Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 285 - 294 The Scientific Research of Gan Di

Chapter 285: Chapter 294 The Scientific Research of Gan Di

Currently, players in "World of Star Spirits" have roughly divided the Healer Profession into two categories based on the original class division of the game. The first category is the "Starlight Series," somewhat similar to the Nature Series Healer Professions in Shadow World, primarily Druid and Shaman healing skills, focusing mainly on group recovery. The other is the "Dark Series," which focuses on single-target recovery and the addition of various buff effects.

Gan Di played a Healer Profession from the Starlight Series.

However, after testing several different Skill Point builds, Gan Di was not satisfied with the strength of these builds; the healing was still too little.

He repeatedly modified his healing builds, used up all his reset items, and went to the NPC merchants to exchange for more.

In "World of Star Spirits," respecifying Skill Points requires special items, which is different from Shadow World where Gold Coins are used for respecifying.

Gan Di was almost ready to give up because no matter how he changed his builds, the healing effect in this game’s Healer Builds did not satisfy him.

A max-level tank’s health is around 13,000, while in this game, even after investing many Talent Points into healing enhancements, the highest heal amount of a single-target cast healing Skill is only 3,000. And for group healing, the figures are even more dismal, only 500 to 800.

This also means that for a 10-player team, you need 3 healers, and for a 25-player team, you need more than 7 healers.

Clearly, the healing numbers in "World of Star Spirits" are stingier than in Shadow World.

This is quite normal because when Shadow World was initially developed, it didn’t take into account all-class gameplay; all values were set based on normal class settings.

Whereas "World of Star Spirits" considered the issue of value inflation after all-class gameplay bonuses from the beginning, so Ji Heng deliberately weakened the healing numbers in the game to ensure the number of healers required in a team remained consistent.

But such level of numbers obviously could not satisfy Gan Di.

After trying several builds with poor results, Gan Di was about to give up, planning to just pick any mediocre build to get into a raid, to just muddle through it.

After all, with seven or eight healers in a 25-man raid, if they were to wipe, it wouldn’t be just his problem.

However, at that moment, he noticed a detail.

It seemed the cooldown time of one of his skills was not right!

Perhaps because he often played Nitiandang games, Gan Di was particularly sensitive to such subtle changes and caught it at once.

It was a game-changing ultimate ability: "Starlight Illumination."

The effect of this ultimate was very simple; upon activation, it would continuously heal all team members within range, an effect that was straightforward and powerful.

However, as an ultimate, it had a long cooldown of ten minutes, and the mana cost was quite significant, consuming at least a quarter of the player’s mana.

This ultimate reminded Gan Di of the Druid’s in Shadow World: Natural Storm.

But Natural Storm had a lower healing number and an additional effect of damaging all enemies.

Only in the aspect of wide-range healing were they similar.

This wasn’t strange since the development of MMORPG games to this day has so many mechanics; it’s normal for there to be some similarities in ultimates that heal teams.

In theory, an ultimate with a ten-minute cooldown but only ten seconds of duration was not worth designing a specialized build around.

The reason is simple, boss fights in raids last at least three to five minutes, and with an ultimate lasting only ten seconds, you can only use it once every two boss fights, what good is that?

At best, it could only serve as an emergency measure under special circumstances.

Building a BD around it meant there were no extra Talent Points to strengthen other healing skills, which was obviously a loss.

However, at this moment, Gan Di unexpectedly discovered that the cooldown of "Starlight Illumination" seemed to have been reduced by a notch.

What should have been a solid 10-minute cooldown was, during testing, occasionally only around 6 minutes.

This was clearly abnormal!

Gan Di scoured the Talent descriptions yet found no mention of "reducing the cooldown time of the Starlight Illumination skill".

Gan Di’s brow furrowed, as there was only one explanation for such a scenario.

Obviously, a Talent from some other profession, due to some mysterious internal linkage bug, caused the cooldown time of the Starlight Illumination skill to be reduced!

The key question now was, which specific Talent was producing this effect?

Fortunately, this wasn’t difficult to test. Gan Di wiped all his Talents and Skills clean, learned only the "Starlight Illumination" skill, and then started to select Talents one by one based on previous screenshots he had saved.

Given that "Starlight Illumination" had a long ten-minute CD, testing one Talent at a time was obviously too inefficient; wouldn’t it take hours to test dozens of Talents?

So, Gan Di directly divided the previously selected Talents into two parts, selecting one half while leaving the other unselected.

This way, he could directly eliminate half of the Talents.

A few minutes later, he would take the half that was filtered out and divide it in two once more, confirming once again.

In this manner, after about forty minutes, Gan Di finally pinpointed the Talent with the bug!

Of course, after several screenings, there were still four or five Talents left, but by analyzing the descriptions of these Talents, Gan Di could generally figure out which one was truly effective.

This was clearly a bug and not a game mechanic, as the description of this Talent was: When a Dark Series spell with a cast time produces a critical hit, it will reduce the cooldown of your Starlight Series skills by one second.

Of course, this wasn’t the only Talent with an effect that could "reduce skill cooldown times". There were several others with similar effects, so Gan Di had no way to pinpoint it right away; it still required several attempts to exclude other misleading options.

This Talent in "World of Star Spirits" under conventional mode did not have a bug.

This Talent and the "Starlight Illumination" skill belonged to two different professions. In the original "World of Star Spirits", players could not have both the skill and the Talent simultaneously.

However, in this new mode where cross-profession skills and Talents interacted, that’s when issues arose!

In fact, the effect of this Talent was quite average, as it specifically required "a spell with a casting time to produce a critical hit". You should know that spells with a casting time would generally need at least one second at the shortest; anything less wouldn’t make sense due to the common 1-second cooldown that most skills have after being cast in the game.

A player spends one second to cast a spell, and even with the good fortune of a critical hit, it can only reduce the cooldown of Starlight Series spells by one second.

In the original mode, this Talent could be used to refresh some Starlight Series offensive skills, but at best, it could only refresh skills with one or two minutes of cooldown time; it wouldn’t fundamentally impact the balance of professions.

But now, a bug occurred!