Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
Silvonis was reminding people that the game will change during beta. This will be a working beta, not a PR beta. Lots of big games these days use the word "beta" to mean "free play time," and you can expect very few changes during those betas. But we will be working very hard on the game design so a lot of things will change.

We do sometimes need to dramatically redesign skills, and basically reset them as a consequence. That's only happened a couple times during the game's long development time, so I expect it'd only happen once or twice during beta. But I don't know for sure. That's not even related to the "partial wipe". That's just something that might happen as we work on balance.

Much more likely than actually "wiping" a skill is changing it to the point where it's unrecognizable. I've talked about changing Battle Chemistry very dramatically by breaking it into two skills, and that still may happen. So what you currently call Battle Chemistry may not be the parts of the skill you love; they may be moved to a new skill. And if that happens, you'd need to level up that new skill to get it back. Other skills may get reworked in similar fashion.

And I can pretty much guarantee that your favorite abilities will change their stats, gear mods will be revamped multiple times, monsters' relative power will go up and down as we try to bring this very complex game into a basic sort of balance. (It'll never be perfectly balanced, as that would be impossible and also super boring. But it will be a lot more balanced than it is now.)

---

Let me put it another way. If, during beta, we realize something needs to be changed, we will NEVER say, "no, we can't make that change -- it's beta! Too late! The players' current characters would be impacted too much!" No. It's beta, meaning that it's the perfect time to make critical changes. So please expect them.

Also expect that we'll do our best, given the circumstances of each individual change, to lessen the impact of those changes. For instance, when skills have changed really dramatically in the past, we've given players free gear transmutations for a week to help get them back into fighting form. Or when an item is changed too heavily for the auto-updater to automatically rebuild the item, it becomes "legacy gear", which means it keeps working in its now-imbalanced state for 30 days to give you time to find a replacement. That sort of thing isn't always practical or called for, but we'll do what we can to keep beta players happy and engaged.

But yeah, changes. Tons of changes. Often uncomfortable nerfs. That's to be expected during beta. And if you don't want to deal with that, and want to wait until the game launches, that's entirely understandable.









I do have a question that has been on the top of my mind for a while. I'm very much so into min maxing and finding the best possible set up for what I want to do specifically, and i've found this game intrinsically complicated. I'ts been quite enjoyable, but I would like to know something. When you balance a skill, do you consider the effect of other skills on the primary when balancing it? Overall, it feels like it has been done quite well, minus a skill or two here and there, but synergy seems to be a complicated issue. I'm a huge fan of animalism and don't spend very much time researching other skills and their combined effects, but i've noticed that a large number of skills that animals can use are either entirely useless, or insanely powerful depending on the current animal form.


I just wanted to throw this out there because i've started to build around it and it feels... odd.

After doing some calculations on how abilities scale, reading other player input and getting a good idea of how everything works, mock is very strange. I'd suggest looking into it to see if you agree with how it functions. Currently, because it deals direct health damage, it actually ends up as one of the best DPS abilities you can get. If you have lycan, for example, being able to modify the base damage with the MASSIVE percent damage multipliers that it has access to, you can get it to well above 2,000 damage on a 6 sec (+4 with mods) cd with no cost, that is absolutely devastating.

This build does require a lot of build up for it, and some preemptive usage and ends up being something that requires a lot.. of mods. But also ends up being insanely efficient for single target damage (phsych lych).