Huge Astrology Nerfs

[maca0147]

How badly were your guys' bonuses nerfed after spending all your refunded dust?

It's actually nuts to me how my buffs have been gutted. I had multiple 13/14% boosts that are now like 4-8% even while leaving some perks w.o a single lvl...

Basically, the skill seems to have had these changes:

1: Been completely gutted in overall power, losing the majority of it. Even max boosts are substantially worst than non-BiS perks, w/ this patch capping your max buff in a specific golden perk at 5% (66% nerf compared to old astro) or in a blue perk at 8% (47% nerf compared to old astro)

2: Severely nerfed player choice. You're now shoehorned into jack-of-all-trades play style by not letting you focus one of the two constellation's skills. In exchange for this you can have a wider variety of buffs. It's no longer like agility where you're changing your astro perks based on your activity, overall giving the system less flexibility

3. Any semblance of the old astro's power lvl is now locked behind a MASSIVE study grind. Although the nerfs I've described above are already huge, the current ones you're going to feel are even more substantial, because you're not going to get even close to max boosts (even if you were near BiS before). The costs of higher levels are insane, if you choose to get max boosts in some important perks you'll leave others empty

4. Accuracy. Lifesteal. Wtf happened to these perks. For accuracy, old BiS was 90%, new BiS is 40% and it cost just about all of my stardust to obtain that BiS when I was already at 80%+... my old lifesteal was 14% now it's 3%, with 27/33 yellow perks completely empty and no golden stardust left. I have 3 "max" perks that are a third as strong as they used to be, with the remainder at level 3.

5. We don't have to reroll anymore

Besides #5.... I cannot think of a beneficial change to players. With such a big blow to player power, the skill basically feels like some semi-useless side thing that can be safely ignored as the return for time investment is so poor compared to other skills. We used to be at about 80-90% of a max power level that was 2-3 times where it is now. Now we're at like 20-30% of BiS boosts, and that's without any new constellations the xpac might add. If we get more, the grind will be insanely long w/ really awful xp rates (ironically, the only xp buff the rework isn't giving us )

With one of my favorite skills being deleted from the game reworked like this and township being a little overly complex (IMO, I'm probably just dumb), has killed a ton of my hype for the xpac. How are you guys feeling, how bad were your astro bonuses nerfed?

[Sobakaa]

Well, reroll mechanic was a bit infuriating. Perhaps they should've added "weighted" chance of rolling a higher level of your current mod via some rare drop. Nerfing it outright is indeed a bit disappointing.
Agree on township, though - perhaps it's easy but the interface requires so many, many clicks i just can't be bothered with it.

[Xuhybrid]

I think the rerolling was awful however to lose so much power in exchange is a bit of a slap in the face. For example i had 70% Accuracy now im at 30% from my refunded dust. The only thing i can see as a positive is you can get Hidden Levels with Accuracy, but im not sure how much of a difference that makes.

[123]

Originally posted by Xuhybrid:

I think the rerolling was awful however to lose so much power in exchange is a bit of a slap in the face. For example i had 70% Accuracy now im at 30% from my refunded dust. The only thing i can see as a positive is you can get Hidden Levels with Accuracy, but im not sure how much of a difference that makes.

I had to reload from a save to do Astrology twice because i spent too much at the beginning trying to match my old stats. That's when it hit me how fu'd we are and the grind to get back.

[Pandorian]

Originally posted by Xuhybrid:

I think the rerolling was awful however to lose so much power in exchange is a bit of a slap in the face. For example i had 70% Accuracy now im at 30% from my refunded dust. The only thing i can see as a positive is you can get Hidden Levels with Accuracy, but im not sure how much of a difference that makes.

You still end up with an Accuracy reduction even with Hidden Levels.

The numbers are basically 113*1.4 vs 108*1.9 as your multipliers for ranged/magic/defense. The first part of the accuracy equation doesn't change with the astrology rework.
So 158.2 vs 205.2 or 77% of what your maximum accuracy was.
Melee it's 116*1.4=162.4 vs 111*1.9=210.9 which is still 77% if you're using Attack/Strength.

Of course you get other stuff in exchange for that accuracy loss but that's a different discussion if the other stuff makes up for the accuracy loss.

EDIT: The equation is (Weapon Accuracy+64)*(Skill Level+9+Hidden Level)*(1+(%boost/100)). Since the Weapon Accuracy doesn't change you're just looking at Skill Level+9+Hidden Level where Hidden Level went up by 5 and the last part which is 1.4 vs 1.9 (40% vs 90%).

[Lestrouxe]

As someone that hadn't gotten to the point that grinding to minmax specific stats was needed to progress. I LOVE the changes. No randomness in getting buffs! You can still choose to focus on specific buffs first. More bonuses overall make the game a tiny bit better everywhere.

Can't wait till the 120 expansion!

[Princemousey]

Originally posted by Lestrouxe:

As someone that hadn't gotten to the point that grinding to minmax specific stats was needed to progress. I LOVE the changes. No randomness in getting buffs! You can still choose to focus on specific buffs first. More bonuses overall make the game a tiny bit better everywhere.

Can't wait till the 120 expansion!

Minmaxing was never required. I'm at that point and I still couldn't be bothered as long as I can afk dungeons. Love the changes too! No more FOMO.

[regint]

I had 102% accuracy, 13% vampirism and 14% reflection damage, 15% damage from items and 14% to minimum damage. Now i have 40% accuracy and 5% of everything else, consider minus 60% bonuses. 'Best' developer improvement.

[OOR | Bender Rodriguez]

It's disappointing considering I have 100% mastery in Astrology and have nowhere remotely close to enough dust to get all the buffs. Whereas before I had 4-5% in everything in every constellation. Failing to see the benefits of the rework at the moment other than no more RNG but even then...

[Jalir]

I've had my completion cape for about 4 months, and have continued to check progress daily to stock up in anticipation for the expansion launch. I have similar thoughts to you, as well. I have lost the motivation to continue, will most likely not be picking up the xpac.

Was fun while it lasted.

[Volonas]

I thought the original design sucked, frankly. It was like a worse version of Agility where you had to play a slot machine until you got lucky enough to get the bonuses you wanted. And if you wanted the best bonuses you were gonna have to plug all your nickels into it, making the idea of switching bonuses later unpalatable both for how much it would cost and how much you'd already spent to get the ones you have.

I much prefer the ability to max out all of the bonuses simultaneously, even if the caps on those bonuses are lower; that said, it seems exorbitantly expensive right now. Even with all the stardust gained from maxing out Astrology mastery I could only afford like 10% of the upgrades, which seems absurd.

[Destro]

Eh, I don't really think the time needed to max the skill is too big a concern in my opinion. Doing the math, it's not 'too long' really to max a skill with good bonuses. I have the math for my character below, but it's only like 13 days to max with 10% interval and substantially shorter to get 'just a bit below' BIS.

I think the more important issue is the total loss of power from Astrology. It's still really good, sure. But, it has obviously been gutted pretty hard.

My guess is they nerfed Astrology's max potential so hard to make room for the 120 expansion content. So now you get to 'earn back' what you were able to get pretty easily in the past, woo! Design space is fun. :)

So yeah, sucks they nerfed it hard. But, hoping that post-99 skills, the skill cape, maybe monster drops (like stardust) make it more interesting. There was the meteorite icon that got accidentally included with the 1.1 release for Astrology and who knows what that does? (Well, probably used for meteorite armor if I had to guess, but whatever).

Math

(disclaimer: sorry if these numbers are trash and do feel free to correct me, not a mathematician, just kind of did it quick and dirty and hope they are at least 'close'. I did have to guess on costs doubling 8 times up to 1280 and 5 times to 800 for the two dusts, cause I'm Astrology dust poor atm, lol)

At 10% astrology interval, we get:

3 * (10 + 20 + 40 + 80 + 160 + 320 + 640 + 1280) = 3 * 2550 = 7650 regular stardust a tree. / 7650 * 11 trees = 84150 dust total
-
3 * (50 + 100 + 200 + 400 + 800) = 3 * 1550 = 4650 gold dust a tree
11 * 4650 = 51150 g.dust total
-
27 seconds per dust = 2,272,050 seconds for 84,150 dust = 26.3 days ( / 2 if you have cape)
-
38.57 seconds per g.dust = 1,972,929 seconds total for 51550 g.dust = 22.8 ( / 2 if you have cape)

And, this doesn't include things like item doubling, higher astrology interval, other bonuses, etc.

edit: P.S. If devs see this, buff Astro pet to like 0.5% or if you're feeling generous 1%!!!! :)

[Mguard]

i honestly think the astrology perks were overtuned and the rerolling was annoying at best. I think it is in a much better place now

[Donate Plasma!]

I ain't gonna farm stardust for another 2 week or 1 month just because the dev thought it would be fun to reset all your astrology traits. ♥♥♥♥ that. 33 traits that cost roughly 2k gold stardust and 33 more that cost more than that for silver. I was almost finish with this stupid game doing my last dungeons when they patched astro. It ain't even fun, just some random website you casually look at in the morning. It's not even rewarding.

[FFS_Fenix]

One of the newest signs for gold dust... gives +5 bank space, i'm not sure when an extra +5 space would be useful except early game but by the time you unlock it in astrology you'd have well over 400+ spaces... "shrug"