Agree with Yaffy.
Well explained.
Agree with Yaffy.
Well explained.
I was wondering if Hammer and Buckle Artistry were considered for this change? There is a lot of hammer mods which add % dmg based on rage and such. Also Buckle Artistry buckles don't seem to be as interesting anymore since there are many kinds of normal belts which do much more interesting things than add some percent of dmg.
good stuff
Last edited by s5669111; 02-21-2019 at 07:21 AM.
Yeah I have to say past 3 months Hammer skill has been dismantled, as Yaffy saying with my fairy spring armor I got very low armor, Hammer skill has high aggro and the latest update my hurl lightning went from 2300 to 1500, hammer epic doesn't even hit for 3000 on a 60 sec cool down, while wolf's hit now for 4000-5000 every 30 sec. Game becoming more unbalanced and some skills becoming merely road kill in the grand scheme.
We'll be revising more damage-type-mod gear and recipes in the next update. (Well, not the next quick-fix update, which is tomorrow, but the next "real" update.)
A warning about those damage-mod recipes: I expect we'll increase the potency of those recipes, but due to technical limitations we usually can't convert old equipment that already uses those recipes, so they will probably be stuck with the old (current) values. So unfortunately you may need new gear to get the updated effects. I'm sorry about that, preemptively; we try to update all gear "in-place" when possible, but sometimes it's just too expensive (in terms of dev time).
Edit: hmm, it may be possible to do conversion for those recipes -- I'll have to see. The items don't store what recipes were used on them, so I have to write "sleuthing" code that analyzes the item and tries to figure out what happened to it. "Oh, it has +3% fire damage and it's missing 60 enhancement points, I think I know what happened here..." That sort of code gets really ugly really fast, and usually causes more problems than its worth. But given the small number of recipes involved I may be able to do it. I'm not sure.
At the very least, you should hold off on using those recipes on new items.
Last edited by Citan; 02-21-2019 at 09:46 AM.
I just wish sword damage base potions didnt require pemphredo eyes there not easy to get in bulk other skills that require less expensive/mats have it way easier I might have to ditch sword to this nerf its way over the top
Sword wasnt op to begin with and now this happens I chose sword cuz I thought it was the least likely to get effected by nerfs -_- and now I have been proven wrong
Last edited by spider91301; 02-21-2019 at 09:15 AM.
Thanks for the post Citan, hopefully you can figure out a nice way to fix up those items, but don't worry too much if it's a huge hassle. Maybe an alternative could be something that removes crafted bonuses like those and gives back the enhancement points? It would make players lose the crafting materials, but those aren't a super big deal if it ends up being easier.
Incoming wall of text I wanted to share about damage type bonuses...
Bonuses to damage types were typically very small, but they scaled very well because it didn't matter how well geared of a player you were. Whether you did 100 damage or 1000 damage, a 5% boost increased your damage by 5% (In most situations). This meant these bonuses would be consistently helpful. It also added an interesting element to figuring out what gear you wanted because a 5% bonus would negligible if you could just grab a much easier base damage mod, but when you were highly geared a "universal" 5% damage increase could mean a lot of extra damage, especially if you exhausted all the mods you could get.
Currently, elemental damage bonuses are very comparable to base damage modifiers. They give extra damage to a wide set of abilities (Based on damage type rather than skill), but they don't scale well. At best it scales with flat damage bonuses at the cost of being a bit more awkward to use, but the availability of flat damage bonuses varies a lot for different skills.
Because these bonuses don't scale with player strength naturally anymore, it's important to have these bonuses scale heavily with player level. However I think that the new damage formula might make things hard to balance, because in order to be comparably as strong as they used to be, the bonuses need to be very high.
For example, a fully modded Hurl Lightning from hammer could hit for around 1181, only using mods for Hurl Lightning, base damage increases for hammer, and the universal "More damage to enraged enemies".
262 *3.66 + (262* 1.85 - 262) =1181
Previously, a full set of enchanted Spring Fairy armor could add 36% more lightning damage, which would multiply the whole formula. This resulted in 1607 damage.
(262 *3.66 + (262* 1.85 - 262)) *1.36 =1607
Now however, due to the formula change, the bonus now only adds a bit under a hundred damage.
262 *4.02 + (262* 1.85 - 262) =1276
And now to prove my point, if we took the 36% lightning damage bonus and changed it into base damage, we get the exact same damage.
262 *3.66 + (262* 2.21 - 262) =1276
And since in this case, elemental bonuses = base damage, we can do the math to figure out what base damage equivalent would make it do the same damage before the change.
262 *3.66 + (262* ( x+1.85) - 262) =1607, x=1.62
So because of the new damage formula, in order to be around the same in terms of effectiveness, a set of spring fairy armor enchanted with lightning damage would have to give around 162% bonus damage. This is split between the chest/pants/shoes and the enchanted lightning on the chest/pants, which might mean giving each piece of the set something like 30% bonus damage and having the enhancement add a similar amount. This is just one case obviously, and it only looks this bad because Hurl Lightning doesn't naturally get any flat damage bonuses (The elemental damage = base damage comparison wouldn't work if you were using a shocking masquerade mask for example), but it shows just how big of a change the damage formula is and how much numbers need to increase to be around where they were before. I think it's safe to say that the damage formula change has cut the effectiveness of these boosts from 3-4 times.
The real question is, as the developer would you be willing to give body armor what is essentially 30% more base damage? I know one purpose of the patch was to reduce player damage overall, but compared to the other overall nerfs to % modifiers the damage boost would still be something around 24-27%. One issue is that while those numbers would be fair for a player with good gear, 30% base damage would be a substantial amount for a player with no bonuses. I personally believe this might be fair, because crafting spring fairy armor is a huge pain to craft and therefore a new level 70 player would probably acquire some modded armor before going straight into crafting it.
This isn't limited to equipment either of course. Skills such as Way of the Hammer which are focused around increasing damage are affected in the same way. If the effectiveness of it has been cut by 3-4 times, then you can say Way of the Hammer's 15% boost is more like a 5% damage boost for well geared players, which is way too low for a 10 second buff. However, unlike a full set of enchanted Spring Fairy armor, you probably don't want to increase it to a 45% boost because it's very easy to get. In cases like these, the damage formula change makes it a lot harder to balance these skills. Skills like bruising blow are much weaker as well, but aren't as badly affected since it does damage even if its main purpose is the debuff. In these cases you might want to change the buff to flat damage, add an additional effect, or maybe make the mods for the skill improve the damage buff by a decent amount so it scales with how well geared players are if the player puts mods into the skill.
Anyways sorry for the wall of text, but I hope it gives some food for thought. I personally believe it might be a bit simpler to keep elemental % bonuses separate from skill % bonuses because it makes it a lot easier to balance. Plus, having at least another layer of multipliers to damage allows for more design choices. If you want to keep the new formula though, then a lot of things based on it definitely need to be rebalanced.
Last edited by Yaffy; 02-21-2019 at 12:32 PM.
Well... every skill was affected, not only sword, so I'm not sure what are you complaining about.
@Yaffy - I agree that Skulk needed nerf, this thing was way over the top.
So I got some time to play around with new update, here are my thoughts:
1) I didn't felt much change to my damage to be honest (I'm playing Wolf/unarmed). Skulk still gives crazy damge bonus, even though (at least according to tooltip) its lower than before, its still enough to 1-shot most mobs.
2) New dungeon seems fine overall. The thing I like abotu it is that it has it's.. lets call it 'theme'. You go in, you explore for a bit, and you know what you are dealing with and how to preapere. I think mobs on upper level deal a bit too much damage with they dot's, it might be good to tune it down. Ratkin's are mostly fine, imo. Even though they high evasion is annoying, fact they are concentrated in single area makes exploring this dngeon much easir. You know that if you want to fight them, you need some accurace.
One complain I have, is that Necro Shaman's root last a bit too long. Overall, this dungeon seems to favor ranged classes over melee, but then again, ranged always have advantage over melee so it's not that bad.
I was hoping for some more lore there, maybe some puzzles and secrets to explore. I know there are this braziers, (I wasn't able to figure how to ligth last one...) And those leavers (I used all of them but didn't noticed anyting happening...). But they are kind just sitting there, without any explanation.
About other changes:
Damage formula - like I siad, I didn't noticed much difference in my damage output, but then again I fought only in new dungeon. Today I'll try some higher lv mobs, see how it will go.
Elite mobs HP change - to be honest, I would prefer if they damage went down. Many fights with stonger mobs feel like they are luck-based, since you cna get killed extremally fast if mobs crit few times. Right now, we are encuraged to focus on burting down mobs as fast as posisble, which I think is not good thing.
@Edit
Ok, I ran a bit in Tover view/Amaluk Valley cave in Gazluk (aka Worg Cave). Pefore last patch using Skul+ Barrage or Bite, I coudl easly one-shot Barghest rooms (Bargest+2 wolves). Now, They surrive with around 10-15% health, so my damage is noticably lower.
Not that I mind, it's give me chance to use other skills.
Hoever, I noticed that there is not much difference when it comes to damge of my DoT's. I picked all mods increasing Trauma damage I could, to make bleed build. Sanguine Fangs dot's seems to be doing similar amount of damage, not sure about Mamba Strike, since its tooltip don't show effects of % increase on it's trauma damage. I will test it on dummies later on, but I don't expect much change here. Before update, elemental boosts were only thing affecting this type fo additional damage - so it was always Flat dmage * Elemental % increase.
So, this seems like nerf to direct damge, but neutral change for Dot - based builds. One coudl argue its indirect buff, since thy are now slightly stronger comapred to directd amge, but then agin elite's HP got lower, so thsi might balance things out.
I'll attempt to solo Pask at some point, see how it will go. I was able to do it before patch, unless I got swarmed, or got unlucky with crits (please nerf crits, they are too much).
One more thing - Patch notes mentioned soemthign about buffing mods that give skils small amount of healing, but I don't think any of wolf/unarmed mods were buffed - or it was change so small I didn't noticed.
Last edited by cr00cy; 02-21-2019 at 02:45 PM.
I also feel like sword was in an ok spot compared to other melee skills. It is definitely considerably weaker now.
Maybe a boost to calligraphy will help.
Lycan still is overpowered.
Pretty much 100% of the stuff I say publicly (in global and on the forum) involves complaints. So...
I just wanted to say that you guys (devs) have continued to prove that I was correct in choosing this game. When you try and convince someone to play it, "early access mmo" gets some people to immediately turn off. However, the fact remains that you guys are dedicated to making this a wonderful game and the content part of this patch proves as much.
...
Shame on you for completely decimating hammer though. Shame.