[Trexmaster]

So, I'll preface this with the fact I've only tested, personally, sparingly. Though I've a good grasp of how this system has panned out from my own experiences and speaking with many others about it. I'll cut to the point--

Spoilers to make this easier to read.

Aptitude: Has yet to be seen, but people are flocking to it because it's in their comfort zone of having decent stats everywhere. This is the same reason the same people keep suggesting 4 stats per level. 4 SPL is too much.

Aptitude is sought after precisely because 3 stats per level isn't enough. If you look further down, you give us the reason why it's so good in your own words. Many stats are good to have, but we have few stats with which to get those stats. So what's the solution? Invest in the stat that gives you well-rounded bases. Not doing so causes a build to suffer heavily if it invests in more than 4-5 stats.

I'll even go into detail for you.

You want STR to maintain your BW.

You want WIL for...uh. Maybe some FP and skill slots?

You want SKI for skill slots, and for most classes, hit/crit/infliction.

You want CEL for initiative, and evade for some classes.

You want DEF to not instantly die to the lightest breeze. (there's quite a difference between having 10 and 20)

You want RES for similar reasons as above. (and due to how simple it is to deal both physical/magical damage with the same stats, having equal RES is important, if not vital)

You want VIT for...similar reasons as above. Combined with the two stats above, this means you have much more effective hp. Obvious, but when you're running a setup that can't afford much of these stats? You're not going to live long at all. Oh, yeah, and it bumps your carry weight.

You want LUC for numerous things, namely crit/crit evade. This is essentially your only real defense versus critical, as I'll detail below...

You want FAI if you're rolling Summoner or Priest. Otherwise, this is a borderline dump stat. It provides halved effectiveness crit evade (thus making it highly dangerous to dump into for crit evade only), some fp, and status resistance, if I recall. If you aren't one of the two classes, or using a FAI weapon, then from what I've witnessed, this is a risky stat to dump your precious points into.

You want GUI if you like killing people dead. Anyone who uses criticals to deal damage wants this, or hitting from range, or just...hitting at all due to its flanking bonus encouraging the already meta tactic of shoving pointy objects into people's rears. Which is AGAIN supported by a base hit increase from flanking that's now default.

You want SAN if you like your racials (or hate them if you're one of those people we don't talk about), or want even more HP/FP. And some resists.

You want APT if you picked more than 5 of these stats to go above 10. See the issue here? There's so many stats people would want -not even going into the nitty gritty of what weapon they've chosen or what classes they'll use-. The only exception is Summoner/Priest relying on FAI for a lot of the stuff they do, as far as I'm aware.

STR/WIL: STR is fine. It's useful for BW, it's still the primary damage stat for a lot of weapons. It doesn't need HP tacked onto it. The only change WIL might need is an increase to the FP it gives for level and/or its Skill Pool increase reduced to 5 instead of 10 points. It's still useful if you want to stack status infliction, which not every mage wants to do, but that's fine. I don't think WIL needs to give all elemental ATK either, part of the goal of this change is to promote diversity. Making mages samey by making them rely on WIL heavily like they do now isn't going to help that.

Alright, sure, STR is still used by a lot of weapons. Issue is, whose gonna want to use them when they can go searching for say, an axe that uses 85% of their DEF instead? Why would they even -want- STR at that point, when they can use the precious few points they have into say, making their effective HP pool higher. The problem here is that STR offers little to no utility beyond damage, while other stats can now be used to do the same thing, and also provide their inital function -on top of- now dishing out the damage for you.

WIL suffers the same issue, and an FP increase might help make it so you need less of it to get where you want to be, same for the SP option. As I mentioned before with FAI, it's a risky choice dumping into WIL for infliction unless you plan to use it for something else. This isn't inherently bad, but when WIL's utility is only slightly greater than STR's it's going down on the list of priorities, just as STR did. The reasoning behind the elemental ATK boost is that a mage shouldn't need to invest in so many stats to raise their elemental ATK to a number on par with a -non- mage. One of Evoker's greatest assets is the fact they have several different elements they can use to inflict high damage. Though if an Evoker wants to deal the same damage with all their elements, now they're looking at having to invest in STR, CEL, SKI, LUC, and DEF. Thus the want for WIL to provide halved effectiveness across the board elemental ATK to represent magical prowess, since there's been so much deemphasis on actually using WIL for magic with how the tomes have been scaled (some scale less with WIL than they do their primary element's scaling--hell, MOST do!).

VIT: You don't really elaborate on why more HP = bad or why it should be changed, so I question if this is really your opinion, but regardless, I think the amount of HP it gives is fine at the moment, so I don't know where this discussion is going to go.

Kay, so I will. Boosting how much HP VIT gives serves to give a large boon to anyone who invests in it. Issue is...not everyone is going to invest in it equally. The disparity between someone with 20 VIT and 40 VIT is going to be even greater. This becomes an issue when damage also reaches a point where you -need- that much health to withstand more than a round or two of hits.

For example, building a tankier character vs building a dodgier character. Let's say they go for these builds--

40 STR 30 DEF 30 RES 40 VIT 40 APT vs 40 STR 40 CEL 30 LUC 30 SKI 40 APT. (these are points invested not their final stats, they'd be those but +8 to everything and racials yadda yadda not my point)

Just spitballing numbers here, Tank has about 600 HP coupled with roughly 40% DR across the board. Dodge has about 300 HP with 10% DR across the board. Tank's EHP is around 1,000. Dodge's EHP is around 333. Already there's a pretty big problem here.

But it only gets worse. Tank gets to use his VIT for his offensive, using let's say, an Ensui. Using his 40 STR and 40 VIT to both apply half their values to his weapon power. Dodge planned to use a STR/SKI weapon, like say, a Wo-dao. Not bad, but, they could've opted to dump STR for GUI instead...but, that's touching on a different point.

To cut my long winded analysis short, Tank suffers nothing for going almost full defense, while Dodge loses a lot more for not focusing on their defensive stats at all. This can, of course, be avoided if you more evenly distribute your points, but, then builds that don't heavily use defensive stats end up starved for the points they really -did- want...then you see why VIT offering even more HP is bad.

TL;DR Bigger flat numbers multipled by percents get bigger as the base rises. Smaller flat numbers cry in the corner and get abused.

GUI: Rogue characters receiving benefits from Guile is a given because it boosts all of the things Rogues like to do, such as flanking, backstabbing, etc. I also don't really understand the point of reducing the Critical Damage gain from GUI, something that requires investment, and increasing it on weapons, which you get for free.

Yes, it makes sense that Rogue's want the Rogue stat, but it does so to an absolutely insane degree. As it stands GUI is required if you want your criticals to inflict higher damage than your basics at all, or if you want to hit anything at range, or...just hit people. Most melee builds often utilize crit, not even for damage, but just to gain more actions on their enemy. Killing them harder or being able to hit more effectively are boons too, on top of getting more slots for skills.

Not to mention it's used in the scaling for some weapons.

The justification for altering the crit on GUI and the bases on weapons is to remove the over-reliance on GUI for determining how effective a critical hit is. As it stands, a lucky amulet will take most criticals into being worse than a basic attack. And GUI already does so much that it doesn't also need to be the main contributor to critical damage in the game.

Critical/Critical Evade: In what sense should it be tweaked? Because the only imbalance in crit VS crit evade is that SKI gives 0.5 critical more than FAI resists it. I don't understand why it should change, either, because the benefits you get from criticals now are weaker than before and thus require investment in GUI to be significantly powerful (daggers are the only ones that really get around this but they have lower Power to compensate).

Changing SKI to 1:1 for crit and removing DEF from the equation has horribly titled the scales of Crit vs Crit evade, on top of making FAI a very, very painful stat to dump into for any build that isn't specifically using FAI heavily. Most builds will be fortunate if their base Crit Evade can even beat the weapon critical of their opponent, let alone their Critical.

Before, being a BK/Boneheart user meant someone had to work pretty damn hard to crit you. Now if you're fortunate, you might not get crit if you do that, otherwise, nearly everyone will have well over 100% on you if they've built at all for it. Many things factor into Critical, and very few things grant you Crit Evade.

I mean, just look back at my example under VIT. Tank would only have around 15-20 Crit Evade, and Dodge would have 76~ Critical. If Dodge is using a crit weapon, and Tank doesn't run BK or have Boneheart, they'll be looking at taking a crit every turn. You might say that this is because Tank didn't invest in Crit Evade enough, which, while true, doesn't mean it should be so easy.

Put simply, the issue is that it's near impossible to avoid being 100% crit if a person even tries to build for critical, bar using the most extreme options of Crit Evade available. This is due in part to there being so many flat + crit bonuses available to people, and high stats no longer offering as much protection as they once would, meaning these flat bonuses are more sought after and ultimately more effective in attaining higher numbers. I can list three right now--

Wazabanae (+25-50 HIT -AND- CRIT) > Attrait (+36 Crit) > Northern Wind (+32 Crit if N, +12 if not.)

Used optimatlly that will give you well over +100 Crit on someone for just over a turn's worth of effort, and that's using a fairly popular class combination (kensei/rogue).

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Skill Scaling: Verglas is the only example that makes sense because otherwise is was mostly the same across the board anyway. Lots of WPN Power + STR + bonus based on Rank for almost every class. Monk is one of the few that come to mind that utilized a variety of stats but they also use Elemental ATK now they still use a variety.

You didn't give any examples of which base class skills are more powerful scaling wise than the promoted class, so I don't know what to say there.

Alright, so, I looked over the skills as they are now, and I'll post some of the more glaring examples, but, in general, from what I've seen 120% is the high end of most promoted skills that don't go for major damage (see: face stomp). And 90-100% is the average for base class skills, with some going as high as 150%.

To make things simple I'll compare a few cllasses and a promo of theirs (archer doesn't really work since neither Arbalest or Magic Gunner got any new skill scalings that you can really compared. Oil Chain was always a str-based additon to your damage. MG is MG.)

(x/y% = elemental atk/weapon scaling)

MA: Highest Power: 150% (Peddling Wheel) Second Highest: 100% (Tied- Geldoren/Light Tomahawk)

Verglas: Highest Power: 165% (Face Stomp--note this has caveats to using it, unlike the above) Second Highest: 120% (4-way tie between all the Bear skills and Axe Kick.)

Curate: Highest Power: 130% (Solar Lance) Second Highest: 100/100% (Tie between Holy Arrow and Kel.)

Priest: Highest Power: 160/100% (Divine Shower - requires an invoke) Second Highest: 120/100% (Tie between Shine Ray and Gentle Torrent).

Soldier: Highest Power: 150% (4-way tie, between Shinken, Retreating Swipe, Turnover, and -Execute-) Second Highest: 145% (Roundtrip)

Demon Hunter: Highest Power: 140% (Rising Tide) Second Highest: 110% (Tie between Chaser and Elemental Rave).

Mage: Highest Power: 100/100% (3-way tie between Fir, Vyd, and Rye) Second Highest: 90/100% (2-way tie between Isendo and Miu).

Evoker: Highest Power 160/100 (4-way tie between every Invocation aside from Overload) Second Highest: 110/100 (Overload)

Sure, it can be argued that some of the promo classes skills also offer utility in exchange for the lesser scaling, but, looking at Verglas and Evoker, whose utility is more often than not simply dealing more damage...it seems odd they'd get scaling about on par with that of their base class. Sure, they still get a flat bonus to their damage, but you'll probably be better off saving your FP if you just want damage out of these skills, and using its base class equivalents instead.

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New Profiles: Image dimensions are fine for me. I don't have trouble cropping a large variety of images. Size is appropriate for the image dimensions and necessary since images are stored on the server now. I like the portrait shifted to the upper left and thinks it looks more interesting that way, myself. It's possible I will introduce more detailed customization options to them in the future but it takes a backseat to everything being worked on to finish the system change. Also be aware that any customization options that require server space (such as uploading additional images) are probably going to be donation items.

I'll be honest, I don't like the new profiles at all. With that out of the way--yeah, cropping images isn't hard, but some will suffer a loss of quality when reduced, which may make certain details more difficult to discern in the picture, but, alas. Having some sort of choice in the portait's positioning would be nice on a case-by-case basis for those who may have a different opinion on the best place for it to be (something to think about for said customization options).

Oh, right. As to -why- I don't like the new profiles? They offer much less room for creativity than the prior profile system, to put it plainly. If you're deadset on never going back to the old profile system, then I suppose we can't do much about it, but, looks to me like a lot of people, myself included, like the old profile system the way it was. You could potentially have both implemented, somehow...maybe. But my vote is 'I want the old profiles back'.

Music: I will probably introduce a new preference setting for this, but honestly it's no different from before where profiles would autoplay music.

...Wasn't there an enforced rule that you couldn't have autoplaying music in a profile? You know, because that's kind of annoying and sometimes there isn't even a method to stop it (that you can plainly see). I know I'd just instantly close or mute SL2 if I saw a profile that autoplayed music from an invisible player. I won't care if there's a toggle set for it, but, until then, it's a nuisance.

Equipment Tab: As a counter point, having equipment not available to be seen has some issues as well, such as clarity, or not knowing things you should be able to tell at a cursory examination that the person is simply not RPing (for example, wearing heavy plate armor, if you're using a sword or an axe or whatever). It could also be useful for catching anyone exploiting an unknown bug; for example, back when the upgrade bug exploit existed, which let you get to higher than intended upgrade amounts.

As a counter-counter point, some people's equipment aren't openly visable, or discernable. Like say, a guy using an axe, but, really, it's a mutated bow that now acts as an axe. Are you suddenly going to glean that that man is -definitely- going to -throw- that axe at you? Or other things like hidden weapons or ones with multiple functions that aren't immediately apparent (see: a finger gun for a Mech). While bug-catching is great, isn't that what GMs have an equip-view verb for? If they couldn't actually glean all the details like we can now, well, consider just giving -them- access to such information.

Given how scaling works, equipment is extremely vital to a build, and being able to read someone's equipment will tell you nearly everything about them now. There's no indication someone even checks you, so you might not even know your build's been say, countered/copied before it's too late. Beyond just expecting people to play nice, there's little to be done about round-about counter play upon seeing the other person's gear, should they not have the foresight to run around naked at all times. (this is a joke)

And that's all I have to say, for now.