NEStalgia Skill Tree Details Extravaganza – Part 2

Having covered all of the essential information about skill trees in Part 1, today I’m going to expound on some of the details and previously unannounced features coming in v1.52. Again, if you have any additional questions then please feel free to ask them in the comments section. Today’s Q&A:

Will the new spell animations be included in v1.52?

Yes. The current flashing boxes that represent different attacks and abilities in battle are getting replaced in this update with full blown animations and additional sound effects. Just writing about this change doesn’t do it justice, so I posted a short video on NEStalgia’s Facebook page and Twitter feed a couple days ago to demonstrate some of these new effects in action:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrnQknyyJyI&w=420&h=312]

What changes are coming to Soldiers and Merchants?

I had planned to answer this question here, but I’ve instead decided that it will be better to devote an entire blog entry to this topic instead. Look for that post soon 😉

Are Stat Seeds staying the same?

Stat Seeds will still function the same way, with one major convenience change: you will now be able to remove individual seeds through your Status Menu instead of having to purchase and use a Seed Cleaner to remove all of them at the same time (removing a seed will still trash it). This change should make managing and swapping out your seeds much easier.

What does the big re-balancing entail?

As we’ve mentioned many times in the past few months, most of the game is going to be re-balanced to accommodate the new skill trees and to smooth out the rough edges that currently exist. The stats on many abilities, items, monsters, etc. may change, but the general “feel” of the balance throughout the existing content should remain the same.

Inflated burst damage is the biggest balance issue right now. Across the board you’ll be seeing attacks doing a bit less damage, particularly AoE (group) attacks. Damage done by AoE abilities like Wizards’ Blizzard spell will now be spread out across multiple targets. The more targets your attack hits, the less damage it will do to each individual target. This should help close the gap that currently exists between classes that have AoE attacks and those that don’t.

Although we’ll be testing all of this it may still take a couple weeks of tweaking on the live servers to get things just right, but balance will be a top priority for us with this update and the small patches that follow.

What are Fire/Ice/Storm Enchants?

Located within the Foundation Tree shared by all classes, the new Elemental Enchant skill branches will serve to make Plus Element, Piercing and Elemental Resist much more viable for melee classes. Each level of the enchants add 4% elemental damage to all physical attacks (that includes special moves), and also convert an additional 4% of the base damage to elemental. Therefore, if you max out an enchant branch you’ll be dealing and additional 20% elemental damage on physical attacks, and another 20% of the base damage will be counted as elemental.

It may sound confusing, but it’s actually pretty simple. If you’d normally do 100 damage to an enemy, then with a maxed out Storm Enchant you’d deal 120 damage, with 40 of that damage being counted as Storm. That means that any Plus Storm you have will increase those 40 points of damage, and any Storm Resist the enemy has will reduce them (Spell Piercing comes into play as well). In other words, these new enchants are a double-edged sword, but one that gives players another potential play style and also increases the value of many of the overlooked gear drops in the game. The next time you pick up a piece of Soldier gear with a bunch of Plus Fire on it, you might want to hold on to it.

When will v1.52 be released?

The size and scope of this update has grown exponentially in the past few weeks, which is partially why it’s taking longer than I anticipated. Almost all of the new features would be big updates on their own, and combining all of them into one massive patch is much more time consuming than the “skill trees only” update that I had originally planned.

When we’re nearly finished testing and I can set a solid release date, all of you will be the first to know about it!

Comments

16 responses to “NEStalgia Skill Tree Details Extravaganza – Part 2”

  1. puppetshowjustice Avatar
    puppetshowjustice

    Looking good. Don’t have much else to say beyond “Looking forward to that SD/MC post.”

  2. magistross Avatar
    magistross

    Are elemental enchantments of any use to spell casters ? It seems to me that these are for physical class only … unless the behavior for these abilities are different throughout the classes ?

    1. evilinuyasha Avatar
      evilinuyasha

      Makes your melee conjurer even better.

    2. Silk Avatar

      Yes, the elemental enchants are useful for casters as well. I’d rather not talk specifics until we’re done balance testing the skill branches and new abilities for casters that deal with this, but elemental enchants will be a viable option for every class.

      1. puppetshowjustice Avatar
        puppetshowjustice

        You just gave me a very nice mental image of Clerics healing people with fire. I cast Cauterization!

        Edit: Actually. That’d be a really cool to way to stop Bleed status. lol

  3. lordrayken Avatar
    lordrayken

    Nerfing AoE’s?

    Haha…
    Wizards are now useless until high level.

    But that’s okay. I’m not a wizard!

    1. Silk Avatar

      I haven’t provided you with nearly enough information to formulate any meaningful predictions about how useful Wizards will be after this change. There aren’t any hard numbers listed in this post – all that I’ve said is that I’m reducing the damage of AoEs across the board in order to bring them into balance.

      You’d be hard pressed to find a player who doesn’t believe that AoEs are somewhat overpowered right now. The whole point of updates like this is to hone the balance and improve the game for everyone – the idea that I’d just up and make a class “useless” is nuts.

    2. puppetshowjustice Avatar
      puppetshowjustice

      Putting AoE balance aside completely for a minute: Keep in mind also that we don’t know what new tools Wizard will have post skill tree update. One of the screenshots last blog post showed a skill that allowed ice magic to induce a Slow effect on targets. And it looks like (naturally) fire and storm will provide other things. So Wizard might end up adding some more utility to its arsenal in the future. Which I think is pretty cool.

      We might even end up living in a future where a caster would want to make use of their Attack button every now and again.

      1. blacksniper Avatar
        blacksniper

        God I hope not… I’ve always hated playing as a caster and spending time attacking. *glares at hack and slash games like Champions*

        1. puppetshowjustice Avatar
          puppetshowjustice

          Then don’t spend points in that area. It’s that simple. Doesn’t mean everyone feels that way. This whole thing is all about finding your own playstyle.

          1. grimoirem Avatar
            grimoirem

            I like the foundation tree change, I kind of wanted to try a melee wizard once I got better at this game, even if he is outclassed in damage and doesn’t bring more utility in the game’s current state.

            Perhaps Silk’s interest in adding proc based weapons would open more potential for our arcane gish?

  4. josh Avatar
    josh

    Happy to see us soldiers and merchants are getting a full blog post, I guess this thing is going to be big change.

  5. deadfool Avatar
    deadfool

    I see that The 7th Saga as influenced you in some of the battle animations.

  6. cakemanisfake Avatar
    cakemanisfake

    hai guys

  7. schwanzerberg Avatar
    schwanzerberg

    It took so long time for part 3 and also for v1.52 update. To be honest, since part 2 I don’t play NEStalgia and guess I won’t play until part 3. I play mostly with my SD and need to see SD skill tree with part 3, to keep playing the game and to buy subscription.

    Please hurry up and please post part 3, at least.

  8. footx360 Avatar
    footx360

    i like the new animations instead of the flashing boxes, my only complaint is that the fullscreen color flash is still there, rather seizure inducing lol especially if u get lagged out right when its active.

Leave a Reply