January 06, 2025

Class and Combat Dev Blog #4

Year-In-Review 2024

Wow, it's been a while since the last one! 2024 was an interesting year for development on classes, combat, gameplay, and balancing. Now that we're in 2025, it's time to share some of our thoughts with you, and hear what you all think!

For our Dev Blog #4, I’d like to update you all on what the Class Team has done this year, how it has gone, and what we'd like to do going forward. Let’s talk about them!

Class Reworks and Rebalancing

In the last few years, we’ve taken a much more proactive approach to rebalancing, reworking, and polishing existing classes. These class updates have ranged from small numbers changes  to full out reworks. These have all been done with the goal of making the classes feel best for when you can obtain them, and to give players a good progression path through the game, from start to end.

There were different periods throughout 2023 and 2024 where we dedicated time towards this, and here is a list of the classes that have been significantly buffed or reworked, in chronological order:

• DarkBlood StormKing
• Dwakel Warlord
• Arachnomancer
• Chaos Avenger
• Rustbucket (for one day)
• Evolved Pumpkin Lord
• Psionic MindBreaker
• Soul Cleaver
• Blood Ancient
• Blood Titan
• Empyrean/Eternal Chronomancer
• Interstellar/Infinity Knight
• Great Thief
• Warrior
• Healer
• Mage
• Rogue
• Dragonslayer
• Dragonslayer General
• NOT A MOD
• Enforcer
• Chunin
• Legion Paladin
• Darkside
• Ninja
• BeastMaster
• Master of Moglins
• Pirate
• Sentinel
• Vindicator of They/The Collector
• Dragon Knight
• Frost SpiritReaver
• Frostval Barbarian

For more information on each class tweak, why we did it, and what it did for the class, have a look down our Twitter Feed, or through the past year’s Design Notes. 

The previous updates have added to news DN posts, and can be difficult to find retrospectively. In the future, we will be consolidating our updates to this Design Notes post, so keep the page handy!

Quest and Events

Last January, during the Nulgath Birthday event, we reworked the introduction to Nulgath's Tercessuinotlim zone linking it to the Citadel storyline, making the map more straightforward for players entering the zone for the first time, and finally /joinable after all these years. Essence of Nulgath and Totem of Nulgath also received a few new ways to be acquired. You can read more about these updates here. As usual, our quest reworks and rebalances are focused on making existing grinds smoother, more fun, and less tedious while respecting the achievements of those who have already done them.

In March, during the Dage the Evil Birthday event, we increased the stack limit of Legion Tokens and replaced Dage's Legion Soul Collector quests with a new set of daily quests that involved defeating tough bosses for a large amount of Legion Tokens and Soul Sand in some cases. We also released the Hollowborn Lich King set endgame farm. You can read more about these updates here.

Forge Enhancements

Last January, we released a brand new weapon enhancement called Ravenous, which increases your class' damage the lower your target's HP is. In March, we released an update to some  existing Forge enhancements, including Smite, Praxis, Dauntless, Absolution, Avarice, and Hearty. We also made some of the existing enhancements a bit easier to obtain. The goal of Forge enhancements are to add more depth and fun to the game, while increasing the variety of classes seen in the endgame.

You can read more about the enhancement changes on the March 1st balance update here.

Challenge Bosses

Last year’s tougher boss fights focused more on Challenge Bosses that up to 7 players can participate in, which range in difficulty and generally offer rewards with some type of damage boost on them. Some of these bosses included Devastator Deimos, Firebird Anqa, Astral Empyrean, and Azalith Morningstar (and a shoutout to Mechabinky & Raxborg 2.0, which was released near the end of 2023!).

Part of the reason we shifted towards Challenge Bosses was that we saw an increased demand for bosses that more players could participate in at once, as Insignia bosses only allow for up to 4 players to participate at a time. However, some of you have said that rounding up 7 players can be difficult to do at times, so that poses the question: Would you like to see "easier", non Insignia challenge bosses that have lower room limits? If so, let us know!

Additionally, we’ve slowed down significantly on new Insignia Bosses for several reasons. Firstly, the project has achieved its original goal, which was to offer players with less time to play but were still willing to put in effort, a way to keep up with hardcore farmers, giving them another way to obtain endgame rewards.

Secondly, we’ve practically run out of unique boost gear to give to Insignia Bosses as rewards! We don’t want you all to feel like your time fighting these bosses is worth less. Additionally, a host of daily and weekly bosses are already available now, and adding more might spread players thinly throughout them.

To combat both of these, we’d like to look into adding a few updates to improve the existing bossing experience and to keep progressing players populating few but more important bosses, instead of adding in too many new bosses. With that being said however, we don't have any plans to stop creating either type of boss.

Zone Rebalancing

The latter half of the year was heavily focused on rebalancing the 13 Lord of Chaos zones, starting from the Prologue, all the way to Mount Doomskull, with a few stops to Doomwood and Etherstorm with the goal of improving the pacing of the early game and making the overall experience better. The amount XP that story quests give were drastically increased to make leveling faster. We also increased the amount of Class Points obtained at lower class ranks so that players would unlock all of their skills much faster. Many zones with factions also had their reputation rewards significantly increased so that new adventurers can access the faction classes much easier, and have a wider arrange of classes to choose from. Monsters in each zone were also rebalanced to be appropriately strong for the level that a player is expected to be around when they first arrive, and bosses were changed to be a lot easier to solo. In the future, we'd like to look at rebalancing post 13 Lord of Chaos story areas as well, such as Throne of Darkness and the Queen of Monsters saga, but those are unlikely to happen for a while.

New Classes

In May, we released the brand new Arcana Invoker class! A versatile endgame class that excelled in farming, and utilized the power of all 22 Arcana. This class was quite overdue as the Darkon saga had concluded a couple of years back, but there was such a big demand for a Darkon class, that we couldn't say no! You can read more about the class here.

In August, we released our first Scaled Class, Sovereign of Storms! Scaled Classes are an improved version of an existing class with the intent of performing much better than their base version. A late game scaled version of DarkBlood StormKing class that plays about the same, but is much more powerful. After releasing Sovereign of Storms, the common feedback we got was that many of you seemed to like the idea of scaling up earlier game classes, but in the case of Sovereign of Storms, some of you expected the class to be a lot more powerful, and that players who are able to defeat Queen Iona would already be strong enough to the point where Sovereign of Storms wouldn't be all that beneficial to them. In the future, we'd like to re-evaluate how Sovereign of Storms is obtained so that players who obtain it make more use out of it, and we also want to continue scaling up more classes. What Scaled Class would you like to see next? You can read more about Sovereign of Storms and Scaled classes here.

In October, we released the Martial Artist class! A late game class with a focus on dodging. In the pursuit of being innovative, Martial Artist was intended to be a complex class that revolved around numerous stance changes and manual Auto Attacks, but based on your feedback, we made some very extensive changes shortly after its initial release. We're continuing to keep an eye on Martial Artist and will determine if it requires any more changes in the future. You can read more about the class here.

In December, we released Phantom Chronomancer, the 2025 calendar class. This class utilized magical damage and the power of death to create a powerful group DPS class with an added effect of being able to debuff resistance stats quite significantly, while also being able to trade off some of its damage output for an increased Dodge rate. You can read more about the class here.

We’ve started doing fewer new classes each year, as our existing 130+ unique classes already provide much gameplay variety. Instead, we’ve been focusing more heavily on polishing and reworking existing classes, to make the game a better experience for existing, new, and returning players. Many class reworks are extensive enough to feel like new classes and add new life to parts of the game, and we encourage you all to try them out.

Into the Future

It's been a big year for classes and zone revamps, but we've got a lot more in store and we'd like to share with you all some of what we have planned for classes, quests, and rebalancing. 

Endgame Farms: Many of you have expressed frustration regarding the amount and length of late and endgame farms that were released this year. Going forward, we'd like to cut back on farming times, whether this is through shorter farms in general, or daily quests (while still allowing those who want to farm as much as they want to continue doing so), or other methods.

However, this might have to come with adjustments to certain existing farms in the game as we want to preserve progression. 

New Bosses and Insignias: As mentioned above, we've slowed down with new Insignia Bosses. We'd still like to release them, but only when we feel like there's an appropriate cause to.

Additionally, we’ll continue to do World Bosses this year. We know many of you felt like the drop frequency of items during the last event was too low, so we plan to boost these significantly for the next World Boss that comes along. Additionally, some of you expressed dissatisfaction with having to use consumables to counter World Bosses attacks. This mechanic is present to provide some interactivity against the bosses, while also preventing AFKing, but we may opt for zone attacks for future bosses instead, as they have recently become a bit easier for us to implement.

We'd also like to keep doing live events. If time permits, we’d like to increase the frequency of these so that they’re held at least a few times each year.

Classes:

Lots has been learned and your feedback has been read. While many of you have had positive things to say about certain class content released last year, some of you took to expressing your concerns with the direction that classes are going in. Going forward, the plan is to dial back on the more "ambitious" class designs, and to continue creating classes that are intuitive and feel good to play. Our goal is never to release something that we think will be negatively received so if we disappoint, we're just as unhappy as you. With that in mind, we know you're looking forward to upcoming class content, so we'd like to give you a bit of a preview as to what's in store. 

MORE Class Updates: 

As expected, we’ll be continuing to rebalance classes in 2025. As we get close to the end of the list of non-rare classes to update, we’ll also focus more on Heromart classes, starting with CardClasher and PaladinSlayer.
As zone rebalancing has concluded (bar any unforeseen circumstances) for the 13 Lords of Chaos saga, we'd like to take a look at the classes obtained throughout that storyline, and make changes to any that we think are in need of an update. Please note that most of these classes are intended for early game use, so any changes made would be focused around that.

There are also some classes that we'd like to integrate better into the main story path, such as Oracle and Blood Sorceress.

We still want to continue with class reworks as well, with the next one up being Berserker. As the original "low health equals more damage" class, we'd like to give it an update that gives its low HP playstyle justice, especially since other classes that have been introduced throughout the years have had similar functionality.

Alongside existing class updates, we still want to release new classes every now and again. We know a lot of you want to see Hollowborn and Good faction themed endgame classes, so we'd like to focus on those for our next new class releases.

Of course, there might be a new Scaled Class in store as well. What class would you like to see scaled up for late game?

Additionally, we plan to release the HeroPoint variant of Phantom Chronomancer some time in the summer, giving people a chance to purchase the merchandise variant first.
And more… but you'll have to wait and see!

Consumables: In October, we released an update to consumables that allows them to stay equipped upon changing classes. We'd like to do more with consumable features in the future and better integrate them into the early game, such as keeping them equipped between logins, but there are still a few bugs to track down, mainly the one that causes potions to sometimes freeze and not do anything when used. This bug in particular has proven difficult to reproduce, so if you have any information on how to replicate it, please send a ticket to https://bugs.artix.com/ 

Forge Enhancements: We plan to continue gradual development of new enhancements, aiming to add them when we find it appropriate to. We'll also continue to keep an eye on existing enhancements and determine if any are in need of an update. Ravenous is one such enhancement as it effectively replaces Valiance, another endgame enhancement, while its Execute effect also causes certain classes to perform exceedingly well. Our intention is not for an endgame enhancement to be a replacement for another, so we're looking into potential changes for Ravenous to better differentiate it from Valiance and to regulate the increased damage it provides on monsters with missing health, without compromising its identity and performance boost on most classes.

So.... what did you think of this dev blog post?

 Tell us on Twitter at @AqwClass and @Alina_AE, or join the official Artix Games Discord Server to share your feedback with us directly, and discuss it with other players! 
~ Immortal Joe