Greetings Gambit Players
Hey everyone,
welcome to the third installment of Balancing Background Stories! This time we want to tell you about some more "strange" issues we have encountered and how we resolved them. This also turned into one of the mayor changes going on right now. With this post we want to outline for the first time how it will affect the Live Server once released.
"Where is that damage coming from?"
While changing Skills on the Void Mage and Corruptor, mainly "Spirit of Fire" and "Tempest", we noticed some really strange damage spikes.
Our first thought was that we overtuned the reworked skills and simply needed to reduce them again. Which didnt have much effect. So we tried reducing the overall Power of the two classes, maybe they were just broken right now. Nope. We still had some insane damage spikes. However, any skill not effected by "Spirit of Fire" or "Tempest" was now dead in the water, dealing barely any damage.
How could this be?
A few skills absolutely destroy anything they touch, while the rest doesnt even tickle monsters anymore. So we started digging.
And what we found was the most Rappelz thing ever...
Monster Defenses - A Rappelz Joke
Our test results regarding those strange damage spikes looked something like this:
71.830 -> 228.781 (damage correct)
x2
142.252 -> 453.800 (damage correct)
x2
284.662 -> 913.466 (damage correct)
x2
568.698 -> 18.394.728 (damage spike happened)
We increased the Base Patk/Matk Value (Character Screen) in steps of x2 and compared the outgoing damage. At one point the Damage jumps unexpected.
It took some more tests to find out that no change we made caused this to happen. Our buff to the skills simply revealed this issue. We noticed the same on every single skill once the damage got too high.
For some skills, this wasnt a direct issue. The Base Patk/Matk values needed to be increased so much, no Player would ever reach those numbers. But many many other skills reached the point early enough, not even needing any endgame gear.
We looked into the latest available Source Code (Epic 9.1) in the hope that not much was changed by Gala. With the calculations from that Source Code we indeed could pinpoint our current issue.
When the Game calculates attack damage, it compares the damage with the monsters defensive values. If that ratio is below 5%, the game defaults to taking 5% of that damage and deals this to the monster. This causes certain increases to Patk/Matk to be linear. Double your Patk/Matk and the damage dealt increases by the same factor.
The issue is for all cases where the ratio is over 5%. At that point the game not only takes the damage increase from increased stats but on top of that a whole new multiplier into consideration. This causes the damage to spike massively!
Several attempts were made to somehow circumvent the damage spike from happening. We found no direct fix without causing itself 10 new big bugs. While the solution looks simple, just increase the defenses of the monsters, this sadly doesnt work.
We outlined before the limitations of the 32-Bit System, resulting in a maximal possible HP of 2.14 billion for Monsters. In regard to PDef/MDef this number is even lower. With around 7-15 million PDef/MDef, the defense effect does not increase any further. Even giving monster 2.14 billion PDef/MDef is the same as 15 million. But even when this wouldnt be the case, giving monsters too many Defenses makes many Debuffs absolutely useless. As an example, Sky Monsters already have 5 million MDef on the Live Server.
And yes, there are cases of this damage spike on the Live Server right now.
The Fix - The long way home
We are not going to sugarcoat this. This issue did cost us months to get resolved.
After we exhausted all solutions, we were only left with one long and tedious way to prevent this damage spike from happening in the first place: Reducing all Numbers Serverwide.
By doing this we could once more work with max HP as an option to adjust monsters while also using defenses in a meaningful way.
In more detail, we are in the process of reducing the following values serverwide:
- All Monster HP
- Hit Skill Damage
- DoT Skill Damage
- Pet Skill Damage
- Indirect or Item related Damage Skills (Circus Earrings for example)
Please note, this is not a Nerf in Power
Once done all mentioned above numbers will be reduced by the same muliplicator! This is separated from any other balancing changes that are expected.
The effect is as if we removed a Zero on each number mentioned above.
Your own stats on gear and whats shown in the Character Screen are unchanged.
Monster PDef/MDef are not mentioned above, as we did something different there to further prevent other issues from occurring.
How will this feel while playing?
Our goal is that the feeling is unchanged. You still kill monsters as before. The changes that are noticeable should only be the actual balancing changes on skills. Which will be listed in detail with the patch notes accordingly.
There might be some slight variations here and there, but they should be minimal. In line with rappelz based, rounding errors minimal. Some Endgame Dungeons might be different, but only due to overhauled gameplay loops in that particular dungeon itself.
When is this finally done and the balancing released? Its been so fucking long.
Yes it absolutely has been. And we are really sorry for the insane delays we keep on having. We are working as fast as we can and how the game allows us to progress. Our ambitions also got the better of us and kept us from releasing anything in earlier stages. And now we dont want to release something that feels half-baked. We want to get it right.
In the meantime, we have some other new content in the pipeline.
There are newer Epics already released of Rappelz which we are looking into converting to Gambit appropriated versions. The new Dungeons are already on our Testserver for example. And a new PvP Feature paired with some PvP Balance tweaks which we can release separated from the global balancing.
If you have any questions or Feedback to anything related to the balancing, you can use these Discord Channels here:
Balancing FAQ/Open Channel
or
Feedback Forum Posts
Thanks for playing on Gambit!
Without our amazing community, we wouldnt be able to do any of this.
Your Gambit Team