B5 to B6 Pain Points

[larvacea]

Would "Remove and Restore Power" ...

hot-key J removes or restores power, I'm happy to say. I would miss hot-key O (fortifications) but I can understand that in the event of active defenders that could get frustrating. I would be delighted to have Drink and Eat hot-keys for great grinding happiness. I really, really like the hot-key T behavior of selecting that piece of UI but not actually shooting the extra valuable potion on the floor. This also makes it super easy to set up my bottle of booze as a target in place of that extra valuable potion. I do not need a hot-key for speak: advertise the wonders of Advanced Thrown Weapons.

[Thenixon]

1.) Spawn plane priority. It feels like many skills and choices that feed in to this, but then most of them get overridden by what, pact use and faction alignment? Even when using one of the skills that supposedly override? I can't even figure out why my characters appear where they do half the time. I feel like the factors could be clarified in one place, and if there's a skill that offers an 'override' for character points it should be the final say unless the manual very clearly states that ['Pact use overrides this']. I really don't think faction membership should override transcension/empyreal/hellspawn.

2.) Transcended infusion - Transcended characters infuse to their morality, not their selected alignment. Morality is hard to control and a pain in the butt to transcended, since most strategies of play tend you towards evil. If you're a transcended character and want to join team evil fine, make a choice and actively select an evil faction then do your evil - and do it well. But unfactioned transcended should be pushing neutrality no matter what Namm thinks about their actions. They chose carefully joining T2, and a flippant decision to break a door at -19.9 MO should not override that.

[Kandarin]

So this thread was started in search for clearly-actionable stuff with fairly simple solutions, and we are serious about implementing things from it. It's worth saying that B6 is going to have to be pretty light on mechanics changes. Various things that happened in 2024 significantly reduced the ability of effectively every member of devteam to participate here for reasons both good and bad, and that's adjusted our sense of what's plausible accordingly. A recent dev call and discussions since have focused on trying to get consensus on what we can do in the short term.

I realize what's a simple solution and what isn't isn't always obvious from outside the codebase.

I think one of my biggest problems with PMs is their inability to use their pets against NPCs currently. I understand NPCs will probably not be introduced at B6 start, but will most likely be introduced as the breath progresses. My suggestion is that Titan pets (assuming they and pets in general aren't reworked significantly) can target NPCs.

A planned update is to make NPCs possible pet targets, but make attacks on NPCs cost meaningfully more pet MP than attacks on PCs and pets. This is so you can attack NPCs if they're what you find while hunting, but without petmasters just insta-sterilizing the map. We can adjust this "higher cost" number up or down to get the desired degree of accessibility.

Fairly minor complaints on my part;I've been quite pleased with this Breath.

1. The ease of solo raiding - I think it's no secret that some classes are a bit overtuned, but I feel characters shouldn't normally be able to break a ward AND kill half a dozen people inside in an AP cycle. Solo wardbreaking is fine; I wouldn't want to have to coordinate recaps with someone else if I'm a combat class, but I'd expect the basher to be mostly tuckered out after that. I'd suggest pushing bash buffs over to spellcasters try to require more balanced raid teams, but some of the solo raiders are already spellcasters, so maybe just remove them altogether if the classes' outputs are already high enough?
2. Enchanted weapons - I was one of the biggest champions of nerfing enchantments, and I would still prefer to see innates (and mundanes!) be on par with them, but I recognize that the nerf hit a little too hard. Even if the numbers still work out, the convoluted nature of employing them killed most of my desire to use them. Activation is a great idea, but I found myself wanting my MP for other things slightly more. Perhaps lowering the activation cost would help that, but I think the main obstacle to their use were the comparable innates that most classes had. Maybe stripping some of those would push certain classes to be expected to use enchanted weapons and keep the market for their enchanters consistent.

I'd be curious which classes and builds you still see soloing the ward followed by clearing in 2025. We had thought that was mainly IB and that rebalances had addressed that.

As per a recent dev call, in a pending update enchanted weapon activation is going away, though there'll still be a cost of another kind. We're hopeful that this will make enchanted weapons more accessible.

1) Pet decay
I wish all petmasters worked similar to the Ele with a cap and no decay, liches could have a much higher cap for ghouls/skellies like 30 for example (both pets would share the same cap)

The dev team generally likes the idea of replacing decay with caps for primary petmasters, though implementing this might be a breath-change thing depending on the schedule of the dev taking this on.

3) Map size
While this breath the map was a pretty good size, I tend to favor smaller maps so people are more likely to run into each other etc. While it is interesting to have some remote places I don't like too many of them. My least favorite parts of this map are both Shrek ears in Cord and a lot of Purg in general.

B6 isn't going to reuse any B5 maps; at the same time there aren't any plans to rework B5 maps between now and breath end. B6 Valhalla does something really, really different than prior Nexus maps and does it as a core feature.

1.) Spawn plane priority. It feels like many skills and choices that feed in to this, but then most of them get overridden by what, pact use and faction alignment? Even when using one of the skills that supposedly override? I can't even figure out why my characters appear where they do half the time. I feel like the factors could be clarified in one place, and if there's a skill that offers an 'override' for character points it should be the final say unless the manual very clearly states that ['Pact use overrides this']. I really don't think faction membership should override transcension/empyreal/hellspawn.

2.) Transcended infusion - Transcended characters infuse to their morality, not their selected alignment. Morality is hard to control and a pain in the butt to transcended, since most strategies of play tend you towards evil. If you're a transcended character and want to join team evil fine, make a choice and actively select an evil faction then do your evil - and do it well. But unfactioned transcended should be pushing neutrality no matter what Namm thinks about their actions. They chose carefully joining T2, and a flippant decision to break a door at -19.9 MO should not override that.

The former is a bug with a pending fix.

The latter - sure, that's a thing we can do, and it makes sense. That said, it affects a one-digit number of active characters - factionless transcends are pretty rare.