Tonight was a bit of back and forth. I did some games in the Shikishima (and got some decent video material thankfully) and spent the last few games in the Shimakaze. Overall a good night. I’m just hoping I can get Premier running smoothly on my pc again so I can get some more videos together. Not just for WoWs but in general.
During the development of M.A.S.S. Builder, we’ve seen players create an uncountable amount of M.A.S.S. units. One of them being thematically elemental robots has always caused distress to players with how property damages work in our game, conflicting their interest in making these "God of Thu…
Vermillion is always ready to address some very specific gripes from the M.A.S.S. Builder playerbase. This one’s interesting to me personally because I’ve also felt downright compelled to mix in all damage types and not lean too heavily into any specific themes.
I play on Very Hard, leave me alone.
I don’t know anything about “God of Thunder Swordmaster Machines” or “Fire Breathing Dragon M.A.S.S.” but I do know that if I had things my way, my builds would mostly include normal and fire based damage, with lightning where it’s appropriate. The ice element doesn’t fit into most of my design themes and yet I always have it somewhere just to balance out the weapons. It usually goes on chainguns or missiles because that sticks out the least for me.
Here’s where things are currently heading:
Removed elemental disadvantages from the game, there are now only either neutral or advantage with property damages.
Every enemy now has almost the same property damage resistance with every property damage. Property advantages will only result in around 5% to 10% more damage when correct element is used now. Players who bring multiple elements can still take advantage of it, but they aren’t forced to or be punished now.
Architecture and tech nodes now make property damage much more effective than before. Players who don’t invest in property damage will now have around 30% less damage when using weapons with property damage in comparison to raw damage while those investing an architecture node (such as Revenant) will make this number back to 0% less damage. This should allow players to specifically use Architectures and Tech nodes to counter the lowered damage and perform as well as other methods of play through property debuffs.
Balance special debuffs to match the new powers as best as we can.
M.A.S.S. type enemies (including in PvP) is not effected by any status effects, but their property damage resistance are now lower than Quarks.
My original thought was to make elemental disadvantage less noticeable generally by shifting the damage gap more to the right (less damage reduction for disadvantage and more for advantage), but that idea wasn’t node based, it was more of a universal game tweak.
The more I think about it while looking over the notes, the more I prefer Vermillion’s approach. Customization through the node system is a better way to go, and makes use of more of the game’s mechanics. This, as opposed to just tweaking values universally which could inadvertently push the node system well past what the devs intended.
Of course, they’re aware that certain elements in PvE can get wildly overtuned very easily:
Now your question might be, “What if one property is extremely effective in PvE, how will you fix this? It’s always a problem of either too strong or too weak with their special effects like BURN being meta once again?”
We’d like to answer that with “Let them be too strong, as M.A.S.S. Builder development has been going on, we don’t think balance is required in PvE. Players must be able fulfill their fantasy and have fun with the game. To the abyss with balancing, fun comes first.”
And they’ve promptly chucked that concern out a window. My feelings on that were mixed until I thought back on games at the far end of the spectrum (New Gundam Breaker). Things could get silly, but that won’t detract from the fun as a whole, and if it starts to, Vermillion will do what they always do and quickly address it.
I’ve never been so glad to have a short break from everything. It’s been a rough week and I need at least a day to recharge.
Everything’s still on track as far as I can tell. I’ll either do a general update on Sunday or save that for next week. Those seem like they should be either in the middle of the month or toward the end and right now I’m leaning middle of the month.
I’ve had to reinstall or reconfigure so many things in the last 24 hours I’m too drained to even ‘rage’ about it. I’m just … tired. So tired. I’m still catching up on things on the side but today was mostly putting files on my computer back in order and testing.
As of this writing, I’m still in the middle of that.
On the bright side, I guess I accomplished my goal? I freed up more than 100gb on the C: drive, which is great. I didn’t learn anything that would actually be useful later on, though. That’s the awful part. Normally when I’m having technical issues, they last just long enough for me to pick up some useful information I can use later on. That way it doesn’t feel like a waste of an entire day. This is just a case of using a workaround I already know and hate and picking up the pieces afterward.
Anyway, that’s all there is for today, so back to it.
Sadly there was no fighting in space. Clan Battles was pretty fun tonight. I actually started out in the Shikishima and only swapped over to the Yamato once W-P-A’s Phoenix showed up (I’m W-P-O’s Phoenix). We like to pair up these ships when we can get away with it and tonight was one of those nights. Lots of stupid, high-calibur fun and nonsense.
Footage
I got a bit more footage but the update is tomorrow so I don’t know if I’ll have time to record the better games for posterity. Pains will be taken and efforts will be made.