Public Forum

May's Content Thoughts

Hello, it's me again. We've been silent and there hasn't been much movement from content or anyone really for the past couple of weeks. You will be happy to hear we have not given up on the game, instead we have been working intensely in the background on resolving some major combat pain points.

Formula Change: Back to multiplicative

The main premise for initially changing the formula from multiplicative to additive to begin with was to simplify the game and improve on end user experience - e.g. to aide in understanding how the numbers in combat work together, which was obfuscated previously with multiplicative processing, stat tags alike, etc.

Whilst this change was to the benefit of userbase convenience, it introduced a very difficult balance act from a developer perspective. This is largely because going full additive made DR very weak initially, which resulted in a meta of who has the best dmg buffs wins, or who clear + smacks first wins (giving T1 advantage) - we haven't forgotten the era of seeing players hit for 1k+ damage through smoke bombs. As a result, we investigated changing DR back to multiplicative processing without diminishing returns (so multiple DR tags were added first prior to processing).

DR going back to multiplicative resolved this issue, but introduced a new one. We had to balance a linear/additive function on damage increases vs a non-linear/multiplicative function on damage reduction. The end result? End output was HEAVILY sensitive to the smallest tweaks to DR changes; e.g. a 2.5-5% increase or decrease to average DR values on DR made DR either too weak or too strong. Finding a healthy ratio between static damage increases vs multiplicative DR has made putting effort into damage scaling very unrewarding and has pushed everyone towards a defense-heavy rat meta - spamming DR, heals and pierces to maintain damage.

Due to the above, we will be reverting the additive change and going back to a multiplicative damage formula. This will not be entirely like the old multiplicative formula, which was entirely sequential/multiplicative on each out of combat/in combat damage modifier, resulting in the crazy damage ceiling we had before. Instead, we are "bucketing" out of combat damage modifiers (dmg increases and DR), bloodline boosts, in combat damage modifiers (dmg increases and DR) as individual systems prior to processing them multiplicatively. For example:

• Bucket 1: Out of combat modifiers like skill tree and armor boosts will be additive with each other and then processed multiplicatively on raw dmg
• Bucket 2: bloodline boosts
• Bucket 3: multiplicative in combat damage increase and damage reduction tags

This yields a formula that gives you: end damage = raw damage x bucket 1 x bucket 2 x bucket 3

The above allows for better control and maintains a healthy damage floor/ceiling, without running the risk of going to excessive damage scaling that we had previously in the original multiplicative system.

We appreciate your patience and support while we have been navigating these issues and limit testing the combat system. Out coders are hard at work implementing this change, a news post will be made when it goes live.