The Balance Thread

[wasp3]

Originally Posted by Bluddy

The way to search archetypes best is to first look in /Loc/English/global.trn for the name of the monster, then get the internal monster name, then look in archetypes.gdb. Not all monsters need this though.

so I found the "blot" is shadow , thnx for your response, minimap toggle from 8 to 16 with next patch and with this upgraded wiev will help too

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by wasp3

so I found the "blot" is shadow , thnx for your response, minimap toggle from 8 to 16 with next patch and with this upgraded wiev will help too

I actually haven't investigated either the minimap adjustment or the different possible views -- I'm quite happy with the defaults so far. Since these things aren't balance related, I think they belong more in another mod. Fortunately, mods can co-exist quite happily so long as they modify different files, so any UI mod can be used at the same time as my balance mod.

[Bluddy]

Just a quick update. Now that I understand how the spawning system works, I was going to change it significantly to make harder monsters increase as you go up the difficulty levels (champion, elite, legendary). However, it's a lot of work and I'm not sure it's worth it at this point. So my plan instead is to get back to modifying monster enhancements and resistances etc to get them to where I'd like them to be.

From my sporadic tests, it seems like monster HP is really shaping up well from update to update. I'm also looking for feedback about durability: do items break too fast in the mod? Too slowly? From what I've seen the length of time seems about right, but I can't be sure.

[Bluddy]

Version 0.65 is available.

This is a minor release. It's much smaller than I was expecting it to be. I thought I'd be able to do monster tweaks in this version, but I then realized I still need to update a whole bunch of stuff in my excel workbook first.

So this version contains a preview of the bugfix that'll be in the next patch: the screes are spawning as they should. I also fixed (I think) the new kinds of temporal flux I created so they should actually spawn as well.

Other than that, there's just a couple of small changes to armor and defense. I made sure characters and monsters start with around 50 attack/defense. Starting from 0 causes big distortions at the lower levels. For example, you might go into the 3rd level of the dungeon and be completely unable to hit mobs. So now attack/defense values at the low levels should be more consistent.

[Castruccio]

Originally Posted by Bluddy

Version 0.65 is available.

This is a minor release. It's much smaller than I was expecting it to be. I thought I'd be able to do monster tweaks in this version, but I then realized I still need to update a whole bunch of stuff in my excel workbook first.

So this version contains a preview of the bugfix that'll be in the next patch: the screes are spawning as they should. I also fixed (I think) the new kinds of temporal flux I created so they should actually spawn as well.

Other than that, there's just a couple of small changes to armor and defense. I made sure characters and monsters start with around 50 attack/defense. Starting from 0 causes big distortions at the lower levels. For example, you might go into the 3rd level of the dungeon and be completely unable to hit mobs. So now attack/defense values at the low levels should be more consistent.

Having some problems hitting with a pure Demonologist at lower levels. Lots of parry, dodge, miss, etc, or at least much much more than I'm used to in vanilla DC.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Castruccio

Having some problems hitting with a pure Demonologist at lower levels. Lots of parry, dodge, miss, etc, or at least much much more than I'm used to in vanilla DC.

Could be the attack/defense values need some more adjustment. Send me the character so I can take a look.

[Bluddy]

OK it's really good you brought this to my attention. Turns out there was a typo in one of the mod files for the expansion. This typo prevented the pure Demon Hunter from having the bonuses in one of the hidden skill trees, which means he didn't have enough mana as well as enough attack/defense after the last update.

I fixed it in the mod file for the expansion (assetsbalexp.zip). I don't think such a small change justifies a new version, so a re-download of that one file should do the trick.

This should make attacking and defending much better. I'm not saying it's at the sweet spot yet, so feel free to give more feedback if you feel that it's off.

[Castruccio]

No prob, glad to help. I've downloaded the fix.

[Bluddy]

Phew. I've finally updated my excel book with all of the monster and monster skill data. It's amazing how much insight (and how many questions) you gather that way. Now time to start working on some improvements.

One of the things I've noticed is that the expansion has reduced the faction interactions in some ways. It used to be that DC monsters hated each other even more than they hated you in many interesting patterns. The expansion has reduced this somewhat. For example, chaos lords used to have their own faction, and they used to hate the furies. They also hated some other factions. This stuff makes fighting the monsters much more interesting than if monsters all get together and decide to chase you.

The Demon War expansion brought in a lot of new demons. In fact, it probably introduced way too many of them. It placed them all in one faction -- demons. It also moved all the pre-existing demons in the game into the same faction. This faction is programmed to hate anything undead, which makes sense given the story of the expansion. But there's no inside quarreling at all. Chaos lords no longer hate furies. In fact, no demon can ever fight another demon type -- not even as a monster war quest, because they're in the same faction. This is a big loss in my opinion. One of the things I'm going to do is move the demons out into different factions, and introduce some hatreds between them. They may hate the undead even more, but they also shouldn't like each other.

Another thing I've been looking at is how to lay out the different monster types. Basically, the way the game is organized, it repeats itself every 25-30 levels. By level 30 (which could be a deep dungeon at level 20-something) you've seen every single monster variation that exists. That means that every single variety of every single monster -- there are 55 monster archetypes and around 5 sub-types of each monster making 275 variations -- are squeezed into the small space of 30 levels. When you go up a difficulty level, ie. when you progress to champion, etc, that process repeats itself: you encounter the easiest monsters, then they get harder and harder until 30 levels later you get the hardest monsters. I'm not crazy about the way this works.

First, I don't particularly like the way the game handles difficulty levels. I may have mentioned this before, but essentially you're forcing people to go up a difficulty level to proceed with their game. What often happens in the vanilla game is that going up a difficulty level makes the game SO much harder that people give up on their character. Thankfully, the game has another parameter which is the town level, and this allows you to really determine what difficulty level you want to play at. But forcing people to go up a difficulty level to continue with their character? I don't like it. Difficulty levels should be optional.

What's really GOOD about the difficulty levels going up is that the game can be increased in difficulty to match the skills you should have by that level. For example, at the beginning of the game you can only afford a little defense per level. But by level 50, you have skills and items helping you get a lot more defense per level, and monsters need to match that if they're going to be able to hit you at all. So it's good as a way of adjusting game parameters to match the level of the player. It's NOT good as a way to up the challenge for the player, since the player never asked for that extra challenge in the first place. That's the philosophy I've been following in the mod.

It's also not good IMO to make the player replay the game (in terms of encountering monsters) every 25 levels. All 100 levels should be seen as a continuous experience, and that includes seeing new monsters and therefore encountering new challenges that the player hasn't seen before. This is what I'd like to switch the monster system to, but unfortunately it's currently a LOT of work to do this. Hopefully Shadow can patch something in to help me out, but if not, this will have to wait until much later in the life of the mod.

[Castruccio]

What you say about the Demons seems like it'd be a really interesting change, and fairly easy to implement. I look forward to it.