PT: In/Out of Combat System and more!

[Shatter]

man how big is this wall going to be from Nevov?

maybe he’s just thinking it through.

[TannerLG]

I don’t mean with like the real old RoTMG. I’m referring to more Kabam era than Wild Shadow era. My apologies though for confusing you with that.

[Unicorn]

maybe he’s just thinking it through.

Usually that, Nevov always take forever to post (the excuse is “multitasking”, I don’t buy it though)

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Umm yeah so pets and stuff. 100/100/100 still OP, especially since coins can be paralyzed now survival is real fast with elec pet. Duo’d petless mbc with angryleo, the OOC is fking op because he can actually dodge so the heals were . Also did a petless nest and shaitans solo, none of which have been recorded on prod before hmmm wonder why…maybe because OOC is FKing op

[WindowsHDD]

AMEN BROTHER Thats my pocket priest. But fr they fall under US jurisdiction. They should obey the law. Even if there is no law they should allow pets created before the patch went live to act the same as it did before the patch.

That would literally defeat the purpose of this entire update and would just make even less new players join the game than the already low amount because they would be forever inferior in power to everyone else. It just doesn’t work in an MMO.

how about a third option.

after the unity port is finished, they begin doing a complete overhaul of pets, abilities, and everything related to them. You’d have more choice and variety to choose from with your pets, such as their abilities, what you specifically want to improve, and actual personalization of your pet. (LIKE A CERTAIN OTHER POST I MADE)

keeping them the same is not a good solution, neither is nerfing them numbers wise and nothing else. And I think people would be more welcoming to IC/OOC affecting pets if pets were more like what I said above.

but what do I know, we should have all 100 level abilities and steam roll bosses in 2 minutes all the time, then have that taken away because its too hard to fix a integral part of a game

[Sketchbook]

The way they nerfed them is a good solution though, and I’d like to hear your thoughts as to why you think it’s a bad idea.

Here’s a list of what this IC/OOC update does for the game:

• Petless players have an easier time with the game due to 2x vit/wis effectiveness if they dodge, promotes good gameplay skills early on
• Vit and def builds will become a thing now because vit actually affects your character and isn’t completely overshadowed by pets
• The IC/OOC timer in general promotes good dodging skills, and people can prioritize vit in their builds to lower the timer if they so choose.
• While IC, pets of higher level ranges aren’t as drastically better than lower level ones due to the static +3 seconds
• Death may be more commonplace, meaning that deca could buff the drop rates of super rare items such as event whites, and other items will be more in demand so the economy may start to make a return. (Theoretical)
• If you’re good at the game and dodge shots well (minus MBC, I’d like to see it reworked for this update) then you get to keep the full abilities of your pet. If not, then you get penalized for getting hit by not being able to heal back the damage instantly. Overall, should result in a much more skill based game.

[TannerLG]

Come on @Nevov, we don’t got all day. Nah joking, take your time.

[Nevov]

A few thoughts (and lol at the comments about how long it took):

To the pet despairers: remember that level 100 pets will still be the best pets! The changes even INCREASE the value of a high pet, being in-combat lowers only the frequency of heal, you still get higher heal than every other pet level; and when IC wears off, a max pet will directly spew a giant chunk of HP on you compared to lower/no pet players who still have to wait long seconds remaining OOC for their bar to refill with +30 every 3 seconds or whatever).

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It may be well worth considering exempting Slow, Curse and Exposed from the status effects immunity/cooldown. Since these are the lowest of the effects players can bring onto enemies, and ability use will already be lessened with the changes to pet Mheals, so a chaining of these will require much more coordination/skills/MP pots than now.

This will have the advantage of removing the “surprise!” wearing off after someone uses the “wrong” lesser item (eg. someone spamming T0 traps, or Fulmi, negates the effect of someone’s well-placed T6 trap and potential longer slow). There’ll be players shouting at those who bring lesser items and ‘ruining’ things, especially ‘pros’ yelling at ‘noobs’ to “stop using their worse abilities and messing things up” which isn’t going to be a positive.

Having every effect feature an immunity also makes it redundant to have duplicates of several classes fighting, since a single maxed can do the job well enough. It will be like how a high pet warrior currently has no need to be around other warriors, only on a lot more classes (samurai/mystic/archer/huntress). So the meta could end up being 75% of players on high HP/Vit for survival as it’s pointless to be the second ‘paralyser’ etc. And a frustrating game experience if your own contribution of effects is always ‘immune’ then why bother. That’s glass-half-empty speculation I freely admit.

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Stun is a big problem, there could be trolling to deliberately hit (eg. O2) with a short stun (ST shield does 1.5sec) so that players think it’s gonna be stunned for standard 3 seconds, then boom nope and “haha I killed you”. And worse than in the ‘old days’ because a player can no longer rely on their own stun to last X seconds.

Standardising durations across all items would be one answer. Otherwise I think it’s got to come along with effect-wearing-off and immunity-wearing-off visual cues if enemies are going to have variable durations. Else it’s too random to go in to a stunned enemy unknowing how long you have. Same for paralyse.

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I maintain it’s worthwhile to make stunning items also do dazed (eg shields), and paralysing also do slow (eg high tier quivers), so select enemies can have full immunity, if desired, to one effect, but the lesser effect gets done, without the daftness of carrying lower tier gear (seriously my archer still does the T2/T6 swap).

One huge “yes” to these changes is lava hopefully becomes a hazard again. It’s really dumb that players can stand in lava outhealing it. Should lessen a lot of cheese behaviour in dungeons like Shatters lava running with a stack of paladins, and an end to leeching in red Lod (yes people still do that). In fact Shatters might be a whole lot improved with this, nerfing the idiot with 100 pet rushing/dragging and ruining it for others.

Electric pets still seem to be totally out of balance doing more dmg than Att Close pets (right?) as well as having a useful ability in paralyse. Maybe that’s one for a future nerf after we digest this one, eh, since I’m sure the same cross-section who are angry at these changes will spit the dummy at that being nerfed too. Or get all the pain dealt with at once? Heh.

Last thing: I wonder would it have been worth, instead of doing this via a ‘vit mod’, to think about implementing it via a 9th stat (resilience?), and transfer wismod onto a 10th stat (intelligence?). Obviously a bigger undertaking! But might give overall more satisfactory outcome, easier to balance things? And it would expand the game, more things to do, lengthen the journey to 10/10, etc?

Edit: also: forgot to mention Dwarf Miner event changes, Yes! Can’t come soon enough!
Maybe even give some of the minion mushrooms stat pots drops as a clearing-incentive? Guarantee 1 per wave or something?

[Wilhuff]

@Nevov

[Nevov]

And short at only a fifth the length of the OP.

[WindowsHDD]

Petless players have an easier time with the game due to 2x vit/wis effectiveness if they dodge, promotes good gameplay skills early on

current prod still promotes dodging, albeit with the reward of not taking damage (lol). But I don’t have an issue with this specifically, since it does help both petless and players with pets since you wouldn’t need to rely on your “Priest in a box” (or useless waste of space).

Vit and def builds will become a thing now because vit actually affects your character and isn’t completely overshadowed by pets

def builds still most likely wont become a thing, since most bosses and enemies deal so much damage that it would be better to specialize in vit. As for overshadowing, it can be fixed if pets were overhauled and not propped up as these necessary things you need.

While IC, pets of higher level ranges aren’t as drastically better than lower level ones due to the static +3 seconds

stat wise they are, which is why I don’t like this part for pets. It cripples common, uncommon and rare pets in some cases, which is not okay for inexperienced players.

Death may be more commonplace, meaning that deca could buff the drop rates of super rare items such as event whites, and other items will be more in demand so the economy may start to make a return. (Theoretical)

the death part is a possibility, as for raising droprates I doubt. The economy has collapsed due to stagnation and duping, so I don’t think this could help in the slightest.

If you’re good at the game and dodge shots well (minus MBC, I’d like to see it reworked for this update) then you get to keep the full abilities of your pet. If not, then you get penalized for getting hit by not being able to heal back the damage instantly. Overall, should result in a much more skill based game.

I disagree with losing all of your pets abilities, as currently most of them are useless, with the exception being the unholy trinity. I’d still want a complete rework of pets because they’re just outdated. The HP and MP healing is lazy and promotes reliance on pets, instead of pets enhancing your playstyle, and abilities like decoy and savage that are supposed to promote subversive or aggressive approaches are doodoo trash, being completely useless. So in their current form, I would say only HP , electric, and MP heal should be penalized since the rest (excluding electric) are bad as they are.

[Sketchbook]

Focusing specifically on the lower level pets point, there’s actually a really good change in the right direction regarding them. Because of how the IC mode is handled and pets just get a static 3+, the total equivalent vit amount healed is much closer per level than before. Here’s a graph to see what I’m talking about.

[CRUISEAIDE]

I messed around in the test server for a few hours when it first went live. I did MBC (usually failing at the fourth marble core phase), Halls, Void (just once on knight, rather unsuccessfully), Caverns, Shatters (1st only), and the dwarf miner event on the classes Knight, Warrior, and Paladin. I also messed around with rushing LH a bit on rogue. Everything was by myself, and unfortunately I didn’t have the time to do 2nd and 3rd on shatters as I only did it once on a knight with a max rare pet.

First of all, in regard to IC/OOC… It’s an interesting concept for making VIT relevant again, but as of right now the change is too drastic. I think it would be better if IC caused your pet to heal half as much as opposed to effecting the time between each heal, and MHeal should not be effected by it. I tested around with having a max-rare, max-legendary, max-divine, and being petless. Even with a max legendary you don’t really feel the healing while IC is active; it’s only with a max divine that it is honestly even noticeable. Perhaps the fact that I have a 100heal divine on prod skews my perception, but honestly I barely noticed a difference between facing mbc petless or doing it with a maxed rare for instance. Changes definitely need to be made, as this is certainly too much of a shift. Also, IC/OOC should absolutely not even be considered for release until allies can be made transparent.

The paladin rework will work fine if IC/OOC actually gets pushed through. If not, then paladin will once again be the bad melee most likely.

I liked the warrior rework. It’s probably the one thing that I can confidently say is a good change, and it felt like a good change as I played it on testing.

The stun rework is interesting. When I first read what they did to the stun effect, I thought that it would act as a nerf to the knight. After play testing, however, I honestly think this is a buff to the knight. In fact, this might make knight too OP, and this stun rework needs to be carefully considered so as to not turn all endgame content into a joke.

I didn’t bother to use any of the new weapons, so nothing to say about those.

The dwarf miner event is hard to judge, since the entire issue in the first place was HP scaling. It seemed like there were less waves? and they seemed smaller? so that’s good lol.

I think the most important thing I can say is to tweak around with the effect of IC, and test it at different points.

[Sketchbook]

The problem with changing only the amount is that it can’t be universally applied to all pet abilities. If they were to do this, then I would suggest that IC/OOC should only apply to heal and mheal. Additionally, half of the healing per tick isn’t large enough of a nerf I don’t think, especially in the upper tiers. The reason I like the current implementation is that it makes it more fair across all of the pet levels, affecting divine the most. For example, a divine pet healing 90 every 4 seconds instead of 1 second is 4x less than out of combat, while a rare pet healing every 5 seconds instead of 2 seconds is only 2.5x less than out of combat. It would be hard to keep this sort of system if changed to the amount that is healed, instead of the time it takes to heal.

As far as moving mheal out of the IC nerf, I don’t really think that’s the best course of action. Large groups would be able to spam heals just as much as they do now, and it wouldn’t really make much of a difference. Many abilities in the game can drastically change how a group performs, such as a knight’s stun, an archer’s paralyze, all of the various dps buffing abilities, the various healing abilities, etc. For how strong these are, it makes sense to me that a player should only be able to keep these abilities active for as long as they can keep dodging and staying in out of combat mode. Of course, they would still be able to use these abilities while in combat mode, just the regen for them would take longer. It’s another thing that encourages dodging, even in big groups.

I do definitely agree about the player transparency issue, which is why I hope that these changes come out on unity launch day, since unity already has this feature implemented. I also see unity as the best time to implement these changes because of how drastic of a change unity is already going to be.

[SilverM]

As far as moving mheal out of the IC nerf, I don’t really think that’s the best course of action. Large groups would be able to spam heals just as much as they do now, and it wouldn’t really make much of a difference.

MHeal could instead be added to on ability usage rather than on damage taken. As it heals more your ability then yourself, it should be more keen on punishing you spamming your ability rather than dodging, as getting hit doesn’t lower your MP, pressing space bar does

[Sketchbook]

That’s a fair point, but I also think it makes sense to reward players for good gameplay by giving them more ease of access to their abilities. (I also edited my original post quite a bit, so I would suggest re-reading it.)

[SilverM]

A fair point too, but this is coming with mind more of the assassin, wizard, ninja, huntress and archer ability usage. As those can use them away from harm (outside of endgame dungeons) and spam them unchanged due the huge coverage of their abilities compared to others

[Sketchbook]

The classes that have short range abilities also have more defense though, so it offsets this a bit by making it harder for their IC to activate

[TokinBud]

GOD I am NOT looking forward to this IC/OOC stuff as my pet is already garbage, so I will basically not have a pet anymore. But, the mystic and paladins buffs are amazing!

[Gorilla]

I’m not either, I dont think anyone is. This is my 4th 100/100 account ngl, kinda disappointed with the approach deca is taking.

[Mynamerr]

why do you have 4 100/100 accounts?