The original reason behind cutting the amount that each level of balance/equilibrium gave was because flattening stats had the adverse effect of making each level above base far more important than it was originally. This was why aslaran, for a period of time, was considered one of the best races for warriors...excellent bonuses when strength meant very little to damage/wounds output. If balance bonuses are to once again mean more, consider also partially reversing the changes put in by stat flattening so that people are required to choose between single-hit burst output with a slower balance and faster balance but less burst potential. Otherwise we'd just end up revisiting old problems once again.

Just a question, was stuff for Tae'dae discussed?

Yeah.

They're/we're considering making weaknesses and resistances scale equally, and as such Tae'dae will need buffs to compensate. Especially since eq/bal bonus/penalty scaling may be looked at too. And random flavour skills.

It's more in depth but there's still a Tae'dae player or two out there.

Okay, so they'd lose more tankiness, and equilibrium and balance penalties will be worse again?

I think they nerfed resistances in the last revamp, and they're bringing up weaknesses to the same scale. So you'll take less magic damage, I guess. Your tankiness was already nerfed.

Eq and balance will be worse again. I can't remember the better suggestions on how to balance it all.

Oh. Great.

Resistances/weaknesses weren't changed last time, just eq balances, iirc.

MY TAKE ON SPEED MALUS/BONUS

To be honest, I think speed caps on skills is a better solution to changing balance/equi malus/bonuses as opposed to changing racial effects. The later is a sweeping change that affects too many things. Like say warrior swings. I think it's better to have a cap of say 2 seconds as opposed to slowing down all speed races so they never hit 2 seconds. This way Faelings will hit that cap with their speed bonus but they can adjust accordingly with weapon stats instead to accommodate in some other way.. You get rid of the overbearing affliction rate but at the same time you don't nerf Faeling overall. I just saw speed factors as not a problem in general save for certain skills. Then it isn't the speed that's the problem but the outlying speed effect on the specific skills.

I also think this should be both ways (ie for malus) A tae'dae warrior going at above 4 seconds for example just makes anything it dishes out ineffective no matter how you put it mainly because speed affects things like, possible reaction time, affliction rate, wounding rate, damage rate, enemy reaction time. Even if you increased their damage and wounding rate to accommodate, the fact that your swing is longer than most balances means that your enemy can react to you more effectively, in effect giving them a bigger chance to cut out your damage, affliction, wounding rate even further. One way to solve that is by adjusting damage and wounding rate to accommodate for reaction time as well which then makes the adjustment really huge possibly creating more outliers for one-shot moves which then screws over balance once more. Changing speed values overall on the other hand reduces uniqueness of such a race in a sense that its malus also makes up what it is. So instead, I think, it's better you put a malus cap on certain skills like warrior swings so that you address a problem of a malus being overbearing by reducing its effect on repeated actions but retain the effect on non-repeated actions.

Plus in my opinion, Furrikin with a 5% boost is like nothing at all for a lot of things that they use it with. When you're dealing with values like 2-4 seconds that's .1-.2 seconds. A bonus that is less than most people's latency is kind of funny.

So overall I think speed bonuses/maluses specifically weren't the problems but the affects they had on certain skills. The fix of placing caps is more work though as it involves addressing individual skills as opposed to a sweeping change but sweeping changes wrecks more things if currently there are more things going right than wrong. Also I think this would push speed bonuses/maluses to be more centered around vulnerability/resistance to tactics like balance locking and what not instead of centered around overall effectiveness of a race in a class.

MY TAKE ON DMP:

I don't think damage bonuses are also a problem per-say either, rather the formula of how they are calculated. I don't pretend to know the exact formula but I would guess that it's something like (base damage)*(bonus damage)*(resistance) + (targets health/(base damage*x))*(targets health) = total damage. Each factor also having a formula to calculate. Not an accurate formula but given something like that there are many ways to address resistance as too much or too little. One way is to fix the scaling partition of damage to a target's health so that squishier targets do not go *poof* vs high damage outputs. Another is addressing the way bonus damage base damage and resistance plays with each other. Another is how resistance itself is calculated. What I'm saying is that the formula can be tweaked to an extent where damage can adjust accordingly to avoid outlying effects.

Another way is to spread out damage sources. Destruction (i'm guessing) for example being fire and zap being lightning (considering a zap train) is a lot to handle for say an Merian. Is it the Merian resistance problem? I say it's more of the existence of these two skills that is the problem. Destruction being a high source damage makes it a problem for many fire malus race. Zap being accessible to many is basically giving groups a weapon against anything with lightning malus.

Maybe one creative way to address resistance is by changing how it works. Instead of DMP maybe you can make it a proc to a modifier of the damage output. The higher the level the higher the chance that a damage modifier will proc. That could open up more options for skill effects like say badluck could be made so that resistance procing is significantly lower or higher. (Not saying badluck should, just saying that it could be.)

ANNOUNCE NEWS #1667
Date: 11/11/2010 at 6:51
From: Sior the Anomaly
To : Everyone
Subj: Racial Change Testing

As astute forum-goers have heard, we are looking at tweaking races to
help overall game balance. The major changes will likely be related to
percent-per-level for each level of equilibrium, balance, resistance,
and vulnerability.

You're welcome to playtest these changes and make suggestions based on
what you find on the test server, located at 96.241.145.114 port 2000.

Please make comments on
http://forums.lusternia.com/index.php?showtopic=19551. Please keep the
new level amounts in mind when making suggestions for races.

Thanks!

Penned by My hand on the 2nd of Dioni, in the year 281 CE.

hup hup