[5/7/2020] Meina’s Distorted Desire

Introduction

The long awaited Amigo post after the LAN Amigo has finally come.
Not all the changes they mentioned during the LAN Amigo are in this post. Actually some were slightly changed as well.

Here’s a Summary of the changes the post will discuss about:

Summary:

• Meina, Glenn, Jola has a chance of respawning as a stronger version of itself.
• Skills changed for Archery, Sorcery, Malediction, Battlerage, and Swiftblade.
• Percentage stats – like Evasion – that is gained by player’s base stats have been slightly changed.
• Language Proficiency has been increased to 20k. (No longer will have symbols.)
• 3rd season of Mistsong Banquet is out.

Stronger Meina, Glenn, and Jola

These three bosses are familiar names for the players. They used to be formidable bosses against the players, but now the players have become too strong and these bosses don’t really challenge the players anymore. Now these bosses have a chance of respawning upon death as a stronger version of itself and drops better loot so behold!

Meina and Glenn

Unfortunately they don’t really mention the new patterns it might have so it is up to the KR players to figure out what they do.

Jola

Like Meina and Glenn, there only talked about the lore of these new bosses. So there’s not much to mention about. If you want to know the lore, let me know and I’ll translate them as well.

Skill Balance Changes:

Archery

The changes are roughly what they mentioned how Archery would shape into during the LAN Amigo.

The intention the Archery changes are the following:

• Focusing on changing the fighting style by making it more movement oriented with some CC skills.
• Improving ways to counter situations when the opponents are untargettable and improved methods of chasing the opponent.
• Adding more skill combos and expanding Archery to become usable by itself.

Skill	Changes
Concussive Arrow (Includes Ancestral Skills)	Combo: 17% increased damage against snared targets.
Double Recurve	(All Ancestrals) While in effect, Concussive Arrow becomes instantly castable. (Life) 3% Crit Rate increase for 3 seconds.
Snipe	(All Ancestrals) Combo: When hit, stuns flying targets for 5 seconds. (All Ancestrals) Combo: 21% increased damage against snared targets. (Lightning) Changed so that it can be used during casting. (Like how flame concussive arrow works.)
Missile Rain	(Basic) Changed to a 5 charge skill that can be used on targeted location. (Mist) Can be used without targeting an enemy.
Deadeye	Name changed to Hit & Run (Liberal Translation). While moving, player receives the def pen buff. When stationary for 1 second, the buff is removed. No longer gains range increase buff
Steady Shooting	Cannot shoot targets closer than 4m. No longer walks while skill is on. (Players still have 0% parry, block, and evasion.)

Possible new combo: Hit & Run, Steady Shooting, Stealth (10 stack), 30m Snare, Stalker’s Mark, Double Recurve, Concussive Arrow, 3x Blazing Arrow, Charged Bolt.

Sorcery and Malediction

Malediction was always in the discussion of skill balance, because it had great damage and also was able to adapt on many sticky situations. As the developers are aiming to separate Sorcery and Malediction, they can’t just simply nerf Malediction as well. This patch won’t solve all the problems, but XL is trying to form an environment where both skill-sets can be used separately by removing the synergy between the two skill-sets.

Skill	Changes
Soulbound Edge	Removed Combo effect that gains increased damage with Malicious Binding. Prioritizes targets within 20m that are hit by Crashing Waves.
Ring Throw	Reduced skill range to 5m (from 10m). Cannot be used on targets that are behind you.
Flamebolt (Flame)	Casting time changed to 1s (from 1.5s). Reduced damage based on the casting time change. (Roughly 33% reduced per hit.)
Arc Lightning	46% increased damage against targets that are affected by Burning, Freezing, and Electrical Shock. Removed existing 70% Crit Skill damage increase.
Mana Fountain	Removed Attack Speed increase effect. Decreases Cast Time 25% (from 15%). When equipped with 2H weapon, reduces Global Cool Down (GCD) for Sorcery skills by 10%.

Battlerage and Swiftblade

Luckily the synergy between Battlerage and Swiftblade isn’t as great as Sorcery and Malediction due to Swiftblade utilizing the Left hand weapon. At this moment, it it not strong enough as a DPS skill-set itself, so users currently incorporate it with Battlerage. In the future, the Dual Wield Swiftblade users will be able to rely less on Battlerage.

Skill	Changes
Battlerage Trip effects	When equipped 2H weapon, trip increased to 3.5s (from 3s). When equipped 1H weapon or Dual Wield, trip reduced to 2.5s (from 3s).
Blink (Includes Ancestral Skills)	Can use the skill during GCD while in effect of Fleeting Footsteps. (Fleeting Footsteps buff doesn’t remove while using Blink during Combo effect)

Miscellaneous Skill-sets

Skill	Changes
Backdrop: Wave	Removed Concussive Arrow instant cast.
Enervate	While on effect, target cannot receive buffs from songs.
Critical Discord (Includes Ancestral Skills)	While under effect of Discord, target cannot use Shield related skills.
Pain Harvest	Immune to Bleeding while caster is under effect.
Mettle	Bear’s Vigor gains 5% of received damage as Mettle (from 10%). Boastful Roar deals damage equal to 100% of your stacked Mettle (from 60%). Mocking Howl increased threat level by 500% of your stacked Mettle (from 100%).
Shield Slam: Gale	Cool Down reduced to 2s (from 4s). Removed effect that cancels target’s skill cast.

Percentage Stats

Like mentioned in the LAN Amigo, the devs can no longer increase percentage stats that are gained by base stats as they are reaching its limits. As a result, they are changing the linear increase of these percentage stats into more of a logarithmic one so that as the base stats increases, the efficiency of the percentage stats will slowly decrease. Get nerfed mage suckers.

One thing to note that having 1000 Strength and 1000 Agility gives the same amount of Focus compared to having 2000 Strength. Same applies to Cast Time as well.

XL decided not to completely remove Parry from Strength and Evasion from Agility, because it would affect class synergies. On the other hand, Evasion was completely removed in Intelligence. To compensate this, Intelligence and Spirit gained more Cast Time than XL previously planned for.

As for compensating for the reduction of Crit Rate across every stats, XL increased the Max Critical Damage cap from 300% to 350%. This affects Archers the most, because the change lets Archers use Steady Shooting without wasting the Crit Damage increase effect from it. Also affects Dual Wield Swiftblade players as well.

The table does not show stat changes for Block Rate as well as some other percentage stats, but they have been applied the same treatment.

Basically…
When Stamina < 2000, Block Rate after the patch will be higher than before.
When Stamina > 2000, Block Rate after the patch will be lower than before.

Armor Type Changes

Cloth type is shit and everyone knows that. XL decided to buff Cloth as a result and also decided to slightly buff Plate as well. Plate really didn’t deserve a buff in my opinion.

7 Set Cloth Effect

• Removed Shackle Reduction.
• Silence duration reduced to 30% (from 20%).

7 Set Plate Effect

• Shackle duration reduced to 30% (from 20%).

Attack Speed Changes

Until this patch, while casting Magic skills and Healing skills with scepters, staves, clubs, and greatclubs Global Cool Downs (GCD) were not applying the weapon’s attack speed. This resulted on having a constant GCD regardless of the type of weapon you are equipped with. In this patch, XL now applies attack speeds from scepters and staves to reduce GCD. (Clubs are not implemented yet and will come in the June patch.)

Here are some attack speed changes for each weapon type:

• Scepter: 1.2s -> 1.0s (No changes in atk speed or skill dmg, because old atk speed wasn’t applied before.)
• Staff: 1.3s (Attack speed 30% reduced. Skill damage 30% increased.)
• Shield: 2s -> 1s (Shield skills now use shield’s attack speed instead of right hand weapon’s attack speed)

To clarify,
these changes don’t affect Cast Times of skills. The decrease of attack speed by using a staff basically increases the GCD when using Magic skills.

The equation for skill animation speed & skill damage are the following:
Reference

• Skill Animation Speed = Base Skill Animation Speed / Weapon Attack Speed
• Skill Damage = Base Skill Damage * Weapon Attack Speed

In regards of Shield skills, in previous builds, Shield Skills skills used the Right hand Weapon’s attack speed when calculating attack speed. As a result, users could have different GCDs when using shield skills even with the same shield.

Side Note for some abandoned changes

These are some explanation about the changes discussed during the LAN Amigo that was ultimately abandoned/postponed.

Shield Block during GCD

During the LAN Amigo, XL mentioned that they were thinking about removing shield blocks while the player is in GCD. This was aimed to nerf DPS classes that equipped a shield. This change was abandoned, because it was also going to hurt tanks and healers which XL did not intent. As a result, XL will be looking for better implementations.

Sonic Wave breaking Imprison

A lot of the players showed concerns about Sonic Wave breaking Imprison. XL thought of this change, because there were not enough skills to counter Defense and XL didn’t want the tempo of the fights to slow down by more and more players picking Defense. However Imprison is a key skill used by Tank players while Sonic Wave is used by many DPS players. This change was thought to just immobilize Defense players, because there are much more players equipped with Sonic Wave than Tanks equipped with Imprison.

Mistsong Banquet Season 3

Like Season 1, Season 2 was a big hit and XL decided to make season 3 of the Mistsong Banquet.

Change Summary:

• After round 16, a Treasure Mole appears which needs to be killed in a limited time.
• Round 21 is added that spawns mobs (max # of mobs: 50) from round 20 with short intervals.
• Laser Cannons damage and range are increased and Thunder Cannon’s attack speed is slightly reduced.

Round 16 is a break round where you won’t lose even if you weren’t able to kill all the Treasure Moles. But these moles give you a lot of Crystals and is key for succeeding round 21. Round 21 will spawn a ton of Guardians, so it is important to kill as many as you can while maintaining your middle tower’s HP up to round 20.

Thunder Cannon and Flame Cannon was superior to the Laser Cannon so the Laser Cannon got buffed while the Thunder Cannon’s efficiency got reduced by roughly 3%.

Language Proficiency Expansion

XL fucked up with the language proficiency way back then and is finally fixing them. Even with 10k max proficiency players would still have symbols in their chat. Players’ configured language was also getting reset upon exiting instances. The necessary mats are pretty cheap, so don’t worry about it 🙂

Necessary Materials:

• 50 x Paper
• 5 x Memory Ink
• 5 x Leather
• 8 x Dawn Lake Light Essence

Changes:

• Expanded the max language proficiency to 20k which entirely removes symbols from your chat.
• Configured Language is never reset until user changes it.
• Current speaking language can be checked from the a UI.

Don’t worry. Your existing language tutors can also teach you up to 20k proficiency so you don’t have to go to those locations.

Weapon & Armor Type Change Scrolls

The armor type change scrolls available in Unchained can only be used for Hiram gears below T5. This new scroll allows players with T5 Hiram or T3 Library to change their armor type.

XL also released Weapon Type Change Scrolls as well which lets player change Hiram and Library weapon types. These scrolls are RNG and are sold in the Credit Shop. Wait what? lol

Even with these Weapon Type Change scrolls, you cannot change a 1 Hand weapon into a Right hand Weapon, change 2 Hand weapon into a 1 Hand weapon, etc. Basically Bows can’t change itself to anything else until XL releases the new upcoming Rifle.

Lunagem Type Changing

Lunagems were a pain to change, because you would have to unsocket them, transmute them, and then socket them again. XL is adding a Lunagem Tranmuting stone in the Credit Shop that uses 200 labor to change a single Lunagem. lol free money for XL YAY

Luckily for the Koreans, XL will be giving a certain amount of these gems for free, because of the Skill Balance changes like how they did with the Armor Type Scrolls with the Armor Type balance changes back then.

Don’t worry and trust Gamigo. You know deep down in your heart that they won’t gives those scrolls to us for free.

Conclusion

XL is gracious enough to give their KR players free Lunagem transmuting stones and free Stat Migration items, because of the changes from this patch. I doubt Gamigo would ever give those to us, but I guess we never really know.

I suspect that, in the future, XL will nerf the Sky Emperor Glider. A bunch of whiners are requesting XL to nerf it in the KR Archeage Forum. I hope they don’t…