Break It Down For MeIf you have 35 or more heroic Strength, you will now have 35 Damage Shield and 25 Damage Shield Mitigation.
If you have 35 or more heroic Stamina, you will now have 35 Shielding and Stun Resistance.
If you have 35 or more heroic Agility, you will now have 100 Avoidance and 35 Strikethrough.
If you have 37 or more heroic Dexterity, you will now have 150 Accuracy and 100 Combat Effects.
If the higher value of your heroic Intelligence or Wisdom is 35 or more, you will now have 35 DoT Shielding and 35 Spell Shielding.
Why Would You Do This?Our goal is to remove unnecessary complexity from the game. Once players are in the Buried Sea items, almost everyone will have all of the mods we’ve mentioned above at their caps. This makes these modifiers largely ignorable, but they show up on every item in roughly irrelevant numbers. Removing those 10 line items from the item inspection window will clean that window up, hopefully allowing it to be easier to compare items more quickly.
Attaching these modifiers to the heroic stat system helps flesh that system out a little more, and extend the caps on the older mod2 system. For example, as your heroic stats pass thresholds (set every 400 points), your characters can continue to grow in power, instead of hitting caps. For example, at 401 hSTA, you now have 36 Shielding and Stun Shielding.
In addition, this is a small performance increase on the server side. We're using less memory to store those ten stats. While that's not a lot on an individual item, it adds up when you consider that small amount is saved across every item we currently have in the game. Will you notice an improvement from this one change? Probably not, but it's still movement in the right direction.
Opportunities For Even Further Progression
We're taking this opportunity to use large values of Heroic Stats to extend the caps on mod2s. If you have more than 400 of any Heroic Stats, that stat's modifiers will now go above the current caps as shown here:
The mod gains are spread out evenly between 400 and 4000, setting up a deeper progression for heroic stats beyond their current abilities. Everyone should be able to reach the current baseline, but still have some goals to work towards. We're planning for these new caps to be unreachable for quite some time, and this gives us opportunities to do more interesting things with itemization in the future.
On Details and DevilsAs some of you are probably thinking, there were a lot of items that either came out after mod2 effects were added or before heroic stats were consistently high enough to replicate those values. You're correct, and we're converting those mod values to heroic stats. This means that many items that existed before heroic stats were introduced are going to get them retroactively.
This became a little bit of a balance problem due to the fact that each heroic stat is now responsible for two mod values, so a pure 1:1 conversion would essentially be doubling all mods. On the other hand, if we simply cut everything in half, it would become impossible to hit the mod caps in some gear eras.
We've decided on the following formula: the first three points of any mod2 with a 35% cap are counted 1:1. Any values higher than that are counted as half a point of heroics, rounding up. While this will collapse the advantage of some outlier pieces of gear, it should ensure that good items remain good and low-stat items won't lose their value.
For Accuracy, Avoidance, and Combat Effects, the math is similar. Accuracy translates to 4 points per heroic Dexterity, so the first 12 points of Accuracy will translate into three points of heroic Dexterity. After that, every 8 points (rounded up) will count as one point of heroic Dexterity on the item.
Avoidance and Combat Effects translate to 3 points per heroic Agility or heroic Dexterity, respectively, so the first 9 points of either stat will translate to 3 points of their associated heroic stat. After that, every 6 points (rounded up) will count as one more point of the heroic stat on that item.
Our goal here is to make sure everyone gets roughly the same amount of mods, with the additional benefits of heroic stats. While this will shake up item values a bit in the mid-game era, overall everyone should come out a little bit stronger. Here is an example using a level 65 warrior:
You can see there are gains in HP, Endurance, AC, and HP regen. As for mods, everything increases except for Damage Shielding (1 point less) and Strike Through (4 points less).
We've also set up tooltips to show you the new formulas before the caps:
And after you reach the caps:
While we’re excited for these changes, what do YOU think?
