Happy June, Adventurers! Your HorizonXI Community Managers had the opportunity to sit down with Aerec and Ophelia to answer some of your burning questions for our very first Dev Blog. Topics include gear and job balancing, elemental magic, and Salvage related content!
Q: Will artifact gear be rebalanced to be in line with what is needed on jobs as far as stats? INT+5 on Rogue's Bonnet, for example, never made a lot of sense to me over something like DEX, AGI, or even STR +5 instead. Sure, you could argue it for cyclone, but how often is that used? A lot of original AF had these pointless stats that made those equipment basically glamor items.
A: (Aerec) The balance team is looking into this exact scenario, and while we cannot make any promises, we are exploring the possibility of improving the utility of specialty gear sets like artifact and relic armor that may have been originally designed with less desirable stats.
Q: Any consideration for balancing the different elemental spells to bring them more inline with each other? Instead of seeing Thunder and Blizzard everything? It'd be nice to see things like Stone match up well with thunder against mobs that are actually weak to it. When I say match up well I mean surpass it. I don't mind if MP is increased for casts to even it out more.
A: (Aerec) This is a complex problem; doing such a thing possibly breaks the game early on depending on the scenario. We have a couple of options that we are exploring in this exact case, especially due to plans for how we want to expand on the leveling experience for mages.
Q: Will jobs be “balanced” differently from the beginning? I would think they’d need to be balanced as more content was developed, especially as you move past the 75 era. A lot of the traits and mechanics weren’t introduced until much later, but is your idea that when we launch with CoP, the jobs already have the changes?
A: (Aerec) There will be some job balance adjustments on release, however while we may bring some OOE traits in earlier to give jobs some extra needed oomph, we don’t want to give a job everything it will ever have right away. So we are definitely keeping some adjustments in our back pockets for the future. On the other hand, if job changes aren't enough or are deemed too much, we will act like a proper MMO dev team and constantly make sure balance adjustments “stay the course”.
(Ophelia) We plan to balance jobs as they are introduced, so the short answer is that these balance changes will be there from the start. This means that people will have a different experience than they have previously, but even though their implementation at the start may be something, as the server progresses there may as well be further changes to keep a job competitive in the meta.
Q: I know that it's been mentioned that we will have the full implementation of RotZ/ToAU before WotG comes. I was wondering if this includes Salvage and/or if there are any plans for Salvage and Salvage gear. I can't imagine it's the most popular activity, but I've yet to see a private server with it (that I know of). So to make that a question, will Salvage/Mythic Weapons be coming to Horizon?
A: (Ophelia) As we have previously stated, each expansion will come with a full list of its activities. Thus in this case Salvage, and its child items, would be coming with ToAU alongside Nyzul, Besieged, etc.
Q: Any discussion of implementing seasonal events? Or perhaps custom events?
A: (Ophelia) We do plan on adding seasonal events back in. The timetable for this will depend on our development schedule, but there are plans to finish implementing them at some point in the near future. We will be porting the work done on Harvest festival and Starlight festival at minimum, but for things such as the summer events we likely will end up having to wait at minimum until next year.
(Annona) As a Community Manager, I just wanted to chime in that we will be hosting community events on Discord and across various social media platforms, so if you are looking to get festive, please look forward to what we have planned!
Thank you for reading our very first Dev Blog. We hope you enjoyed it! Opportunities to have more of your burning questions answered - next time LIVE AND IN PERSON - will be posted on the Discord soon. Also, are you disappointed that your question wasn’t answered? Hang tight as the CM team will be releasing a follow-up to this post with even more answers. Please look forward to it!
