an unconventional idea would be to adjust old items to stat mods that make more sense.
Been following this thread closely and I love seeing all the creativity flowing from the community on these traits! Definitely keep it coming, as we have a little bit of time before we need to finally confirm them.
1 Like
Very cool stuff. Iâm glad to see you are thinking about this so deeply!
I will admit that the introduction of a separation between Melee and Ranged Damage was done quite near to the end of our deadline, and although I do remember thinking there may be a slight imbalance with a tanky Ranger, we were under deadline to publish 
Now that the traits are publicly available, Iâm all for proposing a Paatch to confirm traits that are even better balanced than the current ones, as long as there are no obvious downsides for other groups.
16 Likes
Thanks for the detailed analysis!
Iâm not an expert in game balancing, but I feel that your proposal doesnât correct the imbalance @Caacao talked about.
Your attack archetypes seem op with respect to the defense ones. Compare the Paladin with the Thief, for example. The Paladin has strong melee and range attack, AND strong armor. The thief, on the other hand, has no attack strengths. Yes, heâs very fast and great at dodging, and his health regenerates quickly, but not useful for anything else.
1 Like
Thanks for your encouragement @coderdan !
I am really grateful for everything you are trying to build and if I had only imagined one tenth of what you are announcing today, I would have already signed up 100 times. I didnât think Aavegotchi would go this far but itâs also super exciting.
About what you are saying, on the contrary, I think that separating ranged and melee damage is a good way to prevent access to certain features without blocking them completely. In my proposal, there is nothing to prevent an Aavegotchi at range to focus on armor while doing less damage in return. My whole point is realy simple (even if it need a lot of explanation) : if you want to have high damage per second while being ranged, you canât have armor. So the tanky ranger is impossible.
About proposing a Paatch, we should try to find some sort of consensus here. Then I will be happy to write the first proposition (the acceptance of such modification to traits) before a more precise Paatch proposition if you agree.
3 Likes
It would be even better if you could confirm if weapons are even a thing or just cosmetic. So far, it seems like my guys just shoot link and are just as happy with a cup of coffee as with a sword. Is armor actually armor or is this all just stat based.?
Hi and thank you for your long time trying to improve my proposal.
While I really appreciate the effort, I think like @MGG that your proposal doesnât correct the imbalance problem I pointed. Not to mention that my last update changes only 3 traits instead of 4.
To better explain why armor is the real problem (and not ethereality), I would like to add a paragraph that will be important for the further reflections we have.
Why ARMOR and not Ethereality is the problem with ranged?
Armor should decrease the amount of damage you received when damaged. Unlike Ethereality who mitigate the damage by allowing you to completely ignore an attack that should have damaged you instead. So in armor there is no luck involved.
And thatâs how we properly create a tank. huge HP or huge armor (or both). Dodging however is not reliable enough to be viable for a tank.
Now, suppose we add HP regen to this. Most of the time, you can approach hp regen in two ways. Based on HP percentage or fixed. If HP regen is fixed, everyone benefit from this equally but if it depends on max HP, having a lot of HP can become very valuable.
And thatâs how a tank can become real in Aavegotchi. HP Regen with High HP let you regenerate hp faster and if you add armor to that, you can regenerate hp faster than a low damage attack, effectively tanking. With ethereality, if you doesnât dodge enough of attacks, you can die as if you had no dodging at all. Thatâs why it is more often a trait for special classes like a ninja or a rogue (just examples).
Thatâs why being strong at range should not let you have high armor.
You will tell me that we could reduce the effect of armor and increase ethereality if it become an issue. Itâs a very very risky assumption and let me explain why.
First, KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. When we are in the fundamentals of creating a game, we shouldnât take these kinds of risks.
But the most important is that dodge can become a real and uncontrollable issue. In a lot of games, dodging is not a very important characteristic that can help sometimes but not save you from dying⌠until a certain point. When you dodge 10% of attacks, only luck can save you. When you start to dodge 90% of attacks, only luck can kill you. So dodging should never be high or follow a logarithmic curve that canât go over a certain value (like, I donât know 10%).
6 Likes
Yes. I agree with what you said about dodging. I remember this mage build I used in GW. She was an AoE glass cannon that used a blind signet that she could only use in contact with the foe. I could use it even without mana or under the influence of some spell-negating hex. It was hilarious using the signet on a tank warrior or assassin. They would be instantly blinded missing 90% of their attacks. They would just swing their weapon in front of me while I danced in front of them. Too funny.
A few thoughts I see with the overall setup:
I see it as there are critical stat mods and secondary ones.
Critical mods:
Attack speed
Armour
Ranged damage
Melee damage
Secondary mods:
Carry capacity
Movement speed
Ethereality
Health regen
As you said, dodge is an unreliable stat for tanking and more niche for rogues etc.
Health regen I donât see being so important that it acts as a self-healing mechanism.
Move speed I donât see so important that low NRG gotchis crawl and top ones fly
Carry capacity is irrelevant when talking about damage, tanking, etc.
The critical stats are self-explanatory to me. You have high armour, low damage for tanking. High damage, low armour for dps classes.
I believe melee and ranged damage could be combined into one stat mod that pairs against armor.
What weâre not seeing in here which I find odd is casting & healing. Without healing, there is no group play. And what is an RPG without casters?!
Before the launch of this chapter, I believed weâd see something like this:
NRG
low NRG = tanking, high armour, carry capacity
high NRG = movement speed, melee/ranged dps
AGG =
low AGG - healing.
high AGG - damage & crit
SPK = couldnât figure this one out. some kind of wildcard stat like dodge, crit chance, etc.
BRN =
low BRN = melee & ranged crit
high BRN = spell damage & crit
When you look at what we have going on there are basically eight possible stat mods in four binary categories.
Another solution would be to let your gotchis spec into a class which would then route his or her stat points in a way that is coherent to the selected class. With the speccing, you could open up certain talents and abilities while closing others off, thus prevented any super op builds. Talent specs would also make it easier for game balance as you can tweak how specific stats affect that one class, rather than it affecting the entire system.
4 Likes
hey @Caacao thanks for the awesome post and all the effort for raising these points! As we are still trying to wrap our heads around the recent chapter, I think the points you are bringing are very much valid.
I think the last iteration of traits you have put out are quite balanced, thereâs even some room to choose what style of range damage to play with by having a trade off between attack speed and regen i.e full glass cannon type of dps vs less squishy steady but slow range damage. I also like the fact that health regen and attack speed are in the different sides of same trait, which also provides for melee to have bruiser/assassin w/ high energy kind of play or full tank archetype combined with low energy.
More I read about it, it seems to make more sense. Forcing low armor for ranged attack and a naturally desirable dodging stat(low agg) being on the opposite side of melee, seems to fit very well in the rock-paper-scissor equation and in terms of lore.
Thanks again for the awesome post!
1 Like
Nice post, SlickBB. Well thought-through, articulate, and diplomatic. Interested to see more branching from this post.
2 Likes
Keep up the discussion, Caacao. There are a lot of good ideas people are proposing. See if you can help reach a consensus. I know you have your strong opinions, just try and keep an open mind at this stage⌠fostering community input and thinking will help us all move forward together. Great topic, thoughts, and enthusiasm!
3 Likes
i feel like the target of the change needs to be fixing the the current high range dps tank build that exists while also ensuring that the results make the most sense.
this is why i propose. spell dmg/efficacy be part of ethereality with the chart proposed by @SlickBB
while i think that the attack speed disadvantage to higher armor makes a lot of sense and limits your dps, i think that pairing it with one dmg type is wrong and so attack speed makes the most sense.
as for health regen. this being attached to a health based stamina sprinting system is very strong and should not be underestimated for ranged fighters and tanky gatherers. currently dodge chance has its niche use case typically as one that is too high is no fun for anyone and one that is too low doesnât matter so vamping this up while making sure that you cant have ranged fighters who both have boosted spells and boosted ranged attacks is a must.
so for my thoughts the health regen stat should matter. and so should ethereality. you canât have move speed discrepancy be too high or your energy stat could be a gravestone so that will be the soft stat as mentioned by @notorious_BTC
also since melle dps is typically at a natural disadvantage against ranged fighting and would have to sacrifice that juicy hp regen for its dmg. a think a soft life/soul steal should be available as it scaled to allow for melle fighters who are battling extensively to have their own system of sustainability.
1 Like
I just want to say that I agree with Angst and I donât think evasion is a fun mechanic in a pvp game at all, I would rather it be changed to something else.
1 Like
Hey frens!
I have read everything you had to say and I think it would be important to create several discussion spaces regarding the different subjects discussed in this topic.
We have among others:
- The basic effects of traits
- The effects of the items (some people suggested to change some of them)
- Additional effects (like healing, casting spells)
- The gameplay (PvP, open world or not, etc.)
- Archetypes (class names)
I propose to focus here simply on the basic effects of traits. This way we could draft a proposal that can be agreed upon at least by those present here who feel they can give an objective opinion (like @SlickBB BB).
I had the chance to talk to a friend who has been in the business for years and he was able to enlighten me on some points. He immediately identified the same problem but suggested a completely different modification that I hadnât thought of but now seems so obvious! Moreover, this is consistent with what we were told by @coderdan about the deadline and the separation between melee and ranged damage.
The new proposition
He therefore also identified a problem of the âtanky mageâ and that there can be no âtanky warriorâ. But his proposal was so simple because he didnât agree with me on one thing: The fact of being able to cumulate effects and thus favor archetypes can have the consequence of increasing the effects of a meta. For example, suppose defense become overpowered, cumulating armor, health regen and evasion could become problematic.
So, the balancing must be kept. And the problem or âtanky mage, no tanky warriorâ can be gone by just changing an effect.
Here is the new chart.
Introducing a new effect Critical Strike Chance. This effect could just be a proposal to the dev team but could be anything else that counter Attack Speed.
The proposal would therefore have only 2 changes and thus avoid complicating the mapping with wearables even more.
8 Likes
Just want to thank you for your work on this, fren. It makes a lot of sense to me.
For all the proposed options (with diagrams), I prefer the 2nd version in the original post (believe it was a modification made upon discussion in #4). That introduces a quite well thought out design with the least disruption.
This last one is very interesting in introducing critical strike. Though it is simple in terms of the traits mapping themselves, it could be very challenging to implement considering how weaponry are defined etc and there could be lots of intricacies. Still top priority is gotchiverse launch. And keep tweaking as we move forward.
2 Likes
This remapping makes most sense.
I am afraid though we really need to address the casting situation as those attributes will need to fit in somewhere.
I suppose AGG could morph into Armour / ALL damage, whether ranged, melee, or casting.
An alternative I like would be to allow for gotchis to choose which class they want to play. Then the stat mods affect that class independently.
This route has one huge benefit: if one class is OP, you can tweak the outputs on the stats without throwing off the whole game balance.
Without some form of differentiation, one stat adjustment will affect EVERYONE which can be a huge problem as well. This is a case where micromanagement is actually a good thing! 
We could start with, say, four classes and each one would benefit positively from the extreme ends of the stats in similar, but different and specific ways.
1 Like
I like this best so far. Cant believe we missed critsâŚ
And yes, thereâs no point in locking a gotchi in to ranged or melee. You can balance those better if you just have an attack value.
1 Like