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, 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.