Haha, forgot to send in about my Mecha Knights uselessly spawning in the abyss, most notably in Arenas; that's fixed now.
Anyway, I suppose we can report any of the equipment balance changes and fixes here as they are discovered, updating that wiki if it need apply, and discuss the patch overall.
This has easily been the WORST patch to date. Nerf things that were fine. Buff things that were already the strongest in the game. Chaos armor is now more useful than Grey Feather with how bad this rebalancing was. How that is even managed is beyond me.
Hearts vanishing, totally pointless.
Ice chipping early causes damage. Sounds good, right? WRONG. This only applies to players. Thinking about cool haze bomb combos? Well too god damn bad.
This is plain outrageous. I am not going to play Spiral Knights until there's a patch that fixes these horrible, horrible screwups.
I don't know if this was in this patch, but GEEZ. When you in Firestorm, A cramped place with traps and fire every inch this is the last thing you want.
My ideas:
Grey Feather Set: Remove resistances and weaknesses; bring back charge time redux
Vog cub and Skolver sets: Make one damage bonus based, and the other Attack Speed based
Fallen Set: Damage bonus medium; vs fiend medium, bring back a bit of normal defense
Divine avenger: Do what you do best and nerf it to the point of uselessness. That way, it'll still be very useful, but not overpowered anymore.
Freeze damage: Change it to DoT; remove chip or thaw damage; make the DoT stronger than Fire
Adventure Board: Bring it back. Not everything should be minimalistic
Hearts: Make them disappear, but lengthen the time to around... 3-5 minutes.
I have no complaints about the constant sudden changes to accessible armor before the official release. The ice thing seems okay too, if what Magnus says is true (I prefer enemies taking damage if the ice wears off on its own) and if party members breaking the ice doesn't hurt you.
Hearts running out relatively fast is annoying, though. Though kudos to having them instanced for each group member!
Hearts for each player was added a few weeks ago, if you didn't realize beforehand. Disregard if you were mentioning it in general.
To touch upon the Freeze status:
Ice DoT could be viable; hopefully it wouldn't tread too much on the other DoT statuses.
I'm glad this is an approach at fixing Freeze resistance (as it would practically punish you for having such), but the new effect on players is not the best option either.
My pardons if this was exactly the intention, but it leaves afflicted party members M.I.A., and for extended periods, rendering them useless. A Frozen player must wait until they naturally thaw, completely immobile during the duration of the condition, and must remain untouched to not take any damage from the ice.
I suppose it sounds simple enough, "just stand and youll be fine, !".
However, there are variables that practically ensure the frozen knight to be freed prematurely, and the player is forced to endure the damage. Unless the player was afflicted with the cold at the falling of the last enemy, 3 events come to mind.
Either,
A) P1 is frozen in the heat of battle, and will take Freeze damage due to a monster, or rather monsters, attacking. P1 will take extra damage from the monster's attack.
B) P2 tries to save P1 from being attacked by attacking the monsters surrounding P1, but ends up nicking P1 in the process, causing the Freeze damage to be taken. It is rather easy to hit a frozen player.
C) P1 must be broken out to allow escape from/evasion of impending threats. Freeze damage must be taken, and leaves P1 at that much of a disadvantage for dealing with whatever he had to take damage for.
Freeze damage is seeming to be inevitable, especially when it will happen in the course of battling.
Once you're in, you're done.
At least it's something to fear more.
Wait, would you still take damage for breaking the ice if the frozen player puts up his shield?
Could you chip the ice away if the frozen player puts up his shield?
What aggravates me most is that one of the tooltips in the game is "When you're frozen, you cannot turn or move. Ask your friends to chip away at the ice with their best attacks."
You're pretty much discouraging players from helping each other.
About the only good thing this patch seems to have done is make Wasteworks possible again and making the correct enemies spawn in Venom Fang. The Freeze rebalance is just evil and actually completely counterintuitive to what your loading tips tell us to do about it, armor that was useful is once again completely useless, temporary hearts simply makes Vanaduke harder than he already is.
My Salamander set's damage bonus to slimes is now just plain gone, apparently, and now I gotta craft a new set of anti-Jelly Palace armor until I get enough goat blood to complete the ritual for Basil to finally stock Shadowsun Slickers (or, apparently, much else of worth).
Is the damage taken from freezing more if you sit there taking it than if someone breaks you out? Sounds like the lesser of two evils to get chopped out immediately if this is the case. Perhaps this is what they were going for with the patch? You're frozen, you take damage, seems reasonable.
What I find especially interesting about the recent update is that many of the things rebalanced have been modified repeatedly of late... if anything, the wiki list of 3-4 different iterations of stats/abilities on armor like the mad bomber suit or grey feather mantle understates the case. (Eventually we all just give up on keeping things up to date)
Because of that, I'm concerned about the prospects for having balancing stabilized by release in a few weeks. Only the eventual prospect of a refund has made it acceptable to have gear reduced in star value (where I had to pay to get back my originally purchased weapon power: as happened a while back for the old alchemers and vaporizer bombs), or to have repeated sets of 5* gear beaten down in short succession.
Once release occurs, if a 5* item is again changed, then how will this be handled? Some of these changes are very large, and can render an entire 650 energy investment (plus months of searching for materials and recipes) useless. Will we receive full refunds, plus materials? Will we receive an alternate armor exchange of our choice? It would be good to start thinking of a policy now, because there are still entire classes of gear (esp bombs) that haven't received even an initial pass of re-balancing. There are also items of inconsistent star level (Radiant Sun Shards goes 3-->5*), where reducing the crafting price only after some people crafted it would not go over well. (Nerfing it to 4* would cut the total crafting cost almost in half!)
Grey Feather no longer has Charge time reduction.
The Grey Feather set is the "vanilla" 5* member of the Cloak line, none of which have a general Charge Time Reduction; that was an ancient, crusty bonus that I found and fixed. The Cloak line should be compared against the Skelly and Jelly lines, which similarly have a couple status resists and a chunk of defense against a secondary damage type.
Vog Cub set had its bonus reduced YET AGAIN to low. Yet Skolver remains unchanged.
The Skolver and Vog Cub sets, like all 5* armor sets, have to both be reasonable choices. The addition of Elemental defense makes the Vog Cub set more widely useful than the Skolver one, so the Skolver set gets a slightly higher Sword Attack bonus. I'm not convinced it's enough to differentiate the two, but it's something.
Someone further down suggests giving the Vog Cub set a Sword Speed bonus, and leave the Attack bonus to the Skolver coat: I've previously considered that. That might be a good way to differentiate the two sets.
Divine Avenger had its attack boosted by about one bar.
It shouldn't have, and looking at the code here, it doesn't appear to have.
Hermes
I'm interested in the balance between Armor of the Fallen and Radiant Silvermail. Fallen has Shadow defense, damage bonus low, fiend penalty high and two status resists plus a weakness. Radiant Silvermail has more Shadow defense, just as much Piercing defense, Undead bonus medium and two status resistances. I don't see the broad damage bonus justifying the relatively poor defense.
In my mind there's no point to Armor of the Fallen when Radiant Silvermail offers superior defense and similar side bonuses.
On the subject of armor of the fallen... valkyrie gear now has the same damage bonus and pattern of resistances (some strong, some weak), with the main difference being that crown of the fallen has one more health bar.... and a heaping helping of fiend damage penalty that the valkyrie gear is free of.
Insofar as most hits in tier 3 do 5-10 bars of damage regardless of what armor I'm wearing, the extra 1 health for the crown of the fallen makes it a pretty bad deal relative to the valkyrie. I view penalties as there to offset a major advantage, and the crown of the fallen (having lost its normal defense, and plagued by giant curse weakness) is already penalized very heavily as it is.
Also, Hermes, do check the code relating stat bars to item power. For example, the Cold Iron Vanquisher and leviathan blade appear to have the same (max) attack power at level 10, but that seems imbalanced. Likewise, the damage done by a single swing of the 5* dread venom striker is *not* 80% the damage done by the Cold Iron Vanquisher, even though that appears to be the relation between their power based on stat bars. (Shield health is even more confusing: many people seem to swear by the omega shell shield, but looking at the stats, there is almost no conceivable reason for this. Is the health bar off the scale or something?)
Shield status resistance also remains a giant question mark for me (only active when shield is active, but status can only be inflicted when shield is off?)... but first I suppose the focus needs to be on correctly balancing- and displaying- item stats, before smaller UI issues are addressed.
The Grey Feather set is the "vanilla" 5* member of the Cloak line, none of which have a general Charge Time Reduction; that was an ancient, crusty bonus that I found and fixed. The Cloak line should be compared against the Skelly and Jelly lines, which similarly have a couple status resists and a chunk of defense against a secondary damage type.
And then I ask you; What was the point of removing fire defense, in this case? You have to remember that in general, people won't look much at the defense. It does help, sure, but people mainly want bonuses - The way the game works right now makes pure defense mainly useless. On those vanilla sets, it seems none offer fire defense. Wouldn't it make more sense, balance-wise between the vanilla sets, to take off freeze and keep fire defense? And I also do not understand why you just reimplemented AND increased the stun weakness. I do not know about the Skelly set lines, however Jelly had its weaknesses completely removed; Why should Grey Feather in this case remain the weakness and at such a major level?
And the charge reduction. My problem with this is that I'm a sword user, and I like my charges. No armor has any kind of bonus for sword charge reduction anymore, except for Chaos - But it's pretty obvious Chaos is quite worthless with the low defense, weakness to everything, and simply low bonuses. I no longer have any options if I'd like to get sword charge reduction, apparently? This is stupid.
The Skolver and Vog Cub sets, like all 5* armor sets, have to both be reasonable choices. The addition of Elemental defense makes the Vog Cub set more widely useful than the Skolver one, so the Skolver set gets a slightly higher Sword Attack bonus. I'm not convinced it's enough to differentiate the two, but it's something.
This change is also a bit pointless. If Skolver had high, this would at least make a bit of sense; But nobody is going to sacrifice a lot of elemental defense (which is the most important defense on the game at the moment, if you notice) for a minimal bonus like that.
And again, as I said several times - Nerfing something is not the right way to go when balancing equipment. Even less when the gameplay on higher tiers and more difficult levels is so ridiculously hard at the moment. The right solution would be buffing other equipment. What you are doing right now is simply ruining the game for endgame players, to a point of making it so way too difficult to be actually playable.
Aaaaand again, you didn't adress some of our other important questions. What's the point into nerfing the Angelic sets even more when they're already completely useless? Why the hell did Salamander have its already minimal bonus removed?
One other thing to note. You guys keep nerfing the "popular" gear, but end up ignoring the less used ones. (note, only because they're way too weak) I mean, come on:
-Ancient plate has a major movement speed and a major attack speed penalty. And for what? Some stun resist, only normal defense, and two more HP than other sets. The other Plate sets are in a similar situation.
-Dragon Scale Mail only offers high piercing and elemental defense, with some fire resistance. The helm has attack speed bonus; Why doens't the mail have it, aswell?
-The Chaos set only has elemental defense, with medium weaknesses to literally ALL status effects. And the trade-off? LOW damage/charge reduction bonuses. Why was this already really weak set nerfed to low, and never buffed again?
I'd also like to talk about how several status effect resistances on a single armor barely makes a difference because a single map will usually only have one single status effect, and how resistances are pretty freaking useless after you get a certain amount, but that's probably something for some other thread.
Just to step in for a moment amidst the vitriol- I actually like the fact that there's some effort to make the more powerful items balanced, and poor Hermes is trying feverishly. There are ~320 items, which makes it all the harder a task... but balancing is definitely important, and the new reduced bonuses do leave more room at the top as sets are equipped and trinkets are stacked.
That said, I'm not sure that removing an entire type of defense (ie normal, elemental etc) from an armor is the way to go about it- leaving yourself totally defenseless to 50% of all attacks is an insane penalty to pay. Likewise, slightly higher normal defense isn't nearly effective enough to justify armors with only normal type defense (like the plate armor), much less movement speed penalties too on those items.
I'd rather see status weaknesses and thematic penalties (like the crown of the fallen has) to offset advantages. Even general "vanilla" armor has pretty stingy defense (2 types), and most mix-match combinations still leave you totally defenseless against one entire type of damage. (Most items have normal defense + 1 special damage resistance type)
Because the armor system is conservative by default, then, totally removing one type of protection is an incredible penalty to tack on, insofar as armor is good at reducing damage at all. I'd rather see focused local penalties while leaving basic defense sort of intact.
I'm interested in the balance between Armor of the Fallen and Radiant Silvermail.
So am I! :)
It's clear that having only one defense in Tier 3, especially a non-Normal defense, makes you about as sturdy as wet cardboard. However, a broad Damage Bonus (and a broad Charge Time Reduction, in the case of the Chaos Cloak) is universally useful enough that it has to be tempered by a significant disadvantage. We've tried both sides of this coin, and neither worked so well. And so here we are! :P
I definitely think at this point that the Chaos Cloak and Valkyrie/Fallen sets need at least two damage resistances in order to actually be usable. What this means for their status resists and special bonuses, I don't know just yet.
Wouldn't it make more sense, balance-wise between the vanilla sets, to take off freeze and keep fire defense? And I also do not understand why you just reimplemented AND increased the stun weakness. I do not know about the Skelly set lines, however Jelly had its weaknesses completely removed; Why should Grey Feather in this case remain the weakness and at such a major level?
We actually discussed the freeze v. fire thing internally this morning, and we'll probably indeed make that change. That has the nice side effect of covering six of the seven status effects across those three armor sets.
As for the severity of the weakness, the Skelly set has an equal strength Fire resist penalty, and the Jelly Mail has none, owing to the fact that its positive bonuses are in Stun and Sleep. With few exceptions, status resistance bonuses and penalties just plain stage upwards from star level to star level.
I no longer have any options if I'd like to get sword charge reduction, apparently?
Not all bases are covered in the current sets of armor. There's no Movement Bonuses, there's no Charge Time Reduction (Sword), there's no Damage Bonuses v. Construct or Gremlin, and so on. Maybe someday. For now, there's at least a trinket line that provides Charge Time Reduction (Sword).
Ancient plate has a major movement speed and a major attack speed penalty. And for what? Some stun resist, only normal defense, and two more HP than other sets. The other Plate sets are in a similar situation.
Ancient Plate has a Low Attack Speed and Low Movement Speed penalty, and has the highest standard Normal defense in the game. I actually even increased it in the last patch.
Ironmight Plate also has a Low Attack Speed penalty, strong Normal defense, and now has some added Piercing defense.
Volcanic Plate has the same Low Attack Speed penalty, similarly strong Normal defense, but also gets some Fire resistance and Elemental defense.
Dragon Scale Mail only offers high piercing and elemental defense, with some fire resistance. The helm has attack speed bonus; Why doens't the mail have it, aswell?
That was another crusty bonus that was removed a couple patches ago. In its place, I gave the Drake line a Beast Damage Bonus.
The Chaos set only has elemental defense, with medium weaknesses to literally ALL status effects. And the trade-off? LOW damage/charge reduction bonuses. Why was this already really weak set nerfed to low, and never buffed again?
I spoke to the Chaos and Angelic lines earlier, but I wanted to quickly address the focus on bonuses being marked as "low". A few patches ago, we streamlined the way we display item stat bonuses, both on the items themselves and on your character panel. Items generally will only be rated Low, Medium or High in a particular bonus, and these will stack together and display themselves appropriately on your character sheet. All that said, keep in mind that what is marked now as "Low" or "Medium" is not what historically was "Low" or "Medium". So, if you're judging gear based on an old conception of what "Low" is, it might be instructive to try out a few different pieces of gear to get a feel for how we designate bonuses now.
Thanks for the quick response, Hermes. I appreciate it.
About the Plate sets; Even if the penalty is just low, I don't really think they end up being a worthy trade-off. They should at least have some kind of low attack bonus or whatever to make up for the attack speed lost. Pure defense doens't really seem worth it.
About the Chaos set; Being an active player I'm aware of this change, however, there was one balance patch that had reduced every bonus on armors to low. Later on, it seems you brought back them to medium - However apparently, the only armor unaffected by this was Chaos, remaining at a low bonus.
About the Dragon Scale set: Currently, normal defense is quite major - Only a select few mobs ever obtain piercing type attacks, so with no normal defense you'd probably be getting owned tons. A monster type bonus doens't really feel like it's quite worth it; Maybe if those bonuses were higher than the general universal bonus other sets give, it'd be worth it, although currently, it's a bit silly. And yeah - No longer any attack speed/sword attack speed sets either. I just hope you guys get some more variety in gear upon release or whatever - Most sets end up being the same right now, simply with small differences in resistance or defense.
So, what you're saying is, Scale is now totally and completely pointless.
I just gotta say that Armor of the Fallen is practicaly useless now. I get about 5-10 additional dmg at a Tier 3 run then my fiance that runs non-dmg boosting armor. 5 -10 dmg is nothing in a tier 3 run, especially when healers are healing for 100's of dmg per second. lol. Also the other alternatives to this armor do the same buff's, but dont give a dmg penalty vs Fiend.
I just hope it all gets balanced and set in stone before the official release, cuz i'd be pretty bummed out to put all the time spent leveling, and energy spent upgrading to end up with an armor that changes to something of total uselessness once I had already made it. I liked how the armor was originally, Do lots of dmg yet at the same time take lots of dmg. So the point to wearing the angelic line of armor was to strategickly fight, doing dmg when you can but ultimately avoiding dmg.
I'm sure things wil get figured out in the end. Balancing is a hard task to do with so many items and attributes to take in effect. Keep up the good work Three Rings! Cant wait for official release! B)
So, got to actually test freeze for once. What I noticed:
-Damage can be blocked by shields. Great! Although this might not have been intended. I seriously hope it was.
-...However, you can be inflicted with freeze while shielding.
-...And party members chipping you can inflict damage to you. WHY?
-With no freeze resistance, I was being inflicted by 8 seconds long freeze that would deal about 5 bars of damage. At depth 19. And it was inflicting me all the damn time.
At the first part of an ice slime arena at depth 19, me and Magnus defeated it with a total of one bar and half of HP left, all because of this Freeze change. Glorious. Even fire arenas wouldn't be this incredibly dangerous.
So yeah. Fire? Pfft. Freeze is now officially the most broken status effect on players. And weirdly enough, on enemies, it doens't deal damage by chipping it off! Yay!
I mucked around with the join/make party window a little bit. I support the removal of the checkbox that was used to rob people. And the removal of the misleading numeric and location join options. The last 4 buttons on the 'start a party' side are a bit ambiguous. You have to click 'Invite Only' to be able to select 'Allow Friends' or 'Allow Guild', which makes it sound like you still have to invite your friends/guildies.
I still don't like pressing the 'join party' button and spending 10 energy before I even know where I'm going and who I'm playing with. It would be keen if at the very least the depth of the party I'm about to join could show on the gate map. Better would be showing the names of the people already in the party. Best would be giving a list of 'open' and joinable parties including names and locations that I could scroll through and choose from, with my friend's parties prioritized to be at the top of the list.
Sorry, wrong topic.
List of open parties with who is in them and where they are would be great.
List of open parties with who is in them and where they are would be great.
Not really there are a few options you can do:
D-scale helm and Body to get High damage vs Beast
Or
1 item from the d-scale series and a wild hunting blade to get Ultra damage vs Beasts (which can be very useful)
Atm in this game the only variants people should aim for damage wise is:
Construct, Gremlins, and Undead the rest of the monster types our armors allow us to own monsters with.
You mean what /you/ can do.
I prefer having defense, and not dying as often as other people. If you'd like to have armor that grants you no normal defense, and a bonus you'll use 10% of the time, then be my guest. You're not the case being discussed here.
>Balance changes
One of the worst balance updates so far, for me. Most balance patches end up ruining the game quite a bit for me, but this was one of the worst ones. As I have posted on my suggestion thread about all those balances that are simply ridiculous nerfs;
-Magic lines sets (Including the five-star Grey Feather) no longer have fire resistance, and the stun weakness is back, however worse than before. Not that bad... right?
-Grey Feather no longer has Charge time reduction. At all. What?
-Vog Cub set had its bonus reduced YET AGAIN to low. Yet Skolver remains unchanged. What?
-Even though the Angelic sets are already pretty much the worst set of equipment on the game, nerf them even more! Fallen now has low damage bonus, while fiend penalty remains medium. (...what?)
And some others I noticed:
-Divine Avenger had its attack boosted by about one bar.
-Grey Owlite shield now has shock and freeze resistances.
>Hearts will now disappear after 90 seconds
What's. The. Freaking. Point. Why the hell should hearts disappear over time? One minute and half is quite a bit I guess - However, think about arena battles, for example. The first parts are easy and will drop tons of hearts - But later we'll be having tons of trouble on the final waves (imagine 12 gremlin bombers... Or 8 rocket puppies... etc)... and no hearts anymore because of this change. The current state of the game is that it's too hard for first time players - You're supposed to make it generally easier for them, not harder.
I really do not understand what was the point of this. I guess it makes it a bit more realistic, and adds a bit more challenge since you can't just go back and grab hearts... But... Really. This is going to have a major effect inside arenas and Vanaduke's boss battle, for example.
And honestly, I just simply liked how we always were free to decide when to heal... It could be handiful for if someone is near death, and you're waiting until they die before you heal so you don't waste that much health or whatever. And also simply being able to prevent wasting a bit of health by picking up big hearts with near maxed out health... But now that's gone.
>We've streamlined the Adventure Board to make it easier to join or start a party.
I do not understand this. Did you just make the whole thing smaller? In general, it's the exact same, with the added option of allowing guild members. And I personally liked the old design for this better. It seems really simple now. And this actually makes things a bit worse for newcomers, since you removed the Join Friends tab. Sure, you can join through social - But most new players won't really know about this. The Join Friends tab was much handier.
>Now when frozen, you will receive damage if your freeze block is broken early, instead of if the freeze time runs out
Random question; Would this be when you get hit by monsters, or chipped by party members? If chipping causes this, it's a bit ridiculous. Hell, even if it's mob hits, it's kind of the same thing as it was before this update, except now it's more likely to happen - Unblockable high end damage that is pretty hard to prevent. At least this fixes freeze resistance being useless.
So yeah, this patch wasn't very pleasing for me.