May 2017 Tuning Discussion - PRELIMINARY

[IronSentinel]

U mean AoF? If so AoE attack needs to be targeting killed toon

AoF yes.. sorry

didnt know that.. but it makes no sense.. maybe you target one and another gets killed.. how can you know ?? is it really the intended way?

another thing i can not sell evo runes.. i get an inventory error every time i try.. i have like more than a thousand

[Ezz]

Question on furious charge. It's supposed to grant the buff to allies for 2 turns. However every time I use it this it only works for 1 turn on my Eddie character. Is this intentional or a bug?

[Tridimensionale]

Good update.. fixes for the viking finally and some interesting talisman changes

Can t wait to try Pharaon dog and the other buffed toons

[Kardas]

Question on furious charge. It's supposed to grant the buff to allies for 2 turns. However every time I use it this it only works for 1 turn on my Eddie character. Is this intentional or a bug?

The way it works for magic charge is that the status effect is either consumed when used or lasts for 2 turns. So if you have say, a Carriage Rider and a Pharaoh Dog King together, and PDK does magic charge, PDK can take advantage of it the turn after he used it while Carriage Rider can consume it immediately via an attack (or use something like Lifeline and use it the next turn).

IIRC, magic charge also got consumed on Soldier Eddie if his Fury happened to do magic damage. It used to be a handy combo back in the day when the magic damage done by his Fury sucked in comparison to his physical or true damage

[Nine]

Alright, here we go:

- Strike Talismans

My interpretation of their intention

It is reasonable to assume they are designed to mitigate the first turn advantage of a team by forcing the player to either change their attack priority (by switching away from the toon who will counter attack you) or to react (by healing at the the end of your own (first) turn, for example).

What we got

Easily the most powerful Talisman set in the game, increasing the damage output of a character while active by a lot - with bad luck and the "wrong" team on the other side up to 400%.

Why are they so strong?

Here is where it becomes interesting. There are so many factors impacting this, who are each on their own very strong already but become even more powerful when combined.

- The effect is rather strong: Granted, the 400% given above are rather high and refer to a "worst case". Even under reasonable assumptions they outperform every other, especially red, Talisman, though. Even if a characters with a set counter attacks only once its damage for that turn is effectively increased by 100% for that turn. Let's compare that to other Talismans: Warrior CotD has the highest Attack in game now with 2128. A set of Strength Talismans give him a 15% bonus on that, which is 319. It's important to note, that since the set bonus only affects the base stats, the 15% bonus is not equivalent to an 15% damage increase. A CotD with 4 red, 2 green Talismans gets roughly 2100 more ATK by those, resulting in 4547 total ATK (impressive) - assuming 2 green here only is in favor of strike Talismans. The set bonus of the Strength Talismans account for ca. 7% of ATK, aussuming ATK enters lineary, that is equiivalent to the amount of damage. Now, Strength Talismans only need two to grant the bonus, so let's assume 3 of those result in 10% - which is again in favour of Strike Talsimans because that you can actually use 2 set of Strength Talismans is not said at all (and this would have to be the case for the average to be true).

So for these two types of Talismans to be equal the fight has to be 10 rounds long, if the Strike Talismans trigger only once (!) in one (!) turn. You can do the math how long a fights needs to be if they trigger more often - and how the chances are and arena battle lasts that long.

- The effect scales: This sounds like a minor footnote and I think I haven't read that anywhere on the forums but I think this one is actually rather important. This is only Talisman that actively scales with your character. The better developed your character, the stronger the effect. Up until now it was noticeable that this relationship was strongly avoided. There are Talismans that scale with enemies (burns for example), but this is the first of its kind. So even if other Talismans were equal with Strike Talismans at some point, you would always prefer them once your characters are maxed.

- They are extremely hard to counter: first of all, one can point out that if I read the intention correctly, they are doing exactly what they should. So good that if you are against them it is actually better to go second than going first in many cases. Why is that? Simply, if you go first, you don't have enough power to use alternatives to your basic attacks which means the Talismans will trigger and you have absolutely no way to avoid that. You can than try to heal yourself so will survive the actual turn of the enemy and you can try to work around this with energy Talismans but depending on the team you are up against the first one doesn't work and the latter one requires a huge amount of luck. Without Power there are excactly 3 characters in the whole game to counter them and one Talisman: Visions Eddie, Warrior and Assassin Newborn of the Light Void Shields. Visions Eddie is extremely rare and already (now) quite powerful. That the NotL are the counter against counter attacks is of course quite ironic, but they each only work against a single character. Then there are Void Shields. With no other Shield Talismans left in the game they are already way to valuable and basically no team can go without them, why they become even more essential now is completely beyond me.

With Power everything becomes easier, of course. But even then there are only a handful of characters that can remove benefitial effects (reliably), that they can't be blocked (contrary to e.g. Void Shields) doesn't help either.

- They last insanely long: When I first read about them I assumed they would be active for one turn. When I first saw them I thought the buff would vanish after a counter attack. When that didn't happen I hoped that there would be a limit of one per turn. Nope. They just stay on for what is basically a complete arena battle. Of course I had battles that lasted for more than 3 turns, but against (in the near future) a team full of Strike Talismans? Good luck.

- There is no way to prepare for them: Most other problems one is confronted with can somehow be prepared for by knowing what team you are facing. Since Strike Talismans aren't listed in the Team info you only know it once its to late. No adjusting your team like when facing a Prisoner. You can only always be prepared for them or never. Not reaching ahead here but that limits team selection severly.

Why is that all a problem?

I assume there are many reading this (at least of those who are actually reading ) thinking what the problem is, because after all, they are available for everyone, without being dependant on luck and no matter what state of the game you are in you will get them sooner all later. If everybody can (ab)use them everything is alright, right? Well, that is completely missing the point and I'll argue why. First of all it is important to point out that they are only now available in the store and will join other essentials like Immunity Talismans in the dark myths of the game until BNW is there. Than they have to farmed, at a - what can already be interpreted by Spartons words somewhere here, given their value - marginal drop chance.*

But even if one assumes everybody has them (even that they are completely free...which would save everybody at least 12000 Iron Coins) this is a huge problem:

- They limit Talisman selection: As shown above they are way stronger than their alternatives. One reason for that is of course also that there are no decent red talismans and there is no trade of with either freeze, stun or shields and counter attacks - although I would argue even those would be won. So everybody will reasonably equip them.

- They severly limit character selection: At the moment it rather funny to me that people are actually trying to equip a GRE with them, but that shows which is the way it goes. Given their power you will use characters where they are actually useful. To put it flat: good bye to every Magus character that wants to deal damage. Or every Assassin/Sentinel/Gunner character that deals magic damage and doesn't have outstanding support. Sounds drastic? I know.

- More automation: Now that we don't have taunting teams as drastic as before we get a new type of automated game play that simply isn't fun to play. If the enemy uses Strike Talismans you are effectively only playing every third turn, if you yourself use them to (which of course you'll do) it becomes every fourth (Yes, numbers vary depending on attacks/powers used).


At this point in time things are not that bad, but as I said in a post above if we wait until we actually have teams with 4 Strike Sets going against teams with 4 Strike sets it is probably way to late to change them without a major community outcry. And for all of this there don't even have be teams with three nomads, which still help to illustrate how problematic these will become - I can assure you it can come way worse than those but I won't go into to much detail or my defense team-to come is all over the place if this issue persists

Please feel free to correct me if I am seeing things to pessimistic.


*ending with a "fun" fact about drop chances: Just completed 1000 SL today, still haven't got a full Death Talisman Set yet.

[Sparton_LOTB]

Hey Sparton,

I didn't get how exactly is going to work the Visions Take, can you please explain it better?

And Im curious, why was this change necessary?

We want Visions Eddie to still excel in the area of trying to remove beneficial effects from enemies with a basic attack, but the "all or nothing" way he was doing it before meant that there was very little counterplay opportunities.

Instead of now doing a 50% chance per enemy of removing all beneficial effects on a given enemy, it's doing 3 checks at removing just one thing at a time (but still per enemy). A 35% chance of removing up to 3 beneficial effects looks something like this. This means that, assuming a target has just one buff, he's actually more likely to remove it, but once a character has two or three, it's more likely a "critical" buff (like Immunity, or a damage reduction shield) will not be removed, allowing for more counterplay by stacking more start-of-battle passives (character and talisman) that give status effects, or by using power skills which give more buffs to all of the characters on your team. Also, Accuracy now impacts this much more than before (Accuracy Up can be much more devastating, while Accuracy Down almost completely kills the effectiveness).

In short, we want to add more counterplay options against Visions Eddie's Take without just reducing the buff removal chance.

Also, if you're gonna be working on the magus haunted pumpkin, is there any way you could sync the animation of the CAST impact better with the crossing of the circles on the ground? Currently he's well into his backpedal when the circles cross. Perhaps its just me but I struggle the most with this toon to obtain perfect hits...primarily due to the out of sync animation.

We're not really working on him so much as just fixing a weird issue where the text information for his skill description got accidentally replaced and it took a bit for us to notice (it was reported from a player that the name got garbled).

I'm glad to see a revamp on the Resistance and Resilience Talismans, but they're still short on attack buff because of DEF and MR scaling on the class which has the lower stats on these.

It's important to note that Resistance and Resilience increase stats based on the characters Attack + Magic, not based on HP/Def/MR. The intent is that they're best with Assassins that want to trade the offensive value they could otherwise get with the Assassin Talisman set for something that shores up their defensive stats (or at least get more defensive stats than what purple talismans normally give while still gaining decent offensive stat gains, even if not as good at increasing defensive stats as Health or Iron or Ivory talismans would).

Also, since there are some changing in slot colours, even if this isn't the right place, may I suggest a look at the Desert Golem's slots for a future change? I believe that a change from the 3 yellow slots to a 2 yellow ones will make him worthy in the Arena. Thx.

We'll have a look at what kinds of talisman builds we'd expect to want to do with that Golem compared to similar characters and see if there is any room for improvement there.

On a side note, since there are some changes for the Resistance / Resilence talismans, will they return in the game? I have currently 2 Resistance (out of 3) and 1 Resilence (out of 2)...

Not yet, but they will be in the Brave New World.

- Will Resilience and Resistance Talismans still have the 2 and 3 set bonus respectively?

Ah, good catch; they're both going to be 2 sets now. We will update Resistance for the full patch notes to clarify they're becoming at 2 set.

- I wasn't around when you changed up the Daily Rewards. Why did the team decide to grant specifically the Gunner Undead Allied Soldier to players?

One of the things we felt we were lacking previously was rewarding specific characters for new players (as opposed to relying on Souls). We felt that the Gunner Undead Soldier would be a good place to start that new players could work towards and have something that could be helpful/interesting when they earn it, while still being a modicum of value for sacrificing for everyone else (alongside other changes we did for new players to clearly indicate quests where you earn specific characters).

We may change it up in the future, but for now it's just him each month.

But no love for shaman? As an Eddie he's really cool, has a unique pose, a cool fury, a cool look... but he his dmg... its questionable... I feel like they could've done a thing or two for shaman to be usable.

Shaman Eddie starts to really shine once you've given him buffs. I've been using him a lot with Angel of Fear, because using Shaman Eddie's Perils of Death to both Attack Up, Magic Up, and Extra Turns to your entire team means you can rip a hole in nearly any defense so long as it has one character you can bring down. With his Perils buffs, you can easily do things like 5k+5k Perils of Death, or a few thousand + marks with Hedged Bet, or even 4-6k with his Conjured Flame basic.

The biggest problem he has for fitting into any old team is that he doesn't synergize well with other characters that do true damage for the most part, which is obviously a pretty big part of the PVP meta, but he can still be a potent damager or strong support to enable others to do big damage.

No fix for AoF. Just had another match with EZZ where AoF granted 2 extra turns??? Visions,Prisoner,AoF,Nomad

There is definitely some deep, technical issues with how Angel of Fear looks for first blood triggers, but even though we're not doing much for that in the next update, we are queuing up all of the various issues we can and are going to have them be high priority fixes after this next update.

Could you go into detail what "Heals up to 3 random allies" means, that is, how high the chances for healing 1/2/3 are?

Basically, it's going have 3 chances to heal, with it being a 35% chance for each of those heals to occur. Each of those heals targets a random character on that character's team (could be itself, could be the Eddie, could pick one guy twice and another guy once, etc). The heal amount is for 15% of the affected character's Max HP.

(By the way, it would be great to know that for the most recent Endure change of Assassin Rocket Dog as well - which didn't make it into its Skill descreption at all, I read that people are seeing it as a bug...)

The change definitely is in the description (the skill description ends with "[...] for self and up to 2 additional allies.").

- suprised Thieve gets a buff, but it certainly gives the Troll more usefulnes in different teams. However, I would much prefer a fix of the Fervor charge bug that is somehow existing for an insanely long time and seems to be overlooked?

It's not a game data issue, so it's not something we can easily fix, and has to be prioritized relative to other tech issues, like Passive Disabled stopping talisman augments, or counterstrike triggering from reflect shield damage, First Blood triggering even though a kill hasn't occurred...

Basically, we know it's there, but the cost/benefit is not in it's favour relative to other combat-related tech issues.

- A clarification: "Take: Now has a 35% Chance to steal up to 3 benefitial effects from all enemies [per enemy!]", right? 3 buffs total wouln't match the addition in your brackets. As I interpret it the chances for Take are calculated per buff, correct? So an enemy toon with 4 buffs has a 35% chance of buff A being removed, 35% of buff B being removed and 35% of buff c being removed? And there is a 35% chance of buff D (and so on) being removed if the total isn't 3 yet?

Whenever something is removing (or stealing) a single beneficial effect, the beneficial effect is randomly chosen. For more about the math of that (and why we're going that way), take a look at my first response in this mega-comment.

Sooo, last but not least, the issue that might be the most important one and I am really highly suprised about not being addressed properly:

- Strike Talismans

[Short version of opinion on Strike Talismans]

Strike Talismans (and Life Talismans, to an outshadowed degree) are just the current phase of many meta-shifting changes that will be layered onto the game. It's expected that new additions will shift the meta, just like Shell and Immunity talismans did, or how the next batch of characters likely will, and how even more talismans from Brave New World will... and so on and so on as we add more content and features to the game.

Kaz just mentioned to me as I'm writing this that you posted your full thoughts in here, though, so I'll give that a read later today at the very least.

[Sparton_LOTB]

[Perhaps a bad sign; I just found out there's a character limit per post, and I was way over]

---

1. Warrior ABB - Slot change is a welcome one, will there be a further review to balance his base magic stat so that he is more in line with other true damage chars?

2. Assassin SSD - So glad to see a slight change for him and his blood brother. Will you guys ever consider putting his useless high attack stat to good use by allocating it to his DEF and MR stats?

3. Soldier Ed - Would have liked to see a change to his 'Endure' skill as it is quite expensive for immunity and endure for only one char. Any plans to make that skill work for all chars or to work more similar to Artillery Dogs 'Entrench' skill (up to two allies)?

4. The Resistance and Resilience talisman changes are also welcome but are also not available at the moment, will these be added to the Arena store or will they be added to secret locations and will the Resistance still be 3-set or will they change to 2-set as they will be more similar to what Resilience talismans originally were?

5. When can we expect these changes?

1. The Warrior ABB is meant to be more of a supporter than a damager, and the lopsided nature of his stats helps emphasise getting better benefits from Attack Up, or talisman skills that do physical damage (such as Meteor).
2. I can discuss it more with Kaz, but even with that odd high Attack, I don't think we'd consider reducing it for the sake of increasing the Def or MR unless we specifically wanted to increase those two stats (and that's not following the general direction we have for the Assassin Soulless Demon of glass cannon-y character who relies on his Invincibility for survivability).
3. Short of using something that removes buffs, Immunity + Endure means you cannot be killed and cannot be stunned/frozen/etc to break that chain, so I'd be weary of making this able to affect more than one character, or for lowering it's cost. Like Carriage Rider Eddie's Ghost, this is definitely a special case skill we don't expect to be employed often.
4. Both talismans will be 2 sets, and we don't have plans to make them available before their release in the Brave New World (at least no plans yet)
5. We are targeting mid-May.

Question on furious charge. It's supposed to grant the buff to allies for 2 turns. However every time I use it this it only works for 1 turn on my Eddie character. Is this intentional or a bug?

Kardas beat me to it, but to clarify further, the Charge status effects (Physical Charge, Magic Charge, MR Charge, etc) only increase the effect of a skill of the appropriate type once (ie they're "used up" once they've had an effect of improving one skill). That's different from stat up status effects (Attack Up, Magic Up, MR Up, etc), which are not as powerful, but will be able to affect a character for multiple turns of using their skills.

[Silentknight]

AoF yes.. sorry

didnt know that.. but it makes no sense.. maybe you target one and another gets killed.. how can you know ?? is it really the intended way?

another thing i can not sell evo runes.. i get an inventory error every time i try.. i have like more than a thousand

Just gotta judge which toon u target. Don't think it's intended but it's known. Contact support or post under bug report about runes

[Silentknight]

[Perhaps a bad sign; I just found out there's a character limit per post, and I was way over]

Now that's funny! But yeah, it's a big one! Nines fault.

[Ancient Mariner]

Is there any way to fix a problem i'm experiencing lately, which doesn't let me sell some of my runes?
Randomly some stocks seem bugged: indeed if i try to sell some of the runes of these stocks, an error message appears which tells there was a server error, and the game restarts everytime.
At first I thought it was cause i tried to sell a lot of runes at once (because some piles now count 300/400 runes), but actually it happens even if i only try to sell one of that pile, while another one (even from the same color) might not give any problem...so i got no idea what causes this, but it's boring, also because otherwise the number of runes will keep increasing while i'm no able to sell them

Any idea?

ps: and please, please add a sort of "quick battle" option which i'm waiting for so long, which would spare us a lot of time everyday, while now we have to manually control the game even for those boring battles we play just to gain trooper points. It would be fantastic to have the chance to select for example 10-15 troopers to use one after one in 1 second in the selected stages, or at least having a quick battle which simulates an entire stage battle, without showing the animation and saving us some time (hope i explained it clearly enough)