Post:Test Instance: Evasion (and misc) Part 2 - 7/1/2009 - 4:08:51

Test Instance: Evasion (and misc) Part 2 · on 7/1/2009 4:08:51 AM	168
Heyo! Time for a few details on the evasion updates from yesterday now that we've had some unbiased testing going on. Some of this may rehash what I have said in the original post or in follow up posts, but I want to keep everyone as up to date as possible. IMPORTANT: All that follows applies to the test instance only. (1) A fairly major bug in how stat bonuses are calculated in combat has been fixed. Currently this fix only applies to evasion in Test, but will eventually be passed through all combat. To make a long story short, stats under ~35 or so were penalizing combat skills, not bonusing them. Since this was true across -most- (but not all) of combat, the impact was fortunately not as bad as it could have been, but it did cause a lot of problems for new players with low stats, since it essentially insured they stayed at or near 0 ranks until they gained enough skill to offset the penalties. (2) Evasion was previously penalized independently by three separate factors -- nerve damage, poor balance, and status state (ie stunned, immobilized, web, etc). It still considers all three, but only the -worst- of the three penalties will apply, instead of all three. (3) Shields no longer hinder evasion. (4) The minimum hindrance for armor has been altered from a guild-based format to a skillset-based format. Armor primaries can reduce hindrances farther than armor secondaries, who can reduce it further than armor tertiaries. No, I am not going to post numbers at this time, so don't ask. I will say that most players will stay the same or see reduced hindrance. Rangers will see a very small increase in the min hindrance for bone armor, and warrior mages will see a very small increase in the minimum hindrance on plate armors. Shield hindrance, although no longer applied to evasion, still exists and has gone down to some degree for everyone. (5) It is no longer possible to just train armor to a certain rank and have permanent minimum hindrance. In order to keep hindrance minimized, you will need to keep training armor skills. If they fall too far behind your evasion skill, the evasion hindrance will start creeping up again. I want to emphasize that you do NOT have to keep your armor skill and evasion perfectly in line with each other to minimize hindrance. On top of some built-in padding, there is also the simple fact that nobody can ever reach 0 hindrance. You need only reach the point where you hit minimum, not the point where you hit 0. (6) The range of the random number generator for combat has been drastically reduced. The range is still fairly broad, but not nearly as extreme as before. (7) Positional modifiers (prone, sitting, etc) have been temporarily turned off. They may return, but if so, they will most likely fall in with the worst-of-three group (and make it "worst of four"). The reason these have been grouped and moved to a worst-case scenario is because many of them can overlap. For example, being stunned or prone caps your balance. This means that if you are either stunned or prone, you also get a massive balance penalty to evasion as well...by default. Being prone also caps balance, so penalizing for both being prone and being unbalanced is essentially a double hit. One problem with defenses in general and evasion in particular is that they have traditionally been very heavily penalized by a multitude of different penalties, and we are trying to get this under a bit more control so that we can scale offense versus defense better. - GM Dartenian
This message was originally posted in Combat - Weapons and Armor (11) \ Game Master and Official Announcements, by DR-DARTENIAN on the play.net forums.