[h3]Hello Lumia Island survivors![/h3]
Today’s Dev Journal will cover changes in Mastery and Crafting.
The defining moments of win or loss are played out by how well you fought - controlling and maneuvering your character against others. However,
players spend most of their time in the game trying to improve this defining position even if it’s just slightly more favorable. Mastery, Crafting, and Credits (which we’ll cover in our next Dev Journal) make up the three pillars of character growth in Eternal Return.
Eternal Return is a game with a tremendous amount of information. With so much information to keep track of, you have to open several pop-ups to monitor the character’s status while playing the game, including Mastery (V), Crafting Menu (B), Open Saved Plans list (P), and Scoreboard (Tab). But now,
3 pop-ups, excluding the Scoreboard, will be combined into one - the VPad! *All preview images released in the Dev Journals are subject to change during the development process.
VPad stands for Vectorized Projection Assistance Display, a vector screen projected from a bracelet on the subject's wrist that allows them to see their current status during the experiment.
Players will now have access to the three pillars of growth - Mastery, Crafting, and Credits - in one glance! And all you need to do is remember your V Key!
The left side of the VPad is reserved for the two kinds of special skills:
Weapon Skills and Tactical Skills. Weapon Skills get stronger as you gain weapon mastery, and Tactical Skills get stronger as you buy and upgrade them with Credits. 
As for Mastery, it has been simplified into six categories: Weapons, Hunt, Craft, Search, Move, and Defense, while Health and Traps have been removed. However, it's still important to build up your skills evenly, as the overall structure of leveling up as you gain experience remains the same. Another important change is that Weapon Skills now have 3 levels, allowing you to learn your first Weapon Skill faster.
Of the six, the one with the most impact on combat is Weapon Mastery. This is one of Eternal Return's unique systems, but it has also had its ups and downs.
On the other hand, Season 7's Skill Amplification's update was one of our most poorly received updates. Not only did it have some serious unbalancing issues early on in the patch, but it also created some new problems in the long run.
The biggest problem with it is that
items have lost their universality. With items having a separation between Skill Amp and Attack Power, there have been many incidents where looting enemies or loot crates do not feel rewarding if they are not fitting items. We've since added an item destruction system to make it a little better, but it's still quite inconvenient and incomplete.
Additionally,
it has made Mastery more confusing. Mastery's Skill Amplification has become meaningless for Basic Attack Characters, and vice versa. To improve this, we removed useless masteries and added different mastery effects that match each character's needs. As a result, each character at the moment has different mastery per weapon, making it practically a second passive that needs to be learned.
Even within the development team, there have been many discussions about rolling back the Skill Amplification Update, but there were a lot of downsides and complications to that. First of all, ignoring the changes already made to Characters, Items, Objects, Phases, etc could possibly
make this rolling process a "Second Skill Amplification Patch" . Besides the structural problems caused by the Skill Amplification Patch, the first month of Season 7 was a total balancing failure. Even in the past, we had seen some issues in the balancing from introducing new systems such as Augments and Battle Zones, but a rollback that
"alters the fundamental formula for all characters and changes all of their skills' weight" would likely cause the same level of confusion and consequences as the Skill Amplification Patch.
Even though the balance was severely destabilized right after the Skill Amplification Update, the previous system also had many flaws. Problems such as "Skill casters having overly powerful Basic Attacks", "Tanks dealing overly strong damage", “DPS characters wearing tank items”, or "Damage being too concentrated in a single skill", were not easy to solve.
So, instead of going backwards, we wanted to find an alternative to solve the current issues. First, we want to address the biggest issue with the Skill Amplification patch - item versatility - in a new way.
To do so, we’re introducing a Reward System. Now, when you eliminate an enemy,
their Legendary Equipment will be converted into Rewards. You can get Reward Pouches from enemy corpses and use them to accumulate Credits. The more Legendary Equipment the enemy has, the bigger the reward! Now defeating powerful enemies will get you more than just your honor, you'll be rewarded accordingly for your efforts!
Up until now, fiding 2 or 3 Legendary Equipments from a corpse would instantly result in a drastic increase in the power curve, making it an excessively significant return. But if they weren't useful, players would have to use a rather inconvenient UI to destroy them. However, now
we have equalized the expected return and it's made it more convenient. Air Supplies also had an issue regarding item versatility. We'll cover Air Supplies' changes in more detail in our next Dev Journal, Credits and Game Phase, but to give you a peak of one of its changes,
all equipment collected from Legendary Boxes will have adaptive stats, making them useful for both Skill Amplification and Basic Attack builds. Selective Stats, well, select and provide the character's highest stat between Skill Amplification and Attack Power.
(All the values, including the stats exchange ratio, are just examples.)
Once the problem of item versatility for the two ways of obtaining Legendary Equipment, besides crafting, has been solved, the inonvenient destruction function will be removed.
Another big problem, the
lack of intuitiveness of Mastery, has gotten worse in subsequent patches to the “Skill Amplification Patch”. To solve the problem of Mastery not being useful for some characters, we individualized it for each of them. As a result, the entry barrier increased, but the expected results were not achieved. There were many conflicting points between the 2 intended directions, one changing the mastery and the other opening up the possibility of alternative builds.
We want to make Mastery simpler and clearer.
Weapon Mastery will no longer be individualized per character, and all characters will have only one main effect, either Skill Amplification or Basic Attack Amplification, and all of them will have Attack Speed as a secondary effect. You might be a little skeptical about Attack Speed, but in order to give characters using multiple weapons a different Attack Speed per weapon, this must be attached to Weapon Mastery.
While giving Attack Speed as a secondary effect to a Skill Amplification Character is not completely meaningless for Skill and Basic Attacks combos, or Uninstalling Cameras and Traps, Skill Amp side will be compensated a bit as they scale with Attack Speed a bit less.
Therefore, all test subjects will only have 2 Weapon Masteries. All secondary effects that were added before, such as Omnisyphon and Cooldown Reduction, will be removed.
Simplifying Mastery increases intuitiveness, but it makes it harder to create alternative builds other than the main one used with Skill Amplification or Basic Attacks. We plan to address the variety of builds in the future by working on the differences between Weapon types.
For Characters with skill sets that are suitable for playing in both directions, their different weapons will be assigned to different playstyles. If they only have one Weapon type, we'll prioritize adding Weapon types.
The Tactical Skills in the bottom left corner are upgraded by using Credits, as we covered in our last Changes to Accessories, making early game play more diversified. We'll talk more about the types of Tactical Skills in our Dev Stream!
You can organize better by checking the items you obtained through Crafting and Remote Drones on the right side of the VPad. The purpose of this new feature is to connect all Crafting related functions.
As your crafting progresses, you'll see a % progress indicator, and clicking on an incomplete target item will show you the materials needed for that item at a glance.
If you haven't found a material yet, you can call in a Remote Drone directly by pressing the button that has the price on it. We'll be covering more about Credits on our next Dev Journal, but as Credits will now be used more often, we will now display their price, just like in a store! It's time to forget the times when the UI wasn't clear about how to use a Remote Drone.
In addition to letting you call the materials you want from your Crafting Tree, the bottom of the VPad will also give you a
separate list of materials that you can order with Remote Drones. For example, if the
creator of the Saved Plan recommended something, it will be included here. The most common use of this new feature in early to mid-game is whenever you need to find an item
in one area and you don't find it, so you move on to the next one. For example, if you know you should have gotten Glue on Route 1 and you didn't, the item will be
automatically added for easy recall.
One of the most important features of the new Crafting Guide is the
Process to get Legendary Equipment. While beginners in Eternal Return somehow manage to get used to crafting Epic Equipment, the #1 most challenging task after that was leveling up to Legendary.
So now when you're done crafting your Epic Equipment, it will blink as “Completed” in the Crafting Guide. When you enter the VPad by tapping on the Crafting Guide, you'll be given
three options for Legendary Equipment to target in that area.
If you have any of the latter items registered in your Saved Plan, they will come to the top of the list, and the rest will be suggested based on their build types. If you choose one of them, it will be registered as a target. Of course, the materials that can be teleported will also show up again.
This
process smoothly leads you to change your target to Legendary Equipment once you have completed your Epic tier. If you do this for all five pieces of equipment - Weapon, Head, Chest, Arm, and Leg -
all five will be turned into Legendary. Typically, when crafting a Saved Plan, Weapons are allocated as VF Blood Samples, Head as Tree of Life, Chest as Meteorites, so you can respond according to the materials you get.
But, as you play, you may find yourself picking up
Legendary materials that you don't have set up in your Saved Plan. In these cases, Operator Nadja, not VPad, will suggest Legendary Equipment that can be crafted from those materials. We'll cover more of this in the Operator Nadja Dev Journal!
While the process of crafting major equipment is important,
crafting Consumables such as food, traps and cameras, is also a big part of the game. Of these, food has a formula that allows you
to take any item to campfire , greatly reducing the difficulty of crafting. Beverages are a different story, with an overhaul to the crafting recipe that makes it more of a
"any common beverage (white) can be made into a higher-end beverage (green) by combining two different types" concept. As a result, food and drinks are less about crafting with a specific goal in mind and more about improvising as you go.
In the upcoming Dev Journal, changes to “Traps and Cameras” will be introduced.
Traps and Cameras will be added to a shortcut in VPad, allowing them to be quickly targeted or called up by a remote drone when needed.
The goal of VPad is to make sure that you only have one pop-up open at any given time, rather than a bunch of different ones. And that you can see it at a glance, rather than having to navigate through multiple tabs like you would in the original Crafting menu.
Moreover, the existing Mastery pop-up (V) and Open Saved Plans List (P, Shift+P) functions will be completely removed, but the Crafting Menu (B) will remain functional. However, all of the most commonly used functions of the Crafting Menu will now also be available on the VPad, so it's unlikely that beginners will ever need to open it. In some cases, experienced players who want to craft items that aren't on their Saved Plans will still be able to use the Item Catalog.
Next Dev Journal will cover changes to Credits and Game Phases. See you there!
Thank you for reading!
[h3]
You can get WP from the Dev Journals on our web event page.[/h3]
[h3]
Web Points(WP) are event points that can be obtained and used throughout the Season 9 web events[/h3]
