1.3.6 Test 1: What We Learned

Keep in mind that the current build of 1.3.6 on the PTS is 1.3.6.525. The Live version of the game is 1.3.5.539. “It’s still 1.3.6 and that’s bigger than 1.3.5” you say. No it isn’t. It’s missing hotfixes from many weeks ago, maybe months. This means that some of the features in 1.3.6.525 are early iterations… earlier than even the core testers knew about them. This means that most of the changes probably don’t have any of our feedback so far taken into account. Do not take this build as the final product. It’s an alpha at best.

Yesterday we had a Q&A. Anyone who pays attention on the forums would know most of the answers to the questions asked in the Q&A, so let’s skip that.

4 hours(ish, I slept through these) after the Q&A, we had a “stability test” on Warpstone. What most of you didn’t realize was that it wasn’t a stability test at all, but there was a change implemented that they wanted to test without telling you first. Usually when they tell everyone, it doesn’t get tested, it gets complained about and picked apart at completely unreasonable levels.

Friendly collision was turned off.

I knew nothing about this until we were fighting outside the keep and I realized that I could just walk right through people. I said in region “my friendly collision appears to be broken”, then I went “O M F G I REMEMBER” in my head. Good thing nobody even noticed that I had said it, because everyone else appeared to still be clueless about it.

Performance was greatly increased for me, and plenty others. I still remembered the 15% performance increase statistic from, well, where I had heard it beforehand. It felt like 30%, easily to me. It was fun hearing 50+ people on vent go “ohhhhh” when Andy had announced that friendly collision was missing that night.

Then, of course, came the theory-crafting. People started talking over each other in Vent about how it would affect tank walls, and how it measured up compared to the performance gain, and a few people talked about tank walls being completely gone. Andy re-iterated that it was FRIENDLY collision that was gone, not all collision. Still, tank walls are a reasonable debate to get into. Let’s do it.

Here’s a good tank wall with friendly collision on.

And here’s a good tank wall without friendly collision:

As you can see, with friendly collision enabled, it’s not viable to make the tanks’ hitboxes overlap. Assuming it takes 4 seconds to move through player collision, you’d easily be able to create 12-20 seconds of collision where a target is barely moving. This would allow your MDPS and RDPS to take out the target very easily.

Realize, though, that neither of these situations really happen that often. You’re the ones that wanted to theory-craft about it, though, so here you have it.

At this point in the game’s life we need to start thinking about what would greatly benefit the game, not what would greatly benefit the game WITHOUT changing any of the current mechanics of things. The age of drastic changes is upon us.