After a lot of thoughtful debate among a number of staff, we have decided to remove two-handed daggers from the game. We will be doing this over time to give characters time to adjust, and we are also introducing a number of options for you.
Why?
They empower LS hunters and trolloc rogues in a way that's detrimental to PK and that compounds because the access to get them increases relative to the level of play that you put out. E.g. top tier trolloc rogues (as far as kills) and Wolfbrothers are the most likely candidates to take advantage of the practices from them. Even with the recent survival change for trollocs (which we think is working very well), trolloc rogues can easily get 53 mvs per tic versus 44 with 1h sblades, so we believe this change will be quite playable for trolloc rogues even though they have fewer pracs than LS rogues.
The biggest long term issue of removing dirks as a class is their inherent value as top of the market. So to remove them you have to also maintain their current market value. Feneon and I put our heads together on it and came up with the following:
The changes
- Dirks and steel sai no longer load in the game
- Dirks are no longer craftable
- Dirks and steel sai have both had their stats reduced such that they are sub-par to one-handed daggers. You can continue to us them until they decay if you prefer the practice advantage to combat stats (though you will not be able to replace them once they degrade). You can find the stats in the weapons spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
- You can trade in both dirks and steel sai at the weapon crafters in Sidona and the Dark Fortress. If you give the dirk or steel sai to the appropriate crafter's apprentice, you can get:
- Dirks: A silver crafting token, a vial, and a basilard
- Steel sai: A crafting token, a vial, and a random high end dagger
- You get 250 TPs instead of 3 tokens and 3 qps. This will allow you to e.g., purchase surcoats or lace shirts at the TP trader, or trade them for qps.
- (Steel sai are not tradeable at the weapons collector)
- Dark oak javelins are now 1h instead of 2h (pb has been adjusted accordingly)
It is live as of right now.
Obviously this is a big change for rogues who have been used to two-handed daggers and the pracs they afford, but you'll notice a big shift in our PK and balance philosophy is that we think pracs should matter, and tradeoffs should be meaningful. Two-handed daggers were just too strong in this regard. We think this set of options should give you plenty of fair rewards to minimize the pain from the changes and help you adapt.