Letters to the Players
Jessica has asked me to formulate our rationales for the proposed June changes and put it all into one huge document, rather than littering a dozen threads with snippets of information. It is my pleasure… but be warned: this will be HUGE as there are a lot of changes to cover.
First off, why didn’t we give a detailed explanation in the first place? Well, last week was absolutely killer; we were running around like headless chickens getting May debugged and polished. Lots of bugs, lots of polish needed to make May the huge month it needs to be. So there’s not much time, and in the back of our minds is the constant cry of “We have to get our June proposed changes out the door!” So we worked til the wee hours of the morning, and Keth worked overtime to get all the changes into one document, and by god we posted it by the Friday night deadline! And we shouldn’t have. Not without explaining it. But we really wanted you to have the information ASAP. It’s a mistake we won’t make again… better to have no information than information without context.
To make matters worse, without context it reads like it’s set in stone. This is untrue. We haven’t even started implementing it yet… this is your chance to see what we’re doing BEFORE we do it, and talk to us about it as we implement it. We’ll be coding it up the next couple of weeks, and we’ll be talking to you the whole way.
So let’s jump in…
About the Taunt System
The taunt system isn’t pulling its weight and has to be rewritten. Right now, taunts just force the monster’s AI to target the taunter for a moment, but once the monster recalculates who he hates most, he goes right back to the old person. Detaunts just make the monster forget he ever saw you – but if he notices you moving around or if you attack him again, he immediately remembers exactly how much he hates you.
This works in theory – the skills DO taunt and detaunt, after a fashion. But the taunts especially are not good enough to build strategies on. “Tank” classes like Defenders or LM Feral Intendants should be able to taunt the monster off of the “damage dealing” classes like Berserkers and offensive mages. We’re going to make that happen for June. We probably won’t get all the variables right, such as distance vs. damage vs. racial profile vs. whatever, but we’ll get a more intelligent system in place, and then we can tweak it til it’s fun. Realistically we know it’s unlikely that we’ll get it perfect the first time, but hopefully the process will be done in August – that’s two revisions of the formulas.
About the Changes To Monsters
This is what it boils down to: nobody should be able to solo a group monster when we’re done. The game is on a bad path, and we have to get it off this path. A lot of people think the game is boring now – well, that’s because players are too powerful and we can’t make better monsters. We’ve run out of ways to make monsters more difficult, more fun, more challenging. If we make them harder, they do too much damage or they cast astoundingly powerful debuffs on you, which makes you angry. Why are these the options? Because you do too much damage to them. It’s a vicious cycle, and we’re fixing it. As an important side-effect, big battles should take longer than they do now, so there should be more time for strategy. I realize this doesn’t come across very well in the June notes, but it will make more sense as we fill in the missing pieces by adding monsters with new flavor to them. And yes, there will be new solo monsters on Linvak in June. Soloing monsters will still be a viable advancement path in AC2, but not on group-statted monsters. To that end, we will be re-evaluating the stats and experience rewards on many solo monsters to make them more worthwhile to hunt for single players. This will start happening in June and likely continue through August.
We like this idea of adding armor to monsters because it solves a lot of problems at once. Not only are combats currently short and brutal (or long and tedious, for some classes), but they tend to consist of lots of auto-attacks over and over – combat skills don’t do enough. Why spend vigor to add 200 more damage to your attack? You can just swing again to get 300 more damage for free from your auto-attack! You are clearly better off saving your vigor to use for heals – there’s no contest. Monster armor helps to solve this problem. Since auto-attacks will go through armor, they will do less damage. Skills, which stack on top of auto-attacks, will be a lot more noticeably useful.
That’s the “nerf” side of the coin. The other side is to make the skills themselves worth using, and we’re doing that aggressively. We’ve planned to buff some 90 skills in June to make them more interesting and create some choices, and there will be more buffs to come.
Skills are the source of our combat complexity. We must make them work in order to maximize combat funness, and we can’t get there just by buffing the skills. (Because if we just make skills do more damage, then monsters are too easy unless THEY do more damage, and then battles are even shorter.) Right now combat is too short – you don’t get to use enough skills or tactics or anything. By giving monsters armor, we slow down combat and we increase the importance of skills.
When we get things where we want them, we can reduce some monsters’ damage output so that they aren’t so murderous – this is the other aspect of the balancing that we hope to do in June/July/August. I don’t know how much of a decrease yet, though. We will make some simple monster changes in June, some more complex and subtle changes in July, and some very individualized balances and monster flavoring in August. Another important reason we’re doing this monster work is so that we have somewhere to go with our Hero Monsters. Those guys need to be even more challenging than current monsters – and just making them hit harder isn’t the answer.
The formula for monster armor we published earlier is clearly too high for mid-level monsters – this will have to be on a gradual scale, not a linear one. As a rule of thumb, monsters will typically have less armor than the max for a player of their level. (Monsters like Armoredillos get more leeway as they are supposed to be very armored.)
The Rationale for Reaps
Armoring monsters plays a big part in making combat more interesting. But it isn’t enough. One of the things that we did wrong in AC2 was have tons of “batteries” – templates who can just get vigor and health forever, never dying unless something goes wrong. This lets them kill things that they were never intended to kill (like group monsters). Classes without these abilities feel quite strongly that they need these powers to be viable. Right now, they’re right; in today’s climate you need reaps or heals (or at least pets) to be a viable group-monster-soloer. But we can’t go the route of giving one of these to everybody – we’d permanently reduce our combat system to a handful of skills you mash over and over. Balanced, sure, but tedious, and you’d eventually get bored and quit. Our job is to make the classes differentiated, not homogenized. Ironically, to differentiate classes we need to nerf some skills – balance their power against other skills so that they aren’t astoundingly more powerful. We nerfed reaps as much as we could nerf them while still making them worthwhile. Yet they’re still so good that they can cause the same problem – you’ll still be able to just stand there and “turtle” forever by just using Reap Essence over and over. But we don’t really want to DESTROY turtles, we just want to make turtling as a solo player a less-than-ideal choice. We have another trick up our sleeves to help make sure that solo turtles can’t kill group monsters: we’re giving monsters a small health regeneration during combat. So these classes will still be able to stand toe-to-toe with group monsters forever, but because of the efficiency drop in these skills combined with the monster’s health regeneration, they will not be able to kill group monsters this way.
Again, turtling is okay if you’re a tank, we aren’t saying it’s evil or anything, and it will remain a viable choice for soloing, but you shouldn’t be able to turtle-solo a group monster. Will you still be able to after these changes? I don’t know. Is this too punitive? Are the skills too weak now? I don’t know. We haven’t playtested yet. We’re talking with you about our plans, not telling you how it will be.
The Rationale for Reducing Healing Skills
This is very similar to the reap problem. Self-healing is the other way to “turtle” and stay alive indefinitely. It makes the human defender and melee sage in particular extremely good tanks. On the other hand, these classes have healing skills because they’re supposed to be healers, at least to some extent. So it’s a difficult balance between tankability and healing power. Have we got the balance right? I don’t know, we haven’t playtested yet. Haven’t even implemented yet. Again, this is not set in stone.
Individual/Class Info, Skill By Skill
Here is the skill-by-skill rationale. Let me preface this by saying the same thing I said in the official internal documentation – the nerfs are really placeholder fixes. They represent a problem that we’re trying to fix, and nerfing the skill is the most straightforward way to fix it. There may be better ways. A few of the problems may not even need solving. But the proposed changes will at least do the job and solve the problem. If you have a better way to solve the problem, by all means, speak up. Even if you don’t, that doesn’t mean this is in stone. We’re still thinking about these things. We can often tell without your help that some nerfs are unneeded. So why did we put it in the doc, then? Because we wanted to tell you what we were thinking right that minute.
Before I start on individual skills, let me assume that Skill Buffs, which are green in Keth’s document, are understandable without a rationale. These skills weren’t good enough; they were made better. End of story. Similarly I will skip over what I consider “obvious” Skill Changes and only cover the stranger ones. And the Skill Nerfs that I covered earlier (reaps and heals) will be skipped as well.
So here we go:
Burgeoning Will - This skill will add 10 to 100 points to the target's maximum Vigor, which is half of its previous value.
Well, we aren’t really sold on this change. The idea here is that we want to give some classes very powerful versions of this. Say giving the Berserker a powerful max-vigor-booster. We don’t want Burgeoning Will to overshadow that. But this is one of those half-baked-still-coming-together things; it’s one of the shakiest and least-thought-out nerfs in the list. It will no doubt change and become a fully-fleshed-out solution, or more likely, it will just get cut from the change list. Lucky me, the first nerf is the least defensible. Let’s just move on.
Quicken Pulse - With this skill enabled, the character will regenerate health in combat. The amount they regenerate will be range from 3% to 15%, depending on skill level, of what they would regenerate in peace mode. This skill won't stack with other combat health regen skills. When in peace mode, this skill will work as it does now.
We worked for a good while on “how do we make health and vigor regeneration skills good?” We haven’t found a great solution for vigor regeneration, but we have a start of a solution for health regeneration – they will let you regenerate a bit of health even during combat. Without these skills on, you still won’t get any health regeneration, however.
On the flip side, we are also making monsters have a small amount of health (not vigor) regeneration while they’re fighting, too. This combats turtling – people who just stand there and heal themselves over and over will hopefully not be able to do enough damage to kill the monster in any reasonable amount of time.
Battle Cry - This skill will be changed so that it will taunt monsters and draw their aggression. In addition, its range will be reduced to 20 meters.
One of the problems with having 600 skills is that you get a lot of overlap. Everybody and their brother has a little bit of this, a little bit of that. We’re cutting down on that just a bit, and giving people more skills in their field rather than skills that steal the thunder from other classes. Battle Cry had a range of 40 meters – this is longer than the Lugian missile tree range! We are considering making some of the Lugian Missile Tree skills have longer range, but that still doesn’t make a 40m Battle Cry any less out-of-place in this tree.
We didn’t feel Battle Cry was too powerful as a skill, it was just not right for the base melee tree. That sort of utility skill should be in a specialty melee tree, if it’s going to appear at all. So we figured we'd make Battle Cry a taunt to make it more useful. Don’t like? Talk to us.
Maim - The maximum this skill can decrease all of the target's attack skills will be reduced by 25%.
This is a general power balancer for Juggernauts. They’re really very powerful compared to other melee classes. We foolishly over-buffed this particular skill in an earlier update, when we made it decrease magic and missile skill as well as melee skill. This was when we were still getting the hang of how to balance trees – not that we’re masters of it now, but we were really green then. We made a mistake. Actually, I made that particular mistake because of a miscalculation. Playtesting would have revealed that it was dumb, but it didn’t until too late… we didn’t playtest it soon enough. After that, we left it in, figuring other things would balance it out. But they haven’t.
Rather than revert it to its old form, we’re reducing its power a little bit. In my opinion this makes it more useful than it used to be, because over time there will be more and more missile and magic monsters added. If the Juggernaut population would prefer to have their full-power melee-only version back, though, that is certainly okay. I think that would be less powerful, but then I don’t play a juggernaut every day.
Oh, I should also talk about Juggernauts in general – I know a lot of people think they’re supposed to be pure tanks, but they aren’t supposed to be pure tanks. Before ship, we had three Lugian melee classes. The Titan was the pure tank, the Berserker was the damage dealer, and Juggernaut was somewhere in between. Well, the Titan was cut due from ship due to a lack of art. So until we can get the art and balance time for the Titan (which we want to do, but won’t happen this year), there is no pure tank spec tree for Lugians. Melee/sages are the best Lugian tanks (and actually, they’re a bit too good at it!). It’s frustrating that there’s no pure Lugian tank class. We don’t like it, but we can’t fix it right now. We considered making the Juggernaut into a pure tank class, but it would have meant cutting the percentage-attacks, and nobody would have liked that. So he remains a hybrid.
Reckless Abandon - This skill is really more akin to a Berserker skill, so it will be removed and put into the Berserker tree.
This is another of those out-of-place skills that blurs the lines between skill trees even more than necessary. Additionally, in its old form it was a fairly crappy skill. Honestly we don’t think anybody would miss it. We moved it to the Berserker tree and powered it up some. But again, talk to us. If this is something your Juggernaut uses every day, that’s something we want to hear about.
We are thinking about putting a max-health-boosting skill in this spot. This would help the Juggernaut be a bit better tank.
Power Surge - The percentage damage increase this skill provides will be reduced by roughly 25%.
This is a general nerfage of percentage-damage-increasers. These are too good. They obsolete skills in general by making base attacks too good; they become overbalanced at high levels.
Berserk - The armor debuff cast by this skill will be completely removed, and the damage increase given by this skill will be reduced from 20% - 40% to 5% - 30%.
This was reduced in power mostly because we removed its down side, but also because a 40% damage multiplier is crazy too good. But now it’s all goodness – there’s no downside to using this skill. We think this is a clear win for Berserkers.
Forced March - This skill will be completely removed and replaced by a modified "Reckless Abandon."
Forced March is a 20% run-speed increase – barely noticeable even at very high skills. We felt it was a "speed bump" skill – a waste of credits to get to the good stuff – so we cut it. If you need a run buff, we moved the melee tree’s Surge Step to a much more accessible place near the bottom of the tree, so you can take that. If you really like Forced March better… tell us why!
Wound Twister - The percentage damage increase this buff can give to weapons will be reduced from 30% to 15%.
This is not very overpowered now. But it will be. We are reducing all percentage damage increasers because they break future content. For the same reason, we are changing Infected Caress in July (we’re thinking about making it a huge damage-add instead of a multiplier). When the eventual 500-damage sword goes into the game, we don’t want a base-tree skill adding 150 damage to it.
We’re making all our nerfs before September. After that, we won’t be nerfing non-hero skills unless we have really good reasons. We want to get all the nerfs out of the way now so that people can stop cowering in fear of our monthly updates. Monthly updates are supposed to be happy occasions. (We reserve the right to fiddle with the hero skills for a few months after they ship, though.)
Again, this skill is a problem waiting to happen – percentage skills just get more powerful as better items are introduced into the game. This isn’t a big deal now (especially because of the existence of Infected Caress), so I know it seems arbitrary and stupid, but we think it’s necessary.
Detonate - We are going to increase the cost of this skill from 298 vigor to 300 vigor points.
Because it annoyed one of the team members to have an ugly number there, we rounded it up.
Heart Rend - This skill will be reduced from a level 35 skill to a level 30 skill, the skill credit cost will be reduced from 3 credits to 2 credits and it will be deal out 12 - 260 points of damage.
Sages are too good at vigor healing. Yes, it's they're class-defining skill, but they are way out there. In a full party a Sage can heal almost 50,000 vigor a minute. This is too much. It removes the need to do vigor-management at all. It takes away an important element of balance. It was a mistake to make them this powerful. We’re fixing it. They’ll still be the best vigor healers by a long shot… but hopefully not so powerful as to obsolete vigor management for everyone.
We want to fix this both because melee/sages are too good (they’re great tanks, plus they spam out the free vigor!), and because pure sages can dump out the 50k vigor a minute. It’s too powerful. It’s also a boring role for a pure sage. When we nerf the vigor-heals, we’re trying to come up with other useful things a sage can do in combat. This skill is almost a placeholder. It isn’t really, but we don’t have a good solid plan for how the Sage will play yet. We thought, hey, a good damage dealer sounds like it would be a nice trick for a Sage to have. Some people would prefer a new crowd-control skill be added to this line. That works too, and fits in with their vision better than this. We can do both. What should they have for crowd control?
Backstab - If used from behind the target, this skill's damage is increased. The arc in which this attack is most effective will be reduced from 180° to 150°. In addition, it can will useable by characters dual wielding Rangers.
A simple data error in our December update caused the range on the four positional attacks to be 180 degrees instead of 90 degrees. It wasn’t until we sat down and played with them that we noticed, hey, you can get three of the four positional attacks to do their extra damage just by standing in front of the monster! There was supposed to be some element of alignment required, as this chain of skills is intended for damage-dealers (such as Bounty Hunters), not tanks (such as Defenders). We realize that tanks can’t move around the monster. That’s by design.
We figured we’d fix it by reducing it to 150 degrees. This creates a large enough window that you have to move around (as we want you to have to do), but it’s pretty easy to position yourself correctly.
Find Hole - The armor ignoring damage done by this skill will be reduced by 50%.
End Game - The amount of armor ignoring damage this skill can deal out will be reduced from 75 - 400 points to 30 - 200 additional points of damage.
These are too powerful for the base tree. When there’s more armor on monsters, big armor-ignoring skills will be more powerful than ever. We want the best offensive skills to be in the specialty trees, whenever we can make that happen.
The reasons are twofold. First, it only makes sense that a specialist is going to be better than someone who only uses the base tree. Bounty Hunters should have access to better-damaging attacks than, say, a melee/Enchanter.
Also, we want to discourage hybrids who don’t choose a specialty. If you’re a melee/missile guy who just uses the base trees and takes no specialty, there won’t be very much for you to do as a Hero. There will be some generic Hero powers, but the new individual powers are going into the specialty trees, not the base trees. Yes, it removes some of the templates from the game, but we just can’t afford to spread ourselves that thin by putting unique hero powers in the base trees.
Inspiration - The vigor restored by this skill will be cut by 25%.
Bring Peace - The reset timer on this skill will be increased to 4 seconds.
Again, we think the tanks in the game are a bit too good at tanking. This is our idea of how to fix it. Keep in mind that the Defender’s role is NOT a healer. It’s a tank first, a supporter second. But we’re open to talking about this, and we haven’t implemented it yet to see if it’s too much.
Mighty Blow - This skill does additional damage if used soon after Anticipation was used. The maximum damage possible from this combo will be reduced from 400 to 300 additional points.
This was too powerful for a defender. It stole thunder from the Bounty Hunter. 400 through-armor damage is the biggest we give out unless the skill has unfortunate side-effects (like doing damage back to you). The Defender shouldn’t have this.
Hunter's Intuition - Although the skill's description said that it only did additional damage if used soon after the pet Lasher attacked the target, in reality this skill always did full damage. This skill will be made to work as originally described. In addition the reset time will be increased from 5 seconds to 10 seconds.
I think this basically speaks for itself. We didn’t fix it before because we didn’t have time to sit down and look at the Ranger before – this bugged skill alone made many high-level Rangers viable. Now that we have time to make the Ranger more viable in a well-rounded way, we’re able to fix this.
Lilitha's Vengeance - This will be a new attack that does 7 - 260 points of damage, increasing the amount of damage a Ranger can deal out. This skill will replace the "Scent of the Prey" skill.
The ranger is a hybrid class. Hybrids are good at a lot of things, but not GREAT at anything. That’s by design, but yet – everybody needs to be good at something, or they get lost in the shuffle. We decided to make him particularly good at shooting things with arrows.
Actually, we wanted to just remove dual-wielding from Rangers entirely, maybe stick it in the Bounty Hunter tree. It would have fit better. But tests of this idea didn’t show that player support would be strong for it – there are a lot of dual-wield rangers. So the Ranger is good at arrows, but he is also pretty good at dual swords. He can use traps and his pet to give him flavor and strategy.
Spontaneous Combustion - The damage this skill can deal out will be reduced from 12 - 260 to 7 - 200.
This is just too good. A 40m line-of-sight attack shouldn’t be this good at this low point in a base tree.
Encase - The reset timer on this skill will be increased from 0 seconds to 1 second. In addition, the duration of the skill will be reduced from 10-30 minutes to 5-15 minutes.
We had two rationales for this. First, we wanted to make it clearly inferior to the Defender’s Shield Wall skill, but also, we did it to make buff-bots less attractive. We don’t like what they do in AC1, and we don’t want that to happen here. In AC1 they are a significant balance problem, especially at low levels. It works something like this: buff bots become very intelligent and efficient, and people start to rely on them. Then they stop buying Encase or other buff-bot skills and just rely on the bots. It's the optimal path – it frees up skill credits for something else. But now they’re tied to the buff bot and have to come back every 30 minutes… irritating. If we add content that takes an hour at a stretch, they get mad because they can’t participate very well. And worse – because people with buff bot buffs are so much more powerful than other players their level (especially at low levels), it becomes impossible to make monsters that are challenging for both the buff-bot users and the non-buff-bot users.
I’m not trying to say that buff bots are a big deal in AC2 right now. They aren’t, and we know that. But we want to stop it before it becomes a problem.
So this is really a placeholder nerf. Yeah, it fixes the problem for Encase, but it pisses off people who use this skill normally. And it does nothing for the other buffs that buff bots give out. Not a complete or optimal solution. Something to talk to you about, not something set in stone. Actually, I think all of the skills team has become convinced over the past few days that this particular change isn’t the right way to go.
Explosion - The area of effect will be reduced from 20 meters to 10 meters, the vigor cost will be increased to 340 vigor points, and its damage will be reduced from 12 - 260 damage to 7 - 200 damage.
We are having internal discussions about how this is mathematically too much of a nerf. This is debatable and ultimately we need to see it implemented, but yeah, it could be too much. One of the rationales for this is that we wanted to put a big damage-dealer in the Sorceror line in July, and we couldn’t possibly top this base-tree skill if we wanted to do that.
Stolen Youth - The amount of vigor returned by this skill is going to be reduced from 200% to 150% and both Avert Eyes and Lightning Strike will be required before a character can purchase this skill.
On the new requirement of buying Avert Eyes and Growl – we feel it was a mistake to make these skills so easy to get to. The classes who hybrid themselves as melee/whatevers can too easily get the reaps. And yes, even in their nerfed form, Hunger and Stolen Youth are extremely worthwhile. Add to that that we’ll be making Growl more useful to tanks, and it seemed like a good way to solve a skill credit issue without overly penalizing people with useless skills. After all, we hope that tanks will want a taunt, when taunts work better.
Volley - Instead of an area of effect attack, this skill will consist of three separate attacks, each doing 3 - 75 points of damage. The reset timer on this skill will be increased to 7 seconds, while its vigor cost will be increased from 140 points to 170 points.
This is intended to be a buff. Not sure why it’s red. I would call it a “change” instead of a pure nerf. A triple-strike tends to be more useful than a small AoE. Though if you disagree, speak up. We wanted to improve it; we don’t have anything against its old form.
Acumen - The percentage damage increase given by this skill will be cut in half.
Another percentage skill that’s just out of hand. Percentage skills don’t scale well. Heck, it’s too powerful for a base-tree skill even at medium levels – it’s way too powerful at Hero levels.
Where From Here
These are the problems the Skills team wants to address, and this has been our proposal on how to address those problems. Talk to us. But please, keep the insults to yourselves – we’re human beings too, and though we have pretty thick skins, we tend to just move on to the next post whenever someone is insulting us. It's human nature. I know a lot of people are angry, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t be. Just please be on your best behavior so we can try to get in a lot of constructive communication in a short amount of time.
Thanks for reading.
