Post by Lorenor on Jan 4, 2016 8:22:45 GMT -8
1. Introduction
2. Skill Rework
3. Rogue
4. Alchemy and Poison
5. Beastmaster
6. Playing with Fire
...
Rogue Update
The first "class" I want to focus on is the rogue. Rogues are specialised in short encounters and surprise attacks, picking of the enemies one by one and escaping into the fog of war again.
Currently, the best and almost only way to deal high burst damage is to go for a high-willpower mage build. But assassin and thief sound much more like dexterity-based builds to me, so I´d like to introduce Critical Strikes.
Critical Strike
Conditions to critically strike
Now of course I know that there is the unwritten rule in the KT design that forbids RNG (Random Number Generator) abilities in combat. The last RNG element was the 40% chance for an explosion on the fishsticker, and it got changed in patch 1.33. That means that instead of the usual "Increases your chance to critically strike by X%", we need a less random condition to apply critical damage.
So, to critically strike an enemy, you have to attack him while beeing undetected. Ways to do that are:
- Shadow Cloak
- Highground
- Powder Flask (coming later in this post)
- Other sources for invisibility (Striped Lurker)
Critical Strike damage is reduced by the highest critical strike damage the target received in the last 5 seconds. This might sound unnecessary complicated, but it avoids that the whole team goes for assassin builds and just oneshots everything.
Damage Calculation
The damage of critical strikes is based on dexterity and the missing health of your target.
Since most of the formula is based on BONUS dexterity, so all the dexterity you have without the base value of 18, I gave this value [dexterity - 18] a new name: Focus
It´s just like Spellpower and Willpower, but with Dexterity.
Critical Damage = (Base Damage + Focus) * (1 + 2%*Focus*[Target´s percentual missing health])
Since this formula probably doesn´t tell you very much about the actual values, I made a few examples. The values for Strength and Dexterity are for level 10 Kobolds.
1. No DEX/STR build:
Example: Elder Wand, Bear Shaman´s Shroud, Murloc Skull
No mining
Dexterity: 28
Attack damage: 30
Shadow Cloak magic damage: 95
--> Critical damage to full health - almost no health target: 10 - 18
2. Normal warrior build:
Berserker´s Battle Axe, Heavy Iron Breastplate, Vicious Javelin
20 mining
Dexterity: 36
Attack damage: 52
Shadow Cloak magic damage: 59
--> Critical damage to full health - almost no health target: 18 - 43
3. Full dexterity ranged build:
Craven´s Fish Sticker, Outlandish Heartpiercer, Master Ranger´s Maille (with 2 wolves)
20 mining
Dexterity: 53
Attack damage: 52
Shadow Cloak magic damage: 59
--> Critical damage to full health - almost no health target: 35 - 96
4. Full dexterity melee build:
Vicious Armblade, Outlandish Heartpiercer, Master Ranger´s Maille (with 2 wolves)
20 mining
Dexterity: 53
Attack damage: 64
Shadow Cloak magic damage: 59
--> Critical damage to full health - almost no health target: 35 - 104
First, please keep in mind that the second crit value is almost impossible to reach, because it requires the target to have basically 0 health. The highest realistic critical damage is probably around 80.
Also, I know that this change is a buff to dexterity, so to balance it at least slightly I would remove the faster stamina regeneration from dexterity (I bet most of you didn´t even know about that) and put it on STR instead which so far has only one effect, increaseing attack damage.
WIL, INT and END also get some minor buffs, but they have their own posts.
Change to Shadow Cloak
Critical Strikes would obviously buff Shadow Cloak, so to compensate for that, the base damage should be reduced by 20, therefore the spellpower scaling reverted to 3. All in all, the damage for mages should stay the same (they get ~10-20 damage from critical strikes and 10 more because of the better spellpower scaling), but dexterity builds deal a lot more damage against weakened targets with shadow cloak now.
The second change is that Shadow cloak is no longer a toggle spell. It costs 70 mana and cloaks you for 8 seconds. That´s still enough to escape from a sticky situation, but it also gives people without cloak a chance to catch up.
A last change should be that people using shadow cloak can see other people using it. Otherwise you could always just cloak as soon as your enemy cloaks, so your cloak will last just a little while longer than his which means his cloak would be completely wasted while you could still attack after his cloak expires.
New equipment
To fully implement these new rogue elements, there should be some gear specialised on critical strikes:
Thorn of the Pilferer
Slot: Main hand
Crafting: Smithy (10 ART), 1 Shadow Stone, 1 Leather, 1 Antlers; *can only be crafted at night*
STATS: 7 DEX, 5 INT
Passive: Critical strikes on an enemy will steal one random item (excludes spellbooks) from his inventory, as long as you have free inventory space, and also ignore 50% of all armor and magic resistance.
Passive: Every strike on an enemy will steal 10% of his current gold and deal the same amount as damage (max 5 gold and damage). Strikes from behind steal double the amount.
The main purpose of this weapon is harassment. It doesn't deal much damage in terms of health, but therefore in terms of economy. As enemy, you'll always think twice before running into a fight.
Skirmisher's Harness
Slot: Armor
Crafting: Smithy (10 ART), 1 Bear Pelt, 2 Iron, 2 leather
STATS: 5 STR, 4 DEX; 2 ARMOR
Passive: If you get hit by a spell, your next attack within 5 seconds will critically strike.
Passive: Gain 1 STR for each 10% of your missing health down to 30%. If your health falls below 30%, you gain 25% movement and attack speed for 3 seconds, which is refreshed by 1 second each time you attack.
This armor benefits risky fights and thus is the opposite of the iron studded vest and the heavy iron breastplate. Perfect in combination with the new Twin Thowing Axes.
Faithful Whirlwind (boomerang)
Slot: Main hand
Crafting: Working bench (15 ART), Boneshard Blade (coming in Beastmaster post), 2 Lumber, 1 Shadow Stone
STATS: 9 DEX, 4 STR; 4 range
Passive: This weapon doesn´t have a projectile, it IS the projectile (just like boomerangs happen to be). Because of that, it has a different attack mechanic: It flies to the target, hits it and then returns to you. You can´t attack again until the Whirlwind returns to you, so the attack speed is based on the distance to your target. Instead of directly increasing the attack speed, DEX (and other attack speed modifiers) increase the flying speed of the Whirlwind by the same amount.
Everything in the path of the Whirlwind will get hit, even if it´s not your primary target.
If the Whirlwind flies 3 units without hitting something, it will start to glow, which means it will not return directly after hitting the main target but instead fly 1.5 units further and then return. This makes it possible that the primary target get´s hit twice.
Passive: If an enemy get´s hit twice during one attack, the second hit will critically strike.
Passive: If you are in melee range to your enemy, the Whirlwind counts as melee weapon and grants 15% attack speed.
This weapon is very micro intensive. With the right positioning, you can not only attack your main target (twice), but also all enemies between you and your target. At the same time, the enemy has the possibility to dodge the Whirlwind (unless you are the main target, and even then you can avoid the second hit).
Changed Equipment
Already existing weapons and armor can also be reworked to fit to the new crit mechanics:
Outlandish Heartpiercer
Crafting: 1 Boneshard Blade (again, coming in the Beastmaster Post), 1 Frost bear fang, 2 Iron ore
New Passive: If the target is in melee range, your attacks always count as melee attacks, but don´t apply a ranged weapon´s effect anymore (faster attack speed in exchange for the effect).
Changed passive: Instead of stunning after shadow cloak, it´s now critical strikes that stun/slow (to give more synergy with other items). A target stunned by the Heartpiercer is immune to stuns from it for 5 seconds (to avoid perma stuns).
Since the heartpiercer allows you to always attack with melee attacks, you have the choice to go for the ranged 0.95 second stun or try to get in melee range for the 1.5 second stun.
Liquidator Spellblade
Crafting: 1 Pilferer's Thorn, 1 Shadow Stone, 1 Radiant Gem, 1 Synergized Nightwisp
Edit: Changed passive: After using a spell, your next auto attack within 5 seconds will become ranged and teleports you to the target (5 range, affected by all changes to range, for example +1 range from Huntsman Jacket), ignoring all armor and magic resistance.
Changed passive: Killing an enemy kobold resets all your spell cooldowns and restores 25% of your missing mana.
Currently, the spellblade misses it`s actual purpose as an assassin weapon, imo. The teleport is too hard to use properly in a fight, usually you just teleport into the enemy lines when the fight begins, wich definitely isn`t what you want as an assassin. With this change you can control the blink much better, allowing you to only go in when you see a vulnerable target and then use the reset of the blink after you kill your target to get out of the fight instantly.
New Item
Powder Flask (throwing potion)
Edit: Creation: Requires 5 cooking, 1 shadow stone and 1 Spicy Herb
Comes in stacks of 3.
Creates a cloud of smoke in the target area, blinding all enemies (effect from Viper cloud from SC2 combined with dark orb effect) that walk through it and slowing them by 25%. The cloud lasts for 6 seconds.
2. Skill Rework
3. Rogue
4. Alchemy and Poison
5. Beastmaster
6. Playing with Fire
...
Rogue Update
The first "class" I want to focus on is the rogue. Rogues are specialised in short encounters and surprise attacks, picking of the enemies one by one and escaping into the fog of war again.
Currently, the best and almost only way to deal high burst damage is to go for a high-willpower mage build. But assassin and thief sound much more like dexterity-based builds to me, so I´d like to introduce Critical Strikes.
Critical Strike
Conditions to critically strike
Now of course I know that there is the unwritten rule in the KT design that forbids RNG (Random Number Generator) abilities in combat. The last RNG element was the 40% chance for an explosion on the fishsticker, and it got changed in patch 1.33. That means that instead of the usual "Increases your chance to critically strike by X%", we need a less random condition to apply critical damage.
So, to critically strike an enemy, you have to attack him while beeing undetected. Ways to do that are:
- Shadow Cloak
- Highground
- Powder Flask (coming later in this post)
- Other sources for invisibility (Striped Lurker)
Critical Strike damage is reduced by the highest critical strike damage the target received in the last 5 seconds. This might sound unnecessary complicated, but it avoids that the whole team goes for assassin builds and just oneshots everything.
Damage Calculation
The damage of critical strikes is based on dexterity and the missing health of your target.
Since most of the formula is based on BONUS dexterity, so all the dexterity you have without the base value of 18, I gave this value [dexterity - 18] a new name: Focus
It´s just like Spellpower and Willpower, but with Dexterity.
Critical Damage = (Base Damage + Focus) * (1 + 2%*Focus*[Target´s percentual missing health])
Since this formula probably doesn´t tell you very much about the actual values, I made a few examples. The values for Strength and Dexterity are for level 10 Kobolds.
1. No DEX/STR build:
Example: Elder Wand, Bear Shaman´s Shroud, Murloc Skull
No mining
Dexterity: 28
Attack damage: 30
Shadow Cloak magic damage: 95
--> Critical damage to full health - almost no health target: 10 - 18
2. Normal warrior build:
Berserker´s Battle Axe, Heavy Iron Breastplate, Vicious Javelin
20 mining
Dexterity: 36
Attack damage: 52
Shadow Cloak magic damage: 59
--> Critical damage to full health - almost no health target: 18 - 43
3. Full dexterity ranged build:
Craven´s Fish Sticker, Outlandish Heartpiercer, Master Ranger´s Maille (with 2 wolves)
20 mining
Dexterity: 53
Attack damage: 52
Shadow Cloak magic damage: 59
--> Critical damage to full health - almost no health target: 35 - 96
4. Full dexterity melee build:
Vicious Armblade, Outlandish Heartpiercer, Master Ranger´s Maille (with 2 wolves)
20 mining
Dexterity: 53
Attack damage: 64
Shadow Cloak magic damage: 59
--> Critical damage to full health - almost no health target: 35 - 104
First, please keep in mind that the second crit value is almost impossible to reach, because it requires the target to have basically 0 health. The highest realistic critical damage is probably around 80.
Also, I know that this change is a buff to dexterity, so to balance it at least slightly I would remove the faster stamina regeneration from dexterity (I bet most of you didn´t even know about that) and put it on STR instead which so far has only one effect, increaseing attack damage.
WIL, INT and END also get some minor buffs, but they have their own posts.
Change to Shadow Cloak
Critical Strikes would obviously buff Shadow Cloak, so to compensate for that, the base damage should be reduced by 20, therefore the spellpower scaling reverted to 3. All in all, the damage for mages should stay the same (they get ~10-20 damage from critical strikes and 10 more because of the better spellpower scaling), but dexterity builds deal a lot more damage against weakened targets with shadow cloak now.
The second change is that Shadow cloak is no longer a toggle spell. It costs 70 mana and cloaks you for 8 seconds. That´s still enough to escape from a sticky situation, but it also gives people without cloak a chance to catch up.
A last change should be that people using shadow cloak can see other people using it. Otherwise you could always just cloak as soon as your enemy cloaks, so your cloak will last just a little while longer than his which means his cloak would be completely wasted while you could still attack after his cloak expires.
New equipment
To fully implement these new rogue elements, there should be some gear specialised on critical strikes:
Thorn of the Pilferer
Slot: Main hand
Crafting: Smithy (10 ART), 1 Shadow Stone, 1 Leather, 1 Antlers; *can only be crafted at night*
STATS: 7 DEX, 5 INT
Passive: Critical strikes on an enemy will steal one random item (excludes spellbooks) from his inventory, as long as you have free inventory space, and also ignore 50% of all armor and magic resistance.
Passive: Every strike on an enemy will steal 10% of his current gold and deal the same amount as damage (max 5 gold and damage). Strikes from behind steal double the amount.
The main purpose of this weapon is harassment. It doesn't deal much damage in terms of health, but therefore in terms of economy. As enemy, you'll always think twice before running into a fight.
Skirmisher's Harness
Slot: Armor
Crafting: Smithy (10 ART), 1 Bear Pelt, 2 Iron, 2 leather
STATS: 5 STR, 4 DEX; 2 ARMOR
Passive: If you get hit by a spell, your next attack within 5 seconds will critically strike.
Passive: Gain 1 STR for each 10% of your missing health down to 30%. If your health falls below 30%, you gain 25% movement and attack speed for 3 seconds, which is refreshed by 1 second each time you attack.
This armor benefits risky fights and thus is the opposite of the iron studded vest and the heavy iron breastplate. Perfect in combination with the new Twin Thowing Axes.
Faithful Whirlwind (boomerang)
Slot: Main hand
Crafting: Working bench (15 ART), Boneshard Blade (coming in Beastmaster post), 2 Lumber, 1 Shadow Stone
STATS: 9 DEX, 4 STR; 4 range
Passive: This weapon doesn´t have a projectile, it IS the projectile (just like boomerangs happen to be). Because of that, it has a different attack mechanic: It flies to the target, hits it and then returns to you. You can´t attack again until the Whirlwind returns to you, so the attack speed is based on the distance to your target. Instead of directly increasing the attack speed, DEX (and other attack speed modifiers) increase the flying speed of the Whirlwind by the same amount.
Everything in the path of the Whirlwind will get hit, even if it´s not your primary target.
If the Whirlwind flies 3 units without hitting something, it will start to glow, which means it will not return directly after hitting the main target but instead fly 1.5 units further and then return. This makes it possible that the primary target get´s hit twice.
Passive: If an enemy get´s hit twice during one attack, the second hit will critically strike.
Passive: If you are in melee range to your enemy, the Whirlwind counts as melee weapon and grants 15% attack speed.
This weapon is very micro intensive. With the right positioning, you can not only attack your main target (twice), but also all enemies between you and your target. At the same time, the enemy has the possibility to dodge the Whirlwind (unless you are the main target, and even then you can avoid the second hit).
Changed Equipment
Already existing weapons and armor can also be reworked to fit to the new crit mechanics:
Outlandish Heartpiercer
Crafting: 1 Boneshard Blade (again, coming in the Beastmaster Post), 1 Frost bear fang, 2 Iron ore
New Passive: If the target is in melee range, your attacks always count as melee attacks, but don´t apply a ranged weapon´s effect anymore (faster attack speed in exchange for the effect).
Changed passive: Instead of stunning after shadow cloak, it´s now critical strikes that stun/slow (to give more synergy with other items). A target stunned by the Heartpiercer is immune to stuns from it for 5 seconds (to avoid perma stuns).
Since the heartpiercer allows you to always attack with melee attacks, you have the choice to go for the ranged 0.95 second stun or try to get in melee range for the 1.5 second stun.
Liquidator Spellblade
Crafting: 1 Pilferer's Thorn, 1 Shadow Stone, 1 Radiant Gem, 1 Synergized Nightwisp
Edit: Changed passive: After using a spell, your next auto attack within 5 seconds will become ranged and teleports you to the target (5 range, affected by all changes to range, for example +1 range from Huntsman Jacket), ignoring all armor and magic resistance.
Changed passive: Killing an enemy kobold resets all your spell cooldowns and restores 25% of your missing mana.
Currently, the spellblade misses it`s actual purpose as an assassin weapon, imo. The teleport is too hard to use properly in a fight, usually you just teleport into the enemy lines when the fight begins, wich definitely isn`t what you want as an assassin. With this change you can control the blink much better, allowing you to only go in when you see a vulnerable target and then use the reset of the blink after you kill your target to get out of the fight instantly.
New Item
Powder Flask (throwing potion)
Edit: Creation: Requires 5 cooking, 1 shadow stone and 1 Spicy Herb
Comes in stacks of 3.
Creates a cloud of smoke in the target area, blinding all enemies (effect from Viper cloud from SC2 combined with dark orb effect) that walk through it and slowing them by 25%. The cloud lasts for 6 seconds.