7/25/2020 at 5:23
Keroc, the Starborn
Everyone
Experimental Changes
I had planned to do this later on, but since it now involves the Pit report (2887 for reference) we'll be exploring some big changes early on!
Elixirs
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- Healing elixirs and defensive elixirs now share the same balance.
* This means you can't drink a health elixir and levitation elixir at the same time anymore.
- Health and mana elixirs will knock your elixir balance for 4.75 seconds.
* Same duration as before.
- Levitation, immunity, frost, antivenin, and vigour elixirs will knock your elixir balance for 1.4 seconds.
* Slightly less then before, used to be 1.5.
- Speed elixir continues to remain free of needing elixir balance for now.
Domination
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- The Pit now strips levitation every 4 seconds, up from 3.
- The Pit can now only be ensorcelled by the person who cast it.
- The Pit no longer bypasses levitation if the target is fallen.
Firstaid
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- Firstaid will use defensive elixirs over healing elixirs.
* I haven't really found a situation just yet where waiting is worth while with existing mechanics and the balance being short, but feel free to let me know if it becomes a problem.
There are some further changes that come along with this that are experimental, as this was something I was working alongside the above ones. I may further adjust, expand, or revert these ones, so keep that in mind. I didn't want to change too much early on.
Celerity & Recovery
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There is now a new mechanic called Recovery to go alongside Celerity.
Under the old system, every second you would recover all your celerity points. With recovery, you now only recover as much celerity as you have recovery. So if you have a recovery of 2, you will regain 2 celerity points each second. Everyone has a default of 2 recovery to start with.
Gaining extra recovery will often only come in the form of a temporary boon or situational position. As such, don't expect to gain a defence that gives recovery at no cost to yourself. It will perhaps require an endurance upkeep or for you to be within a certain environment.
AUDIT will show you your total recovery along with your celerity.
Changes to go alongside this:
- New Affliction: Shock.
* This affliction will block recovery from occuring.
* You will be able to move until your celerity points are spent, at which point normal movement will become unavailable.
* Cured only through time, restores 1 celerity upon being cured.
- Trotting from Horsemanship now bestows +1 recovery instead of celerity as long as you are mounted.
- Stalking from Corpus (and the racial) now bestows +1 recovery during the night.
* No longer hides your player from view however.
- Celerity from Corpus now bestows +1 celerity instead of its old effect of speeding up the recovery tick.
Hiding abilities
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Hiding abilities are making a small comeback in usefulness.
With Heatsight being wildly available, many abilities that hide you from view are quickly countered at zero cost. We would like to see them have some usefulness within the realm, so some changes have been made to strike a balance so that they are usable without being frustrating in day-to-day events.
Changes to go alongside this:
- Heatsight is now a single use command that will show the room, letting you see hidden players only for that moment.
- The hiding defence is now stripped when you move, unless you are shadowing someone.
- Shroud no longer hides the player from view in the room, it continues to hide actions and movement however.
- Spiritsight for Deathlore now lets you see those who are currently dead within the realms.
- Shadowsight for Subterfuge now lets you see through illusions 50% of the time.
- Lifevision remains how it is for now, however it has lost the ability to see through illusions.
Penned by my hand on Closday, the 2nd of Khepary, in the year 489 MA.
4
Comments
But I think what bothers me the most is the Hiding abilities change, specifically this: Sorry, but a 750cr artifact just got made even weaker when it borderline didn't justify its high cost to begin with, and now system breaking illusions have been made stronger with no recourse for effective anti-illusion to deal with them. It's very trivial for me as a Sciomancer to create illusions to break Sunder or other various systems out there and this change basically means that people have to code anti-illusion into their systems again SOMEHOW to prevent that. The goal, at one point, was to minimize illusions having a combat role. This change basically makes it mandatory now. I could be down for minimizing the impact that Heatsight gives, but that could easily be mitigated by changing racial heatsight to work like what has been proposed here but leaving Lycan Heatsight alone -- or just removing Heatsight from racial skills to begin with and replacing it with new endgame racial skills, which has been an oft requested thing for years now.
I don't want to make it sound like I'm angry or ungrateful. I'm mostly just frustrated. These are some substantial, drastic changes that have far-reaching impacts when it comes to bashing, illusions, combat ramifications, the value for certain relics/artifacts, etc.. and I feel like no one asked for them.
I think the elixir change is fine as a concept but will need some finetuning because it does have some (prob minor) effects on other skills/classes beyond pit.
Also just a tad confused about Tekura and Wayfarer lines not being streamlined because supposedly some people already have systems to accommodate for that but we end up with these changes instead.
Actually, given that you said you didn't want to add generics to Tekura because you didn't want people to have to redo systems then add this also irritates me but whatever.
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Backstab requires hidden - since movement strips such the only way to re-obtain this is either the Camouflage relic(which requires a short period to proc) or initiating combat from phase.
Will coldblooded be considered 'hidden' to help with this?
It also renders Shadowslip practically useless.
Do these changes manipulate/hinder/alter Cloak or Ghost in Subterfuge?
As for the movement/celerity - even WITH travel artifacts, Xon Slippers, mounts etc.. you crawl.
With a mount and the celerity artifact (600 cr btw) I am at 4 celerity and 3 recovery. Without the celerity artifact, I am at 3 celerity and 3 recovery.
Please explain why this artifact is not useless save for 1 additional room on my very first movement.
Cause we should have full refunds if that is the case.
Experience Gained: 47720 (Special) [total: 2933660]
Needed for LVL: 122.00775356245
If Heatsight is viewed as a problem, then as I said above, remove Heatsight as a racial skill and revert the rest of the changes. Recompense by adding new racial skills like some of the newer additions we've had over the years like Trawling and Lunar Regeneration. Are they heatsight? No, but would people be okay with it because of new racial skills? Absolutely.
Revert the defensive elixir change and find a different solution for Pit. I'd suggest one, but I'm a little salty that some of the rejected reports put the onus on the players for creating different solutions so that we can get a change, despite an acknowledgement and/or agreement that the underlying problem and logic for the reports were sound. My snark aside, the best change for Pit is to remove the immediate "drop into Pit from prone" effect and create a different set of criteria that causes individuals to fall into it. Levitation is dated. As it stands, the non-trans Purgatory is better than the trans skill equiv in Domination. Some may view that as subjective, but I can go into detail as to why if it needed.
Revert the Celerity and Recovery stuff. I don't see why this is needed, nor what problem existed. This just makes getting from point A to B even more of a slog, and I think @Stine already summed up the problems with this very well as is.
I really can't begin to express how frustrated I am with these changes, and I can't really remember the last time an announce post came close to eliciting an emotion out of me since the Sentinel changes a long time ago. In my career, we test patches and changes prior to their implementation in a production/live environment by having tests run in a test environment. When we've validated that the changes are good, we then put them in a production environment. These kinds of changes are so wide-ranging and hefty in terms of client-side coding and balance that they absolutely should've had player testing and input. That is how drastic they are. My last recommendation is to potentially do that moving forward.
Edit: All I'm also gonna say is that I'm glad that I picked up FFXIV again recently, because I don't think I've had a changelog that has sapped my will to play like this one in a long time.
ALSO SLIMYNESS PLEASE......
Elixir changes: I now have to update my entire system to handle this change. Thankfully I can do that. For the many that can't, this change likely will seem sudden and they will have no idea what to do and may stop playing until their system of choice is updated.
Celerity changes: No one likes to move slow, especially people who have credits invested in go fast. Further, who EXACTLY is getting access to shock? It sounds like an extremely powerful hinder and if rolled into the wrong classes will break them. The idea I will be stuck in one place against a myriad of timebomb momentum classes is worrying.
Hiding changes: I do not mind the nerd to heat sight. Giving people who can hide ability to hide again and explore their class fantasy is a good thing. Hopefully classes that rely on hiding can still do it effectively.
Vision changes: I spent a lot of money to get life vision on my goggles. Others did too. Further, illusion combat is terrible for the simple reason there it is either effective because doesn't contain anti-illusion, or it is useless. There is no finding some method of working it in based on class skills. It is entirely based on whether a system is coded against it or not. No one wants that back in a way as it was annoying for both person using them and those coding against them.
Lastly, these are MASSIVE changes. Many skills and core mechanics just received a huge shift. Personally, I feel something like this should have been announced as in the works, then put on test server with volunteers, then rolled out based on results. Many of us were tentatively awaiting the elixir change, but I dont know if any of us were expecting this much out of the blue. Dumped us in hot water here, so no surprise you got a lot of people saying ouch. Little more warning next time maybe?
I truly hope someone, somewhere, learns something from this.
(Sorry)
i don't really mind the heatsight change - because I have lifevision - but to get one of my guild skills randomly obliterated feels pretty bad
going slow is not very fun
you should keep the elixir change though. no reason .... Don't look into it very much.......
Keroc is, in fact, biased... against players.
I'm doing my best not to have a knee jerk reaction, but I can't deny that the prospect of coding all these fiddly changes into my Frankensystem is not a pleasant one. Oh well, lol.
Combat-aspect aside, low travel speed is unfun on its own. If the change was done for combat purposes I'd suggest enabling the recovery mechanic only for 15 seconds after using any ability/relic/artifact (anything that isn't a movement command basically.) and from that point forth the player can continue to travel with their celerity alone.
But if the concern is that celerity speeds almost anything players can do in the game (Most notably including questing, hunting... So, gold generation.) along with a realization that utility was offered to the playerbase way too generously... The answer for that might be diminishing returns on stacking celerity really high, instead of making it near meaningless for all purposes (Except combat.) by introducing recovery.