Q&A Topics:
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Question from Froglok Magician: How do Pet weapons actually work?
- Pet damage calculates a max damage, then takes half of that to generate a minimum damage. Pet weapons add the items ratio * 10 to their max damage. Then focus effects and other scaling kick in.
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Question From Temellin: Were specializations changed in any way, or have they remained the same?
- Specializations remained the same. However, since people asked about specializations, it should be noted that specializations are relatively small bonuses, somewhere between an 8 and 12.5% bonus for 250 points. Deity bonus then is a multiplier on that bonus. For a 12.5% bonus from a specialization, a 20% increase to that is only 2.5% increase to whatever it’s improving.
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Question From Temellin: Was dot weakening changed in any way?
- We have made no adjustments to dot weakening. The only time it’s been touched in years is when we gave Shadowknights an AA to make them better at it.
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Question from Kise: The recent spoilers about resist changes say that all casted group resistance buffs now provide 35 more resistances. Does this mean they stack with single target resistance buffs or that they provide 35 more than they currently do?
- The group resistance buffs now provide 35 more than they currently do.
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Question from Cornel: The resist work has no mention of the AA shared mind. Has it changed? If not it quietly becomes strong.
- It has not changed! Part of the point of the resist changes were to make things like shared mind stronger.
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Question from Paxit: Will the guild hall and guild management tools be a usable thing on Dalaya similar to live?
- We will have to look into code availability for features like this from EqEmu, but we’re keen to bring both these features eventually. The guild tools would be a higher priority but we’d like to have both.
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Question from Daenar: Does the dev team actually have a formal roadmap? Or some sort of guiding document so that disparate efforts don’t run the risk of stepping on toes or causing weird retcon moments?
- We have a large Trello Board with all of the plans we have and things that we are working on. We use it to keep track of what’s being done, what we want to do in the future, and what is the highest priority.
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Question from Ezie: Is there any way to get the buff duration changed? There are other means of incentivizing groups instead of effectively requiring classes.
- The ten-minute buff system is here to stay. We do not ever want to go back to people having to load buff bots. It caused a bunch of bad incentives, and often led to certain classes who have a power budget in buffs being loaded for buffs then left in town. The general goal is that buffs be spread out across enough classes that it shouldn’t be hard to have most buffs covered. Most buffs are covered by five or more classes now. We’re keen to attempt to fix problems with the current system rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater. We’re going to look at fixing some issues related to soulbond buffs and possibly figure out the issues with raids breaking causing them to tick down.
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Various other topics talked about on stream:
- No new races are being added to monks at Dalaya launch.
- The dev working on the Ikisith changes would prefer we not talk about them much before launch. They want people to experience it fresh without many spoilers. All we can say is parts are going to be a lot different. They’re trying to set us up to actually be able to finish Ikisith in a reasonable time frame.
- There are several changes we’d like to rework that we may not have time to get to before launch.
- Bane Damage: The current Bane System is very unwieldy for both players and developers. We’ve got plans to make changes.
- Elemental Damage: We’re not happy with the power gain disparity between classes of the same archetypes for elemental damage. The fact a wizard can get 8-9% more damage from elemental damage, and necromancers get 1-2% causes balancing issues. We’ll be addressing this either before launch or shortly after.
- Mop Rework: We’re not super happy with the Mansion of Portals. Its main job is to ferry newer players between cities, which it is not the best at. We’d be keen to replace it with something else that still makes it easy to get between cities and allows you to navigate the world somewhat without it being tedious to deal with. It will probably stay in its current form for a bit while we work out plans to what exactly will happen to it.
- Client Limitations:
- RoF2 will not allow you to put two of the exact same augment in an item. For instance, if you had an item with two augment slots, you could not put two +5 armor class augs in that item. You could put a +5 and a +4 armor class augment, however. We cannot do anything about this.
- Due to having to fix a bug related to the pet window, enchanter pets do not have an attack button by default. You can circumvent this by casting an illusion on the pet or by getting all ranks of the Guardian Animation AA. This is a client limitation, but thankfully it’s very easy to fix on an enchanter until you get the AA.