PT: Vital Combat & Exaltations

#557

People will complain about the nerf because DECA era content is “balanced around max level pets”, as if having a divine doesn’t let you tank through without dodging any DECA era boss that isn’t the few constantly spamming sick and pet stasis, and the mheal spams items like puri and mseal that utterly destroy the meta. Sanctuary was not enough, i repeat Sanctuary was not enough to threaten divine pets on its’ own, they had to put sick and pet stasis on every other bullet there.

#558

Honestly, if they just nerf healing in larger groups, but let them do buttloads of DPS, I’m fine with it. The ideal should not be with only 10 people, that’s ridiculous. If 55+ people had the most DPS on average, but their healing was worse overall (like Priest healing being reduced based on more players), it’s more chaos and bloodshed since more people will die or Nexus. Fewer people in total make it slower but more manageable. With the proposed system, it’s just a fuck you to big groups, and the meta will be taking like 10 - 20 people to do dungeons instead. It’s an MMO for God’s sake, let big groups be good at something.

#559

You haven’t actually done the math then, these changes are disproportionately lenient to large groups and screw over ONLY mid sized groups tbh, because the split healing stops at around 14 people, making 65 player groups over 4x more healing effective on average than 15 player ones.

#560

…and this is why it’s justified for smaller groups to have that DPS increase!
Large groups benefit more from Priests since their healing power would far have stopped decreasing with their sheer size, thus allowing them to be more survivable than those faster, albeit smaller groups - which was the intent of the update: players can choose between small groups for faster, but less safe runs, or large groups for slower, but safer runs.
(Cause at the moment, large groups have both faster and safer runs…)

#561

Okay, I played on testing a bit over the weekend and my opinions are basically unchanged from this inital comment. I really want to hammer home that point I made about the status effect rework being bad. The cooldown = base cooldown + duration really screws over a lot of items that aren’t supposed to get shafted. I go into a lot of detail in the video below.

I recorded my play session with live commentary and trimmed it down to relevant stuff. It’s kind of long still so I don’t necessarily expect this to get watched, but here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-OTuwnvO9g

#562

The solution is not to make only small groups have faster and safer runs though. Which is exactly what these changes do.

If these changes happen they might as well reduce the dungeon cap to 25 as well.

And like I said before the “ivory tower” closed testers forget that most people actually don’t care about group size. They have goals and are willing to put up with large groups to achieve them.

Back when halls came out, I never cared about the size of the Lost Hall groups. I just wanted to do them. And discord was the only way that was happening.

I never cared about the size of the group doing an event chest dungeon. I just wanted to have a chance to get some character and pet skins. And discord was the only way that was happening.

I never cared about the size of the group during the “Little Notes to Heaven” campaign event. I just wanted to get enough notes to get rewards. And discord was the only way that was happening.

At the moment I don’t care about the size of the group doing Oryx 3. I just want to have a chance to complete him. And discord was the only way that was happening.

I’ve repeated this like 10 times, but steamroll is a symptom and not the underlying problem. Do people like safety in runs? Sure. However, the real reason steamroll groups have formed is because the players have felt pressured to organize into groups to complete events efficiently given limited resources.

#563

Will that not be avoided then if the most efficient groups will always be the smaller ones? If steamrolling happens because of the fact that players felt pressure to complete content in the most efficient manner, then small groups will naturally become the go to way to complete content the fastest due to the HP scaling changes, however I don’t think it will be the most safe way. With the changes made to tomes, HP splitting reaches its minimum at around 15~ people. This means that larger groups will still be able to efficiently stack healing, meaning they will overall be safer than smaller groups but they will still take longer.

#564

You can’t though. And it hasn’t been trivialized to that point (sorry for the late reply)

#565

Thought I accidentally clicked on the unpopular opinions thread when I read this hahaha. I was thinking the same thing, may actually start playing again if Deca has the cojones to push the updates through.

#566

Forgot to add this in previous comment – I encountered a few glitches in this play session that were caught in the footage I recorded. I’ll post timestamps here since the video (posted above) is long.

  • 00:43 – damage numbers did not display above my head upon taking damage. I’m not sure what caused it because it didn’t trigger totally consistently and I didn’t test it that much before fixing it by screwing with the video settings (as shown in the video). I would describe this as gamebreaking and if it hits prod that’s seriously bad news.

  • 01:46 – temporary stat buffs rendering inconsistently player-to-player. This is incredibly subtle and pretty unimportant, but it looks a little fuzzier over some players than others.

  • 03:34 – mp bar UI element doesn’t update properly when out of combat. I’m assuming the green and yellow up and down arrows on the UI indicate whether healing is reduced due to the vital combat, but the mp bar never updates to reflect out of combat status, it just stays flashing down forever. You can see this bug taking place throughout the entire video.

  • 06:06 – pet sprite delayed update. My pet came out of pet stasis but temporarily still retained the chicken sprite. I’m assuming this is due to the particular implementation of how the in-combat delay is programmed – disabling pets temporarily in some way prevents the sprite from updating as it should.

  • 31:50 – cult portal not rendering. I assume this is something to do with it being drawn on ground instead of being like other portals, but it’s peculiar since there are two other cult portals immediately next to this one that are rendering normally.

  • 33:58 – fame bar displayed as partially full despite having all class quests completed. This was throughout the session but I didn’t notice it until this point.

General feedback that isn’t directly a bug report about the testing build:

  • 16:59 seven minute long rant about the implementation of the status effect rebalance on enemies. TLDW: basically it should be based on how long the enemy has been afflicted instead of being measured from the end of the duration of the first instance (but this would necessitate a longer period, since it would have to allow for effects with long durations to still flex their entire duration – something like Ronin’s Wakizashi swings this somewhat; overall this would require the cooldown to be increased from 5 seconds to more like 8 probably for the cooldown to make sense in proportion).

  • I was also pretty against the tomes having a cooldown, but apparently that’s already going to be changed into a rapid consecutive-use mana penalty so I’m not going to spend too long talking about that aspect here. But what I will say is that I think consecutive mana penalties should be applied across the board to all abilities for all classes and that should be done instead of tying mana regeneration to vitality as is currently being done. Vitality should only affect health regeneration, not mana.

  • I could talk for hours on end about the quest portait/indicator popup in Exalt and how it frequently causes issues (in particular in-realm, but also in boss fights as shown in the video). I whine about it at several different points in this video. I could do a full writeup about my issues sometime if it would be read.

#567

So those shots will stay, while the pets mandating them are weakened? Doesn’t seem like a good precedent to set for endgame content.

#568

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.

#569

After participating in the cemetery event this weekend, I just wanted to pop on here and point out an issue that I’ve brought up before.

Let’s take the cemetery dungeon. It’s a fairly straightforward dungeon, but has long been criticized as a tedious dungeon.

Let me ask you this. Do you think making the dungeon twice as hard (let’s say the developers went in and doubled the damage from every shot the enemies dealt) would make the dungeon a more engaging and enjoyable experience? Or do you think having a constant pet stasis effect would make the dungeon a more engaging and enjoyable experience?

You can come to your own conclusions, but for me the answer is no. The dungeon would still remain long and would still feature very basic enemies. If the developers gave the dungeon a difficulty level where you absolutely needed to dodge shots, I would find it more tedious than it already is. And that’s the issue that I firmly believe is facing us right now when it comes to what in my opinion are bad game changes.

Going back and making the earlier game harder does not automatically make it better. If they made the cemetery enemies deal double damage and did not significantly increase the loot to compensate, in my opinion it would be a worse experience than it currently is.

This carries over to the other bosses in the game. You could make every single shot from dreadstump deal 400 damage and I doubt it would set the community ablaze with excitement.

Just some food for thought.

I believe that challenging content requires proper conception and execution. As much as I dislike O3, it is challenging boss fight that involves multiple phases as well as multiple shot patterns.

Just flat out slapping decreased healing across the whole game with a broad stroke is really not the answer.

Again, I think the proposed vital combat changes will likely not affect early gameplay significantly. However, I do believe that it’s a bad philosophy that harder will automatically equal better.

#570

No, but I think a long overdue nerf to a broken aspect of the game would have a wonderful effect on the health of the game itself.

#571

I think I have only seen you be relentlessly negative in every thread I have noticed you posting, so I am just curious - what DO you like about the game? What are some examples of “Proper conception and execution,” in your mind? I feel like O3 and his associated minibosses (other than maybe Gemsbok) are fantastic and engaging fights. I think that mbc is as well, at least when you don’t have people constantly healing you through it.

I think Cem is honestly a pretty decent dungeon after the rework and increased drop rates (one of the most worthwhile ones to solo or duo on non-rushing characters).

I also think that requiring people to dodge massively increases engagement and long-term enjoyment. Sure, it will be a learning curve to go from face-tanking 90% of the content in the game, but my hope is that it will allow a lot of the community who has been ignoring everything non-endgame, and gain a new appreciation for some of the classic content in the game.

I, for one, am looking forward to all of it, and I am so glad that DECA is willing to move forward with such large steps towards their vision for the game.

#572

I wholeheartedly agree, and would really like to know myself. I’ve not been too brazen to ask in the past, but considering I’ve read every single thread that has popped up since I formally joined + a sizable amount of old threads, I’ve mostly just seen negative statements about the game from you, regardless of reasoning and suggestions. Pragmatism aside, what keeps you playing? I’ve seen several others with similar viewpoints to yours leave already, some of them a while ago. Do you hope, perhaps, that the Devs will finally listen and create the perfect game as you and some others envision?

(My apologies if that sounds condescending or even like an attack. I’m legitimately curious.)

#573

This is true. However, easier also does not automatically make it better, either. There’s a lot more to it than that, as you say.

In this example, you’re taking an already tedious dungeon (cem) and saying that making it harder wouldn’t improve it. I for one agree with you on that. However, taking this one example and then suggesting that you can plaster it all over the rest of the game is a bit of a stretch. Yes, the game will get harder with VC, but more thought has been put into it than just “hurr durr do more damage”; there are a number of rebalancing ideas and concepts that were put forward by this PT session alone, and the early game is actually being made easier for newer players.

Again, it’s not “hurr durr do more damage”; it’s “reward dodging, reduce steamrolling, decrease the inherent disparity between new players and P2Ws and make non-hp glutton builds viable again.”

You’re taking a complex issue and dumbing it down beyond all reasonability.

#574

Ok let’s try to tackle these statements.

Are they trying to reward dodging? Absolutely. As I stated before, noobs will remain the worst at dodging.

As the developers have stated, the express purpose of the combat system was to cause more player deaths.

However, thanks to Oryx 3 we know exactly what to expect if a massive amount of deaths were to occur.

Let’s start out by stating the obvious. The introduction of Oryx 3 has killed far more players than the vital combat system ever will.

Have all these deaths due to Oryx 3 improved the health of the game? In my opinion the answer is no. I don’t see any significant influx of players in the realm doing regular stuff. If anything, the massive amounts of death due to Oryx 3 has gotten players to go on farming/rebuilding crusades with keys at their disposal.

The fact is that the elite players of the game have many characters to spare. If you are a new player, you will find it significantly harder to complete O3 than a seasoned veteran with 30 character slots. This is because an 8/8 character can farm pots faster than a level 1 character ever possibly could. Thus, I believe that the inequities between old and new players remains unchanged as a result of the update.

Regarding the steamrolling comment, I completely understand that the purpose of hp scaling is to encourage players to complete dungeons that drop from event bosses. However, we can look to Oryx 3 again. From my limited understanding, Oryx 3 has HP scaling that favors smaller groups. What we are now seeing is small groups of approximately 15 players who are steamrolling through Oryx Sanctuary.

Many players make the mistake of thinking a steamroll can only occur in large groups. That is false.

Definition of STEAMROLL (verb): to defeat or destroy an opponent completely

This is a steamroll! Lacroix in particular got absolutely destroyed. They dealt so much damage that O3 portals didn’t even spawn.

Thus, it is my firm belief that the vital combat system will push people into elitist discords (like the one in the video above) who will then optimize content by recruiting a small number of competent players. And again, noobs will be excluded from them.

To reiterate, steamrolling is not removed with these PT changes. Rather, steamrolling will be accomplished by excluding players.

On a final point non hp builds did not see any improvement on the PT at all (aside from dps builds that already exist ingame right now).

#575

I may be getting somewhat out of topic because this is a thread about Vital combat & Exaltations, but a lot of these changes seem strongly intertwined with the future changes and what looks to be DECA’s plan…

They’re making death more common so that they can take the next step which is to make completing dungeons more rewarding in general. This isn’t just increasing death rates for the sake of it.

Of course, an old and skilled player will always have better things than a new and unskilled player, mostly in terms of equipment (but also slots/chests whether it be bought or from the daily calendar). This isn’t only about old and new players. This is also about players that are P2W and F2P players. I’m sure DECA is not nearly done bringing these two groups closer together.

Firstly, DECA has already made it so that newly made accounts can buy an extra character slot and vault chests with Fame. Next, IC/OOC nerfs pets and buffs Vit/Wis shrinking down the disparity between P2W and F2P players if they’re on the same skill level. Lastly, DECA is adding potion chests that will greatly ease maxing because you don’t have to die to be able to make use of potions. By the looks of it, DECA is also planning on improving the early-game with the dungeon reconstructions to cater to newer players. (I mean they’ve already released Ancient Ruins)

Whether or not you’re F2P or P2W, your skill is what’s rewarded. Soon the only real difference between being F2P and P2W is the ability to pick whatever class you want to play any time, and the variety of equips you can have safely stored.

I think you mean HP-scaling, not vital combat, that would be IC/OoC, not the group size. And as far as I know, they’re still finetuning the scaling because players are complaining about Voids being impossible with big numbers. If they do get change, we’ll know it’s because of player feedback.

I actually agree with this. Currently, Def-builds are still unviable because of how little Def reduces damage, nearly all bullets will trigger IC in end-game dungeons and early-game dungeons continue to be trivialized, and along with Vit-builds, are only accessible to a few classes. I’m curious on how DECA will handle this.

Oh yeah, and

It’d be great if you told us.

#576

I can agree with this, the only way that’s being fixed is if they nerf hp gear or buff other stat gear so that all 8 stats grow at a relatively even pace, whereas T1 hp/mp rings are 10:1 with other stat rings and are well balanced, T6 hp/mp rings are 20:1 with other stat rings and completely destroy their viability, imo T6 rings should give +120/+12 respectively