New abilities now live:
Cleave - a little bit of nojohr defense, a lot of glee in large-scale combat.
Immaculate Retort - a simple automatic poliir tactic, designed to wear you down.
Poliir lost a little bit of their burst offense, but gained some good sustained benefits. Life also got a bit easier for small poliir (cheaper focus sphere, and a cheaper awakening of the guard with a nifty beyond-100% bonus...)
The Passage of Dark Summoning boost is a ton of fun, too. The "secret" part is somewhat uncommon, but exciting when it does happen...
Cleave is cool! Thanks
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to the 200%+ bonus...
ReplyDeleteOn a somewhat related note, how about racial stat mods for the disciple, etc? They just don't get them. :P Same with wizzie summons, too, mebbe? Deadites also lack it.
Was the tone to poliir that harsh? Just asking because with Cayce quitting over a tone it had to really screw him up. Seems lately we are losing alot more players than we are gaining...Shouldn't it be the other way around? I mean 2 years ago peak hours were 70+ easy. Now I can't remember the last time we even reached 60.
ReplyDeleteRadiant Awakening at his level was four radiant attacks and some random hit/dam/nr, up for just under a minute, prevention 3 minutes.
ReplyDeleteThe new RA is three radiant attacks for around 30 seconds, around 5 minutes prevention. The hit/dam/nr was normalized and is now a permanent buff (its duration is equal to the skill's prevention).
He also lost a little damage on Focused Sphere (a wash with the RA gain). On top of that, he gained a 600-900ish attack which pretty much never misses (scalable beyond 100%).
Frankly, no, it wasn't harsh. He spent no more than an hour with the new change, as a race chosen for synergy with the old RA (burst more often) but which wasn't as good with the new RA (constant benefits). He had int, wis, and agi as his random bonus stats from immunities. There was a marked increase in GPM when he changed to Naj'rei Faehr, just before deleting.
I am outlining the above to put some numbers behind the story, but all of it ignores his primary error. He had a much better choice than throwing a fit and deleting:
- Continue to test the new changes a little more, gather some data. If he still felt that the hit was worse than anticipated, let me know. (I had spoken with him, one-on-one, for more than an hour that afternoon about poliir issues. I even reiterated, repeatedly, that I was implementing and testing changes to bring RA in line without hurting poliir run speeds too much.)
Nodeka is never finished. I am always completely open to player input. It's a delicate balance between trusting my instincts and reanalyzing them with player input, but I do try.
It's somewhat facetious to try to link Cayce's explosion with any kind of playerbase decline over X years. People will quit; that's the way games go. We just try to fashion the best game possible and go from there.
Nodeka, as a game, is pretty unique in many ways, but one of the most exciting is that the playerbase isn't that far removed from the game development at all. You have a real-time direct line to the people that make the decisions and implement them, via this blog and other sources, and the people sitting in those chairs are honestly eager for input. That's something special. =)
Yep I understand Whim. I just wanna say this past week or 2 has been really sweet with all the updates. Good work, I'm quite impressed with the 1 update a day I must say, it rocks, keep up the good work.
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