For those who missed our first spoiler or are unaware of how the new client works, we now have access to a shared cooldown system built into the client. This allows the development team to link the cooldowns of clickies easily. Most clickies that were linked previously are linked again using the new system, though a few have been shuffled between groups. Some new clickies have been added to some groups and other clickies have had their cooldowns adjusted. In addition, we’re grouping all DPS clickies that essentially function as a percentage damage boost into one group, and we’ll be adjusting the power of these clickies.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the groupings and examples of the sorts of things in them. Following will be a long-form explanation of why we made these changes:
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Group 1: DPS Buffs: Spirit of the Vah Shir, Aspect of the Lujein, Melee Haste Clickies such as Mask of Anos, Spell Damage Clickies such as Chaotic Destruction/Focused Channeling/Fulmination, Attack Buffs such as Perpetuality.
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Group 2: On-use Damage Clickies: Earring of the Bound Heavens, Glacial Ice Sheet, Standard of the Vah Sraen, Yclistinite Detonator, One Hand Washes the Other, etc.
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Group 3: Shared Memories
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Group 4: Small Group Heals: Blood of the Brood, Pure-White Skeleton Hands, Trinket of Recompense, Sanctifier’s Gauntlets, etc.
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Group 5: Stronger Heals: Ashpyre, Conduit of Ritual Healing, Soul-Shepherd, Seething Dragon-Scales
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Group 6: Modulation Effects
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Group 7: Taeshlin’s Escape: Scaled Boots of Escape, Gem of Sealed Mist
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Group 8: Taraztu’s Healing Flames — These shouldn’t eat the paladin cooldown anymore to boot!
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Group 9: Theft of Thought
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Group 10: Potions
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Group 11: Mana Restoration: Immature Dretch Worm, Tear of Elael, Halo of Transformation, etc.
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Group 12: Surge of Memories
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Group 13: Chaotic Energies
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Group 14: Poison Bolt: Faefang Necklace, Scales of the Fallen, etc.
The first thing to note is that the client has a hard limit of 20 groups, and we do not want to use all of them right off the get-go.
Next, I am going to reiterate this: we’re going to be adjusting the power of these clickies. Spirit of the Vah Shir and Aspect of the Lujein are going to be vastly weaker than they currently are. The goal is that when you get Spirit of the Vah Shir, it is going to be the best DPS clickie you can get. After a few tiers, things providing similar throughput increases will start appearing, and eventually just straight-up better clickies will appear. We want this clickie to be good when you get it and last for a while, but not something everyone has to farm on every character forever. There will be some adjustments to The Vah quest that we’re not yet ready to talk about, but the goal is to reduce some of the pain points of the quest.
Soul-Shepherd was moved to the Ashpyre timer because it was much closer to the power of Ashpyre than it was to the smaller clickies. Also, Seething Dragon-Scales was moved to the Ashpyre timer because the clickie was not on a shared timer previously and was insanely strong.
We’re making these changes for several reasons:
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We don’t want clickies that nearly double your character’s damage when you click them.
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We don’t want the solution to beating end-game bosses to just be cycling through half a bag of DPS clickies.
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We don’t want everyone to have to refarm every single one of these clickies; it’s fine if people feel like they want different clickies for different situations—heck, it’s probably ideal. We don’t, however, want them to need every single one of them.
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We don’t want more casual players to feel like, ‘I have no chance to kill anything because I don’t have all the clickies high-end content is being balanced around.’
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Linking DPS clickies in this way gives developers the ability to more freely make DPS clickies. Previously, any new DPS clickie we added basically permanently increased player power unless we jumped through a bunch of hoops, which made it hard to justify making them.
Class Spoilers start Wednesday!