Supporter newsletter 66

Issue
This is a copy of Eternal and Diamond Supporter Newsletter #66, published by Grinding Gear Games.

Hello Supporters,

I hope you all got a chance to play in the Two Week Charity Race. The event was one of our most successful races. This week we’ll be looking at the stats from the event (and making an infographic), as well as preparing for Season Eight (looking to start 7 June).

This week, Nick is going to discuss one of the unique items coming in 1.1.4.

- Carl

Soul Strike

Back in issue 54 of this newsletter we discussed a couple of quivers. One was a dexterity-themed quiver purpose-built to enable off-class bow users. That came out a couple patches ago as Hyrri's Bite. The other, a quiver built for Chaos Inoculation builds, is coming out next patch. Back then it looked like this:

CI Quiver

Serrated Arrow Quiver

Critical Strikes trigger Energy Shield Recovery

+120 Energy Shield

30 Dexterity

x-y Added Chaos Damage

8-12% increased Attack Speed

8-12% increased Cast Speed

Wow. Much Chaos. So Resist. Very Recover.

- Shibinu, The Doge of Sarn

(Obviously this flavour text was temporary, but we still received hate mail.)

Now it looks something more like this - http://i.imgur.com/f5Ra83N.png

In text, with ranges:

Soul Strike

Serrated Arrow Quiver

150% Reduced Energy Shield Recovery Cooldown

+100-120 Energy Shield

30 Dexterity

(13-18)-(26-32) Added Chaos Damage

8-12% increased Attack Speed

40% reduced Energy Shield Recharge rate

In this chaotic world

The rewards of the soul

Outlast the rewards of the flesh.

You'll notice, beyond the cosmetic changes, a few mechanical differences. For example, your ES will no longer instantly start recovering after a crit, which was the main mechanic of the early version.

We really loved that mechanic, but beyond some power concerns, there were worries about how such a stat would function between the server and the client. Specifically, when your attack crits, it's the server that knows first. So the server would start to regenerate your ES before your game client even knows whether or not the attack has landed. If you're taking damage as you're attacking, there's a chance that you'd take enough damage to kill you on the client but not, due to the ES that regenerated from a critical strike, on the server.

That means it'll look like you've died on your client, but the server will think you're just standing around doing nothing (or, more likely, still taking damage until you actually DO die on the server). This is one of the worst possible cases of desync, so we had to do away with this mechanic for now.

Instead, we've added a massive reduction in the cooldown of ES. With Soul Strike equipped, it should take about 2 seconds rather than 6 for ES recovery to begin. That's very strong, so we had to reduce the overall speed of ES recovery to compensate.

The increased cast speed is also gone. I'm not entirely sure why it was there to begin with. Probably because Rory is crazy (or, more accurately, because we wanted to provide some benefit to bow-users that supplemented their attacks with spells, curses, totems etc…).

Functionally, though, the main difference between the version that's due out soon and the version we posted weeks and weeks ago are the builds that will use it. The crit version, while theoretically very strong, suited a narrow type of builds (crit!), and benefitted from high aggression. The release version benefits a much wider set of players, and benefits from high-mobility, evasion, or line-of-site exploitation—whatever gets you out of danger for a couple seconds.

It's an interesting example of how a technical limitation (discussed last week!) can cause a slight mechanical change, and how that change can impact the overall feel and function of an item.

Insider Info

Continuing our run of concept art for different characters, this week we have Hyrri:

http://i.imgur.com/GyGsUTe.jpg

She isn’t in full battle dress in this image, but that belt sure looks interesting.

- Carl