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Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2015 5:25 pm Post subject: Breath 4 Development: New Decay & Repair Mechanics
As development of breath 4 continues, we're hoping to start leaking bits as we work them out. This is the first thread where for that, it's the first officially finalized mechanic: Decay and weapon quality..
When we sat down to create the design for breath 4, it was our intent to rebuild the entire game from the ground up. Everything from the code to the way things work. We're taking a good look at everything and asking what worked, what didn't work, and why.
One thing we didn't like was the way weapon quality presently works. Right now, weapons and armor have the qualities we all know about, and you pretty much always have to be using a Pristine weapon. And if you get an unlucky streak with weapon decay, then it sucks to be you. There were several problems we found with this, ranging from the way a lot of people felt they had to get Advanced Crafting skills in late tier 2 just to maintain pristine quality, to that whole unlucky streak.
So, what have we done about it?
Weapons and Armor now both have Durability. You use them, they wear down, and eventually you'll want to repair them.
When found, weapons and armor will have anywhere from 25/100 Durability, to 75/100 Durability. The 3% chance of decay is now 10%, but now when decaying the weapon loses anywhere from 1 to 10 Durability. This whole time, your weapon still maintains the same accuracy, so an unlucky streak just means you'll need to throw it to your smith sooner, rather than lost accuracy. Oh, also your weapon only rolls the decay chance on a hit. Your armor only rolls a decay chance when you are hit. No more decay on a miss. No more death decay.
So, when you toss it to your smith, what happens?
A character with Repair Item can repair the item. When you repair, you gain 20 Durability, not to exceed your maximum. After this, your max durability will drop by 15 durability points. If this would put your max Durability below your new Durability, you may save yourself some durability loss as it generally won't reduce max durability below your actual durability, but you will always lose at least half (rounded up) of the normal durability drop. Your Durability should never be able to exceed your max durability.
Smithing gets a lot better. Not only do you only lose 10 max Durability, but you gain the ability to craft new items as well. Items you craft are always at 100/100 Durability on creation.
Advanced Smiths get even better at this, and you'll be wanting dedicated smiths in your faction. When an Advanced Smith repairs your item, you only lose 5 max Durability. Further, when crafting a new item, it is created with 150/150 Durability.
When a weapon reaches 0 Durability, it is totally broken, and can no longer be used or repaired regardless of its previous max durability. It's really only good for scrap metal at that point. Now, we haven't worked out the specific numbers of scrapping yet, but when you have an item whose quality has gotten too low to really be useful anymore, Smiths have the option to scrap it. This has a chance of returning some of the components. Right now we're talking about a flat % chance rolled per component but we really don't want to touch that number until after we've gotten into our Alchemy system.
We're also discussing the idea of Reforging an item. This is where a crafter takes a critical component (e.g. Steel for Swords) and uses that with the item to increase the max Durbaility. We're still not settled on the specifics, but a lot of us are big fans of the idea and are just hammering out the numbers.Again, we don't really want to commit to any numbers here until we have an idea (via our Alchemy system) how rare these components will be.
So, what does all of this mean?
This means that innate weapons have a built in mechanical perk of their own, unique to innate weaponry: They require no maintenance. Weapons users will eventually need to go out and find new weapons, or have their local crafter make more.
I imagine that it will become very common for faction smiths to simply stock the safe with quality weapons, and remove any damaged weapons for repair, reforging, or scrapping, and there are a few other semi-related changes we're making to help enable this:
Enchantment: No longer on the weapons or armor themselves. Instead you wear special enchanted items, such as rings. So, if you have a Ring enchanted with Acid Damage, then it would simply affect all of your attacks, changing all your attacks to Acid damage. This means you don't have to hang onto your enchanted weapon, just swap it out for a fresh one.
Named Items: This is obviously a concern, and we're pleased to say it won't be an issue. when you get a custom name for your items, you're actually getting a Name Tag, which you can attach to any item. When attached, the name of the item changes, simple as that. By default, if the item leaves your inventory for any reason (e.g. dropping, giving it away, placing in the safe, destroyed, scrapped, ect.) then you get the name tag back. You may remove this yourself in the inventory tab if you want (0 AP to mess with this), and you can also set an option to have the name stick with the item if you hand it to someone or place it in the safe (just in case you actually want to give it away. This option should need to be re-selected if that person wants to give the item away and have it keep the name)
Magic Weapons: NW vets will remember Thundersword, Hate Blades, Flaming Swords, Magic Throwing Knives, and Eagle Eye Pistols. They'll also remember how eventually they become so plentiful that they were basically standard issue. With this new system, we feel a lot more comfortable introducing such rare, epic weaponry since eventually they'll cycle themselves out of the system. They may be more difficult to repair, but we're hoping we can make them a really special (albeit temporary) thing.
This is a big deal, and I expect some people may be shocked to hear that their Swords will eventually wear out and they will have to go out and find/craft new ones. Well, we ran the math to se how often this should happen.
Lets say you have an advanced Smith make you a sword. With your 70% accuracy and a 10% chance to lose an average of 5.5 Durability per hit, that actually comes to an average of losing 0.55 DP per attack made. Going from 150 DP to 0 would take almost 272 attacks. Assuming you make 60 attacks per raid, that comes to about 4 and a half raids before you really should get that sword looked at and repaired. And then the advanced Smith gets to repair it 6 times, bringing a 10/150 DP weapon up to a 122/122 weapon.
We're all really excited to see how the system will work out, and will keep you posted on it once we get far enough along in the process to realistically play with it a little and test it out. _________________
Awesome! This breath has been the first time I've really paid close attention to the crafting system, and there are some undeniably wonky bits that this new approach addresses pretty nicely. Number one is that advanced crafting skills will result in actual crafting of items rather than repeatedly fixing up the same months-old gear. Also cool: this may lead to more characters eschewing crafting skills and opening a niche for dedicated crafters as a result, since decay is more predictable and your accuracy doesn't get abruptly tanked in the process.
A black-footed ferret already automatically repairs anything in the safe that's damaged (and seeing worn/ broken/ destroyed microfiche this Breath always gives him a pang of 'damn, not repairable') but the rest of it sounds really interesting.
I assume there will be changes in the Fraternity of Wondercraft and various skills (like the Conduit Code of Efficiency, Rule of Resourcefulness, etc.) to go along with this.
/me starts a fresh page for "Breath 4 Ferret Build', leaving a lot of blanks in.
So if there is no longer the accuracy bonus for weapons and the soak bonus for armor in good or pristine condition, how is this going to effect the balance of crafted weapons and armor vs innate?
Will the Hold Bladed Edge skill be present in breath 4?
Let me get back to you on that.
We talked about this, and the answer is "no".
The problem is visible in some of our combat tree design (which hasn't been leaked yet). The Unarmed tree (Formerly called the Hand to Hand tree) gets very similar results as the Melee Weapon tree; however, it pays 20 CP more and never has to ever worry about quality. While we could easily and fairly charge 20 CP to remove all decay, this would make the two trees too similar and almost entirely remove reasons to pick the Unarmed tree over the Melee Weapon tree. Further, it would create conflicts with Magical Weapons, which we really do want to eventually decay into nothing to keep them rare and unusual. As such, even a skill to merely reduce the decay chance raises too many concerns.
Srekto wrote:
So if there is no longer the accuracy bonus for weapons and the soak bonus for armor in good or pristine condition, how is this going to effect the balance of crafted weapons and armor vs innate?
Igor_Dolvich wrote:
I assumed there will be either more smoother transition of quality into various bonuses.
Or maybe there will be various ranges that will correspond to old weapon conditions.
There is no longer any bonus for quality. An item with 1/10 durability has the same functionality as an item with 150/150 durability. The only difference is how long before it is likely to break.
This change was done to reduce the urgency of needing to repair. Previously, just 1 drop in quality level could be a really serious thing that had to be fixed as soon as reasonably possible. The "Pristine quality bonus" essentially became a mandatory thing, which really turned "good quality" weapons into something which has a 5% penalty compared to what you normally do. It became somewhat common for people to carry backup weapons just to swap them out mid-raid as they are hit by decay. This also led to several posts in the Dear RNG thread showing frustration some people had with a string of bad luck, where their weapon turns into a useless hunk of metal after just a half dozen swings. We wanted to eliminate that risk, and instead give a much more consistent result so that it wouldn't be necessary to carry several weapons on you.
As for the balance between Innate weapons and armor, it actually makes it easier to design. We no longer have to consider these pristine quality bonuses when designing innates, and can just set them where we need them. Innates have a fundamental bonus of "you never need to worry about decay", which is a small thing but still meaningful. We haven't really worked our way high enough to touch on innates beyond the Fist and Kick though. We have a few rough ideas for some neat things to do, but let me get back to you on that once we finalize them. _________________
Will the Hold Bladed Edge skill be present in breath 4?
Let me get back to you on that.
We talked about this, and the answer is "no".
The problem is visible in some of our combat tree design (which hasn't been leaked yet). The Unarmed tree (Formerly called the Hand to Hand tree) gets very similar results as the Melee Weapon tree; however, it pays 20 CP more and never has to ever worry about quality. While we could easily and fairly charge 20 CP to remove all decay, this would make the two trees too similar and almost entirely remove reasons to pick the Unarmed tree over the Melee Weapon tree. Further, it would create conflicts with Magical Weapons, which we really do want to eventually decay into nothing to keep them rare and unusual. As such, even a skill to merely reduce the decay chance raises too many concerns.
That's about the feeling I had when I thought about it. Having that available to literally everyone, or even just all combat classes, would go from a niche skill to a no-brainer.
What about the Eternal Soldier's Master of Munitions skill treating all guns as one quality level higher? Maybe that effect could be replaced with something similar to Hold Bladed Edge's effect on melee weapons, where guns never (or rarely, in the case of magical weapons) decay in his hands. A gun ES is about the only T3 combat class that does not get a discrete innate weapon (I'm being generous by counting Soft/Cobra Strike and the NC's Tattoo of Spell Projection as innate weapons) and his theme is that of always being ready for anything in the Nexus, so I don't think it'd be unreasonable for him to be far better at maintaining guns than anyone else.
Will the Hold Bladed Edge skill be present in breath 4?
Let me get back to you on that.
We talked about this, and the answer is "no".
The problem is visible in some of our combat tree design (which hasn't been leaked yet). The Unarmed tree (Formerly called the Hand to Hand tree) gets very similar results as the Melee Weapon tree; however, it pays 20 CP more and never has to ever worry about quality. While we could easily and fairly charge 20 CP to remove all decay, this would make the two trees too similar and almost entirely remove reasons to pick the Unarmed tree over the Melee Weapon tree. Further, it would create conflicts with Magical Weapons, which we really do want to eventually decay into nothing to keep them rare and unusual. As such, even a skill to merely reduce the decay chance raises too many concerns.
That's about the feeling I had when I thought about it. Having that available to literally everyone, or even just all combat classes, would go from a niche skill to a no-brainer.
What about the Eternal Soldier's Master of Munitions skill treating all guns as one quality level higher? Maybe that effect could be replaced with something similar to Hold Bladed Edge's effect on melee weapons, where guns never (or rarely, in the case of magical weapons) decay in his hands. A gun ES is about the only T3 combat class that does not get a discrete innate weapon (I'm being generous by counting Soft/Cobra Strike and the NC's Tattoo of Spell Projection as innate weapons) and his theme is that of always being ready for anything in the Nexus, so I don't think it'd be unreasonable for him to be far better at maintaining guns than anyone else.
I really don't want to talk too much about tier 3 skills, since we're nowhere near that point in development yet (though I break this rule frequently myself whenever n idea comes to me which I don't want to forget). We can talk about giving the ES something like that, but no promises. _________________
If you're removing the increase in accuracy because that's what everyone was using it for, and if the advantage of class-weapons is to be the lack of maintenance, does this mean all craftable weapons will get their 'pristine' attack increase naturally, or just stick to their 'average'?
There is no attack bonus. Functionally the only difference between a 150/150 weapon and a 1/150 weapon is how long it is likely to last before it breaks. _________________
The attack chance value we are throwing around for h2h/light melee/archery/firearms is 70%, so at or higher then the current chance pristine weapons have.
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