Post for Devs. About the future of Eternium.

[Bart the warrior]

Hi people. About the daily quests. Nobody is asking them to delete. It's about changing and diversifying tasks. All questions to Dyoma, this is his idea.

[Primus]

Spending 1-2 months to collect Brilliants for a Perfect Set, the a day or two collecting random stat greens. After completing this, you tell yourself, I will DOMINATE the game now and in reality, all you had to do was make Near Perfect 87-90 range stats with Radiant Gemstones in about 3 days or less worth of effort to reap the larger part of the benefit of Jewelry to make the advancements in the game. Yes, jewelry crafting needs some attention to make the game more enjoyable.

They are also considering to make CR linear,LOL the need to farm Topazes will reach trollish level if that happens.

[mattks1]

The p-rare boxes must not be removed,rather made more available.Gemstone farming is the most boring part of this game,add in endless clicking for purchasing rings and necklaces and you have the definition of tedious.And the fact that Devs constantly change the importance and value of stats(which I hate,but understand to some extent),means we need MORE p-rare boxes rather then eliminating them.For instance,haste will likely be nerfed soon and you will end up with a potentially undesirable haste intensive ring.Crafting those rings again and again only for Devs to render the stats less valuable is sometimes very frustrating.

All other suggestions are good,apart from the daily one.

Spending 1-2 months to collect Brilliants for a Perfect Set, the a day or two collecting random stat greens. After completing this, you tell yourself, I will DOMINATE the game now and in reality, all you had to do was make Near Perfect 87-90 range stats with Radiant Gemstones in about 3 days or less worth of effort to reap the larger part of the benefit of Jewelry to make the advancements in the game. Yes, jewelry crafting needs some attention to make the game more enjoyable.

[Primus]

The p-rare boxes must not be removed,rather made more available.Gemstone farming is the most boring part of this game,add in endless clicking for purchasing rings and necklaces and you have the definition of tedious.And the fact that Devs constantly change the importance and value of stats(which I hate,but understand to some extent),means we need MORE p-rare boxes rather then eliminating them.For instance,haste will likely be nerfed soon and you will end up with a potentially undesirable haste intensive ring.Crafting those rings again and again only for Devs to render the stats less valuable is sometimes very frustrating.

All other suggestions are good,apart from the daily one.

[mattks1]

Nightmare story mode: Each level in the story becomes proportionally harder relative to the characters capacity. Along with proportional rewards.

Oh yea! Making Story 4 like this would be epic! A story mode with greater difficulty and ranking closer to TL80+ in exp and gear at the final levels of the story but still having the gemstone collection advantage of story mode. The trial levels can still reap the best EXP gains and Gear Farming to make fair and possibly further increasing the stat rolls RNG and adding Tear 3 Gemstone Drops in TL100+. This would only get more people interested in story mode, but also further advancement in Trial Levels. It also means you do not have to rely on Trial levels for EXP and Gear and you don't half to do story mode for gemstones.

[Rytrik]

Yeah, don't remove or change the daily quests. I like them how they are. They're perfect, imo.

And they won't remove celestial items nor p-rare boxes. they JUST added them in. Celestials are a way to boost player HP without knocking down damage. That's a good thing to have for the future. The main reason why they won't remove p-rare boxes is because they don't want their player base spending so much damn time crafting jewelry vs actually PLAYING the game. And no, spending DAYS of one's life click click clicking to MAYBE get a few pieces of near-perfect or perfect uncommons is NOT what the devs intended for this game. THAT is a true waste of time. If I'm going to spend some of my time playing Eternium, I want to be doing things that the play store says I'll be doing... such as destroying enemies, adventuring, slaying massive bosses. You know... A(CTION)RPG stuff.

[giecomo]

I agree with most parts except the daily quest suggestion. I boot up the game to play Eternium, not to spend 20 mins trying to complete daily quests to get the 100 gems before I can start playing.

[PeterK]

Nightmare story mode: Each level in the story becomes proportionally harder relative to the characters capacity. Along with proportional rewards.

[Arionthe]

Have these problems become known only now? I'm two years in the game, for one and a half years mechanics and numbers are changing. Are you sure that they will not continue to be changed?

You are absolutely right. All you need to look at is how long I have been banging my head against alacrity. However since Red (Developer) has joined the team, things have definitely moved in a direction that I appreciate. Yes the progress can be halting, but this game has really good bones (touch control scheme, rpg feel and not at all an exercise in monetization). I'm happy to give it time. By no means this game is perfect. I'm going to describe my views on what makes for a good core of an ARPG, please note I'm not game designer, just a semi avid gamer for many years.

Below are all just my personal opinions.
You can mathematically and methodically create perfect balance in a game. Here are the steps to achieve that.

Define the major meta of the game. In general there are two, dealing damage and taking damage. Using Eternium as the example, you have below:

Dealing damage is made up three parts, normal attack damage, utility skill damage and finally proc damage (which is a function on utility skill damage). Let's name them A, B, and C respectively.

Taking damage is made up two parts, effective HP pool (toughness) and Recovery of the said effective HP pool (recovery). Let's name them Y and Z respectively.

In an idea game, dealing damage and taking damage is each 50% of the game. Meaning they are equally important to the progression of the game. However for practicality, dealing damage tends to have a much heavier weight due to it's more fun to dish out damage than just surviving (but hey tower defense game is still pretty popular last I heard).

Currently, again using Eternium as the example, I will weight those meta thusly:
Dealing damage is 80% while taking damage is 20%. Breaking it down further, here is how I would respectively weight those 5 meta.
A:20%, B:40%, C:20%, Y:5%, Z:15%.
So as far as I'm concerned, the current game meta is very imbalanced. A more ideal but still practical weighting of those 5 meta should be: A:15%, B:30%, C:15%, Y:15%, Z:25%.

Next consider the game stats that affect each of those meta.
I won't bother working it out every game stat is related to what and what its relative impact is. But I will give enough detail to describe what I'm trying to illustrate:
For A meta:
1:Power
2:Critical Damage
3:Critical Rating
4:Haste
5:Weapon Base damage
6:Normal attack skill modifiers

For B meta, from 1-5 also impacts B, plus you add:
7:Utility Skill modifiers
8:Ability Rate + alacrity

For C meta, from 1 to 7 above plus you add:
9: Proc conditions
10: Proc modifiers

For Y meta:
11: Armor
12: Dodge
13: Parry
14: Block
15: Toughness Procs (Shield bubble etc)

For Z meta:
4: Haste
16: Life regeneration
17: Life on Hit
15: Toughness Procs (shield bubble)
18: (I hope in the future) other game mechanics that trigger recovery such as shield slam triggering LoH etc

Now you treat a single unit of investment into a particular stat being the measuring unit. Multiply its effects in the various meta will give you how important any single game stat is as related to your ultimate progress in the game. Ideally you want every stat to be relatively close to each other in terms of its overall impact on the game. This way a single measuring unit of stat investment will have a relatively similar benefit. For example if the overall impact of the game stat haste is 3 times that of Power (see the fact that haste matters for meta A, B, C, and Z where power only has influence on A, B, C and in varying degrees as well). This is what allows for build variety. Above is the methodical way for you to construct the game and balance it. The benefit of doing the game balance this way is that it allows simple expansion of game content in terms of new gear and new game mechanics because it's unlikely that you will carelessly create overpowering combos/glitches that gives rise to cookie cutters.

That's it. This post summarizes my views on game balance and build variety. Once the game has a good core/foundation, it becomes relatively easy to add content and more complex stat interactions.

This is also why I'm very excited for the new balancing patch as what has been said about it seems to move the game towards what I consider ideal. Mind you it's not anywhere close to perfection, but the direction is what's important here.

[Matyese]

These are great ideas but I doubt that any of these would happen. Just look how many things have changed through past few months. Not really that much, as far as I love this game I am sure I won’t play it in 5 months, just look at the content being added - for me it’s not enough to keep me playing.
The really good thing is that this game is free, and I don’t think it’s the type of game that you can play forever.

[Kuska]

I agree with almost all! I hope devs will consider the sugestions

[Dyoma]

I actually agree with the path the devs have been taking with the game....

Have these problems become known only now? I'm two years in the game, for one and a half years mechanics and numbers are changing. Are you sure that they will not continue to be changed?

[Purple Potato]

avg highest trial completed

no, good idea, but AVG would mean someone could be at trial 1 and have a friend at trial 115 or whatever. Or you could just not complete trials and it wouldnt be too hard.

[Arionthe]

I actually agree with the path the devs have been taking with the game. That is to continue tinker with the base mechanics of the game until such it's close to a perfect foundation for the future. Unless we fix what is "wrong" or irrational with the core, adding new contents will simply make future fixes that much more troublesome. Now I know this is just one person's opinion on how an ARPG should be, a mobile one at that.

Here is the issue that I see with the current base mechanics. There are several powerful meta in the game that any build must focus on in order to be effective. I'm talking about Skill Cooldown (thus AR but more importantly alacrity), Recovery (LoH dominates regen and yet haste plays a huge role in it), DPS on mob vs single target. Basically all three meta are too dependent on a single game attribute -> haste, which leads to very little variety in how you can build your characters.

So what is the fix? In my mind, reduce overpowering meta that affects one of those three meta. Thus the proposed nerf to alacrity, re-balancing between LoH and regen, and moving proc to a more PPM (procs per minute system). What is the common theme in all these? basically introduce trade offs into the system. You can no longer be the best at every aspect by focusing on the one game attribute that affects them all (haste/attack speed). By reducing the impact of alacrity, you can actually allow other game mechanics to trigger it. Thus no longer the only way to profit from alacrity is attacking fast, giving inherent advantage to dual wielders. Look what is happening, shield attacks (basically passive on block attacks) will trigger it as well as damage reflection. What this is doing is introducing more ways to trigger alacrity. Only possible by first reducing alacrity's power. Otherwise alacrity will overpower the game mechanics. The upside is now you have multiple ways to benefit from alacrity; thus more build variety and more game stats becoming relevant. Reduce LoH value (don't know if this is coming) relative to life regen means have other viable path to stack recovery. Having procs not wholly dependent on attack speed will lead to more possible path to build characters. This is absolutely the right direction to take with this game, Right now the entire LB is filled with carbon copies of each other. Wouldn't it be more fun when ppl play differently and are still within 10% of each other if gears and skills and platforms are equal.

Once the core mechanics are "fixed", and allow for build variety and more importantly gear variety (this becomes easier to accomplish when multiple stats can have significant impact. I'm not talking about crit, cd, power, attack speed. those are just four inputs into the dps calculation. Rather I'm talking about getting 20% toughness has almost the same impact as 20% more DPS in the ways you can progress with this game. Then you have true variety, not just 5 different ways to generate 100 Mil DPS. This probably require additional game modes and co-op modes. But that's for future development and contingent on first having a solid core. Think D2's core engine as the model.

I really like one of the suggestions about having additional game modes that is tied to the existing game content/story mode. Here is my very rough idea on that.

Co-op dungeon/raid: keys or other rare drops that can open hidden dungeon... like writ's leg and cow level., there are tiers of dungeon. Let's say 4 players enter,
Difficulty: normal = mob lvl roughly equal the avg highest trial completed by the player - 5, 10% chance dungeon generates with +2 to trial lvl difficulty
Difficulty: heoric = mob lvl rough equal to avg highest trial completed by the player. 20% chance dungeon generates with +2 to trial difficulty
Difficulty: legendary = mob lvl roughly equal to highest trial completed by any player in the group. 30% chance dungeon generates with +2 to trial difficulty.
Difficulty: you are nuts = highest trial completion +5, 40% chance +2 to trial difficulty

For you are nuts: if that 40% chance triggers and the group succeeds in completing the raid, 4 Celestial box is rewarded and 4 custom legendary boxes (assume group of 4).
if it's just regular you are nuts, 1 celestial box is rewarded and players roll for it, 1 custom legendary box for everyone else

And reduced reward from the above on down.

to guard against ppl purposefully never enter trials or keep trials low in order to reduce the challenge of the mode, game can use CLs to estimate the trial levels the player should have completed. ie CL 2k should be trial 110 etc

[Dyoma]

I agree almost on everything besides on point 11, the personal request of Denis. Farming for jewellery again would make me quit.

https://forum.makingfun.com/forum/eternium/general-discussion-ab/91084-discord-conversation-with-red-08-mar-2018

https://forum.makingfun.com/forum/et...s-3-8-comments

That's what I'm saying. They promise Act 4, the city, multiplayer. Instead, they change mechanics again.