Stats and Skills Balancing

[Tim]

There's been some discussion lately that some stats and skills aren't balanced. I agree. Aegis has posted his thoughts on some of the classes in another thread (good read), but I wanted to open up the discussion to include the individual stats themselves. It's hard to come up with a good way to balance skills and classes when the stats those skills provide aren't balanced.

In a perfect world, there would be no unbeatable gear setup. Every setup should have a hole that players can set their gear towards. Some have hinted that this may not be the case still: that some stat combos make it quite hard to lose unless against someone at a much higher level. Do you guys agree? Are some stats still overpowered? Or is it more that their counters are underpowered?

The most complaints I hear about are Speed still being king, or Taint being too strong at low levels. The common thing I see here is randomness. There is no real counter to taint or poison, but the fact that they are random was intended to be a counter itself to stop them from being all powerful. And the counters to high speed are Stun and Wound, which also have randomness associated with them.

Before I get into that too much though, I want to hear what you guys think. Do the stats need another revamp? Or are things pretty good right now and the skills/classes just need some balancing?

[Hugh Longshanks]

I would say that poison seems to be VERY powerful this version - at least in high quantities. Perhaps this is simply a matter of me being unused to the new balances, but I have noticed that it seems nearly impossible to counter in certain situations. although it is random, when it hits, it's almost totally debilitating (at least to me). I have gone from plus-100 damage to under 15 in one case (as ashamed as I am to admit it). Also, I have noticed that in general, defense is still under-powered compared to offense.
Now this may simply be a matter of playing style, where most players over-use damage and accuracy while neglecting Dodge, but hits of +700 dmg are not uncommon. I think I need to start investigating the dodge/defense/block combination more...
That said, with a perfect defense allowing no damage through you still can't win offensive battles, whereas if one were only to use offense without defense, one could win both offense and defense. Defensive stats really should be more effective than offensive skills, simply because you cannot win with nothing but defense in this game - but you can in the real world (and you all know how crazy I am for realism).

[fearless]

taint and poison are random.....what are the attributes that are always "on" ??

[fearless]

Damage
Block
% Damage
% Defense
Health Gain
Luck
Taint
Speed Wound
First Strike
Stun
Accuracy
Dodge

[Tim]

Taint, poison, stun and wound are random.
Damage and block stats are a range, so each hit is a random number in that range.
How critical you hit is random, but the accuracy and dodge effect on them are constant.
Everything else is always 'on'

[Edvar al'Given]

Darkhounds. Out of a few hundred I've faced I've only beaten 2 or 3. Also, straight offense and defense % is practically worthless.

[Hugh Longshanks]

What Edvar said. Although, when you think about it, Darkhounds SHOULD be nearly unkillable....

I'm going to continue flogging the mortally wounded horse of defense and attack. Those should be the most important attributes, since they are ALWAYS on, but they seem to do very little.

[dahllia]

my 2 cents:

- wound really shouldn't be valued the same as speed since one gives you 100% while the other is random(50% chance?).

- speed and damage % seems to be the two best stats to go for at the moment. seeing as no one(at least not reliably) can beat me atm and I've gone almost completely for speed and damage.

- I agree with Hugh on the offense vs defense thing, but I think it would be better to buff defense than to nerf offense.

the other stats I haven't really looked much into. if someone can come up with an elegant way to make taint/wound/poison/stun less random I'd think that would be good.

would it be possible to get a list of how much each stat is worth vs the others on gear and skills? like 1 speed is worth 2% damage and 1 stun is worth 1% damage.

with some fancy math you should be able to calculate their relative value and see which are stronger and weaker

[Tim]

Here's the formula how damage dealt per turn is figured out. Tried to take what the code did and write it in a human readable way, but still probably a little confusing. Variables ending in 1 are from the attacking player's stats. Ending in 2 is from the defending player. poisondmg is how much poison damage that player took last turn.

basedmg = damage1*((damage%1-poisondmg1)-(defense%2-poisondmg2))-block2
hit = random(0-100)+accuracy1-dodge2
hit(<=0): crit=0.0; hit(1-10): crit=.33; hit(11-25): crit=.67; hit(26-74): crit=1; hit(75-89): crit=1.25; hit(90-99): crit=1.50; hit(>=100): crit=1.75;
damage = basedmg*crit

[Edvar al'Given]

Darkhounds should be overpowered, but they also shouldn't be normal NPC battles. Darkhounds are rare in the books and always travel in packs. They should be Hunt quests or something

[Tim]

I do have to say that I find it interesting that Darkhounds are touted as being most difficult to beat, but they have a defense/taint/poison setup that's supposedly not competing with other setups like it should.

[Hugh Longshanks]

Perhaps it's the amount of said stats? After all, it's VERY difficult to set up a decent taint screen anymore.
Honestly, I think Taint should be a very powerful weapon. I've never used it, but I think you should be able to essentially destroy your oppnent just with taint - provided you can keep him from disemboweling you first (ie, speed and damage).

What needs to happen is we need to have a workable scissors-paper-rock dynamic. The only question is what that dynamic could be. Tim, could you outline what the three types of strategies would entail, as you envision them? Cause right now, all I can really see is two: speed/damage (with poison occasionally) or else everything else.

[Edvar al'Given]

You do have a good point Tim. I've actually noticed that darkhounds defense is so high that I can't even damage them most battles

[Tim]

Well, I think there's lot of strategies. Possibilities off the top of my head are:
-High damage (damage, damage%, accuracy)
-Quick damage (Speed, first strike, damage)
-Slow hitter (Wound, Stun, damage)
-Defend and drain (Defense, dodge, taint/poison)

I think a lot of the stat are weakened by the randomness too much and people tend to avoid them. Wound especially. I was afraid of making Wound too powerful, so I overly nerfed it and therefore it's not an effective counter to speed.

What if I changed how randomness worked. What if instead taint,poison,speed, and wound having a 50% chance to hit, each turn they would do a random amount between 0 and whatever your stat is. I think that would smooth these skills out a bit. So if you had taint of 3 you would do either 0,1,2 or 3 taint to your opponent each turn. That way you almost always hit them for something from these skills, but having a ridiculously high poison/taint skill doesn't completely dominate when you get have high stats. Wound still wouldn't be stackable, meaning if you Wound your opponent for 5 the first hit, any time you would Wound them for less than 5 that battle would still have no effect. Would be too crippling otherwise.

Might also make poison so it only effects the opponents damage% OR defense%. Not both. Not sure which one yet. Both makes it too powerful when you have ~50+ poison.

Health Gain still needs boosted again. I over nerfed it a while back and still haven't properly fixed it. I still would prefer it be tied to how much damage you take instead of how much you deal. Otherwise it's useless in a defense build. Need to give it some more thought.

EDIT: Has anyone tried a health gain build at high levels? Would be interested in seeing how effective it is in large quantities...

[fearless]

would it be feasible to have your percentage of probability go up as you level up ? a focus in taint could increase its % as you poured more points into it as a skill ?