Posted by MrTact on Stratics



Some time ago I posted some suggested changes for the oft-promised and much-maligned PvP rebalance. These were met with skepticism, and justly so, because in a vacuum they were fairly meaningless. After that happened, I decided not to talk about what we were planning until there was a more coherent overall plan. That day is today.

This post presents A) an overall strategic view of where we want to go, B) the initial tactical changes we're going to make to get there, and C) some rationale for why we're making these changes. I look forward to your feedback.


The problems we aim to solve

1. Fights are over too quickly

This is a matter of simple arithmetic. The way damage is calculated now allows the potential for up to 12x base damage. Hit points scale from 55 to 125, a range of roughly 3x. At the top end, it's entirely plausible, even with maxed-out resists, to get killed in only 2 or 3 hits. This is compounded by the dramatic impact stamina has on swing speed; about 60% of the weapons in the game are capable of swinging at the fastest possible rate (1 swing per 1.25 seconds), meaning that unless you are running a heal bot, when someone ganks you from stealth you are dead in about 3 seconds.

2. Templates not balanced against one another

This encompasses a number of problems. Interestingly, I find it is this category where most players consider the game to be broken. Some of that is due to template partisanship, but there are also legitimate complaints there.

My intent with this stuff is, once the groundwork has been laid (which I talk about below), to catalog these problems and deal with them as bugs. The goal is that any viable template should be competitive in terms of damage output and special moves.

3. Too item-dependent

Items simply count for too much right now. It's possible to compensate for lack of character stats or player skill with high end items. While an element of that SHOULD be true -- otherwise items are meaningless, and like it or not UO is an item-based game -- in my opinion, gear should not be so useful that it allows you to forego a skill.

4. No good tools for analysis/rebalancing

Self-explanatory. Much though I'd like this to be the definitive, be-all end-all revamp of the UO combat system, history suggests it will not be. As we travel down this road, I hope to accumulate a collection of spreadsheets and whatnot that make this a LOT easier the next time some poor sap has to do it.

5. 3rd party application cheats/exploits/hacks

Again, self-explanatory. We will not be addressing this as part of pub 40, though this may be the topic of a future publish.

6. No reason to PvP

The faction system is horribly broken. And, as one person on the boards kindly pointed out, all our efforts to drive people to Fel have centered around either PvM or crafting. Duh.

We need a more engaging, meaningful system that entices people to fight one another. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen in this publish.

The Ancillary Goals

We have two objectives in addition to the six principal ones:

• Don't mess up PvM. Note that this doesn't mean PvM won't change at all.
• Don't make the game any harder to play and understand than it is currently. Wherever it is possible, make it *easier*.

Diminishing Returns

You may have heard me talking about diminishing returns. Perhaps you even wondered what the heck I was talking about. Here is a short primer.

The idea is that as you pile more onto a particular stat, those adds start to give you, pound for pound, less actual benefit. It's a mechanism for curbing runaway stat growth (especially due to stacking items) which is an alternative to capping stats. There's an inherent problem with this, and that is if the diminishing algorithm is too hard to understand, it makes things confusing (and annoying) for players.

I have spent quite a bit of time crafting this algorithm, and I think it yields the results I'm looking for, while being straightforward enough that most players will be able to get a handle on it. Each stat that diminishes will have two numbers associated with it: a threshold and an interval. The threshold for a stat is the point up to which adding to the stat adds at a 1:1 ratio. For example, for Str, Dex and Int, this would be 125. Above the threshold is where the diminishing returns kick in.

The interval can best be described with an analogy. Think of them as tax brackets. Each interval yields less than what is put in at a fixed "tax rate". The tax increases as the number of intervals increase. Again, an example may help. Assume you have a total Str of 135 (maxed out base Str plus 10 from items). The threshold is 125, which means the first 125 points raise your Str to 125. Let's also say Str has an interval of 10. The "tax rate" of the first interval is 25%, which means that the 10 points from 126 to 135 add 7.5 points. We drop the .5, so you end up with 132 Str instead of 135.

The multipliers are 3/4, 2/3, 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4. Subsequent intervals past the fifth continue to add 1/4 of what you put into them. Continuing the example, if you drank a Str potion and added another 15, the next 10 would add 6.67 points, and the last 5 would add 2.5. Your pre-diminish Str would be 150, but after diminishing returns it only actually raises your Str 16 points (to 141).

I understand that this may cause some confusion. It may also not yield the results I am hoping it will. However, I am optimistic enough about its usefulness that we will be trying this out on TC. We also have some thoughts on ways to make this less opaque, but I don't want to go into details on that until there's something concrete.

The First Few Phases

I have outlined the first upcoming steps of development toward balancing the game. Most of this work is in shoring up the underpinnings of the combat system, cleaning up and unifying things. This has two benefits. First, it makes the game more easily comprehensible to those who play it. It also makes it substantially easier for designers to tune things by making underlying game mechanics work the same way.

Phase 1: Swing speed changes

In this phase, we will convert all weapon speeds from arbitrary numbers to a quantity in seconds. The way we are determining the base speed of weapons is to figure out swing times for a character with 100 stamina, then add 3 ticks (.75 seconds). We will also change the way Stamina and Swing Speed Increase impact weapon speed. The current plan is to grant a swing time reduction of 1 tick for each 40 points of Stamina. This means that going from 100 to 200 Stamina, instead of halving the time it takes to swing your weapon, will reduce it by 2 or 3 ticks.

Swing Speed Increase will become an adder instead of a percentage multiplier. +30% SSI will equate to +30 Stamina . . . except that it will be diminishing. The threshold and interval for this are not solid just yet. I am planning to start testing with 20/20.

We will be testing a swing phase of 3 ticks. This is the portion of the swing cycle when archers have to freeze.

The net result of this is that if you have 120 Stamina (including SSI bonuses), your swing speed should be exactly the same. However, weapons will no longer be abysmally slow at low stamina, nor ridiculously fast at high stam.

Phase 2: Hit points, damage & resist changes

Hit points will be tested at Str + 50. The goal is to have hit points end up between 5 and 8 times average damage (in other words, a character should be able to take 5 to 8 hits before dropping).

Most damage enhancers will be converted to use flat damage adders. The currently planned values will be:

• +1 per 10 Str
• +1 per 10 Tactics
• +1 per 20 Anatomy
• +1 per 10% WDI
• +1 per 10% bonus from special moves et al.

Damage bonus will diminish with a threshold/interval of 10/10. We are not planning on making significant changes to base weapon damage values at this point. As a result, damage values should peak in the 60-70 point range, pre-resist.

Resists will diminish at a thresh/int of 10/10. A skill (tentatively Arms Lore) will be added directly to your armor values before applying the diminishing effect. If you have all 70s in your suit now, and no Arms Lore, your resists will be 37%. If your Arms Lore + resist is 200 (which isn't currently achievable), that will give you a net resist of 70%. Damage totals are being tuned to allow players to survive with only 40-ish resists. This is all being done to allow players to optimize for tanking if they choose to, but requiring a skill slot to do so.

The corollary to that is that the amount of AL skill you can apply will be capped based on the armor you are wearing. Skill alone will not be enough; you will have to wear heavy armor to be a true tank. Heavier armor materials will have built-in mana regeneration and stealth penalties. It should be possible, but difficult, to be a tank mage or tank stealther.

Minimum resists provided by Resisting Spells skill will go away. We'll be fixing RS in a subsequent phase.

Phase 3: Healing changes

The basic premise of this phase is that if fights are geared to last longer, and it continues to be possible for you to heal in an unlimited fashion, this could well cause fights to last until participants run out of healing materials. What we are going to do about that is after you have been healed, subsequent heals will diminish in effectiveness. This effect will linger for a certain amount of time after the heal, and it will stack. So, as an example, let's say each subsequent heal is 25% less effective (not necessarily the final number), until after the fourth, you can't heal anything at all for a little while.

Bandaging will be changed to deliver healing over time, starting immediately. This is mostly to give healers back a little bit of the edge they lose by not being able to freely bandage anymore. The amount healed each tick is based on the healer's bandaging skill. If the healer takes damage while bandaging, there is a chance the bandage will be disrupted, based on a skill check versus the amount of damage taken.

Other forms of healing are expected to remain mostly unchanged. Pots will have longer diminish times, since they are easy to use and don't require a skill. Other forms of healing (spells, Spirit Speak etc.) will be reviewed when we get to the point of implementing this.

Phase 4: Bringing magic into the picture

All magic spells will be changed to work the same way weapons do, to allow for a more apples-to-apples comparison (both by players and designers). Magery spells already work this way, but spells for other disciplines will be changed from the (occasionally baroque) methods they use now to a simple die roll + adds. Magic spell base damage may be reduced somewhat to bring DPS for those skills in line with meleers.

Damage for all Damage Over Time effects will be unified with a duration, damage per tick, and tick length. No more "ticks get faster as time goes on" weirdness.

Spell casting time will be mitigated by stamina in exactly the same way it affects weapon swing time. This puts pressure on mages to have some Dex, which is a significant current imbalance (fighters need mana for special moves, so they have to have all three stats, whereas mages really only need Int, so they max out their Str just because they can). FC and FCR will add to stamina in a diminishing fashion, exactly the same way SSI does for swing speed. Existing FC & FCR items will have their value upgraded, probably to +20 or +40 per current +1 FC/FCR.

Magery damage bonuses will work the same way as combat bonuses: +1 per 10 Int, +1 per 10 Eval, +1 per 20 Inscription. Spell damage increase will be a flat modifier, like weapon damage increase, at a rate of +1 per +10% SDI. Spell damage bonuses will diminish at 10/10, just like weapon damage.

Resisting spells skill will work for spells the way parry works against physical attacks. This includes necro and spellweaving spells, but not Chivalry, Bushido or Ninjitsu special abilities.

Some sustained spells may be converted to have an ongoing maintenance cost, instead of being balanced in other ways. In particular, I'm thinking of defensive spells here -- so instead of, say, reactive armor having a bonus to one resist and a penalty to others, it might just give a bonus to physical but cost 2 mana/sec to keep it running. We may experiment with doing this to other types of sustained spells, as well (e.g. buffs and debuffs).

Spells cast from wands and scrolls should be subject to similar limitations to those cast from a spellbook. The details of this are nebulous at this time, but that's the goal. In particular, you should not be able to use these methods to circumvent the normal recovery time.

There are no plans to change the Lower Reagent Cost magical item property at this time.

Phase 5: Stealth

Stealth has a history of going from being uber to being worthless and back. It's currently pretty worthless -- it's nearly impossible to sneak past a monster with Detect Hidden skill since they get a chance to try and detect you every step you take. We will attempt to strike a better balance here.

Smoke bombs will likely have a reuse timer. That's not my favorite mechanic, but since smoke bombs are pretty much an all-or-nothing effect, I don't see an alternative. It should not be onerous (10 seconds?).

Death Strike stalking bonus damage will be capped based on the stalker's tracking skill.

We will evaluate reveal on first aggro, instead of reveal on first damage.

There will be more, but this is the game plan for the next few weeks. With luck, we may have some of these changes available on test center as soon as tomorrow.

What really REALLY bothers me about:
Is that he is talking about things like mana regen taking the place of meditation... yet here we are with all these (insert big grown up curse word here) + to skill items.
Dear GOD I wish they would take out all these skill items and make people have the skills they use everyday again. I see Glorious Lord Journeyman Stoics for Gods sake....

OK I gotta go cuz Survivor is coming on... but you get what I'm saying here anyway.

I hear ya.

Everything else seems pretty good to me assuming it'll all be tested, tweaked and balanced properly, but the changes to Magic Resist and Arms Lore proposed...

... the idea itself isn't too bad, I just fear they'll both become a necessity for any combat char rather than an option to specialize in. It all depends on how damage will be altered across the board in relation to the lower armor resist levels.

Hopefully we'll also get some interface/display improvements to facilitate these changes, all the numbers are hard enough to grasp already even without diminishing returns.

I'll wait to see the whole thing in place.

I like the changes. Kill the Gimps. Deminish over time thing is GREAT.

Making our items less effective and more SKILL based also seems great.

All we can do is wait and see.

BUT, if your a test center junky, then TEST it and REPORT it!!

Yeah I'm against the arms lore thing too... who has room on their template for another skill?
Yeah maybe if you make tactics unnecessary... or anatomy... sure I'll be glad to pick up some arms lore.
But eh? Unless you're raising the skill cap I don't see a lot of folks being too thrilled with that one.

yeah I agree Flutter.

apparently, tactics and anat will be just as beneficial then as they are now, though. i dont see anyone dropping them.

might cause some problems.

If anything, I can see tactics and anatomy getting more important, as they are lowering the damage on the weaps, specifically bows. They will need as much DI as they can get before item bonus. I can not even begin to see how I can fit gm arms lore on my char. He is already loaded down with anat, chiv, heal, swords, parry, tact. with 60 points leftover for whatever.

I think that what they are saying about balance comes into play here. You probably cant fit everything into one template, so you now have to pick, should I take Arms Lore or Parry or Chiv or whatever.

Now they need to pit different templates with different arrangements against each other on Test Shard and see whats worth having and whats not.

As a side note, Mr Tact metioned that battles are over too quickly. What do you all think about how long a fight should last, on a one vs one basis?

I was on there a few weeks ago with the 200+ hp thing, and the only way people were killing me was with group ganks. I was able to handle most 1v1, and it lasted a fair amount of time. I hate when fights are over in 3 swings or 3 spells. I have always used my swordsman, and when going against another swordsman, they dont go really quick. But when its against a damn archer, they just run around and dance around you, so the fight appears to take longer when still only taking the same amount of hits to kill. I hate dueling archers! Mages, well thats a whole different arguement there, because alot of of em will scroll cast as well as book cast, and throw in wands. You see 4 or 5 numbers over your head in a matter of 2 seconds. game over