There’s a new Dev Blog out previewing some of the stuff we’re currently working on behind the scenes right now. Check it out when you get a chance:
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Just out of curiosity will this stress test only be open to those in beta or anyone who has backed the game in order to get the most activity during that window possible?
Just those who are currently in the Beta, because I don’t really want people’s first impression to be this test, haha. Plus it would be more work to set it up beyond what it’s already configured to do.
Really even if we just get like 30-40 people online that would be good, I’m more looking to just make sure that we get it tested across a variety of network setups and environments than anything else.
Awesome! One concern though, and I’ve been thinking about this for quite awhile, how will you give your gear to another artificer for enchantment? Will you just have an artificer consultant that you go to have him tell you what combinations to put on your gear, or will artificing stations be portable and something other players can put their gear into so you can work on it on your end? I’m planning to be a pretty devoted artificer at launch and this would be very helpful information for how I work with it at launch.
So once the set is created, it’s a tradable item just like a Potion. Then to apply it to your gear, you just tap the set in your inventory, then tap the gear to apply it to.
So I guess the steps to the process are:
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Artificer watches you play and determines common patterns. This is the “most skillful” part of the process and where if I were an Artificer I would charge the most money.
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Those recommendations are taken and turned into actual sets. To do that you need to acquire the correct tiles by buying them from another player or making them yourself from ore. Some Artificers may also do this step for you, but my guess is some folks will just do this step themselves. The tiles are meant to be fairly cheap to acquire so I don’t think this is a part of the process that would be very expensive.
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You apply the completed set to your gear. Anyone can do this themselves.
So there will likely be a “high-touch” market for Step 1, where a “Master Artificer” could distinguish themselves. And then there will be more of a “low-touch” market for Step 2, where people are just making tiles to sell and maybe even selling “common” sets that you can use on your gear if you don’t want to pay for Step 1 – they wouldn’t be nearly as good or finely-tuned to your play style, but they would at least be a little boost. My guess is more casual players will take that approach. Kind of the difference between buying a suit off the rack and having one tailored for you specifically.
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Is there any way to hide the runes used in a tailored combination? There wouldn’t be anything preventing a player from paying you to figure out the tailored combination and then giving that same combination to another person to recreate or even recreating it themselves, right? That definitely explains how figuring out that combination is the most expensive part, but can it be kept secret? Call me greedy, but if I can keep the secret sauce recipe to myself for repeat customers I would prefer to do that.
I don’t think there will be any way to hide the finished set from the customer. It’s up to you if you want to explain what each of those runes means and why you chose them, though.
If a person is able to just share an exact duplicate of their finished set with someone else, without knowing what the runes mean or why you chose them, then the system wouldn’t be working as intended (or, I guess, those two players just happen to have the exact same play style). It’s not about finding “just one perfect combination” that you then re-sell to lots of people. It’s about tuning it to each individual player.
So I guess in short, there is no reason to really care if a player you sell a set to shares that set with someone else, that would be like someone giving a suit tailored for them to someone else, it’s probably going to fit very poorly.
As for keeping it from your customer, again the idea is that your play style will change as you play the game, encounter new challenges, etc. A really good player who wants to be the best is not going to have any problem paying you to check them out on a regular basis to keep things well-tuned. A more casual player is not going to bother paying you to custom-tailor it in the first place. I would focus more on building good relationships with clients, and less on worrying about people stealing the secret sauce, since unless they know as much as you do about what each rune “means” and why it’s “good” to use there, they can’t do anything more than make ill-fitting knockoffs for others.
Of course this is all just speculation at this point, and I’m open to suggestions/having my mind changed about why it’s a good idea.
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One way to keep it “secret” while maintaining the skill level would be to randomize what the runes represent for each player. That way a skilled artificer would always be required to create sets for every player and they wouldn’t be able to make generic premade sets. This would obviously up the difficulty level by a lot, but it would also allow the really skilled artificers to keep their client base. The artificer wouldn’t necessarily have to tell their client what they discover each rune to correlate to for that particular person, allowing them to keep trade knowledge to themselves. It would also add a greater level of cryptography to the artificing process. Again, much more complicated, but much greater reward for the skilled practitioner.
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So there only seems to be a few playstyle currently (spam provoke aND bash everything, spam wound and bash everything, fireball, frost/icelance). How detailed is the system? I feel like there will only be a few combinations that will fit most players.
I don’t think I would be in favor of that…if we end up deciding that it needs to be secret, I would just allow you to “name” the set whatever you want (e.g. “Logan Sword”) and then it would only show that name both when you inspect the set and when the set triggers for you.
It’s much more detailed than just what ability you used. That said, we’ll just have to see. If it’s not detailed enough, I will add more detail to it.
Use cases I see are different sets for farming and raiding and maybe enemy types.
Farming set may have the enemy death rune in a different spot than the raiding set. Sets may be different based on whether you are playing solo or in a group. Solo farming means you tailor the set for max dps, raiding set may be more tailored towards group play (healing for a musketeer, aggro for a warrior, etc.).
Right, my concern was less about having that player share their combination with another, as that would hopefully be ineffective, and more about having them come back to me each time they need a new set created because the old one has broken. Then you could charge a premium for the set because no one else would know that player’s winning combination. I hadn’t considered playstyles evolving over time and each player needing their playstyle examined regularly to stay 100% though. That means you do have a chance at a repeat payout for the expensive option.
I am curious how this will play out though. From the little information I read it seemed (to me) like the main focus is on ability rotations? So, if it is accepted by the community that power shot, poison arrow, shoot, shoot, shoot, spread shot is the best ability rotation for rangers and each ranger adopts that rotation would the same rune combination work to the maximum benefit of every ranger or are there more than just abilities taken into consideration?
Edit: Ignore the last bit as Logan touched on it. I’m on mobile and slow because if it.
adding a note taking section in the book would greatly benefit this profession
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Will a player be able to see their own symbols if they drink a potion or just other players symbols?
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This system seems really really cool, I can’t wait to dive into it!
I have a few main things I may be a little confused about.
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It seems like very quickly there will be a mapping figured out for what each rune means, and then people won’t need to use the potions anymore (until new ones are added). Is there any mechanism in place that would make a pre-mapping not viable, and from players saying “well, based on the runes available, these are the ones I want that will trigger all the time”? Wouldn’t this undercut the notion of the skiledl runesmith observing a player and making sets for them?
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It seems like the output of the entire system is for your runesets to trigger as much as possible, in order to get a damage boost. Do the runesets no longer have the potential to modify your existing ability functionality? (Things like cooldown time on specific abilities, etc, I recall that being discussed at some point).
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If I can make sets in size from 3 to 5, wouldn’t the ideal almost always be to take your most common set of 5 triggers, and then make runes that include subsets of that 5? So that triggers 1/2/3, 2/3/4, 3/4/5, 1/2/3/4, 2/3/4/5, and 1/2/3/4/5 are the sets you equip? (Well, I’d guess you drop one of the smaller ones as you can only have 5)
Bonus Question: What’s the recipe to make the potion? 
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It seems like based on the discussion on here so far and on Discord, the two major concerns are:
- The system will be too easy to figure out, and once you figure out one pattern for someone that same pattern will just be re-used by everyone…just generally speaking, it’s not going to really be “unique per player.”
All I can say on this front is, there are a lot of runes, they represent a lot of things, and it goes beyond just “I used a Fireball spell, followed by Frostbolt.” If the things we’re tracking now aren’t unique enough, we’ll track different things, or more things, or whatever else it takes to get it to that point. I didn’t want to start with 200 different runes and have it be impossible to figure out, but if 36 is too few or people are all ending up with the same patterns, we’ll change it. There’s really nothing else I can say on that front until you see it in action, because I don’t know how it will work until I see 100 different people using it.
This also feeds into the “but once I figure out a really cool set everyone will just share it around and not need me anymore” side of things as well. If that’s happening then the system isn’t working as intended and we will make changes.
- What happens when a set hits, it’s just damage? What happened to it being about enhancing certain abilities and matching your play style?
What happens when the sets trigger is actually the least set-in-stone part of the whole thing right now. A straight-up damage boost is an easy thing to start with, but it may be that we put like a sixth rune in there and so when your set hits then you can place a rune that gives you “Buff of Eld” that is closer to what the original thought was where it buffs certain abilities. I’ll be playing with this in the lead up to the Beta test so it may change.
In general, as I said in the blog post, this is a really new thing that’s never been done before, so while I appreciate all the discussion and excitement and questions on it, keep in mind that we won’t really know how it’s going to play out until we see it in action once people get their hands on it. It may end up working in a way I’m not expecting, after all. All we can do is play and see!
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Players will figure out even a complex system just by empirically trying all different combination of actions. You would have to permute the meaning of the runes with a lot of other non-obvious and maybe even literal tracking data (like height, arm length and motions of the player itself), which in the end would work similar to a randomizing algorithm. The most differentiated playstyle would be the Runemage, if the system could track how the spells are drawn.
If all fails, there is an option of extreme measure: to link the meaning of the runes to a specific time or potion usage. That means that for each player the runes would change over time, but the set itself will be “frozen”. So the sets will provide the same effects forever, but each time you want to make a new one, you will need to get analyzed again by a Runemaker.
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2 a.m. on a Thursday morning is probably too challenging for me, so I’ll have to pass on the stress test.
I love the concept of this skill, so I’m really interested in how it pans out. Will it be clear when your rune sets proc and how much bonus damage they’ve added to the fight? Or will it left to a feel of how quickly you can kill various monsters?
It will be very clear when they proc, and then basically when they proc you get a buff (so you will see your attacks increase in damage).
Have you decided if all sets will reset after 1 triggers or can you have a set of 3 trigger then a 5 trigger after only an additional 2 conditions are met? X,y,z proc. X, y, z, 1, 2, proc