Targun wrote: ↑20 Dec 2022 16:30
If that's the case, then that might be the primary reason. Before Carnak left he increased health pool by 20-30%. Question is, whether recent changes take this into account or not. I suppose Ckrik or Zizuph would need to let us know.
For me, the combat feels too slow right now. I'd rather have decreased XP and previous combat pace than current situation. I think we're back to the meta when everyone's a gobbo and you're a tank with any guild. Slap a shield or just enough con and you passively outheal all the damage.
Previous iteration had many flaws, but in my opinion rather than change one OP configuration to a different one, it'd be better to address the root cause of the problem which is the fact that on Genesis in-combat and out-of-combat health regen is the same. It ruins all attempts to balance things out.
Yes, the health boost was taken into consideration, and the damage reduction would have been higher if not for that.
Before this change, a team of three myths would be killing myth-level NPCs in 5-10 seconds. Which would potentially mean PVP kills at that pace, and a 10 second movement stun would guarantee kills, particularly if there were alpha strikes involved.
This changes provides multiple things. It is a necessity to allow movement impairment to be viable for PVP. It makes teaming more viable, because areas can provide longer. It enables melee layman guilds to get more out of their natural regeneration, which tries to make them more viable again. It reduces the need for evasions and such for the same reason.
kelrhys wrote:
Meanwhile guilds are now more copy-paste vanilla with less unique spice, which vastly diminishes the reward of the roleplay core value of creating new characters to live a different lifestyle.
I have heard multiple people say this, about copy-paste vanilla, but it is less clear to me which guilds have had their flavor reduced from the past. It would be helpful if you could elaborate about why you feel this way. Is it because white hits are a bigger portion of the damage now? Or is there some other uniqueness that comes into play?
kelrhys wrote:
You've just exposed another required component to good organizational decision making: mission and vision.
There are some that play to grow and try to be as high a they can on the toplist. If you want to compete there, you need to expect to put in thousands of hours of grinding. There is a very steep soft cap already in place, but some people have been working 40+ hour weeks for years to keep climbing that cliff, for relatively small gains. Cassius chose to put in these thousands of hours of work, most of it at the current combat speed, and if you want to catch him, expect it to take years, just like what he put in.
Others hunt as an activity while interacting with their team. Equipment hunting is another popular pastime. PVP, we hope to make more reasonable so players can enjoy conflict. Supporting RP has always been a core goal.
I personally think our mission is to make sure all of these are well supported, both for casual and hard-core players. Some ideas are more viable, and some less. ALL of them are discussed, even if you don't hear it externally. And big changes need a lot of deliberation, as pretty much every solution has tradeoffs we don't like. Win-wins are hard to find, if they exist at all.
I work with Ckrik on balance, and one of my personal goals is to make sure you have a good experience no matter which guild you are in. I have spent much of the year trying to bring quality of life improvements to many guilds. Melee and magic should both be quite viable, though I do wish we had more content (we could use more wizards) to get better spell enhancer coverage.