toyed with as I was drafting my proposal is to combine the current item tier system with my proposed system, so that:
1) white items have no mods
2) green items have one mod
3) blue items have two mods
4) red items have three mods
5) purple items have three mods but the mods are 10% stronger than red items
6) gold items have three mods but the mods are 20% stronger than red items
7) gold enchanted gold items have three mods but the mods are 30% stronger than red items
This would be a little unnatural but I guess is viable....

4. Now I don't know if I'm missing something, but are level 10 players going to have the same potential mod strength as level 80 players? That's going to throw balancing damage completely out of whack because you'll have level 10 players with mods that add hundreds of flat damage. You would have to do an absolutely major mod rework and damage scaling rework for the entire game to account for this.

I absolutely overlooked the fact that many mods do have flat increases to damage, and they will have to be a major rework of all the mods to account for this. I personally am an advocate of a completely percentage based mod system, so that all mods increase the effectiveness of skills by a percentage of base (say 20% more damage, or mitigate 10% of elemental damage, or restore 35% of max energy).






ErDrick's previous post have spoken about the problem of a flat value mitigation system and how it makes it difficult to balance unarmed against other tanking skills, I would take it a step further and say that all flat value systems make it more difficult to balance combat from a developer point of view, and also for players to judge whether one particular mod is more effective than another (easier to tell that +25% damage is better than +20% damage, but harder to tell if +20% damage is stronger than +100 damage, especially given how damage formulate is calculated in game).

Assuming there is a corresponding rework of the mods to a percentage based system, I don't think there is any problems with a level 10 gold item adding the same percentage increase damage as a level 80 gold item. A level 10 player with say +44% finishing blow damage will go from 42 to 60 damage, while a level 80 player with +44% finishing blow damage will go from 514 to 740 damage.

5. The numbers you're suggesting for armor scaling are basically what they are right now. A level 10 player having about 100 armor and a level 80 player having around 800 armor sounds completely normal, unless if you're suggesting that cloth armor should have about 800 armor like metal does. The current way that player armor scales will not be very strong encouragement to replace player's lower level gear, as several full DPS sets at end game already get by with 400-500 armor, which would be level 40-50 in your example. Not only that, but if the amount of armor scaling is about the same, then your suggestion boils down to nerfing players by 3 mod slots for the most part, while Citan wants to encourage people to sacrafice damage for survivability.

I think the armour values probably need to be scaled up further to encourage people to upgrade their armour, and combat will have to be rebalanced to account for that. I must admit it didn't click in my mind that the armour value of some sets are so low (fairy armour I presume you allude to), I use metal and leather armour mostly and my observation has been that there is only a minimal difference between armour values.

6. Making every kind of armor from the same armor class give a bonus like the ones you're suggesting forces people into certain roles which I heavily dislike. For example, it's very likely you'll pick up at least 3 metal pieces of armor in goblin dungeon when leveling, but with your system that would give people +50% extra taunt which would basically force them to always take aggro from there. It's highly likely someone will be forced to accept one of your armor set bonuses even when they don't want to, since negative taunt or positive taunt can be undesirable. It's not a good idea to assume that everyone wearing 3 metal armor pieces wants to be a tank. In fact, as a tank player I would say the evasion bonus from leather sounds way more appealing than the taunt bonus.

Buried in my wall of text is the assertion that this system can only work if there are valid options for metal/leather/organic/cloth armour at different levels (is it possible to simply add the craftable armour pieces to the loot table?). The way I pictured it is that players will hold onto different armour pieces of different material so that they can change roles on the fly. If say you are wearing leather helmet and boots, plus metal chest piece and pants, you can change your role by changing your boots. Put on metal boots and you can hold aggro reliably, and put on some leather boots and you now have good evasion. One other intended effect of my proposal is that metal is not necessarily the "best" tanking gear, you might want to pick organic armour for additional hp, or leather armour for evasion as you stated. But you probably will not want to tank in cloth armour unless your damage output is so high, you negate the negative taunt from cloth armour.

I do see that one unintended side effect is that people who are forced to wear three metal pieces (lets say they have been unlucky with drops) will be forced into taking a lot of aggro, but hopefully if it is relatively easy to find a non metal piece, they can swap out one of their metal pieces to avoid this set bonus

7. For tanks, getting extra armor/health is not that important, at least outside of the early game. You suggested that tanks would want to use higher level gear as soon as possible for the armor/health for better survivability, but that is not the case even now, despite higher level gear typically giving more armor. Even right now several BiS tank equips are not level 80, and several of them aren't even metal armor, because sacrificing hundreds of points of armor is worth the resistances they give. In fact, a big reason why tanks can get away with lower level equipment is not because they don't care about getting good mods, it's because there's so few good mods for tanking that the level penalty to your equipment doesn't matter as much. For example, on Unarmed/Shield there is ONE mod on the chest that is worth getting for tanking (Physical resistance from unarmed) while everything else just gives damage, very minor bonuses, or don't really scale that much (Ex. Generic poison resist/accuracy). That one mod is really good and you want it to be level 80, so you augment it to 80, and the level of the other mods isn't very relevant since they don't contribute to your survivability nearly as much. Your suggestion wouldn't change this because even if the chest was limited to three slots, you still would only care about having that one mod while the other ones are just damage bonuses.

I think the question is about the distribution of available mods on different equipment pieces and the general lack of effective tanking/defensive mods. I can't say I have a lot of unarmed experience (I have it at level 70 but haven't used it since it was reworked months ago) but I presume you mean this mod: "While unarmed is active, 18% of all Slashing, Piercing, and Crushing damage you take is mitigated and added....". I deliberately didn't comment on the lack of effective tanking mods because others have already discussed it in great detail, but I feel the amount that are already present in game, if reworked (possibly into percentage based mods) will be enough to make tanking viable and fun, if the combat is tuned so that a tank is actually needed.

I actually have my own thoughts about the the philosophy of tanking but I won't share that now as it is outside the scope of the current proposal. I will write it up and post a reply on your other post Yaffy.

Lastly I'm hurt that you haven't commented on my idea on consuming beads/baubles/ornaments/contraptions to upgrade the level of items.... I personally would put all my other ideas down as "too hard, not worth the effort" but I would love to have the ability to upgrade a lower item level to level 80, with matching stats.

[Chilton]

Make it an event! Announce the patch and give out the patch notes with lots of combat changes. Give a large bonus to experience and encourage people to go kill things for a week. Ask for specific feedback from people, giving us details on what to test. What type of armor sets, what skills, what mobs, etc. Then change things back, digest the feedback, and hit us with more changes and a similar event.

I second this idea, making it an event with a view to rolling back the changes is a great way to test things in game

[Yaffy]

Lastly I'm hurt that you haven't commented on my idea on consuming beads/baubles/ornaments/contraptions to upgrade the level of items.... I personally would put all my other ideas down as "too hard, not worth the effort" but I would love to have the ability to upgrade a lower item level to level 80, with matching stats.

Oh well in the case of an upgrade system to increase the level of a lower level item I'm all up for it existing, but maybe not in the way you suggested. Upgrading lower level items into higher level ones is neat, but your system might be too easy to do. Outside of augmentation being tricky to acquire for brand-new players, it sounds like leveling players would just keep one good piece of equipment they got early on and then just upgrade it as they level, rather than picking up new gear. Collecting 100 beads is a lot easier than finding new yellow pieces. It's important that players will want to continue picking up new gear, because that's a big part of the fun with the game.

I feel the same way about upgrading rarity as well. It could be neat, but it might be a bit too easy to use. 1000-1500+ phlog is a much steeper price to be fair , but I'm not sure if it's the best way to go about such a system if combined with the ability to upgrade levels as well.

So basically what I'm saying is that a level upgrade system would be neat, but I don't agree and I am unsure with the method/cost that you're proposing.

[Kifyi]

I've enjoyed almost all of the halloween event and how it makes you go and meet new NPCs and start working on their favor, try new professions, etc. I did not, however, like the Monsters and Mantids quest. I don't like that it encourages you to gamble away a bunch of councils or tickets, how slim of a chance you have to succeed for the quest, or the fact that it's by a long shot the true boss of the halloween event. It many times harder to achieve this, IMO, than Heart 1-5 and going into this, I thought that would be the 'big one'.

If your goal was to make the M&M sub quest be the big final boss of halloween, it should perhaps have more emphasis on the story leading up to it. I read all the dialogue and the fact that you get a special title for Westley and his really simple quest, it feels pretty strange that the really challenging one doesn't have something special on its own. At least not that I've heard about, I haven't gotten a win yet! :)

[Mikhaila]

I really dislike having to win Monsters and Mantids be part of this quest. It blocks you from finishing what feels like a major part of the event. I've dumped several hours into the game, but I don't enjoy playing it, and it seems like just pure like as to how far you get. There is certainly some skill in your decisions, but it seems like even if you play perfectly, it's still random on whether you get the right skills, or get a hat, or don't get a couple of bad rolls in a row.

I found myself hating it, and didn't want to log into PG at all. Finally decided to just give up on Halloween and go play PG.

[Panic]

I also think the M&M quest is awful, I feel compelled to try it every year and always log out frustrated. It should definitely not block the main quest as if you are unlucky you will probably run out of time before the event ends.

There should be an alternate solution to the quest such as bribing the game master to fake a game, or getting a good score in match 3 which is slightly less of a RNG hell.

[Celler]

Not Played for a fair while now, so can't comment on much gone before.

But I will say I have always felt game needs a way to raise lvl of items.
Mainly because at base they all have different mods and often the one of most use to you is 20 lvls back or so. I also feel it would add much greater diversity to how folks look rather than most lvl 70 players in that dungeons drops and then the 80 in those etc.

It could be as simple as a transmutation costing a fair bit that lvl's item and mods, but I'd also add that every time you raise it's lvl 10, one mod at random would remain at previous lvl, therefore still giving the item a limit but overall increasing it's usability range by 20 or 30 lvls.

[ChompyNibblers]

Hey all,

Came to share my opinions, mostly about combat

M&M quest: Agree x1000 with previous points made about the M&M quest being unfun. I'm not a fan. I don't enjoy feeling like I need to play a minigame that is optionally connected to the main game for material quest rewards/progression (especially timed seasonal ones).

Combat feedback: I agree that combat is too fast. I feel like I'm missing an understanding of how combat should be flowing, especially group content. I personally would prefer a shift towards more traditional combat roles (1 healer, 1 tank, 4 DPS/utility) for group content as I find this more fun. I don't know if this aligns with the future vision the developers/anyone else has - it would be helpful to hear a description of how others would hope a boss fight and/or tough elite fight would feel and flow. Onto my thoughts:

--- Fights as 'encounters' - In my opinion the game would benefit from having more elite+ fights that feel scripted. Wolf cave does this a bit with the wolf rooms where you have to fight 2 or 3 wolves at the same time. I feel like there's a limited number of these fights, especially at higher levels where instead we have a bunch of patrols or just a bunch of spread out enemies that can be body-pulled and fought one at a time. The preponderance of fight content that can be taken 1 enemy at a time feels like it limits how diverse the encounters could be (such as healer/support enemies) and limiting in the ways players are forced to be creative to deal with larger pulls of enemies.

--- Armor - I like this mechanic but Armor feels weird to me right now, I agree with others that it drops too fast. I would prefer to see player armor last longer (with the longer fights described already) but also be a much more valuable and rare resources to maintain/regain - notably having very limited options even for healers.

--- Actively used 'Passives' - I gave up mentalism at lv70 because I found the psi waves to be unfun. In-general I'm not a fan of abilities that require using an action to maintain a passive buff. I find requiring constant re-use of passives unfun because I have fewer choices/decisions to make now due to reduced action economy. I would prefer to be punished in some other way, maybe: damage, max armor, maximum power, power regen, etc could be reduced to maintain passive buffs.

Group content - I am hoping elites and dungeon content will be pushed towards more traditional RPG roles. This would mean most content can be cleared more easily generally with a tank, healer, and 4 dps/flex roles (flex would include things like off-tank). See below for some thoughts on what roles I imagine each role would be responsible for during group content.

--- Tanking - Core tank responsibilities would include not dying, taunting, managing aggro (like resetting aggro on a mob targeting the healer), controlling rage, and otherwise protecting allies (with limited health restoring options, which means mostly through CC's and/or redirecting damage). My ideal tank would feel like they are competing with the other players to maintain aggro from enemies. Simultaneously, the tank should also feel like they're sharing "incoming damage management" responsibilities with the healer, which saves the healer's power and reduces much rage/aggro is generate from healing.

--- Healing - Core healer roles would be restoring health, restoring power (more single target, less aoe than we currently have), using active protection abilities (think temporary HP/shields), supportive buffs (like battlechem skin or increasing DPS for a short time), and supportive debuffs (like faerie fire in D&D - an aoe that makes enemies easier to hit). Healers' power should be extremely valuable - something experienced players would keep an eye on to gauge how a fight is going. A healer should generally not be able to maintain average positive power regen in average+ difficulty content. Most healing kits/skills would have a skill set that enables healing single-tank teams (e.g., just aoe heals wouldn't work). Armor restore options would be almost non-existent with the exception of armor patching (that all players have access to). The healer should also have tools for saving DPS from having pulled too much aggro (e.g., popping a damage mitigation shield on the DPS who got aggro). A team that requires a lot of sustained healing might also cause the healer to pull aggro (especially early in a fight).

--- DPS/Utility - Core DPS/utility roles would be doing damage (of course) and accessing a diverse set of enemy-countering utility options (e.g., stun for ethereals, dots for regeneration, fear for lamias, general CC for big rage attacks, damage types for different enemy weaknesses, knockback for scorpions). In terms of damage this is pretty straight forward (responsible for killing the enemy) except that pure DPS would feel like they are working with the tank to manage aggro (e.g., not bursting too quickly on fresh enemies) and working as a team to manage overall incoming damage in order to maintain the healer's power, limit DPS the tank takes or support DPS who pulled some aggro. Cloth wearing DPS wouldn't have a ton of power issues unless fighting bosses or dealing with enemies that influence power, cloth armor in my opinion would provide little to no armor benefit.

--- Other team compositions
I would also hope that 1 tank/1 healer doesn't have to be the only way to clear stuff. Maybe 1.5 healers and a leather armor half-tank would be sufficient too. Or potentially there are even more bizarre CC-heavy compositions that can manage damage through slows, stuns, etc.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far!

I'll wrap-up my post with a primer question for anyone else: How would your preferred group combat narratives play out?

[Mikhaila]

Other games made Healer + Tank + anyone else the best way to play. That does not in any way mean all other games need to also have the same dynamic.

It's not "traditional", it's just what worked best in EQ and some other games. It's a way to play PG, but not required. And frankly, i'd rather forgo sitting on your ass for hours spamming "LFG" because your class wasn't in demand at that night. One of the things I love in PG is that if someone is looking for more people, and can just join, and no one is bugging me about what skills I'm using.

I think a lot of the skills in PG are interesting just because they have a mixture of abilities, some of which are quite interesting or wacky. You have to pick out of the the actions in your skill. Then decide on the mods you wan't on your gear. This lets a player look at skills, and decide the roll they want to play.

[Cragstone]

Hi, I'm Cragstone. I've been playing a few weeks and wanted to weigh in with my opinion on tanking. The weighting in this thread and certainly the meta in the game seems to lean rather heavily in favor of Cow/UA. Personally, I much prefer the idea of a human with a hammer and a shield, call me old fashioned but it just makes more sense to me.

With that said and despite advice to the contrary I have spent most of my time focussed on building armor and hp. To facilitate this is have gone all in on Hardcore in order to pump my stats to the highest they can go. Also, I have invested as much as I can into consumables, potions, booze, boons etc.... The end result of this is close to 1900 armor and almost 1.1k hp buffed (without steroids) I'm still working on augs but I have picked up as much mitigation as possible which I rotate as part of my routine. 2x 16 slash, crush, pierce mitigation, 32% evade on shield team, etc...

So do I feel tanky? Actually, yes. Outside of GK elites, FR and WT, I am almost immune to anything except dots. This doesn't mean I can faceroll my way around, multiple mobs can still wear me down and if I don't keep up a rotation things do get messy.... and so here comes my first gripe...

There's no time for real tanking. I know this has been addressed and I know that it has even been officially stated that combat is intended to be much slower. This is something I wholeheartedly support, after all... Who needs a tank when you can press two buttons and everything is dead? This is also reciprocated in places like WT where mobs can almost do the same (yes even at nearly 2k armor, STUFF HURTS). This is by far my biggest bugbear, in my opinion it doesn't require much skill or yield much satisfaction to front load your big attacks and hope that everything is dead when the dust settles a few seconds later. This has led me to witness many situations where someone rushes in, unloads their epic and then immediately dies because (gasp) the mob had a chance to hit them back. I respect the idea that combat should be longer and so I made a build that could hopefully sustain this.

My friend and i duo in FR a lot and he plays support, we both enjoy a more traditional style where I pick stuff up, manage threat and he keeps me going. I find that I can effectively keep threat and stay alive even on the big FR elites which is kind of what I hoped I could do as a tank. We recently ran a GK run and I managed to hold aggro almost the entire way (albeit with booze), it was actually very enjoyable and one of those moments where it felt things were starting to come together.

In short, I wanted to put everything I had into mitigation tanking while having viable damage to keep threat and it kinda works. I think the armor system is good, I think the skill system is great, I don't much care for the way the meta is currently played, however. With such high damage from both sides it has become a race to the finish and because of that, tanking doesn't feel so great in high end groups. I appreciate that this is already known and discussed in far greater detail than I can add, my main suggestion is one that has already been stated, make the fights longer, make them require roles other than DPS. I mean, if a boss is going to stay up for more than a cool down refresh, then chances are people might want to watch their aggro/have a tank. I'd also say that longer fights should mean less spiky damage from mobs, this kind of rage nuking behaviour encourages the "kill em quick" meta I see here and which can only be detrimental to any intended role that isn't DPS. After all, what's the point in all that mitigation if it makes no difference end game, I mean, I can take more hits than most, but in WT that just means I can take ONE or maybe TWO more hits. At which point tanking feels a bit useless. Threat management is difficult, but this also feels like a product of the insanely overtuned DPS meta (looking at you AH, Fire mage) even so, with some consumables and zero threat gear Investment I can usually keep a boss on me, provided it is still alive after a few seconds when everyone has fired their epics.

In a lot of games there are false difficulties in regard to bosses having HUGE health pools, to the point that it feels like chopping down a tree. I don't want that here, some of the dailies are long enough as it is, I do think there could be a middle ground, however. One where a boss can survive long enough to refresh a cool down or test a rotation... Or where we aren't punished so severely by incoming damage that we are forced to go all in at the start. IF mitigation had more oomph, both in terms of more damage absorbed by players AND mobs, this would go a long way in helping to slow down combat in a meaningful way AND make tanking feel better.

I appreciate that this is 'traditional tanking' and one of the allures of this game is just how much flexibility you can achieve and how 'non-traditional' things can get. For me however, I enjoy the concept of tanking and in my eyes it is on its way to being in a good place.

TLDR: I think slowing down combat is a great idea, I like the way tanking feels but it needs some work. Not everyone wants to be an animal!

[Yaffy]

The weighting in this thread and certainly the meta in the game seems to lean rather heavily in favor of Cow/UA.

I'm still working on augs but I have picked up as much mitigation as possible which I rotate as part of my routine. 2x 16 slash, crush, pierce mitigation, 32% evade on shield team, etc...

Not everyone wants to be an animal!

Are you playing Cow/Unarmed or Unarmed/Shield? The mods you listed are shield mods which you can't use as a cow, so I'm a bit confused.

That said, I 100% disagree with the notion that you should be an animal to tank or that animal tanking is meta. In fact, I use cow as an example of a skill line that needs help with its design because it offers very little in the way of defense for end game elites despite being intended as a tank skill. Unarmed is incredibly good for tanking and one of the few viable options for sure, but you don't need to be an animal for that.

[Celerity]

I heavily agree with Cragstone. Just wanted to add that in order to fix the issue where you can feel tanky vs solo mobs but not elites, flat mitigation could just have different values against elites. Keep it where it is for solo mobs, then have it doubled (or whatever number) against elites. Also part of it is just that death doesn't mean much outside of full wipes or playing hardcore/fairy. Revives are cheap, especially with tether and it's normally easy to run back anyway.

Cow is not meta however, it has great taunt, but only flat physical mitigation basically, which is ok for gk, but the moment you get to wintertide you get absolutely destroyed by the cold, fire and darkness damage there. Unarmed is the only tanking skill which provides enough % mitigation from darkness, physical, etc. although it has holes in its elemental defence (as it should). You can't use shield as a cow as well, which is normally the skill used for elemental defence because of elemental ward. It is incredibly cooldown based though, just like staff and there isn't really a good skill in the game for elemental defence at all. What ends up happening is you get the % mitigation from items such as old crusty's shield, hunter's breastplate etc. and meditations. You can also build evasion, but you still need mitigation to go with it because of rng, and the moment you get stunned you're dead because being stunned disables evasion.

[Cragstone]

Are you playing Cow/Unarmed or Unarmed/Shield? The mods you listed are shield mods which you can't use as a cow, so I'm a bit confused..

I should have elaborated a bit more. Obviously experiences may vary, but as a new player enquiring about viable tanking setups, cow/ua was consistently touted as the only real viable option. I'm not here to argue meta, merely to represent my own experiences as Humanoid/hammer/shield, and I also wanted to give my two cents about how I feel about it with regards to efficacy and future room for improvement. I can't speak to cow/ua as I've never played it, but I can speak to tanking in general, where it feels good and where it feels bad and wanted to make sure that my feedback got heard. Regardless of all this, some problems are universal. Elite damage is a problem for any tank build and at times makes the entire concept unviable, I would like to see armor matter more, for both players and mobs, that way things can slow down and roles can feel more defined. Of course this is an overly simplistic 'blanket' fix, but it would go some way in making fights last for more than a few seconds of button mashing, as well as rewarding tanks for actually trying to build tanky.

[Cragstone]

Just wanted to add that in order to fix the issue where you can feel tanky vs solo mobs but not elites, flat mitigation could just have different values against elites. Keep it where it is for solo mobs, then have it doubled (or whatever number) against elites. Also part of it is just that death doesn't mean much outside of full wipes or playing hardcore/fairy. Revives are cheap, especially with tether and it's normally easy to run back anyway.



You absolutely hit the nail on the head regarding death and the lack of consequences thereof. I am anything but elitist and I believe games should be fun, but in a game that is so focussed on consequence (which is amazing by the way!) why is death essentially so meaningless?

I'd argue that it is more fun to have an element of risk in everything that is done, rather than not have to worry about anything, people will think twice about going ham on a boss if it means they might spend the next ten minutes with -20% stats due to Rez effects or losing some skill levels temporarily. I don't believe people should be driven to irritation and frustration by overly harsh penalties, but right now death is just a free teleport at best and a minor setback at worst. I understand that this game doesn't need to be traditional in terms of defined roles, but those roles exist nonetheless and more cause and effect would go a long way in adding value to healers and tanks as well as fleshing out a group into a more fun and team based experience.

Thanks for clarifying cow/UA for me. As I mentioned, I am new and can only really speak to my own experiences and what I've heard, I'm hoping all manner of tanking can be viable, the entire concept needs some help!

[Mikhaila]

"I should have elaborated a bit more. Obviously experiences may vary, but as a new player enquiring about viable tanking setups, cow/ua was consistently touted as the only real viable option. "

I'll speak to this point. Not at Crag, but as a general comment about how people react in the game. A lot of times I see the same answer in chat, over and over and over, and they aren't always correct. Or it's 1 answer, when there are a lot of different ways to solve a problem. Why? Because we tend to crowd source information. If you yell out "how do I do X?" you might get an answer from the people paying attention to chat and happen to be online at the time. They will also give an answer based on their knowledge. Obviously. But a lot of times they don't actually have a lot of knowledge, they just yell out what they saw yelled out in an earlier chat. Most people probably haven't played Cow/UA, but they'll yell it out as a tanking option.

It's also a quick answer. A more difficult discussion doesn't generally happen.

Tanking involves armor, skills, mods, group composition, and the use of meditation, potions, alternate gearing for specific problems, alcohol, (and now candles), drugs, and all the odd little things in PG. Ask a simple question, get a simple answer.

Hats off to Cragstone for becoming an alcoholic to further his tanking research. 1900 AC is just insane :)