Release notes

Of note is the fact that a number of basic subguilds now appear to get hide. This skill was never before available from a basic subguild. I wonder if advanced hide on a high-agi elf with a bit of +hide gear will end up being no-fail. I suspect it would, or nearly.

And holy shit, gladiator gets disarm. Another first from a basic subguild. That's huge for something like an assassin. It's now a serious decision between that and wilderness stealth. Disarm is mainly for use against assassins after they backstab you, and having the skill even at journeyman will give you a considerable defense against getting disarmed. Kinda nice for rangers, too.

Many subguilds say they give advanced ride. Does this give them all no-hands riding?

I notice that hunter no longer grants sneak. That was basically the whole reason to take hunter: getting wilderness stealth on city classes. It seems only outlaw gives wilderness sneak, and I wonder if this means that the huge proportion of current characters with the hunter subguild have now lost their wilderness stealth.

In fairness, we have no idea what they actually changed. They could have made it harder for all we know. Maybe you now need to miss while Lirathu is up in order to raise your weapon skills.

I bet a lot of people are now regretting their subguild choices. Especially if the removal of sneak from hunter is retroactive and takes away every non-ranger's wilderness stealth. I'm pretty sure at least 80% of assassins have hunter.

Nergal:


So it's a boost to sparring against more skilled PCs, basically. That sounds like kind of a pointless change as fighting against superior opponents was already the best way to increase. It doesn't sound like it'll make much of a difference to most people, as most people do most of their fighting against opponents that they can beat. As in, most people do most of their fighting against animals they're hunting, NPCs in the 'rinth, and fellow Byn runners and militia recruits.

It doesn't sound like this change does anything useful, because the place where a change to combat skillgains was needed was for already skilled characters who were stuck at like mid-journeyman level because they can no longer fail often enough to improve at a meaningful rate. So... sounds like they completely misunderstood the problem and applied a change that fixes nothing.

It's kind of a harmless but meaningless change. They've made sparring against superior foes even better. That was already the best way, though. There was no point boosting that. The problems with combat skillgains only start to appear once you no longer have a superior opponent to fight. It's not really a step in the right direction; it's like giving water to a man who's starving. It's nice and all, maybe he happened to have a dry mouth as well, but it completely misses the actual problem and there was really no reason to do it. It suggests that they don't actually understand what's wrong with the current combat skillgain model.

But it's advertised as an answer to GDB feedback, despite completely failing to address that feedback, i.e. the fact that you reach the point of "can't really fail anymore" long before you're at a level where no longer being able to fail makes any sense. It's basically a boost to the very least needed aspect of combat skillgains: when you have superior opponents to train with. Anyone who has that luxury was already able to become capable of participating in a timely manner. And then they'll stop missing, at which point this new code does nothing as no amount of increased chance to gain weapon skills will matter when you can't get to do the thing that causes weapon skillgains. This new feature appears to basically say "misses yield better skillgains" when it's ostensibly a solution to feedback that says "we can't get misses."

The new subguilds are great and it seems they're finally going to look into the guild system as a whole to make it less outdated and unbalanced, but the combat skillgain change is a dud in my eyes. It doesn't do anything meaningful if it does what they say it does.