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Hey all!
There are A LOT of changes in this iteration, where quite a few are under the hood as we've rewritten core parts of every core ability, which means there will likely be some bugs!
That being said, we've also fixed a number of existing live issues along the way (a couple of specific ability changes listed below), so please do let us know if things aren't working as you might expect.
Please remember this is a work in progress, and as we're actively trying to get things into your hands as quickly as possible there may be elements unfinished or not yet the final behavior.
And as always, please keep the feedback and conversation flowing, as there's more to come. (Though there will likely not be a beta server update next week.)
We'll continue to be engaging on our usual channels through Reddit, Discord, and Twitter.
Mods Ryan and Sponge
"Yes, that's the technical term... Because ability damage ranges so greatly in the live game (typically 20% fixed damage, 80% random damage) it meant that with the new critical strike system, players could roll low on a critical strike, and do less damage than if they had just rolled high. This leads to incredibly high variance, based on whether your critical luck lined up with your damage rolls. We've squished these ranges to be closer to 80-90% fixed damage, you should notice your hits are more consistent, play nicer with the critical strike system, and are less likely to hit the 30k hit cap. "
"Some abilities generate their damage based on previous hits. For example Snapshot's second hit is determined by the damage of the first hit. Abilities like this can have unintended consequences, such as scaling additional effects oddly (a good example is Snapshot's second hit scaling up a ruby bolt's damage). In order to make combat easier to understand we're moving towards unlinking these abilities so the damage rolls independently. We haven't quite covered all of the abilities like this, but we'll be looking to complete the set in another beta iteration."
"Let's try this again... In the live game abilities you cast do additional fixed amounts of damage if your combat stats are boosted above their base level. This is a triple problem: It leads to multi-hit abilities always being a priority over an equally balanced single-hit ability. It means boosting a stat essentially boosts your damage twice (once at the core making you deal the same damage of the level you've boosted to, and once by giving a fixed amount of damage). And, it means a player with 80 magic boosting to 90 magic would out-damage a player with 90 magic that isn't boosting. As a result, we're going to trial removing the damage per level granted by stat-boosting. With the other changes active in the beta, we hope you won't even notice it's gone."
"In the live game, some abilities have a heightened chance to roll their minimum hit, making them overly confusing as their displayed damage ranges can't be used to figure out their average damage. A good example is 'Dismember', using its tooltip you would assume its average damage is around 144% ability damage, however, it is, in fact, closer to 120% ability damage due to its increased chance to roll low. To simplify these abilities we're removing this skewed rolling, so the tooltips are a more accurate representation of the ability."
"Greater Fury's Critical Strike effect could be considered overly complicated and low value in rotations, so since it's a beta, we made a simple change: locking it to melee abilities and giving it a buff."
"Blood Tendrils was just a little outdated with how it functioned, we gave it a little bit of a facelift whilst rewriting it. In particular, it would get confused if the player was using a spear of annihilation, placing little hits before the big initial hit. "
"No... Always you..." "Greater Barge has a lot of 'niche' side effects, which is often the cause of confusion for developers and players alike. We're trying to clean it up slightly to make it less of a pain. In particular, it would change the attack timings of channeled abilities that were changed to damage over time through its effect, making the timings feel slightly off."
"Berserk was calculated differently to other damage-boosting ultimate abilities such as Death's Swiftness and Sunshine, so we've moved it over."
"Flurry did reduced damage in AOE scenarios, resulting in clunky gameplay where you'd occasionally be trying to move back into single target to get your full damage, as flurry is less used than other abilities we're trying out just removing the reduced damage"
A couple of effects that happen 'on next attack/ability' are misleading and this ability was one of those. The hit chance debuff was only active on the target for a short duration of time with the assumption that they will attack it before it expires. We've felt that a debuff like this on the target could be improved - so, that's what we did!
"Visual clarity is important, and there are a lot of improvements that need to be made to combat. Using Death's Swiftness as an example, the area in which you benefited from the buff was much larger than the visuals so we've updated it."
We're dipping our toe into giving the core foundations of the Combat Triangle the Necromancy treatment, and we wanted to see how much work it would be to implement proper AOE targeting into Ranged - Bombardment is the ideal tester for this.
The 62.5% increase didn't look right in the tooltip, so we're changing up the
Much like Death's Swiftness, the area of the buff has been updated for better visual clarity.
"I've got 99 problems and Seren Godbow is all of them..." "We didn't quite get enough time to modernize and squish all special attacks, so we focused our efforts on the most commonly used ones right now, so we can get a better idea of how the bigger combat beta changes affect them."