*Updated : 13:10 game time*
Hello, I'm gonna jump in to try and give some clarity on this stoof.
Firstly - I wanna apologize for the lack of communication on my own behalf, it's been a manic couple of days with a whole lot going on behind the scenes. You'll start to see me and a few of the other devs coming to life now.
If there's anything I've missed in the thread feel free to let me know and I'll try to comment when I can.
Potion Stat Boost
TLDR: This one was short-sighted on my end.
Why we wanted to do it:
We don't feel Invisible buffs/debuffs are great for the game, nor are they good for players that don't already know about their effects.(On a more extreme case : You'd be surprised at how many returning players were getting confused/frustrated when attacking ghost trolls and missing because theyre wearing full melee gear, due to it just being a harsh invisible debuff)
When designing necro, we didn't want the extra cognitive load on players to know that using an ability that hits 50% damage twice was 'always' going to be better than using a single 100% ability due to behind-the-scenes buffs, this gets more confusing the more the ability hits (You can see this in the magma tempest case). Likewise, DoTs aren't affected at all? And my priority list of abilities can change depending on if im potting, or using a zerk aura/We're happy to add those kinds of effects to necro, we just don't think it should be on a core system like stat-boosting - instead, as an actual choice the player makes because they want to prioritize multi-hitting in their gameplay (and likewise something that does the inverse).
As a result, we decided we didn't need the buff for necro, it just didn't add anything meaningful and if anything made balancing a whole lot harder.
Why did we remove it from the other styles
When making necro, we didn't like adding invisible buffs, but likewise, we didn't really like adding invisible inconsistencies with no plans to remove them, so we decided the best course of action was to remove the buff entirely.I think you can tell from necro, but we have a lot of plans for combat, and an element of getting those out is... getting them out, so we can iterate.
In this case, I need to apologise as this was rushed on my behalf - I should've dove deeper on the side effects of removing it (things like magma tempest being harshly hit / bladed dive starts being affected at Raksha should've been better considered)
I do still stand by a minor DPS squish isn't the worst thing for the game in the short term given that we'd also like to add some of the necro systems to the other styles in the short term that could offset this - but the effect on certain abilities has been too harsh.
The timing on this probably wasn't the best, we have had a chunk of fixes / nerfs to bits of combat recently (whilst there are others we still want to do, they're probably best paired with buffs we want to do to other respective parts of necro) so we'll bare that in mind in future updates.
What we're doing:
We're still investigating what the best course of action is for this - it's something we're currently working on. (apologies again as i know this can come across as a bit of a non-answer)
I hope you agree changes like this are for the greater good in the longterm so we can remove the needless complexity and add more well-thought-out and understandable complexity for everyone.
*Update*
We're gonna revert the potion over stat stuff until we come to a solution that is better fitting for everyone (likely to happen Monday). I appreciate all of your feedback on this. :)
Monsters:
I havent seen many/any players really complain about these but i think it could be worth talking about anyways - if you do have issues i'd love to hear them
TLDR: Happy with how these are panning out. Happy to take on board any feedback.
Sorry for an absolute wall of text:
This is another one of those weird complexities thats been hanging over us.
For those that don't know some monsters around the time EOC came out were made 'taggable' taggable means the first person that hits it gets the drop. The majority of mobs in game are taggable (bosses are not). Shortly after EOC launch all mobs that were taggable got some stats halved behind the scenes (From what I've been told, there were perfectly valid reasons for this to exist, but it was a bandaid that was aimed to be resolved later)
Now this isn't ideal because of a few reasons:
The difficulty of 2 vanilla mobs can be completely different despite them having the same levels (2 monsters with 80 def, would have completely different accuracy values)
It disconnects us further from combat level (E.g. a level 80 monster with taggable could actually be more comparable to a level 60 monster once everything was accounted for.
Now obviously alongside removing the taggable adjustments we also rebalanced some mobs early game to make the slope from early game - mid game - end game less harsh : Typically you'd run around the early game one shotting everything, not needing food and not really needing to worry about using anything but basics (why use a skeleton or ultimate if I'm just gonna 1 shot everything anyways). and then hit a point in the mid-game where that just flips which wasn't a great learning curve.
So it made sense to resolve this with Necro given that we want to try to slowly teach players both the skill and combat, and that we were doing some new accuracy stuff.
Overall this seems to be panning out well (both the taggable & rebalances to mobs) I'm sure there will be some monsters that have slightly too high damage or slightly too high defence since the taggable change - but we're 100% open to feedback and could potentially make some stat changes to account for this in a much more simple to understand manner.
As always if any question re: any of the above, feel free to reach out and i'll try to answer to the best of my ability.
(I am at wedding tomorrow so won't be around to answer questions (sadge no necro) but will be around this evening/back friday)
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