There were a lot of community questions, so we're breaking this up into three postings, the next one will be tomorrow and the third one on Monday. Due to technical issues we can't do a live stream as we wanted, but we'll do that next time. The answers come from the Darkfall developers, and the effort was to answer every one of your questions:
Do we still have to buy the school skills (Stampede, vampire strike, barrage) with our prowess or are they all available from the start?
All characters, existing and new, will have no school skills available after the custom roles patch is applied. Players will need to purchase any skills they desire from the appropriate vendors. The first skills have a very low prowess price that increases as the player progresses towards the Ultimate. Skill can be purchased in any order as there is no requirement for the previous skill to be bought.
"Will the current 'power level' of a character go up, down, or stay the same with this change. IE: Will fireball from someone with 140 INT, leenspar staff, and full light armor (+dmg) hit for the same amount as fireball does today from an Elem with leen and 140 INT? Or will it hit for more/less?" (It will hit for more).
It will hit for the same damage. However if you are wearing elementalist robes, the damage will be increased, because elementalist robes give bonus to magnitude.
Will the custom class patch increase time to kill?
Depends on the build used. Some builds increase it and some are very powerful but extremely fragile. In general the vital stats of all characters have been increased, we lowered the stamina loss from hits but we also increased the damage output with the light robes. But overall we expect TTK to increase.
Will I be able to bunnyhop properly?
What we can say for sure is that nothing is set in stone. From the feedback it seems that people are against no-risk bunnyhopping that allows a player to travel a great amount of distance. We are experimenting with some values that might achieve fixing that. Mainly it has to do with finding an acceptable (large) value of damage that the player receives from “horizontal falling damage”. This might affect other areas of the game as well, so we are rather tentative until extensive testing has been performed on this subject. In any case, we are closely watching your feedback regarding this issue.
What about PP in craft skills - we will get back adventure/skill PP to buy/skill the schools again but not craft mastery PP or?
Crafting skills and masteries will not be affected in any way by the custom roles patch. Player will retain the skills they have bought and levelled up.
Are you going to change or limit movement skills? That is, will you make it impossible to use Evade+Leap+Dash+Stampede+Attunement to Air etc. on the same character, implement cooldowns, or just let people choose the abilities they want, without limits?
There are no artificial limits to skills. Players are free to mix and match as well as use any skill they want. Several skills have been altered to a great extent however, especially movement skills.
What about skills that are rarely used nowadays like eg roar and other skills that will be relatively uninteresting when people can choose from a much higher pool of skills. Any details on adjustments?
There are too many adjustments to go through in this format but our goal has been to make all skills equally desirable. Further tweaks will happen based on our observations and your feedback once the custom roles patch has been deployed. As for the Roar skill that is mentioned we changed it so it is a front cone debuff, rather than cast centered, so it is more useful. We also buffed it.
Any chance you will be reworking movement ? It feels clunky and most people would agree that your character seems like walking on ice. Combat requires responsive movement without any delays to be fun.
We have made several changes to movement and animation blending lately which has mostly addressed the “ice skating issue”. We will not stop there however, as we take combat responsiveness very seriously. After the roles patch we will be tweaking and experimenting with some hard-coded variables, mainly in direction switching and jump delay, in order to make the feel of combat more responsive and accurate.
We know that this will inevitably have other repercussions in the game, we are well aware of them and planning to fix them preemptively.
"Will we need to choose a school to be ""primary"" as now (not role, I mean just school, I know that role will be gone)? If yes, this school will improve its skills (reduces cooldown)?"
No, the concept of a primary school does no longer apply. You can still level up your schools with prowess like before and their bonuses will apply to all skills in the school. I.e all skills now count as primary school skills.
Will opposite school lockouts still apply (e.g. can't have fire and water spells at the same time)?
No, you can choose skills from any school.
What are you going to do about the inevitable situation where practically everyone has ranged gank and rez?
These skills and many others have been tweaked to a great extent.
Are you still going to release the new schools, and if so, will you release them all at once, or one spell at a time?
We definitely want to release new skills, schools and even roles. Whether we do it one school or one skill at a time will depend on our schedule and the intended purpose of the school. One thing is certain, the new system makes it a lot easier for us to introduce new schools to the game as relative balance is no longer an issue.
Thank you for reading