News

The update is over!

New Combat Formula

The long-awaited combat formula update has arrived.

The game has returned to a multiplicative calculation system instead of additive scaling. This means that bonuses now multiply together rather than simply being added.

For example, two separate 40% damage increases will now calculate as:

1.4 × 1.4 instead of 40% + 40%.

The new formula also includes built-in baseline combat values:

• 50% Damage Reduction
• 60% Damage Increase

These values are applied to all players automatically, ensuring everyone has a baseline level of offense and defense without relying on external systems such as the Skill Tree.

This change is intended to keep early-round damage under control and prevent extreme burst damage regardless of build choices.

What This Means for Combat

• Damage Reduction now experiences diminishing returns when stacked.
• Loadout building becomes more important, as players will need to combine multiple jutsu effects to maximize effectiveness.
• Damage increase and reduction values have been standardized across jutsu, making combat easier to understand and balance.

Armor Changes

The armor system has been simplified significantly. Going forward, the primary armor sets will be:

• Genin Armor Set (Starter Set)
• Flak Jacket Family (Standard Progression Set)
• Kaeruun Armor Set

The team will continue testing armor values, imbuements, and future progression systems to ensure they fit within the new combat framework.

Bloodlines

Current Bloodline adjustments are temporary. The balance team will be conducting a broader review, with additional Bloodline updates planned in future patches.

Keystones

Keystones have returned to the shop. Their role in character progression is changing, with future updates introducing new Keystones and making them less mandatory for overall power.

Players are encouraged to experiment, as Keystones can now be swapped more freely.

Skill Tree Updates

• Offense Path Removed
• Damage Reduction Path Removed
• Elemental Paths Unlocked with additional progression options
• Additional tiers added for:
  • Absorb
  • Reflect
  • Lifesteal

These changes are designed to provide more meaningful specialization choices while reducing mandatory power picks.

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Combat Formula

The testing on the formula has been going well, just a few bug fixes/tag interactions to check before it gets merged into the main server.

To be open about the formula and for those who want to see how it would operate, you can find it here:

Combat Formula Excel Spreadsheet

It's an Excel spreadsheet so have fun.

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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.

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