Introducing the PSO Rebalance Project: PSOBB REBORN

NDW said:
Removing Smartlink would render the traditional usage of the following weapon types to be less accurate:

Hunters - Handguns and slicers.
Forces - Handguns, slicers, rifles, and cards.

It would also make Dark Flow special attack less accurate.

My reaction to this is I wouldn't like it and would rather Smartlink be kept in the game.
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Its probably safe for now, however the balance of every weapon as well as the base stats of the classes involved are very different. I'm not going to rule anything out, but I don't currently have a problem with it ;3
 
If you want any semblance of balance, you have to seriously consider removing some of the new BB units, because Sega threw in a bunch of fanservice items that completely destroyed the game's balance.
 
One could argue that Smartlink is one of them, as it takes a key attribute of Rangers and gives it to the other jobs, although I would argue it's one of the less broken items, because it counteracts the ridiculous EVP values Sega used on monsters. A more sane approach would be to eliminate Smartlink and just fix monster EVP or character ATA, though, so that Rangers' lack of a range-based ATA penalty would be helpful, but not mandatory in order to use guns effectively on Hunters and Forces.

V501 and V502 are by far the worst, IMO. Not only does V502 make Hell ridiculously effective to the point where Forces are better off using Hell than Megid (wat?), but both units completely break special attacks. The point of a special is that you have the opportunity to inflict a useful status (paralysis, freeze, confusion), but this is balanced out by the fact that your attack might fail, in which case you're liable to get hit, or even killed. These units increase the activation rate so much that, combined with the already broken android bonus, they make success guaranteed, so instead of having to take a gamble on potentially incapacitating enemies vs just reliably NHHing them to death, your Arrest Needle turns into unlimited Freeze Traps.

Obviously this can be fun, but it's certainly not balanced. Sega's mindset for V4 was apparently that in order to attract players to their server-side PSU beta test, they would throw away the game balance reforms they made in V3 and instead offer up reductive solutions to some of people's complaints about previous versions. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this mindset better than the decision to just throw a bunch of formerly rare items into a "free ubers here" quest, rather than to spend any time or effort simply fixing the stupid drop rates on those items in Episode 1 and 2.
 
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Lol Sega did a lot of retarded stuff, but I think the idiotic drop rates are the one that bugs me the most. Ffs GM, MM, and DB are outclassed heavily by any charge type item already so like..what was their point even? Hell even lavis having a insane drop rate in places doesn't make sense since its outclassed by BKB, something you can pay for in a shop with PD's and farm the base weapon with hell. If the Lavis series was kept rare, I'd rebuff it's special to hard damage and make it stronger for the sheer difficulty of finding a good one and finding/having the syncestas.
 
Aleron Ives said:
One could argue that Smartlink is one of them, as it takes a key attribute of Rangers and gives it to the other jobs, although I would argue it's one of the less broken items, because it counteracts the ridiculous EVP values Sega used on monsters. A more sane approach would be to eliminate Smartlink and just fix monster EVP or character ATA, though, so that Rangers' lack of a range-based ATA penalty would be helpful, but not mandatory in order to use guns effectively on Hunters and Forces.
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This was mostly my intention to begin with, however since Smartlink only affects Hunters and Rangers and neither of those classes can use Mechguns (The extent of their benefits would be handguns and slicers, neither of which are extremely powerful) so i don't think Smartlink will be nearly as good as it is in original. I heard Smartlink increases ATA by the class' base amount. Do you know if this is true?

V501 and V502 are by far the worst, IMO. Not only does V502 make Hell ridiculously effective to the point where Forces are better off using Hell than Megid (wat?), but both units completely break special attacks. The point of a special is that you have the opportunity to inflict a useful status (paralysis, freeze, confusion), but this is balanced out by the fact that your attack might fail, in which case you're liable to get hit, or even killed. These units increase the activation rate so much that, combined with the already broken android bonus, they make success guaranteed, so instead of having to take a gamble on potentially incapacitating enemies vs just reliably NHHing them to death, your Arrest Needle turns into unlimited Freeze Traps.
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Indeed, special proc rates and the power of Hell are a serious problem in original. However I think I have solved the core problem here being that some weapon specials are too strong. Generally Instant Kill specials work less often and on far fewer targets (Most enemies of "champion" class or above cannot be instantly killed) and their activations are balanced around the bonuses provided by a V50X unit at higher difficulties. The same is true of crowd control specials.

This effectively means you use a V50X unit if you care about weapon specials, and you don't if you don't, allowing for more character customization of a sort, as well as serving as a barrier for classes that focus on ATA trying to trivialize harder content without investing in ATP.

Obviously this can be fun, but it's certainly not balanced. Sega's mindset for V4 was apparently that in order to attract players to their server-side PSU beta test, they would throw away the game balance reforms they made in V3 and instead offer up reductive solutions to some of people's complaints about previous versions. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this mindset better than the decision to just throw a bunch of formerly rare items into a "free ubers here" quest, rather than to spend any time or effort simply fixing the stupid drop rates on those items in Episode I and 2.
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Colette said:
Lol Sega did a lot of retarded stuff, but I think the idiotic drop rates are the one that bugs me the most. Ffs GM, MM, and DB are outclassed heavily by any charge type item already so like..what was their point even? Hell even lavis having a insane drop rate in places doesn't make sense since its outclassed by BKB, something you can pay for in a shop with PD's and farm the base weapon with hell. If the Lavis series was kept rare, I'd rebuff it's special to hard damage and make it stronger for the sheer difficulty of finding a good one and finding/having the syncestas.
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The issue of drop rates is also one major reason why I am doing this project as the drop rates for items in PSO can be asininely low which especially hurts when you are trying to get a step on the item rarity ladder to start solving the massive monster EVP jump between Vhard and Ultimate.

Obviously I am tackling this issue from more angles than just drop rates, but that is an important part of it.

Generally item rarity in Reborn follows a soft curve based on the items actual rarity which is now an actual descriptor of how good the item is (rather than the seemingly random distribution of rarity for items in original.)

If the item is 9 stars, it will be reasonably common.

If it is 13 stars you will be lucky to see a single one in your lifetime.

And rarities between those generally follow a curve between those points, with items of higher rarity progressively harder to find.

The goal here being providing a clear item progression later in the game (where one didn't really exist before) while providing chase items for heavily invested players that aren't required to beat the game but provide significant bonuses if you can obtain them.

After the monster rework I will be revisiting the drop table as I have made some core item changes as well as shuffling certain rare items around. Look forward to hearing more about that when I finally get round to it. I can tell you right off the bat though that items in the "free ubers here" quest definitely aren't 13 star rarity, or even 11 stars ;3
 
As far as I know, Hunters and Forces lose ATA over distance, meaning that the further an enemy is away, the less accurate your attack gets. Smartlink eliminates that. There is no "fixed" bonus or something like that.
 
Fire AKA Drazn said:
I know the interface doesn't display past 12
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Exactly, but not only the interface... the game completely ignores all stars above 12 unless patched.

I don't remember right now but if the ship doesn't do the same, certain things that use stars could break.
 
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Aleron Ives said:
One could argue that Smartlink is one of them, as it takes a key attribute of Rangers and gives it to the other jobs, although I would argue it's one of the less broken items, because it counteracts the ridiculous EVP values Sega used on monsters. A more sane approach would be to eliminate Smartlink and just fix monster EVP or character ATA, though, so that Rangers' lack of a range-based ATA penalty would be helpful, but not mandatory in order to use guns effectively on Hunters and Forces.

V501 and V502 are by far the worst, IMO. Not only does V502 make Hell ridiculously effective to the point where Forces are better off using Hell than Megid (wat?), but both units completely break special attacks. The point of a special is that you have the opportunity to inflict a useful status (paralysis, freeze, confusion), but this is balanced out by the fact that your attack might fail, in which case you're liable to get hit, or even killed. These units increase the activation rate so much that, combined with the already broken android bonus, they make success guaranteed, so instead of having to take a gamble on potentially incapacitating enemies vs just reliably NHHing them to death, your Arrest Needle turns into unlimited Freeze Traps.

Obviously this can be fun, but it's certainly not balanced. Sega's mindset for V4 was apparently that in order to attract players to their server-side PSU beta test, they would throw away the game balance reforms they made in V3 and instead offer up reductive solutions to some of people's complaints about previous versions. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this mindset better than the decision to just throw a bunch of formerly rare items into a "free ubers here" quest, rather than to spend any time or effort simply fixing the stupid drop rates on those items in Episode I and 2.
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Arguably they also added a few things to make the game a bit harder that balances this out a bit. (Emphasis on "a bit")

1) Less invincibility frames after getting knocked over (I heard someone mention this).

2) Stupid shit like lizards and astarks (lizards block ranged attacks, and astarks have enough range to punch you from the backline)

3) Gorans that teleport around, and Detonators that teleport around AND hit you from ridiculous range.

Probably more I'm missing.

When I was a GC player I thought all the new ep4 items were dumb. When I actually played the game seriously, they seem kind of necessary in this version.
 
Soly said:
Exactly, but not only the interface... the game completely ignores all stars above 12 unless patched.

I don't remember right now but if the ship doesn't do the same, certain things that use stars could break.
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Thats fine, nothing im doing relies on the stars themselves, and changing their rarity won't affect their stats or actual drop rate, so its probably fine.

falkenjeff said:
Arguably they also added a few things to make the game a bit harder that balances this out a bit. (Emphasis on "a bit")

1) Less invincibility frames after getting knocked over (I heard someone mention this).

2) Stupid shit like lizards and astarks (lizards block ranged attacks, and astarks have enough range to punch you from the backline)

3) Gorans that teleport around, and Detonators that teleport around AND hit you from ridiculous range.

Probably more I'm missing.

When I was a GC player I thought all the new ep4 items were dumb. When I actually played the game seriously, they seem kind of necessary in this version.
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This is part of the reason why I made Ep4 basically optional ;3
 
falkenjeff said:
1) Less invincibility frames after getting knocked over
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This is not true. You get one frame of respite in Ultimate on both V3 and V4. The only difference is that a vanilla BB client is bugged and doesn't give you the proper two-second duration of respite in solo mode to match the duration in GC offline.


falkenjeff said:
2) Stupid shit like lizards and astarks (lizards block ranged attacks, and astarks have enough range to punch you from the backline)
3) Gorans that teleport around, and Detonators that teleport around AND hit you from ridiculous range.
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I would argue that these are not about making V4 harder than V3. They're about nerfing the massive Ranger blowjob that is Episode II. Episode II has Sinow Berill/Spigell/Zoa/Zele after all, enemies that warp away when you melee them, but bounce around like a ping pong ball indefinitely and pose no threat whatsoever if you use a gun to kill them. Gorans are the opposite: they troll you when you use guns and are much less annoying when you melee. Lizards are the same way. Between the obscene EVP in Episode II and the slew of enemies that are infinitely easier to kill with guns than blades, Episode IV was designed to balance out the terribly biased design of the previous one. Episode I can be seen as the Hunter episode, but it's not like Rangers are trash in Episode I the way Hunters are in Episode II.

That doesn't mean that Episode IV isn't a troll of its own, though. It's pretty obvious that it wasn't planned from the start, so it has weird shit like Goran Detonators, only two areas, and only one boss. It still managed to bring in plenty of players to test Sega's first attempt at doing a server-sided online game, though. I guess after the fiasco that was the release of PSOv1, they figured more thorough testing was a good idea before releasing PSU.
 
Aleron Ives said:
one frame
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Wut? Define "one frame."

Because you have enough time to cast basically any tech. If you fall down, you're safe using resta even if you're surrounded. You don't need to use a mate. And I'm pretty sure casting resta... is more than one frame? (I generally have enough time to cast resta and move a tiny bit)
 
You get one second after you stand up and one frame when you take a hit without falling down. That's why everything chains you to death when you get enough HP to not fall down anymore.
 
There's a lot to sift through here and so I just want to state a thought I had reading the design manifesto and hope it hasn't been redone and killed. You say you're removing lightning and fire specials, because you can't make them useful. Is it not enough to have lightning as the only way to "paralyze" machine enemies? It seems to me to be a perfectly fine tradeoff, especially if you gear the elemental damage to work like it does with techs, where the element is actually useful if the opponent is weak to it(maybe make it deal like 120% hard damage to begin with and then apply the resistances of the creature?). For fire, could you set the system to put the poison effect like from episode 2 poison rooms with just a fire icon? I could see that as a really good "burning" mechanic.
 
TMUnreal said:
There's a lot to sift through here and so I just want to state a thought I had reading the design manifesto and hope it hasn't been redone and killed. You say you're removing lightning and fire specials, because you can't make them useful. Is it not enough to have lightning as the only way to "paralyze" machine enemies? It seems to me to be a perfectly fine tradeoff, especially if you gear the elemental damage to work like it does with techs, where the element is actually useful if the opponent is weak to it(maybe make it deal like 120% hard damage to begin with and then apply the resistances of the creature?). For fire, could you set the system to put the poison effect like from episode 2 poison rooms with just a fire icon? I could see that as a really good "burning" mechanic.
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You raise an interesting point about paralyzing machine enemies, but I don't think I have control over how often that effect would trigger, potentially making it still not a very good special (and atleast a very situational one.) It also has the issue that compared to Freeze there isn't much of a competition to begin with.

Perhaps If i figure out how it's damage mechanics work, and if I am actually able to control it with the tools I have, Ill look into making Lightning a useful special for its situational bonus and its abilty to do damage along side that.

Fire on the other hand, I'd love to add another status effect but I don't currently have the tools to do so. Maybe in the future. This issue is fairly low on my priority list though ;3
 
Did a rewrite of the manifesto. Should be easier to read, especially at a glance and has been updated to include new items such as:

The merging of Online quests into the Solo game, instead of providing an EXP bonus to solo mode.

the reduction of weapon % totals to 20% (Including HIT) reducing their relevancy from an absolute requirement to a useful and important bonus.

The second change will require changing the quests where you can pay to improve weapon %s. Any advice on how to do this will be appreciated, but is something I am currently looking into myself.
 
Why do male fleshies need to carry telepipes? lol

(Not that it matters, it's your project/server)
 
falkenjeff said:
Why do male fleshies need to carry telepipes? lol

(Not that it matters, it's your project/server)
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Better defines the tech focused "fleshies" as being tech focused ;3

Mostly a fluff change anyway, telepipes are a problem for your first 40 levels, and then are an irrelevancy
 
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