User:Lestion/HV Suggestions

This is a list of suggestions for the HentaiVerse mini-game. All changes are subject to tuning after testing at various levels of play. Work in progress.

Design philosophy

These are the main goals around which my changes are based.

Good gameplay

'Good gameplay' is, in my opinion, based around players being able to make diverse informed inputs. This means having lots of opportunities to make choices about their actions in response to the game output. HentaiVerse is inherently limited in how much it can do with this, because of the single dimension monster arrangements.

Measured imbalance

It's fine (and desirable) for there to be imbalances between different playstyles, equipment choices, etcetera. But the gaps should not be so large as to make anything obsolete. This seems consistent with past changes (particularly improving ADB on non-slaughter equipments that could roll slaughter). However, at present, I wish to keep equipment changes minimal.

Slower combat

Currently, there are not many options for buffing melee combat without either directly increasing their damage, or homogenizing the playstyle with AoE similar to mage. However, endgame melee already kills enemies in 2-3 hits (with imperil), so increasing damage meaningfully could reduce that to one-shot kills.

In accordance with the 'good gameplay' tenet, I believe it is important for individual rounds to take longer.

Balance for serious players

It is fine for the game to be a little on the too-easy side for low level players, as it does not have a significant effect on the economy (both in and out of HV). Game balance should generally be built around the more active players, so ideally, I'd like testing to focus on levels 300, 350, 400, 450 and 500. Additionally this should account for different wealth levels at 300, 400 and 500. Levelling up should be a rewarding goal, so remaining at low level should not be highly desirable for efficiency reasons.

Completion is fine

It's fine for the game to be humanly completable if anyone wants to spend the still-ridiculous amount of time required to do so. People have long gone past the point of EH currencies having any meaning at that point. As proficiency is not being touched, anyone who completes that (and one set of peerlesses) can just try another build, if they still want to keep going...

Combat

Tuning

Monster Mitigation Formulas

Change from 1 - (900 / (900 + end + secondary stat / 2)) * (1 - chaos rank * 0.01) to 1 - (3000 / (3000 + end + secondary stat / 2)) * (1 - chaos rank * 0.01)

This maintains reasonable mitigation levels for very high-end monsters, and reduces high-level monster mitigations to roughly 60% of their current values.

Low level monsters are affected more strongly (down to around 40% of current).

For some quick numbers, here are giants at level 2250, 1728 (around average for level 350+ players on PFUDOR) and 1560 (low end for level 350+ on PFUDOR).

	Giant 2250 (Chaos 20)		Giant 1728 (Chaos 10)		Giant 1560 (Chaos 0)
Monster level	Before	After	Before	After	Before	After
500	79.73%	57.53%	75.39%	49.92%	59.40%	30.50%
400	76.13%	53.09%	71.15%	44.99%	53.79%	25.89%
300	70.99%	47.62%	65.17%	38.99%	46.45%	20.65%
200	63.07%	40.74%	56.12%	31.57%	36.43%	14.67%
100	49.33%	31.84%	40.83%	22.17%	22.01%	7.81%

Note that level 300 players and below are unlikely to encounter monsters of this level, but this is fine. Low levels are already a high-speed blasting zone, and remaining at low level to exploit monster vulnerability would not last long even with no exp modifiers at all - they would soon reach level 350 or so, and be facing the same high-end monsters as everyone else.

This change ultimately has the effect of rendering imperil (and penetrated armour) non-mandatory.

Player Mitigation Overhaul

Player mitigations should be reduced by ~25%, and HP increased. It's worth considering more achievable caps on mitigation stats to force players to consider utilizing a range of suffixes to maximize their defense by mix-and-matching equipment (ie, if you already hit the physical mitigation cap, you might want to aim for deflection/dampening/stoneskin pieces, or you may drop one of those because you don't feel threatened by a specific damage type already... etc).

The numbers here are hard to adjust without testing, because it would likely require adjustments to the gain from primary attributes, to gear generation values, and adding caps to the formula.

Bigger Changes

Slower Rounds

Monster HP would be increased drastically, to around 10x current values. In combination with the mitigation change, this should be roughly equivalent to 5x slower combat.

One of the reasons for this is that damage increases in HentaiVerse can only be felt in breakpoints, where damage must be increased enough to make monsters die at least one turn sooner. In extreme cases, these damage increases can be extremely rare (particularly for high end imperil mages), where monsters die in 2-3 hits anyway and massive amounts more would be required to reduce it by one turn.

To compensate for such slower gameplay, rounds would be reduced to keep full battle durations reasonable (eg: grindfests could become 200 rounds) and drop rates adjusted proportionately.

Deprecating Overhaul

In extension to the mitigation change, several changes would be made to imperil efficacy and application.

The effect of imperil would be reduced from 50% physical & magic mitigation to 33%. Specific element mitigation reductions would be reduced from -40 to -30. Holy and dark imperil would be reduced from -25 to -15.

Imperil spell width would be increased from 3 to 1 + (1-2 from ability levels) + floor(6 * deprecating proficiency factor)

The same target width would apply to all deprecating spells (even drain!). Additionally, deprecating spells would no longer be resistable.

The problem with imperil is that its usage is generally considered to be tedious and non-imperil styles are preferred for comfort. Presently, due to that discomfort, imperil straddles a line between overpowered (where everyone is forced to use it for efficiency, or survival) and useless. If it were closer to balanced, it would tip towards obsolete, because most people would rather give up small speed gains for playstyle comfort.

Instead, I think it is better to make imperil a little less godly at its job, but significantly more usable. The primary use case would be players who want to prop up poor equipment or proficiency with deprecating spell, none of which are presently used by serious players above level 300 due to their general turn inefficiency.

Round-Based Buffs

All buffs should have round-based timers instead of turn-based, to normalize benefit of certain consumables for all fighting styles. The only exceptions to this I can think of are the spark of life trigger effect, defend, focus and channelling effects (however it may be better to remove those and implement other interesting mechanics entirely).

Auto-Consumables

Similar to Innate Arcana, this would be a series of Hath perks which would be as follows:

• Level 1: Allows draughts to be automatically consumed when falling below a chosen threshold (while their respective effect is inactive).
• Level 2: Allows potions to be automatically consumed when falling below a chosen threshold.
• Level 3: Allows elixirs to be automatically consumed when falling below a chosen threshold.

The threshold would be chosen in settings along with a toggle switch for each tier.

Additionally, more perks:

• Allows Scrolls of Protection, Swiftness and Shadows to be selected for automatic consumption when their effects are not active.
• Allows Infusions to be selected for automatic consumption when their effects are not active.

Consumable Changes

The 'Enchant' interface at the forge would be removed (real-time is awkward for many players, especially with enormously varied turn speeds across the globe).

Aether shards, voidseeker shards and featherweight shards are now battle consumables with similar effects.

Infusions now add extra physical damage as (element) in combat, in addition to their normal effects.

Scrolls of Avatar/Gods would be removed, in response to auto-consumables.

Scrolls of Protection, Swiftness and Shadows will now be present in the Item Shop, costing 1000c each. Their durations will be 50 rounds.

Scroll of Absorption will now apply 5 stacks of absorption.

Scrolls of Life and Absorption will now last indefinitely until consumed.

Bubble-gum and Flower Vase will be merged into one new consumable (tentatively named 'Go Faster Juice'). Double damage, guaranteed crits. Lasts 10 rounds, and can be bought from the item shop for 10,000c.

All drop rates will need adjustment (see 'Economy' section).

Supportive Overhaul

Currently, supportive proficiency is basically worthless, and Full-Cure becomes too powerful if max HP is increased with the intent of making damage slower but harder to recover from. Additionally, to make mitigating damage more involving (without being too tedious), new spells need to be added.

• Full-Cure removed.
• Cure restores 0.2 * max HP + (supportive prof factor ^ 1.5 * max hp).
• New system: Overhealing. Curing past your maximum HP grants the extra as a shield which decays by 1% of your max HP per turn. This shield is capped at the same value as your max HP.
• New spell: 'Recovery' - while unaffected by a shield from Overhealing, recover 0.5% maximum HP, MP and SP every turn. (Increased to 1%/1.5% with abilities).
• Supportive proficiency factor additionally increases all vital maximums by up to 25% (separate multiplier to HP Tank, etc).
• Absorption: now 100% chance, success restores 1/2/3/4/5% MP+SP.

Status Effects

The goal here is to even the difference between mage styles a little. All effects should now be powerful and thematic. The difference between these styles is now expressed in equipment choice (example: fire/cold mages have weaker staff choices, but a fire mage may now prop up their damage by cycling explosions, whereas a cold mage might instead choose to focus on pure cold damage and only chain fire->cold for their most powerful spells). In the new meta all mages are expected to return to non-imperil, so holy dominance is reduced a little (though it may likely remain optimal due to slightly more powerful T2/T1 spells, and the most powerful staff).

• Specific mitigation reductions from mage spells can now reduce enemies below 0 mitigation.
• Increase status effect chain explosion damage. Triggering the explosion effect increases monster vulnerability to subsequent explosions (stacking debuff).
• Searing Skin, Turbulent Air & Ripened Soul (renamed 'Soul Rot'): all effects replaced with powerful DoT effect.
• Freezing Limbs (renamed 'Frostbite'), Deep Burns (renamed 'Static Charge'), Breached Defense (renamed 'Divine Judgment'): all effects replaced with decreased mitigation against subsequent sources of cold, elec and holy damage respectively.
• Burning Soul, Blunted Attack: removed entirely, dark mitigation reduction moved to Soul Rot instead.

The following changes are aimed at diversifying the feel of melee weapon choices further. Bleed weapons should offer the most damage against hordes of average monsters, stun weapons improve survivability, and penetrating weapons are good for taking out very tanky enemies like bosses (or giants, if the player spots them and focuses them).

Bleeding Wounds currently isn't very useful due to how long it takes to stack (and would possibly remain that way even in slower combat):

• Bleeding Wounds now only stacks up to 3 times. Crits against opponents with 3 stacks will deal 100% additional crit damage.

Improvements to mace (and club) damage at the cost of slightly-too-easy survival:

• Stunning an opponent also inflicts 'Off Balance' on them, reducing their parry chance by 50% and increasing crit damage received by 50%.

Nobody's going to want to use rapiers or estocs anymore without similar treatment (remember the mitigation change, too):

• Crits against opponents with 3 stacks of Penetrated Armor inflict damage equivalent to 20% of monster current health.

Siphon procs are worthless at the moment.

• Merge all Siphon x procs into a singular 'Siphon'. Returns 1% of your HP/MP/SP per turn, reduces monster vitals by 3% per turn for 3 ticks. (May be toned down slightly pending testing, but should still be worse for damage than other weapons.)

Melee Overhaul

The best parts about melee gameplay currently are:

• Enormous survivability difference compared to mage.
• Interaction with the overcharge system is fun.
• Managing spirit stance in combination with weapon skills can be fun.
• Some players enjoy minimizing consumable expenditure to min/max their profit per stamina, rather than per time.
• Weapon procs and weapon skills can provide interesting interactions.

However melee is disadvantaged enormously because its AoE is inconsistent (unlike mage, which gets it every turn), in particular.

Melee balance changes are intended to draw upon the best parts of the current melee design (particularly 1H) while maintaining style diversity in feel.

It is especially important that all weapon skills feel powerful. Their cost means players must choose between keeping up spirit stance permanently with occasional weapon skills, or using more weapon skills but not being able to use spirit stance.

Some of these changes may sound ridiculous but please bear in mind melee is currently exceptionally slow and inconsistent compared to mages. It is likely they will still be slower than mages even with these new skills. All numbers are pending tuning after testing.

All melee

• Attacks now always generate 10 overcharge (up from 5-10).

One Handed

One handed should be the slowest and the safest of melee styles. It currently achieves this through both incredible avoidances and mitigations, and from constant stuns from counter-attacks. Ideally, I think turn counts for one-hand should be roughly 1.5-2x turn counts for equivalently invested mages (currently 3-5x depending on mode).

• Uncap counter-attacks per turn. The stun is not a problem with the new 'off balance' effect (see 'status effects'), and these do not benefit disproportionately as counters already cannot be parried and cannot crit.
• Counter-attacks now always generate 10 overcharge (once per turn maximum).
• Shield Bash: now affects 1+rounddown(one-handed proficiency * 0.01) targets. Overcharge cost increased to 50.
• Vital Strike: with a new ability, the full bleed stacks are also applied to adjacent targets (1/2 in each direction).
• Merciful Blow: now instantly kills up to 5 random enemies below 20% HP.

Dual Wielding

Dual wielding is the second safest melee style at present (due to incredibly high parry) but possibly the fastest in arenas (while slower in grindfest than any other, as far as I know). Most of the changes here normalize the arena performance with other melee styles, and make it generally better performing against regular monsters. It would be fine if normal performance is similar to 1H or slightly better, depending on whether it uses light armor (for survivability through higher evade and speed), or heavy (for higher damage, but weaker defenses, best used by high level, high investment players).

• Off-hand strikes now generate 10 overcharge.
• Iris Strike: in light of the new deprecating spells, replaced with 'Disorient'.
  • Disorient: deals damage to all enemies (1 regular attack equivalent), and applies 'Disoriented'.
    • Disoriented: Increases damage taken from Backtsab by 100%.
• Backstab: now hits 3 targets, increased damage, remove poison effect.
  • This should be the precision strike option, for use against bosses primarily and small enemy groups, instead of Frenzied Blows being the only valuable skill.
• Frenzied Blows: replace... WIP
  • Frenzied Blows is fun, but it overlaps enormously with Orbital Friendship Cannon (and the new Disorient/Backstab combo).

Economy

Equipment

Equipment Philosophy

Equipping your character should be a matter of improvisation: making the best combination of what you have available, building around self-drops, or covering holes in your playstyle. Mage currently touches on that reasonably well with the optimal build being a combination of phases and cotton proficiency pieces (with the exact slots depending on your level and base proficiency).

Some melee suffixes are somewhat underpowered because with multiplicative modifiers like crit chance tend to have minimal effect on the final result (since you'll probably already have other sources adding up to a lot). To that end, some melee suffixes become choices to cover for things you may not have much of (for example, 2H may not have much parry compared to crit, so nimble on armour would be more valuable than balance).

Quality

Remove fair and exquisite qualities.

New distribution as % of max stat values:

• Crude: 1-20%
• Average: 21-40%
• Superior: 41-60%
• Magnificent: 61-80%
• Legendary: 81-100%

This change combines with some systems changes (notably forging) to make each quality stage more meaningful, and also expands the economy for better quality pieces at legendary slightly (again, in combination with a systems addition for making equipment markets more stable).

Generation simplification

All prefixes/suffixes should now be given equal distribution. See systems changes later for why...

Melee Weapons

• All 2H weapons gain endurance and parry.
• Battlecaster weapons gain base counter-resist, magic damage, int, wis. Lose attack speed, attack crit, strength, dexterity.
• Illithid/Banshee suffixes: removed (merged all into Vampire)
• Swiftness: add evade (attack speed alone is significantly inferior to parry chance from nimble).
• Katanas: add Vampire suffix

Staffs

• Willow: lower base deprecating prof (deprecating changes make prof more desirable, but currently it is easy to hit 1.0 prof factor with curse-weaver shoes, and curse-weaver suffix on Willow is enormously wasteful).
• Oak: lower base supportive prof (match to Willow for similar reasons).
• New suffix: 'of Penetration' - adds counter-resist.

Suffix availability is now:

• Oak: Destruction, Focus, the Earth-Walker
• Willow: Destruction, Focus, the Curse-weaver
• Redwood: Destruction, Focus, the Elementalist, Penetration
• Katalox: Destruction, Penetration, the Heaven-Sent, the Demon-Fiend

Shields

• Legendary+ shields now always roll all 4 of their primary attributes.
• Remove Protection/Warding suffixes from all shields.
• Kite shield: raise base block slightly. Should become best choice for physical mitigation.
• Force shield: Remove all suffixes, add Negation (with high resist chance), Battlecaster, Earth-walker, Curse-weaver. Becomes a paladin-like magic-oriented shield. Lower base interference.
• Agile prefix: also adds cast speed.

Armor

• Cotton: remove protection/warding suffixes. Other 5 remain, with 20% equal distribution.
• Frugal: buff mana conservation bonus further.
• Phase: remove base magic accuracy.
  • Enormously overcapping magic accuracy is currently trivial; new setup encourages Focus staff for low gear players, and forged cottons should reach 200% for better equipped players.
• Leather: remove protection/warding, add Fleet, Negation. Add base crit chance & damage.
• Shade: remove Fleet/Negation, add Nimble.
• Plate: remove dampening/deflection/stoneskin, add Barrier
• Power: remove protection/warding, add Arcanist
• Arcanist suffix now also adds deprecating & supportive proficiency. If possible, it also loses its base str/end rolls.
• Mithril prefix also reduces interference.
• Agile prefix: also adds cast speed (same as shields).

Drop rates

Base drop rates adjusted to match new round speed. Should equal roughly the same as it is now.

• Scroll changes: protection/swiftness/shadows/absorption/life scroll drop rates increased a small amount.
• Avatar/Gods removed.
• Merged gum/vase consumable equals old gum+vase rate, then slightly more.
• Infusions slightly increased.
• HP/MP/SP consumables rebalanced to a 2:1:1 ratio.
• Draught/potion/elixir ratio tweaked to approximately 8:16:1 (currently ~37:3.7:1)
• Happy pills, amnesia shard rates lowered by about 20%.

Peerless drop rate increased by ~3x at all difficulties.

Systems & Features

Single Player Mode toggle switch

Legendary and peerless rates are increased by 10x, but all equipment drops become untradeable while toggled on.

Mostly an option for endgame players who have no further use for credits, mega-collectors who want to try collecting every set, and casual players who don't interact with the economy at all.

Optional: stamina is burned at 2x rate while using this mode.

Forge overhaul

In addition to 'enchant' being removed, the forge would get some significant new features and changes.

New Forge Material

Many forge operations would now operate on a single generic resource. This resource could be obtained from salvaging equipment as well as through monster lab.

The concept is to make the resource endlessly desirable, and also to encourage players to make choices about whether to upgrade past a certain point, upgrade different sets, or gamble on replacing gear.

This has a side effect of helping rebalance the monster lab (see later section).

Upgrading

Equipments now have a single unified item level. Upgrading equipment uses the new forge resource, and upgrades all stats in tandem. This caps at 100, which should be a 1.5x modifier. With a single generic resource, this could now be a linear increase for each level, with just the cost increasing. Some stats may need lowering slightly (proficiencies most likely) to reduce cases where some suffixes are only desired in one slot due to extreme overcapping (ie, curse-weaver shoes, because robe etc are way more than is needed).

Salvaging

This should probably be removed from the forge interface and built into the Equipment shop as one of two bulk options (with checkboxes, akin to the HVUtils interface).

Reforging overhaul

Potencies can now be removed from an equipment individually, costing Amnesia Shards equivalent to the equipment's level (ie, keeping the current costs, but resetting only the parts you don't want).

Amnesia Shard usage is unlikely to be significantly affected, but it could always be doubled when resetting using this method as opposed to a total reset.

Reinforcement

Equipment can be reinforced up to 10 times, granting a 1% stat increase per level. Reinforcement costs an exact duplicate of the item (or legendary dupes for a peerless variant), and a significant forge resource cost.

Item World

Item world potencies are overhauled to be more competitive with the leading options, as well as unlock odd playstyle possibilities. All item types now have 5 potency options (double potency on armor was pointlessly difficult and unrewarding with 8 options, before).

Elemental Strikes

Elemental Strike potencies at level 10 now also grant the spell damage bonus associated with the prefix matching the element type.

This move makes ethereal staffs less useless (albeit still more expensive to correctly item world to get the right spell damage bonus).

Melee weapon

Melee weapons retain butcher and fatality unmodified.

• Overpower is increased to 5% counter-parry per level.
• Swift Strike is removed.
• New potency: Battlemage - grants mana conservation and casting speed

Staff

Staff retains unmodified penetrator, spellweaver and archmage.

• Annihilator is removed.
• Economizer increased to 8% mana conservation per level.

Armor

• x-proof suffixes removed.
• New potency: Warden - adds 1% parry and resist per level
• New potency: Featherweight - reduces the equipment's burden/interference by 20% per level.
• New potency: Ascetic - increases max SP by 2% per level

Shields

• x-proof suffixes removed.
• Instead, can now roll Fatality, Overpower, Juggernaut, Featherweight, Penetrator potencies.