Cinderstone Studios
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by Nicole "ElocinDev"

Let's talk about: v3.0.7

This update features kind of confusing at first balance changes, and this blog post explains why they were made and how they will affect builds.

Remember these aren't nerfs, they're adjustements. You might need to change your build, but the damage output is still the same.

I want to thank Daedelus, whom I had a conversation with about this balance philosophy. It follows the RPG Series' new balance guidelines, as them being one of the main mods for combat in Prominence is a very high reason on why things are changing this way.

Even though this update might seem like it has a lot of nerfs, in reality there are many buffs too, it's an adjustement and the start of the migration to a new balance dynamic that will make the modpack be more consistent and easier to understand.

🚩 The First Problem

But first, let's talk about a small but big problem: Spellblades.

Spellblades is a great mod, but sadly for anything that remotely touches magic, the gear from it is still BiS (Best in Slot), due to very inflated values.

An example is The Avatar. In its fire form it would give upwards of +40% Fire Power. This would make the Pendant of Fire, a unique jewelry, extremely useless. As that one only grants +8%, the Avatar of Fire would become BiS for every single build.

For this, the solution I decided to do is to rebalance the values of these items, based on the RPG Series Philosophy.

🛡️ Gear Philosophy of the RPG Series

As you might see, my last mod Death Knights is an official part of the RPG Series. Due to this, I wanted to adapt to the same balancing by default that these mods make, and talked a lot with Daedelus (Developer of the rest of RPG Series mods) on balancing these things. You can see his message in his discord about the balancing guidelines, which is very useful if you want to understand it further, read it here (You need to be in daedelusdev's discord).

In summary, the idea is:

  • Keep linearity of the scaling. Make weapons give flat increases while armors have percentile scale.
  • Do not overshadow other gear. Do not make gear of the same tier that is better than everything; that would make other items have no value. In Prominence this gives an extra value making builds a lot more different to each other, and
  • Balance out attributes. This directly interacts with the point above, an example below:
    Essentially players should be allowed to use gear interchangably, but the main goal is to ensure the most optimal selection of gear all classes is what that was designed for them.

    Let's compare the Frost Death Knight, which got a new armor. There are already Frost Mages from Wizards, so let's see our boundaries:

    • Frost Wizard T1 armor piece grants: +20% Spell Power, +1-2 Armor
    • Warrior T1 armor piece grants: +4% Attack Damage, +3-5 Armor

    We need to balance with all relevant attributes in mind. Lets see what kind of mistakes we could make, for our DK T1 armor piece:

    • Armor should be, +3-5 as we determine Armor Weight first.
    • +20% Spell Power with +3-5 Armor

    This would cause wizards to choose DK armor, instead their own, to gain more armor and loose nothing.

    • +5% Attack Damage with +3-5 Armor

    This would cause warriors to choose DK armor, instead their own, to gain more damage and loose nothing

    The solution is half way in between:

    • +10% Spell Power, +2% Attack Damage, +3-5 Armor

Applying this philosophy to Death Knights made me realize that it's also the way to go with Prominence itself, considering how the RPG Series mods are an integral part of the modpack.

✅ The Solution: A New Set of Rules

Applying these changes, the new set of rules is the following:

  • Single Element, Low defense items
    +25% Spell Power per piece

    Example: Arcane Robes

  • Single Element, Medium defense items
    +20% Spell Power per piece

    Example: Gleaming Magister

  • Single Element, High defense items

    +15% Spell Power per piece

  • Multiple Element, Low defense items

    +15% Spell Power per piece

  • Multiple Element, Medium defense items
    +12.5% Spell Power per piece

    Example: Magus Robes

  • Multiple Element, High defense items

    +10% Spell Power per piece

  • Weapons / Other Items
    Balanced attributes depending on other stats such as Attack Damage or use case.

    Examples:

    • High Tier Staff: +8 Spell Power
    • High Tier Multielement Staff: +6 Spell Power
    • High Tier Spellblade: +7 Spell Power
    • High Tier Multielement Spellblade: +5 Spell Power
    • High Tier, High Physical Weapon with Spell Power: +3 Spell Power
    • High Tier, Multielement High Physical Weapon with Spell Power: +1.5 Spell Power

Ultimately in Prominence, this has lead to changes such as:

  • Frostmourne giving +7 Spell Power, to make it BiS for its build type and not affect Frost caster builds.
  • High tier staves giving +8 spell power, to make it BiS for purely magic focused builds, such as casting. As unlike Frostmourne, staves do not have the 12 attack damage it has.
  • Fyr'alath giving +4 Soul/Fire power.
  • A'zhar giving +7 Soul/Fire Spell Power.
  • Fury of a Thousand Fists giving +7 Soul/Fire Spell Power.
  • Readjusting Ashes and Omniscences, to properly fit the Unique Jewelry items made for each specific class style, so they are only BiS for what they're meant to (In this case, Elemental Spellblade builds)
    This way, Avatars will still be giving more spell power than the unique jewelry, but will not grant secondary powers; such as for example the spell critical damage from Pendant of Sunfire.

    Making it mostly useful for maxing out a specific spell power, and giving purpose back to the unique jewelry.

    Although still tied to RNG, the best kind of Avatar can reach up to 12% of the spell power value, giving +4% than

  • Magus Robes, being initially an upgrade from Wizard armor that gives double the power, instead turned it into a mid term armor that grants +12.5% of all powers, being weaker than specific armors like Arcane Robes giving +25%, but granting all 3 powers.

    This makes it BiS for Astral builds; Supernova, Starforge, etc. Without also shadowing other armors for specific element builds.

After this changes and reading the new set of rules, you might have some questions, like:

  • Why some artifacts get treated as single element?

They're very important weapons, so artifacts like Frostmourne which are by definition multielement are still balanced as single element. This is done because of Frostmourne's specific gameplay, which you can't combine all 3 elements at the same time.

  • What about Soulfire artifacts?

Same thing as Frostmourne applies to soulfire artifacts, as of now there isn't anything else that uses Soul power rather than the artifacts themselves, so it gets applied as a single element.

  • Why Fyr'alath only gives +4 Spell Power then?

As mentioned in this point, it is balanced from stats "or use case". Fyr'alath is a tank-focused weapon, so its spell power is lower for that same reason. It also grants great benefits such as reabsorption, and of course a tank focused Upgrade Tree.

🚩 The Second Problem: Two Issues

First Issue: Maximum Health

The first issue comes down to tanking.

Most classes become very tanky at the late game even if they don't build tank at all! And this is caused by two things within the tiers of items:

  • Max Health benefits from Armor tiers
  • Attributes being multiplicative

To combat this, two things happened:

  • Attributes given by rarities now only multiply the base value
  • Max Health attribute was removed from armors
  • Armor's efficiency has been increased; making high defense armors more desirable for tanking.
  • Sin'dorei Heritage now reduces 50% armor instead of 80%

But to compensate that, as it's an actual nerf:

  • Common rarities now give way less negative effects
  • Rare rarity now no longer can give negative effects

This will improve the progression of reforging and make early game more forgiving.

Second Issue: Damage Exploits

Besides the balance, there was also a discovery of an exploit that could grant you almost unlimited damage, with millions of DPS being reached. That's a lot huh?

This has led to the removal of the Broken Watch item, which was one of the things that caused this exploit. The item will not come back, even after the interaction causing the exploit gets fixed, as the concept of the item itself already messes up various mechanics.

📖 Conclusion

These changes are not perfect nor final, but are a good base and first step for Prominence's gear rebalance.

The next update, the Blood Death Knight update, will have similar changes to this.

In the near future I also want to introduce balancing to PvP, and for this I have a very special approach. This will be likely be added on 3.0.8, so expect a new blog post soon!

Hope you liked reading this, and thank you for playing the modpack <3 I hope this will make things less confusing for players and make balancing more consistent.