Greetings Adventurers of Telon, In this Developer roundtable discussion, the topics today are Ferocity and Defiance. These two new mechanics, being introduced in Cave of Wonders, will help you gain a sense of progression and achievement while allowing everyone a chance to work their way through Cave of Wonders (and future raid content) at their own pace in their own challenging manner. Ferocity is an NPC stat that makes NPCs more difficult. Each NPC in Cave of Wonder’s will have a Ferocity rating ranging from about 20 to 150. Every point of Ferocity on an NPC will weaken adventurers, causing a 1% reduction in the damage done, damage mitigated, effectiveness of taunts, block, dodge, parry, evasion, and healing done. Defiance is a player stat that resists the effects of an NPC’s ferocity. This stat can only come from items, and will be obtainable from gear in Cave of Wonders. For each point of Defiance a player has, it will remove one point of the effects of Ferocity to that player until all of the reductions of power from Ferocity have been removed. However, having a Defiance greater than Ferocity will grant no extra benefits to a character. Players will obtain Defiance through Defiance Augments on each piece of gear ranging from 3 points at the weakest and 5 points at the most, letting adventurers gain a total of 100 Defiance if equipped entirely in Cave of Wonder’s gear with all of the best Defiance Augments. Due to the nature of Defiance and Ferocity, many players will end up playing mix and match between Cave of Wonders gear and their old gear in order to maximize their individual character’s potential. We hope to see many players come up with very creative mix and match solutions to get every last bit of power from their characters. In addition to creating this new path of progression, we will also be using Ferocity and Defiance to breath new life into old raid content. This will create a simple way to take an old mostly unused raid and convert it to a Defiance raid, dropping new items that will help with future progression. This will allow adventurers a chance to revisit some of their old favorite Vanguard raids in a new and exciting way. We will also be exploring the ability to create a difficulty slider, using Ferocity and Defiance or similar mechanics that will allow players to choose how difficult they want their encounter to be and give them appropriate rewards for the increased challenge. We hope to roll out the difficulty slider with Mentor Stones in order to grant capped level players a fun, challenging, and rewarding experience in exploring all of the wonderful dungeons that populate Telon. We will soon be ready to move to Test Server and we will need players of all skill levels to come and check out the Cave of Wonders for balance testing to see how Defiance and Ferocity feels. We hope to have the first iteration of Cave of Wonders soon.
okay, I re-read the post and apparently am math challenged. An NPC can have up to 150 points. "For each point of Defiance a player has, it will remove one point of the effects of Ferocity to that player until all of the reductions of power from Ferocity have been removed. " But a player can only achieve 100 points with all the best gear/augs. just call me confused at this point. I cant even begin to comprehend the slider mechanism at this point.
This direction is for someone else. Not me. I hope those who brave it have fun. I want new content instead of being doomed to repeat the past with a difficulty slider. Wigin, I hope your concept works out for you. I'm subbed for a year on my main, but I can't possibly fathom how this will be for me. I wanted to move forward.
Could we maybe fix those encounters that are broken before putting the sliders on them to make them more difficult? So the theory is that breathing new life into 6-year old content is going to make things more fun? Is this how your development team plans on introducing the means to obtain Core and Enrichment augments? JFC ...
Are you basically just blending "hit/focus/toughness" from RIFT into 1 stat, called defiance, which will only come from CoW augments, which will only fit in CoW gear? It still looks like the gear your posted on the other thread will still be pretty crummy when it's all augmented. I was personally hoping defiance was going to be some 'stat multiplier' augment, or 'cap breaker' augment. Will high end raiders need alternative gear sets ? One for for CoW, and one for every other raid in VG? That's what might happen when extra defiance means nothing.
Crummy, but you will have to have it to max defiance. Even versus old content it sounds like. So it's goodness is based on its necessity, not on any other stat values.
Well, the thing with Rift is when you started raid dungeons, you had to sacrifice stats for the 'hit/focus/toughness' to do those bosses, but if you killed them, they dropped items with BETTER ratings than your old gear AND they had the hit/focus you needed. So when you were 'done' with the raid dungeon, you had plenty of the new stat, AND walked away doing 10-20% more damage than you used to. I'm not seeing that I'll be 10-20% better off with the examples of itemization posted on the other thread. Seeing some jaw dropping, drool worthy gear with better stats/ratings then what I got, AND defiance stat, might make me change my mind.
My guess is that it will be underwhelming. All we have to go off of is one screenshot of an underwhelming BP that doesn't even show the possible augs you could stack in it. We have no way of knowing, unless he flat out links the db. Which he isn't going to do because we will immediately freak out and tell him how it sucks.
I just see a new system prone to lots of issues with little resource to fix it. I still don't see why you can't level to 100% of 55 and make it ding over to 60. Use the current system keep the caps in place, change the buff system so it stacks better and design new level 65 mobs that require strategy to beat them.
Yeah I need more help in reading comprehension apparently ... Why is healing effected? And is Defiance vs. Ferocity then calculated based on your offensive target? And riddle me this ... so if it's based on an offensive target what's going to stop someone from summoning a fish, perma mezzing it and having your healers target the fish and their defensive targets to get 100% of their heal bonuses and not worry about the AEs hitting them with Ferocity? I mean wouldn't it be easier to have a disciple plowing a fish for innerlight procs at 100% hit rate than to have them target a level 60 raid boss when they have 0 Defiance and the mob's Ferocity is at 150? So then you're really only concerned about your tank's ability to mitigate and dps'ers ability to damage. Or will Ferocity be a raid-wide or area-wide application? Is the 1% reduction on the aggregate damage pool or only on the base effects before the scaling modifiers are added like bard song, etc.? Apologies for the dumb question initially about what it effects.
I'll be honest, this really sounds like a headache. It might be great for min/maxers, but some of us just want straightforward upgrades. I don't want to keep my old gear in my bags and have to figure out which matches up with what for what fight. I appreciate what you're trying to do here, but I think this forcing a lot of complexity on us, when what we're looking for is a bit simpler. We want new and interesting fights and content. We don't want to grind out old content. We've already grinded that old content, we're tired of it. What most of us really want is a good ol' APW-like dungeon crawl - not APW the regrind. We want interesting strategies. If we wanted 'old content to be harder' we would take off all our of gear and run through APW. That's not what we want to do.
I think what he wants to do is have the CoW bosses all have a Karax-like AOE stat reducer, which you can mitigate with Defiance.
Wigin. Do this for us please. Make new fresh content for us to sink our teeth into. But don't make it like anything we have done already. Also, don't make it different. We don't want to have to get new gear and keep up with that. That's just a headache. We need mobs with strategy. But don't use a new game mechanic on the mobs or we will just assume that this is the only strategy needed to beat it. Just be inventive here. What we need is something to hold our interest that isn't going to be too much of a grind. Something that's new but feels old. Something fresh but familiar. Can you just put us in charge of design. I think we know a little more about how these things work than you do. Mmmmkay.
