Changes Coming To PvP and Combat

Hi everyone!

I've been considering making a number of changes to PvP and combat that I'd like to share with you. The intention is to make combat more fun and fluid while also making a few balance changes.

Health and damage numbers will be scaled up. The intention is to allow players to deal a fraction of the damage they are able to now. Base health and damage will each be multiplied by 10. This change will replace Second Wind for health stats.

Body and Mind will be increased. To compensate for players needing to invest in both health stats to properly defend themselves, body and mind on enchantments will be doubled! Likewise, Strength and Intelligence will provide twice the amount of Body and Mind, respectively. This also means players will have twice the amount of health without any modifications to their stats. 

Penetration and Resistance will affect damage mitigation instead of evasion. These stats will no longer affect your chance to evade a spell, but will instead affect the damage you take from a spell on an equal scale. For example, a spell that previously hits for 1 could hit for 10, and resistance will lower that number for incoming hits while penetration will increase it for outgoing hits.

Critical Hit multiplier will be reduced from 200% to 150%. With spells being able to deal a fraction of their previous damage, critical hits can be adjusted to only dealing 1.5 of a hit instead of double. While this is a substantial nerf to dexterity builds, they have been dominating the game for a long time, and even with this change, they will continue to be the strongest offensive builds in the game.

Spells that spent a spell action will deal 50% more damage. Spells that require spell actions need to feel powerful and increasing their base damage to that of a critical hit of a normal action is how I hope to achieve it. These spells will also be able to land a critical hit, bringing their damage to 225%, more than any critical hit in the past.

Spells will be able to cause multiple effects on one hit. With a significant boost to penetration, a spell hit and a critical hit, in particular, may be able to deal double the normal damage, in which case its effect will apply twice. This will allow you to increase someone's size or breast size by two stages using a single spell action! This calculation will involve the respective health stat, meaning a larger health poll will protect you against spells effects of the type, while a smaller will leave you more vulnerable. For two new players, a spell with an effect will hit for 15% of a health poll, and the calculation will likely be to apply one stage for each 10% of a players health poll. For example, if you can reduce the power of a spell by more than 1/3 using resistance, you can make yourself immune to changes from non-critical hits, while an increase of more than 1/3 using penetration will cause a normal hit to cause twice the effects and a critical hit triple!

Overall, damage is expected to increase, while health polls will increase disproportionally, making the average duel longer while also increasing the ratio of landing hits and number of transformation effects. This will hopefully bring along a more patient playstyle that benefits both roleplay and strategy that will become more prominent with more meaningful combat interactions in the future.

I hope you like the prospects of these changes and I hope to have them out in the test server by the end of the week.

Cheers,

Tinon