BETA TEST May 18th; what's new?

[Xeen]

This feels like a nail in the coffin on Duelists. Serration was already weak, and this cut the damage in half, delay from 3mins to 30 seconds, so you can't even apply to more than one person at a time. The faster cast is nice, but overall this is a net nerf.

Depends on what you want to do with the duelist. Don't forget everyone is getting lvl 20-30 skills. Wait and see.

 

[Rydogg]

Depends on what you want to do with the duelist. Don't forget everyone is getting lvl 20-30 skills. Wait and see.

Regardless of what you want to do, this is still a nerf. We can only provide feedback on the current state of the game as the changes occur.

 

[Xeen]

Regardless of what you want to do, this is still a nerf. We can only provide feedback on the current state of the game as the changes occur.

Duelist got an improved debuff though, right? I never got to either skill yet on my duelist, but from what I heard, serration is a backseat skill anyway and probably wont matter once you have access to the 3 new ones + other favorites. So just speculating, but an improved 'staple' skill and a changed/possibly weaker side skill + new skills sounds like a win. Level 30 probably isn't the end of gaining new skills either.

I wonder why serration was reduced. Maybe it is highly effective when rolled into a high dps/attack speed + haste auto-attack build as opposed to relying on striking skills and 2-handers for big hits per skill use. This actually sounds like a really good build because your damage comes from serration procs multiplied by haste and speed, leaving your stamina in reserve for the other tools in your toolbox + some striking skills. Worth investigating. The major downside of haste is that all it amounts to with skill attacks is burning out of stamina faster when you could have geared for other stats.

 

[AdricLives]

To provide some background around these abilities (of which Serration is one) the goal was to give "Ritual" like abilities that took a while to perform but gave lasting benefits for upcoming fights at little to no stamina cost to the user. I think on paper this is good, you prepare for a fight ahead of time and get more damage without sacrificing more stamina mid-fight. But 3 minutes is really short and even 5 or 10 minutes would likely remain in "annoying" territory.

Because we are working within LAS any buffs that last longer than that are just going to be swapped out and player will repeatedly eat the 30 second skill swap timer. So these abilities are either moderately annoying or really annoying.... So generally these abilities had their effectiveness buffed, duration reduced and execution time reduces to reposition them as like "just before combat" abilities to enhance the battle again at little to no stamina cost allowing you to use more other direct attacks that are now augmented by the buffs.

Serration sits in a rather peculiar place now because its proc based (Follow through perhaps lives awkwardly here now too) which over a short duration you may not actually see a proc. And if we are just going to guarantee a proc we might as well make it do the damage in some other way.

In terms of Serration's damage this was unrelated to the changes noted above, we changed how damage over time abilities worked like 4 weeks ago and we've been finding effects over the past few weeks with incorrect values still set and Serration was one of them which I caught while testing the other changes to the "Battle Prep" abilities.

I've been paying attention to the feedback regarding Duelist regarding Triage, Serration and Disengage and will have changes in store to prevent earlier abilities from falling too heavily in the "Utility" category which makes them feel rather worthless when you don't have any real choice in skills on your bar yet.

 

[Xeen]

To provide some background around these abilities (of which Serration is one) the goal was to give "Ritual" like abilities that took a while to perform but gave lasting benefits for upcoming fights at little to no stamina cost to the user. I think on paper this is good, you prepare for a fight ahead of time and get more damage without sacrificing more stamina mid-fight. But 3 minutes is really short and even 5 or 10 minutes would likely remain in "annoying" territory.

Because we are working within LAS any buffs that last longer than that are just going to be swapped out and player will repeatedly eat the 30 second skill swap timer. So these abilities are either moderately annoying or really annoying.... So generally these abilities had their effectiveness buffed, duration reduced and execution time reduces to reposition them as like "just before combat" abilities to enhance the battle again at little to no stamina cost allowing you to use more other direct attacks that are now augmented by the buffs.

Serration sits in a rather peculiar place now because its proc based (Follow through perhaps lives awkwardly here now too) which over a short duration you may not actually see a proc. And if we are just going to guarantee a proc we might as well make it do the damage in some other way.

In terms of Serration's damage this was unrelated to the changes noted above, we changed how damage over time abilities worked like 4 weeks ago and we've been finding effects over the past few weeks with incorrect values still set and Serration was one of them which I caught while testing the other changes to the "Battle Prep" abilities.

I've been paying attention to the feedback regarding Duelist regarding Triage, Serration and Disengage and will have changes in store to prevent earlier abilities from falling too heavily in the "Utility" category which makes them feel rather worthless when you don't have any real choice in skills on your bar yet.

LAS?

One idea to help out: If you skill swap an active buff, the buff should be removed similar to how an aura skill inherently requires you to have it slotted to maintain use. May require a bit of coding work especially if its an AoE buff, having to check if the originator removes the skill -> other buffed players lose the buff along with owner. I guess it doesn't matter if it is now meant to be a shorter per-fight battle prep thing.

I don't like the idea of having to juggle skills around every fight.

10 minutes seems like a good amount of time (thinking about recent experience with King's potions), plenty enough to complete a 3^ fight and some adds with a party, but not as long as food 'do it once and forget it' granted the buff is not a consumable, instead costing a skill slot, stamina, and activation time.

 

[Undone]

LAS = limited action slots.

Removing a buff when you remove the skill off your bar isn't a good experience either. That means if you use a 10m buff then you would have a dead ability slot for 10m. I think having lower duration buffs that are quicker to execute and don't necessarily have 100% uptime are more in line with what we are trying to do.

 

[Xeen]

LAS = limited action slots.

Removing a buff when you remove the skill off your bar isn't a good experience either. That means if you use a 10m buff then you would have a dead ability slot for 10m. I think having lower duration buffs that are quicker to execute and don't necessarily have 100% uptime are more in line with what we are trying to do.

cool thanks

Depends on how worthwhile the buff is I guess. Considering that stamina is usually the limiting factor in a fight, having a strong long-duration buff at the cost of -1 LAS might not be such a bad thing given the circumstances. I usually end up drained and using only 1 or 2 abilities by the end of a long fight or series of fights.

 

[Undone]

cool thanks

Depends on how worthwhile the buff is I guess. Considering that stamina is usually the limiting factor in a fight, having a strong long-duration buff at the cost of -1 LAS might not be such a bad thing given the circumstances. I usually end up drained and using only 1 or 2 abilities by the end of a long fight or series of fights.

these new shorter duration abilities however have reduced stamina costs and buff the rest of your stuff. we're still iterating through them so things are bound to change - but we don't think that locking an action slot for a fixed amount of time is a good direction.

 

[Xeen]

these new shorter duration abilities however have reduced stamina costs and buff the rest of your stuff. we're still iterating through them so things are bound to change - but we don't think that locking an action slot for a fixed amount of time is a good direction.

Always about juice vs squeeze vs other options

I assume this thinking does not apply to auras? Or are auras going to be changed?

Speaking of auras, is it intentional that Sentinel + Knight auras conflict?

 

[Undone]

I assume this thinking does not apply to auras? Or are auras going to be changed?

No. Auras don't cost stamina and provide an ongoing benefit to your entire group with an infinite duration. It's up to the player if they find it worthy to put on their bar.

Speaking of auras, is it intentional that Sentinel + Knight auras conflict?

Auras are a special case and are a bit of a "hack" that was intended to be the primary mechanic of the warlord. However, because it was a hack and there were so many improvements that needed to be made to fully flesh it out, we decided to use auras in a much more limited capacity rather than spend a large chunk of engineering time for a single specialization. Right now only one aura can be active on any given player and for the aforementioned reasons it is unlikely that I will get around to changing that any time soon. On the plus side however, by only allowing 1 aura to be active on a player at any given time we can make them a bit more powerful than a traditional buff without worrying about players stacking things.

 

[Undone]

Another set of hot fixes coming your way. We would typically just wait to deploy these changes until next week but the sooner we get feedback the sooner we can make adjustments.

• added level 20-30 warden abilities
• warden now gets natural resists rather than movement
• adjusted armor calculations to provide better damage absorption at lower levels and widen the gap between defenders and non-defenders in their ability to take damage

 

[Xeen]

• warden now gets natural resists rather than movement

Nooooooooooooo! lol The spec-class bonus ms is one of the core reasons I chose Warden. My Duelist may see some serious action soon enough. I'm all about the movement speed, even if it wasn't working correctly yet... a star in my eye snuffed out before it could really shine. Maybe everyone will have access to more movement speed through other/new items.

Does anything currently do any 'nature/natural' damage anyway?

Was this change done because of the back-end changes required to make movement work/untie it from combat stance or for another reason/fear of too much movement speed?

If I had a choice, I would not sacrifice movement speed for practically anything, which is why I can be found with 2 +1% 1AC 1wt Runner's cuffs on 24/7, but that may change. That's just me though, and maybe I'm weird for liking mobility so much. So be it. I've been told that even if I was right about what I'm doing and how effective it can be when applied to a specific purpose, my build won't be acknowledged. Oddly, it seems my strategy is starting to be copied. You know what they say about imitation!

I guess I can't miss something I never actually had if it wasn't working correctly and only 1% of it at that until level 25, but I certainly would welcome going back to movement speed bonus for the class later if possible, depending on the reason for the change.



Question on cms if you are at liberty to answer:

Is 100% cms bonus required to combat 100% of the cms penalty? Is that how it works? or is it cms something like a 60% multiplier to normal ms and only 60 cms is required to negate the penalty? Either way, looking forward to doing some crafting tomorrow and a few foot races!!

Question on resilience:

If we had 100% resilience, would that mean we could never die. Probably impossible to get this much.

 

[Undone]

Does anything currently do any 'nature/natural' damage anyway?

I don't believe so. But that's because I still need to refactor the resists system. So in the future it will likely be things like poisons and other things of the sort.

Was this change done because of the back-end changes required to make movement work/untie it from combat stance or for another reason/fear of too much movement speed?

Part of this change came down to oddball situations that would eventually lead to headaches. Imagine you are a warden with an innate +5% movement, then you start your lay of the land aura giving you + your group a fixed movement buff because you have a long run ahead of you. Over long enough distances you would eventually outrun your group resulting in them no longer having the aura applied to them, which would further exacerbate the problem.

Now yes, this is an unlikely scenario, but a plausible one none the less. From a design point of view I'm not a huge fan of giving one person an innate movement advantage over others that cannot be shared because that is going to lead to different permutations of situations like the one I described above. I view things like movement & stamina as more or less "constants" that should typically be "equal" amongst all players if we can make it work.

Is 100% cms bonus required to combat 100% of the cms penalty? Is that how it works? or is it cms something like a 60% multiplier to normal ms and only 60 cms is required to negate the penalty? Either way, looking forward to doing some crafting tomorrow and a few foot races!!

+100% combat movement speed would be required to negate 100% of the combat stance movement penalty.

If we had 100% resilience, would that mean we could never die. Probably impossible to get this much.

Yes. This is another situation where from a design perspective we have to limit the maximum resilience any player can obtain via gear.

 

[Xeen]

For the movement thing, it's up to the Warden to make sure everyone has the buff and stay in range of the party who should remain fairly close to each other. I'm always checking whoever is farthest away for the aura icon because I have other movement bonus items. I already outrun them without the ms bonus even working. It's not uncommon for me to drop back and pick someone up for whatever reason, usually they detoured around a mob or stopped to harvest, chose a different path, whatever the case may be. Hitting auto-run and saying bye to everyone wouldn't be smart, you just end up waiting on the group to arrive so you can begin hunting anyway.

 

[Undone]

For the movement thing, it's up to the Warden to make sure everyone has the buff and stay in range of the party who should remain fairly close to each other. I'm always checking whoever is farthest away for the aura icon because I have other movement bonus items. I already outrun them without the ms bonus even working. It's not uncommon for me to drop back and pick someone up for whatever reason, usually they detoured around a mob or stopped to harvest, chose a different path, whatever the case may be. Hitting auto-run and saying bye to everyone wouldn't be smart, you just end up waiting on the group to arrive so you can begin hunting anyway.

Which is why I said it's an unlikely scenario. Either way that doesn't change my design philosophy behind stats like movement speed and how everyone should typically be on equal footing

 

[Xeen]

That's fine. I know the way of mobility and its power! I'd rather have never known it then had it and lost it.

Duelist starting to look pretty good now. 10% cms baked in between main and spec class is pretty huge even if it takes awhile to get that last 6-10 points.

 

[Randy Magnum]

I like to kite mobs and I stacked cms in previous builds but this build I was lucky enough to get a great bow early and didn't have to bother with cms cause it killed most before mob reached me anyway. Just can't use it in group cause of agro.

Edit: I should be more clear so the Devs don't nerf my bow,lol. I usually kite green mobs, and fast mobs will get to me , like deer, bear -cause high hp but their health is usually diminished by half or more so a couple swings with a sword will finish.
Crafting items used to let you add cms to items - i think it was type of wood on weapons, and then leather armor - i think it was boar leather that added cms, but crafting has changed, a lot, and I haven't gotten enough flux to do any experiment/comparisons now that you need those for stats.

 

[Khuros13]

This feels like a nail in the coffin on Duelists. Serration was already weak, and this cut the damage in half, delay from 3mins to 30 seconds, so you can't even apply to more than one person at a time. The faster cast is nice, but overall this is a net nerf.

I think making serration easier to use and funner to use should not also result in a dmg nerf. On my brigand it felt really nice having a Duelist around for that big buff. A real potent dps buff that everyone kind of desires (especially DPS classes). It gave the duelist a nice niche to fill and made them a true support.

 

[Undone]

I think making serration easier to use and funner to use should not also result in a dmg nerf. On my brigand it felt really nice having a Duelist around for that big buff. A real potent dps buff that everyone kind of desires (especially DPS classes). It gave the duelist a nice niche to fill and made them a true support.

Adric mentioned this above but the changes to Serration damage was not a nerf; it was fixing a bug.

 

[Rydogg]

Adric mentioned this above but the changes to Serration damage was not a nerf; it was fixing a bug.

Intentional nerf or not, its a change that resulted in a 50% reduction in proc damage, in addition to the change on the duration which prevents it from being applied to more than one person due to the 1 min cooldown. I am excited to see what other changes are in store for the Duelist because I've always loved a supporting role that can put out some DPS.

From a testing perspective, it would be helpful to understand which areas of the game still have changes coming (aside from the usual balance tweaks which are expected). For example, now knowing that there are many more abilities being rolled out, the prior testing and comparison across the supporters was almost for naught if there are some level 20+ skills coming along that would bring the class more into balance.