The Great Rebalancing (now live!)

[The Fox Knocks]

Based on feedback I've been receiving, Nomad Idle is great, for some people it's amazing, for others it sucks. That's fine. No such thing as a game for everyone. However, I notice there's a lot of skills that nobody really recommends, which makes me think the game needs another balance pass. I've done these pre-launch, but I clearly missed the mark on some things, so here's what I'm going to be doing:

- Testing the game from start to finish, considering skill balance starting in Area 5 (content up to Area 5 seems fine),
- Adjust skills so that they're useful when you get them, try to adjust their scaling so they remain valid, however please understand that achieving perfect balance is a fool's errand. I will do my best to at least make sure skills you get recently are competitive.
- This will include Character Starting Skills, LMB, RMB, summons, their abilities, Trinkets, DoTs, everything.

You can expect a lot of buffs in this coming patch, but you can also expect some nerfs. I'm definitely going to find things that are simply too strong and would harm the game if I used them as a baseline. It is NOT my intention to suddenly make Nomad Idle way harder, it is instead my intention to make it more interesting.

No matter what I do, some builds are going to be "the best", but I think right now a lot of builds are utterly worthless and just not feasible. They're not just bad, you genuinely can't progress with them. That's my concern.

Just letting you know this is in the works now. Ideally I'll be done in the next day or two.

[Aminy]

Yeah I think the trinket on the slime is too strong. Also ghost blade and final spark doing 90% of all my damage. Those need huge nerfs

[Palandus]

Okay, I'll take another look at Nomad Idle then.

Some grind is acceptable. Like I'd have no issue with the game taking 1-2 weeks to complete, but as it stands right now, with the builds I'm playing with, it feels like it would take 1-2 years without cheating, and with cheating 2-3 months.

[The Fox Knocks]

Originally posted by Aminy:

Yeah I think the trinket on the slime is too strong. Also ghost blade and final spark doing 90% of all my damage. Those need huge nerfs

I didn't want to say anything outright as I still need to test for myself, but most likely these will be prime targets. We'll see, though! I need to do testing both of the mid-game and late-game, and I know some of these fall off later. It'll be an interesting challenge to bring them more in line.

[Some Sort of Ape]

I would resist nerfing the few things that work well. There's a lot of examples of users disliking the experience of losing effective tools to end up with nothing that feels good. Poison and bleed are outstanding damage dealing methods. With them nerfed it would feel like a monster slowdown in progress for anyone already playing.

[Palandus]

Yeah, I'd avoid nerfing things.

Focus more on buffing things up to a reasonable level. I'm not asking for things to destroy the content, but like it feels like Region 8 is expecting 150M dps and I can only do 25M dps to complete wave 50. So if my build was beefed up to say 125M dps or higher, then I might be able to have the stat flexibility to beat it with different combinations.

But I do point out that I'm only making 25M dps with ghost blade. If it got nerfed I might only deal 3M dps.

[kakodaimonos]

Originally posted by Palandus:

Yeah, I'd avoid nerfing things.

Focus more on buffing things up to a reasonable level. I'm not asking for things to destroy the content, but like it feels like Region 8 is expecting 150M dps and I can only do 25M dps to complete wave 50. So if my build was beefed up to say 125M dps or higher, then I might be able to have the stat flexibility to beat it with different combinations.

But I do point out that I'm only making 25M dps with ghost blade. If it got nerfed I might only deal 3M dps.

You mean billions, right? Because with 150M Dps you can probably barely clear region 6.

[Palandus]

Probably. I haven't checked my dps meter to see how bad my dps is. I just know its not fast enough to kill guys quickly in region 8. Usually takes 5-6 seconds per enemy... with 100 enemies attacking me usually all at once.

[The Fox Knocks]

If I buffed things up to the current level of the outliers, you'd delete all of your enemies and there'd be no point, as some of these outliers are rather extreme. I haven't done my testing yet though, I'll start on it tomorrow.

[Palandus]

I'm not asking for that.

I'm asking to buff them up to a midpoint between the ♥♥♥♥ build I have and the outliers.

So if the game expects 150B for region 8, and the outlier is dealing 5T, you'd melt those enemies. But if you are like me struggling with 25B, then, the enemies be melting you.

So having the best buffed build at say 750B, so that the void is at least challenging but as it currently stands if you don't have one of these 5T builds you can't progress at all.

[Bizzar]

This is a good thing because now there is no build at all. Characters use the same skills, and they are the same.

[Sawtooth]

I don't mind bleed or poison being effective, but generally the most passive damage dealers in an already-passive game are hardly engaging, so I'd rather they not be optimal.

[Osamaru]

Originally posted by The Fox Knocks:

Originally posted by Aminy:

Yeah I think the trinket on the slime is too strong. Also ghost blade and final spark doing 90% of all my damage. Those need huge nerfs

I didn't want to say anything outright as I still need to test for myself, but most likely these will be prime targets. We'll see, though! I need to do testing both of the mid-game and late-game, and I know some of these fall off later. It'll be an interesting challenge to bring them more in line.

Apex Predator and Thornskin might be a good place to aim for DPS wise when balancing things.
They're both consistently near the top of the chart, regardless of build type, but at the same time, they're still not doing the insane amount of damage poison seems to be doing.

[Palandus]

Yeah I'd expect those to do decent damage, but they don't seem to make much of a dent at my current stage of progression and the enemies I'm facing. Especially Thornskin, as that gets more damage based on Vit, I always max out my Vit stat as the damage coming my may is so extreme that if I don't I die in like 3-4 seconds.

[Azmedon]

I love idle games, I just put this on and play other games while this is idling.

[BlackLight]

I know you nerfed them during development but the biggest thing id like to see get more balances is max values for Cooldown Reduction and Evasion, 50% is not that good, it could be a softcap because every 1% contributes more and more mathematically, but still with all the gears and stat points you can get, hard capping them at 50% feels weird, id say make it cap higher like 70 or 80 but getting to those point a lot harder, like you really need to build around one of these stats to achieve that.