General Impressions on Overhaul

Estarra

Please post your general impressions here!

From the announce:

As many of you know, we are attempting to do a complete overhaul of combat. I'd like to put our foot in the water by testing what we have so far, which is basically enough to put together combat for two bards. You can test in the arena using a special overhaul challenge to duel as avatars which we've set up. See HELP OVERHAUL ARENA.

PLEASE READ THIS DISCLAIMER: This is in very early testing, it is not even anywhere near what we could call a beta test. There will be bugs and there will be imbalances. There will be skills that work and some may be overpowered or underpowered. Please don't freak out and think these are the final results! We want to be transparent and open with this process so we are looking for your input to help shape the process as we go through it.

Right now, the avatars have general skills, but I would prefer if you not use those skills except for firstaid and bodyscan. The general haven't been fully converted and I'm not sure how they'd interact with the new skills. Remember, this is a process and we need to take baby steps.

However, you should be able to extrapolate the intent of what we are going for with the overhaul. We are getting rid of MANY afflictions, and using a progressive ailment system, wherein each ailment has 5 levels. However, most skills will not be able to get past level 3. Each skillset may only have 1 or 2 options to get an affliction up to level 5. You'll find afflictions may be harder to cure (we've slowed down the cure rate) and it may be harder to keep up with curing. You may also find damage to hit very hard. (Part of this has to do with the fact that we haven't coded a new armour system yet.) Again, please keep in mind that you help with early trial testing so expect it to be a bit funky.

I've started a new forum category for Combat Overhaul, which I hope you will participate in if you help with the testing. If you want to bug something in overhaul, please type "OVERHAUL" at the beginning of the bug. Otherwise, stick with the forums. We have suspended the envoy reports currently, but we may open them up in a month or so but focused on the overhaul.

See HELP OVERHAUL for more information.

 

Lehki

The OVERHAUL LIST command doesn't seem to be working at the moment, so can't actually challenge anybody to test. Bugged that as well already.

Caerlyr

Starhymn keeps losing to Necroscream

Moi

Constant Recklessness + Bleeding + No systems makes Necroscream seem way better than it is.

Moi

Further testing reveals that StarLight + Aeon Tarots leads to one heck of an Aeon/Void Lock.

Rivius

Only got a round or two in, but I definitely am liking the general idea quite a lot so far. Will need more time to oogle.

How much feedback do you want about balance at this stage? I'm thinking we'll need to whip up some mini-systems to get a good feel for that.

The new affliction system seems like it will be so much nicer to balance with now.

Estarra

Yes, please whip up mini-systems! I definitely would like feedback to balance these two classes around each other. It's best to balance early before adding new skillsets. That said, I'd like to do a few more bard skills (or their tertiaries) to get a broader perspective.

Daraius

I'm a little confused about the levels of afflictions (nor have I played around in the arena yet, so forgive me). What does it mean to have a level five auric affliction or a level three muscular affliction, and so on? Are you just really really deaf and have to cure deafness five times, or does it have some additional effects on you? 

Moi

HELP 50.4 has the list of afflictions in the overhaul and their effect.

Auric has the following:
Aura, Spiritual (reishi)
    Leaky Aura: Mana drain
    Justice Curse: Rebounding damage
    Jinx Curse: Missed commands
    Aeon Curse: Slowed time
    Peace Curse: No offense

which means that auric five does mana drain, Justice, Void, Aeon and Peace as long as you have it. If you eat a reishi, the Peace effect goes away, but you still have Aeon, Void, Justice and the mana drain. Another reishi will get rid of the Aeon, and then another for the Void, then the Justice and finally cure you of the mana drain.

Auditory (the thing that does deafness) is a special case, because the first "affliction" level is deafness. Which is a beneficial effect.  It looks like this:

Auditory (earwort)
    *Deafness: can't hear
    Earache: increase music damage
    Tinnitis: increase music damage
    Hyperacusis: increase music damage
    Echoes: hear double of everything, increase music damage

You're only deaf if you have Auditory 1. At Auditory 0, you can hear normally (and bards can use non-blanknote stuff on you, but not blanknote). At Auditory 1, you're deaf and can only be attacked with Blanknote. Past that, you can be hit with any music effect, and damage is scaling upward based on level.

Lerad

I like the new affliction system. It makes aff blocking a thing in lusternia, at last. As an affliction class (currently, at least. Not sure after overhaul, but still) this was one of the biggest annoyances to me. The randomized nature of cure trees in the past meant I could never guarantee an important aff is stuck on the opponent, no matter what shenanigans I may try. Worse still, I could never have any hope of tracking an enemy's afflictions. The new system will make it possible, or at least, more possible than before. All we need now is a discernment skill to reveal what is cured by things like green, allheale and focus.

Removing entanglement stacking is definitely a great idea. I love that. Entanglement stacking is beyond ridiculous in groups, and should go the way of the dodo. A little early in the design stage, but remove entanglement from overhauled monks as well. Grapples mechanics have always been the most frustrating part of a monk offense, as well as being horrendous to balance around. By doing this, you also greatly reduce the effectiveness of contort (I'm fine with that) and summer/tipharet (hrmm, might want to consider reworking those).

Daraius

Cool, thanks! I haven't been in game since he announcement came out. Sorry!

Lerad

As an additional note, I've seen (from the helpfile) that the new racial attributes will affect eq/bal speed. I would like to suggest that this is a very bad idea. In combat, speed trumps everything. By putting eq/bal speed into racial attributes, you guarantee zero racial versatility for combat. Eq using classes will use the race which gives them the fastest eq, bal using classes will use the race which gives them the fastest bal. The only choice comes when there are races with the same amount of eq or bal bonus (and when they also happen to be the fastest). Let's find another way to give meaning to these attributes, and stay far, far away from eq/bal bonuses.

If possible, make eq/bal bonuses non existent. Everyone operates on neutral, please. This will make balancing so much more easier, and pretty much eliminate some of the more egregrious outliers that can be possible otherwise. Afterall, a 0.5s bonus can turn a balanced affliction rate into something entirely ridiculous, as the current combat system has shown.

Speaking of affliction rates, can I ask if there is any regulation on what affliction rate the currently released bard passives are restricted to? For example, was there a decision to place bard passives at a 3 affliction levels per 10s rate, or something along those lines? If not, could I suggest such a thing be looked into and decided on? Make all bards have a constant passive rate. This way, afflictions from active skills can be balanced around how potent the passive afflictions their respective skillsets have. For example, if a Cantor is operating at 3 levels per 10s, and a Cacophony is operating at 2 levels per 10s, then you could give Cacophony an active ability which can give an additional level of affliction. Or you could do things like give Cantors access to more potent affliction trees if their passive rate is slower than a Cacophony's etc etc. If you can come up with a guideline for roughly how many afflictions a guild should be giving out over time, we can use that as a baseline to decide where all the other classes should be standing at, and how fast/slow the herb curing balances need to be etc.

Malayn

Little too early to look at affs that simply. We need to understand how/if focus works. And if beastmastery will still have curing/healing, will we have heal scrolls (forgot to check if rak was holding one), etc.

Moi

Starhymn currently gets 1/3 auric, 1/4 ocular, 1/4 nerves and  2/4 delusions.
Necroscream gets a command, musculature 1/5, skin 1/4 (2/3 with dyscrasia) and bleeding 1/3 on bound targets only.

I think it's pretty clear that Necroscream and Starhymn don't give the same number of afflictions and aren't intended to be mirrored that way.

Estarra

Yeah, I don't think we need a tit-for-tat mirror on afflictions in a skillset.

Lerad

The 2/4 delusions in starhymn is AvengingAngel, right? I believe that is an active, targetted, one-time ability, right?

As far as I can see, then they're both equal (at 3 levels per passive tick), with necro being able to boost it up to 5 levels per tick if they use power and manage to stick entanglement.

If this was intended, I'd say that's a good starting point for bards. We can adjust by adding more or reducing if need be as the other guilds/archetypes get overhauled as well, and using a standardized, numerical way of balancing is a good idea, is my suggestion.

Moi

Avenging angel is activated, but does ongoing passive afflictions on a timer for around a minute once used. I haven't checked if the tic rate and duration are still the same, but it's definitely not a one time 2/4 attack.

Sort of a tangent, but can we get a comment on this:

Iytha said:

Possible issue: HealthCurse/ManaCurse/EgoCurse do not decrease current h/m/e, but do effect your maximum. Since damage scales to maximum h/m/e, using HealthCurse means that you're killing your opponent slower (less damage because their max health is smaller, but applied to the previous, larger health total) than if you did otherwise.

I feel like this is a more pressing issue than the specific rate of afflictions, since VitalCurses are given by every bard spec and also happen in tarot. Fixing them to be not counter-productive should be a priority.

Estarra

For some attacks, we could figure the damage rather based on the current maximum health (i.e., adjusted) to the raw maximum health (i.e., unadjusted). However, this could be majorly painful for those with health maluses and actually really reduce damage if they have a lot of health blessings. Opinions?

Lerad

It depends on how easily blessings can be gotten. If we're gonna be able to stack blessings up to 30+ percent and also buff the health stat via racial attributes (do they still affect health under the new system?) then yeah, it would cause outliers to become even more outlying. However, if health blessings are going to be very difficult to come by (or capped at a low ceiling) then sure, making the dchord damage be based on unadjusted health would be a good idea. The curses should help the user, not penalize them.

We can tweak how much health the curses reduce, or even reduce the damage formula to prevent the opposite (too easy kills or too much stacked health maluses) outlying situations.

(Edit: Also, AvengingAngel then is the same mechanic as dyscrasia. Power cost for more passive afflictions, which continues to be a perfectly fine idea.)

Estarra

Well now that I think about it, the easiest solution may be that if you get cursed that your h/m/e immediately drops to its max (if it's over).

Lerad

Iytha's issue is that the damage done by dchord (and similar attacks) will be scaled to the new h/m/e max, which basically means that having or not having the curse does not affect the user's damage output. Using the curses should help the user by making their damage output slightly more potent, and if the opponent allows them to get stacked up, should lead to a much easier kill, ala current dchord effects (almost instakill levels of damage).

Dropping the h/m/e to its max when you get cursed does remove the additional need for the user to remove those remnant health, but it doesn't solve the issue of the damage being scaled lower and thus not affording any benefit to the user.

Estarra

I think it does afford a great deal of benefit if every time they get cursed, they lose health!

We could try fixed damage but that offers its own issues (though maybe not since we're regulating how high h/m/e can go now). Or for some special skills, we could have damage also be based on how many curses they have (hmm, kinda like that).

Malayn

This depends on the skills to get the effect really.

I have to test more but I was getting a curse every aff, and I forgot to check some things. I need more info though then I will have better feedback to the specifics. If we are aiming for guaranteed aff stacking I would prefer to avoid super powerful scaling affs we cant stop though if possible.

Moi

My problem is this:
Hollimar starts out at 4500/4500 health. If Raklang uses a L5 DCC with no octave on Hollimar, he hits for 1669 damage - 37% of Hollimar's current health
If, instead Raklang uses Majorseventh on him three times, Hollimar has 4500/3300 health. Raklang's DCC does 1223 damage at this point, a mere 27% of Hollimar's current health.
HealthCurse makes you do less damage, both in absolute terms and as a percent toward killing.

If you change it so that Hollimar drops to 3300/3300 upon being M7'd, Raklang's M7 isn't helping the DCC (1223 is 37% of 3300), but at least it isn't hurting it. If ther are some damaging attacks (CrusaderCanto? ClarrionKnell? Bleeding?) are non-scaling, then I think you have a workable solution.

Synkarin

I've noticed that HELP 50.4 doesn't list the curses or stat maluses etc. It'd be nice to see a list of those along with the other afflictions etc.

Hiriako

Agreed, Synk. Let's see exactly what the curse/stat maluses do, mechanically.

My initial testing of the two shells is positive. I still want to go through and write down details. Could we possibly get the ability to look at the ABs for the shells from outside the arena? This way we can prepare and give things more of a workout without really taking a long time to prepare within the arena.

Mini-systems would be good, though it looks like automated curing/healing seems to be functioning at the moment.

The max health aspect appears to be a concern right now, where some abilities scale to max health. Perhaps they should scale not to current max health, but to the default health level? I'm not sure if this is appropriate or not, but it's a thought.

As for testing other things, would love to test with glamours/ecology as well, when that's possible, or other music specs. I'm REALLY eager to test warriors, though, and monks!

Moi

Scaling damage to raw max is another option (and, I'm starting to think, maybe the best option), but it would require that the effects of Curses/Blessings be shrunk down to match. Currently level 3 HealthCurse drops your max health to 73% of normal, which would translate to a 36% damage boost when viewed in terms of fractions of the life bar. Or a 36% damage negation, if you get a level 3 health bonus. Making each level of curse/blessing 6% change instead of 9% would keep things from getting too crazy.

Enyalida

The biggest concern I have with the current design of the  new system after playing around with it a little while is that it will make grouping up even more powerful than it already is, because curing is more consolidated and slower compared to affliction rates, and it will take longer to get rid of debilitating afflictions. More than now, you will be unable to cure different sorts of afflictions at the same time, it'll be more like several warriors (or warriors and monks) hitting you at the same time: you can only cure so many wounds at once. Many of the more interesting class mechanics feel like they would fall by the wayside to strategies based around spamming a very small range of attacks over and over to overwhelm curing and lock someone down by sheer output - like the bard's auric tree or the tree with aeon in it (Which also gives void).

This could be patched by moving the afflictions  around and nerfing them, but that would be just a patch. Introducing mechanics/changing numbers to reduce the effectiveness of spamming and to encourage people to split their fire in a group and/or discourage focus firing is a better way to go, imo.

Hiriako

Void + Aeon is exceptionally strong, which...is making this not work so well at the moment. I'm not sure that's a reasonable pair to have in the same tree. With the level of command rejection Void offers, it may be best being an L4/5 of it's own! Perhaps under Delusions or Neurosis?

Also, power doesn't seem to be restoring to the shells after the arena. Hollimar was at 3% reserves when I went in the first time now, and was at 1% the next. 

Malayn

Unless there is another change coming, aeon is perma. If you outpace curing then you will hit level 5 when aeon is level 4. You will never actually be able to cure it.

Hiriako

That's another issue. Aeon should likely be the L5 affliction, rather than 4. The way certain things are building up, my gut instinct is that herb times are too slow at the moment. This in and of itself may be the crucial balance change.