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Zab
February 27th, 2015, 15:05
I do not think that any one skill should be so powerful that a player can wipe out full parties (of similar level) in a round or two and I think Poison Cloud is just that. If you remember, I believed Critical Shot for Scouts was too strong of a skill and I hope for this reset of game you considered that and changed some of the numbers.

Because Poison Cloud appears to be virtually impossible to overcome, it would be nice to see some changes. Perhaps the cloud only has a chance of hitting enemies, similar to Rain of Arrows for scouts. Some of the party gets hit with it, others would not. Or perhaps like certain monsters are immune to Poison Cloud, perhaps a certain guild could be. Like Priests because they too use magical attacks and their use of healing or blessing could help combat what I feel is far too powerful of a skill.

Guild Masters
February 27th, 2015, 15:49
I will review it. Please notice the note in the roadmap: http://www.otherwind.com/forum/showthread.php?1014-Tuning-ROADMAP-for-Balance

We need feedback like this to finish the skills balance.

Regards

Rastlin
March 4th, 2015, 09:35
Haha. No comment on this one! If you do mess with it make it only against players not monsters please.

Zab
March 5th, 2015, 17:05
Haha. No comment on this one! If you do mess with it make it only against players not monsters please.

I have always thought there should be different numbers in regards to quests vs pvp. I think you should have comment about it, Raistlin. Just doesn't seem like much fun for anyone if you can take out a whole average, non-paying party in two rounds. I am not so much concerned about the -attack the spell gives because many players who are on have ways of diffusing that. It is the extra damage it does that I feel needs to be taken down. Also, few skills hit all party members or monsters at once, there should be ways to resist, just like others can resist other skills. I think with each enhancemement, you should be able to cast the spell with chances to hit more and more of who you are up against. Maybe that means you would have to use that spell much in the same way others use their skills....more than once per fight, to get desired results.

Alex, why do the wizard's spell continue to carry on in the fight even when the wizard dies? "Realistically" I would think it would be the other way around...that the priests spells would carry on into their afterlife because the prayer is to the gods....however, I would like to see what ever skill/spell casted is ended with the death of player.

Zab
March 5th, 2015, 17:19
My idea of punishments for attacking players much lower in level would be something like this: Example: Natural level 45s would still be able to attack Natural level 40s without punishments, but if you go beyond this to something like natural 50s attacking a party of natural level 20s, you would get a 1% (0r something) decrease for each level difference to all attributes. A 30% decrease might make it more undesirable to hit the easy target of low level parties.

Rastlin
March 6th, 2015, 08:41
My statement of no comment was basically an agreement on your post to some degree. THe extra damage from PC is not what i fell is the problem it is the attack. At least vs monsters when I hit them with Poison Cloud they just dont do damage. Even when they critical hit it is for 1 maybe 2. Then you all so have to consider that the Poison Cloud is coming from a top skilled, equipped player with max skill achievement. I would like to see skills and maybe damage from regular attacks modified, scaled down for player vs player(ambushes) combat. Players just dont have to vitality or damage potential that monsters do. We need our skills working at best vs monsters but not so much in ambushes. This will lengthen ambushes and make them more interesting.

Zab
March 6th, 2015, 13:12
MI would like to see skills and maybe damage from regular attacks modified, scaled down for player vs player(ambushes) combat. Players just dont have to vitality or damage potential that monsters do. We need our skills working at best vs monsters but not so much in ambushes. This will lengthen ambushes and make them more interesting.


I agree that there are a lot of players out there that do not have the vitality. I see them in squads and I am always encouraging players to make more of it after I ambush. I think this is something that could even be resolved with the automatic allotments for some guilds beyond fighters. The devs could hand out 5 more vitality per level to most guilds, maybe something else (energy) to the fighters who make so much and maybe this may to some degree help to balance the pvp part of the game.

Every thing you are saying is why I will still say the punishment of losing a percentage of your allotments the further you surf from your natural level is a good idea. This could also be implemented with skills... attack natural level 20s when you are a natural level 50 and lose a percentage of your skills. Let's be honest here, there are not many level 20s with vitality much more than 100 (and from what I see, loads sitting around 50) and most have an average attack score of 35-100 tops when dealing a normal attack. This idea, I think of it something like this: You are going to go attack a village to take it over. You have sent your scouts and the intell is they have an army of about 750 people. You have an army of 10,000. You're not taking them all to the battle, are you?

Alex
March 6th, 2015, 14:32
This is an interesting discussion. I am getting note of several interesting points here and I'll discuss them with my team when we have time to make another sweep to the skills (and pvp) balance.

Rastlin
March 6th, 2015, 22:47
How about limit the number of ambushes per day or make them cost energy to initiate? I dont know just ideas in my head atm.

Zab
March 8th, 2015, 10:19
How about limit the number of ambushes per day or make them cost energy to initiate? I dont know just ideas in my head atm.

I've thought there should be daily limits to ambushes. Say 3 every 12 hour period and any more than that must be paid for with diamonds. Though this would probably cause some problems in a group if one person does all the ambushes and others log on and cannot, so maybe not the best idea. Also, what if you did your daily limit of ambushes and then joined a party and they had not done any? That would sort of screw them too.

Maybe a good idea would be to add protection beyond level 10, Alex. Maybe groups up to levels 120 and soloists until 25 cannot be seen. That would give new players a chance to grow without losing the limited resources they have.

Alex
March 9th, 2015, 05:11
I was thinking about counters for parties raided similar to the counters for quest completes, so you have to wait 6h, 12h. 24h os simlar time to raid the same party again. Also we will consider the suggest about travel in concealment like wouded arties.

By the way, how are working the new party sizes for ambushes? now it should not be so easy to abuse of smaller characters.

Ellyria
May 23rd, 2015, 11:30
Currently there is a player who is repeatedly ambushing parties of much lower level. I am of a slightly higher level than him and even with me, the other day he ambushed me four times in a row and although I won, it got very annoying that every quest I ran I had to deal with him. One of the members of my team that follows one of my followers had to deal with him recently. He is a level 30 fighter and they were a party with a lv. 15 priest, 2 lv. 10 wizards, a lv. 9 fighter and a lv. 5 scout. They were no match for him and they were completely unable to defend themselves. He ambushed them so many times repeatedly that they ended up with not enough money left to heal themselves and they couldn't run quests any more. He did this to them about four days in a row. Now only one of the five members of that party still play the game, the rest of them all quit because it was no fun to just get slaughtered every time they played. If you go into the game you'll see many complaints in the shouts and on walls about it. Low level players are quitting because of this one player. That's an easy way to kill the game. This is a problem that needs to be fixed sooner rather than later. I think implementing a cool down timer like the quests would be a good start. The same way you can't run the same quest again until the timer runs out, I think there should be a timer that doesn't allow you to attack the same party repeatedly or like Raistlin and Zab said limits on the number of ambushes. Also, maybe another restriction could be added, as it stands, you can't attack a party that's smaller than you, they just don't show up in the list. Maybe you could make it so that any party who's average level is say more than 5 levels lower than the attacking party's average level doesn't show up in the list.

Rivanen
May 23rd, 2015, 15:20
First of, great game dev's really old school nostalgia. been enjoying it for a while now.
but please for the love of every god in the realm you created, do something about the ambushes.
Being ambushed isn't really a problem on it's own or is ambushing. with some desency it can even trigger a Match system between players.
but the last few days lower level players been under attack of ambushes all the time .even right after being ambushed, just healed and ambushed again.
this kills the flow of lower levels because they will not get anywhere at all besides the few city quests.


simple math: players quitting means no diamonds bought , why would they they won't even get far enough to unlock some decent gear
i'll be honest, i haven't bought any yet but did use the free diamonds botton, hoped it helps you too.
so far it went from just a regular ambush now and then ,to plain harrasment

Alex
June 1st, 2015, 17:14
Hello friends. I agree with most of your suggestions and complaints. This week we are going to upload a update with some enhancements for the combat screen to make it more dynamic, and also we made some adjustments on the multiplayer skills, adding some random chances to avoid or deflect the effect of the multi-target skills which was making direct effect with no salvation. Also, we are increasing a bit the cost in energy of multitarget skills. This will increase balance!

About ambushes, initially we disabled the "brackets", I mean the level ranges for targeting parties in ambushes, because there were not many parties in the field. Now that there are more parties available to be raided, we definitely have to do limit ambushes by brackets determined by sizes, as well as limit daily the raids of a party over a same target. We also will consider other suggestions mentioned here and other threads.

We want to thank to players their active participation in the game development!

Rastlin
June 11th, 2015, 11:37
Hello friends. I agree with most of your suggestions and complaints. This week we are going to upload a update with some enhancements for the combat screen to make it more dynamic, and also we made some adjustments on the multiplayer skills, adding some random chances to avoid or deflect the effect of the multi-target skills which was making direct effect with no salvation. Also, we are increasing a bit the cost in energy of multitarget skills. This will increase balance!
Please tell me this is only for the purposes of ambushing. Sure Wizards spells are powerful but the energy cost for these spells is high enough. Please dont mess with regular game play because ambushes are not working properly.

Thank you!

Alex
June 11th, 2015, 22:13
Hello Rastlin. I am aware of the annoyance caused by these kind of changes, but we consider they are still needed. In this case is my fault; we detected a mistake in my charts valuing the average damage/benefits per energy point for the multi-target skills. Last year when we lowered energy costs by half to all skills, we should have lowered it for multi-target skills in a lower amount .

These changes won't affect only to Wizards. Every guilds have multi-target skills and all them will be changed. However, it's true that wizards will be more affected than others as they rely on these skills more than others. But the new feature which will affect almost only wizards is the new "salvation roll" to avoid the direct damage from those skills causing area damage direct over a group, to increase fights length and balance them.

Asking to your question, I have to say that these changes are not being made to balance ambushes (at least, not only them). The changes try to balance difference between different guilds caused by the multi-target skills, most of them too powerful. You have only to watch the ranking ordered by level, to see that you will find 4 wizards in the Top 6, and 2 scouts which also rely on multi-target skills and xp bonuses. Rain of Arrows/Fireballs have been very powerful tools to harvest XP and we wanted to solve this time ago.

Notice that the requests from my team mates included halving the damage from spells, and decreasing greatly the energy regeneration wizard's passive skill, but at least I could stop them to lower the passive skill, and changed higher energy better than lower damage, because though damage/SP is the same with both possible changes, at least in my way they will keep the potential of the skill.

Alex
June 11th, 2015, 22:17
By the way, we are finished and testing our next update with enhancements for combat, as well as these adjustments I said above. This update will be uploaded on Monday surely.

Now, our next goal is the party screen, and also we will make the needed adjustments on ambushes. We plan to set brackets to window possible targets, and set limits to amount of ambushes. We plan to set individual limits per target in the way I explained days ago, though also consider to set general daily limits as some players suggested here. What do players think about this?

Zab
June 11th, 2015, 22:45
Daily limits for ambushes are a good idea, Alex, but how will you do it? With people moving in and out of parties more often because of the cooldown timers, what happens when a player hits his daily limit and they party he is now in wants to commit an ambush....and they cannot even get the one with his limit hit to leave party because he is offline. How do you move around this? Will you set something to make the player who has hit daily limits come across as dead entering the ambush (even if he is not), so that it is fair to the players who want to do an ambush....?

Alex
June 12th, 2015, 04:38
My initial idea is to set the ambush limits for targets, not globally, in the same way that the quest limits are limited by quest and not globally. So a player could not raid a party several times in a row, but he could change targets. Combining this with "windowing" the possible targets to a bracket where targets have more similar levels, or party compositions, etc, limiting the number of targets, both together would be an effective global limit. However, if possible targets are many and this is not enough, we could consider to set a global limit too.

If we implement for ambushes the same replenishment times (for target parties instead by quests), the last raid considered for the party is the last of the members, this is, if your party is ready to ambush and accept a new member who is not, your party will have for all members be ready to ambush. Same than quests, with the difference that here we will not have bonus on the replenishment time reduction for the first 20 times you make a quest.

Zab
June 13th, 2015, 00:20
I like the idea of cooldown timers for ambushes, Alex. Thanks for the reply.

ByronRich
June 16th, 2017, 04:09
Yes only make it effective against players not monsters!