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Aelthai -> =Dev and Balance= Of Armors, Skills, and Wizards (5/27/2010 23:45:33)
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I have three somewhat related topics today - all about Armors.
First, you may have noticed that the new Cyber-Rex Rider armor has higher Statpercent than Base/Random - and that the higher Statpercent lines up with the preliminary Post-Sweep numbers that have been posted in the Game Balance Issues board for a while. We looked at items, and realized that the only items that were not being released at very close to post-sweep power were armors, and decided that there was no reason to leave them as an exception.
Future armors will be using Post-Sweep numbers to the greatest extent possible.
Speaking of Post-Sweep armors and the Cyber-Rex ... the Cyber-Rex has two skills/spells. It's also not a Defensive armor - and the elements of the skills and spell are not exactly very good for the armor. This seemed simple enough; just apply the Item Compression penalties and the bonuses for the element being bad for the item it's tied to that we developed for Wizard and ... well, ideally it would have worked out easily.
It didn't.
The armor is strongly elementally aligned. This makes sense for it (and means that flat-resistance armors have a reason to exist), but it means that the boost it would have received for being used on its worst resistance was far, far too high - high enough that it was blatantly obvious it wouldn't work.
We therefore ended up going with a partial correction to the armor skills. Since it's a Z-Token item series, I prefer to err low, figure out the proper correction, and then buff the armor - hopefully that's how this one will work out.
I can't give specifics until it's done, but I can say that we're still looking at it. It's possible there will be no buff, or that there will be a notable one - I don't now yet. Don't count on anything, but do know that we're looking into it.
This brings us to Wizard, since I mentioned it.
Some of you probably know a lot about the plans for Wizard that have been revealed so far, while others probably do not. First, then, a few general comments.
In AQ, the Mage is a beginner at magic; they do a lot of things at a relatively low level of skill (and therefore power) that will appear in a more refined form in later classes.
The Wizard is a specialist - specifically, an elementalist. You can see this in the current Wizard and Pyromancer armors; Wizard is the "generalist" while Pyromancer is a Specialist with Fire magic. Indeed, Pyromancer gives an idea of where Wizard in general is going with the revision. There will be 9 Wizard armors: one Generalist and a Specialist for each of the 8 elements.
ArchMage, rather than working with the elements, works with magic itself. Which is all I'm going to say on ArchMage at this time :-p
As you can probably guess by what I said above about developing a new standard for Wizard (and from it appearing in the Coming Soon section of the Newsletter), Wizard is in active development. It's not yet done being statted (and the changes resulting from what we're finding on the Cyber-Rex armor may result in yet more changes), but it is actively under development. The skills have all been selected, and final numbers have been assigned to many (but certainly not all) of them. Unfortunately, the easy ones were done first, so the ones left are difficult and time-consuming.
Once Wizard has been completed (and tested! and possibly released!), we can move on to the next class. I think I'll leave what that class is open for now.
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