Spiegazione dei cambiamenti alle combo sul server test

First of all, thank you for all your feedback on these changes. We appreciate all the effort you all put into testing and providing feedback.

Next, let me give a bit of the reasoning behind the previous changes as the changes in this post were made because of them.

Whiffing Penalty:

This penalty to your combo finisher damage for ‘hitting air’ on the sequence steps was introduced due to the fact that a lot of damage was back-loaded into the combo finisher. This allowed the ‘pre-loading’ of combos, then rushing in to try to hit with the finisher and deal massive damage. The opposing player could be caught unaware by this and, for some classes, this damage was enough to kill them outright. Thus, the Whiffing Penalty came about.

However, we did not want to penalize the players who miss one attack in a sequence due to lag or any other uncontrollable factors. Therefore, we lowered the scaling of the whiffing penalty from 15%, 30%, 45% to 5%, 20%, 45% per missed attack.

This type of linear progression, however, could scale out of hand in the case of a 5-step combo and cause less damage to be dealt than just regular swings. This led us to the next step, Combo Step Reduction.

Combo Step Reduction:

While the Whiffing Penalty led our thoughts to this course of action, it was not the only factor in having us introduce the Combo Step Reduction.

Burst Damage:

Having longer sequences led to more damage being applied to the combo finisher. This creates high burst damage potential and the potential for ‘one-shots.’ This reason ties in with the Whiffing Penalty. Having shorter combo sequences allows us to spread the same DPS over a longer period of time, essentially.

Reasons to Use Combos:

We had received feedback and found from our own playing that the only reason we used a particular combo was either that there was a feat that made the combo incredibly more powerful than it should be, or it was just the next combo that was not on cooldown.

Due to the 5-step combo sequence on all combos at level 80, executing a debuff combo for the sake of debuffing felt like too much work for too little gain. Allowing debuffs to be applied more quickly, and while your main damage combo was on cooldown, made combat feel smoother.

Along these lines we felt it was necessary to reduce the damage of debuffing and crowd control combos. The benefit of these combos should come from the effects they provide, not the damage they deal. We will be looking at the power of these debuffs in the future to ensure they are worthwhile. The next reason for the change was because of Sluggish Combat.

Sluggish Combat:

With the exception of a few combos, level 80 combo sequences were 5 steps long, including the starter. This caused the average combo finisher lead-up time to be around 5-6 seconds. After spending that time to ‘load up’ the combo, there was a possibility of no damage being dealt either though evades, blocks, parries, latency issues, or other reasons beyond the player’s control. Adding the finisher animation to this (which for some classes is very long) leads to around 8-9 seconds of lost time for some classes.

After testing out these changes, we found with the increased combo speed, the cooldown on the faster combos needed to be reduced. Certain classes could get into a situation where there was no damage dealing combo available due to the cooldowns being set up based on the old execution lengths. This led us to bring the cooldowns on these fast combos down to four seconds.

Feat Rebalancing:

Due to all the changes listed above, many feats had to be rebalanced. This also gave us the opportunity to rework a few feats and change many feats which were giving bonuses that were higher than intended.

Healing Debuffs:

With all these reductions to combo damage, healing became more powerful. In order to counteract this, we wanted to give out the ability to reduce the incoming healing a player receives. We have begun by giving this ability out to the fire-wielding classes. As we monitor the power of heals in PvP, we will adjust the values of the healing debuffs and the number of classes who can use them. Our goal is to come to a balanced solution to the power of heals in PvP so neither healers or the people trying to fight them feel too weak.


This post is a bit long winded, but hopefully, it will give you all some better insight into our reasoning and intent with these changes.