1. Issue
I see you're trying to make old statuses useful again. To be honest I don't think it's really needed, and definitely it shouldn't be priority but whatever, if you really want to change it then I want you to at least not fuck it up. If you want to make them usable again then you need to take into consideration few things first.
2. Few facts about players, warfare and statuses:
Statuses can be put into 3 groups:
>the ones which turn you into sitting duck: stun, frozen, crystalization, deep sleep, stone curse, sleep
>the ones which just lower your performance but can be cured by yourself (aka irrelevant): all this shit like blind, chaos, curse, poison, silence etc
>the ones which just lower your performance and can be healed only by teammate: GX poisons, freezing, burning, divest, howling
The last group is pretty balanced: getting status doesn't equal death and ABs can efficiently cure them with AoE laudas.
Second group is, as I've said above, irrelevant. It doesn't matter what you'll do with them, as long as you can get rid of them instantly by just clicking panacea or some other item in your BM these statuses will remain useless. These statuses are only good against unprepared scrubs and even then I think only silence is decent enough to actually matter.
The first group is the one that actually matters. All these statuses turn you into vegetable, unable to move, pot, cast, in some cases additionally give you weakness to certain element/weapon type which makes you OHKOable. Players will ALWAYS try to get immunities from these statuses, but even there there are priorities: the easier the status is to spread and the more weaknesses it gives you, the higher it is on priority list. Look at these examples:
Stun - turns you into vegetable AND locks you in animation making it impossible to cast anything unless you move/use first aid/get hit or whatever. Can be easilly applied in the whole screen by dancers at pretty fast rate. This means it's really high on priority list.
Frozen - turns you into vegetable with wind weakness that can make you OHKOable. Breaks on first hit but is too common (Frost Joke, Jack Frost, SG, cards, basically lot of AoEs inslucing whole screen). It's also high on the list.
Crystalization - turns you into vegetable, slowly drains your hp and gives you weakness to wind (50% more dmg), blunt weapons (50% from maces and axes) but lowers from sharp weapons (-50% from swords, pikes, arrows). Applied by just 1 AoE with cooldown and breaks with any fire attack (back when Dragonbreath was main offensive skill nobody really cared about crystalization because it was instantly taken down with DB hit). It sure is pretty dangerous status but it isn't as common and to become immune (shorten duration to 0 seconds) you need 200 base vit which is rather unlikely to get without any non-reliable buffs. These two facts place it lower on the priority list.
Stone Curse - turns you into vegetable with fire weakness but before doing so you have some time to run back, breaks on 1 hit and I don't think there's really reliable big AoE skill that inflicts it. This places this status really low on priority list despite being on of the better statuses in general.
If there is chance to get additional immunity to common, dangerous status without completly sacrificing offensive power/damage reductions, you can take it as granted that players WILL get it (for example if beret was slotted and sleep was common people would surely sacrifice these few str/atk points to get nightmare card). This means if you want to make the most dangerous statuses relevant, you need to actually make it impossible to get immunity to them.
Another fact that it's good to know is that just because these statuses aren't inflicted doesn't mean they're useless. You can increase your chances for victory in two ways: by either increasing your own firepower/mobility etc or by decreasing your enemy firepower/mobility etc. Decreasing your enemy performance isn't just debuffing but also preventing him from certain moves. Sometimes you need to take certain strategic point not to use it yourself (for example cliff advantage works in only one way), but to prevent your enemy from using it against you. People get these immunities because they're basically forced to get them. And if you use marc card, you can't use other, better card in your armor. If you invest these stat points into vit, you can't pump your str or int even more to hit harder. These statuses actually ARE useful. They work as suppressing fire and filther out scrubs who dare to lean out from the trenches when your soldiers storm under your suppressing fire, or retards who don't wear marc in WoE.
This is argument for leaving old statuses the way they are but also something you can use to balance troublesome equipment: if something gives too high reductions you can remove slot from it. Then someone will have to make choices: superior defense or reliability.
3. Mechanics - how this shit works
Each status has chance for infliction and duration. Chance can be lowered by stats and gears, duration only by stats. It's important to remember that reductions from gears don't stack with stats reductions. It basically goes like this:
Check for skill success > check for gear bypassing success > check for vit bypassing success > shorten duration according to stats.
This means there're actually 2 types of immunities: by decreasing chance of infliction to 0 or by decreasing duration of status to 0. Keep that in mind because if you just disable chance immunity, people still can reduce duration to 0 and in the end not be affected by status.
But let's look at this example:
We've got Dazzler skill with 50% success chance and target with 75% gear resistance and 25 vit (let's assume vit reduces both chance and duration by 1%)
1/2 (skill chance) * 1/4 (gear chance) * 3/4 (vit chance) = 3/32 = ~0,09%
0,09% chance for infliction per skill use. Seems low, right? Now let's soo what will happen if dancer screams 5 times per second (because let's not bullshit ourselves, people use shit like AHK etc).
0,09 * 5 = 0,45%
That's 0,45% chance per second. If you we have 2 dancers it's almost 1 % per second. That's 30-60% per minute. Now let's look at the duration. If we assume that stun lasts for 30 seconds then our vit decreases only 25% of it. This gives us 22,5 seconds duration. So in the end with 2 dancers our target statistically get stunned once every something like 100 seconds. Now subtract these 22 seconds during which you'll be just sitting duck incapable of any action. That gives us about 78 seconds of action. Still not that bad, right? Then think that it was just with 2 dancers, your own dancers also affect you and there are more AoE skills that inflict stun (like Meteor Storm, Varetyr Spear, Crimson Rock or any AoE skill with status spreading cards). In the end you'll end up with yellow stars above your head every few seconds. And remember that each stun locks you into animation. At that point it doesn't even matter that it can be cured with AoE Laudas.
4. Solutions:
Actually it'll be one big analyze and suggestion on how to handle whole status mechanics revamp because if you're so determined to play with statuses, it'd be good to fix everything that's bad with them.
Let's start with what we found out before: to actually make any change you need to make it impossible to get immunity. This right at start throws into the trash all the suggestions that were allowing immunity at any cap: increasing stat immunity cap to 120, 130 or even 150 (btw, with just foods you can increase your vit by 30 points) doesn't change shit unless you pick value so high it'll be impossible to reach it and any investment into vit won't be worth shit. You're only fucking up character building for no reason and making calculators useless this way. It's also pretty big change. That's why best choice would be to preserve hitting reduction cap at 100 vit.
You also need to think about cards like Marc. Do you really want to nerf them? Do you think people would like something so basic to them being changed that much?
So now we'd have to decide at how many % cap chance reduction. This ofc must be balanced with status commonness (chances from skills, amount of skills that can inflict status, AoEs, spammability of skills) and status effects (stun completely prevents you from any action while poison is completly useless). That's pretty complex stuff and it'd require to judge every stat, maybe even separate them into specific categories. Ofc you can set the same cap for all statuses but then you can end up with stun or something beeing too OP while shit like bleeding or GX poisons too hard to inflict.
Then it'd be good to think about durations of all statuses and duration reduction caps. Once again we have to check status commonness and effect for every stat.
Another thing worth polishing is status stacking, including things like lex. Ofc stacking the best statuses can be really OP, but buffing weak stuff with ability to stack (for example bleeding with poison and blind and chaos etc).
It'd be really worth it tidying up mess in status - affecting stat connection. Right now vit and luk affect vast majority of statuses, then there's int affecting just 3 statuses, agi affecting 1 or 2 and str affecting just vacuum. Reduction values for each stat are so fucked up even iRO wiki doesn't show everything. For example nobody knows how much luk affects frozen status infliction chance. Clarify this, preferrably make some scheme for all statuses or at least tie 1 status to 1 stat + EVENTUALLY make luk affect it with 1/3 of main stat value or something.
In renewal 4x100 (or even 5x100 with increased lvl cap) sure can work but still is a bit less effective than specialized builds. If you spread statuses more widely over stats, you can get more weaknesses. For example making dex affect silence, str affect stone curse or agi affect freezing. There're also 2 interestign ways to do that: to either pair stats and statuses based on ability (for example dex affects cast, so it should also affect silence - if you're good at casting it should be harder to prevent you from casting), or to turn statuses into counters for specific specializations (for example silence should be reduced with stat that isn't commonly used by casters, for example vit or agi). It'd be good if they had some logical explanation though (for example casting could be done by either speaking spell or by making certain gestures with hands/staff/rod/dick/whatever).
If you find some status troublesome, you can always change its effect a bit. For example stun wouldn't be as bad if you could pot while being stunned and it didn't lock you into animation. Or you can completly change it and make it mix of chaos (random walking) and curse walking speed.
Interesting approach to solving statuses issue would be to make certain statuses lower your stats, making you vulnerable to other statuses, just like curse lowers your luk to 0. For example if you made agi affect poison, and make that poison lower target's vit to certain amount (0 for example) or by certain amount (50 for example), then inflict character with natural low agi (like mage) with poison, suddenly said mage would be vulnerable to stun. With said approach you wouldn't even need to get rid of immunities because, as I've said before, most builds aren't 4x100 anyway and everyone have at least 1 weakness to some shitty irrelevant status or stone curse. If you'd use this idea then making full circle it'd be even better because this would mean you can infect anyone with everything, you ust need to find his weakness and exploit it to create more weaknesses.
Still I think this shit shouldn't be priority. We can easily live without few shitty skills like Poison Buster or Silentium being usable, but WoE will be awful if you won't clean the mess with damage, resistances and few skills % mods or effects. So think if it's really worth the trouble to make fucking Frost Divers relevant.
Edited by Psor, 09 December 2014 - 08:40 PM.