Hello, Taernians!
In the August Broken Ranks DevBlog, we’re returning to a topic that has been keeping many of you awake at night for quite some time: changes to defensive skills. Some of them only required value adjustments, but in several cases we decided to go much further and change how a skill works or give it entirely new applications.
The second part of the post will focus on the economy. For some time now, we’ve been observing an increasingly rapid growth in the amount of gold in circulation. Players becoming wealthier is, of course, not a problem in itself. The problem starts when the amount of gold being generated begins to grow faster than the opportunities to spend it. In the long run, this leads to the devaluation of gold and rising prices, especially for goods with limited supply.
That’s why we’re preparing the first package of economic changes. Some of them will reduce the inflow of new gold, while others will increase the amount leaving the economy. At the same time, we also want to improve several related mechanics, including the death penalty at level 140.
But let’s take things one at a time.
Defensive Skills – Where Are We Now?
The subject of defensive skills isn’t anything new. Earlier in the process, we conducted an internal survey among a group of the most engaged and experienced players. We asked representatives of every class to evaluate defensive skills, identify their biggest problems, and point out those skills that are rarely levelled up in practice or simply fail to fulfill their intended role.
We combined this feedback with our own observations and character build data. Based on this, we separated the skills into two groups: those whose main issue lies in their values, and those whose problems run deeper and require mechanical changes.
The design of these changes is now advanced enough that we can show you the direction we want to test.
Just keep one thing in mind: the solutions described below will first go to our Ad-Hoc testing team. Based on their tests and conclusions, some of the ideas or values presented here may still change. We’ll clearly indicate any such adjustments before the PTR server goes live.
Druid
The Druid is getting the broadest range of changes. On the one hand, we want to improve their basic healing tools. On the other, we want to give Natural Resistance much greater tactical importance.
Healing and Group Healing
For Healing, we plan to:
- reduce the mana cost
- reduce the Healing Reduction debuff from 2 stacks to 1
- increase the base healing value
At the same time, we’ll reduce the healing value of Group Healing.
We want to create a clearer distinction between the uses of the two skills. Single-target Healing should restore more HP to one character, while Group Healing will restore more health overall, but spread it across more party members, making it harder to heal a single player.
Natural Resistance
This change is much more substantial.
Natural Resistance will be usable both on the Druid and on other party members. A character affected by it will retain the physical resistance bonus and will additionally gain increased melee, ranged, and mental defense. At the same time, we’ll increase the effect’s dispel difficulty to 400 points, meaning more Dispels will be required to remove it.
If the Druid uses Natural Resistance on themselves, they will also deal increased damage with Bash. This will, however, come at a cost: while the buff is active, the Druid’s healing power will be reduced and the effectiveness of Dispel will be limited, meaning Natural Resistance itself will be even harder to remove because of its increased dispel difficulty.
In this way, we want to give Natural Resistance greater tactical importance. Cast on a party member, it will serve as a strong defensive tool. Used on the Druid, it will also allow them to increase their offensive potential at the cost of some of their ability to support the party.
Our goal is to move away from a situation where Natural Resistance is a very flat skill that is used automatically and provides relatively little. After the changes, it should become a tool around which players can make meaningful tactical decisions, both defensive ones and those involving the Druid’s other skills.
Fire Mage
Fire Shield
Fire Shield will also receive an additional defensive function. After the changes, it will reduce damage received from melee through percentage-based reduction. This effect will work independently of damage reduction from orbs.
The effectiveness of the reduction and the number of times it can trigger will depend on the Power of the character casting the Shield. At the same time, we’ll remove the current flat physical resistance bonus.
Above all, we want Fire Shield to provide the Fire Mage and their party with more direct protection against a specific threat instead of simply being another source of general resistance bonuses.
The damage reflection effect will remain unchanged.
Meteorite
While working on the Fire Mage changes, we also returned to Meteorite.
We’ll increase its damage, but its mana cost will also go up. We want using Meteorite to feel more impactful and satisfying while still carrying an appropriate resource cost. Its current parameters, combined with the fact that modifiers such as Double Attack Chance or Critical Hit Chance do not affect it, meant that Fireball was the best choice in most situations.
Voodoo
Shadow Aura
Shadow Aura will shift more toward supporting the party’s defense.
At present, its values mean that the skill weakens the target’s accuracy and defense by roughly equal amounts. As a result, the skill can feel mediocre. We want to change these proportions and move more of the Aura’s power toward protecting the player’s own team. In other words, we’ll significantly increase the ranged accuracy penalty while slightly reducing the ranged defense penalty.
Face of Death
We haven’t forgotten about Face of Death either. Implementing the changes turned out to be more complicated than we initially expected, which is why they will only arrive with this update.
Currently, whether the skill kills the target is determined at the moment it is used. The more times Face of Death is applied, the more separate rolls are made to determine whether the target dies.
After the change, hitting a target with the skill will apply a stackable Face of Death debuff, while the actual instant-death roll will only take place at the end of the round, after attacks have been performed and all effects affecting the player have been resolved.
This will give the opponent a chance to respond to the threat during the round, for example by killing the entire opposing party and ending the fight before the death effect is rolled.
Each subsequent use of Face of Death on a target that already has the debuff will add a stack to the effect, increasing both its duration and the chance of killing the opponent during the final check. Further uses will therefore not be wasted, but will instead strengthen the already active effect.
If the death roll at the end of the round fails, the debuff will remain active, but its chance to trigger in the following round will be reduced. Our current assumption is a decrease of 20 percentage points after each failed check.
The timing of some related effects will also change. The Lun drif will only be taken into account during the final Face of Death check, and the intended order of resolving effects will be as follows: attacks → applying stacks → checking whether the target dies → if death occurs: checking whether Drif Lun triggers → Drif Verd.
Archer
Survival Instinct
Survival Instinct will continue to serve as the Archer’s primary emergency mechanic, but its current scaling makes it relatively easy in some situations to reach maximum effectiveness and recover a large portion of the shield very quickly.
We’ll change the skill so that reaching its highest effectiveness requires a greater investment of Skill Points. We don’t want to remove Survival Instinct’s strength, but our main goal is to increase the difference between a moderate investment in the skill and levelling it up heavily.
Hail of Arrows
As part of the Archer changes, we’ll also increase the damage dealt by Hail of Arrows.
Sheed
Evasion
For Evasion, the direction is simpler and mainly concerns values.
We’ll reduce the chance of the first dodge, as well as the probability of subsequent successful dodges within the same sequence.
The skill should remain one of the defining elements of the Sheed’s defense, but we want to reduce situations where a chain of consecutive dodges has too much impact on the course of an entire round.
Barbarian
Amok
First and foremost, Amok will receive a new effect: a chance to evade a mental attack. The mental defense bonus, which has not worked particularly well in its current form, will be removed.
The skill will also be usable on other players.
The effect reducing the levels of negative effects will remain unchanged.
This expands Amok from a tool focused primarily on the Barbarian themselves into a buff that can also be used to protect a specific party member when the situation calls for it.
PTR First
With this many changes, we don’t want to rely solely on internal testing.
That’s why we’re planning to launch a PTR where you’ll be able to test the new defensive skills in practice. We’ll be paying particular attention to situations where the new effects create combinations that are significantly stronger or weaker than intended, and we’ll also be collecting your feedback on individual classes.
The tests will start tomorrow (August 25th at 10 AM server time) and end on Friday (August 28th at 10 AM server time). When the PTR launches, we’ll also provide more precise skill values.
There’s More and More Gold
The second major topic of today’s DevBlog concerns the economy.
For several months now, we’ve been observing a clear and sustained acceleration in the growth of the amount of gold in circulation. This is partly a natural consequence of the game’s development: characters are becoming stronger, completing familiar content faster, and increasingly focusing on the most profitable activities.
The problem begins when sources generating new gold consistently outweigh the mechanisms removing it from the economy over an extended period. That is exactly the situation we’re currently dealing with. This isn’t a short-term fluctuation, but a trend we’ve been observing for several months, and without an appropriate response, it will continue to intensify.
As a result, gold is gradually losing value. This is most noticeable with items that have limited supply: the more gold competing for the same number of goods, the greater the pressure on their prices. This affects, among other things, some goods traded between players, and above all Platinum Boxes.
That’s why this time we’ve decided on more decisive measures than we normally use for balance adjustments. Some of these changes may be clearly noticeable, but given the scale and duration of the current trend, minor corrections would not be enough. Our goal is to bring the rate of gold generation closer to the rate at which gold is removed from the economy and limit further devaluation.
We’re preparing two stages of changes. We want to describe the first one now, as it concerns several specific sources and sinks of gold. We’ll present the scope of the second stage later, once we’re ready to show its details.
Daily Challenges
The first change concerns Daily Challenges.
For level 140 characters, we’ll reduce the amount of gold awarded both for individual challenges and for the main reward for completing a series of four.
At the same time, however, we’ll increase experience and psychoexperience rewards from challenges across all level ranges. This way, the activity will generate less currency while contributing more to character development.
Challenges should remain an attractive part of everyday gameplay. At the same time, we simply don’t want them to be such a major source of new gold at the highest levels.
Marketplace Tax
The second element will be an increase to the tax on Marketplace sell offers.
The current standard rate is 3%, and with the buff active it can be reduced to 1.5%. After the changes, these values will be 5% without the buff and 3% with the buff active.
The Marketplace provides a very convenient and safe way for players to trade with one another, while the current fee is relatively low compared with the benefits it provides.
At the same time, the tax plays a very important role: unlike a normal transfer of money between two players, it removes some gold from circulation. This obviously means slightly lower profits from sales, but it also creates a constant gold sink that grows along with trading activity on the server.
Emperors and Related Prices
We’ll also change the price of Emperors purchased with gold, from 4,000 to 5,000 gold each.
At the same time, we’ll adjust the purchase price in platinum so that this option is more competitive than it is now. Buying them with gold should still remain the most cost-effective option under current economic conditions. Per item, their price will drop from 0.2 to 0.12 platinum.
However, the purchase and resale prices of some pets available for Emperors will be reduced, including single-use pets, Hounds, the Black Raven, and the Red Monkey.
It is important to us to avoid a situation where having a large stockpile of Emperors before the patch allows players to make easy profits afterward. This would be particularly easy because there is no limit on how many Emperors can be accumulated.
That’s why we’ll perform a one-time conversion when the update goes live.
All active buy and sell offers for Emperors on the Marketplace will be canceled, and the fees paid when listing them will be refunded. Then, all Emperors held by characters or stored in deposits will be converted into gold at the current rate of 1 Emperor = 4,000 gold. The gold will be returned to the same location from which the Emperors were taken.
Players affected by the conversion will also receive a message informing them that the exchange has been completed.
This way, everyone will start operating under the new rate on equal terms, without being able to use the announcement of the change itself for speculation.
Death at Level 140
Finally, we have a change that connects the economy with a purely gameplay-related problem.
At level 140, the current death penalty system has a significant loophole. Experience stops being a meaningful cost for an obvious reason: the character cannot drop to a lower level. At the same time, players can limit the amount of gold carried directly by the character and therefore greatly reduce the consequences of subsequent deaths.
We want to clean up this mechanic.
The death penalty for level 140 characters will be higher, and the amount owed will be taken both from the character and from the deposit assigned to them. The penalty at level 140 will depend on the player’s Might. The weakest players, below 10k Might, will pay around 18% more than they do now. For players between 10k and 20k Might, the statistical cost of death will increase by between 38% and 65% compared to the current system. The biggest change concerns players above 20k Might: for them, the cost of death will rise by between 92% and as much as 110% compared to current values. Simply moving gold out of your inventory will therefore no longer allow you to avoid the cost of death.
But what happens if a player genuinely does not have enough funds?
In that case, the death will be marked as unpaid and the character will receive a special debuff. Until the amount owed has been paid in full, all fights will stop awarding gold, psychoexperience, and mastery points toward infusion, while the chance of obtaining gear from enemies will be reduced by 50%.
Gold obtained from enemies will not be lost, however. It will automatically be used to repay the outstanding penalty until the debt has been fully settled.
The debuff will also be removable at the appropriate NPC by paying the amount owed plus a small additional fee.
The idea is simple: having no gold at the moment of death should not provide an advantage, but at the same time, we don’t want to create a situation where a character with no funds becomes permanently blocked. Players will always have the option to work off their debt to Death simply by continuing to play.
Alongside this change, we’ll significantly reduce the existing non-material death penalty that many of you have felt strongly and have often asked us to ease: the amount of time it takes. We’ll greatly shorten the time the cards are displayed and add an automatic draw option. Once the relevant option is enabled in the settings, you’ll no longer need to manually click a card after every death.
This Is Only the First Stage
The economic changes described above are not an attempt to “fix inflation” in one go. An MMORPG economy is a system of interconnected mechanisms, and every intervention requires us to observe how players respond to it.
That’s why we prefer to work in stages: reduce some of the most visible sources of excess gold, strengthen several natural gold sinks where they have become less effective because the mechanics were designed for different economic conditions, and evaluate the results before making the next move.
We’ll describe the second package of changes separately.
Before that, however, we have the PTR and testing of the new skills ahead of us. We’re counting on your help here, especially from those of you who have been squeezing everything possible out of your classes for years and will probably find combinations we never anticipated ;)
See you on the PTR and in the next DevBlog!
