Update Discussion: April 26, 2019

[ErDrick]

Gk mobs probably still need a little more health, but I'm pretty sure from the patch notes you already knew that, I still think it feels more on the right track. Not being suddenly one shot killed is a huge improvement fun wise regardless.

Mobs that cast indirect damage effects need to not spam them every second as basic attacks, vipers are pretty big offenders here and so are slugs, it's fine for a viper to spit poison at you every 6 seconds or so but when they do it constantly ( in fact they have no melee attacks at all) it gets ridiculous. Geyser slug/ rakshasa mages / drakeworms( fire ones) are also huge offenders here, indirect attacks are fine as long as they aren't spammable until you have 7 versions of the same damage over time effect on you. Even with the indirect mitigation from thick skin + alcohol tolerance these DoT's feel over tuned at 70, can't imagine how much a 50/60 hates them. You just need to add a cooldown on these effects like 6 seconds or so and give them non-indirect attacks to use for the other 5 seconds. This would be in line with most of our skillsets. I know potions are an alternative but you honestly can't be expecting us to carry 20 different potions with no "potion bag" or something similar.

I know this is going to be unpopular but you need to get rid of the percentile based mitigation shields for unarmed and cow, it is impossible to balance damage when you have both forms of mitigation existing, my advice for unarmed would be to change it to some sort of evasion self-buff ( since that makes more sense thematically for a monk, and they'd still be tanky.. but it would be the sort of dodge dodge spiked for 40% of your health, tankyness) and change cow version to flat numbers or a temporary health buffer shield, like 200pts or so. Either that or give more skills access to percentile based mitigation... there is really no other option balance wise unless you do one or the other, because any changes to damage otherwise will make one type overpowered while making the other type underpowered at the same time. For example right now cows and unarmed builds can still pull 5-7 mobs at once in GK, no other skillset can ( possibly barring staff as long as all the mobs die within 10 seconds, which seems unlikely at this point). This is going to end up boring people that are using those skills, and frustrating anyone that isn't.

I would still like to see mitigation from armor not be tied to your remaining armor, it's unreliable and doesn't really do much since from even a single hit you no longer have the same mitigation you had a second ago, you could leave everything else the way it is armor bar wise, alternately you could tie it to weather you have armor at all instead of scaling down for every 25 damage your armor receives, as in.. you lose all armor mitigation when your armor hits zero, until then it stays as a flat amount ( 40 if you have 1000 max armor etc). This would give heavy armor a lot more reliability and make it a competitive choice vs cloth or leather.

I know you are aware of the taunt + root issue that can allow groups to cheese difficult mobs, and I believe you said changing their target priority while rooted would be problematic... so how about this : Make all direct damage attacks have a 10% chance per attack to break a root prematurely, hell do the same thing with snare if you really want to, snare feels balanced though already because kiting eats your power, it already has a downside.

Archery still needs a quiver, badly.

You should also "never" be considered in-combat unless you are actually hit by something or hit something, this is extremely frustrating for travel when you are slowed down because something saw you and doesn't like you, especially when you are flying and some tiger on the ground decides he hates you. It's also pretty frustrating when you land as a bird, see a mob coming..start transforming and your transformation fails even though you still haven't been struck, because the game considers you in combat anyways. Also even on the ground when you run past something 15m away it shouldn't suddenly slow you down unless it actually hits you, this just makes sense.

I know this might come off as criticism or overly negative, but it really isn't. We all just want to have fun and you need to know about these issues, it's up to you if you decide to act on them or not but they are certainly problematic. I'd be remiss if I didn't at least try to mention them to you in a clear format.