Hello People of Midgard,
I have no doubt many of you have no idea who I am and why I am making this post; short answer is I'm the guy in the background that helps coordinate things on a production level rather than on the front lines like Njoror and Zanbee. I haven't posted in a while and feel I should to maintain my street cred.
So the AOV update came and with it a new tier of building your level capped characters, a new refine system and complete rebalancing of skills/stats. And of course with all that a host of undesirable things too. To be honest we were expecting a few rough spots, as we know any big change will always have some confusion and rough spots, and we knew much polishing would be necessary.
I do think the idea of the Master levels is a positive one, an ability to customize your character more to your liking with gear, stats and skills; I also think tweaking skill/stats/gear so that increasing them feels like it accomplishes more is very important to making your choices in-game meaningful. But the way those balances are now are not the way you, or we frankly, want them to be and we are working on tweaking that.
Mastery Point gaining and losing.
- Mastery Points being split among party making it slower still to build them up. We are proposing changes so partying will not be a suboptimal choice for your time in the master levels.
- No way to protect your Mastery Points so death is a hugely disheartening event. There are a number of proposals we are discussing to help this either from protection type items, loss reduction items/systems etc. I can't say what specifically they are as I don't want to build an unreasonable expectations before we get some sort of agreement from the studio.
- Time to gain Mastery Points: Yes it is a bit slower than desired. Likely more quests will help alot with this. Some quests are not available that we are going to try and implement that will help both give more content and speed up the point gaining.
- Mastery Point loss when falling/drowning PVPing/ WoEing. We are treating those sort of losses as bugs and pushing them to get fixed. You should not fear your advancement when participating in designed content like those.
Refining System.
- 1st, Infinium does work, every case where we have investigated a broken item when using the Infinium has ended up being a case where it wasn't used. We think there are some help updates we can make to make that mistake less likely. Right now those that drag the items to their refine windows may miss the small notification that the item is protected, and when zoning out doing a lot of refining one mistake of missing the Infinium is possible. We are asking the visual queue of PROTECTED being a lot more apparent. In the mean time it is suggested you group the item, refine and insurance stones near each other in your bag and right click them to be sure they are used. We are being forgiving when checking those reports of loss and restoring when we can (IE when it is apparent you were meaning to use the stone)
- Defense for armor and attack power for weapons is the only intended benefit currently. But we are investigating whether the intended results match up with what we are getting on the live servers (on first glance it is not matching up).
- Additionally later there will be a system updated to improve stats too on equipment. It is still in the design phase so whether it is a standalone or rolled into the current refinement system is unknown.
Quests removed
- Yes they were but we have had the studio check to make sure none of those were key quests, and that no equipment rewards were missed. They all should be side quests with their exp rewards being added over to other in-line quests. Though we expect there were some unintended removals/breakage and are reporting them for fix when we find or you report them.
- Some quests may not have their quest items with proper information (NoID) we are fixing these quests as that was not intended to happen.
- We know the removal was a surprise, as it happened with the update but was in the patch notes for a later maintenance. The listing should have been in when the change happened and you have our apology for that confusion. There was a snafu when received the patch notes.. we did not intend on surprising anyone with it.
- Large Bag Drop Event. It was intended as a Holiday event, but we did not get the affirmative for the event until it was already in and noticed later. Again this was likely overlooked with the wall of text patch intention notes we received for the AOV update. Don’t worry it is an event we intend on having again.
Stat Points
- We are currently making extremely detailed reports about why you the community are unhappy with the stat/skill/equipment balance. In theory they currently as intended, but intended does not mean final. We are going to be discussing and tweaking everywhere possible to make sure:
- Potions heal enough to be useful but not so much as to be a win all
- Adding stats have a noticeable impact on performance, perhaps not 1 point being too noticeable but when a handful are done you will see a benefit.
- Skill point spending feels beneficial, without having some skills being “too good”.
- Notice on the DoTs and HoTs update of Jan8, they may have been a bit too powerful before, but we are looking to dial back the adjustment so those overtime abilities get a bit better than now.
- Casters… Yes the casters have lost a bit of umph. This likely is a combination of all 3 parts, and that is what our reports need to detail well so the studio can make adjustments so casters feel empowered by their equipment, stat, skill and class choice. They shouldn’t be completely dominant like pre-AOV but they certainly should be better feeling than now.
Item Drops in Master Areas.
- We are asking to increase the crafting drops so potions and such are not such a rare commodity.
- Also the dungeon needs a bit more reward in the item department so that when MP earning is bettered you will have more reward for attending the dungeons.
Equipment
- We are looking at their stats and rune hole allocations to make sure they are meaningful upgrades to your level 50 items. Seed Equipment is intended to be pretty high up there in power, but it is not intended to eclipse the “end game” tier of items for Master Levels. Certainly later down the road new tiers of equipment will come but for now we want the master gear to be worthwhile alternative and supplement for your Chaos Dungeon gear.
We cannot say what changes will be made yet, because much of the balance will need to be figured out in conjunction with stat/skill/equipment/refining balance and how it “plays”. Your player feedback as we move down the road will help that tuning. We don’t want you to feel like guinea pigs, but if we want to be part of the creation of a new system it does require player feedback so you are our much appreciated "Guinea peoples". We are the first and our feedback is the feedback we want the studio to make game adjustments with. You all play different than players in other parts of the world, and that is great! So please help us make RO2 the game you want to play, this time now is our best opportunity so far to make that happen.