How Strong is AoE?

General
1

I wanted to quantify how strong AoE boon is compared to other stats in the game. Here are my findings. TL;DR: AoE is by far the best stat in the game.

Here are properties of 3x3 AoE boon, described in terms of other stats:

  1. As good as a 9x multiplier on durability. That’s like eating 22 persisting pies at once and having them stack. Or like taking the durability epic 30 times for a total of 150 skill points.
  2. 3.6x DPS multiplier. That’s like putting 24 skill points into Power Bonus; 15 points past the current cap.
  3. 3.6x speed multiplier. With max speed from skill points, forge boon, and mega fast brew a ruby tool will reach ~16 attacks per second. It can’t actually progress much further than that even if you could stack 2 fast brews, because the game caps attack speed at 20 attacks per second. AoE ignores this cap; so currently you can reach a speed of 57 blocks per second, almost 3x faster than the cap allows.

In summary the AOE buff is like a +durability and +speed buff, adding both buffs through a secret multiplicative buff slot which stacks with other sources and ignores caps. You trade -damage for it, but it works out heavily in your favor. You can offset the damage lost with other boons or brews.

Now for a quiz to see how much you learned.

Which character would you rather be for the most DPS?
A. Lvl 20+ with 8/8 power, 8/8 dex, 8/8 agi, 5/5 attr bonus, 5/5 hammer mastery, hammer epic
B. Lvl 1 with no skills and a single Diamond hammer with 3x3 AoE and nothing else on it.

If you guessed B, you’re correct! The AoE buff alone is worth more damage than most of the damage portion of the skill system. You’ll need the damage epic to pull ahead.

For the visual learners:

M4txhGP.png752×466

Hey, I finally understand why Random Adjacent Boon isn’t the level 1 effect! It should be the level 3 or 4 though, to keep the progression intact. 3x3 is still in its own class. A titanium hammer with 3x3 AoE does 6x the work as any unforged alloy or lower tool. Take that, new players trying to farm anything!

Here’s the worksheet I made if you like numbers :nerd_face:

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Don’t you also have to account for the -dmg that comes with the AoE boon? Sure usually forgers add on +dmg to offset it, but if you’re quantifying the AoE effect on its own, then I think you need to include it.

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depends on the planet… A T1 planet and a level 1 toon, with a 3x3 diamond hammer with no + dmg will hit level 50 before the level 22, with a normal non 3x3 hammer ever could.

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Good point, I’ve never seen a hammer without it so didn’t know it was doing that. I’ll fix the curve in the worksheet now and update the post later

edit: it’s all updated

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You lose 60% of the base hammer dmg for 3x3 aoe. If you get just the aoe boon by itself. While the aoe boon is incredibly strong its not as completely outlandish as this data would suggest :slight_smile: now a max forged 3x3 with +dmg and +durability… Thats definitely more along these lines for outclassing skill points spent in your character.

Good info though, I like the idea of showing the data for sure.

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Just updated to take the boon -dmg into account. It does pull back from the edges of insanity! But compared to every other boon in the game it is still head and shoulders the best one

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3x3 barehands. Add it

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You’d have to look like this guy. We already look like him from the waist down…

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9

Transmog brew incoming? ^^

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Shhh… you don’t want to wake the nerf hammer…

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It depends! Would you take an AOE nerf if it brought back the economy because

  1. new players aren’t out-earned by end-game players 6:1
  2. everyone couldn’t powerlevel alts with thousands of rocks
  3. current end-game materials like gems and alloys took more time to gather?

Basically this game exists on a spectrum of sandbox to mmo and the most direct way to move that slider is to adjust the behavior of AOE. If you want more mmo (more economy, more meaning to character progression) then AOE could take a nerf. If you want more sandbox then it’s probably fine where it is right now. But all mine-able materials will trend down in price until they’re close to worthless at present trajectory.

edit: There is also probably a link between AOE and prestige wars. Any 1 end-game player can gather enough resources to overthrow 6 low level players’ settlements.

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The problem is you assume the economy will be fixed if that was removed.

It wont as many people will have stockpiles of resources and as we have seen when the new worlds were released that the devs are not concerned about the gem and such market otherwise they would not have released such worlds with these types of resources in them as we have seen with the new t6 overstocked worlds.

High end forging has to have something in it for everything and this is what the resource gathering tools have and alone it’s weak unless you have enough skills to make it worthwhile really otherwise the grind will get worse.

Remember you can get this on low end tools now easier also while it’s harder to make gem tools as effective as they once were so if anything it’s made progression even faster for those types of tools on lower tier worlds and once again it shows the devs feel this is a good thing for the game but not so much for the economy as some feel.

The main issue is there is no heavy resource drain out there thus people can stockpile goods so easy over time.

The grind in this game is already the #1 issue many players have as you can see in sites like steam reviews generally and the 3x3 helps a lot and it already comes with a heavy drawback, 60% damage reduction, not to mention the forge requirements needed to even craft it effectively in the skill points and resources if you actually want to add other abilities to the hammer and not just that alone.

If you really want to go after something that “damages” the economy even more are the regen bombs. :wink:

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To answer the direct question, no, i wouldn’t lose AoE tools to “save” the economy. The economy has many more issues than people being able to collect resources faster anyway.
Removing or giving AoE tools a major nerf would be the end of the game for me.
If new players are able to gather as fast as end game players then what’s the progression? And why would you want current end game resources to take so long to gather? Do want to artificially extend game time?

Gems will never be worthless because they have a use. Being cheap due to ease of access isn’t a bad way to go. All resources should have a value based on how easy they are to gather and how useful they are, that to me seems natural. Atm prices are dropping because of deflation.

Prestige wars were a feature that’s gone awry and the devs are working on another solution to that.

AoE tools make collecting some resources fun and is one of the best features in the game imo.

Hopefully I’ve not gone too far off point, it’s 6am here.

5 Likes
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They definitely shouldn’t remove AOE, or at least not without replacing it with some other locator boon. The mandatory trait of AOE is that it helps you find gems & alloys in solid rock, since the later planets don’t have as many natural caverns. Mass resource accumulation is a side-effect and not a necessary trait of AOE.

The exponential growth of the curve can easily be flattened and still maintain high level players’ rewards while also closing the gap on haves and have-nots. Even linear growth would accomplish this. The point of this analysis is to show that AOE scales too quickly; not to take issue with its existence. Even flat progression would accomplish this as long as you still gave enhanced visibility to high level players.

This would require a heavy resource drain that only affects high level players, since they’re the ones getting 6x the returns for equal effort. If you target the playerbase equally, then making heavier recipes to sink the high level players’ stockpiles places those recipes out of reach of the average player.

Of course, if they make any recipe heavier players will complain about the grind and especially if they do this on recipes that only high level players use. The truth is most players unabashedly argue on these forums to have every recipe at their fingertips at all times. In effect, they want a pure sandbox. Anything that isn’t as easy as changing your brush in Magica Voxel or similar program is a “grind”.

But these same players also want economic reward for their effort. These two desires are irreconcilable. They form a spectrum. It’s like asking to be black and white at the same time. You must choose a shade of gray.

I favor choosing a shade which moves the game more toward MMO. The primary reason I lean that way is because the sandbox desire creates the grind in a self-reinforcing loop. Everything feels like a grind because when you have 1,000,000 stones, you plan builds that are hundreds of plots large. The game’s interface does not facilitate this. It’s immensely more clunky than a voxel editor. So now the “grind” feeling spreads to placing walls, plotting land, removing terrain, etc. Grind begets grind begets grind.

I am also fine if the devs want to lean into sandbox, but the economy will not bounce back in that case. When builds need thousands of materials all equally worthless, we will hit the limitations of shop stands and 1c will be too expensive for 1 stone. If the devs are going for a sandbox they will need to implement bundles in shop stands (100 stone for 1c) and constantly focus on improvements to the UI to make building large builds feel less grindy.

I’d rather they work on mmo stuff like Titans and limited event planets/moons.

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This buff also takes loads of tedium off the mind. I feel so free using it compared to single hit madness.

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You’re all under the logic, that gems are end game hammers… Maybe they are just mid game… and late game has not came out yet… with all the unreleased ore types.

I mean they were an advanced race… do you think they always used hammers?

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There is currently nothing beyond gem so they are indeed end-game. Later on there will be higher resources however that’s probably not for a while so isn’t really a part of the issue. For all intents and purposes, gem are, and will be for the near future, end game.

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Yes its a strong boon, doubt most ppl would bother getting pass the gemwall without it.
Without aoe boon the economy would just die. Gems would not be on the market nor would be any coils. Anything requiring rock would be more expensive.
Many players would just quit.

Worlds would not be behind on block regeneration tho.

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Just quoting this as I don’t want to quote the whole of your posts, but I have been thinking on a similar line. The issue at this point is that the Genie is out of the bottle on 3x3 now and you see the resistance being brought up at even the thought of it’s removal/tweaking.

The thing is, suppose that 3x3 never existed, what would max forge hammers look like? +Dura +Action Speed +Dmg (enough to 1-shot veins on T6) is my best guess. Even at half the rate you mention of the ruby hammer, at 8 swings per second 1 shoting all blocks, you would mine really fast. Much faster than lower level players, such that the reward for getting there would surly be worth it, but you would be stuck with the same methods that lower level players use, and those can be sort of tedious. If you add a “Block Radar” boon that lets you put a resource in your hammer (like an atlas) that then makes those resources show through rocks to you, that would allow higher level players to gather the things they want really quickly without the byproduct of infinite rock/gold/silver/iron/coal of all flavors.

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I agree with you, Mr. a130. I also really like your post on the grounds of it being far more sapient than that which I’m used to seeing on any kind of game forum.

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