Update Discussion: December 11, 2020

[Sims]

The update notes are here: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/show...cember-11-2020

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

[Deldaron]

Vanity Pets

Okay, first and foremost. Vanity. Pets. I love it, I love them. One of my favorite completely unnecessary, but oh so important pieces of online games is vanity items. I keep velkort's gift staff (now I use the ratkin drop, but same asset) for my travel form because I love how it looks. And the event pet is FANTASTIC - the face of death is a nice one too, but I'm still saving up for the utility items. I hope to see more (though I don't expect more soon since there are higher priority development pieces) and I'm glad to see the system introduced outside of fairy lights. Also, this is a gentle request that we at one point get transmogrification.

Skill Updates

I don't play deer or ice so I can't get too deep into those updates, but I do like the idea of temp taunt for off tanks and I think its a nice touch also the proc summon pet mechanic looks cool.

Live Event Token item changes

Live event token changes - I support the move to fox/portal going to a skill I think that's cool. I would like to see more ways to get tokens continue to pour in I think. I did a lot of events in October/November on up to 4 characters and am sitting just above 50 w/out purchasing any. Now that we have a new 50 token purchase as well as a move to having to get the 75 and 100 token items per char instead of once per account I would like to see tokens become a little more common. I know this is a tough balance b/c you have to straddle making them so common that people hop on for a month, get what they want, and then stop supporting world events and being so rare that people aren't motivated to bother, but I think the current system effectively makes the portal guns invisible and I think they're a really cool addition. They're not that useful because 1. if you're doing a dungeon the chances are you are doing a daily/am and can get a portal from an npc for free or way cheaper and 2. the personal teleporter ones just aren't that useful and event tokens are selling for crazy amounts. I'm not sure where the balance should be, but I think they're a little too rare/limited.

Ri-Shin

Now for the big one - Ri-Shin updates. I love this. I played vanilla WoW during the AQ opening event. At the time I didn't have an end game character, but I still loved it - it really made me feel like part of a community working with people towards this same goal by collecting and donating items. This obviously gives very similar vibes and the fact that it will open up server rewards is amazing. Its been fun to be in the gardens with everyone and you can see the group effort. It's still a little premature to comment on b/c we're only on tier 2 so things my change as we go forward, but I have some thoughts already.

One thing I would like to see in future iterations of events like this is multiple means to the end - beets in particular seems to be slower going than wood which people had on hand and I'm guessing it'll get slower from here. I did my 99 beet donation on 4 characters and I would LOVE to keep going but... I'm out of fertilizer. I spent 3 stacks of strange dirt (obviously I wasn't growing just beets so I was being wasteful, but I also wouldn't have done it w/ just beets) and now I'm out. I can farm for more or buy some if anyone has any to spare, but I think it would be cool if things were tweaked to help work around that.

Some ideas on how this might look written for beet, but designed to be generalizable:

While the beet tier is open all monsters have a small % chance to drop beets scaled by level - designed in a way to be much slower in beet gathering than gardening regardless of how fast you kill so this isn't going to be the primary source of beets for the server, but it lets everyone feel like they can constantly contribute regardless of if they have fertilizer, any levels in gardening, or just hate gardening.

Absolutely insane barters - 10 carrots for 1 beet, 50 normal quality skulls for 1 beet, silly things that again are less effective than just growing the beets, but give people a work around to reward other activities.

Fertilizer free beets - these could be an item that takes 2x as long to grow as normal beets (or longer), can't be used in any recipes, and can't be grown at the same time as beets, but only require water. This is specific to gardening style acquire quests, but it removes the monetary/resource component of this event.

I think this is a great first iteration from what I've seen so far, but I think by giving alternate paths to completion it would help to include more people with different play styles and let you switch gears to something else while still working towards event completion.

Another place I would tweak is the barter rewards. This is a tough space to tweak b/c there's a sweet spot on item rarity/usefulness. If the items are _too_ good and good in multiple quantities (e.g. bartering for live event tokens) then the economy could respond adversely, people could hoard their beets instead of donating and try and sell them. With 25k for tier 2 this seems unlikely since people will have ample time to slowly get barter items over the course of the event, but you never know - I saw at least one person offering 50k for 99 beets though this has not been common and I didn't see listings for beet sales, just offers to buy. That being said the barter items in place are not personally motivating. I'm excited about the server rewards which is probably the main point, but I don't feel the same fire to drop off another stack as I did the first 4.

Also this isn't related to this update per say, but is related to the barter items from snowflake re: plant combat precog. On paper, I love these different combat precog varieties, get a longer precog at the expense of it only working for this type of mob. But 5 seconds precog on all mobs just isn't that hard to unlock if you put your mind to it and its leaps and bounds better than any other variety. I would suggest that there's two versions of precog: the everybody variety that is semi-permanent and then make the per species buffs have a set duration and stack with the other. There isn't a space I can think of where the mobs are so homogenous that its worth taking the longer time for a specific type and honestly the difference b/t 3 and 10 seconds doesn't gain you that much so I've never intentionally grabbed a species specific buff.

My last note I would say is that I think pixie dust and the FR tree just isn't worth it - it's not a problem b/c you can freely skip that tree at this point, but I feel like its a con that is working on completionists. It gives you another chance at the rare titles/items per day which is cool, but compared to all the other trees pixie dust is just too rare and too useful.

Overall great update, excited to see more work on abilities moving towards longer combat - curious to see what people have to say about elite health updates and happy with the pieces I've already explored!

Edit:

Now that the event is over I wanted to recap my thoughts on Ri-Shin server event - clearly when I posted this I didn't realize Ri-Shin being the god of plant life was the theme. I ended up buying a lot more fert and continuing through to the end. I got some generic yellow ri-shin sets for fun and did enjoy it. I think as a "lets test the waters" this iteration of the event nailed it - it added little in the way of mechanics and items so it could be set up quickly and if it flopped little was lost. I do think the buffs should be a little bit longer and the storage chest should link up to kur to be more useful - the storage is primarily useful for newer players who might leave their cold weather gear here or some fires/blankets to make exploring kur easier, but for anyone past kur its not that important. The buffs are actually quite nice, but the 60 minute duration and their out of the way locale makes them hard to truly take advantage of - I think even 90 minutes would be nice b/c that buffers some travel time.

For future iterations however I think it would be best to get creative about how we think about plant life and again to give multiple paths to completion for this event. The server really did come together over this and people who couldn't grow later game items were still playing music and gathering fert which was a lot of fun! But I have seen the sentiment that the end result of the event felt a little lack-luster and knowing how much of a time/resource drain it was for the reward (not counting first donation reward) I think there would be less motivation next year without more variety in the tasks. I also think doing something like, "once the shrine is complete the next donation gives event tokens" or "talking to snowleaf after event completion gives a reward" - I know its hard to design something like that in a way that it can't be abused, but I think variety in tasks and a better full completion reward would help motivate future iterations. Another idea that might entice some players is having a rewardless leaderboard on donations - I don't personally find that type of competition enticing, but I saw people mention wishing they knew how much they donated. Maybe the shrine could have some flavor text off season to highlight the top 5 donators of the previous year.

Either way I still love the inclusion of events like this and hope to see future iterations of it

[Celerity]

I really like the increased elite hp. It's actually worthwhile to use dot builds and combo mods now, rather than just going all in on a few burst abilities. Tanking is also more valuable, which in turn makes supports more valuable. Bosses actually feel boss-like now and not just like a 20% harder elite. Their damage doesn't really scratch me in my tank build anymore though and only the bosses with adds are any threat at all. I'm not sure how you can balance this honestly. For the regular elites, the difficulty feels a bit harder than before, since you can't just expect 1 or 2 elites to die right at the start of the pull anymore and instead they all stay alive for a lot longer. For all dps groups this is especially apparent and it is much more challenging.

I think the money drops from elites was a good idea to make up for the longer kills. I think I would still do groups anyway because I find them fun, but I know for some people the rate of money is important. Maybe the sound effect could be removed for it though, it gets a bit grating when you're hearing constant cash noises from every single corpse x 6 people.

Shame that unarmed didn't get it's rework this time around but I'm looking forward to it.

[Mikhaila]

The changes to elites is good. Indirect damage now has time to actually be useful. Who cares if you have a 3k dot over 12 seconds if the mob is dead in 2? It makes a lot of treasure effects more useful, and not just the ones that dish out maximum damage at the start. Less damage vs more hp is good. The longer fights give more time to think and use skills.

I had a little time to test on War Trolls and the fight was more fun. Instead of hit and run, i could stay and uses melee abilities and it felt like both I and the troll were wearing each other down. Over all a good thing.

[Melkhiresa]

Holy smokes stacks and stacks of phlog later I think i'm finally ready to give a look at the changes this patch has brought. Going to target ice magic first and break that further down by the specific changes and overall effects they have had on the playstyles of said skill.

(TDLR Ice is great you should play ice. Like right now go level it!)

Cryogenic Freeze:

-Changing this to a toggle and cancelable whenever one wants is a major quality of life and much needed change to it. Not much to add beyond this because it's in essence still the same skill and mods with virtually the same numbers as before. I don't find a place for it in a lot of builds but the ones that do or moment's make it pretty great.

Ice Armor, Ice Nova and Shardblast:

Literally everything you changed about these skills and their mods I freaking adore. With all the mods that give back armor/hp/power tied to these three skills and the constant shuffling of shardblast, ice nova and Ice armor the rotation of full Aoe ice feels fun and never a dull moment. It also does damage worth mentioning now comparatively to the past. The downside of this being I find single target builds of Ice to now be pretty bad in comparison.
When it comes to the increased tankiness you added to ice armor via mods and with all the above number restore I can see ice magic finding a spot in the tanking world once again. It brings probably the best aoe threat a tank could ask for to boot. Well when they aren't ice immune at least...

Cold Sphere:

When every mod is taken for this it hits surprisingly hard for what it is and seems to do it in a very small aoe radius. The major problem I have with both the changes you made to this ability and in general are two fold. First it summons with 276 hp and 0 armor. Literally abysmal one shot territory. Ok cool....now the damage mods take -80 and -80 from it bringing it down to a wonderful 116 hp. Yikes. Ok then you had two separate +90 hp mods for a net gain of 20 hp over the original total. What is the point of all this? If you want it to be a strong damage hunter seeker type pet I can get behind that but the 30 second cooldown needs a revision. Something like 10 seconds so all those mods aren't wasted when a breeze kills your pet might help. It then turns in to a strongish temporary pet made of wet tissue. Having it last either still 30 seconds or until it dies but only allow one summon up at a time of course. I would also probably just get rid of the whole -hp and +hp thing in general. Just a weird mess and mod bloat that doesn't seem needed.

Overall it's a great start to it just needs a little bit more and I can see some builds being able to use this little fart ball. More skills that do or can do ice damage would also help make use of the ice vuln you gave to it via mods. It's somewhat hard to make an ice build that uses this to its potential and still has enough other modded ice abilities to benefit from the vuln.

Blizzard:

Adding flat damage instead of armor helped differentiate and turn this in to finally a great damage aoe. Would still like to see a tiny snare increase to this but regardless it's a great ability now.

Frostbite:

Damage went up slightly overall at the loss of rage % but that was needed. Overall good ability got slightly better not much else to add.

On going Ice issues:

Single target ice has ice spear at 8 seconds, frostbite at 20 and that's about it. With Ice lightning being such a terrible damage ability and only useful for the modded fire % vuln and slight core damage boost via mods there really isn't much leeway or anything to build on. This is mainly said with both of ice's 33% chance to do 48% increase single target damage in mind. They lose a lot of luster with the above problems.

- Blizzard deals +16% damage, generates -765 Rage and taunts -830

Tying a derage with a detaunt to this ability seems to be a silly thing. There are plenty of ways to gear for less threat if you really feel the need to go that route. I honestly would almost rather just see it add taunt instead and help focus the idea of Ice being a great aoe tank. Could also just remove the detaunt and ever so slightly up the -rage. I've suggested upping the snare in the past too via this mod but nonetheless I find the -taunt a bad fit.

Chill still is horrible outside of the rare occasion you can make use of its crushing vuln mod. Adding a single +x nice damage mod or something at least makes it worth something for any other non crushing build pairing. PLEASE add a longer range. While it does not matter for aoe builds of ice it's just another super annoyance for single target ice.

Deer changes:

This one I didn't get to test as much due to blowing stacks and stacks of phlog on ice but I was able to get an overall general test and feel of the new changes and pets enough to throw my two cents.

-Deer Bash deals +120 damage and knocks the enemy backwards" => "Deer Bash has a 15% chance to summon a deer ally for 30 seconds

While I find myself a fan of the random nature of the zoo this build brings the changing of this mod creates a big issue. There are a 4 mods to increase the damage of Deer bash % wise and zero ways for you to increase the base of it now. Thus you end up with even if both of the below linked mods happen to occur this ability still then does pretty crap damage.
(Deer Bash has a 60% chance to deal +110% damage)

- (Head, Necklace): "Pummeling Hooves deals +45 damage and has a 8% chance to summon a deer ally for 30 seconds"

I'll talk more about the summons later but while the +flat damage is a nice added bonus it still runs the same problem as the above. You can run super heavy and get every mod below

- Pummeling Hooves Damage +38%(2)
- Pummeling Hooves deals +22% damage and taunts +500(2)
- Pummeling Hooves has a 60% chance to deal +66% damage and taunt +400(2)

and the ability still hits for pretty low damage even when both 60% chances happen. It's a lot of mods for little return.

The deer that are summoned from the new mods seem to do rather low damage. I know its a hard balance to not make them too crazy if you happen to get a lot out but it seems too low entirely to make them worth it. Just some slight tweaks or changing around some of the mods that effect the pets should fix this. There's also some leftover +hp and +armor mods from when the main summoned deer was a tank that seem ill-suited to the new direction and could easily be turned in to more damage options and further cement a strong zoo option. Also considering the actual summoned deer is no longer a tank and has way less stats consider lowering the 90 cooldown a bit to accommodate death more so.

Positives:

With the changes and new mods to Cuteness Overload the ability really does feel epic and is the rightful hardest hitter in the arsenal. Always have been a fan of this ability and I'm happy to see it get love.

The changes to the tankiness of deer are quite nice and make a difference comparatively to what it once was. Time will tell if its enough or too much but it seems to be in a good spot mitigation wise. A lot of flat mitigation and a varying degree of certain elementals. Also one of the few skills to get -fire vuln.

Damage issues aside when all the mods are taken and you get rolling I enjoy the new random summons and find it an fun and unique option.

Final Deer note:

Cuteness Overload, Doe eye's, Forest Challenge and King of the forest seem to be in a good place in both damage and role now but I find deer kick, deer bash and pummeling to be a little behind in the damage department or role. The random pets were a nice touch but if you don't go that route you are left with just samesie kick attacks.

Overall it was a nice pass at deer and helped shore up some of its issues and add some more flavor. I still think it needs a bit more love but that's entirely your court.

Random thoughts:

-Super happy not only rabbit got it's mods fixed but had the lv80 tiara added. They seem to drop super rarely and i've yet to farm up a yellow one but they drop and that's good enough for me!

-Really like the increased health and armor for elites like most have stated in their posts before this. Just overall makes everything better for many reasons.

-Please consider reducing the amount of ice immune non boss mobs. It hurts both damage and tanking playstyles of ice and is quite common everywhere in our current 'end game'. The entirety of the second floor in WT for example is immune to ice outside of Hippogriff's. You run in to it a lot from the time you hit yeti's, gazluk, gaz keep and then FR. Very ineffective is much preferred over 0.

Broken record time but I'm loving the ice changes so thanks! Anyone reading this really should try out the new and improved aoe's.

[Mbaums]

The ice magic changes are huge. Blizzard and shardblast are now probably the two best skills for ice magic. I will admit I dislike the fear mod on blizzard, and if I’d really like a mod that is like… reduces the mobs hit by 9 (mod lvl /10 +1) instead of that fear. But I get it, the focus was more on the tanking side of things. The ring slot is really tight currently after the blizzard change. There are big choice most ice magic players doing AoE will make on the ring, whereas the offhand is nearly void of mods. But either way, the overall changes are good. The fire/ice combo people used to be pigeonholed into is no longer present with the Calefaction change.

Did some theory crafting and planned out an ice magic+shield tank. You know how some of the old complaints with staff was that it was not engaging at all? I think ice magic’s tanking might be too busy! One stun at the wrong time and you are in trouble. It look’s like an ice magic tank is just consistently refreshing ice armor, and building agro before they jump into an ice block. The preparation phase is so important, and one ~4 sec stun could really throw everything off. I just hope there is more player support/stun cures in the future!

The mob HP increase is good, and I think the council mobs drop is appropriate. Overall, it’s more enjoyable combat. One unexpected side effect though is when the AM daily is WT, the number of stray folks wanting to follow a group has shot through the roof. I think this is because the more casual group struggled and disbanded. Obviously they need to do the FR dailies outside and do GK and build towards a set of armor, but players aren’t quite doing that. I think the troll giving the daily quest in FR should offer more council, or offer multiple quests at once. The goal would be to get more pre-WT capable players ready for WT.

The Ri-Shin Celebration is grand. I don’t trust the new storage in kur, so I’m not putting anything in that thing! When it comes around next year, I think you should keep the same amounts of items. People’s interest won’t be as strong as it is now, so I don’t expect the players to blaze through. However, if you add a title to the list of things people can buy, people would harvest 25,000 of anything!

[Mikhaila]

One unexpected side effect though is when the AM daily is WT,

Yes, that's been interesting. I think with the normal dailies, players have evolved a "no level, we'll carry you" attitude. Some people even ask "who's starting a group to carry us newbies through?". They they hit the AM dailies, and it's tougher. WT much tougher, and now with the changes, groups are having trouble with the content.

This is great!!! Keep it hard and something for people to work towards.

[Ranperre]

I think you got the council drop/mob about right in terms of time compensation. Maybe add an additional % chance at a 300-400c coin bag at treasure chests too in order to balance out dungeon runs hitting chests (WT is chest heavy, GK is mass murder heavy).

When it comes to increasing combat length, two things should be reconsidered: stun resistance and cocks in WT (at least their current placement).

- When fights lasted 5-6 seconds, it made sense to ensure two stuns wouldn't disable for 60% of the fight length. However, these days, I believe the minimum stun length should be increased from negligible (where it is right now) to about one second so that these spells aren't worthless in longer fights. The problem with decreasing stun length according to times stunned is that it overly punishes overlapping stuns during fights. Further, it might be nice to give players some level of stun resistance (there are periods where you can be stunned for 4-5 seconds).

-When it comes to the cocks, there's one "impossible" intersection, see yellow circle: https://i.imgur.com/zV2XSnp.png. By "impossible" I mean that it's entirely up to chance whether you can survive. If you walk up to it and there's a cock, you can either wait (no thanks) or just hope that you aren't going to be pulling eight. In the past, you would just suicide pull, kill 3-4 (make headway), die, then survive next time. However, these days, you might not make enough headway to survive the next bout (b/c of the massive hp increase). We've been over this before with crits, but having situations where life and death is 100% luck based just sucks.

I believe the changes have only exacerbated the difference between 30-40 mod newbies and finished 60+ mod sets. In the past, you could tolerate newbies that had a bunch of 500-1000 damage attacks. However, these days, those same newbies experience a 50-80% reduction in their first barrage of attacks because armor is so high (in terms of damage equity, it's self evident why armor/flat mitigation is regressive). While making these adjustments to force a tank on us, you have vastly, vastly increased the importance of having more than one damage carry (something pickup groups can have a tough time with). To start, I would decrease armor by 30-40% across the board and increase hp by that exact amount. Maybe something like -30% armor, +15% health. This also comes into play with taunt for weaker tanks. If your taunt isn't fully modded out, is might do 0 damage and rely entirely on the extra taunt.

Did some theory crafting and planned out an ice magic+shield tank. You know how some of the old complaints with staff was that it was not engaging at all? I think ice magic’s tanking might be too busy! One stun at the wrong time and you are in trouble. It look’s like an ice magic tank is just consistently refreshing ice armor, and building agro before they jump into an ice block. The preparation phase is so important, and one ~4 sec stun could really throw everything off. I just hope there is more player support/stun cures in the future!

I made this and it is exceedingly unforgiving. Shield stuff + ice armor isn't enough and the stuns are crippling. It's all a crapshoot as to whether or not you can get off enough taunt before hiding in your cocoon. And with longer fights, do you really want to be hiding in cryogenic for long? Further, if you can live long enough to get off all your taunts before getting into cryo, do you really need cryo? Maybe give cryo some passive taunting.

Edit note: My opinion on shield/ice is, more or less, compared cow/unarmed.