Hi all,
Minus briefly showed off his inventory during last night's stream:
I actually paid 0 attention to it last night, you know we see inventories so frequently in games that after a while you don't see them, but on rewatching the stream I realized things looked different to me. However it's been a while since I last watched the inventory UI stream.
One thing I know was mentioned in an offhand comment: Attribute rebalances. We can see that here. Previously I believe everyone started at 1 in everything and then had a few points to spend, and maybe there were some racial differences. That's clearly been changed as we can see from Minus's stats.
Have we seen a Mastery XP Bar before?
But look at that huge list of skills! Obviously he can't learn them all but we can still see them which I find interesting. And we can see his max skill level is quite low. 3 for most things. How much will that go up per level? I noticed he was earning incremental skill levels in chat (0.1, 0.1, 0.2, 0.1 etc) and I thought that was kind of dumb but I didn't realize that the max was only 2 or 3 so it makes more sense now. However, I still think if you're going to show that kind of progress you might as well move the decimal over and make it a max of 30, but that's just my opinion.
Plus the starting resistances... base crit chance and accuracy, the haste stat etc. I really need to go back and watch the last inventory or gameplay stream to see what has actually changed and what I'm only just now noticing (see previous comment about not actually seeing things because they're always there.)
Always love seeing the community pick apart the hidden beans :)
Just a quick point of clarification before anyone reads too much into it: some of the melee stats (specifically Weapon Damage, Attack Power, and Accuracy) aren't currently displaying their actual values in this window due to changes to how those values are calculated and therefore how they are displayed. Rest assured we aren't starting players with a 20% accuracy rating!
Also re: incremental skill-ups, the incremental gains are just reflecting progress, but you don't actually see a benefit until you actually reach a whole number / integer. So for example, a skill of 1.6 is still an effective skill of 1, but the increments are helping us give players a sense of building up towards that next gain - a level within a level, if you will. If we moved the needle to just multiply our skills by 10, not only would you see some ridiculous numbers at the end (1500 skill at 50), but we'd either be giving incremental power increases that we don't intend to with each point, or we'd only be giving players actual power increases every 10 skill points which would yield all sorts of confusion from players who don't understand why their skill points aren't actually providing any tangible benefit.
Thanks for the response Tehom!
It makes perfect sense that you wouldn't see any actual improvement until you skilled up to an integer. Just like you don't get any stat increases until you level up, even if you're at 99.99% of XP toward the next level. But personally, as far as skills are concerned, I'd rather not see that kind of incremental progress, especially if it's not displayed in the skill window. If you're going to give us a little XP bar under each skill that might be fun and less confusing than being at 4.20 in your Ennervation skill but actually you're just at 4 with 20% progress toward the next point. Being at 4.2/5 implies the same to me as being at 42/50 in a skill.
That's just me being nitpicky, though.
I went back and looked at the most recent gameplay stream I could find. The Cohhcarnage stream from August 2021.
I'm just now noticing my mouse is in the shot but I don't feel like re-doing the screenshot.
So the Mastery XP Bar is there. But look at those Attributes! Quite the difference between then and now. Same with resistances.
No skill window and the weight appears to be just a placeholder, which is what I thought. I distinctly remembered Cohh being at 35/45.
Personally I like the implication of the attribute changes. It still makes each point of an attribute have a lot of weight but also gives you a little bit of room for customization. I mean... just look at poor Cohh with his 0 Charisma...
In D&D an ability score of 10 is a modifier of 0. I wonder if before it was displaying the modifier but now it is displaying the score. If the number displayed is a modifier, than I would say a +8 seems really high, and a +0 seems just right on the low end. A +0 essentially means that you have the same charisma as the average sentient being.
They could have bumped up all of the numbers so that they could have negative modifiers without players actually seeing a negative number. For instance, if they make the global baseline at a +6 than a person with a +5 is essentially a -1.
I feel like a UI element could relay the 0.x of a skill increase better than just feeding it to the chat.
If it was me there could be a circle around the skill level that fills 1/10 at a time until full leading to your skill up.
But thats just QL thats way down the road right now and seeing it active in chat works better for development tracking.
Gintoki88 said:I feel like a UI element could relay the 0.x of a skill increase better than just feeding it to the chat.
If it was me there could be a circle around the skill level that fills 1/10 at a time until full leading to your skill up.But thats just QL thats way down the road right now and seeing it active in chat works better for development tracking.
Just being in to make sure everything is working is fine. I just see it as avoidable chat spam.
Just a quick question for @Tehom if you're still reading this thread.
It was discussed way back in the day that VR was totally ok with UI modification only addons. In more recent times, Dev's have answered questions about UI tweaking by vague "You will be able to alter your UI to a degree."
I just wanted to clarify if VR's plans are to just have a build in UI tweaking tool (ie let us move things around, change colors, change scale, etc...) but not allow UI mods/addons. Or will there be a proper UI API which players can use to create their own custom UI's and upload them to Mod sites for other players to download and install?
I think it was stated in a stream or dev-roundtable that racial stats would be coming online. I think part of what we are seeing here is the basic human stat allocation. It's hard to know if any additional points based on class, personal allocation, or armor are also involved.
I decided to dig a little deeper Re:Attributes. My brain works in funny ways. I knew I remembered something about Attributes being rebalanced or something and I thought it was in a Producer's Letter so I checked there first and I found this from November 2021:
Attribute & Stat Adjustments
The importance of individual stats in Pantheon – be they core attributes, skills, or other modifiers – is paramount to creating the iconic and desirable itemization model we have in mind. Individual point gains should feel like a noticeable improvement, and the tighter we constrain those numbers while enhancing their effects, the more we can ensure that loot maintains value and longevity.
We have overhauled these aspects of the game to create better clarity in what individual attributes contribute to, and to promote desirability in attributes that may not otherwise be considered ‘core’ to a given class. By taking a ground-up approach to these improvements, we have also made substantial enhancements to the underlying formulas and sub-stats that enable us to create items with even more nuanced benefits, as well as significant gains to the effects of buffs and debuffs that influence these stats.
"[...] and so while that's not something we're ready to commit to right now, um... I can say that there are now, you know, deeper differences between the races than just what classes are available to them. Um. So one fairly substantial change between the last Pre-Alpha session and the current build is that our races now have a much greater degree of variance between their attributes. Um. Not just the ones that they start with but also how their attributes grow over the span of leveling. You know, these differences aren't so substantial that players can never overcome them. It's again similar to the weapon skills where we want there to be flavor and we want plaers to experience the game in different ways, but we also want them to be able to offset those weaknesses. Um. But. That's that is about driving two players of the same class, but, you know, two different races to different objectives in game, right? Creating, um, different journeys, right? Different experiences even though they are, you know, theoretically similar."
So now we can see the implementation of several things they've been working on come together, even if we didn't notice it at first. Meaningful attributes, meaningful choices in your race selection, and the fight against power bloat/creep (by keeping the numbers small while still giving you a sense of progression.)