Hi all - our small working group (the blackest of ajahs, I assure you) wants to preview some of our thinking for the upcoming weapon and item changes with you, at a high level. This is also an experiment in sharing upcoming changes ahead of time to see how it goes. Our goal is to build a shared understanding of the direction and our thinking in the spirit of trust and transparency. This is made easier by the fact that these aren't coding changes with an unknown delivery date, so I want to stress you shouldn't set the expectation that this will be the norm - given we're a staff of volunteers, we want to be very sensitive to not promising vaporware and don't want to backslide into "Coming Soon(TM)" meme territory.
High Level Changes
In general with these changes, we’re adhering to the following set of beliefs:
- No weapon class should be great at everything, outside of special rare weapons like heron blades. Today, the differences between many weapon classes - abs especially - are minimal. We are pushing weapon classes apart more into distinct identities. E.g., clubs for bash, long blades for ob, axes for damage. That means trimming back power in some areas, and adding it in others.
- Dodge should be more competitive than it is today. We’re aiming for a roughly 25% bash rate vs a full dodge set with a high end non-rare, non-club abs weapon as a non-master. Depending on the weapon, it’s often upwards of 50-60% today.
- Dodge doesn’t need the abs% some of its non-rare pieces have. Getting hit in dodge should hurt. We’re trimming this back.
- OB is coming down across the board to reign in bash chance.
- We’re keeping an eye on the impact this will have on parry setups, but aren't planning to make changes here yet.
- The current range in db in a good or rare set (~135-160) makes it almost impossible to balance around. Good dodge is either a joke or high end dodge is unbashable. We have to balance around the high end, but also feel that dodge should be more accessible than it is today, vs requiring rares to play. So we’re compressing the range of db:
- The extra db on dodge rares is being shifted into pb instead, at a favorable rate (greater than 1:1).
- Abs weapon damage should, in general, be higher than it is today to account for stronger dodge.
- Combo damage is getting a smaller buff.
- Stab and charge damage are improving to account for the adjustment to the impact of master damage. In particular, you will see wider ranges for both, but an improvement overall.
Here are the rough weapon class identities we're pushing weapons towards. Not every individual weapon will fall neatly within the category, but as a class this is what they roughly look like. These are mostly relative to each other within a category (e.g., axes say "stronger damage", but all abs weapons generally have stronger damage than combo or defensive weapons).
Abs and Combo Weapons Classes:
- Axes: stronger damage
- Clubs: stronger bash, with lower OB
- Long Blades: stronger OB
- Polearms: jack-of-all-trades
- Flails: multihit, weaker in other areas (ditto defensive flails)
- Fencing Blades: stronger OB and damage (due to attack), low PB
- Medium Blades: jack-of-all-trades
- Staves: stronger PB, lower OB & damage
- Short Blades: stronger damage
- Javelins: stronger ob, weaker pb
- Projectiles: largely unchanged
- Lances: 1-handed abs/bash charging weapons
- Spears: more defensive & combo oriented charging weapons
We are still several weeks out from these changes. As you can imagine, there are a lot of weapons and intricacies to consider. We aren't going to promise a specific date since there's a group of us working on these, and our timing is always variable, and we ask for your patience.
Feedback
We're open to feedback on these - especially feedback that is well considered and thoughtful.
Feedback that is more helpful:
- Are we missing anything?
- Are there unintended consequences or anything else we should consider?
- What excites you most? What least?
- Whether or not anything should be changed at all. We know change is not always comfortable and we don't always get it right, but we're aware of that and this post is part of an effort to be more open and communicative about our thinking. We'll continue to listen to feedback and iterate where needed.
- Whether or not dodge should be improved. We feel strongly that it is too weak today.
- Whether or not rare dodge eq should add more db. We feel strongly it should not and the range on db needs to shrink.
- Feedback on warrior changes, or interactions with warrior changes. Vampa's already shared that changes are forthcoming to warriors to reign in some of the mitigation.