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Board Index » Seasons Of The Wolf » leveling skills (idea)
jack1974 Mar 10, 2014
Yes I was including also those in heavy armors. I probably won't have time to ask the artist to draw specific items/armors for SOTW, but things like the one you mention for sure :)
jack1974 Mar 10, 2014
Uhm after doing some tests, I'll keep the name "Ranger". I forgot I hard coded it into several point of the game, so changing to Guardians means a lot of bugs, some immediately apparent, others hidden that could pop up maybe after 8-9h of play, and slow down the release of even more time (a week or more). I really don't want to add stuff that can cause extra bugs at this point :oops:

So my ranger class can wear heavy armors :mrgreen:
renke_ Mar 10, 2014
Well what's the fun of a battle that ends in 2-3 turns anyway!?!?!?!? :mrgreen:


Any skirmish should be fast and deadly ;)



And yes, imho short battles are more fun - without a working tactic you're simply dead, war of attritions (after 20 rounds of slashing the side with 3 HP more wins) are boring. [not that Loren or (probably) SotW will work this way, this was meant as an in extremis example]
yayswords Mar 10, 2014
I tried to build a party in Loren completely optimized for quickness and high-yield damage (think all mages + thieves) - great at the beginning, middle- and end-game are nearly impossible as the possible damage done in the first round is not enough to kill or critical damage all enemies.

I find that mages actually suck because magic damage is bad at causing stagger, and if you don't stagger your opponents they will stagger you, and stagger is VERY POWERFUL. If you wanna try a hit hard and fast party, check Team Fierce or maybe future Team Thrash in http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=3218



Issue potions - in WoW potions used to be on a one minute cooldown, but it became more or less "automated" that you'd pot every minute because you could and it wasn't really a choice. Now you can only pop them once per combat session. Although it's sometimes kinda obvious when you want to use it it's still better than "as often as possible". Then again, WoW potions do not cost any of your time, you can pop one and immediately begin casting a spell.
jack1974 Mar 10, 2014
In SOTW many things will work differently. For example attacks targeting a single enemy will have much higher chances of a condition/event to happen. I realized that before with such lower chance, the special attack would lose a lot of importance. So we can have:

"Final Blow"

"Hits target with critical hit and has 75% chances of instant kill if target is under 30% of health, if not boss."

(in Loren, a similar attack had only 45% chances to instantly kill an enemy target under 50% health)



In practice the special attacks should play a much bigger role in this game (hopefully!).
yayswords Mar 10, 2014
I still want a 100% chance, just saying. I am fully accountable for the way I choose to play the game and all that, but this is what will happen. Either the skill has such a high chance I assume it will always work, or it has such a low chance I would almost never use it for that effect (but maybe the bonus damage). If the high chance skill HAS to happen for me to win, I will save, use it and reload until it happens. Many might do the same. There was a skill in WoW that gave you 90% chance to resist spells for the duration (Cloak of Shadows). Since 90% is almost 100%, people assumed it would always work, and raged when it didn't, and because of a lovely human feature called selective memory, the 10% failure chance felt much higher. Now the resist chance is 100% :P



The skill in question here would have a much better scaling if higher levels increased the % at which you could finish someone off. Or perhaps better, the delay/mana cost.
renke_ Mar 10, 2014
A little bit more on-topic (as the thread is called leveling ;))



Did you ever thought about "unlevelling"/retraining? This was a feature well done in Avadon - the trainer NPCs allowed the player to reset every invested attribute and skill points to completely retrain the characters. At least I welcomed this very much as I had to develop a "feeling" for the right combination of traits and abilities - typically one is forced to restart or accept a broken PC in mid-game.
yayswords Mar 10, 2014
Yeah it's pretty unmodern actually to allow players to make permanent mistakes (or permanently right choices). But I think replaying in cheat mode alleviates the problem a bit too.
jack1974 Mar 10, 2014
I still want a 100% chance, just saying. I am fully accountable for the way I choose to play the game and all that, but this is what will happen. Either the skill has such a high chance I assume it will always work, or it has such a low chance I would almost never use it for that effect (but maybe the bonus damage). If the high chance skill HAS to happen for me to win, I will save, use it and reload until it happens. Many might do the same. There was a skill in WoW that gave you 90% chance to resist spells for the duration (Cloak of Shadows). Since 90% is almost 100%, people assumed it would always work, and raged when it didn't, and because of a lovely human feature called selective memory, the 10% failure chance felt much higher. Now the resist chance is 100% :P



The skill in question here would have a much better scaling if higher levels increased the % at which you could finish someone off. Or perhaps better, the delay/mana cost.

Many will have 100%, but since this one gives an instant-kill, I thought would be better to give the poor target some chances. Though I could probably tweak the HP left though.

However remember that I've given up the leveling skills idea after some attempts - so there won't be higher level, each skill is unique :oops:
Did you ever thought about "unlevelling"/retraining? This was a feature well done in Avadon - the trainer NPCs allowed the player to reset every invested attribute and skill points to completely retrain the characters. At least I welcomed this very much as I had to develop a "feeling" for the right combination of traits and abilities - typically one is forced to restart or accept a broken PC in mid-game.

I have to ask Anima if is something possible (I know how to learn new skills but not sure about unlearning all at once and resetting the attributes/skills). If is something I can do without much headache yes, sure :)
Becca2828 Mar 10, 2014
Did you ever thought about "unlevelling"/retraining?

Do you mean like prestidgeing? If that's even the right term or spelled correctly which I know it's not but someone might know what I mean. I mean like you hit the highest (levels, if there is a level cap) you can with a character so you retrain, do it all over again I suppose or is it like someone else said and fixing a mistake you made such as you put a skill point in the wrong skill or something along those lines?



I suppose now is the time to ask if there is a level cap, and hope no one else has asked. But seriously, is there a level cap and if there is one is it moderate to hit or very hard to get up to, or well impossible?
Lonestar51 Mar 10, 2014
Retraining is more like: OK, you have a char, say a mage, and you gave him water attacks and additionally some dexterity for avoiding attacks (Or whatever). Later, you notice, that the combo does not really work, and you retrain the char: away with the water attack, fire is much nicer. And instead of dexterity you decide to put everything into making the magic attacks more powerful.



However, as an old-school RPG player I do not need such new-fangled knicknack.
jack1974 Mar 10, 2014
Level cap will be 30, right now I have no clue exactly how easy/hard will be to hit it, but even the grinding will be different from Loren. While present, I'll put some limits based on key plot-points, so that I don't see anymore situations like people fighting Fost (last boss of Loren) at level 27-28 :lol: (a normal playthrough should get you there when you're level 17-18!)
renke_ Mar 10, 2014
Retraining is more like: OK, you have a char, say a mage, and you gave him water attacks and additionally some dexterity for avoiding attacks (Or whatever). Later, you notice, that the combo does not really work, and you retrain the char: away with the water attack, fire is much nicer. And instead of dexterity you decide to put everything into making the magic attacks more powerful.


exactly! Thanks for the explanation


However, as an old-school RPG player I do not need such new-fangled knicknack.


Life's short - as an old gamer I'm not interested in completely retrying a game in different combos. I'm not a teenager anymore, every day counts ;)
yayswords Mar 10, 2014
Many will have 100%, but since this one gives an instant-kill, I thought would be better to give the poor target some chances. Though I could probably tweak the HP left though.

Sounds way better to use 100% and rather tinker with the threshold.
Becca2828 Mar 11, 2014
Thanks for the explanation, so do the enemies, mobs, not friendly things... I don't really know what to call them, level up with you or is it like different area's give different leveled mobs to fight?

Someone's probably already asked but I don't really want to sit and read through all the pages, I'll end up doing it at some point though
jack1974 Mar 11, 2014
In summary:

- I have a system that auto-balances the enemies to you party statistics (not level or skills). Using as base the average stats of your party

- then I can tweak the values to assign "traits". For example: Bruiser means has 20% more HP, 20% more attack than the average party member

- finally, in the encounters I can assign a level RELATIVE to the party average. So if I put -2, means that this monster will be 2 levels below the party average, so weak. If I put +5, will be 5 levels higher so very powerful



Using this relative system is much easier because I don't need to play the game in all possible ways to see which levels the player reach (though I'll also put level-based limits). Also, a tough encounter will be tough no matter which level you play it. Of course, if you find battles hard in general or a specific battle too hard, you can always change the difficulty during the game :)
yayswords Mar 12, 2014
Did it take you a whole game to think of that! About time bro. Don't you dare have second thoughts about it :)
jack1974 Mar 12, 2014
Well, Anima is skeptical about my approach for example. But I think I will convert him once he can play the beta next month 8)
yayswords Mar 12, 2014
I am a sucker for big numbers so I like that solution over just having a level cap that increases as the story progresses. Or did he have another solution in mind? Either way this is better than leaving things as they were in Loren.



Fittingly enough, there's been a recent comic about this very subject :) http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20140307 only 5 days old.
jack1974 Mar 12, 2014
Ah no I was referring to the auto-leveling enemies. But to be honest was a while ago, when he thought that by auto-leveling I meant simply that enemies were always the same as your party, instead using this new "traits system" I can still define enemies in detail (the big enemy with lots of HP, the quick enemy with high attack but low defense, etc). He likes the level cap as story increases idea, I think actually was him that suggested it to me for PS2, and I'm adopting it in SOTW too :)