DoP Balance Mod

[Bluddy]

This mod is currently experimental. The goal is possibly to eventually do something similar to what the DC balance mod does, but for now, this mod does a couple of things:

- Town gate is limited to being used in Jorvik and in dungeons. Other areas have gates you can activate, so they don't need the player's gate. This prevents many exploits.
- You can no longer offer junk you don't want to the races. You can, however, ask them if they want anything. This hopefully prevents some other exploits.
- A small bugfix for one of the bosses.

Grab the file here and place it in your assets folder.

--- Old post ---

OK so even though I'm still working on the DC balance mod, some people are really excited about the prospect of a balance mod for DoP.

I probably won't start doing this until I'm close to done with DC. Much of the work I've done with DC should be applicable to DoP: multiplier inflation, for instance, is just as rampant in DoP. Other things are very different -- for example, in DoP you're essentially expected to tackle mobs with a friendly NPC or two, which makes things very different and in some respects harder. The fact that classes are neatly separated, on the other hand, makes some aspects of balancing much easier.

So for now, feel free to post ideas you have about improving balance or your analysis of balance issues.

[DeathKnight1728]

Originally Posted by DeathKnight1728

Ive been analyzing and playing the classes in dop and like I was saying, things are very different. Like i was going on about the rogue, i believe i have an answer. If shadow was to make the rogue in future dop or even a patch for the 1st game, he should give the rogue a chance to generate mana for every deep wound caused. This would help make the rogue have something else to generate mana other than just a critical. What if you dont play rogue like a stealth class and want to go brutish rogue with strength. With that, you have criticals, deep wounds, and kills to give you mana. While not as good as warrior who gets, on hit, parry, block, and when he gets hit. He still gets a sizable better time with coming up with mana.

I would say that as it stands right now, here's the strengths of the classes with greatest to weakest-Mage, Warrior, Priest, Rogue.

The reason i think the mage is the best is because of a few things. First, the mage takes the rangers place in this game. He not only casts spells, but he can do it while running, which imo should be in dop 2. The mage also can do all this without generating mana like the warrior and rogue-a big advantage.

Warrior is next as even though he has to generate rage, he still can lob someones head off with a few shots at high levels.

Then priest as even though spirit isnt as good as intelligence, still can spam spells, fight somewhat and defend as well. Priest is alright they just dont do as much damage as mages.

Rogue is last. While a good rogue can do alot of damage, they are hard to play as. Ive restarted my rogues countless times as i just wasnt able to compete with other warriors. Im hoping that in the future, shadow will give rogues more chances to gaining momentum.

The biggest thing in my opinion, would be to make rogues much more viable and have more choices.

We cannot create a ranger class, but if it is possible, it would be great to make shuriken for rogue, thus giving another ranged character option. We can do this through taking the animation from stalkers and adding that to rogues, along with taking the picture icon from Dins skill and adding that. That is one of the big things to do as i feel that the warrior and the rogue are too similar. They are both melee and i dont think that 2 melees make sense as warriors already do melee better than rogues. If rogues had this i think that we could see much more viability for them. As it stands now, they are fairly weak in my opinion. Im not sure how hard this would be to do, but it would definitely enhance the game quite a bit.

Having 2 classes that both do melee with no ranged is a little monotonous.

[Bluddy]

I think that one of the main problems the rogue has is his mana gain ability. It doesn't incentivize the right things. The rogue gains mana for kills, right? But how does he get those kills? Using his skills of course. But how can he get the mana for those skills? From kills. The problem with this is that if he faces mobs that are too hard to kill e.g. bosses, he's stuck. He has to resort to his mana generating skills which take up precious time. It also makes those particular skills indispensable.

The fact that the rogue loses mana over time means that he doesn't have an incentive to lay low and wait for a kill. Just like the warrior, he has to attack to get his mana. Unlike the warrior, he has to kill to get it. This gives a strong incentive to invest in strength so he can kill quickly, which is not what we want to emphasize. We push the rogue to do things he doesn't want to do.

At first I thought we should just take away the degenerating mana and let the rogue keep his mana that he worked so hard for. But then there are some skills in the rogue's tree that are specifically built to freeze mana reduction, and those would have no use.

After thinking about several ways to fix this issue, I've come up with something that at least on the surface, sounds interesting. What if the rogue gains mana with time like a magician? Not nearly as much mana of course, but some mana relative to his fixed mana of 100. This reflects his preparation time -- the more he lays low, the more he recharges.

The twist is, that when the rogue gets hit, he loses mana per hit. This emphasizes several things: 1. The rogue should avoid being hit ie. high dexterity is a good investment. 2. The rogue should stay out of combat as much as he can, specifically against multiple foes. Fighting one foe will only reduce his mana a little. Fighting many foes will reduce his mana a lot. 3. The rogue is best fighting with a partner to attract aggression, unlike the fighter who becomes enraged (ie. receives mana from being hit) the most when he's alone. Finally, since this becomes the rogue's way of losing mana, his freeze mana loss skills are still useful: they simply prevent being hit from causing mana loss for a certain amount of time.

I like the idea of adding a shuriken to the rogue, but I think it should be an expensive option mana-wise to prevent him from becoming a purely long-range class, and dominating all of his other skills. The shuriken is something you'd shoot once or twice while approaching an enemy, right before you engage in hand-to-hand combat. I think the variation on mana gain here will make his combat different enough.

Assuming this is a good idea, this also gives me ideas about what I could do for DC. One can split up the classes into those that like fighting and being hit, and those that don't want to fight too much and want to avoid being hit. For the fighters, mana regen will decrease mana or at least be neutral (depending on the specific class). For the magicians/rogues, mana regen will increase mana and being hit will decrease their mana. Like the rogue, magicians also don't like being hit -- this reflects the difficulty in casting spells while being attacked. Mixed classes (fighter/rogue or fighter/mage) will neutralize each others' advantages and disadvantages. This also solves the problem of mana regen effects stacking in a pure class like Mage. Sure, they get more mana regen, but they also lose a lot more mana when they get hit.

[DeathKnight1728]

Well, if you were aiming on making shuriken higher mana cost, I would shoot for 15, as 20 might be too much. Shuriken will actually benefit from hitting and running as you are out of sight, thus gaining more mana like you just said.

I think that if this was to be done, it would dramatically affect how cool the class is. All of this makes sense to me as i never understood why mana gain for rogue went down when it takes a lot of skill and sometimes luck just to gain some of it.

[accelerator]

EDIT: Its not truly a balance mod but you could steal bits and bobs from this list.

Im still on my first playthrough, level 45 warrior, so take that in mind with these proposals I've been steadily noting for a mod. I didn't want to post anything too early before I've appreciated this game to 100 and experienced more of the other calsses but you forced my hand. I've totally stayed away from modifying the skillset as I wanted to tackle some base issues with the game and also transform it into my vision of what an explosive in your face hack and slasher should be.

Note that the the items further up the list can largely be interpreted as buffs. My reason for them is to provide the player with more to do and pick from which I'm then hoping can be offset greatly by the difficulty increases in the final section.

Flow

- Increase food drop chance
- Increase potion drop chance
- Reduce power falloff (increase total amount of power with skills at some later point)
- Reduce boss buff Thorns to 1-20%
- Can resistances make a boss unkillable for a mage?

The point of the mods in the flow section is to allow the character to reduce unnecessary downtime to a minimum, I know some sadists may find it more fun to port back to town and wait at the lifestone for 15 seconds but my simplistic mind needs constant action. Secondly I find it a broken mechanic to just click a gate for full health or to use the gate to throw a constant wave of respawning recruits at a thorns/regen boss as the only viable tactic (see next section for a counter to still using this against the now weaker bosses).

Exploits

- Reduce item quality for covenants on spawning a new world
- Remove NPC recuits in wild (ie you cannot recruit a higher level NPC without being of an appropriate ability yourself)
- All NPCs: Increase health and provide slight health regen buff
- NPC Rogue: Reduce the modifier that increases base DPS without touching skills (eg the rogue still has access to an occasionally impressive lethal blow but doesn't rip through mobs with slice)
- NPC Warrior: Reduce base DPS and increase tanking ability
- NPC Priest: Allow the heal over time buff as an optional skill
- NPC Mage: No change?
- Reduce lifestone 'heal' %
- Possibility to increase NPC respawn timer outside of raids or killed by mobs?

I find it horrible that the covenants always have at least one set item and too often for my liking an artifact, I think half my equipment must have come from them even though I never abandon a world or race too quick to destroy all the covenants (see further down to keep incentives to destroying a covenant). NPCs, or rather the rogue and warrior and the stealth rogue in particular are too overpowered. The focus should always be on the character which is why I propose turning the NPC into simply a companion with complimentary DPS that can take a little beating and isn't always dying on you, I've reduced the lfiestone heal due to the regen buffs (and other healing buffs for the character).

Items & Rewards

- Major increase to item quality in reward chests after destroying a covenant or conquering a world.
- Trader item levels to 2 levels below and 10 above or equivalent if possible
- Increase trader item quality
- Increase cost of trader items (artifacts exponentially greater cost than common)
- Increase item quality of gambler (and cost to match)

Although I removed the spawning of great items on creating a new world I think there should still be a big incentive for actually completing a world successfully hence the better chests. I also find that traders TOO rarely have decent items, I know thats the way its always been in many games but I also think that grinding up green item sales and saving your cash for an exorbitantly expensive item that could almost bankrupt you is another fun avenue that makes the traders inventory actually useful.

Skills & Attributes

- All static skill numbers turned into percentages where possible (Hardiness = % of Vitality, Devastating blow does % of Max Damage or easily called number per rage, blockparry/defence skills now a % instead of +#, etc)
- Balance all attributes to be useful for each class so a real choice is to be made (eg for Warrior, Intelligence gives a much bigger element res %, Spirit adds + regen health or rage, for mage Strength adds +% armor, etc)

Just throwing this in as a very general idea, it would need a lot of testing but I think there are some seriously underpowered (or overpowered) skills that could instantly benefit. Is there actually a function to increase the % increase skills by an additional percentage per level, eg + 20% physical damage per level is now (+20%)+(skill level/10) physical damage?


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INTERMISSION
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You might right now be thinking WTF is this dude on? He's turned a satisfyingly punishing game into Hello Kitty Online, fear not, this next section is what makes it all worth it.

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END INTERMISSION
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Difficulty

- Decrease event timer (ie more events more often)
- Quests at minimum 2 levels below to 10 levels above character
- Much higher chance of champion to legend mobs (eg harder difficulties of Diablo or elite mode of Hellgate)
- Increase mob difficulty modifier (see semi-official balance mod)
- Covenant levels set to +5 and aggression to hard/very hard as standard

I am thinking in the region of a 5x multipler for events. Over the top? Yes. I want the world to be chaotic to the point that losing the world is the constant rather than the exception. Actually more basic than that I want the player to actually pick and choose quests based on their merits, XP or do I save the steward who could give me more quests later or do I go and recruit this awesome priest with health regen but then lose the steward or have the monsters build too powerful an army to attack the town? With your better 'flow', gear (reward chests, trader, gambler, better quality mobs) and skills (more % powerful and a greater variety to pick builds from), you should be able to complete any task without being frustrated (sorry priests, will need to buff you later), the problem is you can't do them all and at some point something will give. Oh, and on top of all that you can't just pacify the covenants by setting them to easy.

[fab]

- Increase food drop chance
- Increase potion drop chance


I think the money drop rate is messed up. I'm always running out of cash. You barely have time to destroy fire towers before half the village is dead, plus the plague, the prices going up, and the NPCs take forever to respawn.

On the other hand dropping potions and food would take the focus away from the village vendors. Which in turn would make protecting the town less of a gameplay mechanic.

* Instead I'd like to see the money drop at a reasonable rate in a future update. It should be about 120 to 150% to what it is now.

* Reducing the respawn intervals on NPCs.

* Reducing the death penatly. Yesterday I played all evening (at least 3 hours) and made level 33 to level 34, ridiculous. Eventually I had to resort to the Escape > Save and Exit strategy just like hardcore Diablo 2.

* Random auras on bosses need to be toned down. +30% Life Leech + Major Regeneration... OK. +100% Damage Retaliation (thorns)... just silly. This game is not meant to be like Super Meat Boy and those insta-death platformers.

The difficulty is way off the chart, because of the very bland and uninteresting Uniques, and the rate at which random quests spawn means you can never keep up.

And obviosuly if I post about it when it's dead and no one's reading means it's also a really good game