Avoiding advanced classes to balance a server.

[horo]

Hm decide on one thing first:

What do you think about equipments that can "replace" an existing item?

For example, for slotted garments, in the beginning we just have hood, muffler and manteau. Then Pauldron started coming in, followed by valkyrie manteau. Wool Scarf and Dragon's Breath joined, and now we have satan morroc dropping the newest available slotted garment.

If I recall what you mentioned before, you said that you don't want players to waste time hunting an "inferior" garment. So does that mean you want all garments to be usable on the same extent, or are you keeping some of the garments only as "stepping stones" to use before you reach the 'best equipment' stage?

Sorry if this post is confusing. Hope that you understand what I meant.

I think I understand. Using your example of garments, I'd like each one, coupled with their droprate, to serve a purpose. Hoods for example are light, good for switching, and overupgrading to get certain card bonuses, but Muffler, Manteau and Pauldron are made almost obsolete by Wool Scarf, which is often chosen even over Valk Manteau. Ridiculous, considering the difficulty of obtaining it compared to those it surpasses. Stepping stones are usually stepped over depending on the card droprate (unless there's a card remover), and while I'm not trying to make all equipment remotely equal, I want to restore a variety of choice in equipment to the player. There'll certainly still be 'best' equipment (Satan Morroc, Randgris stuff), but that's nothing you can obtain without having great stuff to begin with, unlike a lot of the equipment I've decided to make changes to.
Posted on: Apr 08, 2009, 04:48 amI've decided on skill changes I'd like to implement, and would love to hear your opinions on them!

Rogue: Get preserve.
Alchemist:
Change Alchol recipe to require 1 x Stem and 1 x Poison Spore instead of 5 x of each
Change Acid Bottle recipe to require 1 x Venom Canine instead of 1 x Immortal Heart

Dancer/Bard:
Ensemble songs to be made single:

Lullaby: 35 sp per cast, 1sp / second upkeep
Eternal chaos: 35 sp per cast, 1sp / second upkeep
Battlefield drums: 70 sp per cast, 3sp / second upkeep
Ring of Nibelungen: 70 sp per cast, 3sp /second upkeep
Into the Abyss: 35 sp per cast, 1sp / second upkeep

Loki’s Veil and Invulnerable Siegfried stay ensemble songs. If I figure out how to make Mr. Kim not be abusable in solo play by using it on last hits on high exp enemies with sling arrow, it might be changed to non-ensemble also, otherwise it stays as is.

[Ayu]

I dunno... I prefer ensembles to be dual. Dancer is horribly useless in relative contrast to bard if its not for ensemble to keep them "necessary" in those cases ._x; Plus once you change a skill, you are more likely to receive some complaints one way or another so do keep that in mind.

Another suggestion of a type of approach you can take while deciding on normally trans item. Once you lower an equipment's value, you sort of get "congested" with a lot of equipment being relatively the same without being all that different from each other... for example, meteor plate armor compare to full plate, legion plate and chain mail are all grouped together and their only difference is just def number change and meteor being the only unique one with status resistance. One approach is that instead of nerfing/lowering the numbers, you can add some more drawback so that they become "high risk-high return" type of approach.

Just for example, you can say keep tidal combo as is, but lower the effectiveness of potions by 20%. You start off with a higher max hp, but potion is weakened as an exchange.


I personally prefer equipments to be more distant and unique from one another, instead of relatively the same except number changes. It's another possibility that you can take.

[Sarin]

Dancers aren't useless, but they have to be played right. But most people dunno what does it take so they tend to think so...but when used correctly, Slow Grace can deal debuff about as strong as Bragi's buff is, if you get what I mean. Bards are definitely better support...but dancers have their place, and are very underestimated in their abilities.

You get the point in equip. Seems like reasonable approach, if used correctly. I support that.

[horo]

I dunno... I prefer ensembles to be dual. Dancer is horribly useless in relative contrast to bard if its not for ensemble to keep them "necessary" in those cases ._x; Plus once you change a skill, you are more likely to receive some complaints one way or another so do keep that in mind.

Another suggestion of a type of approach you can take while deciding on normally trans item. Once you lower an equipment's value, you sort of get "congested" with a lot of equipment being relatively the same without being all that different from each other... for example, meteor plate armor compare to full plate, legion plate and chain mail are all grouped together and their only difference is just def number change and meteor being the only unique one with status resistance. One approach is that instead of nerfing/lowering the numbers, you can add some more drawback so that they become "high risk-high return" type of approach.

Just for example, you can say keep tidal combo as is, but lower the effectiveness of potions by 20%. You start off with a higher max hp, but potion is weakened as an exchange.


I personally prefer equipments to be more distant and unique from one another, instead of relatively the same except number changes. It's another possibility that you can take.

I like Dancers too, but my experience with the classic servers I've played in the past is that the average player (or guild) doesn't recognize their worth, so they're the class played least, and I doubt many guilds would nurse an aspiring WoE Dancer up, so I'm trying to make them, and Bards, although they're more common because of Bragi, obviously appealing to anyone. Most ensemble skills besides Exp song aren't used much in PvM either. Do you think the changes I do suggest for these classes are alright either way? The SP requirement is way high, so I'm not too sure how that will work out.

I understand the suggestions about equips becoming too similar, but there are still loads of set pieces, and ones with special effects like that. I don't want to weird players out by making changes anymore drastic than necessary to achieve the sort of balance I mentioned earlier, although I'll probably use that kind of approach with all the "new" headgears, as there are definitely a bunch far too similar to each other. The higher the amount of customization introduced, the higher the risk of screwing something up, too.

I'm not yet sure what to do with godlikes either, as those are items genuinely not supposed to be balanced, considering they were introduced way before advanced classes.

[fluidin]

All good guilds do recognise the worth of Dazzler spam, Slow Grace and At Your Service at least. And I mean all.

[LiteX]

All good guilds do recognise the worth of Dazzler spam, Slow Grace and At Your Service at least. And I mean all.

Vit Knights are not affected by Dazzler spam
Slow Grace is required to be near the target, while Quagmire can be cast from cliffs, so=Dead Dancer
Service For You is a very good skill for pre-trans, without Soul Exale, Wizzies will need more SP, GFist gains more damage w/ it
You will need atleast one Bragi Bard and one Service for You Dancer for your wizard line and your precast will be stronger than average, and I approve of the high-risk stuff.

[horo]

So you'd say they don't need to be buffed up, and are fine as is?

[LiteX]

So you'd say they don't need to be buffed up, and are fine as is?

In a way, yes, ensambles are one of the things that make bards and dancers both useful, the only thing that needed to be buffed up desperatly pre-trans, were alchemists, but w/ homunculus and no AD they are already balanced, I wouldn't advise buffing up assasins, their link already can make them quite powerful

[Sarin]

About godlys...they are balanced, if like 1-2% of population reaching several thousands have them, like on kRO/iRO. Otherwise, they're kind of too much.

[horo]

In a way, yes, ensambles are one of the things that make bards and dancers both useful, the only thing that needed to be buffed up desperatly pre-trans, were alchemists, but w/ homunculus and no AD they are already balanced, I wouldn't advise buffing up assasins, their link already can make them quite powerful

Alchemist, Rogue and Dancer/Bard were the only ones I considered buffing up as they are seriously underplayed. I consider changing the games crit like I mentioned earlier a buff to assassins mainly. TK, SL, GS, Ninja are all out, as they are too strong, so I won't have to deal with soullink luckily.

About godlys...they are balanced, if like 1-2% of population reaching several thousands have them, like on kRO/iRO. Otherwise, they're kind of too much.

Balancing WoE rewards between worthwhile and overpowered is a challenge for private servers always I feel. I don't want to nerf the godlikes themselves, but rather make the difficulty of their acquiration inversely proportional to that of getting castles.

[Ayu]

In a no advanced class environment, demonstration has its place as a member of the pre-cast team. With homunculus to help out pvm, I think that alchemist should be just fine.


As for handling god items, I don't have much experience but to share what heRO server chose to do. Instead of each castle having a fixed set of unique chests, we changed it so any open castles have a chance to take a shot at any of the 40+ treasure chests and all castles can access the other guild dungeons. You can say that it eliminates some strategic value to get a particular castle, but then when the server just starts, you'll just have one castle open anyway. Also, since chests are randomized, you can't just go invade a particular castle to aim straight for the missing pieces of the god items. A good econ with solid defense to boost the number of chests you get in a castle is all you can do to try to speed up the process. So far, heRO server is open for three and a half years, and currently with 3 castles open, we still haven't seen a single god item created yet (people got pretty close but still not there yet.) It's an approach that's worth considering. You get less whining if you decide to fidget with how to get the god items, rather than play with the god items themselves.

[horo]

As for handling god items, I don't have much experience but to share what heRO server chose to do. Instead of each castle having a fixed set of unique chests, we changed it so any open castles have a chance to take a shot at any of the 40+ treasure chests and all castles can access the other guild dungeons. You can say that it eliminates some strategic value to get a particular castle, but then when the server just starts, you'll just have one castle open anyway. Also, since chests are randomized, you can't just go invade a particular castle to aim straight for the missing pieces of the god items. A good econ with solid defense to boost the number of chests you get in a castle is all you can do to try to speed up the process. So far, heRO server is open for three and a half years, and currently with 3 castles open, we still haven't seen a single god item created yet (people got pretty close but still not there yet.) It's an approach that's worth considering. You get less whining if you decide to fidget with how to get the god items, rather than play with the god items themselves.

I'd love to go with this, can you elaborate a bit on its setup? I assume you have all 20 castles' treasure boxes set to spawn in a treasure room at the same rate? Are they affected by the servers 3x droprate, or did you leave it at 1x? Did you leave the drops the same as they've been since the beginning of WoE, or did you replace them with more up-to-date things? I really appreciate your posts!
Posted on: Apr 10, 2009, 10:17 pmIn light of the forums rollback, you don't have to repost your explanation to this once again =3

[Ayu]

Out of 40 castle chests in woe1, 20 of them are identical and 20 of them are unique, each unique chest containing 1 god item ingredient. This is because official server each castle only spawns 2 chests- 1 generic and 1 unique one. In heRO, each castle has a chance to spawn any of the 40 chests, so you still have 50% of a generic and 50% of the god item pieces. However, you can't pinpoint which castle to go for in order to speed up the rate of collecting god item pieces because all castles got the same chance of getting you the god item piece that you want.

So the chance of 1 particular chest dropping the god item ingredient that you specifically want in heRO is equal 1/40*0.024 (in heRO the 3x drop rate applies to chests as well) which is around 0.06%. We never changed the chests since the beginning, and we never had any wipe so in 3 years, our system allows people to get really close to the god items but no one has completed any yet.

Pros and cons to this system... pros of course is that god item ingredient is sort of diffused and all castles are now equal in value if it's not for the castle floor layout if it's easier to defend or not. The same pros to some players is a con, so it's up to you to decide if it works for your future server. It certain works pretty well for us.

[horo]

I'll definitely go with that, except maybe replace things like chainmail[1], shoes[1] with more worthwhile stuff. thanks a lot for your help! I'll also illustrate the zeny inflation problems 10x droprates brings with it:

Mineral: 3k @ 50%
Myst Case: 1.5k @ 80%, 3k @ 15%
Venatu: 2.5k @ 35-50%,
Dark Frame: 1.5k @ 100%
Stalatic Golem: 800 @ 100%, 2.2k @ 25%, Elunium @ 12%
Sleeper: 1.5k @ 100%
Peach Tree: 3.5k @ 100%
Skogul: 5k @ 50%, 1.2k @ 100%, 5k @ 10%
Zombie, Skel Prisoner: ~800 @ 100%
Mavka: 27.5k @ 30%, 7.5k @ 100%, Blue Herb @ 100%
Wild Rose: 27.5k @ 5%
Vanberk, Isilla: 1.5k @ 100%
Echio: 1.6k @ 100%, 15k @ 5%
Agav: 1.6k @ 100%
Seeker, Hodremlin: 2k @ 100%
Succubus: 10k @ 50%, 2.5k @ 100%, 4.2k @ 100%, 22.5k @ 15%
Incubus: 4.2k @ 100%, 15k @ 50%, 22.5k @ 15%

so many adjustments to make 

[Ayu]

Rather than "adjusting" every single mob which is too much work, I think almost all pservers prefer to use zeny drainage system of some sort for the monsters to combat zeny inflation problem. In a sense, knowing what monster gives good OC loot or valuable drops consistently is part of their advantage as an experienced player to know where to go for these goodies. Instead, it's better if the server has features that suck zeny out of the economy. Afterall, I thought that you prefer less adjustments the better.