List of confirmed changes

[Chickenudoom]

(Excuse any typos, writing from my phone) I'd like to put together a list of confirmed changes to be made in upcoming releases. These aren't finite though, and opinions/criticism are welcome.

Alchemy:

1. Increase potion durations to a minimum of 1min 30sec. Obviously the power of some potions will be changed.
2. Alchemy potion duration from spend skill points would be increased from 5% to 10%. (Ex: spend 20 skill points into alchemy yields +180 seconds extra duration)
3. Delayed reaction will be either heavily nerfed or deleted. I prefer the latter.
4. Toxicity regen will be changed from -0.0025 to +3.75
5. Fast metabolism will be changed to -4 per rank. This will counter #4's positive number (since it is a "default" ability), as well as make ranks 2 and 3 actually feel worth the investment.
6. Most potion toxicity values should be changed to around 425.
7. Change some trophies to give alchemy-related bonuses/nerfs (max toxicity/potion duration/other?)
8. Change the ammo percentage of the oil skill from 40% to 60%

Melee:

1. Change whirl's stamina consumption from 50/sec to 25/sec
2. Reduce the critical strike chance of almost every ability (if the ability's other effects are still worth investing in)
3. Change the cat, gryphon, and bear general skills to effect the amount of stamina consumed for actions in combat. Cat: +1 (per piece) Gryphon: +2 per piece Bear: +3 per piece All other benefits of these skills will be completely removed.
4. Lower the base stamina consumption of all combat actions, and let the armor general skills increase them accordingly.
5. Rebalance some trophies that effect critical strike chance.

Signs:

1. Implement burning back into normal Igni in a manner that won't make it overpowered. Perhaps change the burn duration to 1 second, and utilize it mostly as a stagger and a means to stopping certain enemies from naturally regaining their health. Also decrease Igni's base damage. Base damage increases per rank.
2. Edit NPC armor types to be weaker against Igni depending on how heavily armored they are.
3. Change quen's amount absorbed from +5% per rank to +3% per rank and decrease its base duration to 8 seconds. Hits it withstands unchanged.
4. Change alt Quen's minimum amount healed to 1.5% max HP.
5. Change normal Aard to have a smaller chance to knock down enemies.
6. Normal Aard decreases enemy stamina regen by 50% for 4 seconds and decreases enemy attack power by 20% for 4 seconds. These stats will not change with skill point investment.
7. Normal Axii staggers, decreases enemy's max stamina by 100 and adds -90% stamina regen. NPC Attack power -10% per rank. NPC attack speed -5% per rank. Entire effect lasts 5 seconds.
8. Alt Axii would have the same effect as normal vanilla Axii(but still require being charged up), and add +50% damage reduction to the NPC to prevent abuse in 1v1 battles. Stamina consumption changed to 50/second. Effect on NPC lasts 3 seconds. +1 second per rank.
9. Yrden's changes are still undecided.

General: Change the respec potion to include the same effect as Triangleauthority's original cleardevelop script, and also tweak it to not destroy the player's equipped mutagens. May need to tweak the GUI to prevent level-up spamming on the screen.

2. Review some trophies, make changes if necessary. Definitely add some more alchemy-related bonuses.
3. Make all general skills useable without slots, but still require skill point investment.

Please share your thoughts on things that could be changed. After discussion, we will decide if it makes the list. :)

[BardBlue]

Most things looks good to me. I literally just posted that you should drop quen's absorb per rank from 5 to 3. I like the aard change, though it seems a tad redundant with axii now. I guess it's more group cc vs single enemy cc. Dunno what you mean by stamina consumption as 50/second for alt axii. Does holding it longer have a better effect? Just seems like it punishes you for holding the sign key longer than you need to.

I'd really like Yrden to have a weaker slowdown effect, but for the Yrden intensity skill to let you convert some of the damage it does to healing (though that'd only synergize with the essence drain and alt Yrden talents). Or if you sort of leeched speed from your enemies, and gained a speedboost, though that might be weird to balance, and would stack too much faster roll-speed you get from ESGO's flat-footed. Even a subtle bonus (10-15% faster speed) would make Yrden more fun and skill-indexed though.

So, cat/bear/gryphon skills now have virtually no benefit? They just indicate how much stamina penalty different armor gives you? Seems a bit odd to me. Should have a subtle effect, at least. Light armor increases damage by 1% for each piece, heavy increases vitality by 1% per piece, medium does something else.

Alchemy changes sound good, but I'll have to play with them to really know. I don't know if 10% per point is too much. Sounds like a lot. What about a trophy that decreases potion duration by 80-90%, but boosts your toxicity drain a lot? For the person who likes to drink a lot of potions at the right time but only has like 15-20 seconds to utilize the effects (which will probably be weaker if you're balancing potions effects for 90 seconds minimum.

Another idea is higher max toxicity (+1000, maybe) but again reduced potion duration by 80-90%. This would be good for stacking decoctions, which even at 10% would last like 4 minutes, whereas regular potions would hardly be worth using even if you could use a couple more of them in a fight.

Lots of other possible tradeoffs to boost alchemy efficacy. -attack power or sign intensity or armor for higher potion duration or toxicity drain.

Not sure about general skills being passive but still needed to be unlocked. I kind of like the dynamic of having to sacrifice mutagen bonus for for a general bonus, though obviously they need need to be strong enough to compete. I think making them passive would make entail nerfing them a lot or they'd all be pretty obvious choices for single point investments, unless you made some of them require multiple points.