alpha/prototype build 0.5.1

[jack1974]

Thalia's Backstab ability is inflicts more damage than the predictor suggests. First it reduces the armor, then it applies damage on top of the lost armor. DOT effects are pretty devastating with these small numbers.

Yes doing damage prediction is hard because of the new defense decrease system, I'll see if I can fix this

I wish there was a way to restore Defense. Kira, who I give a greater amount in constitution and skill, often falls as she gets dogpiled by mobs, especially when outnumbered by foes with a speed advantage.

I think might change the default skill "Rest" that right now restores 1SP, increases defense by 50% but has a very long delay to a skill that restores only defense (maybe percentage based) and not the SP. Since now you get 1dmg anyway even if you have higher defense I think should work (besides the long delay would still be a big penalty).

Is the damage in Joanne's spells determined by strength? Anyways, outside of damage, her offensive skills don't have interesting properties like Kira or Thalia's.

Yes, in this game all attacks are determined by that. I am thinking to rework Joanne's spells to be about the 4 elements, so should be able to hit all kind of monsters. Right now I think the Ice Shard is the most powerful since freeze reduces enemy speed, and speed should be important.

Critical hits can be devastating, unlike SOTW, which are barely noticeable. However, they don't happen often enough without investing heavily in Accuracy. Either gains critcal % needs to increase for every point put in accuracy, or their needs to be certain skills or equipment that can multiply their chances of occuring.

There will be items that increase the % of critical hits indeed. But I actually spotted a bug, adding points in Accuracy is indeed supposed to raise Critical by 1 every point spent! so that should change things a bit too.

On the skills tab, there needs to be number that displays how many skill points are available.

That won't be necessary in the final game since you will NEVER be able to gain more than 1 skill point on each level up. Just happens now in this test because I give 5000XP at once

[yayswords]

Another thing about defense is I'm unsure when you're able to go over your starting score, if ever. For example the "defense heal" says you can't go over your maximum, but can you go over it with Defend, Invisibility, Shield Wall, Thalia's speed/defense skill, etc? The game should communicate when you're not gonna get anything/everything out of a defense bonus.

On a side note, I envisioned combos as interaction between skills. Conceptually they seem to just be overdrive from Final Fantasy or whatever they call the bar in Street Fighter and similar games. Not saying bad idea, just maybe bad name.

[jack1974]

Yes I need to check that, originally defense wasn't supposed to decrease after every hit like now, so it could have messed up things.
Regarding combos I made the original discussion here a while ago: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3511
Anyway changing the name is not a big problem. I need first to see if I can implement them though

[Jaeger]

Yes, in this game all attacks are determined by that. I am thinking to rework Joanne's spells to be about the 4 elements, so should be able to hit all kind of monsters. Right now I think the Ice Shard is the most powerful since freeze reduces enemy speed, and speed should be important.

I'm thinking Joanne could have a crowd control ability of some kind, like an AOE slow, a paralyze, or some other debuff. At higher levels, it becomes more difficult to take down foes within the party's first turn as the enemy's HP/Defense increases. The 5 skeletons can especially be problematic, as they can use their numbers to tear away your Defense, and spam Knock Down to further continue their onslaught.

[jack1974]

True that is a good idea, will make some tests

[yayswords]

I was really holding back on commenting on skills, but now you basically said it's okay to do it

Right, firstly, I'm not a fan of the pre-requisites, but I think that might change if we reach... high levels. Not sure how high, but with the four skill points we start with, it's really not cool to use one of them just to unlock the skill I want to use (like Backstab unlocks Throwing Knives).

And can we replace Normal (tier 2) with Journeyman or so? Normal doesn't really feel like a skill level.

Kira

Focus Target, Knock Down, Wreak Havoc, and more (not just in the warrior tree)
I'm a cautious disliker of exponential power gain. These abilities gain both strength and duration with each skill point. I think that if for example Knock Down had 5 ticks of slow at every level, I'd feel better about taking one "value point" in it. Currently, even if I don't want Kira to be bringing the damage, I'd have to sink 3 points into it to max its utility. It's really a feeling thing but in my mind I see a lot of "zero or three" coming out of design like that.

Stun
I'm fresh out of Pillars of Eternity where nothing is immune to anything, so I guess this looks a little scarier than it probably is, since I guess bosses can't be paralyzed anyway. But CC is pretty scarce across all trees, and then we have this sledgehammer of a huge duration of the best CC. On the other hand I'd hate to sink three points into something that doesn't work on bosses...

Rampage
How is this a defensive skill?

Warrior Blessing
Compared to Joanne's Purify, I'm not sure how this will hold up as the game goes on, given that one is a flat 10 HP HoT and the other is a 40% heal (and dispel). Once Kira has more than 25 health, Purify is definitely stronger.

Joanne

Invisibility
Fix the lore text man. Invisibility doesn't turn you ethereal just say it makes you blurry.

Bramble Coat
I cry a little every time Joanne acts before Kira and Kira loses 1 tick of it to her own turn... is that mechanic removable? The hit counter is enough, I think.

Purify
I like it, but I feel like I might end up sacrificing virgins (accepting volunteers) to fill Joanne's combo bar ASAP so that I can use the only heal and almost the only dispel (there's Rally too) in the game.

Magic Sparks
I saw you talking about redoing her nuke tree to include all elements, but let this be said for the concept of a 50%-250%-50% nuke. I derped up full strength on Joanne. Her primary target takes 39 damage. Those on the sides take 1 each. I guess this is a problem of the defense system... I made this one all shiny for emphasis, because this is probably worthy of several pages of discussion.

Thalia

Backstab
I can see myself spamming this on bosses!

Sudden Strike
Sinking points into this skill hoping that when the combo bar is full, there is a meaningful target for that small amount of SP reduction (does she hit twice?) seems like a risky idea...

Dodge
Unless you read the techy tags, you might think you can use this on other party members. Just change "target's" to "Thalia's".

[jack1974]

I can remove the pre-requisites, in particular we get 4 starting skills just in this demo in the final game you'll start with 1 skill (or maybe 2) and get 1 skill each level up, even if early in the game you'll gain levels quickly.
OK to replace Normal with Journeyman (or journeywoman? hehe).

Focus Target, Knock Down, Wreak Havoc, and more (not just in the warrior tree)
I'm a cautious disliker of exponential power gain. These abilities gain both strength and duration with each skill point. I think that if for example Knock Down had 5 ticks of slow at every level, I'd feel better about taking one "value point" in it. Currently, even if I don't want Kira to be bringing the damage, I'd have to sink 3 points into it to max its utility. It's really a feeling thing but in my mind I see a lot of "zero or three" coming out of design like that.

Well I can't surely have 3 different variants for each skill, they must be all progressive. Maybe I can increase the slowness amount, or something like that. But all skills need to be like this, I can't afford to design 12 unique skills each tree like in SOTW.

As for Stun, yes I want to design the boss battles a bit differently. No more single boss enemies since those clearly don't work well, and I want to avoid immunity as well.

Regarding rampage, any skill that is cast clicking on a party member is a "defensive" skill. You can call it "buff" if you prefer

Compared to Joanne's Purify, I'm not sure how this will hold up as the game goes on, given that one is a flat 10 HP HoT and the other is a 40% heal (and dispel). Once Kira has more than 25 health, Purify is definitely stronger.

The main difference in this game is that since is so hard to regain SP, you won't always be fine to wait Joanne's turn to cast Purify. Especially since they're combo skills. You might be very low on HP and be Kira's turn, so you'll be forced to use it instead of waiting maybe 1-2 more turns.

Bramble Coat
I cry a little every time Joanne acts before Kira and Kira loses 1 tick of it to her own turn... is that mechanic removable? The hit counter is enough, I think.

Yes those effects should just decrease based on hits, even if it means that players could cast several and stack the effect duration. But could be interesting so I'll change that

Anyway yeah there's still a lot to do, in particular today I tried an experiment: I put all points on Strength for the whole party. Result, I could kill instantly all enemies with just 1 hit, and NORMAL MELEE (except Joanne of course)

So clearly something needs to be changed. Allowing total freedom to player to design the characters can break the game right now (I think the same would happen if you put all the points in Speed).

Need to think how to solve this. I might even try the miss/hit thing, even if I really don't like it, I can see solving this problem: if you put all in attack and nothing on accuracy you could hit an enemy with 1 strike but maybe fail 7 out of 10 times. Or some other way to limit the attributes, since there will even be items that increase attack.

Or maybe just give 1 attribute on level up for all the difficulty levels (maybe 2 in Easy). Yeah I just tried this now and even putting all on Attack doesn't guarantee automatic victory, so I think will do just that Of course remove the progressive increase of attribute points needed, so 1 attribute point = 1 attribute increase (and not 2 after 10 and 3 after 20).

[yayswords]

I wasn't asking you to add more skills, just to make for example Knock Down like this: Slows for 5 turns at all levels, but the damage increases each rank. Right now both duration and damage increase with rank. Although maybe you could remove a skill path somewhere and change it into three skills, like for example getting rid of the Haste branch and putting a single rank of Haste there, plus a single rank of a dispel and something else.

The main difference in this game is that since is so hard to regain SP, you won't always be fine to wait Joanne's turn to cast Purify. Especially since they're combo skills. You might be very low on HP and be Kira's turn, so you'll be forced to use it instead of waiting maybe 1-2 more turns.

Okay I laughed a little reading this yeah it's Kira's turn. She's low on HP. I'm going to blow her entire combo bar (and that "extra" bar) to restore two hit points on her next turn, because that will save the day. Realistically, Joanne's turn will come up before Kira gets another turn to get that to tick anyway. Even if Kira is low on health but high on defense, two basic attacks between her turns are guaranteed to nullify the regen, but if the opponents managed to get her health worryingly low then they can probably cause her greater harm than 1 damage chip attacks.

As for Stun, yes I want to design the boss battles a bit differently. No more single boss enemies since those clearly don't work well, and I want to avoid immunity as well.

Another idea I had was that Stun could deal say 10-15% the target's health as damage (ignoring defense), plus the paralysis. That way it might still be attractive against bosses.

Anyway yeah there's still a lot to do, in particular today I tried an experiment: I put all points on Strength for the whole party.

So did I, it was great fun :D

I hope you realize the magnitude of fuckedupness here though. That Magic Sparks did OMG MOM WHY DID YOU BRING ME INTO EXISTENCE YOU SHOULD HAVE JUST SWALLOWED kinds of damage to the primary target. You could say, but these are weak mobs, but then I'll have to ask why my all-strength character did minimum damage to the targets on the sides. One or the other is a problem, and we definitely have to point out that instead of the primary target taking 4 times more damage than the sides, it took 38 times more damage. Not the same ballpark, not the same city, not the same nation, not the same continent, not the same planet.

I know you want to experiment with this but I'd much prefer that you went back to SotW but without miss chances, and with the attack:defense ratio creating a damage multiplier (like it currently works, I believe). Right now I think only the increasing attribute costs are holding back all-out offense or all-out defense strategies.

Maybe you could look into way bigger healthpools at least. I liked the pace of act1+2 battles in SotW. This is just Loren rushdown allover again, though that will probably always be a little encouraged since there's no need to conserve resources between battles.

[jack1974]

Okay I laughed a little reading this

Yeah I forgot that put a 20% on Joanne's obviously doesn't make sense right now! I'll probably add a fixed value to Joanne's as well.

Another idea I had was that Stun could deal say 10-15% the target's health as damage (ignoring defense), plus the paralysis. That way it might still be attractive against bosses.

Can do that, no problems.
I noticed too that the sparks is broken (well any AOE damage spells ) but the mage skilltree (the offensive one) needs to be reworked completely.

I know you want to experiment with this but I'd much prefer that you went back to SotW but without miss chances, and with the attack:defense ratio creating a damage multiplier (like it currently works, I believe). Right now I think only the increasing attribute costs are holding back all-out offense or all-out defense strategies.

Well but I like that you can easily calculate the damage as it is now, doing attack - defense = damage in most cases, is very simple I'll upload another version with the attribute point changes I made, I think doing an all attack or all defense won't make any sense anymore with that.
One thing I'll do for sure is increase the HP though, the starting/base values I mean, since now the battles are a bit TOO SHORT indeed! Considering you can have only 3 party members vs the 6 of Loren, there's no need to even have such low HP
But I also need to finish making the items, since their bonuses can also change the way you play the game considerably.

Oh and I have also changed the Bramblecoat/Counterattack so that decrease only based on hits, and is very cool now, since you can sort of think ahead a "defensive plan" against enemies

[jack1974]

Okay after another morning of testing, I'll definitely change it on next update so:
- higher starting HP pools for sure
- no more damage = attack - defense, since it's really boring to hit enemies for 1 dmg will instead use a similar calculation as SOTW, with a base damage value from weapon influenced by the attack:defense ratio. I'll still keep smaller numbers (no 99dmg!) but the calculations will be similar to SOTW
- unsure if I'll keep the defense down on each hit, but I guess could make sense now if I implement the new system. Sort of simulating the fighters getting tired by fighting long battles maybe

the system I had in mind would work for example in a card game, where you can lose cards and replace them by other, and with always fixed values, but with level up progression and a RPG gameplay it doesn't work well as I thought!