I’ve been curious, people have been using demon-fire orbs, and tar as a means to break into peoples homes, which, bearing that both these items are A: easy to craft, and B: easy to acquire as drops, seems to defeat the purpose of having a home to begin with. Is this intentional, or is it something your looking into? I do like that you can use those items to acquire star metal though.
2 Likes
There is some information floating around about some changes that have been made to how this mechanic works. I have no seen it personally or seen any official information about this topic.
But I can say the current system is extremely broken and needs to be changed. Using orbs is much cheaper than explosives, and gets the same effect. The ability to keep the fire lit using only 1 demon-fire orb is the main reason for this. Even if it required multiple fire orbs, it still makes it such a better option than explosives. The damage to structures needs to be reduced drastically to balance this out.
2 Likes
agreed… there needs to be changes and I’m waiting for them to take the gag order off on giving info on what is being done about things like this… I think they will have this stuff worked out for release… If not, then I will be very disappointed, as will many
2 Likes
What if only explosives went trough T3 buildings. In this way its a bigger purpose to build T3 buildings also.
3 Likes
They said in last dev stream that we’ll “might” (it’s in the list of things but maybe it won’t make it for release, this is my own speculation, not their wording) be able to ignite grease patches with fire arrows/bolts (this is their wording).
And I’m fine with it. 
What we should get is the ability to arm thralls with water orbs to extinguish fires while we’re offline.
Also don’t underestimate the value of placing vapor traps all around your base before loggin out, you can pick them up when you log back in…
I agree that grease fire should not do damage to T3 structures. The orbs were always meant to be a lower tier explosive jar or used in battle somehow. Maybe they could make bosses that are easier to kill with grease fire or poison orbs, but I do not see how it would work into PvP. Even the traps are too much trouble for the protection they provide.
I would like to see orbs and traps buffed in damage for PvP and not do any damage to T3 structures. Shouldn’t a trap kill you and not just damage you? With the new implementation of using only 1 bed roll and not placing stacks at least they will have to make a fresh bedroll to place before running straight back into the raid after dying from a trap.
1 Like
I don’t think vapor traps can damage buildings, or I have never noticed…
There needs to be a difference between Stone and Wood buildings. Stone should not be vulnerable to fire, but it should be more vulnerable to explosives. On the other hand, wood structures should be especially vulnerable to fire, but less vulnerable to explosives.
This way, players can choose the materials they want to use to build, depending on what they need to defend against.
The devs also said that Avatars are going to be much more powerful — likely powerful enough to be more effective than orbs.
Stone should not be vulnerable to fire
As from real life experience the cement/clay that keep stone buildings together can burn…
Either way, we dont need both grease orbs and explosive jars doing the same thing. Take one out of the game and make archers on top of walls not completely useless vs. players walking up to your wall and breaking it down. I think then we would have some good raids. Nobody wants EZ is the main concern I think.
1 Like
Definitely. I’d love to see more variation between:
- Breaking down walls with a hammer
- Burning through walls with orbs
- Blasting through walls with explosives
Players could build multiple layers of different types of walls, which demand different approaches.
There is a particular combination of orbs on the testlive build that yields a high-value explosion. It does about 3k damage once actuated. If it’s indeed intentional for orbs to cause explosions, this might change one’s calculations a bit. I know it’s made me alter my airlocks dramatically.
1 Like
1 t3 buildings and vaults needs to be immune to it.
2 Then grease orbs should put fire out instead of keep the fire going.
3 I think their goal for orbs should be more for Pvp and not raiding.
Plus their removing poise, if they keep everything else the same. Then thralls would be more threatening because forces player use shields and he can’t just run up to thrall to kill it.
The explosion can be stack like grease orbs except it can’t be restart by one. Like almost everyone said t3 should be immune to it.
1 Like
Creating orb-immune structures and placeables seems a bit drastic. Reducing the damage over time done by grease fires, however, may be a possibility to balance out their low cost compared to explosive jars. Tinkering with the explosive power of gas orbs could further create actual tiers of raiding items.
For example: Orb Tactics < Explosive Jars < Trebuchet/Demon-fire Barrage
Or something to that effect.
1 Like
I’m not sure if I would go as far as extremely broken.
Orbing vs Explosives
-orbs only damage one block while tnt does many.
-orbs are still slower than tnt even if you stack the tar before the fire orb
-you run the risk of being blocked in with walls and foundations (if the player is dropping them in to block you if you are not fast enough to destroy what you want to get to with orbs.
-orbs are cheap to make while tnt is costly and there is a reason it damages more and is a faster way to breach a base at its weak point
-base designs done well can increase the hp of the structure being broken and you outpace the damage with repair.
2 Likes
Well that’s just it, isn’t it? Defenders can drop a replacement wall down as soon as one is destroyed.
If you are online while the raiding is happening yes. Last week I had two clans try to crack my main base (at the same time). Eventually they would have gotten all my items but the raid timer hit midnight thank heavens and I was able to repair as they were trying to crack the way in. I used nearly all my repair supplies, all my foundations to keep dropping them in after I read out of repairs and used all my water orbs to put out fires. An amazing raid for sure as it was not in our favor and we held them off. Sure I used a ton of supplies (none were t3 btw) however they lost more… they spent two hours using explosives, orbs over 100 explosives used and who know how many orbs. And I still have all my goodies in the base.
If you are offline and your base gets cracked you are screwed they will find a away in and it does not matter how many thralls or bubbles you have up.
I’m of the belief you simply need to slow them down until they stop from giving up, more help arrives or the raid timer is at the end.
1 Like
Wow, well done.
I feel like the raiding mechanics are actually fairly well-balanced. There are ways to build better defenses against orbs (more layers of walls) and ways to better defend against explosives (build farther apart to reduce the damage done by AoE). We need to complain less, and adapt more.
There are some other clever ways to reduce the damage done by a raid, such as by hiding your chests beneath floorboards and walls. Even if an enemy gets in, they might not find all of your loot, if they don’t have the capacity to break down every wall and floor to search for goodies.
The exponential mechanic of orb damage isn’t bad. If somebody can raid your base using a handful of fire orbs, and a wagonload of grease orbs, then maybe it wasn’t such a great base after all. Building a fortress is one thing, but keeping it standing is totally another.
But I do agree that too many NPCs drop orbs right now. Alchemists aren’t that common, and so it isn’t consistent for every pirate gang to have a few orbs just laying around. They should be more unique than that. Making them crafted-only would make orbs more strategic.
You must not know about how fast grease orbs can take down T3 walls. I can take down a T3 wall in less than 2 minutes. Grease orbs despawn after 30 seconds. You have time to stack around 28 grease orbs and then ignite it with a fire orb. Refresh that fire with one or two fire orbs and bye bye T3 wall. Costs nothing and invites more offline raiding because of this method. Fast and expensive raiding that takes lots of time to farm mats for Raid and requires multiple people to achieve the goal result in more online attacks being that they have a higher chance of success even with the players online defending. Slow and cheap raiding mechanics, of course, will be the go to for offline raiders.
1 Like