PlaneShift
Announcements => PlaneShift News and Rules => Topic started by: Talad on December 20, 2011, 06:30:18 pm
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Merry Christmas and Xiosiamas to everyone! We would like to update you on the recent changes we did to the game rules. First of all, we have built a new model which puts together the rule simulators we already had in place. Basically the tool allows to simulate the progression of a character and calculate the total time spent in performing certain tasks, the amount of experience, practice and money gained. This allowed us to identify some problems in the current progression, where certain skills were very unbalanced and slower than others.
Here is a summary of the changes:
- Monsters for tutorial: The monsters present in the tutorial have been made much easier to kill, so new players will have a smoother start.
- Quests: We have dramatically raised the amount of money and experience quests provide. They were unbalanced compared to fight/magic/crafting.
- Weapon decay and repair: Weapons and armors were decaying too fast, about 1 point of quality every 10 hits, which was quite unrealistic. The new ratio is 1 point every 100 hits. Also all basic weapons (Small Battle Axe, Short Sword, Club, ... ) have been lowered to a cost of less than 1000 tria, and we changed the repair formula to allow everyone to repair items cheaper than 1000. This should make life of new players easier. Also you can now see the instructions on how to use the repair kits in their descriptions.
- Spell Practice: Practice given when casting spells has been changed to vary based on the spell's realm and caster's skill rank. Basically when you are higher rank, you will gain more practice points by using higher realm spells. Before it was flat.
- Crafting: Practice gained from Crafting was previously only related to the number of transformations completed (example smelting one ore). The new formula takes into account the time spent in the process and gives practice point accordingly. We also fixed a bug which was calculating improperly the time of crafting when a secondary skill was not required. This should make crafting have a similar progression to fight/magic.
- Loot: The value of all monster loot (excluding random weapons/armors) have been rebalanced to take into account the actual strength of the monster and the probability of finding the item.
- Damage in combat: The damage dealt in combat (weapons or melee) by high rank characters was exponentially reaching too high numbers. This was allowing monsters to one-shot-kill players and viceversa removing much of the fun of combat. The overall damage formula has been changed to remove this exponential factor.
- Experience points: When killing a monster (magic/fight) the engine was comparing the power of the attacker and the victim and then assigning experience points based on the result. The problem was that only stats (str,agi,end,int,cha,wil) were considered. The new formula includes stats, weapon skills, magic skills, and armor skills. The result is a much more balanced number of experience points.
- Training stats: Stats (str,agi,end,int,cha,wil) were considerably faster to train than skills, up to the point you could max out in few days. This was obviously not the intent, so we slowed down the progression of stats considerably. This together with the other changes we did, will rebalance their usefulness in the game compared to skills.
- Overall progression: The overall progression of a character includes three main factors: experience, practice and money needed for trainings. Now that we have connected the most important formulas of the game into a single tool, we can more easily balance progression. Also we can calculate the amount of hours needed to reach a certain rank (example from 0 to 100 in sword) or to rank up by one. We have reviewed this and made the progression a bit slower than before. For example to go from rank 0 to 10 it doesn't require 10 minutes anymore, but 3-4 hours.
Considering the big amount of changes done, we will avoid doing other changes for some time, and we will wait for your feedback. Please test the system with new characters and with existing ones. We know it's not perfect by any means, but we hope the changes above are a significant progress to make the game more enjoyable and balanced.
Thanks to everyone who participated to the testing!
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Spell Practice: Practice given when casting spells has been changed to vary based on the spell's realm and caster's skill rank. Basically when you are higher rank, you will gain more practice points by using higher realm spells. Before it was flat.
Something went very wrong with it today though. If yesterday that change was noticeable (i.e. higher realm spells really produced more practice and made progression faster than before, which really made using high realm spells enjoyable), today this regressed to something much worse than even before the first change. Basically now magic progression is almost unnoticeable, even after you cast 50 spells. I'm not sure if it was intended, but it definitely didn't make it any better to what it was before any changes were introduced. Can you please review what changes were made (looks like there were 2 changes for magic at least), and make the first change effective, reverting the second one?
UPDATE: Looks like there was a 3rd change, which made magic a bit better again. I'll test it to see how it works.
UPDATE2: It looks somewhat better now. Progress is not as rapid as after the first change, but still probably faster than before. The only missing part now are spells for realms 6-10 which will be naturally needed to progress in levels above 100 with normal rate.
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Another observation. Using some skill boosters (magic rings, special items and etc.) you can get access to higher realm spells earlier. However using these spells doesn't produce more practice, in comparison to spells from the current character's realm for some reason. Is it intended? One could expect to see the increase even with boosting items.
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After an hour and a half of combat testing the only thing that can be said is that the recent changes are staggering for combat skill advancement. Hopefully the tool which has been mentioned can monitor my character, Venorel, to see how the changes have affected things for her.
My general observations is that one will be able to advance a new character quicker or the same in combat up to about 20-25% of max. After that if you ever max a character it will require no other life what-so-ever. That is based on watching the shield skill advancement; which was her lowest combat skill.
The weapons may wear down less per swing, but because you are doing half the damage than you did before, it appears that they may be wearing down quicker for mid-range characters. Quicker meaning per kill.
Armour did not wear down at all in the hour and half of testing yet that may have been mostly because of her constant circling of the mobs to keep on their rear or side so as to not be killed in the extended combats.
Progression of mid-range combat skills are estimated to be 1/5th advancement to what they had been. It may be less.
Hopefully this is a massive balancing that is still under way and being closely monitored.
There was an additional nasty affect of the changes. All the partial advancement (green line) seemed to be wiped during the changes. Not sure if this was because of some formula change or a straight integer update of those values instead of the original real numbers. The fractional amounts seem to have been lost/removed. This has made it a doubly bitter pill to take.
- Nova
[Edit : Mid-Range was used thinking still in the max skill 200 era. So the changes are even more sever than originally thought. ]
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Armor practice is still unbalanced as you can wear two pieces of each type of armor and get a level in each in about ten minutes bye summoning a swarm with Dazzling Lights or Darkness. I did this with the various ranks in the 60-80 range. There is an additional problem with doing this because with 8-10 tlokes, for example, the number of status messages overflows the buffer and the terminal fills with buffer full messages causing the client to stop responding until the practice messages stop upon ranking. Perhaps my fairly old equipment exacerbates this problem, though.
It would seem that there could be a limit to the number of critters that can attack at one time or perhaps in a swarm individual critters' attacks could be lumped together. It doesn't seem realistic that such an onslaught would generate much training. It might be better if armor training was a passive function of time spent wearing the armor whether in combat or not and with the rate of practice increased significantly while in combat. This would allow you to dispense with all those "you have gained some heavy armor practice" messages that fill up the buffer.
The last time I used this technique it generated 28 buffer full messages every second or two. I am not certain if the problem would be as bad if I wasn't running the game from a bash terminal session.
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Thanks for these updates, Talad and everybody else involved.
Despite the fact that there was a considerable amount of graphical enhancements and new content added, I personally think that these are the best PlaneShift news for this year.
Tackling rule issues takes patience, intuition, time and courage... players are used to some game mechanics over time, and changing things will always result in complaints, no matter how imbalanced a changed rule used to be previously. I hope that with the new diagnostic tools, it will be more systematic and less cumbersome to achieve better balance, but even with that I guess it will still take plenty of trial and error.
Considering the changes to the combat damage formulas, that seems a much needed and reasonable thing. I have the feeling that not only the overall spread and peak damage went down by some big factor (something near a factor of 5 for Boni), but this also implies much more reasonable additive damage reduction. The big problem with that was the very frequent occurrence of both, one shot kills (as Talad mentioned) and failure to inflict any damage (even worse! See the various discussions about the uselessness of the knife and dagger weapon class). As a side note, this change is also directly connected to magic, as it should be possible now to assign much more reasonable values for spells that improve the characters defense (diamond skin etc.)
The only thing that puzzles me a bit are those training costs of physical and mental stats. All I have seen about this is a task on flyspray (http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/flyspray/index.php?task_id=5417), but i doubt some 20'000 tria for one lesson at low end ranks are intended. Well, we will see how things will equilibrate.
Armor practice is still unbalanced [...] There is an additional problem with [...] the number of status messages [...] causing the client to stop responding [...]
Well, that problem persists, but it has been there all the time. I think it would be much simpler to link armor practice with your own attack events: Each time you use a weapon, you also gain a bit of practice per slot of armor equipped.
By the way, mixing up armor types does not really speed up practice, as only one hit zone will count per NPC attack event. And I have observed the client freeze issue when finishing heavy armor training (some 30-40 seconds per rank in the end), and hitting the filter button in the stats widget seemed to help a lot.
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Hey, excellent news! You might have just gotten me back in the game.
In the future, though, I'd like to see fighting with less hits and more damage (I know of no critter that can survive 127 blows of an axe, even if wielded by a beginner axeman; I think (but I wasn't there taking arrows or sword-slashes while wearing breastplate) either you hit and the armour blocks it, either you don't hit because the other guy blocks you, either you merely pass the armour and do almost nothing, or either it becomes horrible very quickly), but I do realize what big work on balancing it would mean.
Anyway, bravo on this last update!
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Excellent Work Talad and all devs at work!
I think those improvement were really needed as they should improve the fun (and reduce the dieing risks) for newbies.
I also appreciate the rebalance in skills progression (even if it's going to be quite unpopular) because having around too many ungodly powerful char may sometimes be a little intimidating for newbies.
I also appreciated tria and animal parts re-factoring since it allows a char to approach the mobs best suited to his capability instead of blasting more powerful or one shot weeker mobs for hours just because intermediate mobs don't give out enough tria. This may improve the fun even if training is slower now.
Armor practice is still unbalanced [...] There is an additional problem with [...] the number of status messages [...] causing the client to stop responding [...]
Well, that problem persists, but it has been there all the time. I think it would be much simpler to link armor practice with your own attack events: Each time you use a weapon, you also gain a bit of practice per slot of armor equipped.
About armour training I just want to point that if it is only trained while using weapons it is very unfair to the char that use magic instead of weapons... and we all knows armour training is necessary to survive the mobs ;)
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About armour training I just want to point that if it is only trained while using weapons it is very unfair to the char that use magic instead of weapons... and we all knows armour training is necessary to survive the mobs ;)
You make a valid point, Eonwind.
On the other hand, one could argue that it makes sense to have higher synergy between weapon and armor skills, though. Or in other words: "The best armor is to keep out of range." (Italian proverb.)
All of this depends on your personal understanding or flavor for rules related to combat, armors, and ranged attacks.
For example, I always had the impression that it does not really make sense to have a stronger damage reduction value with higher ranks of armor training. The skill should define your mobility, stamina and ability to engage in combat, while the type and quality of armor alone should provide the damage reduction. However, such a system would be less convenient to set up in terms of character progression and balancing, so the skill does act on the observable that fits in the sense of simple game mechanics rather than realism. Either way, there are always compromises, and the suggestion was meant as a simple workaround. I hope that I am not going off topic here.
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Despite the fact that there was a considerable amount of graphical enhancements and new content added, I personally think that these are the best PlaneShift news for this year.
:thumbup: I agree! This is a step in the right direction :D
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- Quests: We have dramatically raised the amount of money and experience quests provide. They were unbalanced compared to fight/magic/crafting.
A couple of notes about quests. You may have noticed that for a lot of these quests, the tria has been pretty good but the exp was really low (max of 1000 exp per quest). So not sure how much the tria has changed but certainly the exp increase is indeed quite dramatic. \\o//
Also note that this change effects quests that use give scripts. Many of the older quests use a manual "give exp" command rather than scripts, so the values are static. We are in the process of converting those so they will all use the same convention. There are a lot of them so it will take some time. Just be aware that those may not yet be effected by this change, but it's an ongoing process and we should be done in a few weeks.
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I do not understand the comment about only training armor while using weapons. You only train armor when standing toe to toe with a mob but it doesn't matter if you are swinging an axe or gesticulating madly to conjure an effect, or did I miss something?
Nice to hear that about the quests, I wondered why malco was so stingy for lunch while gulm was so generous for his package.
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Training stats: Stats (str,agi,end,int,cha,wil) were considerably faster to train than skills, up to the point you could max out in few days. This was obviously not the intent, so we slowed down the progression of stats considerably. This together with the other changes we did, will rebalance their usefulness in the game compared to skills.
before you could just simply pump tria into these stats to train them, that's why they were so easy and quick to raise, no skill or action was needed past raising the funds. How exactly have you slowed a simple financial transaction down? Make it more expensive? Deny the use of credit cards?
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Credit scrolls rather ;)
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I don't seem to get any practice for axe while fighting with one. Is that normal? I do get practice for my armor when I get hit...
Whoops... forgot to add: I tried fighting with dlayos and I am level 199 in axe and light armor. It still should be trained, since I bought a level some time ago.
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Can it be that you just get very little practice since your skill is too high? Try some tougher opponents like maulberlords or elder gorweals.
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As a 'newbie' maybe i should not post here. but killing Guile (which takes me almost 20 minutes and always levels my crystal way and 1/2 azure way) doesn't give me enough PP to level either skill
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Can it be that you just get very little practice since your skill is too high? Try some tougher opponents like maulberlords or elder gorweals.
I wouldn't mind that. But it should still say "You get some practice in axe" or something like that. But it doesn't say that. That means, I don't get any practice at all
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Nice improvements, sounds like skill progression has become more advanced and I look forward to seeing that play into things. Perhaps this will promote more skill specialization instead of being a jack of all weapons/trades so to speak. I look forward to new content and future balancing, keep up the good work. :thumbup:
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I wouldn't mind that. But it should still say "You get some practice in axe" or something like that. But it doesn't say that. That means, I don't get any practice at all
It can also mean that you get only a fraction of 1 practice point, and thus the system doesn't report it, until it accumulates to 1. At least you see the same story now with Progression Points (which have 200 exp points in 1 Progression Point). For many actions now you get less than 200 experience points, and thus only the fraction of the Progression Point, which is not reported. But when it adds up to 1 - it says that you got 1 Progression Point. Of course better to hear from the devs what's the case.
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Went on a group hunt with a newer guildie tonight and it went pretty well. Once my shield levelled and my character was using two sabres the advancement did not seem as grave as my last posting. It is slower yet the group hunt was fun and we both advanced.
After further consideration, provided Magic gets finally balanced against straight combat, the change will probably be the best for PS and it's commitment to RP.
- Nova
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These are very interesting changes. It's good to see big attempts to address balance and mechanics problems like this. At some point I'll have to get back in game - with the recent large changes I'm very interested.
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Training "Musical Instrument" requires suddenly possibly 10x or 20x the PP per level. That means, I have to check by trial and error all the animals again which won't kill me before I get too few PP per kill to find it useful... and that's not really entertaining if a Consumer is already too dangerous for this character.
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I try to reach the next lvl in ranged (52) but it is hard work. I shoot more than 1300 arrows now and i am only half the way to lvl up. On this way i will never reach a lvl to kill some stronger animal then a customer. Please check the changes that have been done on ranged.
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... and that's not really entertaining if a Consumer is already too dangerous for this character.
My observations have been that monsters that my character could kill before the changes can still be killed after... it just takes longer. Just like the characters, the mobs are not doing as much damage as they had done. So it will be generally safer than it had been before the change with mobs you had been comfortable with, in my opinion.
- Nova
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it should still say "You get some practice in axe" or something like that. But it doesn't say that.
I can confirm Jilata's observation: Sparring with some NPCs will result in a gain of practice, while fighting others won't help you to advance. I guess the threshold is related to the characters weapon skill ranks and the targets defense, such that you cannot simply pick one that has zero percent chance to block or dodge your blows. The more interesting question is: Will the amount of practice points gained per hit also depend on the target? This is somewhat difficult to recognize as a player, even if you make the stats window the size of your screen and watch the pixels of the progress bar. So can anyone confirm that? It would also make an explanation for sammyhundde's slow progress with bows. I try to reach the next lvl in ranged (52) but it is hard work. I shoot more than 1300 arrows now and i am only half the way to lvl up.
Arrows are expensive in such amounts ;)
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The more interesting question is: Will the amount of practice points gained per hit also depend on the target? This is somewhat difficult to recognize as a player, even if you make the stats window the size of your screen and watch the pixels of the progress bar. So can anyone confirm that?
That's why I proposed many times to add reporting of the practice point gain to the system messages. You get those reports for experience and progression points, so why not for practice? I don't see consistency in hiding them.
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It is kind of redundant to report both experience and progression as they are just different denominations of the same thing. It is sort of like counting pennies and reporting both each one and every hundredth one.
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It is kind of redundant to report both experience and progression as they are just different denominations of the same thing. It is sort of like counting pennies and reporting both each one and every hundredth one.
What is the ratio? I've not seen it in a public document.
Oh, and while tweaks remain, it is nice to see gameplay issues being addressed. Compliments to the volunteers who make all this happen.
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200 experience points = 1 progression point
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After some tests with magic skill boosting items (bracers, rings, magic weapons etc.) I concluded that they don't improve practice in any way. I.e. they don't decrease spell casting time (even though your effective magic skill level is increased), and even when you cast spells from higher realms (like when the boosters give you access to realms beyond your current one), practice gained from those spells is the same as from the spells of you current realm. IMO this makes these skill boosting items more decorative, than really useful. Please consider using the effective level of the skill (i.e. base + boosters) for measuring practice gain, and speed of casting. I.e. if you get some amount of practice points for your current realm, you should get more for higher realm spells enabled by the booster, while having the total amount of practice points for that level the same. It will give some real value to these items, since they'll really improve your practice.
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when you use a booster you are automatically in the higher realm while you use it so it's like having ranked to that point.
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If that so, it also means that you don't get practice gain. I.e. for higher realm you need more practice, and in result - you'll need the same (or more) actual time to level. Boosters can be considered a benefit / a bonus, if they decrease the time needed to gain a level, comparing to when you don't have those boosters. This can be achieved by affecting the casting time (i.e. boosters should decrease it), and by measuring the total needed practice to level up according to the base level (not according to the boosted one), while allowing to gain practice according to the realm given by the booster. Those 2 considerations can give practical decrease in time needed to gain a level in the skill. And this will make boosting items actually valuable.
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so if I'm doing an exam and I take a boosting item called "stolen exam from the teacher" do i get a boost on my knowledge of the topic? maybe this is a bit extreme as in most countries that's a penal offense but delivers the idea :)
If you consider boosting item then you consider also the opposite of the medal. If you are under a debuff you shouldn't get more experience at trying to do things which have become more difficult to do due to your current status. If I cannot move a leg don't I get some different and additional experience at walking with only one working leg?
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Could it be that raising your magic way skill with bracers etc actually does speed up your casting times, but the effect is simply so small that you don't really see it in your tests, Gilrond?
Either way, I think it is fair when rare-to-find items do not give you an additional significant advantage for ranking up, as they should already make your spells more powerful. I admit, though, in many cases you won't see much of that, as you are far beyond the spells limit to improve any further.
Another important point with spell practice is - once again - relaxing sleep. When the spell comes with a state that renders the character unable to cast or move, mana supplies will enter as a limiting factor and make other aspects less important for gaining spell practice. At least that is my impression for this absolutely critical step towards a better game balance.
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If you are under a debuff you shouldn't get more experience at trying to do things which have become more difficult to do due to your current status. If I cannot move a leg don't I get some different and additional experience at walking with only one working leg?
Sure, why not, the fact that very few debuffs are implemented is not the problem of the logic above, but again the problem of implementation :) So for example when under Dakkru's curse practice can be slow as you said.
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Could it be that raising your magic way skill with bracers etc actually does speed up your casting times, but the effect is simply so small that you don't really see it in your tests, Gilrond
No, I performed a test with a significant boost (2 Laanx Mind Items and other buffs together). That's more than 40+ in the DW skill which means it gives you access to spells 2 realms higher than your own. There was no change in casting time and practice gain whatsoever (you can either write a small mod that would output the casting time to the system message, or simply count the number of castings in a minute or two).
Either way, I think it is fair when rare-to-find items do not give you an additional significant advantage for ranking up, as they should already make your spells more powerful.
As you yourself said, this benefit is very mininal, and in many cases insignificant. The most valuable commodity is the practice time, and special items affecting it would give them value. Looks like devs aren't interested in doing it, so there would be more wall decorations, from rings and "of Ways" items I guess ;)
Another important point with spell practice is - once again - relaxing sleep. When the spell comes with a state that renders the character unable to cast or move, mana supplies will enter as a limiting factor and make other aspects less important for gaining spell practice. At least that is my impression for this absolutely critical step towards a better game balance.
Hehe, do you mean other aspects are already balanced enough, to make Relaxing Sleep a bottleneck now? That will slow down practice even more (after a while, it starts to look like the current system after all is worse than before all these changes in a sense of magic practice time, and the lack of spells beyond realm 5 makes it altogether unusable for levels 100+).
I understood the intention of changes to make practice more adequate for higher levels of skill, i.e. to balance the rate of progression with giving more practice for higher realm spells. If the intention was to make it harder overall - there is nothing to discuss really. I'm sure they'll find a way to make it harder :D
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Hehe, do you mean other aspects are already balanced enough, to make Relaxing Sleep a bottleneck now?
No, I just wanted to mention the importance of that spell everybody is used to abuse. It is obvious that it will be much less useful once it works the way it should by design. But it makes testing magic convenient in its imbalanced implementation, just like infinite mana cheats would do in other games ;)
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Yes, in the perfect situation there will be limited use of Relaxing Sleep, and skill progression would work better than now. Plus there will be alchemy around, allowing skilled alchemists to create strong mana potions from various ingredients. All that cumulatively could work more or less. As of now - better to leave Relaxing Sleep as is.
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After those exciting changes, I finally had the time to test them.
First of all: It is really good you work on the whole subject and can run better tests now! \\o//
Before listing my observations, I have a, I believe very important, Question:
How are skill-Levels supposed to be converted into ingame RP knowledge?
In magic, being around lvl 100 makes you a full adept. Which I think is probable.
In smithing, lvl 20 I believe is enough to make swords around 200 or more Quality, depending on how much time you spend. So I guess to make 300Q (Perfect!!!) weapons, you might not lvl 200 in weapon making but more or less lvl 50 maybe?
In armor skills, being around lvl 70 is enough to minimize damage done by dlayo Gladiators (!) to about 70 per hit which makes standing next to them using magic really easy atm.
On the other hand it takes around 3-4 hours to skill from lvl 1 to 10 now, costing around 10k trias, which is 40x the income a regular farmer has within a month.
So, is there an overview what skilllevel is which ingame skill? Is any armor skill above 50 or 100 a hero/very very experienced fighter lvl? So that a young character should normally not reach these lvls?
A few things I observed:
Magic:
I have the feeling lvling is at a good pace atm, couldn't notice the difference between high realm spells and others. That seems good, but:
At lvl 45 brown way a stone fist does 91 damage while fist of the vulcano with red way lvl 90 does only 43 damage to certain targets. How is that possible? I like how spells do different damage on different targets, but such a huge difference?
LVLing job skills:
I had to fish around 70-80 fishes to lvl from fishing 2 to lvl 3. While the time spend might be fine as you can already fish many fishes, I wonder if it would not be possible to gain practice points in fishing when not catching a fish. You gain different amounts from different realm spells, wouldn't it be possible to implement pp gained when not catching a fish (as you should learn from mistakes!).
Economy:
I know in the mid ages having a sword was really expensive. But I still think that the system is messed up.
You pay around 5-10 tria for a good meal.
A farmer makes 250 tria a month.
So maybe a cook makes about the same, a little more?
A miner on the other hand gets 250 tria for two ores(!) if he sells those to harnquist.
A delivery boy gets a quest from Harnquist to pick up a weapon part from Trasok has to pay 50 trias to Trasok to complete the quest (how should a delivery boy have that much money?) and gets 3300 trias for completing the task.
A little boy asking to assist Harnquist picks up two apples at a tree infront of Harnquists smithy and gets 120 trias. Now tell me which farmer would choose working for a hard month instead of giving apples to Harnquist?
Next example is someone learning to repair weapons. He pays 100 trias for a repair kit. To get from lvl 0 to 1, he will spend at least 2000 trias on repair kits. How could someone afford that?
I would really like to have more characters who are not just over the top heros but more regular people (and with those lvls you can still enjoy stuff like questing, fighting and stuff without sticking to rats).
I think all comes back to the question which skill-lvl is what knowledge. I would say that the first 5-10 lvls are maybe common knowledge? Things that you learn by living? For example mace and hammer, lvl 5, should be the knowledge of a 15 year old who might have used sticks to fight rats or something? A female at age 20 should have a decent cooking skill?
I like to learn the pp from npcs in just about every skill I see cause I think at those lvls its a learning by doing thing? Wouldn't it be possible to learn skills without a npc to a certain lvl, just that it takes longer?
I would like some other opinions of other players as well, what skill is what knowledge ingame to you? How do you roleplay this?
so much from me.
Greetings,
Symasta
PS: Got a little late, I hope I wrote in a way that is understandable.
PPS: Is more detailed help wanted from the developers on this topic?
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obviously the stated values on the site are not up to date with the game state.
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Well I ran some fighting tests and it looks to me like you didn't take account of the fact that mages don't need defensive skills to be able to take down their prey. A good managing of running and casting can keep you safe from being hit, and I won't even talk about standing on a rock. Much, much harder when you're swinging blades / clubs at stuff.
Here is what I tried.
-Fighting a marfusang with a all physical stats at 300, mental stats all under 75, HA, Shield and Weapon skills at 135. This character almost died, was forced to eat enough fish delight to face diabetes and only got 99 xp (and needless to say 0 PPs). Took a while in normal stance. Using a defensive stance I didn't get hurt so badly but it took really long, plus I dealt a consequent number of almost ineffective hits. I used 50/50Q weapon and shield, 45/50 HA.
-Fighting a marfusang by casting Psychic Blast at it while running around. Character has a magic skill of 133, all mental stats maxed. Agi is 100, Str & End about 75. Took me less than one minute and earned me 40PPs, without getting hurt or even risking it.
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Tribal and active creatures will solve that issue I think. Especially if they start implementing ranged and magic attacks for the ones who are sentient.