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Reddit Dev Posts

Wyatt Cheng made a few posts about two interesting subjects on Reddit. The first is about the context of the recent Iron Skin Thorns damage change. The second is on Set dungeons, their design and problems.

John Yang also tweeted that the Arachyr set and Firebat are getting buffs. Read them below.

Originally Posted by Blizzard

Iron Skin Change

Iron skin from 100 to 300% thorns. Compensate for hack fix?

No. This is not the reason for the change. This is one of the limitations of datamined information - the picture is always incomplete.

The power level of Iron Skin is supposed to be roughly the same for Invoker Crusaders as before, but we changed the way it stacks with the Invoker's 2-pc bonus. Previously the 100% from Iron Skin would double the bonus granted by your 2-pc Invokers as well. The new 300% is additive with the 2-pc Invokers rather than multiplicative.

 

As an aside, before diving into the reason I'll just acknowledge that it's never great when similar looking items have different stacking mechanics - it is confusing and non-intuitive. I don't like it. So this current solution is not my favorite one, but it gets the job done which is why we went forward with it.

 

Previously a high attack speed Crusader could get 2-pc Invoker's up to about 6+ stacks (300% Thorns Bonus), whereas a low attack speed Crusader could get maybe 3-5 stacks (150-250% Thorns Bonus). When the bonus was multiplicative, this meant that 2-pc was going to 600%, and low attack speed was going to 300%-500%.

 

With the change to being additive with the 2-pc bonus, the high AS with Iron Skin is still about 600%. Maybe it's slightly worse when you are at 7+ stacks (we're okay with that, there's always room to tune more during PTR). More importantly though, the low attack speed case is still getting 300% additive to sit at 450%-550%

 

To be clear, high attack speed should still be the way to go, but at least this gives a little bit less dependence.

 

Most importantly though, this change allows the skill to be far more effective when combined with the Novald Steed Charge set. You can activate iron skin and then jump on your horse to get a full 300% right away. This helps you get those first few kills in to get your steed charge duration rolling. So the real root of this change is trying to maintain (non-bugged) top-end Invoker's about where it is while buffing Norvald's Favor setups.

But that is only an encounter with one target. While facing big packs most of the 2P stacks are generated by blocking, so the change to being additive with 2P is weakening our AoE. Also in your math you dont consider the base 100% of thorns you already have. So before the change 4 stacks + iron skin meant thorns x 3 (+200%) x 2 (iron skin) = 600% thorns, which is also the value with the new iron skin: 100%thorns + 200%bthorns + 300% thorns = 600% thorns.
Maybe it's slightly worse when you are at 7+ stacks
So if you are at more than 4 stacks, this is already a loss.
Edit: With your examples it was 800%+ for the 6+ stack one and between 500% and 700% for the low speed one. You already forgot to include the base 100% in the math about LoN nerf (800% to 400% nerf is 4.2935215923 GR levels and not 4.41).
TL:DR Iron Skin change is a nerf if youre at more than 4 stacks x

Hey great points!

For the most part some stacks come from AOE, but a lot of the stacks come from your attacks. You're right about there being the base 100% as well - so the math in my explanation is off.

Either way, the numbers are subject to change anyways - this is why we have PTR. So at the end of the day it doesn't really matter if this was a nerf or not, what matters is how strong Invokers ends up at the end of the day. (Reddit)

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On Set Dungeons

I really do not think set dungeons should punish you for having too much damage or survivability
I'm working on the firebirds one right now. Too much damage to get 45 enemies burning at once and too much survivability to die and proc meteor. Both of these are quests in the dungeon.
It feels more like I'm fighting the game than fighting the monsters or trying to play well.

We totally agree but we don't have a lot of awesome solutions at this time.

I know that's not a very satisfying answer, but it's the truth. We have had the same feedback come up internally. We looked at scaling the dungeon based on gear but that ran into other problems too (such as min/maxing the types of gear that you wore to "fool" the autoscaler, which given the variety of legendary items in the game, the auto-scaler was very, very easy to fool).

During development we were juggling lots of conflicting design challenges and we found that in order to make Set Dungeons work as a feature at all we had to pick one of the following:

1. not making the dungeons require much execution on the part of the player

2. making the set dungeons more gear dependent to succeed

3. implement auto-scaling and accept that there will be some weird gearing strategies that you could use to overcome the logic of the auto-scaler because auto-scaling 24 dungeons given the depth of our legendary pool and the rate at which power scales is pretty much impossible.

4. Only design dungeon objectives that would never degrade when you overgeared them.

5. Have some dungeons that were actually harder with good gear that you'd have to deliberate gear down for.

We opted for a mix of all, but mostly #4 and #5. We want the Set Dungeons to be accessible to a wide audience, but we don't want them to be trivialized by gear. We do #4 quite often, but every so often we had a quest objective that was particularly flavorful for the set and we opted to accept #5 as a consequence. The Firebirds dungeon is an example of this.

No I can understand that it's difficult. I was thinking about it myself and all my solutions ended up just being really boring. Things like "hit/kill X units with X ability".
Maybe it would be good to keep the gear-down type objectives to one per dungeon, or at least either survivability or damage related rather than both. It's just kind of a pain to deliberately tone down damage and survivability at the same time. If it were one or the other I could maybe switch from an offensive gear setup (ex. focus/restraint) to defensive (ex. unity). Same with passives and some skills.
For example in the firebirds dungeon you could keep the kill units with death-meteor, which would incentivize players to go more glass cannon because they need to have enough damage to get kills with the ability and little enough toughness for it to proc.
Thanks for the reply!

Firebirds requiring you to gear down in 2 different ways is a good point. We'll have to revisit the objectives we had explored. It's just tough when the set is about Burning Things and using the resurrection meteor as a slightly-gimmicky mechanic seemed too cool to pass up given you don't really get to use the meteor that way anywhere else in the game - so no promises. :( (Reddit)

How about rather than scaling the dungeon, scale the gear, would that be possible?
Temporarily adjust the values of the characters gear and from there you could possibly tune the dungeons easier and make them more accessible because no matter how good geared you are, you will still have the same baseline gear as others doing the dungeon.

Scaling the gear is pretty much similar issues to scaling the dungeon - unless we also disable all the legendary effects on all of you gear - which we considered. I should have listed that as Option #6: Turn off all legendary properties on all gear you're wearing. But we tossed that one out - deciding that it was important that you were able to use the supporting legendary items you had chosen for yourself.

Why not make set dungeons be like separate instances? You meet the requirement for the set dungeon, and youre like sent in some kind of ancient flashback where youre playing a prebuilt character that is the same for everyone for a given set? But have the cube legs still be useable for some customizability.

Yes, this would have been a valid way to go as well and was actually prototyped in this exact way for a long time. There were multiple problems. One was the character not feeling like your character felt weird. A second was that there are some sets with multiple different ways for it to be configured and you might be quite successful with a set but not be familiar with the loadout the game picked for you. A third reason is that many of the sets don't feel like "the set" to people without specific other legendaries. Like Lut Socks with the Might of the Earth set. But we don't want to include these supporting legendaries in the pre-made set in case somebody hasn't acquired them yet for real, or they've just never heard of the combo. Believe it or not, lots of people play without looking at guides on the internet and we try to avoid spoiling potential item combos so that people can experience the excitement of discovering those combos themselves - it's a great feeling as a player to figure out a combo without having read about it on the Internet first (it's one of the reasons I suspect many people like figuring stuff out on PTR).

Again I want to reiterate I think your proposed solution is a good one, it has pros, and it has cons. If we had gone that way it would have allowed us to make the set objectives more interesting and tuned to the razors edge. It was a tough decision. (Reddit)

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Firebat and Arachyr Buffs

Hi any chance of getting increased Firebat dmg on the new Firebat staff to boost the build a bit and let the staff be viable.

Arachyr and Firebat build is getting buffs. (Twitter)

Updated Wings Video

Mads Lund made a new updatew Wings video, with all wings from the game's files equipped on a character on the game's main screen. Watch it below.