State of the Game - 05/2020

[dayrinni]

Hello!

Class Balancing Update
We have made good progress with the class balancing (see viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8456). I want to thank everyone for their patience and assistance as we convert to a new way of handling classes and how they interact with the game!

We will always be tweaking classes and abilities and so on. This will never end. Right now, everyone is able to solo effectively without much trouble, based on the feedback I've been given and data I've collected. This is good and what we wanted to achieve!

I do want to reiterate that we will be working together to design a challenging and fun grouping system that is not strictly role based and DPS based. We will begin that discussion soon!

We will also be rebalancing NPC HP. We will do this soon. But first, we need to talk about what's going to be happening next:

Damage Caps
Damage Caps. We will be putting in caps for the modifiers for Damage Percent, Critical Chance, and Critical Damage.

I have intentionally uncapped these and let them run wild as a demonstration for you all to experience. I've also boosted a select few skills in order to demonstrate this in a better light! It is one thing to say “We have to do X because of Y.” It is a completely different thing to actually experience X and Y yourself. There are many things in life and this is one of them! Now, you have personal experience and context to what is going on. Some of you have expressed to me things are out of control. This is good!

Rest assured: I never do things without reason – I always have a reason – I just don't always share it. I also do what's best for the game! I wanted you all to understand how this (damage) works better and this way, you can help give better feedback on the proposed damage cap system (Thanks Sergan for helping with this! He gets most of the credit), that still rewards itemization and gearing and complexity as we have it today (and maybe a little more interesting going forward).

Proposal
There will be a circular system put in place, where numbers carry over from one to another. For example,
Damage Percent -> Accuracy -> Critical Damage -> Strike-through -> Critical Chance -> Dobson Droplets -> back to Damage Percent

Certain modifiers in the cycle will have different caps. Any overflow will be added at a rate (ie: 50% ) to the next one in line. All this will be documented clearly on the website, etc.

Here are 2 examples to demonstrate this cycle:
Example 1:
220 Accuracy: 100 goes to Accuracy and then the 120 gets converted to 60% Critical Damage.
Example 2:
400 Strike-through: 100 goes to Strike-through and then the 200 gets converted to 100% Critical Chance and the remaining 100 gets converted to 50 Dobson Droplets.

This way, you can still customize your character accordingly, and any over flow goes to the next modifier at a reduced rate. In fact, depending on the situation for your character, this may be a very interesting choice.

This still leaves rooms for Double Crits, Crippling Damage, and Giant Cheesepuffs, etc. We can always adjust and change the cycle and the gear evo system could also play on this aspect.

Change of Damage Equations
I know I said that I wouldn't change the Critical Damage formulas. The reason why I said this is because the bonus from this really made or break classes to kill effectively (and in some instances break the game). Also, it was hard to acquire these bonuses so I couldn't change the equation as I felt bad and did not want to invalidate your hard work. Keeping your hard work intact as much as possible is a number one goal of mine.

But now, since these buffs are more plentiful, and the bar has been raised on everything, I feel more comfortable with tweaking the equation to work better. I think we can now agree, after seeing uncapped damage numbers and how everything works together, it's a problem that should be corrected. These changes should not impact your ability to easily kill solo monsters, and eventually grow to soloing or duoing quad monsters. The entire point of this class balancing was to make it so solo mobs are easily killed – that will not change with this equation change.

For those who have itemized for certain aspects, this overflow system described above still ensures your hard work is rewarded, effective, and useful – just in a different and potentially more interesting way.

Timeline
I will be putting these caps in very soon. I am ready to move onto rebalancing NPCs, starting the group design discussion, and more importantly, getting back to doing RP (hopefully this weekend).


Ethari
I have decided to play one myself and tweak as I play. I'm going to have more free time to do this now I've completed the long process of touching all the classes.



Summary
As with everything we do at ATS, if you have any concerns, you can bring them directly to me in a DM, or in tells, or email ([email protected]).


Thank you for your time, passion, and commitment to ATS. Your contributions to the game mean so much to Actinate, myself, and everyone else who helps. Without you in our community, we wouldn't have this great game we do right now! Thank you!

-Dayrinni and Actinate

[dayrinni]

If you use Discord, please discuss this post in #damage-capped-equation-rewrite-chat

If you do not use Discord, contact me with your thoughts.

Thanks!

[dayrinni]

Hi,

The damage caps and damage equation is live. I'm adjusting stabilizes to get them where they need to be. So expect things to go up and things to go down. My plan is to ensure people can easily do 1,000 to 1,500 damage (roughly hp of a solo mob) before any modifiers (ie: critical chance, attribute, buffs etc) at a fast pace (divine word, melee attacks, etc) and then have "max damage" be around the 5-10k mark depending on factors. Remember, homogenization was only for soloing.

Also, I am not sure if the cycling will be needed right now - the caps are generous: 300% damage and 300% critical damage. I'm probably going to table this cycle system for now until I collect more damage.

The reason why I didn't know this while writing the post was because after I rewrote the damage equations, I didn't know things would ultimately behave with my new equations, and now, I have a better idea.

Thanks!