My Observations Post .906 (Some bugs)

[L337GTIMKV]

First off I just have to say how impressed I am with Steven and his amazing ability to listen and respond to our concerns! It's a nice change to see responsive Dev's in this day and age. Go Soldak!

Well after messing around with .906 a bit, i've noticed a few things.. They are:

1) Thieves in town are broken.. They steal everything on the vendors with NO downtime between thefts, and are unstoppable because they aren't in one place long enough.. Something was definately borked in the patch.

2) As was stated by someone else.. Locked/stuck doors make a repeating locked door sound when trying to bash them. Kinda minor, but worth mentioning at any rate.

3) Berzerk skill is now totally broken.. I think you may have accidentally made it REDUCE damage by 50% rather than add 50%... I verified this because I did a crushing blow for 7 damage when my char sheet said I should do 7-15 on a normal hit. (With 7 obviously being roughly half normal damage, assuming you rounded down.) I never saw any larger than normal hits, and truth be told all my hits were very very small when I tried the skill.

3a) My suggestion for this skill would be to actually make it a 5 second long buff that adds it's damage to all your attacks during the 5 second period while also reducing your defense (Similar to Stealth) When I envision a person who's "berserk", I certainly imagine it to be a sustained emotional state, and not only lasting one "jab".. Also, as stated before you changed it. It's damage growth rate is FAR too slow, and in it's present form does not in any way shape or form merit an inherant defense penalty.

4) I've been noticing that stat bonuses on items are much less now.. This change is kinda odd and unneccessary to me, and I feel that the items need to be made MORE interesting and not less. My prior idea:

4a) Rather than have 2 item "tiers" (Purple/Blue) that are basically the same as the uniques with some random modifier on it... Make the Blue/Purple tier like a super rare (With no pre-set mods) but have it generate more mods on average, and make the mods like 33% stronger for the Purple color, and 50% stronger for the Blue tier. Also, if possible add some modifiers that only these higher tiers can "roll".. Maybe also remove some of the less beneficial mods for these tiers as well. (Light intensity as an example)

5) Thank you for implementing my HP bonus idea on the items, but I still think they are a bit too low in comparison with Vit bonuses.. I think they should be a bit higher than what the highest Vit bonus would give you at any given level range, as again.. You are not getting the other bonuses that the Vit bonus would confer. (Stamina/Regen)

5a) We are moving in the right direction with respect to the passive regen bonus, but it is sadly still too low. I also think that making it scale inherantly with level would be a good move to cope with the crazy mob scaling.

6) Proc observations... I have had procs work a bit better since I last mentioned it, but will still be monitoring this. (I really want procs to be awesome.. Can you tell?) I do still think the chances for them are a bit low. One observation that may of some interest.. When I reported that the Frost Nova defensive proc wasn't working, I had TWO items on that gave a chance for it go off.. I'm now wondering if having two nearly identical procs somehow breaks both of them?

7) Renegades need their town attack percentages looked at.. They send attacks a bit fast.. To the point at times that you can't even work your way down to kill them cuz you immediately get attacked by them again. I could just be getting really bad luck, but I doubt it.

8) New buff lengths are better, but not quite long enough still I don't think.

That is all for now, I will edit with more if needed.

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by L337GTIMKV

1) Thieves in town are broken.. They steal everything on the vendors with NO downtime between thefts, and are unstoppable because they aren't in one place long enough.. Something was definately borked in the patch.

I left some debugging data in on accident. I guess for this patch there are going to be insanely good thieves.

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by L337GTIMKV

3) Berzerk skill is now totally broken.. I think you may have accidentally made it REDUCE damage by 50% rather than add 50%... I verified this because I did a crushing blow for 7 damage when my char sheet said I should do 7-15 on a normal hit. (With 7 obviously being roughly half normal damage, assuming you rounded down.) I never saw any larger than normal hits, and truth be told all my hits were very very small when I tried the skill.

I think what you are seeing is that skills take into account your dps not your straight damage. So something like berserk can do less per hit than your normal hit because it is so much faster but it should be raising your dps quite a bit. I might need to lower the mana for berserk though.

[L337GTIMKV]

Thanks for your quick replies Shadow.. You seriously rock.

I am fairly certain that prior to this patch, when I tried Berzerk, I was doing noticeably more damage than a normal swing.. This is no longer the case in my tests earlier today... Of course, I did only test at the very early stages of the game... Maybe I will get some more ranks and test further tomorrow.

That said though, I still think the skill is too weak to merit a penalty of any sort in it's present form.

Perhaps someone who has invested a ton of points into it can shed some light on this issue?

Thanks for the response!

[Gutsman]

Anyone tried the Paladin skill Zeal? The animation is very buggy and seems to take too long. The skill lists 1.5 second time just like Perfect Strike from Weaponmaster, but it seems to take a lot longer. And a lot of the time my character just does some thing where he raises his hands in the air then the target takes damage.

I'd like to use this skill, but it doesn't work very well as it is.

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by L337GTIMKV

That said though, I still think the skill is too weak to merit a penalty of any sort in it's present form.

That's a different story. I'll look at it.

[Cadfan]

The improved attack time is worth quite a bit.

[FloodSpectre]

I had two pairs of different Elite gloves in my stash before the patch. One pair was a yellow color, the other was Tore's Gloves. They both had the same icon, but different colors. Oddly enough, they're both now Tore's Gloves.

I'm also still getting slightly wounded NPCs upon creating a new town.

[FloodSpectre]

I'm not sure if this is a bug or some other sort of strangeness, but I swear all the items I'm getting lately, as well as all the ones I have equipped, are all receiving a +3% to +10% bonus to their armor or damage, respectively.

[Cadfan]

Some miscellaneous stuff:

What's the deal with the damage from Defenders and the other big golem guys? I absorb 75% of incoming damage right now, which is probably as good as mail is going to get me. I still regularly take hits from them for around 300 damage. I am at level 41, and have about 350 hit points. This implies that they are attacking me for over 1200 damage. Do they have a really high critical hit chance or something?

I also have damaged townspeople. I always have, I figured it was intentional.

I don't think that Spirit helps with resisting energy attacks. Here's some math on that...

I am at level 41. I have 9 points of resistance for poison, which means I resist just under 5% of poison damage. We'll call it 5. I got this from gear. If I wanted to get a 5% boost to all of my resistances from investing in Spirit, it would take me 90 character points. This is more than I have in any other ability score. If I invested this much I'd never be able to wear good armor or wield good weapons.

If I wanted to just get a 5% increase in hit points, which is mathematically the same except better because it applies to physical damage as well as energy attacks, I would need 17.5 hp. My character can get exactly this amount by investing 5 points in vitality. I think a generic character with no hp bonus could do it with 6.

Again, maybe I'm completely missing the point on Spirit, but if so I've been missing it since DoP.