No you're right, I was mistaken. Bark Armor is UPed with its current mana cost value. But see, my point is that has nothing to do with the change, but just a simple mana cost mistake. In my build its 20 mana up front cost, putting it at 75 mana total at lvl 3, which is about where it should be for an ability that improves both your hero and units quite a lot (whereas holy shield for ex only buffs other units). Druid is unique in that he is a cross between offensively buffing himself and his units. But yes, as I said its total mana cost is way too high right now... highest in the game in fact. Not intentional. As for heightened senses yes, its 67 total mana at max level. Right on par for its value, which is basically 17s of not only practical invulnerability, but also essentially a HUGE damage buff. I said many duration abilities were the same, not less (or, if I said less, I didn't mean to). Abilities like Heightened Senses and (yes, its true) Bark Armor were OPed. Their mana cost is now more in line with their affect on the battlefield (or, will be in the case of bark armor).
These guys are not on the look out for more iap's. I restarted my game progress bc I want a game that is balanced when I play it so I waited for the update. While creating a new game, I got my already purchased diamonds back so that is very generous. All they want to do is give the best experience to their players and well done to them
I think that where our mutual misunderstanding lies is that I am not comparing attack speed directly to crit. I am comparing daggers to other weapons, specifically the original discussion of dual wielding daggers vs the scythes you previously mentioned (because of their innate high crit values). I think what you are missing is that daggers roll between 10 and 30% crit as well as very high attack speed. I use my toon as an example because I have 20% crit and 2.33x the attacks compared to a Scythe. So, for example: Dual Daggers with 20% crit and 20% attack speed will yield 7 hits per cycle. Factoring all other base damage as 'DMG' you would have: DMG x 1.2 x 7 = Dmg x 8.4 A Scythe with 50% crit and base attack speed would yield 3 hits per cycle. That would give you DMG x 1.5 x 3 = DMG x 4.5 Now, if you add an Armor piece with 20 damage (or a rune) it will be 2.33x more effective dual wielding vs. 2h. Now, compared to say 2h swords/axes daggers are still have a faster base attack speed without either types having additional attack speed modifiers. Further more, For Elves, higher attacks per second capitalize on the high amount of fixed damage value procs or other mechanics that cause instant death and the lack of percentile modifiers, for Elves daggers are more effective with their given mechanics. For Dwarves, they have weapon mechanics specific to axes and hammers. Also, they have a talent that 50% of the time their attacks don't use ANY stamina as well as Iron Strength that removes the double 2h weapon penalty. As for Elves and Staves, the Druid tree has a T1 talent Staff Prowess that gives +10 Staff DMG and the T4 ability Elemental Power that gives random elemental effects when attacking and Humans have a T4 ability called Lightning Block. Also, for staves you have 2 different types: Melee (Physical) and Magic (Shoots Magic Bolts). One of the nifty things that a lot of people haven't figured out yet is that the Melee staff's Heave Attack does a very large 360* AoE and costs MANA for the heavy attach instead of STAMINA... If you havn't tried a Melee staff build yet as an Elf or Human, I highly recommend it... Its a lot of fun
I'm quoting this because force of habit, but I noticed that the Elf's Sniper skill in his Ranger tree doesn't affect Crossbows, only Show/Longbows, and Magic Bows. Is this intentional, or is this a bug in the skill code?
If you raise the mana or shorten the duration of a skill, then you should not stop mana regeneration too. By stopping the mana regeneration in itself, it is already a nerf for most active skills. Here we are taking about double nerfs and as far as I can remember, most useful skills were nerfed to some extent. In this case Bark Armour went from OP to almost useless. If I am sensible, I would think twice before using Bark Armour now. After using this, I would have little mana left for most of my other active skills and there are a lot of things happening all over in a battle versus protecting a group of my units. Under H&C1 whereby skills are based on timer, I am not prevented from using other skills just because I use a certain skill. In this upgrade, I have only a limited pool of mana to begin with, many of the mana gaining skills are nerfed. useful active skills have mana cost raised, effect reduced/duration shortened and prevent mana regeneration. This is worse than H&C1 skill system.
Just going to stop you right there. It's 1 attacks vs 1.17 attacks (assuming you have 17% aspd increase? Not sure where your 2.33x value comes from.). If you're dual wielding 2 daggers, then you need to compare to 2 scythes. Lvl 99 elves have minimal problem sustaining 2 15-20 sta weapons. Trust me, I've done the math. It's not even close until you factor in rending blow and stuff. I will admit rending blow is GREAT. 500 HP includes the majority of monsters. EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't expect raw DPS to be close anyway. It's a 20 stamina weapon vs a 0 stamina weapon. I'm already admitting there's a niche there. EDIT2: And damage channel. That's also better on the 8 dmg 40 aspd daggers. EDIT3: To address the rest of your points: elves benefit the most out of all the classes with higher crit. However, he also benefits a lot from higher attack speed. The main reason is the sheer number of % based procs (stun, warlock bolt, rending blow). Dwarfs also have three, but elfs are much more useful. % based damage additions make no difference in the math. Lacking them is neither justification for asp, nor is it justification for crit. Dwarves actually have more stamina issues. Dual wielding 20 sta even with flurry is tough to maintain. He's much more comfortable in the 10-15 STA range. I'm thinking about going back to double swords or something more manageable, despite once again scythes being best on paper. 20 STA per weapon was impossible to sustain in wave 32. Humans actually have the best time with dual wielding due to faster regen, but they make the least use out of it. Stamina regen is the most important aspect to wielding high STA weapons. Staves get bonuses, but not enough to offset the innate crapitude of their stats. You're better off using soemthing else.
Same here, still getting sync errors. Overall, I think the game is going the right way with this patch. With time, we'll see what remains overpowered and what needs a tweak. For instance, I'm still able to destroy castle walls straight with my Berserker (regular hits). Also, we do need a Leaderboard reset
"Most" skills are now ineffective? We buffed more skills than we nerfed. Yes, many T1 and T2 abilities are less effective, won't deny that - and in those instances it ends up being relatively minor, believe it or not, and often it even ends up being better in certain scenarios (ie the flat damage buffs). Please list the now ineffective skills now, that weren't before, if you don't mind. I'm always willing to listen and tweak, but I've also been developing games long enough to know that I can't go changing values half a day after a major balance update hits. Re: "most of the skills that are 30s or over are not pointless" - 50 mana pre update = 20 mana 30s duration post update... its pretty much exactly the same. As I explained in an earlier post, the new system is better in many scenarios. My ultimate goal is to make a balanced game, so if you find stuff that seems UPed, post it - it doesn't help if you barely play and then don't post anything specific. I wouldn't be on this forum typing stuff up for hours to explain my rationales if it didn't matter to me. Re: weapons, can you name any other weapon that isn't better since the update? Looks like I did nerf Rifles, in particular - they had too much damage with their innate AP I believe was my rationale. We played quite a few multiplayer games without error, so to the best of our knowledge sync errors were fixed. They are admittedly ridiculously hard to find, so we did add some additional logging information that gets sent to us when a sync error occurs - hopefully any remaining should be easier to track down now. Btw connection timed out has nothing to do with our game code.
HMMMM...Ok, you are saying that on your build bark armor cost 20 mana up front and 55 over time. I don't see how you are only spending 20 up front when it see it cost 40. Am I missing something? 40 up front at 55s duration is 95...right? If you think 75 mana cost is "way too high" then imagine a 95 mana cost. Back to Heightened Senses, didn't you mention a lower up front cost? But it was bumped from 40 to 50 and then no regnen and the skill length was cut nearly in half. So what we are looking at is cost of 67 for nearly half as much result. When you factor in the time decrease, that comes out to like 120 mana for something we were once paying 40 for. I agree that it should be nerfed...just not THAT much. If you don't want to enable mana regen, then one idea is to make it cost 35 up front. That way the total cost is 52 and with the time shortage it is somewhere around 98 mana for the same amount of time using Heightened senses before it was nerfed. Another way of looking at it is that previously Heightened senses cost 40 mana for 30 seconds equaling 1.33 mana per second. Currently it cost 3.94. I'm advocating that we decrease that a little bit to somewhere around 3 per second. 35 up front cost plus 17 second duration is 52 mana at 3.05 per second. Even Bark Armor isn't as expensive as that. 95 mana for 55 seconds is 1.72 per second.
Not sure if you know this, but wielding a 2 handed weapon in one hand yields a 25% slower attack speed, which exacerbates the difference in attack speeds even more.
My build as in: development build, meaning, in the next update Bark Armor will cost 20 up front at 55s duration = 75 total mana. This is the amount of mana the ability is worth, imo. I was saying in the live build (what you're playing), 95 mana is way too much. 75 is just right. Its just a shame updates take so long, as little things like this I would love to tweak and get out in a day. As for Heightened Senses, I'm just looking at it like this: 67 mana is well worth 17s of near invulnerability + a huge damage buff (not directly, but you know what I mean - you deal 85% more attacks in that span = a TON of extra damage).... that's what you're getting with this skill. But again, I'm willing to tweak... my point is this knee jerk reaction over the new mana system is complete baseless, as its the total mana cost that matters the most - which can be tweaked. Again, letting me know about individual issues with abilities is something that I can work with (like you're doing ).
Stopping the mana regeneration for active skills is a nerf in itself. Then you raised the mana cost and shortened the duration/reduce the effect of the more useful skills which was another nerf in itself. In addition, you also nerfed most mana gaining skills. All these nerfs added together and you think that it is just a simple balancing and heros are better off? Most heros only start with about 100 mana in a battle to begin with. After the upgrade, my level 70 knight (using legendary 2 H Sword) and 70 Engineer (using legendary Rifle) dmg dropped by half or more immediately. I didn't have the time to check what are the reasons or the sources of the dmg reduction but this is the net effect nonetheless. After spending countless hours building up my heros and then suddenly all the skills were altered drastically (all the individual nerfs adding up). This is not just a simple balancing. So now I have to re-spec, start over again to build new characters, and then next month you decide to drastically re-balance the game again? This upgrade, unfortunately, is anything but a simple re-balancing.
Single or dual Scythes doesn't change anything because they have the same swing timers but the same base damage values. However, Scythes are 2h weapons and now only do 35% damage when dual wielding and the stats are averaged, not added. All you have to do is dual wield daggers and do 2 or 3 combo cycles, then switch to single/dual scythes and do the same. It is very obvious when you do this back to back how drastic a difference in swing time. Also note that if you go back several pages the developers have already confirmed this as well as quoting me... However, I will admit that there is some lost potential from running 0 Stamina cost daggers, as this uses part of the item budget to reduce it to this level. For example (Items I have): Dagger - 8 dmg, 30% crit, 4 stam, 12% IAS Dagger 2 - 8dmg, 10% crit, 0 stam, 28% IAS Dual Wield Average - 8 dmg, 20% crit, 2 stam, 20% IAS (increased attack speed) So, in the event that I get a duplicate of either I can further compound either increased crit % or ias% yielding more crits or more procs. The fact that DMG values are much closer to 90-100 without modifiers an increase of 10% crit vs 8% IAS would yield marginal increase in over all effective damage from crit as Warlock's Blast Procs at 25% already and hits for 50 DMG non crit under 2 targets. However, when you exceed 2 mobs, proc damage through IAS% scales incredibly high. At 2 mobs the 2 stats are approximately equal, but when you go up to 4 or 6 mobs (quite common in rushes) IAS% has 200-300% greater impact vs crit. Plus, with the ability to simply 1 shot most mobs through Rending Blow greatly decreases the effectiveness of crit because a 1shot is a 1shot, be it from a crit or Rending...
Lets just be honest with ourselves... There were a LOT of things that needed to be nerfed... Knights casting Sword Strike could easily hit for over 2k DMG and it only costs 20 Mana... Berserkers easily topped 3k DMG with regular attacks... It needed to be scaled back... Plus the game is BRAND NEW! Devs were bound to code in broken skills in a fresh game. They implemented an adjustment. Just like they can implement further adjustments. So don't go all 'Chicken Little' on them... Present your issue in a mature fashion and propose possible solutions. To do otherwise is simply whining...
Personally, I find the adjustments to be in all the right places. A DPS-specced Knight and Berzerker both had too many multiplicative bonuses. Now that they're more in the additive than multiplicative side of things, they're much more tightened up and better to play against/with.
Yes, if you are referring to high level or players with good items, like yourself. A new player cannot do the kind of dmg you are talking about. Yes, I am whining too. Because after spending countless hours and expecting a balancing, suddenly the dynamic of the hero and skills changed drastically. I play this game as a form of recreation. I can accept balancing and reasonable adjustment. But am I supposed to re-start and re-spec my heros everytime the developer decided they wish to drastically nerf some skills? Not all the nerf are over the top in this upgrade. Personally I think the nerf on Heightened Sense is still within the reasonable boundaries. But most of the longer lasting active skills have become ineffective now that there is no mana regen and mana gaining skills are nerfed too. Or at least admit it. We are talking about double or triple nerfs for mana dependent skill sets. In this current form I would rather the active skills be on timer like H&C1.
Stopping mana regen isn't necessarily a nerf, as I mentioned before. A 60 mana ability before is the same as 30 mana + 30s duration. So no, its a change, not a nerf. Only heightened senses had its mana increased and its duration nerfed, so thats 1 ability... which needed it. Overall, "the more useful skills" aka the OPed skills did get a nerf overall, yes. 2 mana gaining skills got a nerf, yes. Mana Channel for Mage (everyone knows that was OPed), and for GrandMaster. Still evaluating grand masters Mana Channel to see if it needs tweaking. So... 3 abilities getting nerfed is "most abilities"? I honestly don't mean to insult, but I wonder if you even played with the new update, or if you just read what people said, looked at some of the new stats, and then rolled back to the previous update? Also lol if you think I think: "All these nerfs added together and you think that it is just a simple balancing and heros are better off"; no, I think it makes the game better and more fun once you sit back and play the game - 100s of hours of playtesting is what makes me think that, not a bunch of haphazard number changes for the heck of it and hoping for the best. And yes, your damage got nerfed, but so did everyone elses that had the absolute upper echelon damage values - hence the "better balance". Also, 2 handed swords in one hand were OPed before. It was dumb that a 2 handed sword in one hand was better than a one handed sword in one hand. So yes, that got nerfed. The other thing is, while some of those are nerfs for you, they're buffs for others. The great part about this new balance is you don't have to go pure, max damage to be the best off anymore. Before, it was just all about stacking damage. I know that can be cool to see a huge damage number, but it blows for balance, and it makes it that much harder to make new content down the road and to balance multiplayer.
Not that it matters I love this game. I loved it in theory. I loved it when it was announced. I loved it when no one was talking about it in the forum. I loved it when a screenshot was released. I loved the beta. I loved it being released. I loved it broken. I love it now. Huzzah, Heroes & Castles II, Huzzah. Id consider myself a devout player but also pretty surface level. I put a couple hours maybe a day in. Have been since beta. I'll never get obsessed with the stats like this. I just don't have time for that. I'm hoping, overall. That the changes make this a better game especially for new players who will flood in with the free version soon enough... That will mean more players online, more hopefully revenue for the bros and more content.. that's all I'm hoping for.
Despite our whining, we are not ungrateful for the effort you are all putting in to this and for listening to our input and replying. We mentally recognize and appreciate the many improvements to the game even if we are not discussing it in this forum. The "knee-jerk" reaction is based on radical changes and varying opinions of value. Even in your perspective I'm sure you can recognize some changes were quite significant (in the case of time duration skills now costing 2x-3x more than they used to) which is quite a blow to deliver all at once...and I hope you can understand why we are not jumping for joy over it. I suppose the issue in the forums here is that we, the players, and you, the designer, both recognized that skilled needed to be nerfed, we just differ as to the degree. Conversely any new player downloading the game right now might not share our grief over the new changes having not experienced the old version. Anyways, thanks for hearing us out. EDIT: You mentioned total mana cost is what matters most. Just wanted to point out that Heightened Senses used to cost 1.33 mana per second of the ability. Now it cost 3.94 mana per second. So total mana cost has significantly increased, hence our whining...lol. But I agree that it is a very valuable skill. Maybe even valuable enough to keep spending 3.94 mana per second on it, though I'd be happy to see it slightly lowered to around to 3 or 3.3 mana per second so we can spare some mana on other lesser valued abilities too. Or maybe leave it as it is and give mana channel a bit of a boost like a 21% chance for 15 mana. Anyways thanks for the update and for the time.
You know, even if you made damage nonexistent, I'd still find it fun to get in there and just slice at things. Why? IT'S JUST BLOODY DAMN FUN. Personlly, though, I kinda wish all these people would get off your ass and realize that they can easily find ways around this. Sure, my 35 Knight lost like 20 damage, but do I care? Absolutely not, because, well, face it, needed balance is needed balance. Plus, really, DPS-specced Knights and Berzerkers were pretty brainless to play, and even then with my Knight I forced him with no armor because I wanted a challenge. I find it no fun to get Juggernaut going and then spam SS forever and ever. Well... I still have Mana Marker so I can still get force regen off... But you get what I mean.
