September 29, 2016

Post Server Rewrite Class Changes

Pisces and Arklen Talk About the Luck Enhancement

Greetings! With the server rewrite we have an amazing opportunity to look at how stats impact combat and fine tune them to create a healthier class system in game. 

As we've found over the years, Luck (and the Lucky enhancement) has been the go to stat for a majority of classes, even ones that we didn't plan for! Luck is so incredibly well rounded that we needed to reevaluate and modify its impact on combat. We've completely removed the Lucky enhancement and have plans to replace it with a more defensive oriented enhancement in the weeks to come. 

We have introduced two new defensive effects: Parry and Resist. They are a lot like dodge, except they only reduce a percentage of damage taken. Parry will reduce physical damage and Resist will reduce magical damage. Currently, just about all monsters do Physical damage but with the rewrite, we will more easily be able to add unique combat to monsters and will be adjusting certain monsters so that they do magical damage.

Strength and Intellect are still your main damage stats except now they also improve defenses.

Strength will increase the amount you Parry and Intellect will increase the amount you Resist.

Dexterity and Wisdom are also more well rounded now.  Dexterity will increase your chance to Parry and Wisdom will increase your change to Resist.  

Endurance now decreases all incoming damage alongside the health increase.  

Luck will continue to increase your hit, dodge and crit chance but not by quite as much.

Despite this nerf, we will be slowly buffing classes where Luck should be the main stat (Cardclasher, Evolved Leprechaun etc.).

Classes that are not melee oriented will not benefit form Strength and Dexterity and classes that are not spell oriented will not benefit from Intellect and Wisdom.

You can experience what I'm talking about on any of the PTR testing servers RIGHT NOW! Go do that, then report back and let me know what you think!

These changes are all very tentative and are just to give you a brief idea for what is planned for the future. We are already making changes to what is above so keep your eyes peeled for a more detailed update in the days/weeks to come.

Arklen is AQWorlds animator/programmer/class designer/many with many hats. He's been working with Yorumi and the Class balance team for many months now, and coded many of the 2015 releases. He's the head of the AdventureQuest Worlds Class Design group and loves getting your feedback. Tell him what you think about these changes and all things class-related here! 

Pisces is one of our long-time team members - from class design to many, MANY other ideas to help improve AQWorlds for you, the Fish is one of the less-visible but super-important members of the team! He ALSO loves getting your feedback on classes, and you can tell HIM your thoughts here!

Server Rewrite Status

You guys were CRAZY helpful in the big final testing push a few weekends ago.... SO much that you found a bug we thought was fixed... wasn't completely fixed. The CPU usage problem (which is what HAD been causing the test servers to crash) was back once many of you tested again.

Yorumi spent the last 2 weeks working on that issue, and believes he's isolated it. Housing was disabled on the testing servers and, since he did that, they have not crashed... which leads him to believe housing is the cause of the problem.

If you have time, please help him out and pile onto the testing servers as much and as often as you can while you check out what I mean about the enhancement changes. If the servers STILL haven't crashed by Monday, then we'll assume that "housing causes the CPU issue to be confirmed."