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Stabbey Offline OP
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[Hydrosophist] Healing Ritual targeting is bizarre and confusing
Why? - Healing Ritual works in a really strange manner. It goes from the caster to the target, then towards the next-closest ally, then to the next-closest ally until it runs out of allies. Note that I said "towards" the next closest ally.

I used it on a case where my Rogue and my Knight were on either side of an enemy. I targeted my Knight. Healing Ritual hit my Knight, then headed for my Rogue. But it didn't hit my Rogue. Instead, it hit the enemy who was between the Knight and Rogue, healing them, then it bounced back and hit my casters up on the platform where they were.

Needless to say, it's not especially intuitive that that sort of thing would happen. I also don't really see any good way for the player to know who to target, there's no easy way to predict where the energy will bounce to, or what kind of LoS I need between the bounce targets to be sure where it'll hit.

Needless to say, that's pretty annoying, especially the "healing an enemy when I'm trying to heal an ally" part. This seems to be yet another annoying instance of Larian taking shortcuts with the code by relying on "this magic works like someone walks in a straight line between the targets. Even though it's magic, it's totally impossible to have it work if there's a person in the way".

Suggested Change: Improve the targeting of Healing Ritual. It really shouldn't be the case where I have to play guessing games and do trigonometry to figure out if the spell will actually do what it's supposed to do.


****

Yes, balance should be aimed for, but the game has a wide range of players who have a wide range of skill levels, and it is impossible to please everyone.

The game has a lot of freedom, a lot of skills, and a lot of ways to approach a fight, and it's difficult to balance by definition.

At a certain point, there's a line which gets crossed where a nerf goes past punishing cheesers and starts punishing regular players. That's when I think nerfs go too far.

The clearest example of that is Sneak. People in EA busily exploited Sneak a lot to cheese combat, then complained about how OP Sneak was. The result was that in the release version, Sneak costs 4 AP in combat, and is therefore essentially worthless. Sneak is no longer used by players. It was overnerfed.

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Sneak is still very powerful but it's just that most people used it for damage and doesn't realize how broken it is if you use it for other purposes, I'll explain in your other post.

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Originally Posted by Stabbey
What makes Taunt more complicated though, is that it acts like soft CC on enemies, but hard CC on PC's, because it removes control from your character.


I think the real problem here is how taunt works on PCs in the first place. Losing control of your character is far more punishing than taunt is supposed to be. Just mirroring exactly what happens to taunted NPCs isn't fair (ie. the AI taking control with a modified algorithm).

The solution seems pretty simple to me:
Instead of losing control taunted PCs gain a debuff that heftily reduces all damage done to all targets except the taunter (say -75% for example just to illustrate).
That would be a major hinderance and actually give you a good reason to "give in" to the taunt without losing control. Optionally, maybe +10% dmg to taunter also.

If you want to make it even more punishing and remove most of your ability to ignore the problem by spending the time supporting your team (with buffing, healing ect.) rather than attacking you could also make all characters except for the taunter untargetable for the duration. (this still leaves some loopholes with AoE abilities, but would still be very punishing).

In either case I think it would acomplish the goal of taunt - which is more to discourage a character from harming your friends moreso than actually force them to attack you.

You could argue that this could be mirrored for the effect on NPCs too to make it consistent. As long as the AI is capable of weighing the now drastically altered damage it can do to the possible targets it should normally choose to attack the taunter - and if it doesn't then you just mitigated a lot of the incoming damage anyway...

TLDR: How taunt works in general could use an overhaul along with it not being resisted by armor.

-Stigma

Last edited by vometia; 22/11/17 12:19 AM. Reason: formatting
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Stabbey Offline OP
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I like that idea for Taunt. That version, leaving players in control, but giving them a debuff like that could allow it to pass physical armor without being crippling to players.

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Yeah, I kind of like Stigma's suggestion. It could also lower hit chance by 10-25%. -50% damage to other targets would probably be enough if it lowers hit chance.

Last edited by MTaur; 26/11/17 10:31 PM.

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If you are trying to break the game, then don't complain when it's broken.

That said, I do think summoner is a problematic skill because it's all or nothing, because it interacts with basically nothing else. The only way to buff is to buff summoner level, and when you do, you end up with crazy powerful summons.

It seems to me that summoner should be a support skill set. Make the fire slug, oily blobs, etc. scale with pyro and geo abilities and summoner ability -- and make all summons spells require points in summoner. Thus, it will be helpful for elemental mages to get summoner points if they want to use those spells.

Meanwhile, summoner can focus on things like totems and traps, both of which should interact with attributes like INT or STR.

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I really hate the fact that we have taunt mechanic in this game-I wish they replaced the taunt mechanic with a feint mechanic where you can trick enemies to attack a specific target. Also here is an ideea for a talent - Menacing - you look really scary and people want to kill you first because you look really dangerous.

I just did the arena fight recently with the changes to taunt......absolutely horrible my 1st atempt was.

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I agree that Bless should go back to being innate and no source point (mostly for using outside of combat to clear cursed surfaces). If people think granting inviso on clouds, maybe remove that or make it 2 AP. But I never used that tactic so can't say if it is overpowered but 1 or 2 AP should be fine.

I agree gag order and chloroform are inconsistent, since gag order applies silence (soft cc) it should be the level 1 skill, and chloroform should be the higher level spell with sleep (harder cc, but not really hard since unlike knockdown/stun if sleeping opponent gets hit even by splash damage he is awakened and doesn't lose turn). Then 1 and 2 AP would be appropriate, depending on how much magic damage they do. 3 AP seems high, unless it actually removed all magic armor.

From another thread, 'spread your wings' was discussed and I pointed out that the description and animation imply that after flight you do 'touch down' and this is intended and actually preferable because without touching down 'elemental affinity' would become useless with this active.

My recommendation to those who don't like current behavior to stop landing on surfaces you don't like. Since you can fly anywhere for 1 AP over and over, and walking you hover over surfaces, one could say it is overpowered (like most polymorph skill seem to be). Although in general I believe in making other things better rather than nerfing anything.

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[Aerothurge] Why does Apportation exist?
Why? - This skill sucks all the items on the ground nearby into your inventory. That's it. This seems to be a clear indication of a developer needing to meet a quota for "Aerothurge skills", but not having enough ideas. This skill is not even available until level 16, at which point you should have better options to use that Memory Slot for, such as every other skill in the entire game.
Suggested Change: Two ideas:
1) The easy, less work one would be to reduce the memory cost of Apporation from 1 to 0. As in this skill does not cost any Memory at all. Because it's really, really, REALLY not worth a memory slot in combat. It doesn't even have a combat use.

2) Delete Apportation and replace with a better skill. Here's one idea for free:
Wind Shear - A line-shaped AoE effect which does moderate air damage to all targets in the line and tries to set Knocked Down (resisted by Magic Armor). AP Cost: 3, Source Point Cost: 0, Cooldown: 5 turns.

Boom, now you have another level 16 skill which actually is worth using.

_______________________________________________

pretty sure i messed up the quote, my apoligies

I do like the idea, but you could make the Apportation viable in combat too, by making the apportation a set target in combat and basically disarm set target for 1 turn if he has no psy armor, just an idea.

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Stabbey Offline OP
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You didn't mess up the quote, new users have UBB code disabled until 10 posts to make it more difficult for spammers to post malicious links.

Apportation setting Atrophy/disarm on a target would be another good move, although for a level 16 skill, it could probably set it on multiple targets in a radius.

***

A bunch of changes to skills did come down ages ago, but one was not changed. Assassinate remains an overpriced skill. Maybe I can find a better idea.

Originally Posted by Stabbey
[Huntsman] Boost Assassinate's bonus
Why? - Testing with my Finesse character, using Delorus's bow.
Base damage is 407-497.
Assassinate Damage is 468-572. (+15%)
Assassinate Damage while sneaking ranged between... 718 and 856 over 10 attacks. EDIT: Wiki says +72.5%

So maybe the multiplier when sneaking is something like 1.75x a normal attack, which would give a range between 712-870 for 3 AP. My number is no doubt off, but this is a close enough guesstimate for our purposes. EDIT: Actual number is 1.725x the damage of a normal attack.

That's less than the 814-994 you would get for 2 normal attacks at 4 AP, but 1.725 damage for 1.5 times the AP is a good deal. But wait, we're forgetting the AP cost of Sneaking. In combat, with the 4 AP cost of Sneaking to prepare the attack, now you are doing 1.725x damage of a normal attack for 3.5x the AP cost.

So without sneaking, you're paying +50% extra AP to gain +15% extra damage. That is not remotely worthwhile. With Sneaking, it's still underpowered. With the cost of Sneak at 4 AP, this makes Assassinate only useful to open combat, making the AP cost irrelevant. Even if Sneak was reduced to 2 AP, you would still be spending 5 AP to get the damage of 4 AP worth of attacks.
Suggested Change: Boost Assassinate's bonus from +15% to +50% (making this the bow equivilant of "All In") and probably eliminate or greatly reduce the bonus for sneaking.


Maybe the solution is more simple.

[Huntsman] Buff Assassinate
Suggested Change: Decrease the AP cost of Sneak from 4 to 2. Boost Assassinate's non-sneaking damage bonus from +15% to +25%, and reduce the AP cost from 3 to 2. Increase the damage bonus when sneaking from +50% to +100%, for a total of +125% damage when sneaking.

Also perhaps consider something to prevent exploiting it: Assassinate's cooldown is frozen when out of combat, until all combat between players and enemies is ended.


Why? - A bonus of +25% damage when not sneaking is a reasonable bonus for a single-target bow skill. And assuming that Sneak's AP cost is reduced to 2, the cost of Sneak + Assassinate would be 4 AP, which means that it needs to do at least 200% the damage of a normal attack to break even. So Sneak + Assassinate will do 2.25x the damage of a normal attack for the AP cost of 2x normal attacks.

The 5 Turn cooldown will help keep it in check, and it already does not stack with Guerrilla. The cooldown being frozen as long as combat is happening on the map prevents exploiting it by Assassinate->Escape->Wait->Return->Repeat.

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Originally Posted by Stabbey
You didn't mess up the quote, new users have UBB code disabled until 10 posts

Actually, it is a manual process, not based on the number of posts. If I notice new accounts when reading topics I'll edit them at the time, otherwise I try to search periodically for new users with 2 or more posts.

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[Necromancer] Bloodsucker should not damage characters under Decaying status
Why? - The reason for this change is because it is inconsistent. Bloodsucker, when cast on an Undead, heals them just fine, even though they have no blood in the first place.

Mosquito Swarm and the passive from causing vitality damage both heal living characters just fine when under the Decaying status, it is only Bloodsucker which does NOT.

Suggested Change: Change Bloodsucker to match Mosquito Swarm, so it heals living characters instead of hurting them when under Decaying status.



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