Greetings Mortals,
It has been 11 days since our last development update, and the team has been hard at work crunching a monumental number of things into this first patch of the Era of Refinement.
In this update we will be going into detail about the what and why for some of the things which are changing that we thought you would want to know about early, along with providing a link to a questionnaire where you can let us know your thoughts before any of this hits PTR next week on the 14th of October.
This will be quite a long post as there is a lot to get stuck into, so grab a drink or a snack and let’s get started.
Endurance Balance
A common enough experience, which many of you will be quite familiar with, is dying due to running out of stamina and not being able to output actions fast enough to tip the scales of combat in your favor, causing a mismatch between your reactionary and tactical skill as a player and what you are able to perform due to limited or slowly regenerating stamina.
To improve this we have made several changes, however the most straightforward and easy to understand is this first one, which is simply increasing the amount of stamina regeneration bonus applied by the Endurance skill from +1% to +5%.
Removing the Need to Constantly Reset a Parry
A departure from the above simple change, this doubles as a substantial and highly impactful improvement to quality of life by lessening unnecessary gameplay inputs, as well as being incredibly favorable to players in one-verses-many scenarios for multiple reasons.
For those wondering what exactly this means or are not intimately familiar with the game’s combat mechanics, the current behavior for parrying requires that you:
- A) Block in the right direction.
- B) Have input your block before your opponent’s attack has hit you.
- C) Have initiated your Block within the last 2 seconds.
Naturally the first and second requirements are clear as to why they are needed, however the third might not be immediately obvious as to why it never quite made sense.
When you “read” an opponent’s attack charging animation and input your block as fast as you can, the reactionary “skill check” has already been made and performed, and after this point nothing valuable is being checked apart from whether or not you remembered to re-input your block to refresh the parry window, which created a needlessly clunky state where you must constantly repress the block input every 2 seconds until your opponent hits you.
Additionally, as each individual block input drains Stamina, and it is common for melee opponents to perform multiple feints before releasing their “true” attack attempt, and each of these feints commonly must be “respected” (you must attempt to parry it regardless of if it has been or will be released) this means the amount of stamina being drained to block an attack often ends up being much more than just one initial chunk.
This issue compounds significantly when facing multiple opponents, as the number of block initiations increases drastically, often causing someone to end up with very low stamina purely due to this.
To address this, we have removed the need to constantly reset parries in order to maintain the parry window, at the same time we have removed the initial stamina drain on starting to block and replaced it with a constant stamina drain which is active as long as you are holding your block.
This means it is now possible to input several blocks in many different directions, while only draining stamina for the time which you are actually holding the block.
It also means that you can now hold a block in a certain direction and if anyone hits you from that direction it will always be a parry, without the need to re-press your block input every 2 seconds to maintain the parry window.
It is worth a mention here that we are well aware of extremely legacy behaviors (originating in MO1) such as attempting to time your attacks to hit in between these parry-refreshes, however this tactic was entirely dependent on ping variance, not consistently applicable across ping variance and when it does happen often results in the person being hit becoming confused as to how they were hit when they parried on their end in time. In general, it was something that revolved around meta-gaming the game’s combat and network performance rather than playing by what is actually visually happening in the world in front of you.
The amount of stamina drained while holding a block is currently set to a value very close to the effective drain which was happening previously due to the constant inputs over time.
At the moment, we have not decreased the amount of stamina gained when parrying successfully, which means that due to the initial cost being zero now, you have a higher net positive stamina gained than before when parrying.
The exact values of the constant drain, whether or not we re-introduce the initial stamina cost when parrying are all subject to change based on feedback and testing during the PTR.
Naturally, as this is a substantial and far-reaching change that touches the game’s core combat mechanics, it will be receiving the attention and respect it deserves.
New Skill: Mental Fortitude
Nice and simple, a new Primary Action Skill is being added, which behaves almost identically to Defensive Stance but exclusively for reducing magic damage.
The defensive stats of the skill are currently 0-3 flat as well as 0-5% magic damage reduction.
This new skill serves to create additional build variety by offering a new primary skill to choose from, and providing a direct way to further decrease the amount of magic damage received in exchange for valuable Action Points.
Visible Debuffs
Until now, the only way to see most debuffs on yourself and other players has been to scan over them and look at the list of buffs attached to their health bar, or to look at your own list of applied buffs.
Naturally this creates friction and difficulty when trying to identify what is truly going on, and limits the ability to capitalize on timed scenarios.
To address this, we have added visual effects to the following common debuffs:
- Corrupt
- Fulmination
- Bleeding
- Ignited
- Shocked
- Drenched
- Frostbitten
- Oiled
This means that when you or another player (or even an AI) has been Ignited, you will visibly see them set on fire and actively burning until the debuff expires.
Although a small change, these additions will make it far simpler to tell at a glance what is going on around you, and allow you to make more informed and tactical decisions, such as purifying visibly corrupted or fulminated players, or taking more immediate advantage of vulnerabilities and spell combinations based on the Elementalism effects.
Archery “Aim Punch” Rework
We have reworked the way physical hits impact your aim when drawing a bow, to make it less trivial to draw arrows and shoot players who are right next to you and actively hitting you.
This comes in the form of a much more noticeable aim offset when taking damage.
Bandage Timing Rework
This is something which has been close to the top of the pile of “things we want to do” for a long time, and we are very happy to have finally taken care of it.
The invisible cooldown between bandage uses has been removed entirely, allowing you to use bandages back to back, the bandaging buff timer before you gain health now matches the bandaging animation such that you gain health when the animation ends, and the amount of health gained per bandage has been adjusted now that you can use them more frequently.
In general, bandaging now heals you to full health faster than before and in a more active way that does not require you to press your bandage hotkey repeatedly until the cooldown ends.
Getting hit while bandaging still lowers the amount of health received so that you cannot bandage next to someone trying to kill you and receive the full benefit.
This is something that we are very much interested in your feedback on, both now and once the PTR has opened up next week.
As a bonus to this, we have also added two new types of usable bandage to the game which can be found as loot, which heal more than a regular bandage.
Less Adrenaline Received When Taking Damage
Since the Adrenaline and Combat Ability feature made its debut in the Reckoning Expansion, we have not significantly adjusted the gain or loss rates of Adrenaline from different sources. However, we have asked survey questions about the balance of these values multiple times, and one recurring and consistent request in each of them has been to lower the amount of Adrenaline gained when receiving damage.
The primary reason for this change is how Adrenaline relates to and affects one-verses-many scenarios, something which the Combat Abilities were intended to affect in a positive way when they were added.
The current balance means that dealing damage to someone meant that they would gain a significant amount of Adrenaline, allowing them to utilize combat abilities against you.
When one or few players must fight against many, it requires dealing a large amount of damage to their opponents, and the outcome of this is that the group of many ends up earning more Adrenaline than the outnumbered players, making it easier for them to use a lot of Combat Abilities against them, and compounding the difficulty of engaging in such encounters.
As such, we have reduced the amount of Adrenaline gained when receiving damage to be significantly lower, as well as increased the amount of Adrenaline gained when successfully parrying slightly.
These changes are targeted at better rewarding skillful gameplay while reducing the effectiveness of larger groups oppressing smaller, skillful ones by using Combat Abilities.
As with most things in this coming patch, the exact balance here is subject to heavy change based on player testing and feedback on the PTR.
Removal of the “Wet Noodle” Attack
The “Wet Noodle” attack is how we internally refer to the ability to perform an attack which does absolutely nothing, dealing zero damage.
This happens because simply clicking and releasing will only “charge” your weapon for an extremely short time, which translates to close to zero “power”, dealing little or no damage especially to an armored opponent.
This creates several problems, one of which is that it means the simplest, most common input a player can give (clicking left mouse button) corresponds to the worst possible action you can perform during combat.
There is one valid use case for performing these wet noodle attacks, which is to quickly finish off a player in mercy mode as fast as possible. We do acknowledge that this can be useful, however the issues caused by this behavior are responsible for enough frustration that we believe a fraction of a second added to killing a player in mercy mode is a small price to pay to remove said frustration.
For example, due to things like unavoidable latency variances it can sometimes be possible to perform these uncharged wet noodle attacks unintentionally, and the following change ensures that if this does happen, at least the attack will be somewhat effective.
Although we have very specific plans for how to address this in a much better and impactful way in the future, doing so is not a small task and so isn’t currently a viable option for the “quick-and-easy” focus of the Era of Refinement.
So for now and in the meantime, we have improved this by charging all attacks up to a minimum amount which actually has a chance to deal damage and be of some use, about 40-45%.
This also slightly affects the choices one might make in regard to weapon selection as well, as the fastest possible attack that can be performed is now a little different depending on weapon weight.
Additionally, we will be looking at adjusting the global speed of weapon charges and releases in such a way that makes that combat both feel more reactive and faster without compromising on, and even potentially improving, the tolerance for higher ping players being able to parry attacks.
It is also worth noting that naturally the speed of ripostes remains the same as before.
Gathering Quality of Life
We have removed the behavior of gathering nodes (such as Mining & Woodcutting) reducing their yield slowly as you approach the end. Instead, you will gather at your full yield all the way to the end of the node.
This is a simple change that makes gathering and depleting nodes more satisfying, and as another nice bonus the game icon will now flash once you have depleted a node if you happen to be Alt-Tabbed.
Although not strictly related to gathering, we have also increased the Pet Bag interaction distance by +3m to make it less frustrating to open your pet bags while your pet is nearby, massively reducing the need to command your pet to follow you repeatedly to make it come closer.
Crafting Trash Toggle
Some of you may remember this simple feature from Mortal Online 1, and it has finally made its way here.
You will now be able to toggle a checkbox in the crafting menu which will automatically delete crafted items so that you can train skills more smoothly and without needing to constantly delete whole inventories worth of items or use the /droploot command to empty your inventory.
Visible Guild Heraldry
Both adding some much needed visual variety to the world and allowing conveying territorial presence, you will now be able to proudly display your guild’s Heraldry on Strongholds and Keeps.
You will also be able to obtain new buildable territory control structures which contain Heraldry banners, so that you can place them in the world to mark your influence.
We absolutely cannot wait to see all of your creative Heraldry designs now on full display throughout the world.
Expanded Loot Tables
Something which we have definitely felt the limitations of for a long time is related to how our AI loot systems were structured, and that each AI could only have a very limited set of items in their pool to potentially drop.
We have taken the time to expand this in a very significant way, allowing us to add support for an extremely improved number of items something could potentially drop. This means the variety of loot can be increased, and many AI and creatures can become much less predictable in regard to what you might find on them.
To fully capitalize on this new support requires going through and updating many existing AI, which takes time and so this will be an ongoing effort throughout the coming patches, rather than everything being updated all in one go.
Increased Days of Relic Drops & Events
To make sure there are times when you can almost guarantee there will be something going on in Nave during the week, we are going to be designating specific days in which the drop rates of Relics and triggered dynamic events are vastly increased.
Currently we are planning to initially start this running on Wednesdays and Sundays post-patch.
We will also be tweaking the rates of specific types of relics to be higher during these times.
Clade Gift Reworks
Even though our new analytic system added in Patch 3.1.0 has only been running for a short time, there has been a long list of things we immediately saw were in need of adjustment.
One such area are Clade Gifts with an extremely low pick-rate, the worst of which we have collected and plan to rework them into being much more appealing and impactful.
A hot-button issue in the community right now is the prevalence of Alvarins appearing much more often than other clades, and although this is a multifaceted topic due to numerous causes, it is nonetheless true that Humans, Thursar and Oghmir were in need of something to make them stand out and shine a little brighter.
In this effort, it is fortunate that many of the least-picked Clade Gifts were spread out across those clades.
We will not be addressing every case of a poor-performing clade gift in this coming patch, however quite a few of them have been reworked substantially:
Thursar
- “Adrenaline” has been renamed to “Relentless” and is now a Passive instead of an Active gift, allowing you to always attack even on zero stamina, provided the weapon you are using is within your Strength Requirement.
- “Thermoregulation” has been renamed to “Bloodlust” and provides a melee damage bonus starting at 50% health, which increases as you approach death.
- Initially we will be starting this at a maximum of +10% damage bonus while at 1% health, although this is subject to change.
Human
- “Southerner” has been renamed to “Persistence Hunter” and now reduces Stamina drained when Sprinting by 10%.
- “Mathematician” has been renamed to “Resourceful” and provides a +10% chance to gain double yield when gathering.
Oghmir
- “Engineer” has been renamed to “Defiance” and now works by increasing physical defence by a value based on how much Adrenaline the Oghmir currently has stored.
- Each gained dot of adrenaline above 1 (because 1 is passively generated) grants 1% defence for a max of +9% at 10 Adrenaline.
- “Siegemaster” has been renamed to “Vital Surge” and is now an Active Clade Gift which allows you to instantly recover from mercy mode once, with a lengthy cooldown.
All of the above combat-balance-affecting changes were made with a specific goal in mind, to increase the survivability and sustainability of the clade while staying true to their own unique themes and gameplay style.
For the Thursar that means unrelenting aggression, for the Oghmir hardiness and for the Human broad reaching generality.
And Much More!
This development post has touched on most of the major items which we wanted to get people thinking about a little early a week before the PTR, so you’re ready to test them out more thoroughly and to collect your opinions on should we decide to tweak something before the public testing opens.
However, there are many more changes which you will see in the PTR patch notes next week.
As usual, everything described above is subject to change and may or may not make it to live or even be present in the PTR should there be reason to do so.
Hopefully this lengthy post has served to shed some light on the kind of things we’re looking at for the Era of Refinement, and we hope you are as excited about them as we are!
Feedback Survey
Have any thoughts on any of the items we have mentioned above?
We would love to hear them! Simply follow the link below to our questionnaire and let us know what you think.
See you in Nave,
The Star Vault Team