Third Act Beta! - SOTW 0.8.38

[fabulaparva]

I don't mind the difficulty at all, I mind the part where battles take up to 10 minutes extra so that I can be on full health and mana for the next. It's not a challenge, just a test of patience. Riley spends 90% his turns throwing Energize around/meleeing unless it's a boss fight.

I've been using Riley's Energize way less in Act 3 than I did in Act 2

More Money, More Pr... Potions, I mean.

[yayswords]

I'm not expecting you to change anything. I'm merely pointing out that each and every battle I go through a ritual of replenishment that stopped being interesting months ago. I am not proving anything to myself anymore in the effort. It is akin to adding some minigame after each fight: You don't have to do it, but if you do it, you get full health and mana. The minigame is clicking the screen once every 5 sec for ten minutes. You can't fail it but it still takes ten minutes to do. And even after you've done it a hundred times, you still have to prove after every battle that you can still do it.

In pretty much every non-boss fight it's 5 people doing the killing and 1 Riley making sure they can do it again. Does that sound like pretty much every non-boss fight is interesting at all to me? No, they're not. But I am torn between paying gold/skill points to deal with problems I learned to circumvent long ago and spending ten minutes per fight performing aforementioned ancient regen dance. And I don't like either choice. I feel like the lack of full heal between battles is a step too many in trying to solve a problem that other measures have already solved; the leven 30 Loren vs. the level 18 Fost issue. For one opponents autolevel (as far as I can see anyway), and for two you're always limited by respawns (except the freshly discovered grubs and slimes) if you want to grind anyway. But it's such a major change so I don't expect you to make it.

[jack1974]

Well for sure not at this point when the game is almost finished
The problem is that "minigame" you do shouldn't be possible at all, but I don't know how to solve it either. As for full heals maybe I had an idea. What if the characters NOT taking place in the battle autoheals ? this way at least the two (usually) characters not fighting, get full health back in next fight. Interested to know what people think about it?

[fabulaparva]

As for full heals maybe I had an idea. What if the characters NOT taking place in the battle autoheals ? this way at least the two (usually) characters not fighting, get full health back in next fight. Interested to know what people think about it?

A partial heal for those who rest sounds logical, though, but where to draw the line? Not trying to torpedo that idea, but I'm afraid it might break the difficulty on harder levels, even if it wasn't a Full Heal. Have Rowinda in every other fight and she can always start by giving a group heal to all. Have Riley sit aside for one fight and he can upload the other's mana-pool to 50% or over with energy transfer. Pride of Lukoss will get much easier if two of the fighters refreshen up automatically before the Boss. .. Won't those autoheals result in tweaking the difficulties for all quests (except for one-fight-quests) again? Awful lot of trouble for to just avoid using a couple of potions..... meep!

[jack1974]

Yes probably you're right
I can counter the mana dance by making the last enemy escape if you take too long to kill him

[Troyen]

It's not the difficulty, it's the pacing. It's fine for bosses to be tough and for the some of the non-boss fights to last a while. Like the four families' guards, I'm fine with them being challenging and drawn out, since they have in-lore reasons to be challenging.

I'm less sure about having every fight take so much longer. Do we really need to spend three minutes to beat up some crabs or snakes every time, simply because they have 400-500 HP? Given the huge number of fights in this game, it drags on a bit. Especially since in most fights (like vs the Empire), I already know I'm going to win by a landslide, it's just a question of how long. Not to mention it makes the boss fights stand out less (because some boss fights and crab fights can take around the same time).

I think it'd be nice to have a mix of short and fast fights in future games. The long fights let you strategize and use all your party skills appropriately, but the short fights let you feel powerful and show off the awesome damage you did and let you get back to the story quicker.

(On second thought, maybe yayswords and I are talking about different things? I spend a lot of time in combat, but usually not 10 minutes.)

[jack1974]

No I think yaysword is talking about his obsession to do regen dance to start the next fight with maximum HP/SP
I can lower the HP a bit of some non-boss enemies even now if that's the problem (like the crabs). I thought people wanted fights to be more challenging in general (even if what you say makes sense, a mix of long/short battles), but I can do it by raising Attack/Speed, which will make the battles last less for sure

[fabulaparva]

I thought there already was a mix of long and short battles. The slimes and grubs take long, the snakes in MErrow's Men take some time at the start of the act, the crabs go down pretty fast towards the end of the act (with Vaelis and a hunter in the party, anyway + Riley's Slumber), and with quite a few quests you can choose between a quick route and lots-of-battle-route. Am I playing with the wrong classes or what when I don't see any "takes too long" problems here?

[jack1974]

I think probably the Thief is overpowered for damage unless you say that those battles are quick even if you exclude the thief from your party?

[Troyen]

I can lower the HP a bit of some non-boss enemies even now if that's the problem (like the crabs). I thought people wanted fights to be more challenging in general (even if what you say makes sense, a mix of long/short battles), but I can do it by raising Attack/Speed, which will make the battles last less for sure

What I mean to say is that more HP/defense/magic doesn't necessarily make a battle tougher, just makes it longer. If you want to test the party's endurance (like saving Merrow's Men), long battles are fine. But the crabs, for example, aren't challenging, they're just long. And you can rest right after them anyway, so it's not like they're an endurance test.

I thought there already was a mix of long and short battles. The slimes and grubs take long, the snakes in MErrow's Men take some time at the start of the act, the crabs go down pretty fast towards the end of the act (with Vaelis and a hunter in the party, anyway + Riley's Slumber), and with quite a few quests you can choose between a quick route and lots-of-battle-route. Am I playing with the wrong classes or what when I don't see any "takes too long" problems here?

I'm picking on the crabs because they're the easiest to get to. It takes me 11 party turns (about a minute of time on slow animations) to kill 450 HP crabs - not using buffs, but having everyone nuke. If I buff and set up big combos, it takes longer (for dealing with two mobs). My level 16-17 warriors/thieves at the start of the fight deal 30-50 damage (Krimm can do 80), some of that to multiple targets. My casters can do 70-100 damage, but have a long delay. And the crabs are the fastest mobs in the act (that I've seen so far), so most fights take upwards of that. How many turns do you kill crabs in?

There are some points in the story where you can skip fights, yes, but there are other points where there are a lot of fights in a row, some of which can take several minutes. So you get a line of dialogue or two and then another battle very similar if not identical to the battle you just finished. That's where I think the long fights can get grueling and could be shortened. If making them too easy is a concern, than raise their offensive power to compensate. Kind of like Riley's golem, if the mobs aren't actually threatening me, than what difference does it make between taking 20 turns and 100?

I'm not actually expecting a mass retuning of SotW, but I think the overall percentage of time I spend fighting is a little on the long side. Especially when you have something like 400 battles in the game.