"Slydria" Wrote:Long time no see. I'm not back yet but I couldn't help myself and decided to pop on a few times (in secret) on the test server to see the changes for myself and now that I've had a chance to gather my thoughts, I want to make some comments about gripes I have. (I've split it up in sections to make it a little less TL;DR.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
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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.
Music: I will probably introduce a new preference setting for this, but honestly it's no different from before where profiles would autoplay music.
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.
More Options: Your desire has been noted but will have to wait patiently for now. Guild information showing even when toggled off was an error. Moving the window is unlikely to happen; not sure why you would need to, either.
"Slydria" Wrote:Long time no see. I'm not back yet but I couldn't help myself and decided to pop on a few times (in secret) on the test server to see the changes for myself and now that I've had a chance to gather my thoughts, I want to make some comments about gripes I have. (I've split it up in sections to make it a little less TL;DR.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
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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.
Music: I will probably introduce a new preference setting for this, but honestly it's no different from before where profiles would autoplay music.
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.
More Options: Your desire has been noted but will have to wait patiently for now. Guild information showing even when toggled off was an error. Moving the window is unlikely to happen; not sure why you would need to, either.
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Thank you for your feedback.
Eyyyy let's play the quote game.
Here's why Aptitude is the best stat in the game.
Aptitude is ridiculously good because you need points in every stat. If you're a mage who wants to dodge, have decent health, and be able to cast... you'll need WIL, CEL, VIT, LUC, and whatever else your tome might scale on. If you're a smart ducky, you'll take a wind tome for maximum efficiency. However, if you build those three stats alone you'll be lackluster in every other regard having baseline stats for your race (and maybe LEs) which provide a significant flaw in your build. A flaw in this build is that you have no DEF/RES, so if you can't dodge (aka; you're going rogue main class), you are carved apart. Also, you have a lot less skill slots than before. Which means that, by the end, you'll have not enough to properly have a good variety of spells (which is needed. But lord knows magic is dead right now). You'll also be suffering due to every item getting BW soon enough, which means that you'll need STR to carry it all, which means more points diverging from your main build...
So at this point, you'll be wanting, STR, WIL, CEL, DEF, RES, VIT, LUC... Oh lookie there, you have 7 stats that you need to survive. If you reduce all of the points you've currently invested in them by 8, and raise your aptitude by 40 ( because you have a net growth over 40 )... you come out on top and don't actually take any real penalties for taking aptitude. Ontop of this, you also got +8 in every other stat you had. (SKILL, GUI, FAI, SANC) Which means you just got a lot of goodies that, honestly, you needed anyways. (about 3-4 free skill slots from SKI/GUI... HP/FP from FAI/SANC.. resistances to magic from SANC.. etc.) So, overall, you just got a helluva lot better, and hey. Since you're a mage? You were going to probably need them anyways, because you just got bonuses to casting every other type of magic that you could possibly want. Neat. Oh, you also raised your Battleweight, so now you can hold your stuff better and not take penalties and yeahhhhh.
STRENGTH
STR is nigh useless right now because most people only take it for Battle weight/Encumberance. That's all its there for. If your weapon scales off of strength? Fantastic, you get a bonus for having it. Otherwise? You're kind of SoL. Hell, a fair amount of weapons (See: Mostly all of them) that once scaled off of STR now scale off of marginally less strength than they used to. Now going into territory where they're worth about 30-70% STR and the rest in other stats (Like that immobilize bow. STR/DEF/SKI). It needs to give SOMETHING besides just... well. FIRE ATK + BW.
WIL
WIL is kind of a.. meh stat. 5 FP per WIL, 1 skill slot per 10 WIL. That's all that WIL gives. Know what's basically WIL, but better? SKI and GUI give 1 skill slot every 5 (for whatever reason) and WIL is just sitting there, not providing nearly as much of a bonus as those two, and giving 1 every 10. Not to mention that the 5 FP is 'useful', but can easily be subjugated by having FAI.. or even SANC (which most races will end up taking because their racial skills are really fucking good). Hell, WIL is suffering the exact same thing as STR wherein tomes used to scale 100% off of WIL, but now its usually 30-70% WIL, with the rest in another stat (or stats). This is extremely evident right off the bat after the first basic tomes .. where if memory serves, it goes from 60/60 scaling to something like 30 WIL and 70 of the stat tied to the tome. It only really goes downhill from there. (Mugendai, for instance, is 30 WIL 70 sanctity. This tome deals light damage.)
How do you fix WIL? Well, simple. You nerf SKI and GUI (since most people who want those stats will TAKE both anyways) to give 1 skill slot every 10. Then you raise WIL to giving 1 skill slot every 5. This will deal with a MAJOR issue that it has right now. Just see where that puts it in the next wave of testing.
VIT
Vitality is uh.. okay? Let's lower it down to 8 HP per (to make an even 10 HP if you have sanctity too) We have people with HP in the 800s... and even more people with HP in the 1.1k+s. Not that it matters too much whenever people can literally do 300+ damage per hit against your 40 defense but hey. Whatever floats your boat. The main reason I say this is because I casted a friggin CM windslasher with Dualwield Desert Winds and the best scaling I could get for my stats (60/60/60) with them.. and the best I could dish out was about 500 damage against someone with minimal RES. This person then proceeded to dish out 900 damage, Knock me down, and lower my defense by 20. So, clearly, somethings gotta change.
GUI
Where to begin with this stat. Aside from it's overbearing importance to daggers (which I'm fine with), a lot of daggers actually seem to just scale 100% with GUI, or have it as their major stat. Having a dagger with 'low power' doesn't really matter either, whenever you get to critical hit someone with it and deal upwards of 200-300 damage with it, and can attack quite a few times in one round (generally resulting in a ONE ROUND KO).
How do we fix it? Reduce critical damage on daggers. That's.. literally it. They're critting for more damage than they were before. [The worst offender I've seen so far was 130% crit damage on its own.. and it only got better with GUI and Deadly Arms (40 GUI made it into 2.2x critical damage).] Since daggers already have the dagger wielder scaling off of guile.. they shouldn't be getting a triple wammy for just existing with a knife. Just reducing knives down to 110% or 115% critical hit should bring them back more in line with how they were. (Not that before they didn't utterly annhilate people but hey. It's better than it is now.)
But there are a ton of just.. innate things that give +CRIT chance. FAITH and LUC isn't going to be an inherent thing for everyone to have/want. However SKILL is a stat that pretty much everyone needs. So much so that not having it generally puts you on the road to downfall. Even mages need it (or guile) to an extent to have a decent amount of skill slots. Things that can upgrade CRIT.
Upgrades to Weapons, Enchantments, Weapon Parts (major issue here), Classes (Rogue gives +30 for quite a few rounds, VA can give +60 if they build up, Ghosts get +20 hit/crit just for having a light weapon, Kensei just get to negate 15 crit) and the list goes on.. and on.. and on... I have a bow right now that has 35% critical hit baseline, then I get like an extra +30 crit just from using a bow. That can get made even worse if I'm a rogue, etc.
What raises Critical evade outside of stats? Uh.. Black Knights get +50???? Boneheart is +25??? Hey, doesn't Seiryuu give +10 or 15 if you have him installed?????
Yeah. This isn't a good thing. Lower Critical hit overall since it has more things giving bonuses to it outside of stats or raise the stat efficiency of critical evade (not that it will change much since not everyone will build FAI and LUC).
Skill Scaling
Witty retort about Shinken getting 150% weapon scaling ontop of being able to get your stat scaling on your weapon (*1.5 because reasons). This is exactly the sort of shit as to what people mean whenever "Why do base class skills hurt for more than the actual promotion class stuff?" I don't feel the need to list every example of this, but soldier, Archer, and other classes need to be re-evaluated.. and Mages need to get their damage scaling fucktupled to actually be able to deal with the massive amount of nerfs they got with the stat update.
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.
Quote: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.
Quote: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!).
Quote: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.
Quote: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.
Quote: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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Quote: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.)
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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Quote: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'.
Quote: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.
Quote: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)
I normally just lurk when it comes to the forums, but I feel it is important to give an example of a character that wouldn't have visible equipment. I play a mechanation that has all her weaponry installed and hidden within her body. I'd be rather surprised to find someone seeing the weapons she has equipped through her shell. Even a normal person can pretty easily hide a variety of their weapons, like handguns, daggers, fans and even some fist weapons and smaller swords, depending on the size of the user and the location.
While I would like to weigh in on stats, I did not test around with enough of them on enough characters to give an experienced opinion on the entire matter and must leave it to others. All I can say for certain on is I only ticked up enough strength to get her battleweight up because there was no benefit beyond that.
Quote: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.
Well, I don't really agree that it's because of 'comfort zones' but because having a little bit of everything avoids suffering fatal flaws (too little HP, FP, Skill Slots, BW, etc.) but considering the recent changes, I'll leave that go.
Quote: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.
Fair enough, I guess I'll just wait for how accessories and such adding Battle Weight works out.
Quote: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.
I don't think that giving it more FP or Skill Pool is actually going to help enough. If anything, that would simply cause people to get even less of it than they already might. (Save for certain weapon users.)
WIL used to be the big stat for magic users all around, now it's not really special, nothing it has can't be achieved elsewhere for other (usually greater) benefits.
I'm not saying other stats shouldn't be helpful for spells but I still think that Willpower should be a stat that you want for magic damage, not just FP, infliction or some Skill slots. It's just silly to me that in order to be a good magician, you don't really need that pesky WIL at all.
Here's an example of what I mean:
Assume we're using a Zeroraid (60% WIL/60% SKI, 5 Power) and cast Miu (Rank 5; 100% Scaled WPN ATK, 90% Ice ATK) as the example here with 30 WIL and 20 SKI caster.
Quote:(X% of [scaled stat(s)]*1.5) + (Power + Upgrades)
30 * 0.6 = 18
20 * 0.6 = 12
20 * 0.9 = 18
([18 + 12 + 18] * 1.5) + 5 = 77
And now one with 10 WIL and 40 SKI.
Quote:10 * 0.6 = 6
40 * 0.6 = 24
40 * 0.9 = 36
([6 + 24 + 36] * 1.5) + 5 = 104
Unsurprisingly, this means for Miu, Skill is far more valuable than Will. (2.25 damage per Scaled SKI vs 0.9 damage per Scaled WIL)
If you want to be a dedicated mage, you should focus on the Element's matching Stat before even considering investing largely in WIL. If you want to be a balanced mage, you should spread out evenly but leave WIL as a dump stat (you'll get the FP from Sanctity and Faith and the Skill Slots from Skill and Guile).
Quote: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.
I thought this basically spoke for itself but perhaps that was just lazy of me.
My reasoning for my gripe is VIT is more valuable than say DEF/RES.
For one, it is just more effective - Every point is 10 HP, no questions asked. Every point of DEF/RES is 1% Damage Reduced, the effectiveness of which varies based on damage taken.
But for 1 DEF/RES to reduce more damage than 1 VIT provides in HP would take more than 1000 Damage.
Second, because VIT does not care for damage type while DEF/RES only matter if it's Physical for DEF and Magical for RES.
Third, there are methods to shave some points off DEF/RES (Rampaging enchant, Aerial Razor, etc.) but for VIT itself, there's no real debuff that cuts down VIT like that. (Maybe Poison counts but a person with low VIT and DEF/RES will die as quickly as one with High VIT and low DEF/RES.)
However after doing some calculations for this, I must admit the difference is not as great as I initially thought. 6 HP per point might be a tad low, how about 8 HP per point?
Quote: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.
Well, I suppose so, it did used to be mostly STR for fighters and WIL for casters and now Skills with Elemental ATK are a better alternative. (Black Knight skills like Crescent Rook, Bright Bishop and Board Shaker for instance.)
Quote: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.
My bad about the examples. Here's a couple of comparisions:
Quote:Peddling Wheel - Martial Artist Skill
Strong damage (150% WPN ATK)
Decent AoE
Moves the user
Compatible with Elemental Impact and Urawaza: Sends all hit enemies Airborne
vs
Quote:Point Kick and Rising Kick - Verglas Skills
Decent damage (120% WPN ATK)
Single target
Sends enemy/yourself Airborne
Compatible with Chimera Style and Ice Point Greaves
Quote:Crystal Rose - Duelist Skill
Strong damage (70% Ice ATK, 120% WPN ATK)
Good AoE, area can be moved
Compatible with Elemental Impact
Deals Ice Damage
vs
Quote:Toiken - Kensei Skill
Decent damage (115% WPN ATK)
Awkward AoE, can be adjusted with + and -
Compatible with Sacred Art: Deals bonus Wind damage (Unsure how strong this is though)
Slash Damage.
To be fair, it does seem like things are fairly even for the most part though. The weaker skills do usually have caveats to them, such as being able to inflict Knockdown.
Quote: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.
Sure, most images for characters are generally that sort of shape but sometimes you get those expections, the ones from a diagonal angle or are more sprawled out which you can't really fit without making someone an amputee via cropping or a good loss in quality.
Other than that, how come images are stored on the server now? What's wrong with links to picture sharing sites like imgur?
Invariably the elemental ATK stat is more valuable in situations where your casting tool has equal scaling, but the general thought behind it is that you'll want both WIL and your primary elemental ATK stat if you're specializing in an element due to the softcap giving diminishing returns. Being more generalized is still possible, but more difficult.
"Slydria" Wrote:VIT Stuff
This behaves the same way as DEF/RES do currently; HP is more valuable for single hits, but DEF/RES are more valuable for extended fights in most circumstances. As for changing the value, it's a possibility, but I don't know how necessary it is ATM.
"Slydria" Wrote:Scaling Stuff
I tried to be consistent with the skill scaling but I mostly winged it so I don't think every skill is perfect the way it is. That said, my general thought with how much scaling they got boiled down to;
- How hard is it to use?
- Does it have any other significant secondary benefits or situational bonuses (ie, combos)?
- How often is the skilled used now?
For example, with Peddling Wheel, all it really does is do damage, so it has pretty high scaling. It can set you up for other skills with Urawaza but that's situational. As for Point Kick and Rising Kick, giving them average scaling was because they also apply kick damage skills, they set you up for combos, and the Momentum cost can be lowered via Chimera Style. So, having equal or better scaling than something like Peddling Wheel just sort of invalidates Peddling Wheel's existence.
For Crystal Rose vs Toiken, Toiken's Sacred Art bonus is 50% of Wind ATK as a second hit, which is overall weaker than Crystal Rose's scaling, especially since it also gets reduced by armor (might change in the future, I don't know). Toiken does have a few other benefits over Crystal Rose, however, such as applying Hidden Cut, getting increased by Battle Flow, and setting up Sacred Art. As I said, I don't think I got every scaling on every skill perfect, but hopefully this helps you understand the logic behind the decisions.
"Slydria" Wrote:Other than that, how come images are stored on the server now? What's wrong with links to picture sharing sites like imgur?
There are two reasons why.
1) Because the interface was changed to appear on the map control, it can't use http images.
2) Like with the body of the HTML profiles it was possible to add malicious scripts via the image http link, and scrubbing both the HTML profile while allowing 'most' CSS/html, would have been difficult to impossible. Which, you may think that no one in the community would do that, but if I were to (for example) want to publish the game on Steam, such a security risk would be a very big problem. Either way, it was in my best interest to change it, so I did.
Perhaps we'll get more complex control options for it in the future, but I can't really mess with it right now, as I'm working very hard on finishing up the Great Reckoning so we can finally put it on live.
I believe that for WIL scaling abilities, a good way to encourage others to build WIL is to make most tomes just scale WIL even harder, whilist making their other scalings a bit lower currently you can punch fire at somebody for...really good damage, with just STR and maybe 15-20 wil, as long as you are using a STR scaling spell-edge weapon, lets take the sword for example, being 60% str, 60% wil, perhaps, this could maybe changed to 40% str, and 80% WIL.
Also, taking the Rose whip into an example would be good as well
Rose whip is 50% WIL, 25% SKI and 25% LUC scaling.
My lightning based spellblade has currently, 25 WIL, 30 STR, 47 SKI and 52 LUC
This means that they are benefitting mostly from the LUC in this instance, because LUC adds to lightning damage, this lets her deal surprisingly really good amounts of damage, this can be toned down I feel like, as the LUC adds to lightning damage, the lightning damage itself lets her catch up to most dedicated mages, but only in that specific element.
This means Rose whip can be something like 60% WIL, 20% LUC and 20% SKI(Or, 70% 15% 15%) and a dedicated Mage would be able to catch up in damage to the spellblade's specific element (Which there are drawbacks for running a rather specific elemental build)
"Neus" Wrote:Which, you may think that no one in the community would do that, but if I were to (for example) want to publish the game on Steam, such a security risk would be a very big problem.
I can see it now. Two years down the line Devy will say enough is enough and switch from Byond to Steam. The price? 15$ Along with real money in-game purchases, it'll be practically the new FF14 and thousands will flock to it. A 5% cut on the money would be a really friendly thing to do, my friend Neus.
Aside from that, I offer nothing valuable to this whole thread as I can't play it (still looks neat, at least! my character Onirc will be the strongest with her ice wings and frozen toads, just sayin').
"Nothing good ever comes of her laughter. And she's always laughing."
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