PT: In/Out of Combat System and more!

#83

Bug: After being Pet Stasis’d, my pet kept the ‘Chicken’ sprite for a bit, while still acting as a normal pet would (attacking while following and healing me)

#84

The two areas of the game that broke the most due to functional pets were rushing and playing melee. Making pets less effective isn’t going to change the core gameplay loop all that much.

LH and other hard dungeons won’t change because they’re about putting together a DPS ball, you don’t need solo efforts or rushers.

Lastly, the idea is to make pets less effective in combat, not inactive. They’ll still work, they just won’t be as ridiculous as before.

#85

Hey! Just wanted to clarify and reiterate a few things here.

These changes will not be implemented into the game in the very near future. The only content on this round of public testing that is planned to be released quickly is the Dwarf Miner changes and the Agents of Oryx weapon set. OOC and the other class balance changes will take time and iteration, which is precisely why this public testing session exists. Changes that affect the game as fundamentally as this require opinions from a broad range of players. These changes may not make it to production looking exactly as they do now, that’s what testing is all about.

That being said, despite the large influx of comments on different platforms, we haven’t seen a whole lot of traffic on the testing servers. We know these changes can look alarming on paper, so we again want to ask that you keep an open mind and thoroughly play test these changes before guessing their impact just from a bunch of numbers. We know just how delicate game balance can be, and it helps us greatly to know that the feedback we receive is based on firsthand experience. This is especially important in the case of endgame content. We’ve seen many people raise concerns about how endgame dungeons like the Nest, Lost Halls, and Abandoned Mineshaft are not built for weaker pets, but after rigorous testing, we truly don’t feel that this is the case (we even had a successful Void duo). If you test these dungeons and sincerely feel that this is not the case, by all means let us know, but we ask that you give it a fair shot before assuming this was not accounted for.

Our ultimate goal here is to expand the game’s future. Pets of greater rarity still possess more power, the main change is how much that power scales and interacts with the game’s other systems. Bear in mind that major balance changes like these don’t happen in a vacuum. By making death a more legitimate threat, we can move forward with other changes such as increasing drop rates across the board, as the amount of death would become more capable of offsetting the rate at which items are gained (which helps the trading economy in the long term as well). These changes also make room for greater UT potential, since VIT and DEF-based builds are more viable options and UTs can be built around them in creative ways.

These are big changes, no doubt about that. We all share the same objective of improving the game’s future health. With your continuous feedback and testing, we believe we can make that happen.

#86

Arc: 175 probably means 1 shot forwards and 2 sideways

#87

Something that I haven’t been able to really test out, but is pretty pertinent:

How will this status immunity play out when two of the same disable with different durations are applied?

This change is a huge nerf to any item that has a very low duration disable like honeytomb, aether, or the oryx shield. This also makes it a little harder to play with items that have long duration and long cd on common disables, like scutum. If someone is able to get in and apply a low duration debuff before you, your ability is wasted and there is an inferior duration debuff on the enemy that you cannot extend.

I do like the direction this is heading and the pet changes are pretty good. Also the oryx weapons are either amazing(dagger wand katana) or absolute shit(bow), sword and staff are just hard to use despite their overwhelming dps.

#88

how is the katana amazing? It shots slower than a ripper

#89

its the first example, if you don’t think that’s amazing idk man.

#90

The issue is the time needed to actually test these changes on something as long as a lost halls (as well as Flash’s own instability) to reach a conclusion if MBC/Void Entity are really gonna be easily doable while taking in account IC/OOC system as the main concerns currently are related to these pretty long dungeons to complete.

Edit: Ah nvm there are portals to each specific boss room, ooops. I would ask to add one to the nest though

#91

Yeah, effect duration is going to be a big problem. Really what they should do is have every enemy have an on/off cycle with regards to each status effect. So for instance maybe O2 can be stunned for 5 seconds and then is immune for 20 seconds. The immunity should kick in after however many seconds have passed since the first infliction, rather than after one use.

#92

Yes, the boss room in Nest is too small for a shitstorm like that.

What if all boss rooms were big like MBC, would you be okay with that?

That way you can’t sit back and relax, but you’re also not stressed out.

#93

I would think the real solution is to have immunity be based on the duration of the disable applied, something like: 2+1.3*(disable length) = immunity duration

#94

People did tombs before there were pets at all.

#95

I was thinking more from the angle of O2 coming unstunned at unpredictable times, or raging geb coming unparalyzed, or agonized titan coming undazed. For the benefit of the group rather than the player inflicting the status effect.

#96

Tombs aren’t really the issue though, they are quite fine to handle, the biggest worry is about the game’s current endgame which is balanced around divines existing, which means most of them can easily insta-pop you

#97

Disable duration indicators would have been nice years ago, now they may be necessary.

#98

Half the time you are perma pet stasised anyway? how are you making this an issue?
If anything, this is a huge buff to the player you now have increased healing and mp gain.

#99

I agree with your sentiment. Perhaps with a nerf to pets, the developers can address the frustration of the insta-pop.

I have thought a bit about rebalancing pets in the past and one of my ideas was to simply increase player hp by a large factor, and change wis/vit to percentage missing hp/mp regen. This, in my opinion, solves all problems at once without the need to rebalance content:
Players are less likely to get instakilled due to a higher hp cap
Players (even without pets) regenerate significantly from wis/vit
Pets become less OP because they restore a smaller percentage of total hp/mp.

#100

While pet stasis exists, alot of end game enemies (such as the MBC) can kill you mostly with 3 hits of it’s huge bullet hell-like fights. These was to balance the game as you can lower the huge damage from MBC with a simple pet heal. People countered this by locating the pet stasis shots, avoiding them and then tanking everything else within the area. Even if pet stasis exists, there is still the issue that MBC is meant to counter large groups (such as the LH discords by simply filling the entire arena with bullets, which in fact shows that you need to decide what to be hit by.

Without a leeway that lets you somewhat backoff, heal and think, this nerf feels like a way to lure older players back in, rather than make the game challenging, but fun to new and old. RotMG due being a permadeath game, forces you to learn. Good design is allowing you to learn, without giving you the biggest punishment (death)

#101

why does deca constantly attempt to slow the game down? Making the game slower isnt going to retain any players. Not to be that guy but if you mess with pets that ppl put years of effort/money into you might have a realm mutiny.

#102

Personally I believe that most learning in rotmg comes through death, punishing you for pushing your limits as a player.

On the other points, I understand now what you mean by saying things are balanced to be able to kill you only through large bursts of damage. At the end of the day though, this will just mean you have to get better as a player and not rely on tanking. I see these changes as a net positive and think that many bossfights don’t need to change at all, as any scrub with a good pet was able to clear them easily.

Maybe these changes will re-introduce the requirement of skill to get to the endgame, as LH discords have shown that you don’t have to be a good player to reach the endgame.