The Balance Thread

[DeathKnight1728]

By the way bluddy, I have a question about the hunter's net trap. Do you think that as frost trap and fire trap are great, net trap pales in comparison. I think that net trap is good if you dont want an enemy to come after you, but frost trap does that already. I was thinking that since net is more about immobilizing the monster, maybe a small -defense/attack penalty will last until the trap is done. The only reason i say this is because ive noticed that trap mastery always states that it boosts all traps, yet i always wondered what it would boost for net trap. The damage is 1-1 and I cant really think of anything to use the trap for. Another reason to do this is because there are always going to be nutcases (like me) that will want to use the hunter in melee.

When the beta was going on i had an assassin/hunter character and got him to 35. He was alot of fun and used net, but net wasnt giving him the most benefits. I think that if you add a (minor) debuff to defense and attack, it would not only make more builds available, it would also give the hunter another use for both ranged and melee. Just an idea.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by DeathKnight1728

I completely agree. Gut is not something the defender would have in his mindset. Defender is all about waiting for the poor unfortunate guy to hit/parry or block you and then unleashing it. In the original game, i believe riposte's damage can go to the 100s of thousands as each level you gain 50% damage. Imagine that at level 25 or 30. The reason that is so unbalanced is that not even the highest of monsters can cope with that type of damage.

Yep. This kind of percent damage inflation is what makes the vanilla later game unbalanced and produces the glass cannon effect. If you take the huge %damage increase warriors get from STR, multiply it by the DPS of their weapons (they can easily choose the best from a large variety), add the %damage increase from their passive abilities, add the really high %damage increase per level from attack skills, and finally close to 100% crit or crushing blow, and you get numbers no monsters can deal with. Riposte is one of the worst offenders, but all the attack skills have this problem. So the only thing warriors can do so as not to become bored is go 10+ levels higher. However, there are no equivalent multipliers for defense, armor and HP. Those values are fairly steady, so the mobs of those higher levels proceed to eliminate said warriors in 3-5 hits.

The thing about percentage inflation is that it's completely unnecessary. You can keep percentages as low as you want if the numbers are consistent.

Regarding Gut, I'll have to think about it some more before I decide to move it over. I just remembered that one of the changes I made was to make Gut only usable if you're wielding a dagger or a sword (which is realistic and is meant to 'mix things up'). This balances out Gut's usefulness a little. Also, the Gladiator already has quite a few attack skills... It requires some more thought.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by DeathKnight1728

By the way bluddy, I have a question about the hunter's net trap. Do you think that as frost trap and fire trap are great, net trap pales in comparison. I think that net trap is good if you dont want an enemy to come after you, but frost trap does that already. I was thinking that since net is more about immobilizing the monster, maybe a small -defense/attack penalty will last until the trap is done. The only reason i say this is because ive noticed that trap mastery always states that it boosts all traps, yet i always wondered what it would boost for net trap. The damage is 1-1 and I cant really think of anything to use the trap for. Another reason to do this is because there are always going to be nutcases (like me) that will want to use the hunter in melee.

When the beta was going on i had an assassin/hunter character and got him to 35. He was alot of fun and used net, but net wasnt giving him the most benefits. I think that if you add a (minor) debuff to defense and attack, it would not only make more builds available, it would also give the hunter another use for both ranged and melee. Just an idea.

Good point(s). I think it makes sense to have Net Trap lower at least defense. I'll put that in my todo. Other than that, I'm not sure how to boost net trap but I agree that given Frost Trap, it doesn't really seem that necessary. Maybe the key is to weaken Frost Trap somehow -- give it a much less pronounced effect, or perhaps one that doesn't get stronger with levels. Alternatively, net trap could become a much more powerful effect with a long cooldown time that decreases with level.

As for Trap Mastery, I think it should probably boost effect time as well as damage. I'll add that in as well.

[DeathKnight1728]

Hmm...Im not really sure what damage would do for net trap. Besides the usefulness of some of the new changes (blind flash), i think that if you wanted to make the opponent crippled you could make it so that each level gives a slow but steadily rising loss of attack speed. Freezing trap is set at a given speed loss, but net trap isnt. It might work as it makes sense that you would be naturally slow at attacking be it through arrows melee, or maybe even spells. If you are stuck in a trap like that you are naturally not going to be fast, thats for sure.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by DeathKnight1728

Hmm...Im not really sure what damage would do for net trap. Besides the usefulness of some of the new changes (blind flash), i think that if you wanted to make the opponent crippled you could make it so that each level gives a slow but steadily rising loss of attack speed. Freezing trap is set at a given speed loss, but net trap isnt. It might work as it makes sense that you would be naturally slow at attacking be it through arrows melee, or maybe even spells. If you are stuck in a trap like that you are naturally not going to be fast, thats for sure.

The damage boost would only apply to the other 2 traps.

What I'm thinking right now is that the Frost effect is too powerful. The main attraction of Frost Trap is that it does cold damage. Frost should be a side-effect. This is also a bit of a problem with Permafrost in the Ice Mage tree, since all other cold spells cause the Frost effect which slows down stuff anyway. I think there should be a % chance to cause Frost, just as there is a % chance to cause stun with lightning attacks. Freezing Trap is therefore not a dependable way to cause mobs to slow down.

Net Trap itself should probably last longer and I think it makes sense to lower defense and attack speed. There should probably be a small chance of a mob not getting caught -- like a 10% chance.

[Bluddy]

Quick update about what I want to do for the next couple of updates.

Yes, I was going to fine-tune HP, but I'm avoiding that for now It's too much repetitive work.

I've almost finished the monster page in my excel book. One of the things I want to do is to make more interesting resistance patterns for monsters. Right now, fire elementals and demons have some resistance, but what they have isn't very significant anyway. In general, most mob resistances in the game increase gradually with level and are uniform. This is fairly boring.

Here's what I had in mind: undead creatures would be invulnerable to poison, and have resistance against most other elements, but almost all live creatures would be extremely vulnerable to poison. Undead mobs would be extremely vulnerable to magic (it's what animates them), but live creatures for the most part would have some resistance to magic, and mages would have very high resistance. Demons and fire elementals would have resistance to fire (as they do now, but it would be higher) and furry things would have resistance to cold.

Together with a few new commands I've just discovered, these changes are going to make things very interesting. For example, lightning elementals would not be stunnable by lightning or shock bolts. Ice Prison might work on a lesser fire elemental, but a greater fire elemental would be hot enough to resist it. Unfortunately the awesome command 'Immunity' is not as powerful as I was hoping -- I wanted to make it such that if mobs had very high cold resistance, for instance, cold spells would automatically not work on them -- but I can still make quite a few modifications that are really cool.

[jureidinim]

But Physical damage would still do normal against all? Would the 'giant' sized monsters/bosses get an even more improved immunity based on their size?

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by jureidinim

But Physical damage would still do normal against all? Would the 'giant' sized monsters/bosses get an even more improved immunity based on their size?

Correct. Physical damage would basically stay the same, though I want to make armor also a little less homogeneous and more visible, so that mobs with high armor will have a 'heavy armor' icon. That way you know when to use rupture armor and the like.

The things I'm planning on adding to the Giant enhancement (whether on bosses or the player) would be to reduce the chance of getting critically hit, increase the chance of critically hitting others, and reduce defense (it's harder to dodge when you're big).

One of the things I want to address with this elemental system is making poison (as well as every other element) a worthwhile investment. I think that if most living mobs have very low poison resistance, while undead have near 100% resistance, that little realistic touch serves to make it a tool that's very useful but only against some targets -- that's what I want every element to be like. Physical damage can't have that same variability, but there I'm hoping that the sensitivities of different mobs to different special attacks (crits, crushes or deep wounds) and hence to different weapons will mix things up.

[jureidinim]

Sounds good.. I guess u really have to ensure though that no class of hero gets completely "locked out" so to speak... that there isn't a monster type they cant deal with because they dont have a good attack type versus that creature.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by jureidinim

Sounds good.. I guess u really have to ensure though that no class of hero gets completely "locked out" so to speak... that there isn't a monster type they cant deal with because they dont have a good attack type versus that creature.

I don't think any class could get locked out per se, but the idea is that certain classes would have more a difficult time against certain enemy types. This idea is already present in the game and makes sense -- I'm just extending it. Plus, don't forget that the mobs in the mod are much gentler than mobs in the higher levels of the vanilla game, so I don't think there's too much to be worried about.