Over the last month weve made a lot of changes to Swashbuckling in the open beta. Most of these changes have been fairly small, but the net impact of them is significant. I want to briefly go over those changes, our reasoning for making them, and then talk a bit about whats next for Avatar Combat.

One of the areas with the most room for improvement has been the balancing of our Swashbuckling skills. Many skills were clearly better, or worse, than other skills of a similar cost. There were clearly right and wrong choices of skills, independent of your desired play style, and we wanted to reduce that. Obviously some skills will always be better for some play styles, but we wanted to make the choices a bit more interesting. Weve made numerous small changes in this department, too many to list here, but there are a few big picture changes I want to call out specifically.

First we dramatically increased the effectiveness of passive skills. These are the skills that simply modify your combat stats all the time. Previously, passive skills were generally less effective than a single piece of mid-level avatar outfitting, which made them a pretty poor return for your skill point investment. Weve buffed all of them so that theyre as powerful as a level 50 piece of avatar outfitting. This makes passive skills a great investment.
Second we increased the effectiveness of Finishing Moves. We did this by reducing their cost (particularly their balance cost), increasing their damage (particularly their minimum damage), and changing the way that initiative decays (Ill talk more about that in a minute). With these changes I feel that Finishing Moves are useful in a wider range of situations.

Finally we dramatically decreased the effectiveness of the Area Effect Crowd Control skills in the Dirty Fighting chain. The duration on these skills moved from 18 and 12 seconds to 6 and 4 seconds respectively (in the next build Improved Flash Powder is still a 3 second duration effect, but this will be increased slightly to 4 in the near future) The goal of these skills is to allow the player a brief respite when overwhelmed, not a way to immobilize the enemy crew for an extended period.

With those changes in place we started looking at other areas of Swashbuckling that we could improve. As I alluded to earlier, one of those areas was Initiative decay. Previously initiative would decay at a constant rate of 2 points of initiative per second, modified by outfitting and skills. This created a use-it-or-lose-it situation with initiative that pushed players to execute skills as quickly as possible, rather than saving their initiative for the right moment. It also meant that you had to keep doing prep attacks to keep your initiative up even if the targets balance was already low enough. This led to a lot of excessive button-mashing and frustration, so we made some changes.

Now initiative does not decay at all while in close combat. If youve earned 20 initiative points, you keep them until you spend them or until you get out of close combat. (At the same time we capped initiative decay at 0, so its impossible to have positive initiative regeneration, a loophole wanted to close.) In addition to that we set an initiative decay of 3 points per second while out of close combat. This is tied to the same feature that restores balance more quickly while out of close combat, so if youre losing initiative youre gaining balance. The goal of this is that, while in combat, you can save initiative for the right moment, but you cannot save your initiative indefinitely between combats.

This change opened up some interesting possibilities in Active Defense skills, and created some changes there. The big change is Active Block. Active Block is now a toggle skill, meaning that once activated it stays on until you turn it off, or you no longer meet the requirements for activating it. In the case of Active Block, the primary requirement is having an initiative value greater than 0. The effect of Active Block has also changed significantly. It now provides 5 block rating, 2.5 balance per second, and increases your initiative decay by 8 per second.

The intent is for Active Block to be a way for characters to go defensive. By giving up their initiative a character can greatly increase their survivability. Your initiative is the fuel that powers Active Block and once you run out, the Active Block drops. Its possible, though somewhat tricky, to keep active block up continuously, and doing so is considered a valid strategy.

We also made some substantial improvements to the First Aid skills. Our goal was to make running out of combat to quickly apply a bandage an advantageous proposition. First we changed the skills to remove all bleed and damage over time effects. Second we removed the defense penalty and balance cost associated with using those skills. Finally we added a small instant-healing effect to the skills, so even if you cant stay out of combat long enough to get the full benefit you can get a quick boost. In addition to those skill changes, we also reduced the amount of time you are kept in close combat after an attack significantly, so that it is feasible to stun your enemies, back away a few yards, pop First Aid, and then reenter combat with Bleed removed and a small amount of HP restored. These changes, taken together, improve the overall effectiveness of First Aid, as well as making it easy to quickly run out of combat and apply a bandage.

Finally, we believe that Swashbuckling gets more interesting at higher levels. We get a lot of complaints that Swashbuckling is dull and easy, but at higher levels we see players discussing variant combat builds like in any other MMO. This is because as the difficulty of the fights rises, you start learning more of the options you have and discovering ways to use your new skills more effectively. But this means at lower levels, when the fights are really easy, you can get through it just by mashing buttons, and frankly it cheapens the whole experience. What should be a fun challenge is instead just a chore. We want to increase the challenge level a little earlier so youll start developing good strategies for how youll be fighting at higher levels. Currently, Swashbuckling fights get a little challenging around level 16. We are changing this so that you will instead face more dangerous opponents at level 12. Since you can play missions up to five levels above you, you could be facing tougher enemies as early as level 7. We think this slight adjustment to difficulty will help make lower-level Swashbuckling a little more exciting and we are eager to see how it plays in the open beta.

So where do we go from here? Obviously well be making further tuning changes to the skills as the game goes forward. Hopefully those changes will all be minor: a point of extra damage here, an increase in proc rate there, with the goal of creating skills that are useful for a variety of play styles.

Beyond those tuning changes, we want to move Swashbuckling combat towards a more tactical system. We want you to feel more like a ship captain, leading a small contingent of your crew into combat, and less like a solo adventurer. In order to accomplish this we need to put some fairly significant work into our avatar AIs, and various support systems for a landing party. This will be a major project well start after launch and in the weeks ahead well describe more of where were going with Swashbuckling.