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Bluu -> RE: Friday, January 19th Design Notes: Book 3: Convergence - At Fissure's Edge (1/20/2024 9:55:21)
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quote:
- Removing the -Boost on Prismatic hurts, especially for NDAs who already don't have much in their toolkit to begin with. Not sure how much NDAs are taken into account during class balancing but hope this can be added back NDAs are not taken into account for balancing purposes. NDA is essentially intended to be a very generous free trial of the game, and as such, I feel that NDA classes should only be a representation of the power of the class without some of the skills that really cement it as what it is - in the case of Paladin, Radiance is NDA locked as it allows NDA players to get a feel of how the class works, but all the Seal skills, Solemn Vow, and Greater Heal are locked behind a DA as this helps in incentivizing the purchase. Deathknight, too, for instance, still has the ability to switch between Consuming and Healing presence as well as Necrotic Shift, however it lacks most of its invaluable DPT skills. I think that removing Prismatic Strike's Boost was a good decision, as you could previously loop decent amounts of -Boost on the enemy while you already had a loopable Damage Reduction buff and strong passive healing. Imo it makes Paladin very nuanced, that you can only make the decision to limit the enemy's damage by limiting your own, which would cause you to really consider how worthwhile it is to press Seal of Courage - different damage race fights may have different needs from the same skill based on their unique mechanics.
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- Salvation's change was a little odd to me since anything above 100 Health res would still heal minimally 1 HP, unless they change this such that anything above 100 Health res would cause healing to do damage, this doesn't do much except for letting the player use Salvation to its max effect with only 2 Radiance charges instead of 3. The doubled MP cost is huge Seal of Salvation is a full heal and purge on a class that already has really good passive and active regeneration. It's essentially a reset of your state in the fight at any point in the battle - you could play aggressively to take out one enemy and then use Seal of Salvation to return to your default state when Radiance comes off and then tackle the remaining enemy as though it were a solo fight. Such a skill is immensely powerful and needs a heavy drawback - taking out about a fourth to a fifth of your mana is a reasonable downside (the reduced healing to self matters less because if you're going to be healing fully, it would be hard to squander that position in the next few turns. The increase in mana cost was not to balance the change to Salvation's +Health effect; it was done so that you wouldn't have to rush to Radiance III and consume one of your very limited Radiance III turns to block enemy healing - Radiance II does the job just as well with much less of a downside. This isn't even to mention that Radiance I Salvation + Amalgam Blaster can inflict upwards of +100 Health. For all intents and purposes this was a strict buff to how you play the class against healing enemies, your proposal would be an unnecessary nerf. That being said, your point about the mana cost is valid in the sense that low level players would want to use it in the story, but a mana cost of 200 is far too restrictive until you get to level 70+, so some form of mana cost scaling for that one skill might help a lot.
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- Once again, am baffled with the obsession of not being able to have higher Bonus but not really bothered by it The decision to not have high uptime Bonus is a decision that benefits the entire Dragonfable metagame. Sure, it affects Paladin negatively - but earlier, Paladin had a very, very high uptime on large amounts of +Bonus that allowed it to casually ignore boss shields and its damage was good enough that it turned many fights into a joke or a DoA. This meant that future bosses that are designed around MPM and BPD or -Bonus mechanics would have to have their numbers upped significantly to account for Paladin - having to account for Epoch and Archivist is what caused Amaris to drop with 300 decaying MPM on release, which I think we can all agree was a little silly.
If Bonus is such an issue for you, might I suggest using a high CHA gearset and investing enough points into CHA that you can comfortably hit 200 CHA whenever you need to use Dragon Scout (which gives it a downtime of only one turn). Sure, you have to take points out of your mainstat or END to compensate for the increased accuracy, but the ability to drop damage and bulk in favor of accuracy makes builds much more nuanced - especially since you can now build around a 200 CHA dragon, which has a spammable +50 Bonus Beam at 200 Magic and a 15 CD 2 turn shield. I'm not going to go as far as to say that 200 CHA builds are optimal for every fight, but the fact that they exist, and are balanced in that they have strong upsides and downsides, means that if accuracy is a problem for you in any given matchup, you always at least have a method of countering it with every class. As such, classes don't really need to have high +Bonus (unless they sacrifice something or meet the condition for it, such as DK sacrificing health every turn for +50 Bonus and more health on Rite for +40 Bonus, or Ninja, which has to inflict Venoms for a Bonus buff with a significant downtime) and bosses don't need to have proportionally high MPM - the meta can stay at a consistent and balanced state with little number bloat.
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