The Balance Thread

[Bluddy]

New version 0.66 is up.

The changes here include the aforementioned splitting of the factions. I only added a few new hatreds between factions, because too much of it can overwhelm the game. Demons are now back to their old factions (pre-expansion) and for example chaos lords hate furies again. I also made fire elementals hate ice elementals. This is something that I think is expected by players (or at least I expected it). The rylors now have their own faction, and the vortars and kralls are in their own faction. I couldn't split up the vortars from the kralls because vortar guardians spawn kralls (did you know that?) so having them spawn a potential enemy just seemed weird.

I also fixed elemental auras, which I previously broke. Additionally, I fixed the fire/ice/lightning elementals bonuses when they're excited (high morale) which don't work in vanilla.

[jureidinim]

Are these alliances/hatreds between monster factions dynamic? Do they randomize and then actually change over time?

I know missions in the game can say there is an uprising (so one faction is at war with others) - i was just looking at your statement of Chaos Lords hating furies - would that be all the time?

[Bluddy]

I would have liked them to be a little more dynamic but I'm pretty certain they're static. They can change temporarily due to quests, but that will only apply to the specific town. So torvas will always hate orcs, and zombies and skeletons will always be hated by all living beings etc.

There's also a dynamic way to change reputations if one faction kills members of the other (even accidentally). That would have been very cool and I asked Shadow if it's possible to have that. The problem is that monsters that don't hate each other can't damage each other, so there's no way to have that dynamic in practice. What would have been nice is to have a middle ground for most monsters, where they don't hate each other, but they still might occasionally fight each other if they're bored and could slowly cause a war. I don't think that exists in the game though.

The only way to cause monster wars dynamically then is to use the trickster's skills.

[Bluddy]

Version 0.67 is up, and it includes a lot of the changes I've discussed above.

Most live monsters are now sensitive to poison, while the undead are highly resistant to poison but sensitive to magic. This means (hopefully) that every character will be good against some enemies but not others.

I've gone over just about every monster enhancement and every monster. Also, I've made amorphs a lot less annoying -- the mini-amorphs will spawn in a 'cocoon' stage, so you have time to move away if you want. Hitting them 'breaks' the cocoon, causing them to attack right away.

EDIT: There were so many things in this update, they're only coming back to me slowly. For example, in trying to find ways to vary the races, I gave amorphs high lightning resistance, because they're 'grounding'.

[Bluddy]

Here's what I'm working on now: I noticed that there's still an issue with the way attack/defense are in the mod. In particular, there isn't enough of a difference between a weaponmaster and a thief. A weaponmaster should hit a lot less often but hit harder, while a thief should hit more often but possibly for a lot less. I'm playing some more with attack/defense bonuses so that a thief can still do well in the game even if he doesn't invest much in STR. I'd like to make it so that each class is viable in general, so for example I've restored the defense bonus to the hunter(which Deathknight pointed out was missing).

BTW in modifying the enhancements for the last patch, I forgot to mention that I used wasp3's idea from here. I found that was really the best way to make resistance enhancements that scaled well.

The other thing I'm finally getting around to doing is modifying the modifier bonuses for sets. I've had this on the back burner for ages. There are 2 problems with set bonus modifiers:
1. I reduced many item modifier values for balance reasons and now some of the set modifiers are insanely big in comparison. This throws off the stats of some of my test characters.
2. The set modifiers were originally determined to be multiples of the regular item multipliers at THEIR LEVEL. So for example, Ciglio's set is level 3. The bonus modifiers for Ciglio's set are intelligence levels that are 3x the average bonuses at level 3, or 6x if you have more items from the set. This is not a good approach IMO. Why? Because I can get 3x the average INT bonus of level 3 by getting items that are just a few levels higher. The key with sets is that their bonuses should be good compared to items many levels higher. This is the only way you can give an incentive for players to keep those sets around for a long time. This is the guideline I'm going by in changing these bonuses. So Ciglio's set will give you the INT bonus of several items of level 30 or so, giving you a strong reason to keep using Ciglio's set if you want that INT bonus.

[jureidinim]

Originally Posted by Bluddy

Version 0.67 is up, and it includes a lot of the changes I've discussed above.

Most live monsters are now sensitive to poison, while the undead are highly resistant to poison but sensitive to magic. This means (hopefully) that every character will be good against some enemies but not others.

I've gone over just about every monster enhancement and every monster. Also, I've made amorphs a lot less annoying -- the mini-amorphs will spawn in a 'cocoon' stage, so you have time to move away if you want. Hitting them 'breaks' the cocoon, causing them to attack right away.

EDIT: There were so many things in this update, they're only coming back to me slowly. For example, in trying to find ways to vary the races, I gave amorphs high lightning resistance, because they're 'grounding'.

Is there anyway of us seeing these new resistances/vulnerabilities in game? Do they get the appropriate icons to show this?

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by jureidinim

Is there anyway of us seeing these new resistances/vulnerabilities in game? Do they get the appropriate icons to show this?

For the most part, yes.

All resistances now show up as icons. This includes the different elementals, whose resistance was a little inconsistent in the vanilla game. Fire elementals for example had super high resistance which was a result of 2 different ways of adding fire resistance (one hidden and one icon-based). Ice elementals on the other hand had only the hidden cold resistance but no icon-based resistance. The result was that ice elementals didn't have such high cold resistance. The same applies to lightning elementals.

BTW I also made elementals react to being hit with different elements. Hit an ice elemental with cold and it'll take a little bit of damage but also grow stronger (it can only grow stronger once). Hit it with fire and it'll be weakened (same here -- it can only grow weaker once).

So like I said, all resistances are now consistently iconized. Every undead creature has an icon showing their added resistances.

Weaknesses are currently hidden. The reason is that I didn't have icons for different elemental weaknesses and didn't want to reuse the resistance icons (which show an image of an elemental attack being blocked by something). But weaknesses are also pretty logical. I was thinking of putting them in as hints: Most living beings are vulnerable to poison unless they directly deal in poison (like orc shamans). Most undead things are vulnerable to magic. Elemental things are vulnerable to the opposite element (poison is considered earth ie the opposite element of lightning/air). Also, monsters that have a lot of metal on them (like the death knight) are more vulnerable to lightning.

As yet another example of things added in the last update, dog type monsters have slight cold resistance because they're furry. They're also invulnerable to blinding attacks like smoke bomb and blinding flash because of their developed sense of smell.

[Bluddy]

Version 0.68 is ready.

It includes some fixes for the icon textures used for resistances -- I wasn't sure how to do that until I looked into it some more. It also improves the attack/defense bonuses for non-warrior classes, and the set bonuses have been changed as noted above.

[Castruccio]

Thanks for the continued hard work Bluddy.

[Bluddy]

Thanks for the support Castruccio!

Here are my thoughts for what I want in the the next version or two:

I started thinking about the quest system. In DoP, the quest system was very relaxed and really prevented too much work from building up for you. The more quests you have, the slower quests accumulated, making sure that you could catch up if you're behind.

DC has no such system, by design. You're supposed to be overwhelmed if you're not good enough to beat the dungeon, so quests just keep on hitting you at the same rate. I want to modify this slightly. It's good that quests hit you hard and fast, but they also need to slow down a little if you need to catch your breath. Not as much as in DoP, but just enough to show you a little understanding when things are falling apart around you.

Another thing I noticed about the quest system is that there are too many incentives to beat a boss. Bosses create almost all of the havoc in the game. Once you've beaten a boss, the town is pretty much saved. But that's also a negative. If you beat the boss of the dungeon, you won't get many other interesting missions. However, when you beat a boss, you a) eliminate most sources of trouble b) get a ton of loot c) get a ton of money d) get a ton of XP. So your best bet is just to beat the boss. You'll get all the advancement you need that way. You could ignore all other quests so long as you're strong enough to beat the boss, and that's a bit of a shame.

I think this is a bit of a problem in the incentives. Bosses already give you a huge reward by essentially saving the town. There should be a big reward for killing the boss, but not so big that you have little incentive to deal with the more interesting quests bosses generate. By reducing the rewards from bosses, I hope that the incentives shift to 'let's give the boss some time to get things going so I can advance'. There's then a balance between allowing the boss time to create other quests (and perhaps going for other quests) and saving the town right away.

Another thing I want to do is boost certain bosses, such as mages and priests. I'd like to give them more and better abilities, like creating shields for themselves and summoning minions to help them. Other bosses are almost impossible to defeat. I'm thinking specifically of the scavenger, which becomes a bit too strong even as a regular monster.

Yet another issue I'm thinking about is how the player can defeat difficult bosses. Many times you have no choice but to leave a boss for later since he's just too tough. But this isn't always realistic or helpful. In later levels, you only level up after completing many towns, so gaining XP isn't likely to help you defeat the boss. And in terms of weapons, the best weapons in the game are often obtained from bosses. I'll have to think about this aspect some more.