Dev Chatter – Discord + Livestream + Skype – 2/15/2017 to 2/20/2015

The following conversations were taken from the Rift Community Discord from February 15th and 16th.  Quick points taken from live stream chat + the dimensions skype channel.

Come join us at the Rift Community discord here: https://discord.gg/BQJnPQ6

As usual, these have been anonymized, and edited for topic flow and some minor grammar tweaks.  We got talk on a breadth of topics, including support viability, more information about the upcoming Primalist Mystic soul, several class mechanics questions, details on the changes to Tactician, and a discussion about the Planar Fragments system.

The purpose of these dev chatter posts is to summarize the general thoughts of Rift’s dev team.

As usual, all details are subject to change, and should not be taken as 100% guaranteed to happen.

First, some quick points taken from the 2/10 and 2/17 Twitch Livestreams:

• 4.1 marks the start of Carnival of the Ascended (Rift 6th anniversary event)
• Tartaric Depths LFR loot, after the first kill of a week, will cost 2 IR charges for bosses 1-3, and 3 for the final boss.
• T1 and LFR will share the same currency
• Pricing will be such that it will be difficult to buy T1 gear if your mark income is solely from LFR.
• Intrepid: Rise of the Phoenix (T1) is slated to arrive ~2 weeks after 4.1’s launch
• There is a solution in place for Warrior and Cleric tank Eternal weapon rewards, but the team has not shared it yet.
• Starfall Prophecy tokens will go away with the launch of 4.1.
• Guild improvements will not be in 4.1, but are still on the schedule.
• No PvP Eternals at the moment
• Planar crafting rifts will use personal loot and also only have one planar type as opposed to 6.
• Planar crafting rifts are expected to require 1 Individual Reward charges to get a 100% chance at loot.
• The new planar crafting rifts will have similar mote drop frequencies to the older Nightmare Tide crafting rifts, but now there is only 1 mote type, not 6.
• Tartaric Depths will release in LFR difficulty first.  No timetable on a normal/hard difficulty version.
• There is no lockout for LFR. You can run Tartaric Depths as much as you want.  There is a weekly loot lockout though. After that, you have to use Individual Reward charges.
• T1 raid gear will not be on the store.  No word on LFR level gear though.

Dimensions quick points:

• 67 new banners available for affinity
• 20 new Vials for credits in the form of scratchers
• 27 new candles/table candelabras/torches for credits in the form of scratchers
  • Scratchers are a box with a set number and type of dimension items from a specific category and color.
• 79 new items coming out of the new Allitu Mystery Boxes
• Tenebrean building blocks will be in 4.1
• Carnival includes a Satyr Bartender
• A bunch of music boxes coming to the store – Sanctum, Meridian, Tempest Bay, Freemarch, Hailol, Infinity Gate, Planetouched Wilds, and Disco.
• Expanded the playable space of Strozza Estate by a little over 50%.  It basically gives access to the grounds to either side.  Should go live in 4.1
• 5 new keys: Allitu, the Wyrd Hut, Saint Tanaris, Fortress of the Apocalyse and Volcanic Playground (the dimension banners for these were previously datamined).
• New functionality: You can now close off the dimension item list, which has been requested by the community for a long time.  This will be under the “permissions’ tab.
• With 4.1, short missions only give building block stashes.  long mission stashes give all the things that have been in minion stashes so far.
  • Newer building blocks will be part of both short and long rewards.
  • At 4.1, premium missions will still return the old premium stashes.
  • Sometime after 4.1, those premium missions will start returning NEW stashes.
  • The new stashes will have all new dimension items never previously released.
  • The premium missions will be the only distribution channel for these new items.
  • Old boxes will have the old rewards, new boxes, updated rewards.

Discord Q&A

Q: Some are worried that the DPS for support is so far below the top DPS specs, that it might be more worthwhile to run the top DPS specs instead of a support class.  Any input on this?

Even with their DPS gaps I think their CDs (or defensive additions) make them worth running over a dps.

 

Q: Wouldn’t that be just oracle in case someone decides they wanna die?

Oracle and bard both have uses, Bard provides quite solid healing throughput to help out in aoe.

 

Q: why does the [cooldown debuff] persist after wipes?

It is supposed to clean up after raid encounters, normal fights however, you are on your own.

 

Q: [What is the design concept behind the support souls, and how do you expect them to be used]?

Running a type A (Archon) support will primarily be used for pushing damage increases. Type B supports (like bards) fill a defensive role, shoring up healing or mechanics requirements.  Although all supports should have a major dps CD that is basically shared.

Which you bring will depend heavily on the needs of your raid.  We expect the best teams to run type A supports almost exclusively, Unless they specifically need the inability to die, or are replacing a healer with a bard.

The less skilled your raid is as a whole, the more valuable those type B supports will be.

 

Q: so is Mystic (new Primalist offensive support soul) gonna be a class A or B?

Mystic is type A.

 

Q: Can you use the Mystic group stealth for trash skipping?

If it works as designed, as soon as an enemy steps in the ally radius it breaks.

 

Q: Both in pvp and pve? or just pve

Both.  It grants stealth to allies within 7~10m (whatever we set it to), and if an enemy unit steps inside it, the whole thing ends.  you should not be able to cast veil in combat

 

Q: so, its kinda like an invisibility wall that if an enemy steps inside it just blows up?

That’s one way to look at it.

 

Q: About [Spirit] sight – is it only @self or the people around you?

Spirit sight lets you see stealthed targets. But if you take any combat action on the target it should break most kinds of stealth.

 

Q: [can we use the] stealth to skip trash?

The veil will not be a mechanic to skip “trash”.  Basically, if we feel you should fight non-boss mobs, we’ll make sure you do so. Enemies we want to force you to fight will have stealth sight, or there will be other mechanics that make you want to fight the non-bosses on your own terms instead of theirs.

 

Q: I really don’t see much PvE use in boss encounters, especially if it breaks on proximity. Does it wipe threat? If so, it could help tanking (but the proximity thing kind of renders that much less useful).

[It does not wipe threat]. It’s almost exclusively a PVP tool.

 

Q: Are you mobile during it?

you are, and for people to remain stealthed they have to stay in range.

 

Q: How will it interact with rogue stealth?

It won’t. Stealth doesn’t really stack.

 

Q: Are your raid members stealthed on ability use or when they come near you when you have it active?

oh it won’t replace your stealth. I’ll provide a tldr of how it works. It has a cd. You click it and it puts a buff on you, that buff fires an aoe, and anyone in the aoe is stealthed. This fires every second or so.

If an enemy is hit by this aoe, the whole ability ends. So if you step outside of it you have a short grace period to get back, but otherwise you have to stay inside it.

Combat actions will break it and put a blocker on you.  voila, mobile stealth cloud

If the caster does any combat, it ends for everyone

we can set the priority level so that if you are a rogue [or a primalist] in stealth inside of the effect then you are not subject to having your stealth busted.

 

Q: Are the SP synergy crystals the same code as the NT ones?

I’m not sure what you mean “same code”. They are unique abilities in our database afaik.  SFP synergy crystals are completely different effects

 

Q: Just watched a 1 button mm do 355k dps, oh my! [Is this being looked into?]

that should be [functionally impossible] on pts.

 

Q: [is] Legendary Bloom only [hitting] 4 targets with Vile Spores [a bug]? One target always gets 2 hits so making it one target less than in the tooltip.

That is statistically expected, but by no means a rule. Reread the tooltip again carefully, [as it should imply that 5 spores are cast, but they won’t necessarily hit 5 different targets.].

[Tooltip: … Up to 5 enemies near the target will be struck with Vile Spores.]

what happens with bloom is that it fires 5 AoEs that pick a random target in the radius. Basic combinatorics says you are likely to duplicate a target in that case.

 

Q: Why not have [a 30% increase ST healing taken buff] on Accord of Power and Shield of the Chosen instead of the 6 point tank buffs [for VK and Paladin]?

At 6 points, most DPS souls can take Accord of Resilience or Shield of the Hero without significant loss (especially since there’s AP/weapon damage in the first tier).

[The +30% ST healing taken buffs] are specifically on all the guard enabling abilities.

 

In response to the following change:

Rogue – Tactician – Curative Torrent no longer ticks much faster than expected. Now correctly ticks and heals once a second. The target of the initial heal can no longer be selected as a target the heal bounces to. Curative torrent now bounces to one target instead of 2. Curative Torrent now has a 13s cooldown.

 

Q: Are healing values of each tick increased to compensate?

[No]. Tact is still quite strong even with this change. [Players are] going to have to use engine healing more rather than spray and pray forever. All the splashes are smart heals, meaning they will congregate on your lowest players

 

Q: [So it sounds like] you’re better off spamming Restorative Bolt and get more heals from the Engine

It will heal for more a tick than it did (changed the raw tick mult from 0.173 to 0.25.  The total heal over the time isn’t changed, just the splashing rules and behavior

 

Q: Can you let the Engine crit at least? Cause the only reason I’d use Curative Torrent is if I pray for crits.

It might well need tuning, but CT was way too effective before this change, and had a bunch of janky voodoo that needed to change.  It should be much closer to lib/chloro (same with warden). We can look at utility discrepancies once the raw healing is closer.

Tact has some larger underlying issues that I have limited tools with which to adjust them. So [we are going to] start with the mallet before I break out the fine chisel.

We also have less things we can easily rework into healer tools that are in scope for the time we have to make changes. Which is why transitioning some of their tools a bit to spread out into a toolkit is an easier solution

In an ideal design situation we would tear out a lot of chaff that doesn’t really fit the identity we want for the soul going forward and replace it with utilities and tools. But [that is] very time consuming and expensive.

In short, we aren’t redesigning Tact right now

 

Q: If you’re going to put a 13 second cooldown on it, you might as well put a 30 second cooldown on Curative Torrent and make it a strong cooldown heal, like Flourish or Wave of Renewal.

We considered that. We want to see how it plays as something you weave every 10 other abilities you use where it is now, but [it will] likely evolve a bit.

 

Q: Why 13 seconds btw? Such an odd number.

it’s 10 seconds after it ends. [The] cd starts when channel starts.  We thought about it putting a pause while it is channeling so it would read 10s but behave as it does now (and if you cancelled it, it would be 10s), but this was easier and hotloadable for functionally the same thing.

 

Q: It’s just that every other channel with a cooldown in the game is nice and rounded

Like, Ameliorate doesn’t have a 19 second cooldown to adjust for the 4 second channel time

First time for everything. Your dislike of 13 probably is due to how it does not break down into a fraction of a minute.  Which is completely legit. But we can try it at 13 and see how it feels.

 

On Planar Fragments:

Q: It boggles my mind when I see someone get a +15 ding and its Mainstat Endurance, spell power, spellcrit, dodge, block, and tier 5-6.  Its endurance primary, which means tank, and it has SP and SC, so why continue?
(player response): SP is important for an offensive tank warden-oracle you know. I like people that do things like that.  They drain plat out of the game, and that will bring prices down.

(dev response, adding to the player response): While there are a lot of valid issues with fragments and their complexity, they are probably first real plat sink that the game has seen in 5 years.

When we do round two of fragments at some point in the future, I think one of the limitations I’ll put in place is effectively a mercy rule where the max level infusion of a fragment is determined by the [affinity tier].

 

 

Q: So in order to max a fragment to 15 with the mercy rule, you would need a T1 fragment.  Wouldn’t that necessitate tieing growth rates to Affinity Tier instead of the current Tier list to keep things balanced?

[No, we would] let T3 or so go to 15, but 5/6 would be limited to infusion level 6 or something.

 

Q: something like T6 = L6, T5 = L9, T4 = L12, T3+ = L15?

yeah, something like that.

 

Q: what is the future of critical infusion? I am concerned that it doesn’t even out the plat costs for fragment upgrades due to very few fragments being worthwhile to infuse to 15.  So what might cost me 2k plat to upgrade might cost someone else 800 plat

You’re looking at it backwards. Crits are a discount. The price is based around a lower than expected crit rating.

 

Q: It doesn’t feel that way honestly, it feels like a lottery ticket more than a discount.

(Response from another player that a dev agreed with): that’s the point, if you get lucky with a crit, you save save save.

 

Q: while I hear that, I think that detracts a bit from the overall enjoyment of the system.  It doesn’t seem right that I have to work harder (obtain/spend more plat) to upgrade a fragment than someone else, even if it is the exact same fragment stat for stat,

Because of how math works, you don’t work harder. You will click the infuse button enough times over the lifetime of the character to experience what is [basically] a statistically average number of crits.

To regress towards standard crit rates [you can expect] a few hundred clicks [in order to] fall within statistically significant areas.

You could argue that stat reveals are gambling plat away (I might even agree), but better fragments show more stats by default.

 

Q: Right, and my concern is that unless we get more higher quality fragments that are worth upgrading to 15, that the statistically average number of crits won’t even out over the lifetime of a character

Higher quality fragments (and more showed stats) will be available from harder content. LFR and T1 will have higher quality frags dropping [than what currently drop in-game]. Expect some purple [Epic] frags to drop in LFR/T1.

 

Q: So how mandatory are frags for raiding?

That depends on how much you need stats to bolster up your skills. The more skilled you are, the less stats you need to do content.  The closer to average you get, the more stats you need. If you fall below the 50% point, you need more than an average player to compete

[It’s a bell curve] basically, sum total ilvl to complete content is a scale from X to Y where roughly 30% of the player base is +/- 1 delta of N in the middle, and everyone else distributes in a standard fashion up or down deltas.

 

Q: Is there a possibility of introducing a means to increase the chances of a critical infusion?
A: Um… no. We floated around ideas about that internally and we didn’t feel that any of them would be received well by the community. If we do anything like that it would be global event like “this weekend, critical infusion chances are 400%!”

 

Keyen’s advice to the Rift community

http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/157238832062/i-remember-your-52080-rule-and-it-was-an-awesome

[This article] It is 100% accurate to my experiences as a developer. Honestly, if you want to be better players who give feedback, read basically [almost] everything that tumblr posts.  Because it’s almost all well thought out excellent work

An example of how to give that as good feedback would be as follows
“Casting Lifewarding Beacon in Titan never really feels good. It seems lackluster and kinda unfun to cast”

It articulates the problem (Lifewarding beacon isn’t fun) and helps focus the problem (pressing it feels bad). It also leaves lots of room for improvement because I’m solving a specific problem

Feedback given that way is orders of magnitude more useful than “You should make X do Y instead of what it does now”