While this was a well-put letter to community, this message made it clear that Funcom’s stance is “players don’t know what they want, they will stop whining when they realize how right we were”
I had thought the Testlive server was for listening to the community, not just for spotting bugs. No adjustments have been made since the beginning of Testlive and by the sounds of it we’re stuck with this until at least Chapter 2, possibly ever. (Did he really have to double down by ending with “we won’t do a major rework again!”)
It’s also clear that they don’t really understand what they’ve done, because they have accomplished the opposite of what they aimed to with the stamina system.
From my understanding of the livestream and official statements, they wanted to fix:
Stunlocking mobs
Dagger spam (this was mentioned in the livestream only)
Lack of need for tactical positioning “Increasing Dynamics with Tension”
Let’s cover these goals individually
Stunlocking mobs
They made adjustments to the hyper armor system so that we are now “using fast weapons to interrupt slow weapons, but should you fail to interrupt the slow weapon in time, the heavy weapon in motion will not be stoppable.” Now poison daggers-- which took a disproportionately low amount of stamina increase compared to other weapons-- are even more effective and preventing your enemy from doing anything. Pair this with your follower or two, this issue is… worse than it used to be?
Increasing Dynamics With Tension
Contrary to widespread outrage about the fact that you can’t complete some weapon combos now (which is fair and ridiculous), stamina management doesn’t matter anymore. They have completely removed the exhausted state or “grey stamina”, and your stamina regenerates immediately. While actions can cause your stamina to go into the negative, you are never waiting more than a fraction of a second to regain the 1 point of stamina required to perform any action. This means they have removed tension by removing the consequences of careless stamina management. You can roll every second infinitely no matter the build, no matter the armor. There is no tension in being able to spam roll out of every bad situation, and it means that in PvP any proficient offense by a smart player can be lazily undone by spamming roll until your food+Glutton for Punishment top you up. Pair this with Rolling Thrust, now you can roll and poke/swing/shoot infinitely until you die of thirst or starvation.
Dagger Spam
We’ve went over how daggers break the new PvE system more than they already ruin the game in it’s current state, so what about PvP? How do you counter spam rolls? With spam attacks. If you throw enough attacks out, you will eventually catch hits in the small windows provided between rolls. With poison and cripple, daggers are unironically way stronger than they used to be despite some of them receiving number nerfs.
So we have successfully:
-Made it impossible to perform some weapon combos without speccing stamina
-Made it possible to roll infinitely, and in some cases roll and attack infinitely
-Made mindless dagger spam an even stronger choice in both PvE and PvP
-Dramatically reduced build variety by trivializing armor weight class penalty (Rolling Thrust spam in Godbreaker vs Silent Legion light is practically identical speed, roll cost is trivial when you can roll with 1 stamina)
and we have unsuccessfully addressed:
-Stunlocking mobs
-Dagger spam
-Increasing Dynamics with Tension
The Developer Letter said it multiple times: nobody asked for this, and no it doesn’t address the things you say it does. The next step should have been implementing the new Hyper Armor changes on their own and tweaking until it is in a better spot, and reducing the movement distance on dagger light attacks while greatly increasing stamina use. This in tandem with HP/damage reworks and autolock changes would have been already a dramatic shift and would have been plenty to garner feedback on before gutting a well-balanced and well-loved combat system.
Other than the really odd thrall nerfs/buffs, I actually love the other changes. Legendary weapons should feel like lightning in a bottle. I have a vault full of useless legendary weapons and have no reason to ever farm bosses. Bugfixes and content updates sound really fun, if it wasn’t for this stamina rework I’d basically be over the moon with how Funcom is handling new updates. Really sad to see the death of a great system, hope someone realizes that this isn’t in the interest of fun and pumps the brakes a little bit.
In case you’re curious about the rest, I have added a second sheet to the same old thrall stats spreadsheet I had going, with the preliminary AoW stats, you can switch at the bottom.
