Special: Dev Chat Roundup

Through multiple channels, the devs communicate to the playerbase.  Some are private, others are more open like the official forums.  One commonly missed chat source is the Rift Community Discord and the Live Stream chat box, both places that devs answer questions and accept feedback.

You can join the Rift Community discord here: https://discord.gg/BQJnPQ6

Since these can often be difficult to read or even review, I will do my best to summarize several discussion points and some takeaways from some of the recent dev chatter.  I won’t call out dev or player names here.

Thanks to Archy for helping me put all of this together!

The purpose of this post is to summarize the general thoughts of Rift’s dev team.  All of these are subject to change, and should not be taken as 100% fact.

General Live Stream Chat Q&A

• Primalist pack in 4.1 – I can say with certainty, no
• Weeklies – None at this point. Rather, not a date I want to say.
• With next week’s patch (Hotfix #7), the faye yule essences will be adjusted to include AP/SP
• PVP – We’ll split the brackets when we are comfortable with the population being at 70 so that we don’t force long queues for them.
• No new crafting dailies in the new zone.
• PVP healer synergy crystals added, so you’ll get those next week (Hotfix #7).
• No ETA for the new fishing dailies in the new zones.
• Make dreamweaver able to salvage dim items – “Never going to happen”
• We’ll update affinity soon. Didn’t want to update it with the expansion launch since it could have been considered as pay to win. As most of the population gets to 70, we’ll update it.
• Daily Calendar – I think they day 5 is the only one left to update – We don’t have SFP notoriety tokens yet.

On Planar Fragment advancement

There are several vectors for advancement coming for fragments. They were [alluded] to on the stream today (Friday, December 16) but we’ve also mentioned it in forum posts in the past so this is no secret. You will eventually get a new tier of fragments that have better stats on them. These will not come with every new tier of content because that’s not how fragments were intended to work. They are a long haul type of investment so they will serve you well for quite a while.

Even outside of the new tiers of fragments, there are a few systems slated that will augment your current fragments to increase their values.

But let’s say that your current T1 CP frag starts at 200 and tops out at 600 (total made up numbers because I don’t want to open the spreadsheet), the new tier would start at  like 250 and go to say 700.

Even still, there are like 10 more slots to open up on the right hand side of the fragment inventory without upgrading a fragment tier at all.

Q: when you say new factors for fragment advancement, do you mean infusion? or something akin to upgrading frags to a new potential tier? or is that still undecided?

A: That is where we get off in the weeds and I’d prefer to not discuss that publicly until we have decided upon the course of action.

Class Balance in Starfall Prophecy

a TL;DR is that not every calling has had a full pass yet. Rogues/Wars/ and to some degree primalist are rapidly closing in on where they belong (barring a few outlier souls) and should parse pretty similarly to each other, at least in a vacuum test case.

and where do they belong? more towards the paragon-level or towards the tempest/reaver level?

There will be changes to adjust some less than ideal gameplay that arose as part of those changes though

Closer to paragon, but the actual answer is a little more mathematical

 

What is a dps standard to be looking towards in sfp?

the short version is +/- 10% of a median point

a 20% top to bottom spread is a generally solid target (much tigher than that is nontrivial to maintain)

I don’t have a final number for geared players, but the target using a specific test case in foundry on a 72 dummy

 

What should we expect parse-wise from melee vs ranged?

Realistically melee will probably have to be a bit higher just because of the realities of how encounter design works. Melee will always be higher than Ranged due to the disconnects that they feel during combat.

When you look at a dummy parse, melee will perform higher but in an encounter setting where there is the slightest disconnect, they drop off fast.

Its also worth noting that the forums often shoots for “every soul should be parsing the same” which just isn’t a goal that is achievable

Editor’s Note: +/- 10% sounds like a broad spread, but it’s tighter than a lot of games manage

 

Any plans for upping bard dps somehow in the near future? Many folks are confused about the future of support roles as partial DPS, and they’re kinda weak comparatively.

For this first pass we’re targeting DPS first

Supports will get a pass all to themselves, once I figure out how ot get proper BM parses

I generally don’t mind answering questions in a general sense. The forums are just tough because its all asynchronous communication

 

Yeah look at what the “swimming in plat” casual message turned into haha

The plat thing is a whole other kettle of fish. But none of us has time to host an economics 101 class on deflation, currency elasticity, and the entrance of new goods to a market :p

the TL;DR is that your plat/hr is much higher now than it used to be, but people are also spending more than they did at the end of NT

Deflation is generally good for a currency, especially one that isn’t literally minted

Because it makes each one you earn more powerful

and since your earn per hour isn’t (for the most part) based on how much currency exists, deflating it makes your income more powerful

tl;dr you can convert time into credits more efficiently now than you used to

although that isn’t strictly class related

 

back to classes, back to BM: if you change him, make the player the main contribution to dps, not the pet

Its likely they are just gonna get nerfs to bring them closer to archon

archon is way closer to the target dps

its also important to remember that Archon is to BM as Oracle is to Bard

 

they are? I thought the cooldown changes were meant to have only one support in future raids

And here we come to the crux of the goal. If you are struggling on DPS, then you bring Archon/BM (who provide more offensive cds and power), if you are struggling with a healing check (post healing changes when we get to those), you bring an Oracle or Bard

Think of them as offensive and defensive supports

The main goal of the CD changes for supports was actually raid normalization

The floor and ceiling of Raid DPS scaled too much on support syncing, so normalizing that by making them bigger and more concentrated but more sporadic helps flatten that out

As a general goal we’d love to approach a much more standardized number of buttons and less reliance on macros, but those are much longer term goals with no concrete plans

 

I’m looking forward to the day 1-button specs die out again

Macros as written take one of our primary rotation control tools out of the designer kit. Cooldowns (and the resetting thereof) can’t really be interesting designs in rift because of how macros work.

Which is why Sab uses ramping up abilities and some RNG to avoid that situation

and why Shadeborn links 2 thinks you can’t macro (a hardcast and your finisher)

Its also why spec cohesion is somewhat hard to maintain. Cooldown behavior is the easiest thing to communicate to the player, but the hardest for us to use as a tool in spec flow and feel

So yea, thus concludes my design 101 class on cooldowns

 

So we will see more skills like Time Bomb with increasing effectivness if its off coldown?

thats just a simple example. There are a couple tools in the designer toolkit that help inform flow that aren’t CDs

For a handful of examples

Abilities that only work when used in sequence (and don’t have CDs)

Abilities that only work at full potential under certain conditions

Abilities that have shorter CDs than is ideal (ie a dot you only refresh every 8s having a 4s cd)

Abilities that have secondary requirements (such as position or target state)

 

But why don’t we see such “tools” more often in different specs?

we haven’t reworked them all yet? :p

we might hate macros more than others who came before me

we have no problem with a macro that does a bunch of oGCD stuff all at once

but ability sequencing bothers me

we’d rather get it down to where players don’t need many macros

Macros are great tools to improve communication (callouts) and allow faster use of some immediate reaction stuff

but putting 11 things in a macro and removing the gameplay of a spec isn’t ok

 

yeah, reaver wants to be a ranged aoe soul!

Reaver is going closer to ST/Cleave actually. Vladd and Keyens are of one mind on that

 

so same as tempest?

AoE souls in general should move towards more of a cleave mechanic rather than 5+ enemies. We rarely make full use of their capabilities anymore in the open world or in instanced combat. The upcoming fortress sieges might be the one recent case where they can be used.

The AoE/ST split is hard to make good use of. Souls that only have a place in the open world is pretty sad.

Warlord ST

we’re buffing exactly zero in RB right now

It was so wildly out of line before

Its now actually close to where it belongs

we fully admit that Fragments are a very deep and complex system. However, we are constantly looking for ways to reduce that learning curve and make them much more accessible.

 

So my question is more in line with classes that haven’t been talked about, Mages. Sure FK is ok right now with its scaling, but Chloro just doesn’t put out enough healing without a crystal and even then struggles. Its base healing ST on a tank that has only like 4-6% guard isn’t = to what the dmg in SPE’s are. They take 4 hits and the chloro can only catch up to 2 of those hits. Then he takes another 4. Then there is the issue with DPS from mages, being the hybrid and the Warlock are the only DPS choices that aren’t in line with other classes. Like, harb is closer now, thanks for that, seriously. But, Pyro in the dust again, and where is the Necro love!

So, healing will get its own look after DPS is done. There are larger plans there.

As far as lock and pyro, all the parses we’ve seen show Pyro above where it belongs comapred to targets. We haven’t done much tuning on mages though.

Warlock is likely going to come down as well

we’ve not heard anyone having major issues being able to successfully heal through SPEs with where numbers are right now.

Healing did definitely scale up with SPE, but much more slowly than player health and dps did

which is by design

as we are moving away from tank health having to yoyo between 15% and 100% every swing

 

Will battlesongs healing become “intelligent”? Currently it’s healing by distance instead of the most injured targets in range

I’m not immediately planning on it, although I suppose it could

maybe during the healing pass

Its actually partially because its a largely ST focused soul

the Legendary gives them a really strong option in dungeons (if you have Stand Tall up on 2 targets you can basically aoe heal 5 people no problem)

and making it smart improves its efficiency drastically

which is partially why tact is so strong right now

torrent became smart

 

about balance – primalist may be overperforming a bit due to the vulcanist talent still giving 4% AP/WD per point instead of 2. The derv and typhoon ones are right though.

we thought we got all those. (implied second look to be had)