Posts made by spoletta

We are starting to have quite a lot of skills in the game, and the amount of builds which can be done is really benefitting from that.

The new imbues also have opened many more options.

Unfortunately there is one element left which is restricting possible builds by a lot. I'm talking about armor sets.

We currently have 2 light armor sets, 6 medium and 2 heavy.

This unfortunately isn't enough, especially cause most of them are very specialized in what they do, so you are usually left with very few options. This is especially true in pvp, where 90% of players are forced into battlemage armor, even if they don't use its bonus, due to a lack of real options. If these armors had more generic applications, there would be no need to add more sets, the existing ones would be more than enough.

I will go over each of them, and highlight why they work/don't work, and how they could be improved:

• Assassin armor: After the recent changes this is fine. It used to be a pvp only armor, due to the very long time it required to charge. Now that the bonus is smaller but much faster to charge, this is useful both in pvp and pve. It applies only to stealth builds. but considering that it is a light armor, this niche isn't that small.

• Scholar armor: This armor is mostly fine too. The bonus given isn't so huge to give issues in pve, and is achieved fast enough to be usable in pvp. It's pvp applications though are very limited, since the defenses are very low. The physical defenses can be covered with a mage armor, but the magical ones not. I would propose to increase the magical resistances of this set from 220 to 320. This would make it more usable in pvp, without impacting the real effect it has in pve. Right now mages are forced to run in battlemage, this would make it a choice between the better defenses of battlemage and the lower encumbrance, lower mana cost and bonus damage of Scholar.

In medium armors we have the hunter armor, the ranger armor, warlock armor, rogue armor, cleric armor and the battlemage armor.

• Hunter armor: This armor here has a specific purpose, which is to grind. It is pve only and not applicable to real pve challenges (legends). This is fine, but why not pair it with a bonus which is relevant only in pvp? This way you add an option to pvp builds without changing the overall power of the armor. A good bonus here would be increasing movement speed by 20% for 3 seconds after being hit. This is very marginally useful in pve, but very good for pretty much any build in pvp. It would make the hunter armor a generic purpose choice in case that you don't need the specific bonus of any of the other ones.

• Ranger armor: The ranger armor is again pve only, and honestly quite OP at that. Auto crits is a bit too strong of an effect, I fear that soon the DPS role during legend fights will become rangers only, with an acid mage and a knife fighter to lower the armor of the target. The bonus though is very slow to build up, and hard to maintain in a real fight. This means that this armor in pvp will never be used. At the same time, this armor exists for medium armor archers and that's it. A possible change here would be to make it applicable to all projectiles, not only bows. Have the stacks provide 10% bonus crit each stack, stackable up to 5. Each hit projectile adds one stack. Each missed projectile removes one stack. When you crit, reset the stacks. This is a net nerf to its PvE power, which is sorely needed, and makes it easier to manage in pvp. It also makes it an interesting choice for projectile based spellcasters.

• Cleric armor: Ultra specific armor set which has one and only one application. Making it harder to kill your party healer in a pvp fight. Zero reasons to use this in pve, and also not very interesting in pvp either. This armor could be extended in purpose to cover all support cases, not only healers, and to provide a supporting bonus to the party. In particular, using skills from the schools of leadership and restoration would provide one stack per tier of the skill to the user. Stacks disappear after 10 sec if not refreshed. The user grants to party members of bonus of 10 to fortitude/willpower/evasion per stack on him. Max 15 stacks. The bonus is doubled on the user. This way, the cleric armor gets used by support players both in pvp and in pve, and paladin builds may want to use this even in solo to leverage the good amount of bonus saves.

• Rogue armor: This armor has never found a practical application. In pvp the bonus is too difficult to exploit, and in pve it is technically very strong, but makes you burn mana too fast to be useful. This is partially because when it was introduced, many short cd combat skills did not have a mana cost. Now that they all do, this armor has lost its niche. Now, this armor should technically be the main armor for melee brawler builds. Its first issue is that the magical resistances are too low for it to be a melee armor. The magical resistance should go up to at least 280. The bonus set must be something good for brawlers, and I believe that a good bonus would be that when you are afflicted by a negative status effect, your next combat skill for the next 5 seconds cannot be dodged or blocked and is automatically critical if it can be so. Both players and mobs make large use of those effects, so this set would be relevant for both.

• Warlock armor: This armor does see some use, mostly in pvp. First of all, this set should be rounded a bit in the pve application. Adding to its pieces an item property of Life Recovered on Kill, would fit like a glove with this armor, while not giving it much of a bonus in pvp. At the same time though, this bonus set has always been a recipe for disaster, you never know when you introduce a new skill and this armor breaks it. Its cooldown reduction effect should be reduced to 45% (the usual cap for that attribute). At the same time, to give it back something in its pvp utility, the bonus set should also halve the pre cast time of spells. Many mages did like the highly reactive nature of the low pre cast time spells. This would give them a chance to access it again. This way this armor would be for pvp casters which enjoy high reactive fights with minimal restrictions, while in pve it would be played as a constant cycle of using life to machine gun fire your spells, and using the kills to refill your health.

• Battlemage Armor: The most used armor at the moment. Technically this is a very specific armor, which is made for dex/Int builds. In reality, due to a lack of other options and since it offers excellent defenses, it is the default armor at the moment. I wouldn't touch battlemage armor, it is working fine. The issue is the lack of alternatives. I cannot avoid to wonder though, why the change to its set effect was rolled back. It was nerfed (for good reasons) to have its damage capped at the base damage of the weapon used, but that change has been apparently rolled back (bug?). More than for pvp, this is a big issue for pve. A battlemage with a fast weapon can do really mean damage without that limit. Considering that this armor has such high defenses, the damage cannot be that high.

Finally you have heavy armors, and here I believe that there aren't many issues.

• Slayer Armor: The bonus is generic enough to cover all melee heavy damage builds.
• Knight Armor: The best tank armor, almost immune to physical damage. The bonus set is a bit niche in pvp, but can still find its applications.

With the recent balance patch nerfing most forms of CC, we are now left with just Freezing as the only CC with a long duration which wasn't touched.
For those that don't know how this works, a target becomes Frozen when it reaches 100 chill stacks. The frozen effect always lasts 4 seconds, and during that the target has +300 to all physical defense, and -200 to ice resistance.

4 seconds is a long time, there is also no way for the target to cleanse it. Cryomancy is full of spells which benefit from the target standing still (ice spikes, shivers, cloak of frost), so the damage that you can receive in those 4 seconds can be very high.

Now, I have seen some suggestions regarding making it harder to freeze a target. I partially disagree on those, since freezing a target is what frost mages do, and if you make it too hard, it kind of makes them less fun.

I would prefer to make the freeze effect a bit less dooming. Have it break at the first instance of damage, but drop cold resistance by 400 instead of 200 and turn the next attack suffered into an automatic critical hit.

This way, the frost mage gains 4 seconds to set up a big attack, but it does no longer have 4 seconds of free play on the target.

This would also finally give a reason to exist for icebound blast, since it is the single biggest source of damage for cryomancy (allow it to crit) and would become the perfect spell to burst a frozen target. It also has AoE.

I can see that being possible if it becomes progressively harder to own houses.
Like the second house should cost 10x in initial and recurring cost.
Third house 30x.

Remember to keep it as simple as possible. With the game running quickly toward the release (whenever that is going to be) there isn't much time to rework a system.

This issue gets discussed at regular intervals.

There is a need to vacate houses from no longer active players, but I have seen a few suggestions which can ease this on the players:

• The game sends you an ingame mail every week with your house balance.
• The game sends you an e-mail to your account in case that the next rent would make you lose the house
• When the rent isn't payed, the house stays there. The plot has no owners. If the original owner buys the plot, nothing happens, he is simply the owner again. If someone else buys the plot, it is reset as usual.

@MrErad

Thanks I reproduced it and added it to the existing bugs.

Thanks for the report.

@MidniteArrow I though of this many times, but it would make playing mage quite harder at low levels.

Consider that the devs progressively increased the mana regen to 2 per INT from the original 1. This fixed the mana issues at low levels, but we are seeing that it makes mana a non concern at high levels, so it could need another touch.

@Astarog when you get stuck, just shoot a message on the discord and a GM will rescue you.

Discord link: https://discord.gg/NaKBNA5H

I'm of the idea that CHA effect on Luck should be doubled, so that it isn't that easy to dump it.

To be fair, most warrior builds right now would run out of mana too.
They are abusing the mandrake elixirs to avoid caring about it.

CHA is luck which technically affects everything.

STR regulates health regen.

@MidniteArrow this already happens.
Shields decrease your movement speed, attack speed and increase your cooldowns.

@Tor I believe that split earth is not meant to hit the same target with multiple effects.

Here is fine

@DraxOakstaff
insect swarm bug is known and is being fixed in the next patch.

Icebound blast works fine, check the description of the spell

@rainbowmesa
First of all, yes. this is the best place when it comes to getting noticed by devs. Discord chat is sometimes monitored but it is more an exception than a rule.

With that said, I wholly agree with the point you are making.
This is a straight up better version of another consumable, so it is bound to be problematic. It either becomes prohibitively expensive, or overshadows the lesser version.
We see this with the linen and cotton bandages, but in that case it is fine because linen bandages are meant to be the easily accessible "primitive" version of the bandages.

This isn't the case for this elixir.
IMO the solution here is to remove the cleansing effect, so that it no longer competes with the other elixir, but also as you said turn the instant mana into a mana regen effect which scales with Constitution (consumables are meant to scale on that attribute, no matter the effect).

We are getting another consumable in the future for instant mana regen (you can easily guess which ones), but it comes with its own limitations, so this elixir which has only CD as a limitation would also be in conflict with it.

Plots inside a town are decided by the governor, they can go up to 5x5.

Plots outside town are all 4x4.

Insect swarm actually requires a fix not a nerf. The damage you are seeing isn't the correct one.

Maybe you cannot connect to the Aerhen server.

Try completely exiting the game and trying again.

Something is indeed needed, but I believe that we have to act on 2 different points.

First of all, the issue at low orbs does not really exist. The problem is in the scaling of CC duration with orbs. Right now almost all scaling of skills with orbs is set to go from 1 to 2.
This could be ok with damage scaling (pending more data), but we are seeing that with CC duration it is definitely not good. I would prefer a 1 to 1.5.

Secondarily, chain CC is definitely an issue. This is bad in 1v1 but also makes the 1vX miserable.
As such I would propose the following:
The current CC duration is given by the following formula
Duration = Fort/will/eva / (1250 + Accuracy) * base duration

Duration can never be lower than 20% of base duration.

What I would propose it to change this formula as follows:
Duration = Fort/will/eva / (1250 + Accuracy - Stubbornness) * base duration

The stubbornness modifier is given by the "Stubborn" status effect, which is inflicted by many cc skills. The stubborn status effect lasts 10 seconds and applies a modifier of 1000 to Stubbornness, which decreases by 100 every second. This way, another CC inflicted on the target, will get a reduced duration based on how long ago it suffered another CC. The CC will still get at least 20% duration though, since the formula will in any case limit the reduction effect.

The stubbornness effect should be applied on most CC skills, and indicated with a tag in the description "Causes stubborn: Yes/No".

This is a way to limit the amount of CC in a short time span on the same target, without penalizing specific builds.
If we simply give a set amount of immunity duration after a CC, we devalue the contributions of evasion, willpower, fortitude and accuracy to a fight.