The Balance Thread

[Bluddy]

AFAIK if you have 100% crit, you get 100% crit. It has nothing to do with the enemy creature level. The same applies to all the other percentages. It's possible you haven't kept track of your crit level. Even at 250 INT, your crit is only 25%. The only thing that allows you to pass 25% is either items or skills. Because items adding 200% are not that rare, 1 of these plus 1 other boosting item allows you to hit 100% easily. My change makes it more difficult to get to 100% -- you need 3 top items to get there ie. you really need to want it. Maybe it's not even enough of a reduction.

[Manumitted]

Crits can stack with other special hit types, and only one of them is listed if multiple types occur on the same hit. This is more obvious with Warriors who Crush most targets for the same damage and sometimes get a Crit, too.

Base Crit chance is 5.00% (other three special hits are base 2.00%). Thus, 250 INT is 30% base Crit, not 25%.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Manumitted

Crits can stack with other special hit types, and only one of them is listed if multiple types occur on the same hit. This is more obvious with Warriors who Crush most targets for the same damage and sometimes get a Crit, too.

Base Crit chance is 5.00% (other three special hits are base 2.00%). Thus, 250 INT is 30% base Crit, not 25%.

Oh right. I keep forgetting about that pesky base value.

[DeathKnight1728]

Originally Posted by Crisses

Sorry I'm not following the math....

0.025 + 0.025 + 0.05 = 0.1

You said 0.2.

Would you like to revise the numbers on either side of the equation so I can follow what you're looking to do?

.025+.025+.05=.01 Extra critical chance which would then be .2. Since every classes regular critical chance is .1, adding .1 to the wizard class and conjurer class would be really balanced. Think about it, rogues, warriors, demon hunters, and rangers get more ways to increase their damage through skills and in general.

Wizards and conjurers dont get that and instead have to invest in intelligence in order to increase their critical chances. Critical chances are the only way to increase the damage of spells other than the spell and mastery. That is another line that is flawed. Magicians dont have magic mastery, they are left out.

[Bluddy]

OK guys. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to balance out these spells given what we have to work with.

What I would like to do is to:
1. Make most spells attractive without needing mastery or criticals to be useful. Criticals/cast time items would be an extra boost, as they should be.
2. Prevent the phenomenon where mages must choose only 1/2 skills and boost just them.
3. Push mages to try several different spells of different levels.

I went through several ideas. One was to have every spell count as a mastery skill ie. buying a spell boosts all spells a little bit, and especially spells of the same family. This was an interesting idea that's not easy/possible to implement right now, and the damage curves from buying different spells would be very hard to balance.

Another idea was to give a discount. Say I buy a skill that costs 10 points. A certain percentage of what I spent would go towards making other skills cheaper. Once a lower level skill gets enough 'saving' points to go up a level, it gets potentially upgraded. If I buy that cheaper skill now, I'll automatically buy it at a higher level. This is really just giving me an extra percentage of points, but doing it in a way that makes me realize how far I can take those other skills with my bonus points. This idea is worth investigating, but it can't be done with the current mechanics.

The idea I finally settled on draws on experience from other RPGs: weak skills can be upgraded quite often; powerful skills only get upgraded a couple of times throughout the game, and their cost in mana is heavy.

I realized that making the heavy skills upgrade slowly ie. only 10-15 times throughout the game is very important. Currently all chosen spells need to be upgraded around 30 times throughout the game to be effective. The implication of this is that every 3 levels, the spells 'adjust' to the monster's power, and you spend your hard-earned points making sure you keep up with the monsters. But what if you only needed to upgrade a strong spell 10 times? It means that there are roughly 10 character levels during which the spell would stagnate -- it would get weaker and weaker relative to the monsters. This would force you to find other solutions, because you can't yet afford the next level of your strong spell. You'd be tempted to try a couple of other spells to boost your power until you could finally afford the next level of the strong spell. You also need to consider the extra mana that the next level of the spell will cost. Maybe it's not worth it yet. Maybe it's better to keep the strong spell at its level, and instead increase your criticals and mana. At least that's what I'm hoping will happen.

I'm currently working on enhancing my excel sheet to graph mana as well.

[Despair]

let me add my pinch of salt too :]

Originally Posted by Bluddy

I went through several ideas. One was to have every spell count as a mastery skill ie. buying a spell boosts all spells a little bit, and especially spells of the same family. This was an interesting idea that's not easy/possible to implement right now, and the damage curves from buying different spells would be very hard to balance.

did someone played diablo 2 here ? (probably but we never know) do you guys remember that this game had the exact same problem of "in order to be efficient i must put all my point in two skills" then they solved it by creating the synergy system. Your idead really remembered this to me, it could be a good idea but as you said its not easy/possible right now.

[DeathKnight1728]

One thing i never could understand was why the demon hunter is a big tough twohanded weapon user that is like the warrior and yet he gets almost no bonus to strength-.8% bonus. The warrior gets 1.2%. The rogue even gets more at .9% I think that either the warden gets a .1% added to him or the reaver gets his .2% changed to .3%. I think the latter would be better as the reaver should have the most gained from strength as he is a twohanded weapon master-it only would make sense that he can pack some punch to his hits. The warden could get .1% as well as he is a fighter class.

If they did that to the demon hunter classes, then the demon hunter would be at 1.0% strength bonus, a good and fair bonus considering he still isnt as powerful as the warrior tankwise.

Does anyone else find that the demon hunter should get this change?

[Bluddy]

I'll make a note of that, DeathKnight. I think it's a valid point.

To update with my progress: I've adjusted the mana and mana regen to values which I think will work better. Regen wasn't nearly effective enough, and mana was hard to balance because priests and mages get it differently. I reduced for example mages' mana per INT from 5 to 4. This should reduce the effectiveness of investing purely in INT for mages. I also boosted mana/SPR to 2, and lowered warrior mana/INT to 2.5. The idea is that regular characters get their mana boosts about equally from both.

Priests were able to get insane mana from SPR, to make up for the fact that regular mana/INT was 3. To persuade each priest sub-class to focus on SPR rather than INT, they got huge boosts to mana/SPR, which makes their total possible mana very unbalanced. Now that INT only gives 2.5 vs. SPR's 2, they don't need as much of a boost.

The really big change had to do with trying to figure out how mages and priests can increase their mana regen -- it's obviously important to them. Making mana regen go up more with INT just makes the mage even more of a 1-stat character. I thought perhaps mages should get more mana regen from SPR, and priests more mana regen from INT, just to make things more interesting. The problem was that this resulted in builds that were more effective with mages focusing on SPR and priests on INT, which is not what we want.

Eventually I settled on DEX giving the mage & priest extra mana regen. Without DEX, mages' mana reserve will grow, but their regen won't get faster relative to their bigger mana reserve. With investment in DEX, regen becomes faster, making the mages more effective.

The upshot of this is that now, even mages who want to focus purely on mana and spells will want to pick up some DEX. It makes more stats useful to them.

Now that I have everything in place, I'm finally getting some real spell modifications done. Not in the mod files yet, but you can see it in the excel file. With all the parameters, it's proving to be hard work. The main problem is that there are a few very different characters using the spells: full mages, half-mages, priests, half-priests. Really, it's the half-characters that give me the most trouble. If everyone had similar mana levels, it'd be easy, but because half-mages have only half the mana (smaller bonuses & fewer points in INT) it gets really tricky. Hopefully the mana regen bonus from DEX will make a difference.

[alstein]

Are you considering any changes to undervalued skills that need buffs like how Magitek's mod does?

Would your general changes be mergeable with Magitek's mod, I think some sort of combined mod might be really good.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by alstein

Are you considering any changes to undervalued skills that need buffs like how Magitek's mod does?

Would your general changes be mergeable with Magitek's mod, I think some sort of combined mod might be really good.

I am considering changes to undervalued skills. At this point I'm not considering changing skills completely, as Magitek did. My emphasis is on something that can be patched into the full game should Shadow accept it. Feel free to point out skills that you feel need a boost.

Another update: I've made the required changes to the skill files to make it so mana regen can be boosted with a little DEX for mages. I really like this system -- it makes DEX worthwhile for mages, and makes half-mages able to compete by putting points into DEX, which they'll probably do anyway. The problem is that the little box that opens while you hover over DEX doesn't show DEX's effect on mana regen. I should have known - that part is purely in the code. In other words, for now, you'll have to check your mana regen rate directly, or just know that putting points into DEX will give you a mana regen boost.

So one option is to keep the mod as is, with this DEX change. The other is to change it back so that mana regen is only reliant on INT and SPR. What do you guys think? Shadow, would you consider putting this mana regen/DEX change into the code (it should only show mana regen improvement per DEX if there's a skill that supports it)?

I think for now I'll post the mod with regen/DEX so you guys can see what it's like. Feel free to try the mod now. No spell changes yet.