January 2017 Tuning Discussion - PRELIMINARY

[Sparton_LOTB]

Off handedly, any chance those random MACL0 errors at the end of fights might fade back to wherever they came from?

Work on reducing errors is ongoing, but we only have some backend fixes for that in the next update. Tracking down and fixing the various error codes is still a priority for us.

Will the change of trolls fervor make it deal more damage, or is it just 1 more skill shard needed for same damage?

It'll become that little bit stronger with the extra skill shard invested.

thank's for clarification guys. i have to say that i feel that it's not good for pvp-balance, not to touch the prisoner, but OTAH if you guys have some other solutions in your mind they will be good too (hopefully). since your judgement should be far better than ours, i bet you know what you are doing, so i'm very curious too see the upcoming changes :-)

We have some other tricks up our sleeve... it's been a while since we've done an App Store update, and boy to we have a lot of fixes and small improvements coming. I've been compiling the list of the most important stuff for a good portion of this week.

Will he be still OP for one more update?!?!

Stay tuned.

Also you hurt Angel of Strife because Angel of Fear?!?! Torture is not the problem, the problem is the HP damage scaling on red bat... We all stated that same skill in different toons were doing different damage, that means the problem is not in the skill but in the toons. Fix red bat the corret way, not nerf green bat.

The issue was Torture was increasing the damage for the skill far more than what the skill levels communicated, which caused the Angel of Fear to do crazy damage (when it should be doing "good" damage), but that also meant that the Angel of Fear was doing more damage than intended, too.

If we feel we need to tune the Angel of Fear separately, we'll create a new skill and adjust accordingly, but there was still the problem that skill levels were not functioning as advertised, so this brings the Angel of Fear to the damage level that it was designed for.

Great to see more love to Rainmaker, BUT I still believe that you MUST consider a buff on Def and MR. I dont see the point of keep them both at 70, since he doesn't have any other REALLY HIGH stat to compensate.

The intent is that his defensive stats are quite low and that you'll want to consider defense and MR as secondary stats on talismans to compensate (or to ignore that and go "all in" on maximizing damage, using other factors to mitigate damage). Since the bulk of many character's Def and MR when running maxed talismans is primarily from talismans, we feel this is still fair.

Glad to hear this is something you have on the radar. Am I misinterpreting when I read "future ones" as "future updates" and not "future characters"?

I mean more for future characters, sorry. The amount of tech work to ensure reducing total skill levels functions while not "eating" skill shards is pretty substantial, so it is not something on our list of features and additions we want to work on right now.

I have the feeling that with the launch of PvP the role of Skill shards will drastically change - from a nice to have comfort item to a necessary-if-you-want-to-be-competitive item. While I understand that you want to provide long term goals for players, there are two things resulting from tying a huge amount of effort to specific characters: 1) You are unable to vary your team - that's ok in pve as again that's basically comfort, but it takes something that could be an essential and interesting part away from PvP. 2) It might be hugely offputting to (newer) players to spend hours and hours on using Troopers in PveE to be competitive in PvP - and attracting the biggest audience possible might be somewhat disireable. (Just throwing this out there, I am aware that this is probably not the place for a discussion about that).

We definitely want the feature to be accessible, but competing at the top end is still something we feel makes sense to be biased towards players who have invested a lot more time end effort... and investing skill shards is an important part of that equation.

Over time, we will add new ways to get skill shards so newer players can get up to speed quicker and long term players can advance more of their collection (we're adding a bit more you can get over time with PVP itself, and Sacrifice will be another avenue for getting more skill shards too), but we expect using skill shards to finish maxing out characters to be a long term goal that isn't easily shortcutted/reduced.

One more thing in regards to the Vampire Hunter: I don't know if you are aware of this, but at the moment it is not possible to speed up his Fury. I like the animation, but I would be great if this could be fixed to make farming a little bit faster.

That's something we can probably look at, but there's a lot of people who are involved in signing off on the special attacks of Eddies, so I'm not sure if trying to shorten it is a practical thing we can do at this stage. Definitely a consideration for future characters.

Also, the talisman change makes sense EXCEPT with Pharaoh's other mostly useless ability "Mend" which scales on magic. Since every other ability works with HP, defense and attack isn't this silly? Especially since you're changing the one talisman that allows for a little magic juice? (Nobody will use the open slots for magic based on his other abilities). Have you considered changing this attack to be scaled on defense or at least attack damage? That would be great and make the tali change make sense.

Oh, that skill isn't intended to do a lot of damage, but it actually is supposed to scale with Defense. We'll add a note for the final patch notes. Thanks for pointing that out!