Introducing LOTB’s Senior Designer + Upcoming Tuning Discussion (Preliminary)

[Sparton_LOTB]

The full release patch notes thread is now up: October 2016 Tuning Update.

---

Hi everyone! I’m Sparton, senior designer on LOTB.

Quick bio for me: I’m a gamer of nearly every kind you can think of, and I’ve been professionally doing game design for 8 years. All of my previous work has been mobile stuff, so designing for this space is something I’m intimately familiar with (The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, Knights & Dragons, Implode!, Zombie Attack!, and many more).

I’m a big numbers guy. Balancing long-term progression, finding interesting strategies and synergies, and all that other good stuff is what I love working on, which is why I’m now driving much of the tuning and rebalancing in concert with Kaz. We wanted to do this post to help communicate how (and why) we’re adjusting the game based on your feedback and play patterns, so please post your thoughts/concerns in this thread based on what we’ve started, as there’s always room to improve things more.

---

Campaign Reward Adjustments

The campaign is the first game mode players will have access to, and one that players can consistently access. Our intent is that this is where we want players to primarily gain experience (for both player rank and character levels), gain gold, and gain materials for leveling up and evolving talismans.

As the campaign is the consistent mode everyone starts with can access, we wanted to ensure new players stood a fair chance. Those who aren’t strong enough to have access to all of the worlds and most of the difficulty levels shouldn’t have a hard time improving and evolving characters and talismans, which is why we settled on each world having two colours they focus on. This choice allows players looking for a specific colour to 1) know what world you must go to, and 2) to access harder difficulties to improve the odds and star value of drops. Just keep in mind that you’ll still get lower rarity evo materials even on Madness (although they’ll be not as common as the 3 star ones for that world).

Because we have the 3 star coloured evo runes dropping as early as Kingdom of the Sands Madness, we have the 3 star colourless runes dropping based on overall progression. We still want the same general progression for new players coming in, so to evolve characters and talismans to 4 stars/5 stars, you’ll still need to get to roughly the same place in campaign progression as before. Do keep in mind that other than getting lucky at secret locations, 3 star coloured evo shards are still intended to be found in the Lord of Light dungeons.

Finally, for talismans, we wanted to drastically simplify how many talismans drop and where they drop for three reasons:

• We wanted the earlier worlds to focus on more of the “bread and butter” kinds of talismans which are easier to understand and use well in the early game
• We wanted farmable talismans to be easier to get
• We wanted to start setting aside certain talismans as rewards/purchasables for upcoming content (PVP, Brave New World, etc)

Time Rift Reward Adjustments

While the campaign’s main focus is on XP, gold, and improving talismans, the Lord of Light dungeons are focused on evolving (ie evo shards), as well as getting new characters (ie souls).

While we still don’t want to be commonly dropping 2 and 3 star evo shards even on floor 10, we definitely recognize that the amount of times the average player will try to clear battles per day is much lower than anticipated. Therefore, we have done a few key things to help make this more approachable to all players:

• 2 star coloured evo shards are more frequently dropped in floors 4-6
• 3 star coloured evo shards are more frequently dropped on floors 7-9
• 3 star coloured evo shards are substantially more frequently dropped on floor 10
• In all floors and for all star rarities, colourless evo shards are slightly more common than coloured evo shards

In conjunction with 3 star colourless evo shards being dropped in the late game of the campaign, we hope this will make getting the necessary materials for evolving characters to 5 star much more palpable.

One last note: while we do still want to give players Souls and Rare Souls from this feature (which will be really helpful when Sacrifice becomes available [bit of info about that here]), we have reduced the rate that they drop to balance the value of dungeons vs using Troopers.

Character Tuning

This has primarily been spearheaded by Kaz, but is nonetheless something that all developers on the team contribute to, and we do also keep an eye out for what is being talked about on the forum. Sometimes, we notice things that aren’t working as intended (either the effect is not working right or the effect isn’t doing what we originally planned). Other times, it’s just changing skills, fury attacks, or passives so that they’ll allow the character to better perform in certain game modes (including the upcoming PVP).

Overall, there is a substantial amount of small changes coming through. The main motivation is to get as many characters and loadouts as viable as possible for PVP. We believe a robust and varied ecosystem will be key for that feature to be interesting and to continue to have its metagame evolve organically over time. In some cases, there are nerfs coming through (especially if we spot some really degenerate combos), but for the most part we want PVP to be a place where all kinds of strategies can succeed, even if only in certain scenarios.

To see the specific changes that are coming, check out the separate Upcoming Character Tuning post.

---

Sorry for the novelette-length post. We really wanted to make sure, with this large tuning pass, that we’re as open with you guys as possible. Additionally, we also want to take the opportunity to allow the community to provide feedback before the changes go live, so we have the opportunity to potentially do some last minute changes. We don’t have an exact date for this yet, but we expect to have these changes live within the next few weeks.

[MrFreeze]

Thanks for the info. Sounds like things are moving in the right direction. The random farming is horribly tedious. You can farm for a week and get every color but the one you need. I'm glad you realize this and are working to improve it.

[Aristo4]

Thanks for the info indeed, finally

[Kaijester]

Now I can finally move my Aces High Eddie out from the basement storage as another awesome change on Holy Smoke Eddie & Aces High Eddie to switch their Heal ability (scale with Magic) for Rise abiliy (scale with Attack).

Rise is the same AOE attack+heal all as seen on Pharaoh Sun Spirit.

Good Job Devs!

Up The Iron!

[Kaijester]

Thanks Sparton!

Here's one for your consideration, the Prisoner has a very awesome passive but his basic attack deals magic attack while his power ability deals physical attack. thus I'm finding it hard for him to deal decent damage at Lv100 either Magic or Attack stats up.

So do consider changing his basic attack to physical attack instead.

[Sparton_LOTB]

Here's one for your consideration, the Prisoner has a very awesome passive but his basic attack deals magic attack while his power ability deals physical attack. thus I'm finding it hard for him to deal decent damage at Lv100 either Magic or Attack stats up.

So do consider changing his basic attack to physical attack instead.

Yeah, his thing does seem a bit odd, especially since his basic attack says it should be doing true damage (which should scale with attack and magic... but his skill says it scales with magic and special?). I'll have to delve into his innards and see if there's just a communication problem and/or do some tuning fixes for him, too.

---

The main thing I'm concerned about is the reduction of rare souls from time rift dungeons.

Where do we get them then? Only ironite? Rare souls seem to be yielding fewer premium characters so reducing them seems like it will be much harder to get new ones.

You'll still get them from the time rift, just not as often. You can also get them from most secret locations, with a progressively higher chance the longer the cooldown is.

And yes, ironite is an option, which you can pay for, but there's still ironite earnable from secret locations, rarely from killed enemies pretty much anywhere in the game, and soon more daily and weekly opportunities from Daily Challenges and PVP, so we hope that you'll still be able to get an influx over time regardless of how you play.

---

I'd just throw in I figured a 50-33% reflect all change would be nice with a cost adjustment (raise) put in with it, but then again I don't have access to the database regarding how all battles have worked out regarding that.

[...]

If using reflect all were more limited by the cost, the skill could be kept (at less than 50% of course) yet not used as a total game changer overall.

Yeah, I actually convinced Kaz that we should allow it to have it's moderate cost with a more reduced effect instead of keeping how potent it is but raising the cost. It definitely became too much of an answer against strong attackers when they would just beat themselves to death, so we hope that the Magus Allied Soldier still has it's place at softening blows and dealing respectable damage with it's basic, but you pay for damage output if you really want to use that energy skill a lot. Hopefully we can have more strong defensive skill characters added so he's not popular out of nearly necessity; there's some good options at higher rarities, and a fair few options with Block (including the 3 star Dog of War), but we could use more alternatives.

---

I'd like to see some sort of Rare Soul calculation that includes what I've already gotten from Rare Souls like:

Each Character Rare Soul includes a 20% (OR WHATEVER) chance of producing a character that I, as an individual player, has not had.

This is the sort of thing we want to try and solve with the upcoming Sacrifice feature, where you're either trading up duplicates or other fodder for more specialized/valuable souls, among other possible rewards.

---

Since beneficial removal will work on Ghost effect in the pending changes, will "Block Beneficial Effects" be able to block Ghost effect too?

That's the idea, yeah. One more option for neutralizing the Magus Lord of Light, or to be weary of in PVP if you want to rely on Ghost for Carriage Rider Eddie.

---

Are you saying,you'll be pre-releasing the update to the forum members,so we can try out for bugs/stability issues and give our feedback before you post it live in playstores!.

Right now, it's mainly a matter of wanting to just start the discussion with players before it goes live, and then if there's perhaps something glaring that's missed/mistake that we've made/etc we may have the opportunity to ensure it's fixed before actually being released to players. Mostly though, we just want to make it a habit to inform the community sooner, both because we want to share information with you guys that you would appreciate heads up on and to help plan for changes with characters you have if you want to start building up new teams to try out new combos, for example.

---

Also, some characters have skill shard upgrades that don't make sense. I can't think of other examples (they are out there) except the Sentinel Soulless demon and Pharaoh Eddie. Demon's "Brace" skill gets a damage boost on 2 of 3 of your skill shard upgrades. The problem is that there is no damage dealt with that skill. It is purely a defensive skill. Same for "Entomb" from Pharaoh Eddie.

For both of those characters, the intent is that the skill ups increase the effect potency (so Sentinel Soulless Demons' DEF and MR increases are stronger, or Pharaoh Eddie's next DEF-based move gets even more of a multiplier). The reason these character fixes aren't listed yet in this tuning batch is we're still working on ensuring the code handles that properly, and we're not sure if the changes we have in motion properly fix that yet. In any case, once the fix for functionality/communication is out, you'll get the benefit of the levels gained for said skills.

If you do see other characters with that kind of thing, do let us know and we'll at least make sure we add it to our list of known issues for characters.

---

Thanks for all the comments guys! Just to clarify, feel free to discuss character stuff in the other thread; I originally intended to just have all the discussion in here, but decided at the last minute that it might be better to split subjects into different threads and didn't correct that message in a flurry of edits for the posts when I had issues getting the images for changes corrected.

[Kaz_LOTB]

Thanks Sparton!

Here's one for your consideration, the Prisoner has a very awesome passive but his basic attack deals magic attack while his power ability deals physical attack. thus I'm finding it hard for him to deal decent damage at Lv100 either Magic or Attack stats up.

So do consider changing his basic attack to physical attack instead.

Hi Kaijester,

The Prisoner's basic attack deals true damage, which is intended, but it was missing the ATK scaling. This will indeed be one of the fixes included in the next patch and that should help with his damage considerably.

-Kaz

[BillLion]

This is great thank you. The main thing I'm concerned about is the reduction of rare souls from time rift dungeons.

Where do we get them then? Only ironite? Rare souls seem to be yielding fewer premium characters so reducing them seems like it will be much harder to get new ones.

This is tough to swallow right now at end game when the hope of a new character is one of the motivations to keep farming.

I like a lot of the other things I'm hearing and appreciate the thoroughness of your post.

[PsychoEddie]

Rare souls seem to be yielding fewer premium characters so reducing them seems like it will be much harder to get new ones.

I'd like to see some sort of Rare Soul calculation that includes what I've already gotten from Rare Souls like:

Each Character Rare Soul includes a 20% (OR WHATEVER) chance of producing a character that I, as an individual player, has not had.

As it is, whenever I get a Rare Soul I actually feel the reverse of excitement, I feel like 'oh great, i'm going to be getting something i'll want to delete asap')

Even as a rat, pressing the lever should have a good result 1 out of 5 times or the rat will lose interest and seek other opportunities.
(or the reward should be so significant even getting a good reward 1 out of 100 times would be enough...like with casino slot machines)

[zamasu]

Finally something is coming along nicely. I believe i speak for most of us when I say thank you for the information, this us what we've been asking for. To know that something is being done and that the game has a great future