[Autumn]

Its been a good couple of weeks since the 2.49 version dropped onto Live and now that a decent portion of the builds have been developed and put into practice, let me just explain a lot of my frustrations and concerns I've had since all the changes dropped onto the test server.

I would very much like to make it clear that 2.49 has brought us a lot of beneficial changes as well, infact a majority of the update I am all a fan for, those being things like:

-Weapon scaling adjustments/tags
-Stat readjustments, causing hit/evade builds to not rely on luck

-Accuracy/Evade normalization and rebalancing.

-Magic Gunner's mini-rework

-Avoidable secondary effects

-Basic Attack and Damage system overhaul

-Multi-hitting no longer being a nightmare to balance

All of these changes here, without going into too much detail about them, have all been lovely. All of these changes will be overly helpful towards balancing the game and finally normalizing the power scale of the likes of Hexer and Tanky damage dealers.

But easily the biggest, most expansive and unfortunately the most flawed change of them all is the evasion system rebalance and overhaul. There is a huge slieu of areas to cover when addressing this update, but lets start with the benefits I wish to see preserved moving into any other system, those being:

-Avoidable Secondary Effects
-On-Evade effects proccing on glancing/evasion

These two effects should remain to some capacity, they've been two very beneficial bonuses that will serve to keep autohits in line no matter what system it is ultimately shifted to.

Now lets go into the flaws of the new system.

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Evade is too Good and Polarizing

Simply put, Evade is much too polarizing now to deal with, unless your role was very explicitly just a support that only relied on interacting with your allies, you will now be required to invest tons upon tons of hit to interact with your opponents with, otherwise you will hard lose a matchup simply because you were not allowed to hit them. This, to me is a very toxic gameplay pattern that will only detract from the game's longevity.

If you cannot hit your opponent, and do not have access to a reliable source of damage, you lose, end of the equation. And that feels really really bad, this is why I think that the current evade system is too toxic for the game.

Because evade is too good, the existing counter-play is to stack as much hit as humanly possible so that you can reliably hit your opponent, and in doing so I have felt very very bad for my opponents already because I simply will not play to the evade game in its current state, infact no one will, leading into my next point.

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The Actual Numbers

It feels weird to say, but the reason why Evade is weak, is because its simply too good. Because the counter-play to Evade is to stack hit as high as possible to reliably move past it, evade builds end up feeling weak because the counter-play is available to so many more builds now, practically everyone can stack hit, with blessed, Guile and various other easy-to-obtain hit mods being available to them on a whim, the best builds are just removing some of their other stats in favor of these ones. Granted this has taken down some defensive builds, but not all of them, leaving the best ones untouched.

Lets put one of my builds into light, a Verglas who, as a papilion, is allowed absurd SKI investment, but 60 scaled is not unreachable to other races either.



To note, they are using a blessed weapon, so they're gaining 25 hit from blessed + divine sign, 10 hit for their fist from Trained fists, and up to 20 hit from FAO, the result?



296% hit is my maximum, since flanking bonus ignores the cap but chivalry does not I'm showing my hit from the back here, this is a REALLY high number for this new system, like not a lot of people are getting this much easily, but its still there for those who scale from FAI (Such as FP intensive classes like MAs or summoners would be)

Putting another thing into view, this is evade as a comparison when I am fully stacked, Unarmored Body for +10, FAO +20, Hare Stance for +30, 26 evade torso.



Evade doesn't even come remotely close to the bonuses you can get for hit. 

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No One Wants to Deal with it

Since no one wants to be the 150-200 hit Andy who just gets evade walled and dies because they can't hit anyone, the current flock of builds are gravitating towards the high end of the hit spectrum, or they're relying entirely on evasion-ignoring mechanics to just bypass the need entirely.

Putting a few into example are excel-crash fire mages spamming Fir/Explosion, Firebirds utilizing the best parts of their kit or throwing bombs/grenades on repeat until the target dies, of course a lot of this is met with various other forms of counter-play, but the mass result is your evade build is invalidated by all of the above most of the time.

Because the general populace does not want to get evade-walled and for very very good reason, evade ends up weak, and tank ends up being safer as a result, turning us right back to square one when people end up deciding their builds.

Another thing that I can note, is that in the current landscape of builds, if you are playing as an evade build, you die in like 3-6 hits unlike before, where evasion would at least keep you in the game for a reliable amount of time, especially since 80% of the populace wasn't just hitting you through your mechanic.

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Conclusion

In conclusion here, there are a lot of frustrations to be had with the new evade system, and I encourage many more people to share their own thoughts on the matter, because I am of the opinion that if none of this changes, evasion is gonna detract so, so much from the game.

My opinion is that I preferred the old, more reliable evade system, but I am also a fan of some of the changes that were made, such as avoidable secondary effects and the hit/evade caps, I would like to see Evade being higher as a base (such as through buffing torso items) with the trade-off that you cannot truly evade autohits anymore, with the reduction being as high as 45% with no additional modifiers and further segregate who and who can't evade.

I think that 45-50% reduction would be fair if the stat was more reliable, especially if it procs on-miss effects still, which allows the likes of Duelist, Kensei and Martial Artist to thrive from those effects.

[Fern]

Currently not feeling up to writing a long post on the matter, but I wanted to drop a quick two cents.
 
I agree with most of the points brought up in the initial post. Specially the part where Evade being too good actually ends up making it one of the worst choices in the game, due to the reason that most people feel obligated to counter-play it as much as humanly possible.
 
I'm of the opinion that the Hit vs Evade match-up feels more polarizing than it did before the rework. Despite not being "tank" characters, dodgies still had their semblance of DEF/RES, usually from the racial base + Aptitude bonuses in addition to whatever other mods they'd coincidentally have.
 
The DEF/RES nerf, while not massive, is still fairly noticeable. It not only affected tanks, but dodge characters as well. People that were made of glass became paper, which would result in hit stackers doing far more damage to dodge characters compared to the gameplay before the rework.
 
I believe that while this isn't the sole reason as to why hit stackers eliminate dodge characters much faster than before, it's part of it.
 
I have been building some new setups for my characters in accordance to the recent update, and most of them feel like if they don't have reliable hit stacking to get around Evade most of the time, they will be unable to do damage for most of the match. The exception (on my end) is when my character is a crit damage build, that's when I feel more comfortable with having like 40% hit rate on average against someone that's a dodge character, or even 30%. Because when the hit does land, it's pretty big.

But what if I'm not a critical damage build?

It ends up feeling more obligatory to stack hit at that point, because the dodge character will race most of my damage fairly often at that otherwise. Basic attackers actually have a better time than they did before, for the reason that they naturally build hit and crit at once, so they don't really have to stress much about the damage IMO. But other build archetypes don't usually do this sort of thing, instead relying on magic damage or special skills, etc.

And special skills cannot critical. Magic (usually) does not critical. Dodge characters tend to be glass cannons, so you end up wanting to make sure that your damage can compete with them.
 
I think that if Evade wasn't so "glaringly good", then there wouldn't be much of an incentive in the community scene to stack hit rate to high infinity. Before the rework, from my own perspective and experience of things, building hit rate didn't feel so overly mandatory unless you were a basic attacker for the reason that you didn't have to fear your build being entirely invalidated if you didn't have a high amount of it. I'm aware that this also led to the "doomwall no SKI meta", but that was a different system where DEF/RES worked differently compared to now.
 
Make a tank character without a class like BK or Ghost in the new system and try to take in the damage in the PVP scene - you'll often end up feeling like your character isn't a tank at all. Sometimes you'll feel like they're not durable in the slightest, in the more extreme cases.

Despite this, going DEF/RES currently seems more optimal to me in this meta, for the reason that people are stacking so much hit you won't actually be able to execute the "dodge" part of your character in the PVP scene.

As for solutions, I unfortunately don't think I have any. This is a tough topic, and I doubt easy ones will come up. People will likely present (and have presented) very wildly different solutions that won't be commonly agreed upon is what I imagine, which isn't necessarily bad but I feel is part of what shows how difficult this topic is.

Originally in the survey for the systems, I was going to vote glancing blows then refrained from doing so for the reason that I didn't feel comfortable with most of them. If there was a 'none of the above' choice, I would've chosen that instead.

I understand the want for dodging to feel like actual dodging instead of 'alternate tanking' (which I honestly think it already is that way again simply due to being able to completely negate damage/glancing existing), but I feel the current system doesn't actually work that well in SL2's particular gameplay scheme. You could argue "but most RPGs have it very similar to this, so it should work here too!" but as far as I understand SL2 is -inspired- by some games rather than copying them, which also leads to it having its own general gameplay feel. There's also the part where the game has a competitive aspect, unlike those most other RPGs, and that's also a fairly big influence when determining how things should and shouldn't work.
 
I doubt my ramble is well-structured, as I had mentioned earlier, and I don't necessarily think I'm entirely on point about everything I just said. But I wanted to share my opinion in hopes it could be of use in some way.
 
edit: i ended up making a long post anyway bruh

[Maksimum_Fire]

I'm here to make an actual short post (love you fern <3)

this feels like some weird attempt to "return to fire emblem" but in the worst ways. Glancing blows are like the reverse of truehit in 2RN fire emblem in that your real hit rate- for the purpose of doing relevant damage and being able to inflict effects, at least- rounds in a middling way. If you have a small chance to hit, well, you could still get a glancing blow and deal a teensy bit o' damage. If you have a high chance, strap in and be ready to get disappointed cause chances are that 80% hit chance is probably more like 61 for a clean hit.

yeah I don't really like it.

I'm with fern in the sense that I think the evade portion of the balance survey was sorely lacking. I selected glancing blows with a written caveat that as it was I thought it would be unpleasant, but none of the options seemed really any good.

Regardless of whether it's difficult to do, I think reverting the failed changes until a better solution can be found would be best.

[Snake]

That's why I wanted to focus a little on how to make Glancing Blow not a benefit for Evade people, but yet another gamble a dodgie needs to take. It's just not really a fun mechanic, and yes, I voted thinking it would be at the very least expanded a little more upon, but the update came out a tad incomplete and full of bugs. We heard the promise for hotfixes but they can't come any sooner. I feel a little bad we only have one man working on them all, but it's not really something that we can have a lot of patience on, given this was a little too major compared to let's say, some OP rework or crafting rehaul.

Either that, or people overestimated things too much, slash, voted wrong for what they truly wanted. No one really voiced out their real needs and wants in a sensitive way, at the very least for me.

I've been trying to weave things to a certain direction since the moment the test server was hammered down, but it pains me to say that the nosedive the balance took in general thanks to it is, on first glance, unsalvageable. I don't believe so, but it may be if the major problems with it don't get addressed ASAP.

I hope everyone can at least psyche up and see if we can slowly trim this to something a little more fun on both sides. This is not a project a single person should decide for everyone, or else this miasma of exhaustion and frustration will only permeate further. As flawed as my argument is at this rate, I still want to believe that this can go a ways. All we need is just another interactive attempt to tackle down everything that needs to be adjusted.

There's still plenty, plenty of things that do until this is ideal. I just hope deeply that this is not the final product. Or else, welp, ow. I really don't wanna join the 'fuck go back' chorus, but at the same time I don't wanna jump in a thorn-filled pit on pure optimism.

TL;DR

I believe more balance-fus will probably put to the table what needs to be bapped down, or bumped up. And I also believe the only way to fix the morale of SL2 in general is having Dev devote his full attention to our requests/balance-fus. That's something we can only sacrifice a sheep over an altar for.

[MakeshiftWalrus]

I likewise agree that playing into the new dodge changes are awful, and I say that fully knowing that I used to play nothing but low-skill auto-hitters. I'm obviously not alone in having about 95% of my roster completely shafted by the change, and that's to be expected of a wide change like this.

However, builds that I genuinely enjoyed before are dead in the water, unable to fit in the points to hit even minorly evasive characters reliably unless I want to suffer in either offensive, or defensive stats. Even so, some class-setups, such as my favored combination of Evoker/Void Assassin, either embrace Excelgraph/explosion, or hope to God nobody pops an evade buff even with 55 skill to my name.

So all in all, I'm not a big fan of the new evasion system.

[Balor]

So a slightly nuanced take. I feel that all the scaling changes were nice, I still appreciate the removal of luc from the evade and hit equation. I believe that provided a lot of diversity to builds, and such.

However evade being too good means that people have all but taken to finding ways to just ignore it. Whether through evasion ignoring attacks, or by virtue of gouging hit which is much easier to do than gouging out evasion. Meaning that item diversity has changed for the better, however build diversity has not changed.

Observing fights and testing in PVP I have found that evasion builds no longer have carefully balanced managing of evasion buffs, and have moreso turned into games of rocket tag. Where damage races or keep away have taken center stage. While both options were already strong in the previous meta, and iterations of the game. Damage races are now more prevalent now. Which means that people will be driven to try to shut down builds rather than diversify. Falling into the same cycle we dealt with previously.

That's not to mention how oppressive PVE can feel. While threatening, it doesn't seem to matter how high I and others stack evasion, when certain mobs consistently and reliably manage to hit me anyway.

I feel that we should do some slight reversions to the old evade system. To allow for better and more meaningful use of evasion. I would need to think of more meaningful options to remedy things, and I feel bad for offering little in constructive input and more my observations of the current meta.

But I feel some adjustments need to be made that are not nerfing hit, or buffing evasion. But rather giving value back to autohits without invalidating the choice to dodge entirely.

As at current, the general state of PVP has simply been finding ways to work around the evasion with debuffs, and high damage builds to avoid engaging with evasion and glancing blows. Where perhaps buffing evasion DR was the more reasonable option.

[sadbot]

I was a bit concerned about the changes to autohit and evasion mechanics from the get go, but reserved judgement until I'd seen it in action for a while given the sheer amount of moving parts with such a change. You've pretty much summed up my opinions now though, after seeing it in practice a bit.

Hit vs evade is way too polarizing now, it's the worst part of the basic attacker vs evasion stacker matchup from before the rework now forced onto everybody. Evasion is incredibly oppressive, especially to basic attackers less likely to have an evasion ignoring option, while the properly put together hit stacking counter play is just as oppressive to evasion if not more. Whichever side is the loser, it is so very unfun to lose because you can't hit or can't evade after dumping everything into it.

On top of that, in the case of many builds (my own being probably one of the worst offenders in verglas), autohitters neglecting this numbers race entirely are still alive and well due to a small but reliable evasion ignoring toolkit, allowing them to disregard hit entirely and dump stats elsewhere. I would like to add my own two cents on this part especially. Even though some autohit builds are almost unchanged as a result of this and quite well off as things go, they are now incredibly boring to play. Verglas is also a prime example of this, your playstyle against evasion now going from any number of mixed and matched verglas skills from the three styles to rapid kick, ice point guard boosted icicle spear, and one other thing of choice during the frozen debuff that follows. Personally, it has killed my love for the class.


I've seen countless suggestions for how to go about fixing the issues with the new system but personally, I'm of the mind to just revert the main problem causer here in evasion dodging everything.

Scaling changes? Great.
Gun and magic gunner rework? Great.
Toning down hit and evasion buffs and debuffs and capping their stacking? Great. (Although maybe cap debuffs too lmao)
Most of the other small miscellaneous changes? Great.

My suggestion?

• Most importantly, revert autohits to not being fully dodge-able.
  
• Maintain the 60% glancing dr.
  
• Maintain the ability for glancing to dodge inflicts and secondary effects, in some non-guaranteed fashion.
  
• Remove evasion ignore from most or all skills that newly acquired it.
  
• Maintain the def and res changes.
  
• Maintain the luck changes, but give it some sort of boost not relating to hit or evade. This has already been asked for in the current system, and would be even more vital to the basic attack builds that need to invest in it for crit if they're the only ones able to be full dodged again. Maybe even give skill a boost too for the same reason.
  

The main idea here is that autohits return to being, well...autohits, which removes the issue of evasion counter play being absolutely mandatory, be it through oppressive hit stacking or boring evasion ignore spam. At the same time, evasion maintains a horse in the race against those tanky autohitters that were always on a different level previously, mainly due to tanks' oppressive 60-70% dr being cut down and evasion's being doubled. Evasion's requires a bit less stat investment for similar dr and has the added possibility of dodging inflicts and secondary effects, but it isn't guaranteed dr and has a bit more counter play as well.

Long story short, I think the numbers are in a good spot right now. I think the system they play into is bad, and very annoying and unfun for the loser and often the winner as well. The all or nothing of hit vs evade with full dodge is just a bad time for all involved, and the two roll glancing blow system is just a band aid to this bad time at best. It's still very all or nothing regardless of the two roll system. I would even suggest removing full dodge from basic attacks, but that's another matter entirely that I am not in any position to make any kind of suggestion on, mostly because it becomes a bit hard to differentiate mechanically and thematically from autohits at that point.

[Senna]

Two weeks before the first fix patch and we're singing the revert song. Even as a one-man developer, that's quite discouraging considering how many hours he spends on it.

I'd rather give it a few months' worth and see the outcome than before deciding if I want to join that change song. As it is, it's still new and needs adjustments.

There are many problems with the current game system as some things are overtuned and some are just weak. I don't believe we should be considering a system reversal as it's only been two weeks with no balance update as yet, I can't say I don't agree with some of the points made.

Some classes are just more blessed in a hit and evade than others. This forces people to overcap and tries to contest those.

Evasion ignoring is too common and it's getting out of hand. Use two classes with enough spells and skills that ignore evasion and you find yourself not needing to build Skill, period.

GUI is a monster at the moment. This being uncapped can push people to the amount of hit whereas it's almost undodgeable.

BLIND is either brokenly good or useless. You're able to lower someone that probably had a 200% hit on you to 50%~75% if they're not a race with a golden eye.

Some of the older systems are interfering with the current which also makes things a lot crazier than they should be. It lets players abuse certain ideas such as smoke, plants, torso and so on that weren't being used as much as before. 

I believe the system still needs a few months, including balancing and patching before we can really come to a decision about how it is compared to the prior as there are still a lot of things that slipped into the new system that is being abused at the moment.

[WaifuApple]

We tested it again and again on the test server, but now it's on live, this is more than just some test that it is proper to say "wait it out, you should give it a few more months" for.

We are now running with a new system that doesn't seem to be being taken positively, with far reaching effects on the willingness of event runners to run events / make mobs, the ability of people to want to play the game in general - and this is the system we now have potentially affecting people's IC.

So far we've seen note of bug fixes and added suggestions, but people are no doubt getting increasingly anxious, wanting to see or hear more about addressing concerns about a system that has people's desire to fight at an all time low.

If there was ever a time to make a rally cry and express points and feelings, it would be now. Because it's not just a test anymore - and shouldn't be treated as if that is the case. People want to get back to having fun and working with a system that supplements their RP, rather than just draining their energy.

[Miller]

Two weeks before the first fix patch and we're singing the revert song. Even as a one-man developer, that's quite discouraging considering how many hours he spends on it.

I'd rather give it a few months' worth and see the outcome than before deciding if I want to join that change song. As it is, it's still new and needs adjustments.

There are many problems with the current game system as some things are overtuned and some are just weak. I don't believe we should be considering a system reversal as it's only been two weeks with no balance update as yet, I can't say I don't agree with some of the points made.

I apologize but this comes off heavily as an elaborate strawman as a majority of the arguments presented against this system in previous posts were not tackled whatsoever in this post. Dev has mentioned he expected this sort of situation to pop up from the beginning when he decided to do these sweeping changes where players may or may not be satisfied with the changes presented and a vocal part of the community happens to disagree with the new system for evasion.

One of the core issues with the new evasion systems presented is the fact that you MUST build hit. You either have 60 scaled skill or you're either dealing with 60% Damage Reduction or effectively 100% damage reduction; heavily pooling the momentum economy in the other sides favor if even a singular move fails to nail both hit checks. This is only the icing on the cake though, because your true hit rate is effectively Hit Rate ^ 2 to completely ignore glancing/evasion. This turns a 50% hit rate into a 25% hit rate, 75% into 56%, Maksim addressed this in his post, as this is the absolute reverse function of similar systems incorporated in Fire Emblem to make high and low odds more/less favorable than they actually are in a strategy game.

Glancing Blows as a system also, 1) Ignores a fair amount of inflicts and on hits/on critical, including Fleur and a multitude of statuses without any semblance of status resistance for the cost of a singular stat and likely a torso slot after evade has been removed from luck.

This system would have to be reworked even further to function as hit is required to dominate evade by a fair margin for it to be remotely fair as 60% DR while ignoring inflicts or 100% evasion with no strings attached is completely absurd. 

Not to mention this also applies on every single instance of damage including 'basic hits' as it is, it's incredibly discouraging to get a critical on someone only for a superfluous glancing to deny the extra momentum you'd get from that strike. 

As Apple just mentioned, this has been in the works for a while; it hasn't been just 'two weeks', it's been a lot longer than that and the people who have initially had heavy doubts about this system begrudgingly accepted it being pushed into live hoping it'd be better in action. So it's definitely the right time to voice our discontent if any at all.

With that said, my personal desire was for the old style of evasion to be kept with a few adjustments to the DR + evasion allowing them to dodge on hit effects with some exceptions. (No, this system would only apply to autos.) The reasoning for the old system was because it encouraged building hit without making it borderline mandatory, while the new system as it is, is a polarizing system that enforces a 'hit tax' that is practically mandatory unless you somehow have every single evasion ignoring skill available.

I can go on and on about my discontent with this system but I'll pause here because I feel like others in this thread have put my thoughts into better words than I ever will.

TLDR; Glancing Blows as a system is a polarizing system that lies to your face about your true hit rate and enforces a mandatory hit tax, forcing every player to run at least 60 scaled SKI and/or bloodhunt/blessed to avoid running into DR that ignores a fair amount of inflicts that's even higher than most tanks sporting BK and 60 scaled DEF.