PT: In/Out of Combat System and more!

#208

I don’t think you know how muscle memory works. I went to an internship thing for 6-7 weeks, and didn’t play rotmg actively for 5 months and I can still play the game competently (see: Challenger mode)

If you want to discuss muscle memory more in depth I can use a more complex game like CSGO.

Well personally I got my first 8/8 (paladin) with 1 char slot and an uncommon pet about a month before the wis mod, after actively playing for about a month.

With all the free character slots going around and the free pots/maxing candies all you need to do is log in every day.

#209

After messing around with the update some more and hearing some other player’s opinions, I think this is probably one of the best updates this game has ever had. I have one main gripe with it however, and that is tiles. I think that certain tiles should activate IC mode, while other ones should not (and this would be set manually while designing the dungeon) For example, Forax -25 tiles should not active IC, but shatters magma should activate IC.

#210

Though I haven’t played the update, reading through what players who have done testing (on the Discord) has helped me understand what the update is going to change or fix. So far it looks to be the best change coming to rotmg since hearing of the Unity port, and the In Combat and Out of Combat systems seem balanced (again judging from what Discord testers said). The class reworks also look balanced on paper and seem to be from what testers were saying. My only problem is that there are tiles in some dungeons that will proc IC that are mandatory to walk over (Forax), but other than that these changes look really nice.

#211

Two more thoughts on the design of this.

The 15 damage to put you in in-combat seems too low for much of the game, in two ways. First it seems to penalise non-melee classes, and unmaxed characters of all classes. Which is perverse as with lower def they are taking more damage, need more healing. Second in the same sense of my earlier post a lot of content added since pets does massive amounts of damage, guaranteed to put pretty much every char into in-combat. Again referring back to my last post, a lot of recent end-game content would need tweaking to make it possible to take some damage but avoid in-combat. Not avoid it totally as it’s part of the game, but not have it so that from start to finish of a battle you are in-combat whenever you get near a boss.

Having the duration based on vit is good as it makes that stat much more useful. But it means the duration varies seemingly arbitrarily between classes, due to classes’ vit maxima varying seemingly arbitrarily. It’s not a big difference, but that just means for all classes that maxing vit makes little difference. I see a couple of classes are having their vit increased, but perhaps more could be done to balance them.

#212

I thought that too at first about the 15 threshold. The more I thought about it though, it being any higher than 15 would mean that melees (most notably knights) would rarely get their IC activated outside of endgame dungeons. I would be okay with increasing it to 20 or 25, or having it scale with vit in some way. I agree that vit should be more consistently balanced across classes.

I think that new players having to deal with the low IC threshold is good, as it means that from the start they are being encouraged to dodge and get better at the game. This update in general promotes dodging, though I can see where an issue arises with bosses like MBC and how it can be basically impossible to dodge everything, though I suppose that is the point there. Most times you would either be in a small enough group to see what you are doing and dodge, or in a big enough group to where you can’t dodge everything, but you have enough healing classes backing you up anyways.

#213

After playing the public testing myself, I can say honestly that I barely felt a huge difference. Aside from forcing myself to be more careful around, say, armor-breaking shots, I really can’t say that it destroys all that the game is. I sympathize though with older players who view this as something that’ll kill old RoTMG, and maybe it will, but old RoTMG wasn’t perfect either.

#214

What about a (edit:Max HP) scaling threshold? 15 hp to a level 1 wizzy is different than 15 hp to a 8/8 knight, after all.

Just like how duration scales with vit, we could make the damage threshold scale so you need more damage taken as you level up and max, also acting as a soft incentive for life.

Let’s say Threshold = 10+MaxHP/20.

So the level 1 wizzy needs 10+100/20=15, the level 9 wizzy needs 10+300/20=25, the level 20 wizzy needs 10+575/20 = 38.75. The 1k hp deca fplate knight needs 10+1000/20=70 damage taken to enter combat.

70 for knight seems a little too high, so we should probably adjust the equation a bit, use a logarithm or something. Wis scaling already uses stepwise functions, so that’s an option too for further fine tuning.

#215

I feel like that is a bit too high. If anything, just make it like vit divided by 2 or something like that. 37~ threshold for 75 vit characters, 20 for 40 vit characters. Even then I feel like that is too high, because knights especially have a hard time taking that much damage outside of extreme endgame dungeons.

#216

After testing a fair bit more, I’ve found that I need to git gud at dodging.

Jokes(?) aside, here are a few more things I’ve encountered.

Bugs
  • Missing flashing animations on the following dungeon portals: Void, Cultist Hideout, Ice Cave.
  • When exiting IC mode, your pet’s cooldown will still have the 3s added to it, meaning you’d have to wait somewhere between 0 and (your pet’s cooldown+3) seconds before you get healed for the first time. Possible fix would be to reset the cooldown or remove 3 seconds from the current cooldown.
  • In the Fungal Cavern boss fight, the worm segments can be paralysed, leading to nearly unsurvivable situations (see this gif). Probably best to leave those immune to paralyse.
Further thoughts on the pet changes

Clearing dungeons is enjoyable to me with this new change. I can’t afford to facetank everything, but neither am I sitting around a corner waiting for health to regenerate a majority of the time. For this, it’s fine.

Rushing dungeons (Abysses, Cursed Library, Tomb of the Ancients) is also fine, given that you are a bit more cautious about dodging the high-damage shots, as well as lava where required. You won’t be able to go quite as fast as you previously could, but that’s a given since you can’t ignore all damage dealt anymore.

Fighting bosses in confined spaces is a big challenge. I can’t give a comparison to the situation outside of testing, since I haven’t done a lot of these dungeons in two years, aside from LHs which I’ve done recently. Duoing an MBC petless (unsuccessfully) is significantly different from steamrolling it with a group of 15 players with pets though, so no luck there.

Thoughts on the IC/OOC system

I think this IC/OOC is fairly balanced, at least for a maxed legendary pet. I found myself playing with a Savage pet in some dungeons, since Electric gets in the way of some boss behaviours (Fungal Cavern, Cultist Hideout), but I trust those are kinks that will be ironed out as the testing process goes on.

The threshold of 15 damage seems fine to me, it’s fairly balanced, at least for melee classes. On a Warrior, with the provided set (WC tops and a pyra), you’re at 63 defense, allowing you to ‘safely’ ignore bullets weaker than 80 base damage. Since you’ll be up close and personal to a lot of enemies, that’s fine to me.

For ranged classes, they’re built around having more range (such brain, much wow), so naturally they’ll have more room to dodge or time to respond to shots. It’s not crazy to me that they’ll be in combat more often, if they don’t dodge well.

Running dungeons in small groups

Since a lot of you nay-sayers (and aye-sayers alike) aren’t found on the testing servers, I had to resort to manipulating the poor players of SBC into joining my shenanigans on the testing server. This meant that I only had one or two players with me at any given time. No SBC-like LH runs in testing for now.

This did, however, give me a chance to look at how different dungeons are with smaller groups.
Dungeons I’ve taken a look at are:

  • The Nest (Pally with pet, priest without)
  • Shatters (A few with Warrior, one with a Pally)
  • Fungal Caverns
  • Secluded Thicket
  • Cnidarian Reef (petless warrior)
  • Malogia (petless warrior)
  • Oryx God Mayhem (solo on petless warrior, solo on Pally with pet)

Running these dungeons was about at the same difficulty as they are on prod (that goes for the Nest, Shatters and Malogia, haven’t done the rest on prod), with the occasional step back to recover.

The gameplay did change a little bit, as I was forced to focus on dodging a little bit more than I usually would. Not a bad thing for a bullet hell shooter which has somewhat turned into a piñata hitting simulator in the average group on most bosses.

Do dungeons need to be changed to accommodate this update?

Well, it’s complicated.

Yes, most dungeons will require a thorough inspection to see which bosses should and should not be immune to certain status effects, but overall I don’t think much needs to be changed to the overall dungeon and/or boss fight.

I haven’t been able to successfully clear MBC, but that’s partly due to the fact that I’ve merely done 10 LH 2.0 runs anyway (on prod), so I’m not exactly experienced with the fight. From what I’ve seen it’s plenty survivable, even on a petless priest/pally duo it can be done.

Final remarks

I realise that I’ve only really thoroughly tested things on Warrior and Pally, this means I can’t give a proper overview on balance of IC/OOC on all classes. Given more time, I’d have gone through at least all classes I enjoy playing, and checked how IC/OOC works out on them.

Aside from that, I haven’t been able to thoroughly test the effect of status effects on different bosses, because I didn’t play any status effect inflicting classes. I only had my electric pet to test with.

Thanks to the people who showed up in the public testing session this time around, this is a monumental change and it requires all of your feedback, be it positive or negative, in order to create the best update possible.

A special thanks to Unicorn, Kablooeyy, Lamestchee, CrazykidXX for accompanying me in a few too many runs of the same dungeon :wink:

I want to thank the team at Deca for daring to come up with such a massive change, I trust that this will change RotMG for the better eventually. It will require further testing and fine-tuning, possibly implementing a few of the changes suggested above.

If there’s going to be another public testing session, I want to be part of it.

#217

The original game was destroyed when items were soulbound, pet abilities were introduced, and amulets were removed from the game.

As a player from the Wild Shadow era, I don’t see anything “original” about the game, except for the sprites.

#218

ever heard of the crystal dungeon? if pets get nerfed it would be littterally be impossible to do the boss fight

#219

Yeah no, on testing I’ve soloed the boss fight several times with a nerfed 90/90 pet, on both ranged and melee classes. It’s definitely not impossible, and will be a lot less impossible than it was for me to do it if you were with a group of people and not doing it solo.

#220

What a load of merde.

  1. The community is monumentally larger than during previous company records, due to natural growth and culmination of the game’s playerbase.
  2. Public testing has been a historical feature of this game, since it’s near conception.

The daily, weekly, and monthly average playerbase, among the community waiting for the unity port, but not playing, exceeds whatever standards under normal distribution defines “verge of death”. You, yourself, may be dissatisfied with recent changes, or personally are disinterested in playing, but you can not objectively call the game on the verge of death, without concrete evidence.

Hah, veterans? You can’t even fathom what pets did to this game. Most veterans of this game hate what Kabam’s actions wrought. Players used to work together to bring down realm events. Now, it’s a ruthless community focused solely on dps, and apathy is strong as ever. The game developers are struggling to balance and tiptoe around this mechanic that brought the game mechanics to its knees. Before, players valued items such as health / magic potions, drake eggs, infusions, and buffing items, but now anyone with enough money can pay to win themselves to lava walk. You think amulets were broken? Take a hard, cold look at pet abilities.

This is your subjective view. I think some of the changes are fantastic. I’m going to miss some of the old mechanics, but the game should evolve over time, and adapt. It’s healthy for it’s longevity, to not stay stagnant in game play, and to try to fix its own balancing issues. That is my subjective view.

#221

you realize if you would not be on the hacked client there would be so many ppl u wont be able to see a lot of the shots

#222
  1. I don’t use a hacked client and don’t know where you got that from.
  2. Unity will have an option to toggle other players’ transparency, so you will be able to see enough to dodge anyways
  3. The shots in the crystal worm mother fight are so large that you can see them even with a lot of people there.
  4. Other players as well as your pet are healing so much that getting hit by a couple shots is not a big deal.
#223

give’ em back some cash
it ain’t that hard to figure out

#224

It’s such a pain in the ass to do that I. (nor most people) do it. You legit get a mark or occasionally a greater pot/life for 30m of clearing fungal and cavern.

#225

If the pet nerf does happen, people should have the option to get a refund on everything they spent on their pet. Since we spent it with the idea that it would be OP and now you are trying to stupidly screw us over.

#226

No. When you buy virtual currency, to buy virtual items, you waive away such rights. Read the ToS before preaching such doctrine.

They are attempting to balance the game. This isn’t minecraft creative mode. This is a permadeath game. They are not trying to screw you over, but balance a game mechanic mistake that Kabam implemented all those years ago.

#227

Since your invoking TOS. Ever heard of the grandfather clause?