It has come to my attention that many of the wizards around the spiral are upset or confused about the most recent changes to the spell Wild Bolt. Merle, the Professors, and I felt that some clarification was necessary for why these changes were made even though they were deemed unpopular with the community via the poll taken. I will attempt to explain even though it is NOT my school of focus (Halston was able to fill me in on the details in between tinkering with his newest invention)...
The different schools of magic in The Spiral are balanced around potential damage output relative to fizzle rates (for example, storm snake does WAY more damage than frost beetle, but frost beetle has a higher % chance to hit). This is matched up with other effects such as AoE, DoT, Charms, Wards, and even gear potential in an attempt to make the classes all balanced against each other (for example, sandstorm does way less damage than other rank 4 single target spells because it hits all targets).
The problem is that this system starts to break down when through the natural progression of gear and spells one can get the effective accuracy of a spell like Wild Bolt close to 100%. When combined with the high power pip chance that most wizards in Celestia posses this results in a spell that can be cast almost every round and do 1000 damage. At this level you have spell which is arguably better than Leviathan, and that is not only unbalancing but was never the purpose of the spell.
Wild Bolt was always intended as being the “Hail Mary” of spells. A spell used in desperation to win a duel with a low probability of success. It unfortunately turned into an uber spell with a very high probability of success. This change was intended to bring the spell back to its original purpose.
To specifically answer some of the main questions we're seeing...
Q: Why didn't you just make Wild Bolt immune to accuracy increases or cap at a certain %?
A. We really try to avoid at all costs creating spells that have exceptions to fundamental rules in our system, so we didn't want to make this ONE spell's accuracy unable to be boosted. We don’t have any spells in the game with an accuracy cap and it would feel weird to have one spell that exists outside the rule set in this regard. In addition, it would be confusing to more novice players who are still getting used to the game, and just in general, we find simplifying the rules works better than making thing more confusing and technical.
Q. Now that the spell doesn't fizzle, but casts at a lower amount of damage, it eats up buffs! Did you consider this in the design?
Yes, the fact that it eats up 2 pips and uses up buffs like feint 100% of the time was considered in the balance. We had originally considered making 5 or even 10 different potential damages for this spell in order to make it match up with the original base probability of Wild Bolt. That probability being that it does big damage 10% of the time. We decided to go with a much higher probability ( 33% ) because of the point that you are mentioning above. Having the spell hit for 10 damage and use up your traps and blades is really rough, but as mentioned previously, that is the purpose of this spell. It was never designed to be a spell that you use as a staple of your spell deck, but instead as a last ditch effort for victory. By switching the spell over to give you a 33% chance for massive damage we feel it has returned to what its goal was.
Q. I swear that I get 10 more often than not, and monsters get 1000 all the time! Are the spells any different? Is it equally as likely to be 1000 as it is 10?
Well actually, if you do a dance emote right before combat and the game clock is at a multiple of 5 then... just kidding - it’s exactly 33.3% for players and mobs. Same chance to get each outcome. Let us put that superstition to be right now. If you're finding anything else, you might want to get a lucky charm.
Q. Why the change all of a sudden? Is it because of PVP? Celestia?
Wild bolt has actually been on our hit list for a while (even before Celestia and level 50+ combat changes), but we wanted to take the time to think through a change that would be both balanced, but still within the spirit of the spell (it's very unique and we didn't want to take that away). What took the cake is some of the enhancements that brought up the accuracy so much that it was reliably hitting for 1000. That was never intended and obviously needed to change.
While it's absolutely true that it was a hot button topic in PVP and initially brought to our attention in that capacity, we feel that the imbalance wasn't only in the arena (especially after the level cap increase). We as a team would not simply make a global change to a spell that worked fine in PVE but was broken in PVP. However, that was not the case, and hence why we made the change to the spell that we did.
In summary, we far far far prefer to buff rather than nerf classes. We just really had our hands tied on this one. We’re sorry we had to make the change and we know it stinks to lose some power but we are always reviewing class balance. That's the wonderful thing about an MMO that's constantly updated - we always have a chance to make changes when they're appropriate.
I hope this answers more questions than it raises, and we just wanted to address this in more detail as it is a heavily discussed topic on the forums lately!
“If the Mind is like a candle, the Heart is like the sun.”
Professor Falmea
