Developer Musings: An Explanation of Recent Occurances & How We'll Fix Them

[zulnam]

Thank you for taking the time to explain the changes and the issue with the release

Vigilance / Opression - I feel lukewarm at best about this, but fine. 2H tanks should not be super tanky. Ok.

Runefang / Daemonclaw - a buff for knight and a slight nerf for chosen. Bad time to be leveling a chosen alt i guess.

Efficient Swings - changing the previous useless tactic is a step in the right direction, even if it feels a bit silly to give 2h knight a tactic to auto-dispell taunts*. But it might prove useful with the new Runefang changes.


* i can hear the healers now: "CAREFUL GUYS! A knight with a two hander is coming! POP YOUR TAUNTS!" bwaaahahaha

[Oglaf]

Why not try this tactic with adjusted values? Could have nerfed the Values to like 10%..
The SW changes werent nerfed this fast, why is that? I agree 25% was too much, but why delete it completly?

First off, the quick reversion is because it was a mistake and was never actually intended to go out. This stuff happens sometimes. You should probably read the first post in the topic.

Because the way this tactic worked is problematic. "On taking crit damage" essentially means they have maximum range on the ability to reduce crit, passively, on targets that have high enough levels of crit to get through the tanks defensive capability. Also because it's on taking damage, it's not possible to add an internal cooldown on the proc, which means a Chosen getting crit can have this proc as many times as they get hit, potentially allowing them to debuff dozens of players provided they're able to stay alive (something a healed def-tank is pretty good at).

Changing it to "when I crit", up to 5 people get crit reduction at a pretty generous amount. This vastly reduces the effect of the tactic to be more in line with literally everything else. It makes it group oriented, which we find to be a plus. It makes it active, in that you need to be doing something rather than nothing. And you need to spec for it to make it more reliable, which rewards investing into crit as a primary stat (if that's your jam). If you don't invest into crit, it still works fine, albeit at a much lower rate which is intended to be low if you're playing a more defensive oriented spec. Will you eventually crit? Yes. Will it be often enough to keep this tactic always active? No. If anything is adjusted, it will likely be the duration of the proc, not the implementation, so we could see an appropriate uptime on it.

Group oriented is fine and all, but you really expect any kind of % of Chosen players to pick it when it doesn't effect themselves? I see only very organized premades *maybe* using it. Maybe. Cuz tactic slots are one of the most valuable "resources" for characters.

[BrutalWyrm]

I find it difficult to find a place for this tactic on a SnB chosen. Uptime for it would be abysmally low and would of course require sacrificing tank for crit chance to get. Many sieges and defenses are fought at chokepoints and open battles needs me on the move to defend backline or push the frontline, both requiring as much investment in taking punishment rather than dishing it out. There may be some that find it useful, though I dont yet know in what circumstances aside from small groups, however this is my thought on the tactic as it is now. Fortunately as has been pointed out, there are many other great tools in the Chosen's arsenal so for the time being I'll be using those and trying the new tactic where it permits. I dont expect this change to affect forts much, but who knows, it's only been a day.

[Oglaf]

I find it difficult to find a place for this tactic on a SnB chosen. Uptime for it would be abysmally low and would of course require sacrificing tank for crit chance to get. Many sieges and defenses are fought at chokepoints and open battles needs me on the move to defend backline or push the frontline, both requiring as much investment in taking punishment rather than dishing it out. There may be some that find it useful, though I dont yet know in what circumstances aside from small groups, however this is my thought on the tactic as it is now. Fortunately as has been pointed out, there are many other great tools in the Chosen's arsenal so for the time being I'll be using those and trying the new tactic where it permits. I dont expect this change to affect forts much, but who knows, it's only been a day.

Pretty much just a ranked, 6v6 premade.

And even then it is iffy cuz only 4 tactic slots.

[Charon]

I find it difficult to find a place for this tactic on a SnB chosen. Uptime for it would be abysmally low and would of course require sacrificing tank for crit chance to get. Many sieges and defenses are fought at chokepoints and open battles needs me on the move to defend backline or push the frontline, both requiring as much investment in taking punishment rather than dishing it out. There may be some that find it useful, though I dont yet know in what circumstances aside from small groups, however this is my thought on the tactic as it is now. Fortunately as has been pointed out, there are many other great tools in the Chosen's arsenal so for the time being I'll be using those and trying the new tactic where it permits. I dont expect this change to affect forts much, but who knows, it's only been a day.

Pretty much just a ranked, 6v6 premade.

And even then it is iffy cuz only 4 tactic slots.

Crimson Death BG might help ...dont you think + of sov mix instead of def one ..problem solved

[Starx]

Like others have already said this is a nice step in the right direction. However after reading the OP I feel like balance is just being done for balance sake rather than trying to achieve some kind of overarching vision for how the game is played, in city, scenarios, or open RvR/forts etc...

Balance is something you will never achieve and something people will always groan about, take for instance me shilling for magus 24/7/365.

It would be nice if balance changes were explained in context of say for instance these knight/chosen adjustments were done because they were over represented in city warbands, or those tactics where meant to give different off meta playstyles an edge in 6v6/scenario type play because DPS/2h tanks are dominating there right now. A lot of people would probably also like to see balance changes focused on forts, and namely 100+ vs 100+ choke fights, in fact when the patch notes dropped someone mentioned I forget that the new anti crit chosen tactic might be just for that situation.

tl:dr it would be nice to know why balance changes are made in relation to the game as a whole, what direction you guys want certain aspects moving in, and what areas of the game you think have problems and solutions you want to experiment fixing them with.

[Sigford]

So you may be wondering, what is our next step following this assessment?

We are going to make the following changes:
Chosen:
-Corruptive Power: Reverted, changed to "Any time you critically hit an enemy, all members of your group within 100 feet, except you, will gain a blessing that reduces their chance to be critically hit by 10% for 5 seconds." This ability can be refreshed by re-activating it, similar to Knight's Dirty Tricks. This ability can be severed from any group members it is applied to.
-Mixed Defenses: Now exists as the 11 point tactic in the Corruption tree.
-Corruptive Power: Now exists as the 7 point tactic in the Corruption tree.
-Oppression: Now requires a shield to use.

Knight:
-Vigilance: Now requires a shield to use.

Let's go in with a explanation for each of the changes.

-Corruptive Power - This was changed to effectively mirror Dirty Tricks. 5% Critical Hit Chance has the same renown rank cost as 8% Reduced Chance to be Critically Hit. We weigh tactics the same as renown investment, as they are all specialization related. When we factor in that a Chosen must do an offensive attack to proc this tactic on the group, we add about 2% extra bonus to offset the fact that it may not be always up, depending on the Chosen's critical hit chance.
This gives Chosen a very viable 2h build as well as a defensive build, similar to what the Knight has with Dirty Tricks, but on an offensive action to fit the Chosen's offensive class identity. It also ensures you are rewarded for staying near melee range, which also fits the Chosen's class identity. Keep in mind, too, that it may be severed by an enemy team, so that is an extra reason that it has a slight leg-up over Dirty Tricks.
-Mixed Defenses / Corruptive Power position changes - This is done solely for build purposes. We don't want the Knight and Chosen to be exact mirrors, and ultimately this fits two builds that a Chosen can take.
-Oppression/Vigilance: This is done to mirror the defensive abilities. If you're speccing a 13 point ability, you're pretty much committed to the role in that tree. This change will reflect that Chosen is a more offensive tank by nature, but if you want to go defensive, the option is available, but more forced. As such, a great weapon cannot be used for such a powerful defensive ability.
Plus, Chosen's ability states in the description that it is a Shield Slam - kind of hard to do that with a great weapon!
Going forward, we hope to avoid mistakes like this in the future. We're not perfect, however, I hope we can restore a level of trust in the team. We have very talented folks, and our developers have been a godsend in getting work done across multiple disciplines to provide content that never existed in Age of Reckoning. We want to be able to give the game new life in addition to its nostalgic feeling, and we do this unpaid because we're passionate about making sure the game continues on in the best form it can be.

Clearly, we have a lot of work to do with communication. As always has been the case. But admitting our faults and making things right here is our priority right now, and that is exactly what we're doing.

tl;dr whirly axe goes weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Wargrimnir had this to add as well:
Wargrimnir here. First off, thanks for all the patience and kind words, if you didn't have patience or kind words then you just make this job harder and I don't care much for you. The first version of this tactic getting pushed was simply a mistake. It was my responsibility to catch which I failed at doing. Part of this was miscommunication. There were a couple simultaneous discussions going on, what appeared to be explicit approval on this tactic was actually intended for exploring options to replace the existing -AP tactics. When I went back and looked at the conversation, it sure looks like I rubberstamp approved of the -25% crit tactic and no further discussion was had, then it was quickly buried. The other part was real life getting in the way of providing a backstop to ideas and proposals in balance. I had worked 12 hours the day before the patch, and in the morning got pulled into high priority items (when I would otherwise dink around on the forums looking for troublemakers). I saw the patch notes at least an hour after they went up and had the same reaction as everyone else, except I was kicking myself for it. Normally we post them internally at least the day before, but I just didn't see this one among everything else.

I'm not going to promise any of us are going to do a better job. This is the level of job we do here, sometimes you get a bad patch every couple of months because one of the many people around here missed something or glazed over what is otherwise obvious. We have a lot of people that can see these things, they're all free to chirp when something doesn't look right, and the majority of the time we run patches as intended. However, I do offer an apology on behalf of my own failure.

This thread is open for discussion. Feel free to provide constructive feedback regarding the second round of changes. These will be going live later today in a hotfix.

As a player let me start by expressing my appreciation for all that the devs and GMs of this server do. As a long time chosen player I will say that there's no doubt that the tactic that came into the game reducing 25% crit chance was going to be overpowered. The revert changes though are hefty and to far of a back track in my personal opinion and I'm sure other Knights and Chosens will agree. While I do get that Oppression and Vigilance are defensive abilities they were heavily utilized for survivability cookie cutter spec ESPECIALLY with guard changes of block vs parry etc in orvr. Also with this change to make use of the tactic rework chosens will be forced to dump their renown into crit chance to maintain maximum uptime while already reducing the overall survivability going 2h PLUS removing oppression. This only really addresses what is given up to efficiently utilize the tactic and not the usefulness of the tactic. Everyone already runs 0% chance to be crit typically anyways. Getting and extra 10% reduced chance to be crit would only be trying to prevent against initiative debuffs and increased chance to be crit from the enemy. Even then it only affects MY group which just isn't worth the point nor the lose of survivability and renown points. The only way this tactic will be used is if the Chosen player base finds a way to reliably proc and maintain the buff then asking other 5 people to sacrifice futile strikes for other renown abilities (highly unlikely regardless). Again, as mention above I appreciate all that yall do, but at the end of the day from a long standing chosen player. The unused AP tactic was revamped into another tactic that will still be unused.

[Mordd]

So you are working on giving chosen a decent defensive build and at the same time removing build options from the Knights.

[Cheermazon]

Why not try this tactic with adjusted values? Could have nerfed the Values to like 10%..
The SW changes werent nerfed this fast, why is that? I agree 25% was too much, but why delete it completly?

First off, the quick reversion is because it was a mistake and was never actually intended to go out. This stuff happens sometimes. You should probably read the first post in the topic.

Because the way this tactic worked is problematic. "On taking crit damage" essentially means they have maximum range on the ability to reduce crit, passively, on targets that have high enough levels of crit to get through the tanks defensive capability. Also because it's on taking damage, it's not possible to add an internal cooldown on the proc, which means a Chosen getting crit can have this proc as many times as they get hit, potentially allowing them to debuff dozens of players provided they're able to stay alive (something a healed def-tank is pretty good at).

Changing it to "when I crit", up to 5 people get crit reduction at a pretty generous amount. This vastly reduces the effect of the tactic to be more in line with literally everything else. It makes it group oriented, which we find to be a plus. It makes it active, in that you need to be doing something rather than nothing. And you need to spec for it to make it more reliable, which rewards investing into crit as a primary stat (if that's your jam). If you don't invest into crit, it still works fine, albeit at a much lower rate which is intended to be low if you're playing a more defensive oriented spec. Will you eventually crit? Yes. Will it be often enough to keep this tactic always active? No. If anything is adjusted, it will likely be the duration of the proc, not the implementation, so we could see an appropriate uptime on it.

This change being made to promote a more active playstyle to utilize the tactic, contradicts itself versus it's mirror. An "eventual crit" for it to proc, is no where the guaranteed uptime of "on block" of Dirty Tricks 5% crit. 10% crit reduction and 5% crit chance have relatively the same weight in renown at 15 points each, granted 2% bonus for the anticrit. The previous iteration was obviously unintended and a broken talent, but the Chosen defensive tree seems further neutered by the tactic swaps, and the requirement of a crit from a tank.

If the original idea was to provide a defensive addition to destro, why not allow a parry/disrupt to cause the proc to go off for the group? I understand the want for a more interactive gameplay, but requiring a tank spec'd chosen to crit seems out of place; and the statements of "just get/spec crit gear" is a tad apathetic to an obvious problem.

[Noh]

...
The unused AP tactic was revamped into another tactic that will still be unused.

Moreover, the only one useful tactic being moved from 7pt to 11pt.