Today we’d like to give you an early heads-up on our ongoing and latest work to balance items within the game.
The Challenge:
Because RoR is a project that many devs have contributed to over many years, a number of items in the game were built at different points, with different rule-sets, throughout the project’s history. This has resulted in some items having many more stat points than they should, and others having far less than they should.
Additionally, the weight of certain stats was historically calculated with different values. To help address this, late last year the team had a series of meetings to determine new weights for each stat point, which better reflect their actual value.
The Solution:
To unify and fix these issues, this year the team will be updating item values throughout the game to balance the stat weighting and update to the new values.
Summed up, this means:
- Items which have historically been too weak (like the Genesis Shard) are going to be getting buffed later this year.
- - Items which are too strong for their level will see nerfs or adjustments to better balance them.
- - These changes will also add values for Procs and set bonuses, meaning that the bonus values on a number of item sets will also be changing. This will eventually include the Triumphant and Victorious sets, and due to the high War Crest cost associated with the ring in these sets, we’ll share additional information once we determine what these adjustments will be.
For Weapons, Procs (the extra trait or effect) historically did not count as having any value or weight in item calculation. This was a bit strange, as having extra damage, absorbs, etc is most certainly valuable for players, so many weapons with Procs will still retain those, but will see their stats reduced to balance this added benefit. Across the board, mid to end-game Weapon stats will generally be going down.
How we Calculate Stats:
Next, let’s dive a little into how the new system works. Most readers probably won’t care much past this point, but for anyone curious about how we’re arriving at the new numbers per item, we’d like to share how we get there.
- First, we calculate the amount of stats based on the Item Level of a specific item. Historically, these were all over the place, with random, made-up item levels being used and stats that often didn’t match at all. As part of these updates, item levels will change to become accurate to the stat values on a piece of gear.
- - Second, we add in Item Rarity. This one’s also simple: the higher the rarity of the item, the more of a bump it gets to the overall stats.
- - Finally, if you’re a lower level player, we factor in a Scaling System that makes the cost of certain stats a bit cheaper. This is because at lower levels, the value of certain stats are different than for a level 40 character. For example, 10 Strength increases a player’s damage proportionally more at level 10 than it does at level 40, which is not the case for Melee Crit. The result is that you will see higher values of stats such as Crit, Parry etc on lower level items.
More news to come!
That’s all for this initial look and heads-up, but as we expect this item rebalancing to make some adjustments to many items in the game this year, we wanted to give an early heads-up that it was coming. In the meantime, if you have questions or thoughts, we welcome those here on the thread. Thanks for reading!
