It might be a bit late to wish for it now but it would really have been cool if the druid had some spells like this, and some more of general utility, instead of two times four spells that are almost the same. Speaking of druid spells though, I like what you did with Speed of Eagle (has no one nitpicked this name yet? Speed of the Eagle if anything, but I would go with Eagle's Grace), it feels like you've hit a good spot with it now.

+1 for Eagle's Grace. Also kind of feel the same way about the elemental spells. In Loren, it felt like "okay, now I can do the exact same move, but it's fire damage now!" rather than "cool, I'm learning an amazing new ability." There's a little bit of gameplay with the secondary debuff effects and the environmental effects, but most fights seem to have one go-to offensive option.

Yes I'll change the name to Eagle's Grace.

As for the spells, since in Loren people complained about the very different usage of the AOE and the single-target damaging spells I thought to add two variants for each one, useful for fighting a lot of enemies with low HP (AOE) or single monsters with high HP (single target).

Not saying that other spells couldn't be useful of course, just wanted to explain the design decision!



Regarding your other points: yes the AOE have not much use now but because most encounters are max 2-3 enemies, the only exception is the Goblins. But later they should become much more useful!

In terms of stats, dumping everything into constitution for front row characters and will into my druid until 20 has made fights immensely easier. Higher hp allows you to absorb those special attacks (Pounce) without getting KOed in the first round, like I was when I originally went for a balance of skills. I honestly haven't noticed a significant effect on the other skills now that I'm backfilling everything to 20, except my magic missile hits for an extra 4-5 damage. I guess they let me unlock some traits? (Which do seem like a neat idea.)

Yes probably the HP/SP are the key factors in the end, though I think also agility for the speed might be useful. Initially had each CON/WIL point raise the HP/SP by 10 but I immediately realized that it was too much. Perhaps even 5 is "too high" but I don't want to change too much right now. Or maybe I should increase the raise on the other related stats...

Overall, Nightmare difficulty with my setup feels like Loren on Hard (or PS on Hard if you want to go back that far). I don't know what your intended difficulty target was and maybe this level is OK for the opening chapter. It certainly feels better to only have to retry a tough fight a couple times instead of being stuck unable to kill anything while fully rested like I was on my first game (which was on Hard, no less).

Yes is what I wanted. Initially was harder, but then I realized that this is just THE FIRST chapter (and shorter than others) so didn't want to shock the player too early later things will be really hard. You mention the ratmen fight, think a similar one with a cleric, but with front line fighters with more HP or stronger defense...



I might tweak a bit the giant spider again in 0.78 though, since I don't want that one to be TOO easy. Also I'm adding the ultimately awesome skill for the ranger: BRAMBLECOAT!



Description = "Surrounds your body in a coat of brambles for 5 turns. Increases your defense by 15%, as well as harming those that strike you with melee by 5% of their HP."



I am going to test it, because attackers losing 5% on each hit might be a bit too much (if they hit all the time, they'll lose 25% of their total HP!).

I think the problem with the spider is it has two special attacks. One is the paralysis, which does like no damage (single digit) at all, but has a good chance of a 3 round stun or something. The other is the poison bite, which it can use on the back row to devastating effect. But the spider also dies from like three nukes from a druid. If in that time all it did was fail at paralyzing you it was probably roflcakesfreeloot. If it poisoned and paralyzed your druid and the twin is a hunter (=no heals) then you probably would be reloading instead. Or throwing potions WHICH I NEVER DO okay I get it.



I have more to say on the recent posts probably for example the Bramblecoat... I was thinking an empower that would buff each of the weapon requirement abilities of the ranger. But I guess this is interesting to any ranger build anyway.



Also Perfect Balance. You want to make this ability good, then remove Invigorating Prayer. Okay so now it grants 75 SP/HP for 75 of the other plus the 10/8 caster cost. With 150 SP you get an instant 75 SP from IP at a 15/12 caster cost. The static regen just can't compete with a % gain as mana pools grow. If I played on normal I could definitely crank up my SP to 150 by level 6. My previous nightmare party's druid had 135. Admittedly Vaelis sits on junk mana and PB would be a good cast on him but his pool will grow and IP will overtake PB and I will just sit there regretting the point. But if you increase the exchange rate even more I would be killing my low level characters with it.



However I also think in general too many spells have a % effect. I would like to see them depend on the caster's magic score. If I want to use my druid purely as support I can take the first row of skills and ignore my arcane stat altogether. Pump up agility and will.



And I'm calling it out: Anyone thinks hunters can compare with druids for damage? Anyone at all? In any build so far?

I really don't like having stat derivation everywhere. I have rewritten this post three times now because I'm trying not to jump to conclusions and then rant based upon them. But really. How can I make my hunter hit harder? Maybe it'll work to remove all defensive gear that doesn't increase my attack anyway. Then opponents will have less defense too. Okay I ranted anyway...



Okay actually, that does work. I stripped my level 1 hunter of armor (ranger kept armor on) and a snow tiger went from 40 defense to 24. Gear should not be a double edged sword.



Stripped both. 10 defense tiger.



Here is the funniest, funniest part. I could not beat the tiger until I took off my armor. Hahaha. I am going to record a playthrough with this or something.

Ah OK, then yes that shouldn't work, shouldn't consider the armor in the defense computation. Will tweak it now

Are you kidding me, I'm on steroids here editing the video of how effective my unarmored party is. And it's not just armor being derived. Health is. I haven't checked for every stat but I think they all do...



And the point is that normal random mobs should not use stat derivation at all.

Lo and behold:

[youtubewd]0jwaItU9Bx8[/youtubewd]

edit: edited your post so the video is playable from the forums

Haha if you have saves for both "configuration" I would be interested in getting them so I can tweak this

Stat derivation is OK if is mixed with some minimum sanity check, like not go too below a certain level (equal to the average defense a character would have with a standard armor). Otherwise the challenge goes away



edit: nevermind is rather easy to reproduce, don't need the saves

But the thing is I don't think the situation for my naked party is as stupid as the situation for my armored party. If one twin was a druid I could be nuking for those numbers (60ish) without having to give imaginary fanservice. Yeah there is mana but still. I'm pretty sure the magic attack still beats aimed shots. Hunter damage suxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is my point and bear in mind I could just run a party that relies on spell damage and deliberately have very low physical damage. So in turn very little physical damage will be derived, and unless the enemy team has mages they can't win. They might derive my crazy defense so we can all have fun hitting for single digits except my spells.



idontlikestatderivation

A enemy party with high Magic resistance would get almost no damage from Mages. Again you make right observations but based ONLY on this first short act, where there aren't any high-magic resistance enemies. I should make the goblin high magic resistance maybe, so you can see how much damage the druid does against them... MOUAHHAH (no I won't touch that now)

I also invite you to try the "naked strategy" (rofl) against the goblin battle when Morran is sick. I tried and was killed by the scouts rather quickly it works in your example against a single enemy. Of course, needs to be fixed in that case, but is not like if you go naked around you'll always win battles. You'll win easily the battles with a single enemy maybe, but as soon as there are two enemies things change quickly (for worse).



Thanks for all the feedback though, I've greatly improved the system

Yes I had to reload a bit for that until I got lucky. But the better question is: Did you beat it with armor on?



I hope the improvements have lessened the impact of stat derivation a lot. I don't think you can parse feedback well at all with such a mechanic in place. It's like, you could have a player thinking his (physical) damage output is sufficient, but he's a little squishy. Okay, Vaelis goes tank, buys defense gear. Enemy defense goes up. Hunter is suddenly doing less damage. The physical damage output he had and thought was fine now sucks not because Vaelis' damage went down but because his defense went up. Like, wtf. It should be a nightmare for you to figure out how to tune things under these circumstances.



In fact as long as there is some measure of stat derivation (with defense at least), and the enemy has no archers, I could easily remove my hunter's armor to reduce enemy defense at no risk.

No worries I've already fixed this. Now it detects if your armor is too low (using average armor values) and if so, balances the defense correctly. I tested with the battle with goblins, and the snow tiger. The "cheat" now is counterproductive since in some cases the enemy defense is even higher

I just hope you bear in mind I had this idea because I'm disappointed in hunter damage. It wasn't a drunken bet or something

It's like, you could have a player thinking his (physical) damage output is sufficient, but he's a little squishy. Okay, Vaelis goes tank, buys defense gear. Enemy defense goes up. Hunter is suddenly doing less damage. The physical damage output he had and thought was fine now sucks not because Vaelis' damage went down but because his defense went up. Like, wtf. It should be a nightmare for you to figure out how to tune things under these circumstances.

Yes I understand what you mean. I think I need to fix a bit the weapon:attack/defense ratio.

In practice when you hit the damage is calculated by the weapon you're using, and the attack/defense value. The attack defense SHOULD have an impact, but perhaps I need to tweak it so that the weapon damage is a little more important. Is like a percentage that I can tweak, so that one of the two things has more impact. Giving more impact on the weapon probably should balance things more in favor of the Thief.



I'll have a better idea of this in second act with full party fights!



Also sometimes I wonder if I never said I used this autobalancing trick, how many people would have noticed

I've played the game, and played Loren, and this system seems MUCH MUCH better, no battle feels boring (playing in Hard / Nightmare of course, Normal/Easy is still simple) and I had much more fun with the fights.

But is a good way that I did so players like yayswords can try to find any possible ways to break the system and I can fix it!

Well on so many playthroughs I'm sure someone would have noticed the starting orcs having different health all the time (unless you are devoted to a certain initial constitution score for every playthrough).



Sure this game is a step up from Loren, but is it so much because of this mechanic? I mean you have paced the leveling pretty well. Nobody's gonna grind their balls off and fight the kodiak at level 25 and say their druid meleed it down, game is too easy. People finish at level 6 quite consistently, don't they. Above all I don't see why mobs can't just be the same level as the party and leave it at that

I just made some tests, when you say the Hunter damage sucks, DOES IT HAVE SAME ATTACK value as the Ranger? because I just started a new game and put all the attribute points on Strength=Attack. So both char had same attack value. Even with starting weapons, Hunter has 2 short sword 8 +8 damage =16. Ranger has 2h sword = 18 dmg. They were doing more or less same damage, just 1-2 point of difference.

Isn't that your hunter damage sucked because the attack value was much lower than the Ranger ? in this case well is normal

I don't compare it to the ranger, but yes it does less than the ranger. I compare it to the druid who can zap for like 50 damage at level 1, going up to close to 90 by level 6. The numbers my naked hunter was pulling in that video a druid can do without anyone fighting in underwear.



My ranger can't survive waiting for that terrible hunter damage to take stuff down. I haven't seen it become respectable in any playthrough. I haven't even had a playthrough where a hunter plays as an archer all the way. Either it's been mana battery or I tried to use it as an actual archer but it sucked and it went slow and then a new build came and I had to start over. This was another attempt at doing it. And my damage was so bad I started playing naked to fix it

OK well in this case autoleveling doesn't matter, is a problem of balancing the magic power and the hunter skills though if you have any saves with high level Hunter/Druid (and Hunter/Ranger too maybe) I can make some tests. I think simply in this first act I put a low Magic resistance value to all enemies, perhaps will raise it a bit (or is another bug hidden somewhere).

I really cannot seem to reproduce your problems here. I put all level up attributes on strength to boost attack (since the intent was to hit a lot with the Hunter), I just got a nice crossbow, attack 18, for the Hunter and in the backrow does 39-44 damage to a Snow Tiger with aimed shot! Vaelis and Ranger do 10-15 with normal attacks. It doesn't seem too bad to me even considering the long delay of the aimed shot.



So I'm not doing any changes right now unless you can send me saves that prove that your WELL EQUIPPED Hunter sucks (of course if has crappy items, won't do much damage ).

Maybe. Maybe my only playthrough where I got far with an archer hunter is the one I sent you where I couldn't kill the spider, I can't remember. What I can remember is how powerful the druid is at all levels though. But even if the hunter can get respectable at level 5 it doesn't change the situation at level 1. It should be hitting harder than the ranger already at that point. It has no other job. A druid does not need to spend everything (or anything) on arcane to accomplish that.



Yes, I think you could increase magic resistance a bit. Not for actual caster mobs, but the rest yeah.



However let's look at the situation implied if my druid story and your hunter story are both true. My druid nukes for 50 at level 1 and 90 at level 6. It's very impressive at level 1, but it doesn't even double as you get those levels and that gear. Now look at the hunter's improvement. A hunter should be happy to be aimed shotting for even 10 at level 1, but goes it goes to four times that when "well equipped" - I am guessing you are level 4-5 at least. Don't you think we have a scaling problem here?



On a different topic, I believe Troyen raised the point that constitution is a powerful attribute or somesuch. Whatever it was he said, at least I think so too. You start with over a hundred speed, so more agility just doesn't feel so exciting. You can get over a hundred defense... so same about skill. Especially about agility, I think there's like a 30 speed difference between a ranger and a snow tiger. I can't hope to bridge that gap. Attack and magic feel scarce enough that strength/arcane are exciting though, not to mention their defensive benefits. Anyway with over a hundred default speed getting +1 per agility point isn't very exciting.



Then again stat derivation is still very much in place for hit points... long before this beta is over there will be a reckoning about this mechanic. Right now I don't know if getting more health will help me survive or not, because it means the enemy will have more health too and thus can hit me for longer. It's really the same deal as with defense, except I can't strip my characters to lower their health. I haven't checked but I would assume getting more SP means that will happen with enemies too and they can use more abilities on me. Why is autoleveling enemies not enough? Actually, I don't even like that. I might for bosses.



I think all the problems you are trying to solve are better solved by level pacing, and you have made progress with that; you could grind in Loren, you can't in SotW. I can give you more ideas, for example if you intend for us to be level 6 by the end of the first season, then increase the exp rewards in season 2 but also increase the exp required for levels 7, 8 etc. That way if you sucked at getting exp in season one you will get a fast level 6 from the increased exp rewards in season 2. And conversely, if you really try to milk season 1 for exp, it will only give you like 3 season 2 mob kills worth of exp anyway.



I don't have much time to play right now but I am noticing a far lower defense on early monsters at least. And bigger hunter numbers. It's better at least. Were your numbers from 0.78 or 0.79 by the way? I could see the hunter being "okay" in 0.79 at least.



Also does it really make sense to give everyone the same traits to choose from. Like my druid has no interest in bonus attack and my ranger no interest in bonus magic. These could be replaced with like a bonus speed trait. I would love to have one of those.



Oh and I never replied to this but lack of enemies in a row is not really the reason I think the druid row nukes suck compared to single target nukes. Let me tell you of the one situation where I actually used a row nuke and didn't regret it. It was one of the very last fights of the season and I was faced with a back row of 3 archers. Their health was low enough that they all died to two row nukes. But if they required three, I would rather just single nuke them down. It has a little more delay and it costs a little more SP but it kills an enemy each time so I don't have to worry about them anymore. And if their health was so high it wouldn't kill them I'd get a nice debuff on them, which is less likely when I use a row nuke. Furthermore the Regenerate spells imported from Loren are so powerful in this first season that I can't fight them with row nukes - talking about the Mormont fight.



Animal pack in Ninim: Just acquired Vaelis. I've restarted that fight over twenty times. My party is on full health at the start. Got two white wolves - they kill my ranger or Vaelis before I can even act. wtf. Reloaded for different pack, leveled up so fully healed. Now bandits are about as hopeless as the white wolves were. I miss my druid. Did you only change monster defense when you tinkered with the numbers?