Tier stat changes and experience-per-level reductions.

The purpose of the changes below is to reduce some of the ‘gap’ between the tiers while still leaving a good incentive to progress. The real meat of the tier bonus, the +10 level to equipment and skills, has not been touched.

Some people will hate any change to tier power of any kind (relative or absolute) and others will feel like these changes don’t go far enough. I think we’ve found a good balance of keeping tiering a fun feature that is still worth doing while making it more possible for lower tiers to compete. Their lack of tier stat costs and slower level speed will mean they have to work harder to do it, but it is more possible now.

In most other cases, the total power has not changed but the relative difference per tier has changed by moving lower tiers up. The biggest exception to this is the dodge removal. Here’s the list of changes:

• Everyone has at least one free rebuild to be able to redo stats as necessary based on these changes.
• The total max trainable stats is now 1725 + 25 per tier. This means there is no change in max stats for a t9, everyone else moved up some, and the difference between tiers is smaller.
• There was an unlisted (at least in ‘help tier’) bonus of increasing the max trainable in a single stat by 5 per tier. This has been reduced to 2 per tier and the max trainable in a single stat has been increased by 25 in the earlier levels – up to 130 or so. There will be some levels where your max is lower than before and some where it is higher, but overall max at SH is the same as before. ‘Help maxstats’.
• To go in hand with the change to allow roll over of all hp, mana and moves, the max HP is now the previous T9 max for everyone. Max hp in the level 100-200 range is higher across the board with a smaller jump from 200 to 201. Overall max is the same as before.
• The max exp per level you can have at t0 is now 3000 and the max you can have at t1 is 4000. T2 is still 6000 and increases normally after that. I decided against drastically reducing the ‘time to t9’ as I do like the fact that Aard has a long lifespan but the first couple of tiers are painful so hopefully this will help. Because of the EXP calculation change some players will have logged in only 10 exp away from their next level – this is either a gift or something to be careful of if you use noexp.
• The tier bonuses to dodges are gone. The +10 level per tier to equipment and skills along with the cheaper stats and still higher stat maxxes is more than enough advantage in combat imho. We split the difference on this one because, wherever tier bonus would have previously applied, a 5% increase in the base chance was added – so everyone effectively has T5 dodges. Turns out the old helpfile was wrong btw, it was 1% per tier.

We’ll monitor these changes over the next few weeks and see how it all turns out. Meanwhile, moving on to subclasses..