Update Discussion: June 26, 2019

[mrwarp]

The update notes are here: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/show...6012#post16012

Discussion goes here! Please report all bugs using the in-game reporting system for better tracking.

[Citan]

There are more "secrets" in this update than usual, mainly due to experimental ideas that didn't pan out, but which left behind something interesting. Some of those are actual literal secrets (such as hidden rooms) but others are just little interactions or items that didn't merit "patch note" status. But one change that maybe should have been added to the notes: there's a book on Joeh's counter in Serbule which teaches new players how Augments are supposed to work. It gives a bit of Lore XP when read.

[TimbreWolf]

Just wanted to say thanks for the update guys. Not sure if I was the only one that submitted a bug report - but I ran into the work order item removal issue last week and filled out a report for it. With that said - I really do appreciate you guys taking time to tweak that system for us. Now I don't have to worry about changing load outs, only to find my rear end flapping in the wind.

[Niph]

It seems to me that equipment search should allow for the AND combination of skills (i.e. Ice Magic AND Psychology). I just made a search, and all it tells me that there is one shop with a yellow level 70+ Ring or Main Hand slot, and either Ice Magic or Psychology, somewhere. The odds that this item has both skills together is low, and that leaves potentially a lot of shops to search.

[Yaffy]

I complained about how Telka's Teeth potions are not only incredibly strong for a racially locked potion, but also bad design in that if you're playing a melee/tanking build like unarmed, it's blatantly better to pick Rakshasa over the other races due to gaining a huge amount of damage and a ton of melee evasion.
It wasn't changed this patch, but that's ok.

What isn't ok is combining this with the Unarmed changes. Not only were Rakshasa blatantly better at Unarmed due to Telka's Teeth, but now Unarmed actually scales off of evasion now by regaining armor and gaining damage whenever they evade. This makes it so the Telka's Tooth potion is EVEN BETTER. It has actually gotten to a point where you might as well not even be playing Unarmed unless if you're a Rakshasa now, especially because Unarmed is now missing a significant amount of its physical resistance because the physical resistance mods were replaced with these evasion mods, and is therefore weaker if you aren't able to build melee evasion to stack with it.

Just to make matters worse, if you thought picking the wrong race was bad enough, Unarmed + Werewolf is now incredibly good... IF you're a Raksasha as well. This is because Werewolf can also gain melee evasion through See Red, and stacks incredibly well with Unarmed's changes for damage at the same time. You can drink the Telka's Teeth potion in humanoid form and then shapeshift into a Werewolf. This means that Unarmed is heavily effected by not just one permanent choice, but TWO.

Just to put it into numbers, a Werewolf Rakshasa can get 54% melee evasion with 80% uptime, and that's before alcohol buffs and Lend Grace. With alcohol buffs you can get 20-25% additional evasion. This means we're talking about having around 50% melee evasion with 100% uptime and 76% with 80% uptime just by using one skill. With a priest or bard, you can hit 100% melee evasion. If you aren't a Rakshasa you're losing 20% melee evasion and if you're not a Werewolf you're missing out on 26% with 80% uptime (And Lend Grace for 10% more evasion if you aren't an animal), which is to say you're losing a ton of melee evasion. The fact that picking the "Right Race" gives you more than double the evasion that the Unarmed skill normally gives you should speak volumes to how ridiculous this is.

Now of course, evading all those attacks is already overpowered for taking less damage, especially when you should expect around 70% of the attacks against you to be melee in Gazluk Keep and even more in other end game areas. But wait there's more! What makes it even worse is that now unarmed gets more damage and regenerates armor when they evade melee attacks as well, meaning melee evasion gets better the more you stack it!

To start, with two level 70 mods you will regenerate 112 armor every time you evade a melee attack. That basically means that every 3 times you evade, you get 2 free max level, unmodded reinforces (The shield armor regen skill) casted on you. Assuming you're playing the right race + Werewolf, this means that on average you're getting Reinforce casted on you for free every 12 seconds per melee enemy you're fighting, or every 8 seconds with alcohol buffs on. Another way of looking at this is that with 50% evasion, you're regenerating 56 armor on average every time you get attacked by melee, or 84 armor if you have 75% evasion.
In terms of damage, level 70 mods will let you get 234 bonus damage on your next melee attack every time you evade. Combine this with the fact that Telka's Teeth just straight up gives you +100 more damage just for being a Rakshasa and you're hitting for about 217-290 extra damage per attack on average when you're fighting just one enemy. If you're fighting more than one, your average damage increases even higher due to getting more chances to evade before you attack. That's higher than the base damage of most Unarmed and Lycan skills. Although it depends on your exact build, it is safe to say you should expect to get about double the normal DPS with this set up, making this not only incredibly overpowered for survival, but also constant DPS as well. This isn't even considering the idea that you might have a Bard or Priest boosting you to 100% melee evasion.

This means that IF you've picked the right race AND you make the permanent decision to play a Werewolf, congrats! You have the potential to become incredibly overpowered now! If you decided to foolishly pick Human or Elf, well too bad, you'll just be playing a gimped version of this build and you basically shouldn't even bother with unarmed, or even worse, unarmed tanking. This whole thing honestly feels like a personal insult after I complained about Telka's Teeth.

[Niph]

I tried the 6 new War Caches. Difficulty-wise, I think T-2, with the named spider, is too hard for a solo level 60 character. It killed me several times before I could figure it out, but I guess some specific builds will have no trouble.

In the same vein, I suspect M-3 will not be very popular! It's not difficult per se, but some features of the game, when combined, can be annoying. For example, root + mobs aggroing through walls, root + face of death, permanent slow. There is also no marker on skulls that could help you write down the solution to a puzzle, so you got to use pen and paper to map the dungeon and add markers. I don't see any problem with that, but with several annoyance factors in the same place, I'd just abandon the quest when I get it.

[Citan]

Yaffy: personal insult? Give me a break. These are separate development topics. You want me to quickly remove parts of a design because you said something on the forum a few days before the update went live?

First, you shouldn't be able to retain the powers of Telka's Teeth in an animal form; that would be a bug. So let's skip all this werewolf stuff.

Second, like I said before, these are supposed to be rare. They aren't supposed to be something you can use constantly. In the same way you can't use Eternal Greens to just zerg through hard dungeons forever (due to a lack of said items), you shouldn't be able to use high-level Telka's Teeth constantly either. So if they do become popular the rarity will make it obvious how impractical it would be to use them every fight. And if that doesn't happen then I'll be decreasing their rarity, so they become a powerful prized possession. Something that will be mimicked in other ways for other races.

Third, I'm working on adding the necessary counters to evasion to make it more balanced -- hence the monsters with Accuracy in this update as a starting point. A few points of evasion isn't really going to be worth rerolling a character for, at the high levels, I think. And if I'm wrong when all is said and done, I'll fix it.

Fourth, stop with the persecution complex. I'm trying my best to be responsive, but things take time. You need to either give me space to do so or just give up on the game, because this whole "you offended me by ignoring me" thing is not okay. I value your feedback, both in the past and the future, but it should be clear by now that I'm not going to delay an entire beta update because you think it will be more imbalanced for a bit longer. I have schedules to keep; that doesn't mean I'm ignoring you. Stop it.

[Yaffy]

Yaffy: personal insult? Give me a break. These are separate development topics. You want me to quickly remove parts of a design because you said something on the forum a few days before the update went live?

First, you shouldn't be able to retain the powers of Telka's Teeth in an animal form; that would be a bug. So let's skip all this werewolf stuff.

Second, like I said before, these are supposed to be rare. They aren't supposed to be something you can use constantly. In the same way you can't use Eternal Greens to just zerg through hard dungeons forever (due to a lack of said items), you shouldn't be able to use high-level Telka's Teeth constantly either. So if they do become popular the rarity will make it obvious how impractical it would be to use them every fight. And if that doesn't happen then I'll be decreasing their rarity, so they become a powerful prized possession. Something that will be mimicked in other ways for other races.

Third, I'm working on adding the necessary counters to evasion to make it more balanced -- hence the monsters with Accuracy in this update as a starting point. A few points of evasion isn't really going to be worth rerolling a character for, at the high levels, I think. And if I'm wrong when all is said and done, I'll fix it.

Fourth, stop with the persecution complex. I'm trying my best to be responsive, but things take time. You need to either give me space to do so or just give up on the game, because this whole "you offended me by ignoring me" thing is not okay. I value your feedback, both in the past and the future, but it should be clear by now that I'm not going to delay an entire beta update because you think it will be more imbalanced for a bit longer. I have schedules to keep; that doesn't mean I'm ignoring you. Stop it.

The "Personal insult" part was me being sarcastic (Although still in a snarky way). I apologize if it wasn't taken that way. I was going to actually edit it out but you posted the exact minute I was going to change it.

Aside from that, I do believe there's a serious balance issue here. If the Telka's Teeth is supposed to vanish when you turn into an animal, then yes that's a bug. It isn't inherently overpowered to be able to use with animals, it's just that it allows for Telka's Teeth to be used in more builds. If you can't use it with Werewolf, then it can potentially become an issue when used with other skills, just that I believe Werewolf is the best current choice.

I do believe you are highly underestimating just how useful melee evasion is as a stat. 20% is a very useful amount. In any other MMORPG, a tank being able to negate 20% of melee attacks is INCREDIBLY good. I would expect to see that on a buff with a very low uptime, or maybe on a button that requires constant usage, not as a passive effect. Even 15 or 10% is still very useful. Just as a comparison, I would say that the Canine variety of the potion is about as strong as as a staff user constantly using the highest ranked deflective spin (40% reduced damage for 8 seconds, 16 second CD). That's too strong for a passive effect that doesn't require you to use a specific skill. That also doesn't include the +100 damage boost, which is quite hefty.

I don't know how rare you expect Telka's Teeth to be, but they're certainly a lot more common than they should be, given that there are players who have stockpiled quite a bit already. The canine variety is the one I constantly quote because it's the strongest version and not very hard to acquire. Even ignoring canine, I would still say the weaker varieties are still quite strong, so even if canine is supposed to be a very rare treasure, it wouldn't be a big downgrade if you had to switch to Incisor. It also helps a lot that it's race locked, so the other races will be looking to pawn off any they collect since they can't use them.

I do want to state that I think that the new "Dodge for buffs" mechanic on unarmed is interesting, it's just that it clearly scales with melee evasion very well, and currently melee evasion is very limited which is why the Telka's Teeth potions are so useful. Regardless of whether you think melee evasion is that good by itself, if players are expected to try and build melee evasion to synergize with Unarmed, Telka's teeth is currently the best source of it by far due to having 100% uptime and not requiring you to spend time using abilities in combat. That means for players to build around this mechanic, being Rakshasa is a bigger contributor than your other skills, your equipment, your other mods, etc, which is the biggest problem with introducing this mechanic with it.

Also, don't think I have any sort of persecution complex with you. I do not actually feel personally insulted by you in any way. I am simply an asshole who makes sarcastic remarks at things in video games for fun. I honestly forgot sometimes that the developers are actually going to read these posts, rather than just being seen by other players, hence why I wanted to edit my original post.

[Citan]

The new unarmed equipment (that buffs evasion) explicitly states that you must be using Unarmed, of course. And if it isn't working as listed, PLEASE report that, as it is obviously a bug. And if it wasn't listed that way (which it is), THAT would be a bug, too. Obviously. At least I think it should be pretty obvious... okay, I guess it isn't obvious to other people, so let me put it another way:

If you find something insanely out-of-whack from the norm, which doesn't mention being unusual, it's probably a bug and it would be really helpful if you reported it. For instance, if literally ALL skill-specific gear requires the skill to be active, and a powerful new piece of skill-specific gear showed up without that requirement, the first thought shouldn't be "I guess this piece of gear is going into ALL my skill set builds forever! Nice!" but rather "That's a bug, I should help Eric make the game work by reporting it."

I'm not talking about when something is EXPLICITLY different, such as the special fireball abilities that say they can be used even when Fire Magic isn't active. I'm talking about things that don't say that they're breaking the general rules, but are. If it's not explicitly an exception to the general rule, then ... it's probably a bug.

[Mbaums]

I think I'm happy with the UA changes. If you looked at it before, it seemed difficult to imagine how they would scale the skill to ~125. Something needed to be done with the class, and I think I like these changes because my UA setup still tanks well. The bodyslam people probably have something different to say tho!

-IF I dodge 5 attacks in a row without attacking...my next attack could possibly be a 1 shot on a boss. I do not remember seeing anything about not stacking or time limits, just "your next attack".

It only stacks once, but it's still a huge damage increase. I kind of gave up on thinking my tank setup could do real damage before. I'm actually able to kill things now! I am shocked this mod works on all attacks and not just melee attacks, and I think I would be okay if they changed that part.

There is a lot of Telkan's talk: I think the highest Telka's Teeth are too rare to farm, but so many people just sell them to vendors. I think 1 player can't farm enough to keep it active all the time. They'll need to buy it from other players or buy it from the used tab. I think once people figure out there is a market for them, the used tab potions are going to dry up. If you wanted to make it less forgiving, you could make re-freshing the drug not remove the debuff. But I still dont imagine this is going to be something players are going to reroll for. And Yaffy is right that there is a weird way to get this buff on an animal. A bug report has been submitted for it. But I get that it's a no go. For example, eco-location drops when you are no longer a bat, but Telkan's does not drop when you are no longer a rakkie (under some rare circumstances that I'm not going to spell out for everyone).

One thing I am looking forward for is drinking and tanking. The only people that I've seen drink so far just do it to raise the skill or just dabble in the art of booze. No commitment from these folks! I was going to mess around with some beers to raise my armor by ~200, but I think melee avoidance buff is going to be much more interesting. The downside is... if I maintain a buzz for an entire dungeon the shakes debuff might become an issue (as it should).