Combat System Changes Dossier Pt. 2

Greetings, Saviors!

Following up on our QnA sessions about the ‘Plans for Combat System Changes’, we're continuing with a series of posts offering more detailed information on each aspect of the game's revised contents.

Today’s discussion will focus on the changes that are coming to the basic and combat stats of characters, as well as the role of accuracy and evasion, block and critical.

---

1. How will stats be organized and how will the stat system work?

STR, INT, CON, SPR and DEX will continue to form the set of basic stats that you can freely increase using the points you receive every time you level up. These basic stats, combined with the influence of your level, rank, items, buffs, etc. will contribute along with the variables of your physical attack, magic attack, accuracy, critical rate, etc. to form your final combat stats.

Here’s an overview of the stat system changes:

2. In what way will the efficacy of attack stats increase?

As you likely know, in TOS there are two types of attack, physical and magic, which are calculated independently and increased by the STR and INT stats, respectively. If so far STR (INT) increased +1 of physical (magic) attack at a time, now these stats will increase attack +2 at a time.

The following skill attack chart, which includes some of what we’ll be discussing more in-depth on our next post in the Dossier series, summarizes the influence of attack stats on your final attack values.

In the current setup, the skill factor comprises all of the additional damage, so the higher you level up (along with your skill damage and item attack), the less your attack stats will be worth, comparatively. This can cause physical attack characters to lean towards full DEX builds, while magic attack characters, not receiving any effect from DEX in their attacks, often bit the bullet and either invest in INT or go full CON for a tank-like build.

Having STR and INT go from +1 to +2 may not seem like a big difference, but when you account for the new skill calculations, the influence of these stats in attack increases significantly. Forgoing STR and INT to invest in your items while picking only utility skills will, of course, continue to be a feasible type of build, but after the big changes STR and INT will certainly be worth more than before. We’re confident that at least you won’t feel fooled by the stat tutorial NPC in West Siauliai Woods going “STR is for Swordsmen!”…

3. How will CON and SPR relate to HP and SP?

CON and SPR will continue to increase HP and SP respectively, but the extent to which they do so will depend on the character’s class, level and stats.

As far as class goes, max. HP and max. SP will increase as such (assuming characters of the same level and stats):

With the new changes, we expect any total amount of HP you have to be enough for your character. Because of the revised damage formulas, it’s a lot more difficult to become almost invincible no matter how high your defense is, and every little bit of damage counts. This will also, we hope, help avoid situations where a character becomes incapable of combat after one or two hits for having low HP.

SP, on the other hand, is going to become a bigger necessity. A few skills may have gained some degree of SPR efficiency, but in general, if you want to use skills more than your average character, you’re going to have to invest at least a little in SPR (whether through stats or items). Alternatively, you can start relying on SP potions, since you’ll be able to use more than one at a time.

4. What will change about critical rate and resistance/chance?

A lot of things are changing about the basic stats and their purpose, but to physical attack characters, the biggest change is probably in the use of DEX.

If currently DEX increases accuracy, evasion and critical rate, after the changes it will increase a whole different set of factors: attack speed, evasion, block penetration and critical attack. Also, apart from the standard increments you get from leveling up, there will be no way to increase your critical rate or resistance by investing in a basic stat.

With TOS’ current combat formulas, it’s not that difficult to reach nearly full critical attack, if you focus on DEX and collect all the extra critical rate factors from items, skills and buffs. As far as your DPS goes, after level 50 (even with a level 45 weapon), STR and INT tend to become progressively less significant, while the critical rate you can get from DEX allows you to increase your attack by a certain percentage with almost every hit, which makes this stat a lot more appealing to Archers in particular.

[Stat distribution by class tree - data collected from recently active characters on Steam] 

Any seasoned player of TOS will be familiar with game guides advocating full DEX builds for physical attack characters; and for good reason, as they have allowed for 100% accuracy and very high degrees of evasion.

Because of this situation, we concluded that it was best not to leave this up to personal stat customization and instead decided to remove critical rate from DEX and critical resistance from CON.

This is the new critical rate formula we’re using:

critical chance = (max(0, critical rate – critical resistance)) ^ 0.6

To this formula you can add all the other chance-increasing values to calculate your final critical chance. Unlike in the current version of the game, you won’t be able to have all your attacks be critical, but you’re going to get a bigger increase in critical attack from DEX than the one you currently get from STR (changed from +2 to +4).

[Chances of hitting critical according to the difference of critical rate and resistance]

Basic critical chance will come from the difference between the attacker’s critical rate and the target’s critical resistance. There will be a standard increase according to the level of the character or monster, but that difference will not exist when both individuals are of the same level. Unlike attack, since critical chance is determined by this difference, if an item offers +20 critical rate for example, this factor will be worth the same at both low and high levels.

The relative effect of +50 critical rate from a full set of leather armor, then, will also carry over regardless of your level. Along with this, we’re changing the critical rate increase obtained through skills and buffs from a percentage value to a fixed +/- one. A good example would be the Swift Step: Critical Rate attribute, where the increase was changed from +5% to +30 per attribute level.

We do feel like our choices regarding the critical chance formula and the items and skills with critical chance and resistance were a little conservative in these new combat changes. On the other hand, we are aware that there are classes which rely on critical attack and we understand the value of Yellow Gems is important, which is why we added critical rate options to all the new Hunting Grounds 270 and 315 physical attack weapons, and we’ll continue to apply similar options to new items, skills and attributes.

5. What changes can we expect in terms of evasion and block?

First, we changed the evasion calculation formula in the same way we did with critical; like so:

evasion chance = (max(0, evasion – accuracy)) ^ 0.65

The factors are slightly different, but here the final evasion rate is also calculated from the difference between the attacker’s accuracy and the target’s evasion, and just like it happens with critical rate/resistance, accuracy/evasion factors remain relatively valuable regardless of the character’s level.

This, in fact, is one of the reasons why we decided to remove accuracy and evasion from gloves and boots. With the new changes applied, armor items will only increase your basic defense, and to a degree that is appropriate for your own level (in any case, it’s not like accuracy gloves were of much use to magic characters anyway…).

As for the block calculation formula, no surprises here:

block chance = (max(0, block – block penetration)) ^ 0.7

We used a very similar calculation to the other two introduced in this post. Block rates are therefore determined from the difference between block resistance and block penetration, with the final rate also being influenced by buffs or the Peltasta’s Shield Guard, for example.

Here we’d like to note that, the reason why evasion and block factors are going to increase with stat investment while critical won’t, is because the former two do not have the side effect of significantly amplifying your DPS. Plus, they do not produce any results with a magic attack target, since they rely on the side that is receiving the attack.

Also, we’d like to clarify that the critical, evasion and block factors we discussed here are not related to magic attack. Magic attack naturally applies to all kinds of targets, the way it has always been in TOS. Magic attack players therefore have it relatively easier when it comes to deciding their attack stat distribution, but on the other hand they also gain no bonus from it. This is a feature that we do not intend to change.