How Strong is AoE?

It seems like you’ve reached that point where I’d honestly suggest to just do what I did. Abandon the forums except to keep a rough eye on whats happening and post in Dev topics asking for opinions on potential new systems. I’ve found that as soon as I stopped participating in the ‘community’ of this supposedly community/player driven game, my experience was greatly improved. Sure I can still see things that I think are glaringly obvious flaws in the game, but at least I don’t have the frustration of talking at a brick wall about it.

No matter how well thought out, or how right your suggestion is, there are far too many people here who appear to only be capable of seeing how points raised directly affect them, and not the game as a whole. Even when you get a couple of decent replies, they get lost in the noise all too easily. The best you can do it hope the development team see you post and are able to take it for what it actually is.

Just so this isn’t a completely off-topic post: Yes, I’d agree that the current AoE boon is far too powerful, especially when it can be combined as easily as it can to make the current meta hammers.

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An argument like this is very complex. Thanks for the amount of time you spent trying to put it together and at least posting some numbers!

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Thank you for the kind words everyone, sorry to have gotten frustrated and storm off. As penance, here is my latest attempt at striking a balance between everyone’s concerns.

What if AoE boon always gave you 3x3, but the properties of the 3x3 got better at every level? The boon now nerfs both damage and speed but all tiers still gather faster than unforged tools.

Tier 1: 3x3 AoE, -75% dmg, -55% spd (gain access to AoE)
Tier 2: 3x3 AoE, -75% dmg, -50% spd (faster)
Tier 3: 3x3 AoE, -75% dmg, -45% spd (faster)
Tier 4: 3x3 AoE, -70% dmg, -45% spd (stronger)
Tier 5: 3x3 AoE, -70% dmg, -40% spd (faster)

Don’t focus so much on the exact values as this is based on DPS calculations instead of BPS, and BPS would give more accurate values that are less severe. Instead focus on the trend. All forgers can get access to 3x3 AoE by triggering the boon, but the higher tiers continually lessen the penalties. Each tier improves either the damage or the speed.

Here’s what these values look like plotted, but since you get two balance levers (both dmg and speed) you can make this thing take on any shape you want and cap out at any DPS value you want.

There still some nerfs to the top end of the boon, but I still believe those nerfs are warranted given how powerful the boon is compared to all the other ones. By debuffing both damage and speed it makes the “perfect hammer” require a tradeoff. If you make a +AoE +dmg +spd hammer, you can’t get the durability. Or you can make +AoE +dmg +durability and live with the speed. Either way we’re cutting into the amount of buffs that can stack when using AoE which is what makes it imbalanced at the top end.

But there’s also some upsides! Less RNG when rolling for the AoE boon. You know you’re going to get a 3x3 hammer you just don’t know how strong/fast it’s going to be. This is better than messing up and getting a Cross AoE or Random Adjacent. So more players can make AoE hammers more consistently. Maybe they don’t need to be so picture perfect if they aren’t so random to make.

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Just so you are aware, any dmg values that cut off more than 60% of the aoe dmg applies a forging nerf since you need to increase the amount of dmg boon you get to compensate. Currently it’s 8 lvls to even out the 60% loss, at 70 10lvls may be needed and that is substantial in a forging process.
Also to be considered if you make lvl 5 of the aoe boon the one to aim for you have to consider that as a second nerf to forging. As getting level 4 takes less points than level 5 etc.

At some point it would be best to convert this to a blocks per second style of calculation since that’s the real world application of this (for lack of a better term obv) since if you have a 4kdps weapon and a 5k dps weapon but both break a block in one hit it doesn’t much matter, or if both take 2 hits it also doesn’t much matter what the curve between them is. The difference needs to be seen in game while using etc.

Still, good data. Very much enjoying the posts @a13o

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Does anybody ever want an AoE hammer that isn’t 3x3…? Are all the others only considered trash or “tolerable”? If so I think he’s on the right track with making all AoE 3x3 so long as the high end still allows us to create AoE hammers similar to what we can currently make. I would have loved even a weak AoE hammer at lvl 25.

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Honestly I enjoyed the 1x3 in EA quite a bit. Preferred it over the cross. I don’t enjoy the tunnel or cross at all, but the dmg loss for getting the 1x3 in the current forging setup is just not worth it compared to 3x3. I could see changing it to pure 3x3 having definite upsides on the gradual acceleration of the tools use, but maybe making the 1x3 2x1 and cross aoe’s more desirable could be a good way to even the aoe boon across. Say start with 2x1 and you only lose 10 or 20% dmg. So it’s cheaper and easier to make a t6 small tunneler. And then 1x3 you lose 30% or so. Again cheaper and easier to make the coveted t6 one shot. Taken in terms of dps these may be broke. But taken in terms of bps they are still behind 3x3 even if they had positive dmg % per hit. Since to clear 9 blocks it will take 5 hits with the 2x1 and 3 hits with the 1x3 so if you make a 2hit 3x3 hammer it’s still better by 33% over the 1x3 at a 1shot factor. Hence why comparing dps doesn’t hit the root of the balance with aoe stuff. You need to account for at a point dmg is plain wasted. If you do more than 5,000 to a block you break it. If it’s 5001 or 350001. Doesn’t matter at all to the block. And won’t matter much to the player in terms of aoe and mining. Might matter for critters… But the - s you get for using not a weapon on them will be more of the defining factor for dps combat wise.

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Brain is fried… spreadsheet now has hits to break and BPS for every tool at every tier. Next logical thing is to move all this to a frontend like boundlessskill.com so you can see these values change in real time with your build… but I digress.

Behold, BPS for T1/T2 when using AoE.

The spreadsheet has T3 and T6 as well but read on for caveats.

I put Random Adj. back at the end cuz it just uglies the graph up. What the heck is that thing doing as the final boon tier anyway?

Topaz is the clear winner here cuz we’re swinging on a T1 so tool strength stops contributing and tool speed becomes all that matters. Technically Amethyst performs the same but the line is hidden under Topaz. Topaz is probably more plentiful than any other gem in the game anyway so this actually works out nicely… all you fancy pants forgers: topaz is the premier tool for razing T1’s to the mantle. You’re collecting 6 rocks per second. That’s a smart stack every 2.5 minutes. On a level 1 character. Do you know how much XP that is per minute–sorry; I’m getting off topic again.

I’m sure if I dragged this out to higher tiers (I have block health all the way up to unreleased T7 and T8) we would see that you have to switch to Diamond and Emerald like everyone expects. But the charts aren’t actually that useful at the higher tiers because I haven’t taken into account skill points. I could… but I feel like we’re hitting the limitations of Excel. This really should be an interactive frontend if we want to ask it more complex questions like that.

Okay… back to being on topic. The result here isn’t actually much different from the DPS results. 3x3 AoE outperforms unforged tool BPS by 4-6x. That’s the OP bit. AoE tools don’t need to outperform unforged tools so greatly because they already reveal more voxels and increase your visibility with less effort. That’s a boon in and of itself. Ergonomic digging. A dramatic BPS increase on top is this boon doing 2 things at once. There should of course be some BPS curve, as incentive. Maybe capping at 2.5x. IDK. Brain dead. Gonna go eat candy.

If possible i would like to see a graph for T5 and T6 worlds with the 3x3 boon. With and without mining skills. And how it scales with each devastating damage boon level and ease boon.
I believe how aoe boon is paired with those 2 boons is what you’re after.
Without devastating damage a 3x3 takes many hits to break blocks.

Just looking over the sheets, did you factor in armor for the blocks? I see you have a totem able to break blocks on later worlds, as far as I know they can’t do enough base dmg to actually do that at a certain point. At least without skills. Not sure if that would change the math in any other way but it might and I didn’t see it so figured I would ask. :slight_smile:

As for why the random one is at the end of that particular boon, I don’t know for sure but I believe it’s the very reason that we are discussing in this thread. How strong aoe is. It’s sort of a skill check to make sure that forgers have a window they hit instead of just apply x to get y. You can sort of see this mentality as the forging changes have been put in. They are aiming for more of making the player balance the elements of forging instead of being able to just power through. But that’s just my idea.

As for the balance for the aoe. It is a hairy problem when it comes to the 3x3 aoe atm. If you adjust it enough to be felt (aka push it down enough that the best you can get in forging is a 2hit t6 aoe hammer any change less than that won’t be felt by the user just the forger) then you have in effect doubled the amount of time players spend gathering certain resources at higher end. That will be painful for many players who already dislike the amount of time they spend gathering as opposed to building etc. But in that same case, if you do as you are showing and take a gem tool with aoe to a starter world, just base skills will be enough to keep that aoe in 1shot territory. And since the aoe boon is already a forging thing, getting extra damage from forge could make it even easier. A nerf in damage to aoe will only effect the highest level of content. T6. And if you make it so t6 is too slow to harvest. People will got to t5. Make that too slow to harvest and you see a shortage of specific high end resources (gems etc) that makes it more expensive and makes it less available to lower end people. Possibly creating a very large gap between a new player and an established player.

(none of this may be coherent, it’s 5am and I can’t sleep)

The other option is lowering the amount of blocks hit. Going from 3x3 as the largest area to cross being your largest (or technically a different pattern but I shudder to think of what kind of hit box those might create) while mathematics points to this being possibly the cleanest option. As an actual player I would have serious problems with that change. And that’s another reason why any change to aoe would be hairy. Some things are just fun to do, and carving a 3x3 tunnel into the side of a mountain at high speed is enjoyable. It may not be balanced, but it is fun and technically available to everyone in the game (albeit with caveats etc)… I can’t think of anything else intelligent to say so I’ll pick this up later XD

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I agree, AoE is just too fun to remove or nerf at this point. We may just all have to agree that it’s the best possible boon and move on. Could buff non-AoE stuff to keep up, or make other positive changes to the game.

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