(We're live!)
A note on the changes to equipment: we're moving away from the system where everyone can equip everything. The main reason is that allowing this had a lot of unintended consequences that all but eliminated any kind of natural gear progression.
The system will now enforce stratification to close off the ability for high-level players to dump gear on low-level players that are, relatively, much higher quality than they could hope to obtain themselves.
This does however throw open the door for the pre-nerf spectre to rear its ugly head. Therefore, this change was also accompanied with a massive rewrite of the equipment generation system, which should allow everyone to find meaningful upgrades, even if they previously had higher-end gear handed down to them.
Read on for the specific first pass of changes that were made in an attempt to make this happen.
Equipment Level ChangesEQUIPMENT GENERATED PRIOR TO THIS PATCH DOES NOT CURRENTLY HAVE A LEVEL. THE FIRST TIME THIS GEAR IS EQUIPPED, IT WILL BE ASSIGNED THE SAME LEVEL (AND CORRESPONDING STAT SCALING) AS THE CHARACTER THAT EQUIPPED IT.- Equipment now has a fixed gear level that matches the level of the player it dropped for. The gear level determines both the stat scaling of the gear, as well as whether or not a character can equip it.
- You cannot equip gear that is above your current level. You can equip gear that is below your level, but the gear will not scale up to your level.
- By consuming a number of Soul Fragments, you can bind a gear to your player character and make it level up as you do - that is, the old behavior. This will however make the item untradeable. You do this at the forge.
-- Soul Fragments are dropped frequently from random encounters, capped to up to six per day. They are not tradeable and have no sell value. They have also replaced Precursor Artifacts as a prize in the lottery, and if all else fails, they can be purchased (at significant cost) in the item store.
-- The number of Soul Fragments required is
100 50 plus 1 for every two levels difference between your level and the gear level. (Legacy gear that hasn't been assigned a level will count as being your level, and always has the base cost.)
-- You cannot soulfuse items that are more than 50 levels above your current level.
(No, you won't be able to soulfuse all your equipment. This is by design. The idea is that you should be able to grab one "keeper" every week or so just from playing. Past that, it will require a significant investment at the item shop, or (bad?) luck at the equipment lottery.)
- Lottery prize equipment as well as all untradeable peerless equipment granted by the Follower of Snowflake perk will also be soulfused automatically.
Equipment/Loot Generation ChangesThe way equipment is generated has been significantly changed. Instead of getting passed a "quality bonus" and from that generating random stats, before finally calculating its quality, the system was flipped around to always generating equipment based on a given quality tier.
For example, when the system generates a gear of type Legendary, it will now always have three primary attribute bonuses (assuming the gear type has three possible PABs), and every stat is rolled between 85% and 100% of the allowed range. (Legendary equipment can now roll the highest stat possible; a Peerless is therefore simply a perfect Legendary.)
Additionally, this gives the system a lot more control over generated gear tiers than before, which allows it to stop being overly cautious in some cases. It also allows enforcement of strict minimum quality tiers.
For example, tier 4 and 5 trophies will now always be at least Superior, tier 6 will be at least Exquisite, tier 7 will be at least Magnificent, and tier 8 will be at least Legendary.
Further, the chance of generating rare-tier equipment now significantly depends on the quality tier. In other words, you will never see crude or fair power armor, while the chance of legendary heavy armor being power is much higher than before.
The system also increases the fidelity of base stats, which means that it will be very difficult to roll, for example, "legendary max" on several stats. The ranges are however generally slightly higher than the old ones, to prevent the "pre-nerf gear" syndrome.
Note that because of changes to both the generation process and the lower bounds of gear stat ranges, there can be some quite large differences between old and new gear, especially below the highest tiers.
- One and two-handed weapons and staffs no longer have a common and rare tier, to prevent generating mostly katanas/wakizashi at higher tier bonuses.
- Turn duration (and for bleed, damage) for weapon procs are now always the same.
- Cloth armor now has some mitigation against crushing damage.
- Vampire, Illithid and Banshee weapons will now drop with a slightly higher proc rate.
- The effect of the Slaughter suffix was reduced by about 1/3rd. Everything that could drop as Slaughter has had the base damage range adjusted to compensate. (Which means everything except for Slaughter will be relatively more powerful.)
(READ ME: SLAUGHTER GEAR IS NOT WEAKER THAN BEFORE, NON-SLAUGHTER SUFFIXES ARE STRONGER.)
- It is no longer possible to go over the equipment limit by using Mooglemail, Snowflake's Shrine or the Equipment Shop. (People were doing so to the point where it broke stuff.)
- Arena clear bonuses are now always equipment. They are also now based on a trophy-equivalent tier, and will therefore be significantly higher quality than before.
- Luck of the Draw no longer provides a vague "loot quality bonus". As this is not compatible with the new system, it will now instead provide a bonus to the rate of rare tier equipment and consumable drops from monsters.
- If you are at the equipment inventory limit, equipment drops are now simply lost, it will no longer be changed to item drops. (The old method would be a bitch to integrate with the new code.)
Repair Tweaks- Repairs no longer require a catalyst. A larger amount of scrap is instead required. Rather than having distinct tiers, the amount of scrap now depends directly on the quality of the item.
-- On average, the scrap-value equivalent cost for a full repair are significantly lower than before. It is slightly higher with a q between 0.78-0.84 (worst case +17) and between 0.95-0.98 (worst case +12), and slightly to significantly lower at all other quality ranges (best case -55).
- Item wear was cut in half and repair cost was doubled - effectively cancelling each other out, except you only have to visit the forge half as often.
- You now lose item durability if you are defeated. The loss depends on your level, and is 2% below level 100, 5% between level 100 and 200, and 10% above level 200. The Repair Bear will not help you with defeat durability loss.
- Added a final level to the Repair Bear hath perks, which completely eliminates normal equipment wear. It does not work on defeat durability loss.
- Added a simple weapon/armor damage indicator in the info bar. (Out of battle only)
EXP Changes- The way EXP is tracked internally has been changed. This fully fixes a old bug where dawn EXP for stat-ups could be eaten if you were in a battle, eliminating an expensive workaround.
- The amount of EXP granted for monster kills and required for each level has been rescaled, knocking off a couple of digits for the latter at level 500.
-- Up to around level 300, the actual kills per level should be more or less the same. From there, the kills required are somewhat reduced compared to before, and the 400+ levels should be a bit less ridiculous. (They are still pretty ridiculous.)
-- Offsetting this somewhat, the EXP bonuses for trainings and hath perks are now additive instead of multiplicative. (In other words, when both are maxed they would provide a multiplier of x5 instead of x8.)
- Because of the EXP changes, everyone has had their EXP reset to match their current progress at their current level.
- As primary attribute scaling and storage has changed as well, these points have to be reassigned.
- In order to fix a significant shortfall in proficiency at lower levels, it is now gained at a much faster rate below level 250. (This is linear at a 5x rate at level 1, tapering off to the normal rate at level 250.)
Consumables and Restoratives- Draughts have returned! All the old Potion restoratives have been retired, and a new Draught and Potion for each vital has been added.
-- Draughts have a long-lasting regen effect. While it is much weaker than the old regen effect, it also lasts much longer.
-- Potions have an instant restoration effect.
-- Elixirs will now fully restore the corresponding vital, and also grants a longer draught-like regen effect.
-- There are no longer any "tiers" of potions, upgrades are now only from the potion-boosting abilities. Health draughts/potions/elixirs and mana/spirit potions get a more powerful effect with every upgrade, while mana/spirit draughts last longer.
-- Until they are permanently removed from the game, all retired Potions have 50% the effect of new draughts and new potions combined. Make sure to use or sell them before they are removed, in a month or so.
(Why make new ones instead of just changing the old types to the new types? Well, mostly so we can remove a few million rows from a database table, many from inactive accounts.)
- Draughts, Potions and Elixirs (except for Last Elixirs) are now all staple items.
- Elixirs were re-added to the restoratives drop table.
- All consumables EXCEPT for the old retired potion types had their sale value divisor increased from 5 to 25. This should partially balance out the increase in equipment sell value due to the increase in average equipment quality, and allows a higher value to be placed on the new potions.
-- This is unlikely to reduce the effective sale price for most non-staple items (infusions and scrolls) due to the item shop bot profit share, but it will reduce the amount of new credits generated by the item shop.
- Using consumables is now instant. (That is, the action time is zero. It will still count as a turn.)
- You can no longer slot the same item in multiple slots.
- All normal consumable slots can now be used an unlimited number of times, as long as you have stock, much like with scroll and infusion slots. There is a
50 40-turn cooldown on each slot.
(Generally, this should allow more varied use of consumables, and still let players go deeper than before. The cooldown and weaker restoratives should however prevent it from being all-out potion spam.)
- The Holy Spell Damage stat no longer affects cure power. There is instead a new modifier scaling the power from 80% to 150% based on how high the supportive magic proficency is compared to the player level.
-- Scaling starts from the first point and caps at 200%. It is linear in two parts; 0 supportive proficiency yields 80% base, matching the player's level yields 100% base, doubling the player's level yields 150% base.
Misc- Lottery prize adjustments: soul fragments replaces precursor artifacts, so all lottery prizes are now account bound. Chaos token count was doubled. Halved the requirement for each golden ticket, but reduced them to adding +100 tickets (they still double the effective chance up to 10%). Note that old lotteries will incorrectly show up with the new values.
- Monthly toplist rewards were extended corresponding to the last Outstanding Achievements event.
-- It now awards Platinum for 1st to 3rd, Gold for 4th to 10th, Silver for 11th to 25th, and Bronze for 26th to 50th.
-- Each ticket was also bumped up one tier for item quality bonus.
- Culinarian and Gentleman were renamed to Metabolism and Inspiration, and the cost was reduced by 20%.
- Happy Pills were removed from the item table for Snowflake's Shrine.
- Nintendo and Battletoads difficulties were both used less than half as often as every other difficulty, and have therefore been merged.
- Added +1000 and +9999 buttons to the item shop.
- Offhand weapon damage penalty for the Dual-Wielding fighting style was reduced from 50% to 20%.
- Added a warning if you don't have any equipment, abilities or attributes assigned.
START WHINING AND THE KITTY GETS IT
(Oh, and it's a large patch, so post any bugs. If by any chance the new equipment generator generates any bugged equipment, they will be deleted, so don't buy them from anyone.)
HentaiVerse 0.82, Reading material
May 17 2015, 11:14
