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Goblinworks Game Designer

The main feature of the Seneschal skill is reducing upkeep. For now, the crafting aspect of it only gains recipes at the first few ranks (there's the normal crafting time reduction for higher skill total, of course). But we realized this week that it could basically eat the possibility space for Architect (which hadn't previously had enough stuff to do to really justify a whole skill), so I expect us to assign Seneschal more features as time goes on.

Goblinworks Game Designer

I'm pretty sure that message only shows up as a fallback when the automatic respawn has glitched (situations where you'd previously have to log out to stop being dead). It's a bit of a prelude to the full death tech that lets you choose when to release and where to respawn every time (coming soonish but no firm ETA yet).

Goblinworks Game Designer

Pyronous Rath wrote:

Method: I attacked the same bandit with the spell wilting surge documented the dmg number and ran rinse and repeat on SAME BANDIT. I did this for 10 data points. I have wilting surge trained to 3.

...
___Charged staff +0 - 79,79,79,52,79,79,67,54,57,79* Total=704
Diminishing staff +2 - 79,53,79,79,79,56,79,79*,79,57 Total=719

The +0 has one matching keyword. The diminishing +2 has 3 matching keywords. This seem's like maybe there is a bug for staff dmg.

I could not reproduce this on the current internal build.

79 should, indeed, be the max damage for a one keyword matched Wilting Surge against a bandit on live (they have Negative Resist 2 so max is 43 x 1.84 = 79.12 with one keyword); 98 should be the max for three keywords. My test on the internal build showed the expected 10 base damage increase between a Charged Staff +0 and a Diminishing Staff +3 with Wilting Surge rank 3 (went from 51 to 63 with the new multiplier of 1.18).

If anyone else notices similar instances of keyword matching not seeming to matter in EE3 or EE4, please let us know so we can see if there are any other similar inputs going on that I didn't think to try.

Goblinworks Game Designer

The exploits were an experiment in training people to make use of conditionals. That they just add precision and damage was to make them very easy to understand. I'm not sure they've had the desired effect, because they seem to be making people value them as a source of pure damage, when conditionals are generally for making good use of the other effects in the system.

So we may look at making them more varied in their conditionals rather than just incentivizing going for the biggest straight up damage numbers.

Goblinworks Game Designer

I believe that, the simple way the AI is now, if they start in synch, they'll stay in synch unless something happens to break their pattern (like one having to move while the others can still attack). I don't believe they'll naturally synchronize over time if they didn't start out in synch (though I've seen MMOs where that happened due to something about the AI processing cycles).

Goblinworks Game Designer

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The bandit archer low-stamina attack is 100% Interrupt on Opportunity.

The Stamina cost on it is 23, which means they'll have enough to use it every 2.3 seconds once they get low in stamina. If you are also repeatedly using longbow attacks that are also 2.3 seconds, you could probably easily get into a loop where they manage to land in your interruption phase every time. However, if you happen to time it so they're hitting you during your non-interruption phases, they'll probably keep hitting you during those phases and never interrupt you as long as you also keep attacking every 2.3 seconds.

The bandit attack is changing stamina cost slightly due to some math changes in EE4, so it will probably be less likely to get stuck in a perfect loop of either yes or no in the future.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Camps can restore their power to anyone and everyone that can use them within the window it's there for. But you personally cannot then rest at a camp again until your timer expires, so you might want to hold out for a really nice camp that will restore more of your missing Power rather than using the first one you see.

Goblinworks Game Designer

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DeciusBrutus wrote:
I thought penetrating was specifically keyed to physical resistance, and searing armor would do more fire damage to targets with high physical resistance. It seems to me the reason Searing Armor was Penetrating is because it turns heavy armor into a broiler.

Should be whichever resistance you're targeting, not locked to Physical. Which makes me realize that I may have to up the priority of getting a more intuitive Penetrating effect or a less kludgy "Immune" state. There probably shouldn't be cases where Penetrating attacks of an energy type the creatures is "Immune" to are better than attacks from energies the creature isn't immune to, but just has good resistances against.

coach wrote:
hopefully GW will because Keywords are currently frustrating at best and a thesaurus is all that would be needed for more words to bring across what they are saying

I'm givin' 'er all she's got cap'n! The thesaurus only has so many words and I've used all the cool ones already! :)

Goblinworks Game Designer

Yes, the three applied states (Dazed, Distressed, and Unbalanced) are meant to be comboed between players. Most weapons can only really apply one, but can take advantage of at least two depending on which feats you buy. You're meant to synchronize between your party and figure one which players can combo together.

They currently provide a 1.5 divisor to the effects that are conditional on them (i.e., conditional effects using them will be 150% as potent as they would be if they did not require the state), and I generally try to pack as much of the value of Secondary attacks into the conditionals as possible. Which means if you're using secondaries when you don't activate their conditionals, you're wasting a pretty big chunk of Stamina, but when you DO match the conditional, that Stamina is being spent much more efficiently than when using a Primary.

I am curious whether people feel like these states are long enough. Keep in mind that making them longer makes it easier for you to capitalize, but also makes it easier for you to be capitalized upon.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Hmmm, there are three cantrips that capitalize on Dazed, but none of them are available right now since they use effects that don't work yet. Problem is that Dazed capitalization really points to mental controls, like Charm, Confusion, and Nausea. But I think I'm going to go ahead and turn on Spell Suppression for EE4 by replacing the Suppressed effect that doesn't work until it does. Can't really turn on Nauseating Ray without Nausea or Bewitch without Charm, though.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Ravenlute wrote:
Ryan Dancey wrote:
Base Camps, Campfires and Small Holdings will impact Power regen. But they aren't being deployed for EE3. You are seeing the tip pf a very big iceberg.
When you say Campfires are you talking about Engineer crafted camps?

Yes.

Goblinworks Game Designer

The too fast timers are a separate problem that may have gotten fixed for the next patch as well. Apparently a disagreement between two parts of the code cropped up recently and was causing most effects to expend their timers much faster than intended.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Per my discovery and mea culpa on the Goblinworks boards, consumables are, indeed, currently bugged as Spitfire suggests. You won't see any improvement until +4 or +5 (and then, significantly less improvement than they're supposed to have).

This should be fixed for T1 items in the EE3 patch, with the fix for T2 and T3 coming hopefully shortly thereafter. But until the EE3 patch, you're well advised to hold onto your consumables of higher than +0.

(Tokens are always +0, but Greater Tokens should count as if they're matching 3 keywords... however, they'll act like they're matching 0 until the full fix.)

Goblinworks Game Designer

All consumables are basically expendables that act like they're matching (the upgrade value + level - 3) expendable keywords. So, for example, a potion that's +2 should count as one keyword less than its level (or 2, for a Tier 1 potion). Tokens are all +0, so should count as matching 0 keywords for T1 tokens (3 for T2, and 6 for T3). If you have a +3 T1 consumable, it should have 4 Effect Power (because of the way expendables round their keyword effect) and 61 base damage.

And that's a possible reason for the approximately 4.5 second buffs: if you're using a +0 consumable with a one round buff and you're using +1 armor (and matching all the keywords), you have 2 Effect Protection and, thus, should be experiencing -20% duration on your +0 consumables... which should take one round durations down to 4.8 seconds.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Grenades were absolutely working correctly last week when I tested them. More keywords meant more damage. Haven't had a chance to test potion duration yet.

The timer on a buff will start as soon as the effects are applied, and with slower actions you lose a few hundred miliseconds to finishing the followthrough on your action. But I don't think that should be enough to turn 6 seconds into 4.5 of practical duration. I'll try to check that this week.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Looting is the minimal implementation right now, and there's no penalty for looting any husks (other than the looting delay potentially leaving you vulnerable to attack). Getting Criminal for looting someone else's kill is still on the table once we have the Criminal flag, better tracking of kill credit, etc.

Goblinworks Game Designer

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Yes, the cooldown on Minor Cure is a nerf, of the sort where we're removing something that was unintentionally too powerful. It was never meant to be spammed (it was the only direct heal without a cooldown, and only because our experiment with turning cooldowns off on secondaries made it into EE). We intend the HP bar to be a major component of fight timing that can't be repaired indefinitely while in combat, so we did not mean to create a power that would give the impression that trying to heal through damage was viable. I'm sorry you guys started to rely on it in that form, but please expect a lot of the other combat math and mechanics to change as we notice things that aren't being used as anticipated (i.e., my starting math is only a very rough guess and EE is important for actually helping us determine the real value of various elements of the system).

As Lee says, the Tier 2 escalations should, indeed, be out of reach of Tier 1 characters for now, save possibly in very large groups. They should become significantly easier as T2 gear and stats start becoming available in a couple of weeks.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Should be 5% of maximum every 12 minutes (so 100% every 4 hour server day). You probably have to be logged in.

Note that changing armor/armor feat removes whatever power you're getting as a bonus for matching armor keywords, and the total doesn't yet change relative to your new maximum. That is, if you have nearly-full power and change armor you will be reset down to your new maximum and then when the bonus for whatever you slotted comes back on, the difference between old max and new max will be empty until you start regenerating again. Even if you're not nearly full on power, if you don't have all your bonuses working your max is lower and so your regen rate is lower.

Goblinworks Game Designer

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I read this thread title as "Advice on TNT-based crafting" and was sad that, even in Golarion, I cannot justify adding that with the setting lore.

Because that would be awesome.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Orisons works like cantrips and physical attacks: more keywords matched between action and weapon means more base damage and more effect power. Ranking up an action without improving your focus is like improving your focus without ranking up your action: both need to have the same keywords to get the benefit.

For the damaging orisons, you should see an obvious benefit in the form of more damage as you improve your rank and focus. For the buffing ones, generally the duration of the buff will improve by 10% of the base duration every time you match a new keyword (relative to the Effect Protection of the target). A few things, like healing, aren't yet hooked into effect power, so unfortunately ranking up Minor Cure doesn't do anything yet.

The three types of orisons for the three types of foci should have three different colors in their icon background (I don't remember what they are off the top of my head). So if you have a Battle focus and pick one of the orisons off the top of Ryan's list above (that all get the Battle keyword), you can easily find the others by matching the color of its background.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Yeah, Energetic Field was wrong a couple patches ago and I don't think I've fixed it in the wiki data yet. It's to All now.

Speed takes 1.1 seconds to activate (instead of 2.3) and does not provoke Opportunity. Remember that things that take twice as long to cast are more than twice as good due to the interruption chance. First level spells also aren't significantly better than cantrips, but a cantrip version of Speed would probably only be able to support a single round of Hasted for its speed and cost.

You also, as noted, have to be careful with Energetic Field not to buff all the opposition too.

And... AoEs are probably way underpriced for how good they are (that's one of the things I'm looking at this week).

Goblinworks Game Designer

As others have said, there's no anti-spam cooldown on actions. You're likely seeing a bug at work.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Yep, charges will work the same way.

Goblinworks Game Designer

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Yep, +0 ammo will make your ranged attacks continue to work like they do in the ammoless world we live in now. Higher plus ammo is pure bonus over how things work now.

It does break the paradigm, but in a minor way. And it was better to support the +0 to +5 crafting paradigm than to keep the damage paradigm pristine :) .

Goblinworks Game Designer

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Yep, buffs should stack with passives (currently and in the future).

Quickened and Hasted will not stack, however (they're the lesser and greater versions of the same buff and on the same channel). So Agile Feet is only useful if you've been hit with Energetic Field so far as Agile Feet's Quickened is likely to still be on you after Energetic Field's Hasted wears off.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Are you sure they don't stack? There's currently a bug with Encumbrance bonuses where they don't seem to get cleaned up properly when you unslot the feat granting them. But the per keyword bonus is the exception in that it should (under the current implementation) stack with the effects on most passive feats (in the same way that you get bonus HP for Toughness and from your keyword bonus on your armor feat).

Goblinworks Game Designer

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Dunno. How much will you pay to do a few percent more damage than the guy using +0 arrows? (The percentage depending on the + in question, the tier, and the armor of the target.)

That's not meant to be a flip response. There are a few places in the game systems, particularly the crafting systems, where the intent is that you can chase the progressively higher resource cost for higher upgrade gear for an increasingly marginal bonus. But, importantly, it's a total that can't be reached in any other way.

I'm honestly curious whether the player response to some of these is likely to be a "I'm not going to pay for that and if I did accidentally, I'm mad that I did" or "Yeah, that's something that people, particularly well-organized people, will use selectively to get a small but meaningful advantage in certain situations, particularly ones where they've already exhausted cheaper methods to raise that total."

Goblinworks Game Designer

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The intent is for higher plus arrows to not be required for higher plus bows. Instead, the plus on the arrow is a base damage bonus. +5 arrows essentially act like another minor keyword for damage.

You will need higher tier ammo for higher tier bows (or, more likely, shooting lower tier ammo will downgrade the attack to the lower tier, including probably dropping major keywords as well).

We may add small batches of +0 ammo to creature loot tables once ammo is working, but not so much that you can kill using only ranged attacks indefinitely with only the ammo provided from your kills.

Goblinworks Game Designer

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So... it turns out that I left a % symbol off Archer and Travel Domain and that may mean their speed boosts never did anything. Or they may assume the percentage; it's hard to be sure. Either way, it's fixed in the next patch.

All the armor feats with a speed boost should be exactly the same boost at the same level.

Travel has a significantly higher boost than the armor feats, but will not currently stack with them (only the higher bonus will apply). There's a feature request that's not been done yet to use the channels on passive feats so they will stack.

Goblinworks Game Designer

I'm not sure how obvious it is, so this seems like a good place to note that at some point I'm going to get the feature improvement that feat slotting actually looks at the Specific Weapon field on my spreadsheet. At that point, the various Conks will require the noted weapon (e.g., Club Conk will not appear if you have a Mace or Hammer).

Goblinworks Game Designer

I agree that it's possible there's a bug in the process. Without more data, though, I just can't agree that what you're seeing is clearly a bug rather than just statistical noise. We're keeping an eye on it, but it's not yet to the point of telling the programmers to drop what they're working on to prioritize a drop log.

Goblinworks Game Designer

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Knowledge increase should be a flat multiplier on every independent chance the creature has to drop something. If it has 20% chance to drop, and your Knowledge gives you +10%, it now has a 22% chance to drop.

It should not affect any kind of relative chances. If a creature has a 30% chance to roll on its salvage or tokens table, and you get +10%, it now has a 33% chance to roll on its salvage or tokens table, but the relative weights of what's on that table aren't affected.

It does not affect the party, only your own drops (this is part of the reason why you get personal loot that goes directly to your inventory: that loot is yours, was affected by your knowledges, and you're not obligated to share your better loot with people that didn't spend as much XP on knowledges as you did).

There should no longer be any chances that can get to 100% even with maxed out knowledges. I deliberately set them all to under 66% (splitting ones that were over 66% into two independent chances) so even if you're solo you'll never accidentally cap out your loot chance. There's still an advantage to being in a party (a six-member party should, total, be getting around 25% more loot than if they'd killed the same pile of monsters ungrouped).

There shouldn't be anything in the math that creates milestones that could cause weirdness. Rank 7 should differ from Rank 6 in the same way Rank 6 differs from Rank 5: slightly more chance of loot. You guys may be conflating it with the gathering skills (where rank 7 allows you to get Tier 2 stuff, and that DOES mean you can get T2 instead of T1). But the creature loot and knowledges are a completely different system from gathering.

Some things have really low drop chances, particularly when dealing with low-level monsters. For example, the base chance to drop a T1 recipe never exceeds 6.7% (and is 2% for level 1s). That's rolled independently for each creature, and there are no streakbreakers, so my current theory is that any streaks of getting many fewer than expected drops over a big series of kills are balanced out somewhere by someone that got much more than expected drops over a big series of kills. If you kill 1000 creatures with a 2% drop chance, your average result is 20 drops, but that's the peak of the bell curve and there are big swaths of chances where you can get almost none or significantly more than 20.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Physical Damage on something that has a 0 damage factor just means that the stacking debuff is further decreased by physical resistance, rather than an energy resistance type. A Tangle Bomb will usually be less effective against someone in heavier armor. Meanwhile, something like Concealing Mist, which does Acid Damage for its 0 DF and stacking effects, will tend to apply a larger portion of its stack because it's targeting a generally lower resistance type.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Giorgo wrote:
Kadere wrote:
As intended - ammo consumption hasn't been implemented yet.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I will try to slot the quiver in the longbow offhand slot to see if it fits... :)

I don't think it will. Part of getting ammo working is teaching the system how handedness works for ammo containers and ranged weapons. In the meantime, I'm relatively sure that all ranged weapons are set to require both hands and ammo containers can't be equipped yet. (As an aside, that means that since we're likely to get looting in before ammo, you should bank your ammo and ammo containers before looting is live, as they won't be equippable to respawn with you until we get ammo use working.)

In the early design, we had a concept of caster weapons being able to have a small number of charges contained within the item itself so you could wield it with another weapon in one of your hands and get a few cantrips/orisons off too, but that's likely to be too complicated for an already complex ammo system to get in anytime soon.

Goblinworks Game Designer

For now, I'm pretty sure the skill bonuses are only checked when you queue something up.

Long term, the plan is to try to make it more dynamically scaling since we don't really want crafting feats and gear to be something you only care about for the five minutes a day you're actually queuing things up. But balancing the dynamic scaling with keeping it from feeling like we're forcing you to sit in your crafting gear is something we're very conscious of. Part of this is getting more of the Freeholder and Expert feats online so you can spec to be awesome at crafting and still pretty decent at adventuring by using synergy within the role.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Doggan wrote:
All I want to know is why, as a cleric, I'm stuck zapping things with a wand instead of being able to smite evil with a nice holy mace?

Divine attacks for other weapons are in the system but waiting on art approval, balance testing, and a decision whether it's worth holding them as faction rewards for when we actually get factions. But there's no real reason why you shouldn't see them soonish once we get that worked out.

Goblinworks Game Designer

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Gedichtewicht of Brighthaven wrote:

Minor Cure:

What i would like to know here is this.
What is the plan for leveling it?

Healing will eventually change to a small flat number plus a percentage of max HP. Healing will eventually scale based on Effect Power vs. Effect Protection. I'm waiting on tech for both.

Quote:

Healing and flags:

We noticed in the last build that once a member of your party got the aggresor flag he could no longer be healed by other people in the party.
-> I presume this is not wai, so what are your plans for this?

This is a weird interaction of the convenience fix we put in to have Beneficial effects target you instead of your enemy target so you don't accidentally heal the monsters. We need to get some overrides in so settlements/compaines/parties keep people green even when they should be red, and then a further override command that lets you go "I know helping that guy will tag me into the fight, turn me hostile to his enemies, and maybe cost me a rep hit, but I want to do it anyway."

Goblinworks Game Designer

Saiph wrote:
Ryan Dancey wrote:
We want healing to be something you have to do in the thick of battle, not just a bar that you manage sitting safely off to one side. The intent of the design is that Clerics stand right behind the Fighters giving them healing as needed, just like on the tabletop.
Okay, I don't like that plan but that's fine. But why are buffs so low duration?

I have some pretty holistic math trying to peg buffs to extra damage taken or not taken, which gives an extremely rough approximation of the value of a round of each buff relative to damage and debuffs.

For example, if you give a melee guy Mighty, we can look at his normal attack sequence for a round to figure out how much more damage Mighty added, and compare that vs. an attack that just straight up damages a guy. Then I price Mighty so if I put it on an attack, that attack gives up the damage that Mighty is going to add.

Essentially, the buffs are pretty short duration because the math says even that short duration is going to give a comparable boost in combat effectiveness to spending the time you spent applying the buff making a damaging attack. The math, however, does assume a perfect robot capable of applying the buff accurately and with no time wasted, so I'm open to bending the practical durations to make buffing less annoying. I already doubled the duration of most targeted buffs (a perfect robot would be twice as effective with them ;) ). I'm still trying to dial it in where it feels useful without becoming patently overpowered, and I expect the timings to change as y'all get a better feel for the system and how much buffs help in a challenging fight. And the whole system, as noted, is pretty holistic right now; as I get more practical data from play, it'll get less holistic and more precise.

There's also a side goal of orisons being meant to be on the same scale as other attacks, and most focus actions being very fast to activate and not often interruptible: if you could just put six buffs on your focus, blow through them in seven seconds, and be done for a good long while, it wouldn't match the active feel of other weapons. Spells with buffs as their primary output DO often have longer durations since they're meant to be pretty powerful and used sparingly during a fight.

Goblinworks Game Designer

They're the prototypical "pure damage" cantrips that I created as analogs to the Basic X Attack feats for physical weapons. But I think they would distract from employing tactical use of effects in favor of just getting the highest red numbers possible, particularly if made available at low level. So they're unlikely to become available any time soon, and when they do it may be as something like faction rewards.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Expendables will work with no keywords matched, they will just do the minimum damage (if they do damage) and have Effect Power 0 (which means they'll have reduced effects against pretty much anyone). For Expendables, since there are 9 keywords (as opposed to 4 minor and 2 major for other actions), each keyword adds +7 base damage and +1.4 effect power (rounded down, so you basically get a total of 1-2-4-5-6-8-9-10-12 as you increase keywords).

Different domains interact better or worse with different spells. I try to make sure that there's a pretty even mix of well-supported and poorly-supported expendables for each feature, but it's not an exact science. Midnight has Obscuring and Scourging (and every cleric spell gets Acolyte at second level), which means Trickery gets the best effect, Charm, Travel, and Weather can match 2/3 keywords for only slightly reduced outcomes, and all features can match 1/3 for somewhat reduced outcome. But the difference between, say, Trickery and Travel, is that the spell will usually apply 10% less for a Travel cleric than for a Trickery cleric, but can still be very effective (particularly against lower level targets).

Goblinworks Game Designer

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Eventually, we'd like to replace the All Keywords list on feat and item tooltips with just the ones that are actually present at that rank/upgrade so it's more clear which ones you actually have as opposed to what a maxed out version looks like. And we want it to bold or recolor the ones that are being matched whenever it makes sense. That UI improvement is written up, but I don't know where it is on the feature priorities.

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Yep. Stacking effects should be adding your resistance to your defense for purposes of reducing the size of the stack applied. Cold resistance reduces the damage of a cold attack and also increases your defense against the stacking effects it applies.

Goblinworks Game Designer

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You've got the effects reversed. The spellbook type controls the max level, and the + increases the total number of levels that can be placed in the book.

There are seven versions of each implement.

The first one is always labeled Introductory [Implement Type]. Those can only hold up to level 1 expendables of the appropriate type. They can hold total levels equal to 2 plus the upgrade level (so an Introductory Spellbook +2 can hold 4 spell levels, so functionally four first level spells).

Past the first one, there are two of each type for each tier. Those can always hold up to the Tier x 3 as a max level (e.g., a Tier 1 spellbook that's not Introductory can hold up to 3rd level spells). The one that can be made more easily of the two can hold less total levels, but higher pluses of each increase the levels held.

For Spellbooks, the way it works out is:
Spellbook - Max Level - Base Total Levels - Extra Total Levels Per Plus
Introductory Spellbook - 1 - 2 - 1
Learner's Spellbook - 3 - 5 - 2
Apprentice's Spellbook - 3 - 8 - 3
Adept's Spellbook - 6 - 11 - 4
Magister's Spellbook - 6 - 14 - 5
Archmage's Spellbook - 9 - 17 - 6
Transcendent Spellbook - 9 - 20 - 7

For example, a Learner's Spellbook +2 can hold 9 levels of up to level 3 (so 3/3/3, or maybe 3/2/2/1/1, etc.). Meanwhile, an Apprentice's Spellbook +0 can hold 8 levels of up to level 3, so it's actually a little bit worse than the one that's technically lower level (because making the lower level one +2 actually made it cost many more resources than the +0 higher level one).

Goblinworks Game Designer

There's something weird going on with how the creatures are spawned that we've been trying to figure out. The exact same combat stats and attacks do it or don't do it depending on how they're spawned. It seems to only happen with ones that are spawned as part of an event, rather than normal escalation encounters, but we haven't determined why.

But they're not supposed to spin you, it's not anything to do with how the attacks are set up, and it'll stop happening once we figure out how to fix it :) .

The bombers do deliberately have a Knockback if you're Unbalanced.

Goblinworks Game Designer

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@Phaite

A repair system is designed out. It may be a while to get in. But it seems simpler to implement than the original idea we had, so my guess is that it won't be a super long time before we get to it.

@Schedim

Item decay is one of those things that the programmers would probably regret giving the designers because of all the crazy things we'd put it on. ;)

There are currently no designs for an item decay system, and it's also probably impractical due to all the extra tracking overhead it would require.

@Proxima Sin

I promised you Tork's car or Mike's car, not my car. I only bet with the cars of people that don't have cars.

Goblinworks Game Designer

Only on the person that's targeting you. (Just like, right now Cut-Throat should be proccing against anyone that's not targeting you, even if someone else is.)

Goblinworks Game Designer

Yup. AFAIK, every passive feat effect is on the "Passive" channel for right now, except that the keyword bonus from armor feats is on its own channel. (Keep in mind that upgrades aren't really passive feats, and we did explicitly set them up to stack with passives.)

Goblinworks Game Designer

Feature feats and Armor feats should eventually stack, but for now they're both on the same channel. We got a quick fix to passive channels a little while ago to make it at least take the higher bonus and to separate Upgrades into their own channel, but there wasn't time to do the full feature improvement (which is that I actually list an explicit channel name for passives rather than them all being on the "passive" channel). If you look at the wiki data, the Channel column on the passive feats shows you whether things will eventually stack (e.g., if they're both on the Passive channel, only the higher bonus to the same trait will get used, but if one's on Passive and one's on Inherent, they'll stack completely).

I am relatively confident, but not certain, that Precise, Base Damage, and Improved Critical bonuses on an attack will stack with the same bonus on passives. They definitely are meant to.

Goblinworks Game Designer

@Illililili

I remember Mark talking early on about building something similar to EVE's time dilation into our protocols. So the concept is definitely in there, and they've probably architected to take advantage of it. But you have to crawl before you can walk, and you have to get servers that are optimized to handle hundreds of connections at all before you can get them to slow everyone down enough to juggle the messaging coming from all those connections ;) .

@sspitfire1

I've been pretty adamant about avoiding introducing quest items as long as we can, and Bob has grumbled and played along for now. Currently, we have the items set up so that every item in your inventory could have a practical use to another player, whereas quest items could fill up the economy with things that are only useful if you can find the right NPC to turn them into. And if they're useful for something else, like crafting, then Bob has to constantly worry about how many of them he's inserting into the world and how that might distort the economy.

I did grudgingly write quest items into the design space for inventory, but I'm hoping to not introduce them until we have a much more solid grasp on our economic inputs and outputs, and our UI for managing it in inventory and the market. And maybe not even then, if I have my way ;) .

@Diego Rossi

Currently, documents are a designer hack based upon realizing that, hey, we have item descriptions that wrap properly now, why not go ahead and make scraps of text? Like all situations where the designers figure out a way to use a system in a way that wasn't explicitly intended, we're constantly on the lookout for a programmer running up screaming at us about the horrible things we've done to the servers by putting in something that they never expected to have to handle.

So, player-written texts are probably a LONG way out if they're even possible or desirable, since that at the very least means a whole tech and filtering* overhead of letting players write text blobs that are saved in the database somewhere. (vs. what we're doing now and just cheating by making a bunch of crafting components with colorful names and descriptions.)

But it doesn't seem completely impossible on a long enough time frame if you can get enough people to prioritize it for crowdforging.

* for vulgarity and plagerism in particular

Goblinworks Game Designer

Proxima Sin of Brighthaven wrote:
Stephen Cheney wrote:

Great guide. Few nitpicks/clarifications:

Sneak Attack damage is implemented, just Sneak Attacks always triggering Flat-Footed effects is not implemented yet. Getting Sneak Attack does give you +10 base damage. But long term you shouldn't need to rely on Feint to qualify for Flat-Footed conditionals, if you can achieve your Sneak Attack trigger.

So sneak attack damage is supposed to happen when either the target is Flat-footed or meets the other feature condition, and you're saying that right now sneak attack damage is not triggering from the target being Flat-footed?

No. I'm saying that the +10 damage from Sneak Attack is triggering both from the special conditional per feature and Flat-Footed (e.g., if you have Cut-Throat, you'll get +10 damage if you're untargeted and/or the target is Flat-Footed). However, what is not happening yet is if you meet the non-Flat-Footed conditional, you should also count it as meeting Flat-Footed (e.g., if you have Cut-Throat, if you are untargeted but the person you're attacking does not actually have Flat-Footed, you should still trigger all your "if target is Flat-Footed" conditionals for attacks and reactives).

Quote:
By the way, what if I wanted to use these features with, say, a hypothetical gigantic two-handed weapon with lots of 2.5 and 3.6 df feats? It's working as intended that I'd get the +10 base damage on those strikes too?

Yep. And you'll eventually treat the target as Flat-Footed as well. The thing is, bigger weapons are unlikely to have Flat-Footed conditionals on their attacks. So once the system is working correctly, Rogues should be triggering Flat-Footed conditionals all the time, and will want as many things that take advantage of that as possible, so it will be advantageous to stay with the weapons that have Flat-Footed conditionals.

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