Act 3 combat thread

[Troyen]

Haha a nice explanation, I should add this to the lore wiki on aravorn.com
I have to say that I like the idea, though in some special cases elves won't show the tragedies in their aspect... I don't want to see Myrth from Loren suddenly full of wrinkles ! (well Myrth is an Elder druid so could have some powerful magic at works).

Dunno, Myrth with a streak of white hair might look pretty cool.

[fabulaparva]

^She would, actually. Plus it'd be darn cool if you'd see a few extra lines appear and go whenever she'd be sad.

[iWeasle]

I don't really get the whole giving white hair (even a streak) to young characters, it sometimes works out like with the twins, Ashe from League of Legends, or Weiss Shinee of RWBY, but in general it just tends to look weird. But hey, getting proven wrong is like my hobby at this point, so no real reason to listen to me .

[jack1974]

The snow elves have white hairs because is their racial trait (of snow elves). If you notice they've all white (or better, SILVER!) hair and blue eyes

[rooke30]

I don't really get the whole giving white hair (even a streak) to young characters, it sometimes works out like with the twins, Ashe from League of Legends, or Weiss Shinee of RWBY, but in general it just tends to look weird.

White streaks in hair are a mark of power..... according to David Edding's novels anyway

[iWeasle]

The snow elves have white hairs because is their racial trait (of snow elves). If you notice they've all white (or better, SILVER!) hair and blue eyes

Well yeah I get that, the snow elves looked fine with it. I more meant when 20 year old human characters have white hair, it's usually just confusing in my book .

[fabulaparva]

This quote is originally from the story feedback thread. I thought I'd copy it here because I'm only gonna touch the combat points.

Another thing that frustrates me is there are apparently different rules for mobs and players, and the UI isn't always truthful about that. I had no idea stagger wasn't actually reducing enemy stats until yayswords pointed it out, because the tooltip said it might and it definitely reduces stats on my characters!

I don't know what exactly goes on with stagger, but sometimes staggering an enemy will push him down on the turn roster...without any other debuffs inflicted on them. That I've seen multiple times. Other effects I'm less sure of right now, but I think I generally receive less dmg from a staggered enemy than before the stagger effect. Does the possibly reduced attack power show on his stats..that I don't know. These are a bit tricky to replicate since often the enemy staggered is also an enemy with other debuffs. So anyway, what is supposed to happen on an enemy, apart from some skills becoming active, when you stagger one? I'm a bit in the dark as well, to be honest.

And Riley's SP burn skill doesn't even work on normal mobs when their SP hits a certain %, which makes it a pretty weak skill, since you burn SP to prevent heals/resurrects.)

Yeah. The problem with Riley's Mana Burn is built on several things, imo:
a) in the start of the fight, you'll probably want to slow/debuff the enemies or buff your crew. So no mana burn used at the first turn. Or, the enemies move before you...
b) ...so, either way, before you get your second turn with Riley, the enemy spell casters (if they are not bosses) have already hit their most-mana-consuming skills and their SP is pretty close to the %25 threshold, anyway...
c) ... if we are talking about a Boss, it's more than likely that they are at their 50% threshold before you can touch them with mana burn

Allowing Mana Burn to burn Boss SP down lower than 50% might be too troublesome a change right now, but would it mess the system up if with non-Boss enemies you could torch the SP to zero? Considering this:
1)A lot of the critters have ways of recovering mana,
2) they have ridiculously low skill SP cost,
3) the skill has 12 delay on Riley, so he can't really spam it
4) it only burns 25% per one strike
5)and in many cases you have more than just 1 mana-user against you
...so maybe removing the 25% limit from regular critters wouldn't be such a balance-devastating idea? And leave the Boss restriction as it is. At this late of a stage, I do get that it might be too risky for the balance or too late, so this can of course be left as it is for SotW (Riley has plenty of other uses ) Maybe take this as something to consider for future games, should such a skill be reused?

(EDIT: Or it could in the future be a skill that gives a static SP DoT. )

[jack1974]

The stagger reduces enemies stats too in Easy, while has no effect (for both) in Normal, and reduces slightly party stats in Hard/Nightmare:

Code: Select all

self.staggerModifier = {"Easy":{"Friend":1.0,"Foe":0.75},"Normal":{"Friend":1.0,"Foe":1.0},"Hard":{"Friend":0.95,"Foe":1.0},"Nightmare":{"Friend":0.9,"Foe":1.0}}

So yes I think should update the tooltip text I can also change it so that reduces stats only in Easy mode perhaps (as you can see reduces enemies' stats by 25%, that's one of the many reasons why Easy mode is REALLY EASY!).

About Manaburn yes, doing such a change could mess up stuff because until act3, enemies weren't regenerating SP very efficiently. I think a fixed amount SP loss DoT would be good though, so at least isn't game breaking. But for now I won't do the change When the time comes for the DLC (next year) I might do those tweaks while testing the DLC since I'll be supposed to test the new content anyway

[fabulaparva]

NM cheat mode in Act2: Play with a faster healer Druid/Hunter-combo and choose the last tweak option. :D Druid can heal and resurrect, Hunter, Krimm and Vaelis will annihilate every enemy due to the enemies' lowered HP and defense. Riley can do additional speed/defense sabotage, if needed. One of the problems with the last tweak (+30%) option is clearly that is doesn't give any additional power to the enemy mages. So the mages are easier to kill with no additional dmg cast on you. Only the melee enemies are buffed. I guess I should go with the first tweak-option instead, change to Hunter/Ranger party w/o healing skills... or what have you and stop this cheating, but it's kind of hilarious to take down guys like Big John with just a couple of strikes...so much for his big hammer.

EDIT: Moved here from the main thread, as this is not a bug, just having fun with the combat tweaking.

[jack1974]

Well at least it shows that the current game balancing works well enough with all twins' classes