Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 296 - 305: Gan Di’s Second Scientific Research

Chapter 296: Chapter 305: Gan Di’s Second Scientific Research

Obviously, at this moment, Zhou Yang was just as confused as the viewers watching the barrage of comments.

How was this achieved?

Although Zhou Yang was a designer for Shadow World, to be fair, he mainly focused on creating and modifying the game’s basic functions.

For instance, changes to the Quest System and the design of raid bosses, etc.

The fine-tuning of the various game mechanisms, especially the setting of values, these details are complex to nail down.

Some aspects were handled by Wei Chengjie, some were done by new numeric designers under him, and even some were direct modifications by programmers like Zhao Haiquan and Feng Hui after consulting with designers when tests found issues.

This might make the Nitiandang gaming team look a bit amateurish.

After all, strictly speaking, any change in the game should be decided by the lead designer or producer, documented properly, and only then implemented.

But Nitiandang truly was in a unique situation. President Gu, although having the highest prestige and capability within the company and participating in game coding, rarely decided on game design aspects.

What about President Li? Although her word was law and had to be followed, she could never possibly attend to every aspect of the game.

So, it was often unclear who was exactly responsible for many of the game’s functions.

Everyone was accustomed to this way of working, and as long as the code ran and the game was playable, there was no need to pry too deeply.

Take the recent "Nearly Cooldown-Free Natural Storm" build, for example. Zhou Yang could guess that it was somewhat related to the company’s design, programming, and testing, but whose specific fault it was... that was harder to say.

He continued reading, and sure enough, Gan Di was, as usual, thoroughly explaining the principle behind this build in the video.

After the Starlight Healer and Dark Chain builds were ruthlessly discarded by the Shengjing Group under the guise of fixing a bug, Gan Di instantly lost interest in "World of Star Spirits."

In fact, having played for so long, he found that the most fun builds in Star Soul World were Starlight Healer and Dark Chain.

Now that the one-click healing was gone, forcing him back to square one, competing with six other healers in raid battles, working up a sweat playing whack-a-mole?

The disparity was just too great for him to accept.

So Gan Di turned back to Shadow World to continue his research.

In the past, Shadow World players had tried to create a build similar to "Infinite Starlight Healing," but none succeeded.

In this game, there were talents that could reduce the cooldown of the skill "Natural Storm," but after experimentation, players could only manage to reduce it to around four or five minutes at best.

Clearly, this wasn’t fast enough since a boss fight meant at most only being able to cast it twice.

But standing on the shoulders of those players, Gan Di continued to delve deeper into research, particularly after he added the effects of the Tier-2 Set "Forest Gale," and then a miracle happened!

Previous players didn’t have such means because most who liked to theorycraft couldn’t consistently pioneer the Snowy Mountain Summit raid and reliably obtain the Tier-2 Set.

And those healers who could get the Tier-2 Set didn’t dare to gamble on whether the eight-piece set effect was good or not. If they exchanged it and still couldn’t achieve an unlimited Natural Storm, wouldn’t that equipment be wasted? It seemed irresponsible to the team.

Hence, most of them opted for a 5+3 gear combination, or chose other sets instead.

But Gan Di not only had the capability but also enough drive.

After exchanging for the full eight-piece set of Forest Hurricane, he engaged in a series of experiments and ultimately achieved the current effect.

First, he took all the talents that could reduce the cooldown time of Natural Storm, successfully reducing its cooldown by 35% and its mana consumption by 60%.

With the set effect of "Forest Gale", the cooldown was further reduced by 65%.

The original 8-minute cooldown was brought down to about 3 minutes.

But even that wasn’t enough, and Gan Di conducted a series of technical experiments, eventually discovering that there were three specific glyphs in the game that could further shorten the cooldown!

These so-called glyphs were optional effects for skills.

Each skill could choose one from four different glyph effects, which could enhance the skill’s damage, change its attribute, or slightly modify the skill’s mechanics.

The three glyphs chosen by Gan Di were:

"Lightning Storm - Healing: Your Lightning Storm skill no longer deals damage to enemies, instead providing equivalent healing to allies."

"Healing Rain - Thunderstorm: Your Healing Rain skill will transform into a lightning attribute."

"Magma Earthquake - Mini Lightning: Your Magma Earthquake skill will also trigger a small Lightning Storm, but at only 15% effectiveness of the original skill."

The reason these three glyphs could work and successfully reduce the cooldown of "Natural Storm" was because of a talent.

"Electric Surge: Whenever your lightning-based skills provide healing, they accumulate electric energy for you, reducing the cooldown of Natural Storm by 0.1 seconds."

Some players had already discovered this talent before, but its effects weren’t great after testing.

That was because each skill only reduced the CD by 0.1 second, which was too little.

There were healing skills in the lightning category, but not many. There were only two original healing skills: "Lightning Shield" and "Lightning Activation"; the former was a single-target skill with no cooldown, and the latter randomly targeted the three players with the least health, with a cooldown of 12 seconds.

Clearly, relying on these two skills to refresh the cooldown of Natural Storm was wishful thinking.

Moreover, most of the players who were experimenting at that time didn’t have the set effect of "Forest Gale". Even if they noticed that the healing glyph could turn Lightning Storm into a healing skill, they couldn’t achieve a no-CD Natural Storm, so many players did not delve further.

But now, Gan Di had gathered all these key factors!

Lightning Storm was an AoE damage skill, but after applying the healing glyph, it became an AoE healing skill. As long as there were enough people clumped together, the number of healing ticks would also be sufficient.

Magma Earthquake was a damage skill, but with the mini lightning glyph applied, it would also trigger a small Lightning Storm. Although the healing effect was only 15% of the original, the number of healing instances was the same.

The same went for Healing Rain, except instead of switching a lightning skill to a healing skill, it was giving a healing skill a lightning attribute.

Originally, this effect seemed nonsensical because changing the attribute wouldn’t increase healing power and might even result in resistance due to teammates’ high lightning resistance. But now, inexplicably, it worked in sync with this build!

In this way, by stacking these three AoE skills, one could repeatedly trigger the "Electric Surge" effect when a large number of players gathered in the same area.

Each tick could only reduce the cooldown by 0.1 seconds, but what if it ticked very frequently?

Then one could successfully eliminate the remaining 3-minute cooldown entirely.

Of course, eliminating the CD required a process, needing the three healing skills to be in effect continuously, so it would take about 5 to 8 seconds.

But this time, it was entirely acceptable!

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.