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gamekid2k
Member Posts: 360
Patch Notes, October 8th
<blockquote restore="" "=""> Here are the patch notes for today's patch. I've kept the original commentary from our recent update so that there's context as far as the balancing changes go.
General changes
Balancing changes
Balancing at high skill-tier while addressing Time-To-Kill (TTK)
This was quite tricky to address because we have the Warrior role whose nature is partially that of an “easy” entry-level role, that provides new and averagely skilled players a decent vehicle to viability. A consequence of this also made Warrior the dominant role at high skill-tiers, in most situations.
At the same time, Skirmishers and Elementalists were receiving too much damage from ranged attacks as a percentage of their health pool, which resulted in much shorter TTK compared to warriors.
To address both of these issues, we begin by:
Additionally, In order to encourage other roles to counter attack or engage warriors in melee combat, the relevant protections in warrior armors were slightly reduced.
Sustainability and Transfers
In order to help with sustainability, transfer spells are moderately increased in magnitude, while their cooldown is slightly reduced.
In detail:
This obviously affects roles differently, and we felt we needed to implement this change now, together with all the combat gameplay changes.
This change also helped towards a better TTK for the ranged DPS roles, as a slightly stronger "stamina-to-health" transfer was often the difference between life and death while getting nuked.
The bottom line of this change is that it will add extra depth to the game at no cost to complexity. We do believe that player skill, before numbers, should be the primary factor in a fight. This change will help when fighting outnumbered, or recovering from a bad spot after an ambush.
Wobble
We also addressed the wobble mechanic, as we felt it wasn't serving its intended purpose. To that extent, the “shrinking” time for all roles has been greatly reduced, with the skirmisher’s being even faster as they heavily rely on perfect aiming. Additionally, the reticle shrinking was tweaked in order to have it start as soon as the projectile is ready to be released. The delay until the shrinking began, we feel is a big reason why players did not withhold their arrows until their reticle became more accurate, thus rendering the mechanic irrelevant.
In detail:
Skill Changes: Warriors
We also increased survivability of Battle Brand School:
In the Slayer School, the stamina drain for the Polearm Power attack was reduced by 36% , as it was deemed a bit excessive
Skill Changes: Skirmishers
Some of the skirmisher's skills were too costly, causing this role to run out of stats fast. Also some cooldowns were tweaked. The DPS for deadeye school were also slightly increased.
In detail:
Skill Changes: Duelist
The Duelist school has been slightly rebalanced in many areas, to counter strong advantages the Duelists have vs. other roles.
This, so that players have few more seconds of breathing room after managing to escape the duelist in melee range.
These, so that players have a bigger window of opportunity against a duelist, especially when engaged in melee combat.
Duelist offensive abilities have also had their cooldowns slightly increased, so that duelist relies more on in-and-out burst damage, than the "sustained burst" he had before. This was hurting mostly the Primalists, yet we don't expect to see much difference in the outcome against other roles such as Warrior and Elementalist.
Skill Changes: Elementalists
Having addressed one of elementalists main concerns, survivability, means they will now have more time to use their high damage skills.
Some other tweaks include:
Skill Changes: Primalists
General changes
- Guard tower damage has been reduced to 20 non-crit(down from 33).
- Reduced Break Fall cooldown to 30 sec (down from 60)
- Holy protections have been reduced for Elementals’
- Fixed description of Uncanny Focus and Stoic Defense due to rebalancing
- Made the Sea Fortress Map markers smaller.
- Updated the World Map visual to include all the latest changes done to the world
- New sound for Thunderbolt spell
- Various audio updates for monsters and players
- Fixed a bug where when logging out while changing roles it would make role changing impossible until server restart
- Fixed a bug where crafting start button would not "refresh" after trying to craft with a shield equipped
- Fixed a bug where a player could sometimes target himself
- Fix for Skill Up tooltip text for Flurry and Lacerate (skill does not increase magnitude)
Balancing changes
Balancing at high skill-tier while addressing Time-To-Kill (TTK)
This was quite tricky to address because we have the Warrior role whose nature is partially that of an “easy” entry-level role, that provides new and averagely skilled players a decent vehicle to viability. A consequence of this also made Warrior the dominant role at high skill-tiers, in most situations.
At the same time, Skirmishers and Elementalists were receiving too much damage from ranged attacks as a percentage of their health pool, which resulted in much shorter TTK compared to warriors.
To address both of these issues, we begin by:
- Tweaking piercing protections for all armors. Because of this, in our internal tests, Warriors received slightly more damage from piercing attacks, while Skirmishers, Elementalists and Primalists received slightly less. At high player and character skill levels, where fights usually last longer, the difference in piercing protections accumulated, favoring the better player.
- Changes to Warrior Armor Protections
- Changes to Skirmisher Armor Protections
- Changes to Primalist Robe Protections
- Changes to Elementalist Robe Protections
- Secondly, the penalty in stat pools was reduced. As a result, stats become more normalized regardless of role. Effectively this gives more health and stamina to Elementalists and Skirmishers, more stamina and mana to Warriors and an overall increase on all pools for Primalists. The time required to kill another player (TTK) also becomes more uniform across all roles. In detail:
- Elementalist:
- Base health increased by 14%
- Base stamina increased by 7%
- Skirmisher:
- Base health increased by 7%
- Base mana increased by 14%
- Warrior:
- Base stamina increased by 7%
- Base Mana increased by 14%
- Primalist:
- Base Health, Stamina and Mana increased by 7%
- Magic protections on Skirmisher, Elementalist and Primalist armors are also increased. This in conjunction with the above changes help these two roles in larger fights, where it's generally easier for them to get nuked.
Additionally, In order to encourage other roles to counter attack or engage warriors in melee combat, the relevant protections in warrior armors were slightly reduced.
Sustainability and Transfers
In order to help with sustainability, transfer spells are moderately increased in magnitude, while their cooldown is slightly reduced.
In detail:
- Magnitude for all transfers has been increased by 18%. This effectively increases net gains by 2.5x .
- Cooldown for all transfers has been reduced by 14%
This obviously affects roles differently, and we felt we needed to implement this change now, together with all the combat gameplay changes.
This change also helped towards a better TTK for the ranged DPS roles, as a slightly stronger "stamina-to-health" transfer was often the difference between life and death while getting nuked.
The bottom line of this change is that it will add extra depth to the game at no cost to complexity. We do believe that player skill, before numbers, should be the primary factor in a fight. This change will help when fighting outnumbered, or recovering from a bad spot after an ambush.
Wobble
We also addressed the wobble mechanic, as we felt it wasn't serving its intended purpose. To that extent, the “shrinking” time for all roles has been greatly reduced, with the skirmisher’s being even faster as they heavily rely on perfect aiming. Additionally, the reticle shrinking was tweaked in order to have it start as soon as the projectile is ready to be released. The delay until the shrinking began, we feel is a big reason why players did not withhold their arrows until their reticle became more accurate, thus rendering the mechanic irrelevant.
In detail:
- Skirmisher: 0.8 seconds faster aiming with bow. (Requires 0.25 seconds to aim perfectly)
- Warrior: 0.5 seconds faster aiming with bow. (Requires 0.9 seconds to aim perfectly)
- Elementalist: 0.5 seconds faster aiming with staff. (Requires 0.5 seconds to aim perfectly)
- Primalist: 0.5 seconds faster aiming with staff. (Requires 0.5 seconds to aim perfectly)
Skill Changes: Warriors
- Stampede cooldown reduced by 30% and its duration reduced by 10%. Knockback effect reduced.
We also increased survivability of Battle Brand School:
- Bandage: casting time reduced by 14%
- Stoic Defense: cooldown reduced by 25%
In the Slayer School, the stamina drain for the Polearm Power attack was reduced by 36% , as it was deemed a bit excessive
Skill Changes: Skirmishers
Some of the skirmisher's skills were too costly, causing this role to run out of stats fast. Also some cooldowns were tweaked. The DPS for deadeye school were also slightly increased.
In detail:
- Salvo:
- Mana and stamina cost have been recuced by ~ 32%
- Magnitude has been increased by 2%
- Cooldown reduced by 11%
- Slow effect has been slightly reduced
- Explosive arrow:
- Stamina cost has been reduced by 27%
- Magnitude has been increased by 10%
- Puncture:
- Mana cost reduced by 25%
- Stamina cost reduced by 20%
- Cooldown reduced by 12%
- Magnitude increased by 11%
- Exploit weakness
- cooldown reduced by 17%
- Trueshot
- Cast time reduced by 7%
- Efficiency
- Cooldown reduced by 17%
Skill Changes: Duelist
The Duelist school has been slightly rebalanced in many areas, to counter strong advantages the Duelists have vs. other roles.
- Uncanny Focus:
- Will now reduce cooldowns for secondary school by 80%, instead of resetting them. Cooldowns for primary school are still reset like before.
This, so that players have few more seconds of breathing room after managing to escape the duelist in melee range.
- Armor buff reduced by 20%
- Cooldown increased by 9%, and duration reduced by 15%.
These, so that players have a bigger window of opportunity against a duelist, especially when engaged in melee combat.
Duelist offensive abilities have also had their cooldowns slightly increased, so that duelist relies more on in-and-out burst damage, than the "sustained burst" he had before. This was hurting mostly the Primalists, yet we don't expect to see much difference in the outcome against other roles such as Warrior and Elementalist.
- Lacerate
- Cooldown increased by 50%
- Damage reduced by approximately 10%
- Lunge
- Cooldown increased by 30%
- Keep in mind their cooldowns are still way below the 10second mark.
- Pummel
- Slow debuff duraction reduced by 50%
Skill Changes: Elementalists
Having addressed one of elementalists main concerns, survivability, means they will now have more time to use their high damage skills.
Some other tweaks include:
- Magma bomb
- Increased missile speed by 33%, to help Fire Elementalists with distant aiming and nuking.
- Bitterstep
- cooldown reduced by 50%
- duration reduced by 50%
- Frostbite
- Changed targetting so it is a small cone, to make it easier to land
- Thunderbolt
- Range increased by 25% , to prevent it from fizzling due to reaching max range.
- Heatstroke
- Cooldown increased by 4x, as it is very annoying to be on the receiving side of a 5 second stat drain nuke.
- Attunement to Air
- Cooldown increased by 30% and duration decreased by 20%. This is a really powerful spell and it greatly affected combat against Skirmishers and other Spellcasters because of the reflected damage. This will give other roles more of a window of opportunity against Elementalists, who will need to pay more attention to timing, rather than using it the moment it becomes available.
Skill Changes: Primalists
- Wall of Righteous Force was tweaked so that it can be used more often in group combat
- Cooldown reduced by 56%Casting time reduced by 20%
- Bastion
- Cast time reduced by 25%, so that a Primalist can prepare faster when getting jumped by other roles.
- Invigoration
- Cooldown reduced by 20%, to further help with survivability.
- Healing Blast
- Casting time reduced by 27% to help get that clutch heal off a bit faster.
Comments
Updated Original post with the actual official patch notes from https://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?381175-Patch-Notes-October-8th
The changes makes combat worth it. All ex player should sub and have fun for next 30 days!
Now Playing: DARKFALL Unholy Wars "Return to Open World, Full Loot PvP, Conquest in a Sandbox MMO with player driven economy! Just like classic MMOs!"
Now is the time to come back. This last patch was awesome.
If you want more sandbox stuff, you should post about it on the suggestion forums. I would also like more sandbox stuff, but I am still having fun exploring, sailing, pvping, sieging, grinding mobs, doing dungeons, treasure hunting, and crafting.