[Developer's Note] Planned changes to Key Stats

I'd first like to express my sincere gratitude to everyone, for your deep affection for Vindictus over the years.

Today, I'd like to explain into depth of our future plans on the 'Stat' system—an issue that many of you have been waiting for a change, and one that we, too, have considered one of our biggest challenges.

We believe that many of you would likely have experienced moments where, despite investing immense cost and effort into your character's stats, you see minimal, or in some cases, no increase in damage in actual battle.

This kind of situation where you can't see any difference in power, the feeling that your efforts are not being rewarded—we believe this is one of the critical barriers that prevent the enjoyment of growth.

Following up on the stat system overhaul mentioned in our August Dev Talk, I'd like to provide a more detailed explanation of how we intend to fundamentally improve the system to ensure your efforts are well recognized for their full value.

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The core of the problem—where you could not feel actual growth was in the old, flawed structure of our stat system, mainly intertwined with three key stats: ATT, ATT Surplus, and Counterforce.

Each battle has its own 'Maximum Attack Cap' that cannot be surpassed. Any ATT stat that exceeds this, even by a single point, was simply discarded.

On the contrary, ATT Surplus was only meaningful when your ATT Stat exceeded this 'Attack Cap.' It was a conditional stat with no benefits regardless of its amount unless your ATT stat had reached its maximum for that battle.

Furthermore, Counterforce was designed so that it would be required to deal 100% of your damage—As long as it met the requirements for each battle, any more of it would not grant any additional benefit either.

As these three stats merged into our Battle system, a stagnation point appeared where your investments in stats did not transition to a tangible sense of growth: Which is why we have decided that it is time we conduct a complete overhaul of this structure.

Before we started the overhaul, we made sure to keep these three guiding principles in the redesign process, based on our respect to your gameplay and asset value.

• Your Characters will not get any weaker than they are now.

• There will no longer be any wasted stats.

• Flexibility in stat growth decisions will be expanded.

We are well aware that a fundamental change to the damage formula in a Live-Service game may cause anxiety. However, the reason we decided to do so is by no means to weaken characters or make growth more difficult.

On the contrary, it is to fully preserve the value of your gameplay you have built up so far and to ensure that your future efforts return to a more respectful outcome. All changes have been carefully designed so that your expected damage will be higher than, or at least equal to, what it was before.

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The biggest change is the removal of the 'Attack Cap.'

The Blue line in the graph above represents the previous ATT stat formula in 'Royal Castle Topaz Hall.'

As you can see, the moment your ATT stat reaches 59,800, the applied ATT did not apply any more than it. This made your investments beyond this point meaningless.

We have decided to remove this limitation. The Green line in the graph represents the new ATT stat formula—A formula that supports constant