Grind Badges Unlocking New Mortal Skills

[RKBBQ]

Eliding the unnecessary hostility, the innate buff ideas are, on the whole, great. Innates really need a ton of love in the face of the prevalence of +6 chont weapons on every character in a decently-active faction.

I know the argument is made that that's only because we're so late in the breath, but it's a reasonable status quo to expect fairly quickly.

Though maybe that should be its own post?

[Fellis]

I think every discussion of grind rewards has been in the direction of nerfing them, and not buffing them. Also the best way to increase build variety would be making sure each class has 2-3 viable build paths and then limiting CP further. I'm not exactly sure where the forum discussion is, but I think the B5 changes are removing about 20-30% of the CP awarded on a progressive scale (further badges reward less cp), and it will only be available at level 30. That actually sounds pretty good to me when you can currently have nutty things like a lich with every skill throwing out 21 damage touch attacks innately. It really needs to be toned down if anything.

Also, creating well designed mortal skills is no easy feat, because they are available to every class there can be a lot of unintended interactions. I feel that there is such a tiny space between a completely useless skill and a must have skill for the mortal tier in the typical build (for example how many are there currently?). I understand that what you have in your suggestion is just a draft, but it is kind of important for the suggestion. Some of your suggested skills are like the equivalent of 30 or 60 cp skills and it's just hard to say anything but NO NO NO as written.

The idea is not bad though, I just would rather the current classes we have get more well designed skills (especially t2) before we added in a bunch of t1 stuff. Also it's tough to think about the specifics of the numbers when we have a complete redesign happening in the next year. Might be something to come back to in 6 months.

I think a better way to approach the design would be that each badge unlocks a skill for a specific class, rather than dumping all the skills in mortal. That way you can more precisely design a skill to be interesting and flavorful, and a 500/1000 grind can be targeted by a player if the skill is something desirable. A 1k grind is pretty reasonable in 3-4 months so even new players wouldn't be left out of anything on their first character, and established characters might have a incentive to reset to try a new class with a new thing unlocked.

[Fellis]

Coming back to this, if the point of the suggestion is to make endgame grinding more appealing or more rewarding, maybe there just needs to be better endgame content. Having more interesting rewards for raiding/hunting or just things to do with a character at max level other than making stat numbers go up would be a better thing to think of. I dunno just feels like treating a symptom of another problem.

[Huojin]

I completely agree with Fellis in that frankly the game needs better endgame content. That would be the key problem to solve, and which I don't think (but please correct me if I'm wrong, I'll be delighted!) there's much movement on at the moment?

That being the case... I don't think it's a bad thing to say "well if we can't treat the root problem, maybe we can make the situation we've got at the moment suck less?".

If there's no prospect of badges being removed because, as Salmon says, it would "upset people that spent so much time ... grinding [them]", then in lieu of an actual solution to the problem, surely we can do something to make the endgame grind less of a boring waste of time?


Loosely related, I'm not sure reducing the grind CP on a progressive scale works as a solution either, because you've still got a need/motivation to do a grind, except now it's for increasingly marginal gains. If you had a situation where you needed maybe 2 full grinds (10+15 twice) to round out your desired build, but now it's going to take 2.5 or 3, I personally don't believe that's a desirable or fun game design choice. People are either gonna give up on it and... do what for the rest of the endgame? Or they're gonna sigh and grind on regardless (for another 3-4 months, to use Fellis' estimate) because what other choice do they have?


And as an aside, I agree with RinKou, love the concepts for innate weapon tweaks/additions, and with Fellis that a greater number of distinct and viable builds for each class would be a great thing to have. One thing I miss from Nexus War was that feeling (that I had at any rate) that you could more or less make most combat trees work with any given class. Just scrolling through Azure's "Tier 3 Combat Trees" guide on the wiki shows that each class clearly has either one or sometimes two favoured routes, and in practice in game there seems to be fairly minimal variety.

[SaltedSalmon]

[Kandarin]

This would be a ton of developer effort and would involve reworking some pretty basic things from the ground up, for a mechanic that's already so pervasive in terms of the experience of the endgame that we're planning on dialing it back.

I think that effort would be better spent on diversifying other endgame content.

[Lagn]

I think a "practice makes perfect" principle would make the most sense for badge rewards. In other words, bonuses that encourage the player to keep doing the thing grinded. For example, Doors Repaired increasing door repair by an extra 5 HP at the 500 tier and reducing repair costs to 1 AP at the 1000 tier. Rather than powerful endgame content, they should probably just be, well, bonuses, small ones that don't affect gameplay too heavily but have a meaningful impact on the action taken. There could still be a reason to get badges besides bragging rights, but they could be decoupled from CP grinding.

Some preliminary ideas-

Damage Dealt/Taken, Kills, Deaths, Angels/Demons Killed- standard CP reward. Messing with respawns, soak, HP, damage dealt, or kill rewards is more suited to actual skills than badge rewards.

New abilities/mechanics, though fun, would also change up gameplay too much.

[Kandarin]

We don't have plans to totally rework this in B5, and a lot of design is based on us not reworking this.