[2020] Balancing plans for Wolcen

Community translation: Français[www.hacknslashworld.com] - Русский[vk.com]

Hello everyone!

We are currently working on a balancing overhaul that will affect every aspect of Wolcen character customization: skills, Gate of Fate, skill modifiers, items, and more.

Considering the size of the overhaul, we couldn’t complete it for next week’s patch but plan to release it with our first Chronicle.

In order to provide a better player experience in the wait of the big update, we worked on a smaller skill balancing patch that will come along with the already announced performance optimizations, bug fixing and quality of life improvements.

Skill balancing
The main goal for this patch is to allow for more skills to be viable in an endgame scenario.

The main modifications are about damage numbers:

• The damage curve of most skills has been reworked so that they deal way more damage as the character gains levels.
  
• The base damage and value of some modifiers of underused skills have been greatly increased.
  
• Annihilation, Arctic Spear, Consuming Ember, Eclipse, Infinity Blades, Light-bringer, Parasite, Thunderstrike, Stings of Krearion, Slayer’s Flurry, Anvil’s Woe, Evasion, Wrath of Bäapheth, Flight of Gaavanir, Phantom Blades.

Some skills also have had more specific improvements that will all be listed in the dedicated changelog.

We expect that you will be able to pick in a much larger pool of viable skills during your high-level expeditions, leading to an increase in build diversity.

Chronicle 1 and further
The incoming patch focuses on skills and damage numbers, providing a short-term solution to the fact that most skills feel underwhelming when played in high-level expeditions.

There are other issues that we know are not addressed in this patch and for which we have advanced enough plans so that we feel comfortable sharing them with you.

Priority issues we want to address:

• Character identity: we want to accentuate the impact of the choices you make. Currently, if a character fully invests in one damage type (lightning for example), then he only deals around 20 to 30% more damage in that damage type as opposed to others. We think it is far from enough.
  If you mainly invest in lightning damage, your character must feel way stronger when using a lightning skill.
  
  
• Damage scaling: we want to provide more ways to make the damages of a character scale when progressing. Active skill modifiers, the Gate of Fate, and the equipment should play a bigger role in how much damage you inflict.
  
  
• Clarity: we want to make it easier to understand the impact of the choices you make.
  Your active skill modifier increases the damage of your skill by 20%? It should(and it will) really increase the damage of your skill by 20% instead of having a different behavior depending on if it is a spell or an attack and either way only increasing its damage by 5% at most.

Now, about what we plan exactly:

Disclaimer: Please note that all may not come in the same update. Although we are confident in what we want to do, the shape of some things may change as the design process moves forward. Other balancing-related improvements are planned, and we will tell you more about them in due time.
For now, this section should cover the most important ones.

Bonus damage rework
Currently

Most bonus damage are additive. This means that if you have +50% damage from your attributes and +20% from your Gate of Fate, it becomes +70% damage overall.

Because bonus damage from attributes can easily go over 600% damage, it makes it so other sources of bonus damage are comparatively insignificant.

What we plan

• Reduce the damage bonuses that can be obtained via attributes to a more manageable amount.
  
• Make it so different sources of bonus damage are multiplicative. Multiple bonuses to damage from the same source are still additive.

Example: I have +50% damage from my Gate of Fates, +20% damage from my items, and +10% damage from my attributes. Since all sources are multiplicative with each other, I will have a final multiplier equal to (1.5 * 1.2 * 1.1) = 1.98. That leads to a bonus of +98% damage.

Bonuses to damage from nodes of the Gate of Fate, Active Skill Modifiers, and Equipment will then play a bigger role in the amount of damage your character will be able to inflict, allowing you to have much more control over how you want to build your character.

Spell damage rework
Currently

The base damage of spells only depends on the level of the spell as opposed to the attacks for which it is a multiplier of the base damage of the weapon.

It causes scaling issues when going at a high level because the spell level is capped but the weapon level isn’t.

It also doesn’t work very well with some specific magic effects: if you have a staff that allows you to cast Bleeding Edge and because the base damage of the staff is very low, Bleeding Edge’s damage will, for once, feel very underwhelming.

What we plan

• Spells and Attacks will scale the same way: using the base damage of the currently equipped weapon.
  Damage of summons will also scale based on your weapon damage.
  
• Staves will be reworked in order to deal significant damage.

It will allow for spells to scale correctly in high-level situations, it will increase the impact of your weapons on how much damage you deal when using a spell, also allow for right-click build with a Staff and unlock some new spell + attack builds that don’t use a Catalyst.

Damage and Ailment effectiveness multiplier
Currently

If you have an item that adds 10 flat damage to your skills, then it will add 10 damage to each instance of your skill regardless of how often it hits. This means that skills that hit very frequently such as Anomaly will better use these 10 flat added damage than a very slow skill such as Anvil’s Woe.

Same thing for ailments: it will be easier to apply ailments with a skill that ticks very often.

What we plan

We will add a new “Damage Effectiveness Multiplier” that can have a different value for each skill. If a skill has a 120% Damage Effectiveness Multiplier, then all flat added damage applied to this skill are multiplied by 120% (increased by 20%).

A similar multiplier will be used for the Ailments: with a 120% Ailment Effectiveness Multiplier, the chance to apply an ailment is multiplied by 120%.

It can be used to reduce the damage and chance to apply ailment for skills that tick very often but also to increase these two traits for slower skills. For example, we could imagine that a skill that requires to be charged has a higher damage multiplier the longer it is charged.

Other improvements

• Score rework: the formula used for the different characteristics that use a score system (critical chance, ailment chance, dodge, all resistance, attack, and cast speed) will change completely. We want to use a formula with which we can have more control, and make it so investing in these characteristics via attributes points always feels rewarding.
  
  
• Ailment scaling: ailments damage will be able to scale with other characteristics than “Ailment damage”. For example, your bonus fire damage will also be applied to your burn damage.
  
  
• Force Shield regeneration rework: currently, the Force Shield Regeneration works the same way as the Life Regeneration does. It is a flat value that is regenerated each second. We want to change it from flat value to a percentage of your maximum Force Shield.
  
  
• Shield and block balancing: there will be one general block chance value that is applied no matter what weapon is equipped. Having a Shield will greatly improve your block efficiency.

All that may feel a bit abstract to some of you but we feel that it’s important to share more about our intentions for this short-term patch, as well as our plans for character building and customization for the following months. Don’t hesitate to share your feedback!

Thank you all for your support and stay safe!