Hey

So I just wanted to give a general update on the status of where devils are at and why what happened, happened.

The short story is we fixed a bug with them that's been around for awhile, while doing that we noticed a bunch of other stuff broken. However the thing is they've been 'broken' this way for a very long time, potentially ever since their inception.

This then shined a light on another bug that was preventing them from gaining morale in the way we intended them to. That part has now been fixed. So basically before, devils were gaining morale in ways they weren't supposed to, and not gaining morale in ways they were.

This creates a fun problem in that they've never really behaved as we designed them too. ...and the players have never seen that either so to your experience devils just saw HUGE changes. In this respect we may as well have redesigned them. We will need to keep an eye on things to make sure they're still balanced and make some tweaks as necessary. Without getting into specific numbers, here's how devils behave as of now:

- When a devil is conjured and bound, it will have no morale. Certain edges can boost this a bit.
- Devils will lose morale if they aren't fighting. Before devils would gain more by casting buffs on their master. This no longer happens. Some edges reduce the rate at which this happens.
- Devils will lose morale if you flee from combat.
- Devils gain morale from fighting. The higher level the target, the more morale you gain.
- Super low level targets won't increase morale but just keep the morale from falling further.
- The morale is gained as the devil fights. A longer fight? Bigger morale boost.
- After conjuration you have a reasonable amount of time to get into some action. However I would not at all recommend the devil be the first thing you conjure, or to conjure a devil just to hang out and wander around.

So right now devils ONLY gain morale from fighting targets of a certain level range from the devil. I'm not 100% on this threshold but it seemed fairly loose so it shouldn't be too tricky to find a fight to please the devil.

Just to make things clear you will not be able to play a devil exactly like you used to. The changes we are making will make some older tactics and strategies with devils unusable. You cannot linger nearly as long as you used to with a devil. However you shouldn't see situations where you bind a devil and it immediately turns on you. The flip side to this is there are now ways to get a devil happier, quicker. Before they'd only gain by casting buffs on you, which could take awhile to get them happy.

We are hopefully going to be getting some tracking in game so we'll be able to better keep an eye on situations when devil morale is hitting certain thresholds. This will help us keep an eye on the situation so we can assess if it's balanced after this change.

What I'd like to see from the players is bug posts with logs where they think a devil is doing something it shouldn't. IE: you feel it turned and attacked you very quickly in a situation you think it shouldn't have. We will review these and test these out to see what happens. Please use the bug forum for this and not the gameplay forum since this could get spammy very quickly depending on how many log snips we get.

We understand we just pulled the rug out from a number of you and we apologize for that. What turned into a few bug fixes has essentially become a redesign for devil behavior. (Well, not a redesign, just making our original design plan actually work as intended) Anyway, we'll keep an eye on things and hopefully keep things fun and interesting for devil conjies.

If I think a devil is misbehaving but my log is very long, should I still send it?

Is there a max post length?

Also do devils gain morale from long fights with *anything* or just reasonably tough opponents.

>Also do devils gain morale from long fights with *anything* or
>just reasonably tough opponents.
>

Reasonably tough, and the gain scales with toughness. PCs in this context are always considered tough. (This isn't new, incidentally.)

Cool, I'm glad this was able to come to light a month after several conjurers got heavily screwed over by this, and Daev denied anything was wrong or different, and I deleted my conjie because no one was acknowledging the issue and I (apparently rightly) assumed it wasn't going to get fixed.

I'm also glad this is being called a feature instead of a bug. If this is intended design, this design is stupid. Evil conjurers already suffer enough if they want to use demons effectively without getting betrayed; the whole point of using devils over demons was that they were more reliable and defensive as long as you didn't #### up and run. Thematically it still worked because they can and WOULD betray you if you ran too much.

This bug fix made conjuring devils WAAAAAAY safer.

It just made KEEPING them happy much more difficult.

I don't agree in the slightest, demons are SUPER reliable, they simply do not function in certain circumstances, eg raids.

1. Looking back at one of Daev's posts on the matter. It states: "I took another look and I don't think anything is broken." That does not mean that it is 100% for sure working as intented. If you carefully read the wording you might get that.

He goes on to explain that if it does appear broken to you it is perfectly fine to make bug board posts about it. So if you would rather delete than help them figure it out, I do not know what to tell you.

2. If you really have any good ideas of how you think devils should work, please state them. If you think saying "hey, your system is bad design" is going to get it to where you want it then I also do not know what to tell you. Because that is the farthest thing from helpful ever.

To be fair, it's almost impossible to bug board things like devils betraying...After all they form their opinion on you over the course of 30-45 minutes average IRL time.

It's just something you get a feel for. Given the scope of the changes - there's no way a normal person would guess the new magic formula given how long the old one was in place for.

I'd be ok with devils getting marginally more defensive and reliable at the cost of being significantly less lethal (no rot, significant damage decrease on their casted spells..ie, no more ANNI/ERAD spells hitting entire groups).

I don't have a standpoint on whether or not they're OP/Underpowered right now - I haven't played one - but as someone who pretty much never used devils to begin with I still felt evil conjies were very strong before - just not if you plan on playing the "no wands" route.

And for what it's worth, I think archons should be "angrier at doing nothing" as well. I never had an archon turn - ever - no matter how much I was just 'idling'. I'd love to see some downside to hanging out in the Inn with a pocket healer.

It really isn't all that different. Pretty much everything listed is 10+ years old, you just may not have understood it as such.

Every summoned devil killed me pretty much. And you said it was all good. Then changed it to the current somewhat sensible behavior. Not even blaming anyone, just a fact.

nt

Evil conjie was made completely unplayable at the time, so I had to sacrifice.

I kept watching you in that period, but every time I saw you get killed by a devil it was after behavior that I, as someone who has played a lot of evil conjurers, considered to be suicidal.

Devils are not a servitor you conjure and then just kind of hang around with, for example.

Devils seemed to get overly happy from fighting outers. I guess that's because they took a long time to die, and unlike with other mobs, the conjie didn't get beaten badly in the process.

Post-change Outers will be even more useful.

Before the change, the only thing that made a devil happy was casting buffs on a conjurer. Therefore (I'm assuming everything after the first sentence of this paragraph by the way), if you summoned a devil happy then did anything that would allow it to cast buffs on you (such as not having them up already) it would NEVER get angry. Therefore, conjuring a happy devil was exponentially more important pre-change.

My point was that if only buffing you makes the devil happier and the rest of the time morale drops if you are not fighting, you would need to fight a lot to buy time for the devil to get happy. And outerd are something you can fight for a longish time.

He said that fighting now prevents a devil from losing morale.

The only thing he said about pre-change was that devils only gained morale from casting buffs on you.

Maybe it worked that way pre-change, maybe it didn't. I just don't see anything in Arvam's post that leads to your conclusion.

Actually, if devils weren't working properly before I'd be tempted to assume the opposite: that any new mechanics listed weren't in place before the change.

Just kidding Daevey, you know we love you and the work you do. Seriously though Avram, that was super nice of you to write this whole thing out. Also, seriously, I think if all game mechanic posts from the imms were this insightful and/or not written in mysterious ambiguities, a holy hell of a lot *less* people would complain about such related issues. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

It wouold just change the narrative from complaining about ambiguitiy to complaining about the specific design decision.

Ain't no pleasing people.


Thanks Imms for trying though.

I mean - you conjure a devil you have it for like 28 ticks. This kind of logic needs to be explained in helpfiles or with echoes. I'm not overly surprised that people would get mad about losing con for reasons they're having trouble figuring out .

Without any PBF's of people affected by this change it's hard to say if the bitching was justified or not but if people really were getting aced out of the blue 3-4 times a session then yeah that's frustrating no?

The request being that you detail how devil/demon/angel/archon Morale works in their respective helpfiles?

Otherwise:

Great F'in post man, this is the kind of stuff that I like seeing from IMP's. Actual explanations of in-game mechanics are gold, please keep this kind of info flowing.