By: Ken "Graalx2" Burd

Overview

Volume III, Book 2 will address two main issues with the Captain class. First, their Standards give percentage-based additions to Melee Offense and Morale; this is untenable in the long run. As these numbers keep going up, a 10% or 20% bonus becomes overwhelming, plus it leaves no room to give additional bonuses as level caps are increased.

The other issue is that end-game Captains rarely trait in any other line than Hands of Healing. Both Lead the Charge and Leader of Men suffer from confusion over exactly what their bonuses should be doing. Is Lead the Charge useful for DPS or for Tanking? Is Leader of Men supposed to be used solo when using pets or in a fellowship for the buffs and revive abilities?

While looking at these issues, we discovered that Heralds would also benefit from some adjustments. Each type of Herald now has its own special skill. Heralds of War will tend to use their large auto-attacks more. In addition, the Herald of War has a new Coordinated Strike skill that does more damage plus does additional damage when attacking from behind. The Herald of Hope will now be able to “Lend Courage” that restores much more Morale than Lend Will. The Herald of Victory now will ”Lend Resolve” that restores some of the Captain’s Power in addition to Morale.

We also took the opportunity to change Armaments so that they give actual Armour ratings to your Heralds. Previously, Armaments used a form of Melee/Ranged/Tactical Defence that reduced the incoming damage by a percentage. This prevented us from adding in higher levels of Armaments (this is why there were no new Armaments after level 40).

Captain Standards

Let’s get these out of the way first. Currently, Captain Standards give a base 10% bonus to Melee Offense and 10% bonus to max Morale, with specific types of Standards increasing these bonuses. These bonuses will be converted to Melee Offence Rating and a straight addition to Maximum Morale.

While it is theoretically possible, with these Standards, to reach the cap of +30% Melee Offense, the Captain must have a near maximum Might, plus several other Melee Offense items equipped to reach that cap. What the Standards do is allow the Captain the ability to choose equipment that focuses on the other things the Captain is called on to do while still maintaining a high Melee Offense.

The Max Morale bonuses were built by taking a multiple of the Max Morale bonus available on items. This takes into account the high level increases in these items to keep the numbers close to what they were in absolute terms. While we are sure there are some Captains who specifically built their characters to maximize their Morale who will get less of a bonus from these Standards, we believe there will be just as many Captains who will actually gain more Morale or at least be approximately the same as before.

We realize that some Captains may see this change as a nerf, but it is necessary for the long term balance of the game. To help offset these changes we introduced a Tailor recipe for level 65 standards that is available in random monster loot.