Weekly Update 343: Combat changes & improvements!

In today's changelog, we are happy to talk about the major update for the Gloria Victis MMORPG dedicated to combat system changes and balance.

Inspired by our player's feedback, and our own data we carefully noted and discussed various aspects of Gloria Victis' combat and found some matters worth addressing. As we are just starting a new Glory Season in the game, this is a perfect moment to introduce improvements and changes and fix some shortcomings of the combat balance. Watch the newest Dev Log for details!

On the other hand, we are happy to introduce the next part of our Game Interface overhaul by presenting a reworked Supporter Shop in the game on Black Week!

As you may also know, it is time again to vote for your favorite games in Steam Awards! We are counting on your nomination and vote in the Labor of Love category!

And now, let's check some details of the applied changes:

The screenshot’s authors will be awarded. Please contact Jesper#6555 on our official Discord to get your ambers!

Changelog v.0.9.9.7.0 Beta

Combat Changes

We set ourselves several goals we want to achieve: Balancing the two-handed weapons against each other, rebalancing heavy armor as it is rarely found in the meta-level gameplay as a full set, and improving shield gameplay, focusing on its most visible flaws.

Heavy Armor

Let’s start with one of the most significant changes in the latest update - the changes in heavy armor. For some time, we could observe that tank builds, using only heavy armor, were steadily falling out of the current meta. This was mostly caused due to high stamina drain and its fragility against blunt damage. These factors made it more beneficial to create builds that mix heavy and medium armor parts for smaller stamina drain and higher resistance to blunt damage, with the only tradeoff being sacrificing a small amount of slashing and piercing reductions.

In order to bring back full heavy builds to life, we decided to increase blunt damage reductions for heavy armor, while slightly decreasing the piercing reductions. This change should enable heavy armor users to become more resistant to all types of damage, making it the armor of choice for tank builds. We have unified the stamina mod for the chest and legs to avoid any situation where wearing a heavy chestplate will be unprofitable.

What’s more, the upkeep cost of a full heavy armor has been significantly higher than the cost for any other type of armor. Not only fighting on the frontline means that more repairs are needed, but also, up to this point the only viable heavy armor in terms of its protection to stamina drain and damage decrease ratio was the heavy armor of the highest tier. In order to change that, we have decided to increase the reductions of heavy armor of all tiers, making even lower-tier heavy items more efficient on the battlefield.

Two-handed axes

With the introduction of the recent changes, 2-handed axes have become a weapon of choice for many, as they provide many benefits like overhead damage and reach, with very few cons. We decided to reduce the slashing damage from side attacks slightly in order to balance out axes in comparison to other weapon types.

Two-handed swords

We have observed that the craftable 2 handed swords fall short of their special equivalents like the crusher, or ancient longsword. We have introduced changes in attack release speed and attribute damage modifiers for the craftable