Hello everyone! This is something new that we’ll be trying out for a few patches (and potentially forever) where we explain our thoughts regarding changes to the game. This will be in conjunction with changelogs so that you can get a clear idea of what changes with each patch.
Balance Changes
Changes that affect specific balance issues
Kick/Flurry Combo - While we think that finding combos like this is a fundamental part of the game, we think this one is a little bit too powerful, especially in the later game. It also sets a dangerous precedent for Skills that scale with weapon DPS. We’ve considered many solutions, but the one we believe to be most effective and healthy for the game in the future is to make Weapon DPS scaling on skills ignores Buffs (i.e. it will only count the base values + armor/item increases).
Defense Cheese - Some players had the amazing idea of spamming Defense lowering attacks (Hammer Skill + Shockwave) using multiple players, and having one fast attacking player (Crossbow/Dagger) deal insane amounts of damage. Unfortunately, this as an oversight that we’ll have to address. We’ll be implementing a negative Defense limit on each enemy; every enemy can only go to a negative Defense level that is -5x their original defense. For example, an enemy with 10 Defense will be able to go down to -50 Defense. Enemies with 0 Defense will be able to go down to -5 Defense.
Axe Adjustments - We talked about Kick a little bit earlier, and we’ll include a bit more detail now. While we plan on implementing the change where DPS scaling will ignore Buffs, we also want to change Axe to be less dependent on building Damage. Meant to be a flex-pick for Tank players, the Axe Skill, Kick, will now deal damage based on the weapon’s Base Damage + a little extra from DPS. Hopefully this will be appreciated by Tank players, and Melee DPS players will be more inclined to use the alternative, Sword. Alternatively, if Melee DPS players still prefer to use Axe for Kick’s utility, they can still choose to do so without losing too much damage.
Bow Nerfs - Bows are the versatile ranged choice. They’re decent at Bossing, decent at Mobbing, just an all-rounder class. Unfortunately, they’re too decent in both regards. We want to hit bow without affecting Crossbow too much, and we’ll be doing this by hitting Bow’s critical points. Ranged armor will be decreasing in Crit Chance (to give melee armor a better niche as well) and increasing in Ranged Damage Increase. This increase will make the fast attacking Crossbows not suffer as much from the loss in Crit Chance, while Bow will have more trouble building the Crit Chance that makes their Snipe so powerful. Snipe will also be receiving a slight damage nerf, along with a pierce cap. Snipe will only be able to hit up to 10 enemies at once.
Crossbow Buffs - Being stuck as purely single-target damage, Crossbows are meant to be an extremely powerful Bossing tool while not being as powerful against large groups of enemies. We want to keep Crossbows in this area, but feel like players should be rewarded more for running a Crossbow instead of a Bow. We feel that late game Crossbows are in a good spot (especially considering Flame Arrows exist and benefit Crossbows more greatly than Bows), but early game Crossbows need a bit of a bump in damage. We also plan on buffing Fire Arrows slightly to make it feel more impactful.
Dagger Buffs - Daggers, having the highest attack rate of any weapon in the game and lowest attack range of the melee class, they are an incredibly difficult weapon to use as they require players to stay near their enemies consistently. We like this skill requirement, but feel that players aren’t rewarded enough for the risk they need to take. Buffing their base Damage and Crit Chance should help with this.
Rapier Buffs - We want Rapier to be a powerful class that rewards skillful players for timing their Ripostes well. In order to put more emphasis into Riposte, we plan on buffing Rapier by increasing the reward you get out of Riposte (increased Damage on the strike), while also letting players do it more often (lowering Cooldown). We won’t be lowering Mana Cost to alleviate the decreased Cooldown, but we wanted to hit the Mana usage of this class anyways, so we’ll leave it at that and watch closely for now.
Gameplay Mechanic Changes
Changes about overall gameplay mechanics
Fusion - Certain items suffer from a bad increase in stats when they are fused, making them feel not very good to upgrade. We’ll be looking into these items on a case-by-case basis and adding specific changes to how their stats scale.
Large Scale Mobbing - Currently, a strategy to clear rooms of enemies is to have a Tank Provoke many enemies and pull them all to one area, where the rest of the players can just AoE them. While this is intended gameplay, we didn’t intend for players to be able to pull such large groups of enemies. As such, we’ll be making it so that a enemy will reset its Threat if it moves too far away from its spawning location.
Critical Strikes - Critical strikes from Melee Basic Attacks are currently calculated for each swing instead of each hit. We’ve recently reworked it so that it is calculated for each hit to be more consistent with other instances of critical strikes. In other words, when you land a critical strike with a Melee Basic Attack, it will no longer be a critical strike on all enemies hit by that strike (same for non-critical strikes).
New Systems
Quest System - We added a quest system! As of right now, we will be testing with just daily quests. In the future, we hope to extend this system to include World Quests that will expand on the world (and story) of Venture Tale.
Gold Exchange - You will now able to convert Ayagems into gold at the new merchant! Hopefully this helps players who are struggling with having enough gold for Fusion, especially those who are fusing at higher rarities.
Extra Notes
We are aware that some items are more powerful than others when they shouldn’t be (i.e. sword at lower rarity being more powerful than a higher rarity sword at similar levels), and we’ll be addressing these as we go. We apologize if your favorite weapon gets adjusted!
We also adjusted the drop rates on certain items to be more aligned with their rarities. You should see less of situations where an Epic spell has a higher drop rate than a Common spell.