I know I’m about a week or so late to the party when it comes to giving feedback to this (and hopefully it’s not too late), but I wanted to share my thoughts on the changes after thinking about them for a while.
Vital Combat and Defense Rebalance
I somewhat like these changes to be honest, I do have my gripes with them of course though. For one: 15 damage to enter in combat seems like way too little. Did some quick maths while looking at the projectiles from the O3 minibosses and O3 himself and I found 3 projectiles that you may be able to stop you from entering in combat total, all of which from Chancellor Dammah, and I say may be able to because it all depends on if debuffs are applied before damage. If that’s the case, the number you can get below 15 damage drops down to 0. This is all based off of the max DEF knight build, btw.
I understand that you guys want to make defense a more viable stat, but as it currently stands, we have way too little of it for it to be meaningful, not to mention you nerfed one of the things that allowed people to get it to a substantial amount.
A way I think to fix this would be to do one of the following:
Raise the In Combat Threshold - The simplest of the bunch, simply raising it to 30 damage would make some things that would previously get you in combat end up not doing so, but I’m afraid that this change might be confusing to new players, as they would go a while in the leveling process without ever entering combat, and could be confused once finally entering it.
Give Equipment More Defense - Self explanitory, would allow you to tank more things without entering combat. Would cause balancing issues all throughout the game though with players being able to take a bit more damage than usual (though this might not be much of an issue based on healing becoming harder to come by)
Make In-Combat Time Scale With Damage - Would allow you to tank shots while getting minimal in-combat time with a higher defense build, main problem with this is that it does what vitality already does, and could probably complicate whatever formula that would have to exist in order to scale with damage taken and vitality.
Didn’t really have anything that I thought would make the issues of the system go away entirely, but those were some ideas I thought up to attempt to improve it.
DPS Buff, Status Effect and Class Rebalance
I’m mostly fine with these changes, yeah the DPS buffs were powerful, status effects probably shouldn’t be able to be permanently applied to enemies, but what really annoys me is that most classes are effectively nerfed because of this. Knight, Archer, Huntress, Warrior, and Paladin all basically got very powerful nerfs to their abilities because of this, not to mention the Priest nerf, which effectively brings the amount of classes nerfed by this up to over 1/3 of the total available in the game.
Many things could be done to lessen this effect, like increasing status effect times on higher tiers for debuff based classes, or maybe applying a stronger version of the buff you provide when you use your ability similar to the pre-nerf version, which I think could maybe work fine, unsure about the suggestion for the buff classes though.
Priest nerf has been discussed to death and based on Niegil’s leaks it seems that DECA is working on improving priest from what was seen on testing. Thanks for that!
Anyways, what I really have an issue with in these changes are the changes to wands. Who thought it was a good idea to buff up wands to the point where they have more DPS than daggers despite having much longer range. Daggers have always felt a little on the underpowered side when it came to weapons, I’ve always felt like they always dealt too little damage, and now you buff up wands to the point where they outshine daggers in every single way possible. I didn’t ever feel like wands needed much of a buff, their damage was acceptable considering they are the highest range weapon in the game, but a whole 30% buff to a weapon that didn’t need too much of a change? That’s a bit absurd. Anyways, enough of me rambling, instead of buffing them by 30%, how about something a bit more tame, like 10 or 15%. Try some slight dagger buffs as well, see how that works out.
Exaltation
I quite like the idea of Exaltations, though they could definitely use some work. For one: 50 dungeon clears total for the bonuses is way too much. I doubt I’ve completed 50 halls total let alone would do 50 on each class, not to mention completing O3 50 times without dying too much inbetween seems like a tall order, especially with all these healing, buff, and HP scaling changes and effectively lowering the efficiency these endgame dungeons can be ran at by a very much so noticeable amount. I’d say lowering these down to 25 dungeons total for each stat would be a bit of a better approach, and would definitely seem like a more reasonable goal to reach for the more casual players such as myself. The rewards and stuff from exaltation is fine in my opinion, but needing to complete 6400 endgame dungeons in order to fully exalt every single class to get every single bonus is a bit absurd in my opinion.
Anyways, those were my thoughts on the changes that were made, hope this helps you guys out.
