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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Stats and Items - post patch feedback
Fireguard
Member, Alpha Two
Originally I wasn't really going to bother with this as I figured with the survey and the limited time between P3 start - everything was basically locked in.
Section 1 - New Stat Weighting
Short version: Only one stat matters as a secondary. The others add so little usually they are just fluff.
With the new stat weighting, the only stat that really matters on a piece of gear is the first secondary stat that it gives. In the case of Forge armor and Carphin armor, this is Fire and Necrotic mitigation. The green heavy carphin chest gives 4-8 strength as a secondary stat, and 1364-1375 necrotic mitigation. When all the stat weighting is just to 1 stat, who cares about 4-8 STR.
Section 2 - Bad Stats.
Short Version: Either make all stats valuable in some situation, or at least not as unbalanced as they are currently.
Carphin armor and Forge armor give over 1k mitigation rating to a specific element each. These are extremely useless stats with current scaling. People will NEVER wear this armor unless they are bad players. This includes some weapons like Tumok bow which has health regeneration rating, or the Firebrand bow because it has Addative Fire Damage. People will also not use non-universal defensive stats either. Why would you wear magical evasion armor, when you can wear evasion armor and get 2X the value? ETC.
Examples of bad stats and why they are bad -
- Any specific defensive stat (Critical disable reduction rating, magical evasion rating, Necrotic mitigation rating, fire mitigation rating, Physical Critical Mitigation rating, and more). These are bad because they are too niche and they scale bad.
- Additive Damage. Two problems with additive damage. 1- It only applies to auto attacks. I see you guys updated lifesteal to apply to abilities, so should Additive damage. 2- It scales very badly. 3k additive weapon fire damage on Firebrand weapons? Its like 25 damage per auto attack or something negligible.
- Health Regeneration Rating. 500 rating = 1 hps. By default players have 16 ish HPS. Tumok weapons give 3k health regeneration rating which is an effective 6 hps
. imo this shouldn't be a stackable stat, just a flavor 'tertiary' stat or w/e. Nobody wants the HP regen stacking tank meta to ever exist. Also ranger's Regeneration buff is .5hps. Maybe update that?
- Armor and Magic Resist. They just don't scale defensively. Pen is also pretty easy to get too so, yeah.
- ALL ATTRIBUTES. STr, INT, MR, etc. Suppose you do want all the stats that STR gives you. You are already accuracy capped (essentially) by the time you get a set of green gear from passive STR on gear. So you get an effective 8 secondary stats per STR point. But, Physical block mitigation rating? Physical disable duration rating? Remember what I said about building bad attributes above? You are better off getting 1.4k power in your chest slot instead of 120 STR for example. And getting other secondary stats as the main one for other slots.
- Accuracy Rating. Players are already capped through their main attribute - this rating is 0 value 95% of the time.
If you want a summary of why these stats matter so much - imagine fighting a player with 4 pieces of power gear. Meanwhile you are in a full set of green gear with random mitigation rating and disable reduction and accuracy. Noobs won't know how bad their gear is. This also makes it so some named mobs / gear is worth absolutely 0. Instead of "oh you have that, it isn't as good, but at least you have something". Someone puts on a gear and they don't get stronger - thats bad. Meanwhile some of the new stats are extremely strong when they are weighted using the current system.
Section 3 - Gear.
Short Version: There does not exist named drop options for all gear slots, please give some love.
There is some gear slots that you just can't farm named mobs for. Meanwhile there are like a dozen magical weapon options, and offhand magic focuses.
- Bows. Right now there is Firebrand, Tumok, Carphin, and Forge for bows. So two bosses on really long CDS, and two generic drops from random mobs in the POI's. Not to mention that all those named bows suck because of the bad value secondary stats they have.
- Energy Focuses [physical]. Until this patch where some offhands got busted secondary boosted attributes - using a focus for a dps oriented class wasn't really an option because there are no named or craftable options.
- Magic Power Greatswords.
- Magic power maces.
etc. You get the jist. I am sure you guys have a big DB of items and can provide like at least 2 options for all of the server who don't have a physical named mob they can farm for their ranged weapon for example.
Section 4 - Level 10 gear VS lvl 20 gear.
The way the game is balanced right now, a grey level 20 piece of gear is equal to an EPIC level 10 piece of gear. Part of the reason people were so excited for fresh starts is because they wanted to rush to level 10, start farming mats, and make a level 10 'temporary' set of gear, so that they can be ahead of the curve. As it stands right now, you get to level 20, you farm your green named mobs. Then you go full econ. You can try to RNG named mobs to get better drops. But its going to be like a month before nodes upgrade so you are 'done' gearing really early. Theres no real prep for level 10 stuff unlocking from a PVP perspective.
Let epic / legendary level 10 gear be equal to level 20 rare gear imo is a good balance point.
How do you plan to do this long term when we have higher tiers? On server launch everyone will level up to max, farm named mobs and wait 2 months for a metropolis node so they can craft level 50 gear- because anything lower is just deconstruct trash basically? idk
Consumables -
Overall these are fine. I really don't like potions though. Please make them useable at any time instead of being like on the GCD or having an animation, idk. Right now I just either forget or it feels bad to use them mid-combat. I am trying to play my class.
Overall it is good this change happened. Just needs some tuning. ZVZ and small-medium scale pvp feels good. I will warn you though - when people optimize this, the TTK is going to decrease a bit from how it is now. Or some tank is going to go full HP and max mitigation and be an unkillable meatball. (Also consider addressing how tanks steal threat from each other for world boss competing. Right now its the tanks fighting for agro to reset if they think the other team got tag, while the raids all watch. Also the current power DR curve is good. If you remove that curve, expect people to go back to stacking 2 stats only, one offense (power) and the one defensive stat that's over tuned.
Section 1 - New Stat Weighting
Short version: Only one stat matters as a secondary. The others add so little usually they are just fluff.
With the new stat weighting, the only stat that really matters on a piece of gear is the first secondary stat that it gives. In the case of Forge armor and Carphin armor, this is Fire and Necrotic mitigation. The green heavy carphin chest gives 4-8 strength as a secondary stat, and 1364-1375 necrotic mitigation. When all the stat weighting is just to 1 stat, who cares about 4-8 STR.
Section 2 - Bad Stats.
Short Version: Either make all stats valuable in some situation, or at least not as unbalanced as they are currently.
Carphin armor and Forge armor give over 1k mitigation rating to a specific element each. These are extremely useless stats with current scaling. People will NEVER wear this armor unless they are bad players. This includes some weapons like Tumok bow which has health regeneration rating, or the Firebrand bow because it has Addative Fire Damage. People will also not use non-universal defensive stats either. Why would you wear magical evasion armor, when you can wear evasion armor and get 2X the value? ETC.
Examples of bad stats and why they are bad -
- Any specific defensive stat (Critical disable reduction rating, magical evasion rating, Necrotic mitigation rating, fire mitigation rating, Physical Critical Mitigation rating, and more). These are bad because they are too niche and they scale bad.
- Additive Damage. Two problems with additive damage. 1- It only applies to auto attacks. I see you guys updated lifesteal to apply to abilities, so should Additive damage. 2- It scales very badly. 3k additive weapon fire damage on Firebrand weapons? Its like 25 damage per auto attack or something negligible.
- Health Regeneration Rating. 500 rating = 1 hps. By default players have 16 ish HPS. Tumok weapons give 3k health regeneration rating which is an effective 6 hps
. imo this shouldn't be a stackable stat, just a flavor 'tertiary' stat or w/e. Nobody wants the HP regen stacking tank meta to ever exist. Also ranger's Regeneration buff is .5hps. Maybe update that?- Armor and Magic Resist. They just don't scale defensively. Pen is also pretty easy to get too so, yeah.
- ALL ATTRIBUTES. STr, INT, MR, etc. Suppose you do want all the stats that STR gives you. You are already accuracy capped (essentially) by the time you get a set of green gear from passive STR on gear. So you get an effective 8 secondary stats per STR point. But, Physical block mitigation rating? Physical disable duration rating? Remember what I said about building bad attributes above? You are better off getting 1.4k power in your chest slot instead of 120 STR for example. And getting other secondary stats as the main one for other slots.
- Accuracy Rating. Players are already capped through their main attribute - this rating is 0 value 95% of the time.
If you want a summary of why these stats matter so much - imagine fighting a player with 4 pieces of power gear. Meanwhile you are in a full set of green gear with random mitigation rating and disable reduction and accuracy. Noobs won't know how bad their gear is. This also makes it so some named mobs / gear is worth absolutely 0. Instead of "oh you have that, it isn't as good, but at least you have something". Someone puts on a gear and they don't get stronger - thats bad. Meanwhile some of the new stats are extremely strong when they are weighted using the current system.
Section 3 - Gear.
Short Version: There does not exist named drop options for all gear slots, please give some love.
There is some gear slots that you just can't farm named mobs for. Meanwhile there are like a dozen magical weapon options, and offhand magic focuses.
- Bows. Right now there is Firebrand, Tumok, Carphin, and Forge for bows. So two bosses on really long CDS, and two generic drops from random mobs in the POI's. Not to mention that all those named bows suck because of the bad value secondary stats they have.
- Energy Focuses [physical]. Until this patch where some offhands got busted secondary boosted attributes - using a focus for a dps oriented class wasn't really an option because there are no named or craftable options.
- Magic Power Greatswords.
- Magic power maces.
etc. You get the jist. I am sure you guys have a big DB of items and can provide like at least 2 options for all of the server who don't have a physical named mob they can farm for their ranged weapon for example.
Section 4 - Level 10 gear VS lvl 20 gear.
The way the game is balanced right now, a grey level 20 piece of gear is equal to an EPIC level 10 piece of gear. Part of the reason people were so excited for fresh starts is because they wanted to rush to level 10, start farming mats, and make a level 10 'temporary' set of gear, so that they can be ahead of the curve. As it stands right now, you get to level 20, you farm your green named mobs. Then you go full econ. You can try to RNG named mobs to get better drops. But its going to be like a month before nodes upgrade so you are 'done' gearing really early. Theres no real prep for level 10 stuff unlocking from a PVP perspective.
Let epic / legendary level 10 gear be equal to level 20 rare gear imo is a good balance point.
How do you plan to do this long term when we have higher tiers? On server launch everyone will level up to max, farm named mobs and wait 2 months for a metropolis node so they can craft level 50 gear- because anything lower is just deconstruct trash basically? idk
Consumables -
Overall these are fine. I really don't like potions though. Please make them useable at any time instead of being like on the GCD or having an animation, idk. Right now I just either forget or it feels bad to use them mid-combat. I am trying to play my class.
Overall it is good this change happened. Just needs some tuning. ZVZ and small-medium scale pvp feels good. I will warn you though - when people optimize this, the TTK is going to decrease a bit from how it is now. Or some tank is going to go full HP and max mitigation and be an unkillable meatball. (Also consider addressing how tanks steal threat from each other for world boss competing. Right now its the tanks fighting for agro to reset if they think the other team got tag, while the raids all watch. Also the current power DR curve is good. If you remove that curve, expect people to go back to stacking 2 stats only, one offense (power) and the one defensive stat that's over tuned.
2
Comments
Short version - I know these are end-game thingies but, 99.95% of the player base its never worth doing this stuff. I haven't had a chance to poke at tempering but it seems like you would be better off just making a higher rarity piece of gear in the first place. Just do 1-2 more caravan runs instead, its less mental gymnastics, to afford the next rarity tier instead. If tempering was like albion's tier system of 4.0-4.4 gear for example that would be something else entirely.
For enchanting - yeah it matters but like - You clicking someone and getting 1-3 more auto attacks or pressing 1-2 more buttons is going to have more net impact VS spending 600 gold or whatever 'enchanting' all your gear to be slightly stronger.
Does not look like it will feel good, but who knows. This flatter gear curve is more fun from a gameplay perspective but it doesn't get that boost that vertical power does. Overall its probably fine but yeah.
Some stats are bad becuase of balance, and some are bad because they are fundamentally worse than others. They need to figure out what they want to do with all of these and trim the fat.
I think heroic+ gear shouldn't add stats, because they will either blow up gear creep or be uninteresting to players. To me heroic+ gear should add perks, something that is more interesting to players, can increase the skill ceiling and make creating a build more fun, without straight up power spikes.
On the account of lvl 10 vs lvl 20 gear, its absolutely a problem and a bigger one at launch. If things stay as is players will grind for 200+h to max level, since grinding is a self sustainable activity. You can grind to get gear to become stronger to grind stronger mobs and get better gear etc. And this turns out to be the optimal way to max level too. So will players engage with any other system in the game before max level? If this design direction continues I doubt it. This will make low level crafting useless, and destroy the economy for very long time before players start crafting and buying max level crafted gear.
The solution is simple: remove blue an under gear drops from mobs past level 10. You won't be able to gear reliably by grinding and will have to engage with crafting/economy portion of the game. You will grind mobs, get glint, crafting materials and exp, run caravans, gather, buy whatever you need and craft a piece of gear, or make the money and buy the piece. You will engage with the whole game while leveling. Level 10 gear will matter because node progression soft locks gear progression. You will craft level 10 gear and will use it for weeks/months before journeyman stations unlock and you start crafting level 20 gear. At higher levels, with slower progression, you might even decide to enchant gear before the max level, since it could be months before you swap that gear.
As long as you pick a lane I'm happy, Intrepid. And ofc it would be nice to actually let people know with certainty once you pick it.
If everything (Horizontal progression style, mob drop style, crafting style) is still subject to change, so be it. And ofc, on behalf of my group I just say the usual, that we disagree with basically everything in the OP.
as for additive scaling i think it fine for what it seems to be designed for, it should apply to ability though imo. Additive dmg seem to be designed for the fast attacking weapons (that most of the community it ignoring since higher power weapons tend to be better than higher attack speed weapons due to scaling better but i think additive dmg is fairly strong on certain weapons and we dont even have many sources for additive dmg aswell atm so hard to stack a decent amount and the gear with additive dmg on is the hardest to aquire or most expensive gear to make in most cases aswell is it worth the difficulty and cost probaly not for most people. i do like how additive dmg helps the attack speed weapons with flat bonuses since it allows those weapon to be viable and useable compared to everyone and there mum using straight power and crit builds that ther using now.
Additive dmg is also quite hard to build on with current gear either since it scales from additive dmg/ attack speed/ Magic crit chance/power (Apparently casting speed doesnt help with magic weapon attack speed from what ive been told) so if thats your focus u want additive dmg and atack speed but then also magic crit and power and there no hybrid gear sets yet (with the couple of jewelery that has Critical power or chance that does both magic and physical however all your jewelery spots get used up for additive dmg pieces lol
Accuracy i think might be a sleeper stat tbh being able to hit people even when there dodging could be handy i have like a 15% chance to hit people while there dodging and i havant focused on accuracy at all so it could have it niche, also no one realy building an evasion built it seems (mainly cause there little to no magic evasion atm) which is the bulk of the dmg type players seem to use atm.
thats what i've been preaching for a month , even if it takes some changes to stats make the universal stats a soft capped flat bonus even if it needs to change some of them into a secondary or remove them or whatnot then make the waterfall/secondary stats equally good ,make gear focus on 1 of those stats and whatever else it have is a small fluff/bonus then people will have to build gear towards 1 or 2 stat types for their optimal defense or damage or mitigation,evasion,magic crit tank,physical tank ..etc . that will lead to diversity and actually make the class skills more important as you will build a gear that fits the class build you go with.