[Miller]

I'm not going to lie, this system has way too many issues to be fun to play in, even as someone who enjoys playing heavy CEL investment characters 90% of the time.

So I'm going to address the major individual points of why this system is so frustrating to deal with on both sides.

FULL EVASION IS POLARIZING

You either have enough hit or you don't. Glancing Blows ignores a fair amount of on-hits and statuses while completely missing will give the person dodging 100% DR. On the other side of things, if you have enough hit to avoid playing the evade game they'll end up melting like butter unless they're abusing external DRs from class skills or equipment or end up stat balling enough to not care.

Either evasion is godly or it's awful. There's almost never an in between unless you run into someone with one or two evasion ignoring skills with a hefty cooldown.

GLANCING BLOWS ODDS

As represented here, these are the current hit rates you'll get while operating under the current system of glancing blows as it functions on live; what's immediately obvious is that you MUST have 80% or higher hit to reliably avoid glancing on your opponent. This encourages players to max out their hit to the maximum their bases/buff cap will allow them, often putting an emphasis on high base SKI races and an even higher emphasis on the enchant Blessed or Bloodhunt.

Several suggestions have been floating around to make it so if you only miss the first roll / then hit the second, you'll get a glance and that's generally agreeable with me. It'd give you your projected hit rate rather than have a MASSIVE drop off below 75% hit.

GLANCING BLOWS AVOIDING INFLICTS

Avoiding status inflicts on glancing blows is infuriating to say the least, this puts an extra layer of 'Status Resistance' on top of the stat that already exists means that you must first pass a hit check twice in a row and then land a status inflict. Not to mention that this also applies to on-critical effects such as Fleur, making it doubly frustrating if you're someone who hasn't maxed out their hit beyond 80% hit rate.

A simple fix would simply be to do away with the ignore inflicts half of glancing blows and instead boost status resistance by a flat amount based off of armor type.

SKILL STAT TAX

SKI is the first stat to become borderline mandatory to have at least 56-60 scaled with this update thanks to the presence of full evasion. Other stats which are considered mandatory such as VIT only require a very small investment that you can reasonably dock if you have a fair amount of STR and/or SAN or have alternative stats to use for your damage reduction. I frankly personally never go beyond 20 base VIT unless I want the extra bulk, but with SKI I don't have the same luxury as I am required to go to 60 scaled to have a reasonable base to boost with enchants/buffs.

This limits the amount of stats you can invest in other stats by a severe margin.

Though another point that I feel goes woefully undernoticed is the fact that SKI was never a dump stat due to the inclusion of skill slots. The only characters that could reasonably dump SKI were rogues/humans or classes that generally don't use that many skill slots.

Buffs/Debuffs

Due to the nature of the buff cap and how debuffs interact with it, it's generally more worthwhile to overcap on hit/evade to lessen the impact of debuffs. This creates an obvious powergap between combos that include a class that provides a fair amount of debuffs/buffs and combos that do not include a class that has an abundance of these debuffs or buffs. 

This is an issue that unfortunately cannot be band-aided by giving more buffs/debuffs to other classes unless the amount between classes is homogenized and have little to no conditions or simply have none of these buffs/debuffs to begin with. The reason for this is because this would encourage people to focus on classes that provide the most bonuses towards hit/evade and having it be more standardized would be the same as having none at all.

With the previous system, only basic hitters had to play around with these.

Blind

This status alone with how it currently functions is a nightmare. As long as you land an inflict, you'll be playing around with a 44% chance to glance regardless of CEL investment. I don't think I need to state how awful this is to deal with. A flat -hit value would be much much more bearable. 

It's Almost Impossible To Balance Around (Eventmin)

A bit of a hyperbole but, due to the polarizing nature of full evasion being present in a system, there is no singular hit rate/evade that you can give to a mob to make them fair in a PvE encounter. Some players will play a dodgy that has 150 evade base but won't have the evasion buffs present to dodge a mob with around 220 hit. If the mobs hit is too low? Their damage will drastically decrease to an overwhelming degree making it a cakewalk if they can avoid them or a nightmare if they can't. This also applies to the evasion side of the deal, most players are packing 210% to 250%+ hit due to it being borderline required, so dodgy mobs need to have around 180 evade to dodge the average player. But not everyone focuses hard enough to min-max hit and can end up missing/glancing 75% of the time as a result.

[Lolzytripd]

Log curved hit ratios or minimum/,maximum hit rates based on 10+scaled skill and 110%-scaled cel. (1/2 scaled cel for heavy torso)

Glancing should also be changed to a more forgiving system in hits favor, as suggested before. Making it so that glancing only occurs if the first hit check misses would solve it.

With the above change the avoiding inflicts would be fine

With the first suggestion the skill tax wouldn't be as lofty, allowing you to go 35-40 points invested in skill instead of the required 55 scaled.

For buffs ad debuffs we likely need to just shoot it... only the highest debuff/buff to hit evade counts, no others.

Bind should be changed to do something else.

I'm not an eventmin, I can't speak for them.

[Jeff]

I greatly dislike the idea of limiting player-applied buffs and debuffs. It is the system design itself that needs to be addressed, rather than the stats and skills that exacerbate the existing problem.

[Sawrock]

Any system that has stacking buffs heavily favors magic-heavy tropes; why wouldn’t you use magic if it’s another thing you add on? From shield spells in tabletop RPGs being better than using a shield alone to having spellthief hold every buff spell under the sun, it greatly limits character concept. To be the best you need to be more efficient. The same can not be as widely said about magic users using nonmagical means- they aren’t compromising their identity, but are instead clever. Having a thieving sorcerer that can pick pockets doesn’t make him less of a sorcerer, but a magic-using warrior is to the likes of Elric of Melniboné rather than Conan the Barbarian.

If you can only apply the highest buff, it’s still a momentum saver- let’s say you buff your friend. Now he can attack twice instead of wasting a turn on a buff.

[Poruku]

A good summary of why glancing is so limiting. I find myself cramming hit into builds in ways I wish I didn't need to. As someone who loves pvp, I enjoyed the shakeup but as the novelty wears off and I'm trying to make new and interesting builds, I just find the decision making not as enjoyable.

For a lot of combos I wish I could make, like a character using evokes for instance, the only real choice is to either make the character more solid and take the L against evasion, or go for a way to actually win against evasion at any cost (like going runemage subclass just cause +60 hit for 4 momentum). Some builds are naturally fine, like firebird anything or bk or explosion mage or engineer with bombs, etc. But what this update did is make the distinction between a good build and a bad one much more drastic, and difficult matchups (in terms of evasion) less enjoyable

[Kazzy]

Crazy idea time.


Remove hit and dodge bonuses from classes/enchantments. This way it is raw stat V stat.

BUT HERE IS WHERE IT GETS CRAZY.

Give people buttons to say 'My next ability hits' or 'I dodge the next ability'. So people still have the ability to pay resource to guarantee their strike lands. Or, if you see that big chonkin' evoke coming- you can dodge it.

'But Kaz,' , I hear you say. 'Where's the counterplay?'

COOLDOWNS. Give these bad boys a 3-5 round cooldown and make part of the experience a fighting game mentality of faking out your opponent into popping their CD early.

Someone charging an evoke can skip to make the Perfect Dodge™ wear off. Make Perfect Dodge and Perfect Strike™ nullify one another and bring things back to sheer chance. This keeps people from having Glancing Woes, it keeps people from having to splash classes that don't match their IC simply to have enough stats to compete in the big boy games, and it keeps us from having to go into every class that doesnt have a hit/evade buff and go 'Okay now you have to spend points on these instead of what you actually want to use so you can actually participate.'

Someone could probably expand on this idea more than I can. But this is 100% the result of a fever and too much time reading old ttrpgs.