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The event "The Assault on Taekir" is beginning in 1 day, 15 hours.

A bit of discussion for engrave specifically.
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Davairus
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 1:16 am    Post subject: A bit of discussion for engrave specifically.

The general game balance issue is that players may engrave high level rare items to replace low level junky items in small, powerful sets to install a disproportionately strong set bonus where there used to be a bunch of crappy stuff providing a huge downside. An example of taking advantage of it is the champions glory set, where, thanks to engraving rares, you can get 100 AC / 5 damroll from literally equipping only the steel belt from goblin village and the mountain boogum's boots.

I fixed champion glory today by adding an earring to it, but this will continue to be a recurring issue any time someone makes a small lowbie set with a big bonus.

For future-proofing sets, I'd propose we limit our engraves to the forged armor from Grimforge, and also drop the rare items requirement. I think this would be a much more satisfying end-game experience (since these items are crafted, its like the icing on the cake) and it is more inclusive for Keepers as well. It also limits the amount of slot availability for engraving, so there is not going to be so much potential for easy abuse as I described above.
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hamsandwich



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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 2:33 am    Post subject:

I fear that the proposed fix will affect sets very inequitably across the board. Some sets will be "hurt" worse than others. Some low level easy sets may become stronger than high level unique sets. There's a lot to consider here so I could be wrong because I'm not going to lie and say I've scoured everything and crunched all the numbers. But that is my knee jerk at least.

I do want to caveat that I appreciate the intent to better balance things Dav and am not trying to just bash your idea for no reason.
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Davairus
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 4:11 am    Post subject:

I'm not really sure where you are coming from with that. The best set options are presently limited to whatever top-end Winter eq you can engrave on, and that has an additional dimension of OOC + ass kissing + good alignment having better skills for Winter and safer groups. The forge is equally accessible. I have put golden ore up for sale at the juggernaut so it isnt a pure boring mine grind, also. And I'm not worried about whatever the optimal set turns out to be. We can anticipate that and adjust any stand-out sets if we want to. I think its much more important to keep a "check" upon the social behavior so we can ensure evils/Keepers are still competitive at every skill level. We can expect a more level playing field this way.
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hamsandwich



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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 4:31 am    Post subject:

By making the only engraveable item a forged gear you make it so any set with a rare/non-shit item in the head/chest/arm/leg/waist slot likely to be relatively worse than any set that doesn't. A set with the strong items there, offset by shit items in other spots - wrist and neck come to mind - won't be able to be improved by engrave, so it becomes base. Base is not a bad thing, necessarily, but it is very likely to be worse than a set that is not base. ie. a set that has shit items that can be engraved and strong items elsewhere.
That makes sense right?

Like I said, I'm not against the idea, I just think that some sets will be wrecked by this and some sets will be almost completely unaffected. Better to do something that hits everyone equally?
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Davairus
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 5:10 am    Post subject:

From what I saw when I checked myself earlier, most sets have at least 3, if not all 5 forge slots available for engraving. I actually checked that before my original post. Is there some specific set you think should be looked at?

Right now you can get the champions glory bonus, +4 dam and +100 AC, by wearing 3 of its 6 items.

Lets say you buff that with top-end or winter eq.
- hero's banner => banner of illisidar (BEST possible upgrade you could do because lights have no AC, 2/2 bonus)
- heavy banded mail => overlapping plates of armor (dex bonus)
- steel belt => segmented belt of crimsons scales (2/2 bonus)

Not only the fact those are some nice upgrades, but this set in some circumstances allows one to literally wear another set on top and begin engraving that one also. One can join the Justice cabal as well, if they feel so inclined, and engrave the helm of Justice instead of the steel belt. I had a mess around earlier, and I made some really hilarious combinations, which I'm not gonna say what I did, but lets just say I have 36/64 hit dam unbuffed, no imbues, augments or enchants.

With the engrave being limited to forge slots, it keeps you honest because its really difficult to cheese the overlapping set bonuses. It gets blocked because each set shares the slots you can engrave on. If you are worrying about some sets being messed up, you can probably stop ..coz it cant get worse than it is already. IMO, this is already rather out of hand. I've been feeling more concerned about the social advantage allowing way easier acquisition of the items, though. We have more Keeper applications than any other cabal for a reason I am feeling very sure of.
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Vevier
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 1:24 pm    Post subject:

I very strongly disagree that this would be more satisfying. There is nothing more fun than finding the right item to engrave into your set and nothing less fun than farming ore/or medals. Especially since it's already a feat to get a decent item out of forging in the first place.

I would much prefer to see us spot-checking the sets and making more items too important to be engraved out if you want to force people to wear shitty gear for a mediocre bonus. Or cap the scaling of the set bonuses at some amount above the average level of the original items (+10 or +20?).

It's worth noting that on every character I've worn a set with, I've had to pass over rare items because of engraving limits, or have been faced with a big decision of which one to dump for the base item. If this change went in, I would expect sets to become essentially defunct except for mid-level ranking and I would probably just wear rares or gambles from head to toe instead.
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Davairus
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 7:55 pm    Post subject:

a pair of dragonblood some puppy fur stompers of evisceration
Code:

Object 'stompers puppy fur refurbished dragonblood' is type armor, material fur.
Extra flags: anti_good.
Light armor to be worn on the feet.
Weight is 4 lbs, value is 4, level is 32.
Armor class is 5 pierce, 5 bash, 5 slash, and 4 vs. magic.
Modifies hitroll by -1.
Modifies damroll by 4.
Modifies dexterity by -1.
This item is part of the set 'Champions Glory'.
Rare item.


Or using a shadar rare (literally always around)

some dragonblood iron gauntlets of evisceration
Code:

Object 'iron gauntlets refurbished dragonblood' is type armor, material iron.
Extra flags: anti_good anti_neutral.
Heavy armor to be worn on the hands.
Weight is 15 lbs, value is 25, level is 40.
Armor class is 13 pierce, 13 bash, 13 slash, and 11 vs. magic.
Modifies hitroll by -1.
Modifies damroll by 4.
Modifies dexterity by -1.
This item is part of the set 'Malicious Beast'.
Rare item.


This already looks like some broken shit that just shouldnt be possible. And this is not running into winter with a group and engraving the best shit in the game is it


Last edited by Davairus on Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:20 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Rothak



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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:14 pm    Post subject:

If we add the armor forged at Grimfore then that would negate some classes or race/class combo such as monks and eradicator paladins since the armor forged there is heavy and neither of them can make use of heavy armor.
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Davairus
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:24 pm    Post subject:

I think that is a valid point Rothak. We should solve it by adding more ways to make these forged type items, e.g. the ranger class could skin things for leather, and we can just make a leatherworking factory somewhere similar to the forging process.

I am going to mention the golden and mithril ore are on sale for 5 medals per unit at the Juggernaut because it is important and relevant to the thread.


Last edited by Davairus on Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:27 pm; edited 1 time in total
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hamsandwich



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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:26 pm    Post subject:

Dav has a point with the imbue and engrave combo. That's nuts. Honestly I'm too noob and that never even occurred to me lol. So congrats to everyone doing that. But yeah taking easy to get always in rares and just imbueing it over and over (theres no limit to times you can imbue the same rare item without it being destroyed) you're basically engraving random gambled items, which you can't do for a reason.

Maybe just make imbue cancel engrave? So you can't double them up. Idk.

Rothak has a good point though. Forged gear is always heavy.
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Vevier
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:40 pm    Post subject:

I agree, engrave plus imbue is pretty open and it would make sense to make them mutually exclusive.

But like I said before, I don't want to waste a bunch of time farming medals just to fuck up hammers. Still very strongly opposed to restricting engrave to just these items.
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Olyn
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 9:55 pm    Post subject:

I'm not a fan of limiting engrave to forged items. Sure, we can come up with a workaround for the hit and dam forged pieces to have a leather option, but it feels a bit too much like duct tape on the dam.

I think not allowing an imbued item to be engrave, and similarly barring engraved items from being imbued, fixes a big part of what was not intended here. We may have erred way back when we introduced engrave by setting the max number of engraved at half of the set. Max one third engraved items probably fixes the remaining concerns. Anything beyond that can probably be handed individually if a set is out of balance.
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Davairus
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 10:09 pm    Post subject:

Well I just posted the imbue for shock value. The balrog gauntlets had better stats before I imbued them, and I would use them as I found them because my double set bonus with engraved Winter eq is giving me about +10 dex. It doesnt make sense we should bar imbued items but not the original more powerful item that enable these problems. Really, not at all. I think you guys are just comfortable.
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Kalist19
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 11:12 pm    Post subject:

Could you just make things like imbue/engrave/forged gear/justice helm mutually exclusive and then tackle 'problem engraves' or 'problem sets' as they are identified? I don't think you'd have to go through systematically and look at every single possible combo and assess if it's OP or not. You could do that, or you could look at the most commonly used sets (spot checking like Vevier said) or just wait and see what crazy shit people come up with.

36/64 unbuffed is pretty nutty - basically dancing in well-geared, raged fire giant territory.
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Davairus
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 22, 2021 12:32 am    Post subject:

So what happens is you first equip yourself into a position where you can't upgrade your sweet item without breaking your set. You have to replace 3-4 items in one go to avoid your Winter item being a downgrade. Engrave solved this. It gets snowball-y from there.

I think Olyn's on the right track which is to limit how many items you are allowed to do that on, I jut don't agree with the means. I can live with 50/50 and engrave being allowed only on the currently available forged armor slots and jewelcrafting slots. That's an easy change and definitely levels the playing field.
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Vevier
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 22, 2021 3:18 am    Post subject:

If the issue is that you can double up on sets, then we could easily change it so that you can only be affected by one set at a time, though I disagree that this is really an issue. There's only a few sets you can double up and you could easily force an earring on to every one or some other cross-slot. You could also update the floating so that it only reduces the number of items required for a single set, so that you can't get around the requirements as easily for doubling sets.

If the issue is that you can imbue items to get a stellar bonus for engrave, then it seems like there is a lot of agreement. engrave + imbue is clearly cheese and we agree that you shouldn't be able to add top tier gambled items to the list.

If the issue is that there are top tier items out that that you don't want engraved into the set, why not just flag those items no_engrave? "This item is too special to engrave" or something. I know there is already some restriction in place, but atm I think it's based on material rather than particular items. I would be open to disallowing any unique item from being engraved, for example. We could also use our existing system for flagging powerful rates to make a blanket change that any items that are too strong don't get engraved.

It's true that a few people have been able to get super op sets, but at the end of the day, that's possible without engraving and that character is likely going to get an HGOD and lose their stuff anyway. It's been said (and I wholly agree) that is IS possible to get an OP set and need the HGOD (although again, cheers to Rhoa for taking out Dogran solo XD).


The following reasons are why I think it's bad to have forged armor only (sorry if some of these are repeats, I'm taking advantage of my keyboard instead of writing on my phone):

* Ore is terrible to farm...
- Yes you can now buy ore from the juggernaut, but this isn't a fix even assuming that the already stated issues of material are otherwise addressed) because...
- You can only get like 1 or 2 ores of each type on every run through Grimforge (a recent nerf to ore farming) and
- buying from the juggernaut doesn't help because only goods have an overlord at 50 when you'd want to be doing this so there is no natural way to get medals just from typical gameplay like helping people rank.
- The new change to BLOODSHED (see the helpfile, if you don't know) means you can get 150-300 relics from end game content, this would yield enough to make one item for every 2 bosses killed.
- If you also happen to need medals because you want to buy into strife (a staggering 1k medals), or you need to train, that's another reason you won't be able to participate in this system.

* Forging is difficult:
- assuming that you do the forging process 100% right, you could still get screwed over by the 2 random chances you have to nerf the item (making the ingot and cooling).
- To be clear THIS IS NOT A SATISFYING END GAME EXPERIENCE. You'll notice that someone commented on a log when a perfect item got sacrificed because of the time and effort investment that goes into it. We recognize the effort that goes into making a perfect item and I don't know anyone that would engrave anything less than great into a set.
- I would lay down money that every successful forge is done by people who script it. I scripted it when I was forging regularly on Kewlin and that was literally the only way I could get it right every time and not waste all my previous efforts gathering ore. This was back when you could get 4-5 pieces of one type.

* This is going to make sets nearly impossible for newbies to use with any success:
- Newbies will have no idea how to forge and steering them towards sets currently provides a couple of key benefits such as forcing them to explore areas to gather items and giving them a much-needed boost to their stats. They usually need to be taught how to forge and they won't have success.
- This is also an issue for alts that people want to have decently equipped without sinking hours and hours of gameplay in for a character that they want to just log on and wreck face or w/e. Its one thing to try to get hours on the alt, its another to have to spend that time farming medals or ore instead of having fun.

* Engraving is currently one of the biggest gold-sinks in the game.
- Changing engrave to only allow forged items means that people will NOT be spending gold engraving. I think right now the only other major gold sinks are depositing gold into cabals (through purchase of nobility or direct deposits), buying consumables, and buying lair items. I may be missing one that I don't utilize but those are the main reasons my personal bank accounts are not maxed out. Making this change will make gold less valuable.

* The system is fun as it is.
- Don't change what ain't broke. We have the ability to fine tune how we allow engraving without completely invalidating the process. I really hope you hear what everyone else in this thread is saying and DON'T MAKE THIS CHANGE.
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Davairus
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 22, 2021 4:10 am    Post subject:

A) you should have read the BLOODTYPE helpfile before you advised me to read the BLOODSHED helpfile. That is very annoying

B) If you had read the last post, I said I find it acceptable to engrave the slots that can be forged/JC'd, instead of restricting engraves to forged items. This thread has changed direction already and you are responding to old posts without reading the whole thread. That is also very annoying.
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Vevier
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 22, 2021 5:56 am    Post subject:

You are calling me annoying instead of responding to comment. THATS annoying.

Thanks for the typo correction.
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Davairus
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 22, 2021 6:04 am    Post subject:

To clarify, that wasn't a typo correction. You need to read that helpfile. The one you told ME to read. It appears you did not.
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Vevier
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 22, 2021 1:01 pm    Post subject:

I was just trying to share knowledge and make people aware of something. That was literally the smallest point in my post. Please stop being such a dick.
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