PT: Vital Combat & Exaltations

#348

I’m not advocate for refunding, but keep in mind Pets are a major reason for people to buy realm gold, and even without any form of compensation the game’s revenue will still largely suffer. Especially considering that those who spend money on pets are also likely to spend on other ingame items, and if they quit en-masse good luck affording better servers or devs.

I can (and likely will considering how Deca handles player feedback) argue that these changes also break the game, differently than pets but still in a major way. What’s broken is up to opinion and people shouldn’t be disregarded because their opinion doesn’t fit the current Deca/Testing narrative.

Items being obtainable in lower level dungeons shouldn’t stop them from being useful. Every event white, including class-defining ones like Ogmur and Jugg, are obtainable from the get-go and I constantly see new players getting these items. While usefulness often scales with difficulty, there are exceptions, like Divinity, the O3 star, Cult Ring, Sphinx etc. I’m definitely in the minority but I think Puri is fine where it is, it shows off the best of Priest being a support class. Puri isn’t all dominating, when I play priest solo I’d rather Prot or T5/6 anyway.

#349

As someone who played since 2010 and know players that did too, and still do play, I would say that is totally false as well.

#350

Did you notice that I didn’t make a blanket statement and made room for exceptions?

#352

I agree that the fanbase has changed. But trying to bring back the wildshadow players (after literally years and years) is foolish to say the least.

I personally never felt that the game was broken either. It’s not perfect for sure, but honestly I think the current issues with the game can’t be fixed.

For example, if they really wanted to “right the wrongs” of the game they would have to remove keys and end the cycle of constant farming once and for all. But they won’t do that so I think we just have to accept there will always be monetary aspects of the game.

#353

“The healing nerf would barely be an impactful nerf” - what… how would you think that, I played priest on the testing server and the healing you get now is just abysmal. It’s disappointing because my priest is really the only one of my 8/8’s that I care about these days all the rest are just disposable.

#354

i’d make puri purify a set amount of people that scales with wisdom (and yourself), rather than straight up remove it

maybe just yourself at 55 wis or less, and it purifies 1 more person per 10 wis after that

#355

This isn’t really in-depth, more of a thought dump vaguely about VC at 1 in the morning after I did some PT
Now that I’ve actually had time to test it, I must say I love vital combat even more than I thought I would.

While testing I:
Soloed a full cult (had done 2 or 3 cults on earlier testing sessions)
Solo cleared a fungal but was forced to nexus at boss due to a massive lag spike (had done 1 fungal before)
Solo cleared up until Gemsbok but was forced to nexus at boss due to lack of experience (had never done O3)
Did a small group cult
(all done as mystic)

I never really noticed VC in cult as I wasn’t hit commonly. In the solo cult, I used cult staff and stayed within 3 tiles of the enemies up until final phase because they’re so easy to dodge. Don’t really know if cult should count as a good way to accurately test VC, though in the small group cult I was the only one who actually made it to the boss as the others tried to
A. Rush (caught up to their graves later)
B. Tank (witnessed them die like idiots)

But I could go 20-30 seconds without getting hit, probably a lot longer if I wasn’t using cult staff point blank out of impatience.
I’ve got ~19 days total of play time, or 464 hours, which isn’t too much all things considered, this being a permadeath mmo and all, so the standards VC sets aren’t high at all, y’all have just had your standards set so low by heal spam that you actually consider this too hard, all it actually does is require some brainpower. I guess yeah, O3 is hard, but he’s the final boss, so that’s fine.

As far as pacing, I found the pacing of the combat to be significantly more satisfying, it was only slightly faster, but not all that time was spent barely thinking and getting group heals, it was spent dodging and actually doing something, you know, playing a game.

#356

This one quote from MMO designers summarizes everything wrong with this prevalent line of thought in the community:
“When given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of the game”

An MMO developer that does not fight and/or difficultate the playerbase’s attempts to hyperoptimize content into something trivial and industrialized by nerfing overly dominant strategies like puri and mseal spam is a bad designer for letting groups be too overpowered.

You use halls fullskipping as if most other content is anywhere near that dangerous and skill demanding in a discord, the late and endgame bosses in particular all get pummeled mindlessly 99% of the time by healtank except Sanctuary, and even then Beisa can’t hold up to group healing. You can’t use the same justifications for healing either, as using tomes and seals doesn’t even take any skill/“coordination”.

Rewarding coordination is fine, rewarding brainless strategies like spamming mseal and puri that render skill not important is not fine.

#357

The issue is that Deca has placed themselves in an impossible situation.

As I stated above, a true fight back against “attempts to hyperoptimize” would require the removal of keys (in fact, removing keys would kill the discords far more effectively than this update).They’re not willing to sacrifice the revenue loss from that.

This update is no different. They’re trying not to sacrifice revenue loss and, thus, have created the mess that is the “vital combat system”.

#358

Leave the game as it is, just add new dungeons, you want to kill the raids but those same raids earn you money with which people buy golds to buy ig keys and don’t hit the pet ! Leave my game alone

#359

One more thing, there were no pet boxes in PT, while I’m one of the lucky majority who has one from previous PTs, I know for a fact @Backpedal (or at least someone with his name on testing) didn’t.

#360

That’s a heck of an oversight

#361

Continuing the discussion from PT: Vital Combat & Exaltations:

Do I really have to link videos of crystal entity boss fights or old marble defender clips?
It’s not skill to have one person plop down a marble seal with 3 or so priests periodically press spacebar while 50 or so players stand still shooting at the boss. Sure it does require coordination, but it shouldn’t allow a bunch of 0/8s kill an endgame boss without ever moving.

Just because I find some of the changes justified it doesn’t mean I am boot-licking. I just don’t find any of these changes as outrageous as people make them out to be.

#362
They beat up the priest worse than a hong kong protestor! The thing is fuckin’ dead!
The exaltations seem like a nice concept. Although grindy as hell it does give something to strive for apart from just a nice shiny white star.

As for the IC/OOC shyte, I’ll just have to wait and see. I do believe that some dungeons will need some rebalancing and pets should still get an actual damn nerf.
#368

Alright, so this thread is sort of an absolute mess of arguing, so I’d like to bring this back and leave my official feedback on Vital Combat now that I have experienced it for myself on testing.

The current implementation of vital combat is, for lack of a better term… not good. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea that is laid out in concept, but I think some of the scaling is off for a game that is already perma death. It feels a little bit too punishing for a game where you are naturally inclined to make mistakes when trying to learn a fight. From my perspective, every boss/dungeon in the game should be doable on your first try if you are a skilled enough player. I was personally able to complete the Oryx Sanctuary the very first time I attempted it on production, but it was VERY CLOSE to being just over that edge of too hard for a permadeath game.

The main point I would like to make is that the current implementation of vital combat simply attempts to make the game more difficult overall and is less of a “balance patch” and more of a “let’s just make the game harder patch.” I agree with nerfing pets, but I don’t agree with this current implementation because it overall makes the game more difficult for all of the wrong reasons.

What I would suggest is a very small and easy change. I think the in combat timer that is triggered when you take damage is just absolutely too long. This should be reduced to somewhere around 3-5 seconds. As it currently stands, taking damage in boss fights like Oryx 3 or even his minibosses just feels so unforgiving to the point that you feel like you have to dodge literally everything. Yes, I get it. This is a bullet hell game and that’s kind of the point, but RotMG is also permadeath. There has to be more forgiveness in a game that is permadeath.

That’s all I have to say for now. I will most likely make a separate thread to outline my full feelings since I feel that a lot of what gets posted here kind of ends up in the depths of the thread never to be seen again.

P.S. The nerfs to armored, damaging, and berserk are great. The nerf to puri is extremely overkill. Please revise so that priest doesn’t become completely useless again like it was in 2014. Also, what’s with that 3 second cooldown on tomes? If that hits prod I’m going to be really upset. There are better ways to nerf priest that I will outline in a full thread…

#369

ah yes, clearly i should know better that mseal face tanking = players getting better at the game
dodging? haha whats that
in a bullet hell game? naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

#370

wait, but at max vit doesnt IC last for about 3 seconds?

#371

Nope, 4 seconds.

#372

I am confused.

I was on the previous O3 PT server.

O3Dead
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I kept the pet from that server.

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But I completely agree this testing event was a disorganized disaster.

#373

It takes insane skill to stay inside that mseal radius while you have 120 defense and are being puri spammed…