65 réponses à ce sujet

[themaxzero]

DrUcross wrote...

The problem is many people here play on normal, and they don't understand what is overpowered or underpowered as they don't just don't know how to use certain spells effectively (indeed, there is little need).

For example: heal is one of the most powerful spells in the game when the game gets hard, most people don't realize that until they play without it.

You need to focus your balance around skilled players in hard settings. Moderate players will improve naturally simply by playing and understanding.

Actually you need to make a game that is fun for the majority of players (the majority of which are casual).

Hardcore players can easily get mods to up the difficulty.

[Armiece]

Because no one but me seems to play one as a PC (sadface) here's my experience with Spirit Healer:



Cleansing Aura: This one is either a) bugged on my game, or it sucks really bad. It drains my mana very quickly and has almost no noticeable effect on my party; I get more bang for my buck with Group heal and some Injury items. I ended up not taking on my second play through due to this and haven't missed it.



Lifeward: Generally balanced, I think. Useful when there's archers about and has saved my butt plenty, but nothing too insane. I'll have to test it a bit when I get home before I can really make a call.



Revival/Group Heal: I feel these are balanced - their cooldowns are reasonable and their mana costs are okay.



.

[JJM152]

Kolaris8472 wrote...

Yeah, Deathblow restores what, 5 Stamina? For a Tier 4 ability I would expect 15+. It doesn't help Tanks AT ALL.

That really depends on the warrior in question. When my Dual Wield warrior uses a dual weapon sweep or whirlwind to kill a bunch of guys, it's like a free attack since it replenishes most if not all of my stamina right as I cast it. I'd imagine the two handed sweep attack is just as good at finishing off a cluster of low health enemies.

But I admit, I would like to see it return a percentage instead of a flat number. It seems silly that the ability doesn't have any scaling built into it at all.

[Pellegrin]

For those following my balance mod, I just uploaded an updated version in time for Thanksgiving!



v0.92 removes unlimited stealth explosion/traps amongst several other changes based on community feedback. Rogues now have a 50% and 35% of breaking stealth from using Bombs and Traps, respectively. Even better, I have updated the Plot GUIDs in my Dragon Age toolset. This means you should rarely, if ever, receive the "party camp bug" that plagues most mods modifying any scripts.



Please continue posting as you continue to play. I check this thread frequently looking for input on what direction I need to go next.

[Forumtroll]

I find Spell Wisp to be fine. The rest of the line needs help. You DO NOT want it to give you more spell power. If you ever had a PC mage with over 100 spell power you would know it trivializes the game. Turn on Spell Might+Spell Wisp and my Staff of Magister Lord can hit for 64, and Wintergrasp hits for 80-100.

[Faerell Gustani]

My observation on mages and their "OPedness" is that they dish out tons of damage while laying down CC at the same time. The Arcane warrior is a different story, so I'm just going to talk about offensive spells.

Spells like Winter's Grasp and Fireball are particularly powerful because you can easily kill normal monsters with 1 or 2 castings. They likewise have short cool downs and apply a CC effect onto the targets.



I think what should happen is have the Mage spells be focused either on CC or on damage.

CC focused spells should do minimal damage.

Damage based spells should apply weaker CC or no CC at all.



Two examples being Winter's Grasp and Fireball.

Grasp should only slow, no freezing anything that is Yellow or higher. (face it, standard monsters don't really matter)

Fireball should have its damage toned back if it's going to continue knock everyone to the ground. Though friendly fire makes this ability a bit more risky. I'm more ok with Fireball in terms of balance as there is a "risk/reward" part. The risk being properly positioning the attack to catch enemies in the blast while at the same time not hitting your own people despite a moving battlefield. Often times the solution is to not have your party move while casting, but that's a lot like a 1-2 second "immobilize" on your party to guarantee no FF.



Crushing Prison is something else. I agree entirely with Bluesmith's analysis of CP.

[UltraMuut]

As mentioned in various places, the biggest balance issue for mages seems to be the availability of infinite mana pots. One effect is that you don't need to put any points in willpower, so can max magic every level, and as a result all your spells do huge damage, have long duration, and bypass all magic resist. How about capping the effect of the magic attribute on spells at some point (but maybe allow it to continue affecting staff damage as per any other primary fighting stat)?

[Wintermist]

Personally I don't like cooldowns. If you want to tire your warrior by bashing your shield too fast, go ahead. If you want your mage to run out of mana by casting 10 cone of cold, let her. If anything, adjust the stamina or mana.

Some spells can be balanced, but by all means, don't add long cooldowns.


Cooldown:
"Cast a spell, fire, ice... do something, mage!"

"I can't... I just cast one, I got to wait... Third rule of magic sais I have to wait 30 seconds before I cast the same spell twice."

[Seraphael]

UltraMuut wrote...

As mentioned in various places, the biggest balance issue for mages seems to be the availability of infinite mana pots. One effect is that you don't need to put any points in willpower, so can max magic every level, and as a result all your spells do huge damage, have long duration, and bypass all magic resist. How about capping the effect of the magic attribute on spells at some point (but maybe allow it to continue affecting staff damage as per any other primary fighting stat)?

Whereas I agree the near infinite amount of mana potions is a serious balance concern, I prefer a more direct way of addressing the issue.

I've suggested that drinking potions should require time, for instance raising it from instant to 2 seconds. It should limit the potion overindulgence somewhat. Add increased cooldowns on mana potions (not necessarily heal potions), and possibly lower mana gain, and this shouldn't be an issue. 

Modifié par Seraphael, 27 novembre 2009 - 01:13 .

[NVShacker]

I'd be interested to see if you could properly balance the game around only letting you use one potion per fight -- obviously you'd need to up will scaling and in combat regen while being careful to make sure eg Death Siphon doesn't become outright mandatory. As an added bonus the scaling would probably be a reasonable buff for stam users -- I know right now DW builds are reliant on stacking modal abilities and just blowing away the remaining stam for AOE against white mobs if needed, which is decidedly uninteresting. In fact I may take a stab at this if anyone's interested.

[Bluesmith]

Upon further testing I'd like to add the following:

OP
+ Taunt - for a game where almost every encounter follows the age-old tank-n-spank routine, tanking sure is easy. Run in, taunt, wail on enemies. Taunt is so effective that threaten is all but an anti-stam self-debuff, that's how superfluous it is (as well as its counterparts, the utterly pointless collection of aggro-reduction abilities and gear available to us).

UP
+ Disengage/Feign Death/etc. - reduce the effectiveness of taunt to fix. Yes, FD is less uesless.
+ Threaten - reduce the effectiveness of taunt to fix. To be honest, I'd like to see this as an activated, single-target, low stam cost, low cooldown threat builder (perhaps the primary means of threat stacking, leaving taunt sort of a "group them up to start with" ability on a long cooldown). Tanking is just not very involved right now.
+ Powerful Strikes - so horrible that I have to reemphasize it. High miss rate on nightmare already cripples 2Hers; we don't need more missing (-10 attack, which is equivalent to TWENTY STR/DEX!; -5 with 2H Strength, iirc) for a measly +8 damage (which is what, 3 dps after rounding?). Plus, 2Hers are already the most stam-starved/modal-heavy build in the game. Powerful Strikes is basically a self-debuff.
+ Shattering Blows - again, I have to reemphasize this.
+ 2Hers in general - who am I kidding? Miss once (and believe me, you'll miss) and your DPS falls below a mage's staff...

Modifié par Bluesmith, 27 novembre 2009 - 02:46 .

[Loc'n'lol]

I'm tempted to say overwhelm and scattershot are overpowered. Especially when they are put in the hands of normal enemies (ie: not elite or boss, those are fine).



Scattershot is basically an attack that has all the upsides of an aoe without any of the drawbacks (no friendly fire, seemingly infinite range), and adds insult to injury with a stun. This makes some of the fights ridiculous because sometimes, there is just no way to avoid it, and it can hurt a lot : if any of your party members are visible to the archer, all get hit and stunned, even if they are in cover, while the enemy is free to deal massive damage. Of course it has a relatively long aim time, but with vastly superior numbers on the side of the AI, there is bound to be one that will get you eventually, and this can turn into a wipe ridiculously quickly if a few archers use it at the same time.



Same deal with overwhelm. Locking one of your party members in close combat is already pretty good by itself. Dealing MASSIVE damage during that time feels a good bit unfair, especially when you're outnumbered and each and every one of your enemies can use this at will. When fighting a pack of wolves, it seems you owe your victory more to the mercy of the RNG than to your own tactics. Of course you could abuse the imba spells and get away with it, but that's not the point of this topic...



Once again, I think those abilities are a great addition to a player-controlled archer or to the dog, who really need all the powerful abilities they can get to ... err.. not lag too far behind mages. But giving those all-powerful abilities to crowds of random mooks makes some encounters very unfair.



There is a good reason why you never get to fight against 8-12 mages at once.

[Arijharn]

Holy Smite is underwhelming in damage it does,overwhelming for its stamina cost and it's cd. You can also not scale it's damage either (that I've noticed).



Righteous Strike's mana drain is basically non-existant, rather than mana drain a preferred effect personally would be to ignite it to cause additional damage to casters and is still pretty relevant to the Templar lore (i.e., against non casters he's essentially a man in a tin suit...)

[Pellegrin]

Comments on specific abilities:

- I'm not sure if it's possible but I'm considering changing the base attribute for potion effectiveness from magic to willpower. This would bring the willpower attribute in line with the rest of the attributes. Opinions?

- I like Blue's taunt/threaten idea. I had considered making taunt less effective with shorter cool downs but this just seemed like unnecessary micro. Making taunt just effective enough to take aggro only on things not setting off aggro flares (via damage, etc.) and making threaten the big aggro taker usable only on 1 target sounds more interesting.

- 2handers do need improved modal abilities. Will include in the next version.

- Holy Smite has it's stamina cost basically halved in v0.92 - seems reasonable judging by numbers but I don't use it in game.

- Overwhelm and scattering shot are very powerful for basic mobs to possess, agreed. I don't feel like it is abused by the AI and fairly challenges the player to overcome these issues. I have no problems CCing archers before they get scattershot off and overwhelm only affects one character which can be healed (though that does assume you have a mage in party).

- Looking at calculations for spell wisp more closely I agree that it's fine for a tier 1 ability. Spellbloom was weak though and I upped it by 25%.

- I haven't used Righteous Strike either...will take a look into it.

Comments on general gameplay:

- Balancing this game around 1 potion use per fight would be incredibly difficult. The mod would no longer be a balance mod but a combat system redesign mod. I feel the current cool downs in v0.92 are reasonable (15 for lesser, 30 for others). 20 and 40 seconds isn't unreasonable but I'm not sure it is necessary.

- My attempt to balance 2handers relies on making their abilities more effective as opposed to increasing their regular damage. The rationale is that A) there is less to rebalance...changing 2handed damage affects mobs greatly too and may throw some things off and abilities are more interesting.

Modifié par Pellegrin, 02 décembre 2009 - 06:47 .

[CBGB]

The most useful balance mod would increase underpowered skills. We can already avoid overpowered skills ourself.

Think the force field/taunt combo is too much? Don't use it.
Think Shimmering Shield should shut off? You know where the button is.
You say Blood Mages should still need points in Willpower? Place them as you wish.
Find it more fun to have a longer delay between casts of Cone of Cold? Wait as long as you like.

We don't need a mod to keep us from doing things we don't enjoy.

But we could use a mod to help improve the weak powers. Helpful suggestions from this Thread so far:

- increase damage for Critical Strike, which mimics Mighty Blow
- reduced cooldown for 2H Sweep
- increased effect for Holy Smite, Cleanse Area, Song of Valor, Rejuvenation, Deathblow
- increased accuracy for Arrow of Slaying

My mod changes force field so that mobs will ignore the target. That's been one of the most commonly suggested fixes and I think it's the best.

If you don't like the combination of Force Field and Taunt, why not just refrain from using it? I've been doing that, and my fights are good fun without a mod.

If players really need electronic limits to make them behave, could you at least make the effect gradual? Reasonable AI would let threat levels drop as enemies put in ineffective blows



The 2H line and Archery need significant, creative improvement, and that's where I'd be most grateful for a balance mod. A mod that simply keeps my hands off the 'I win' button is a 'nanny mod,' and that's less useful.

[Alphakiller]

The most useful balance mod would increase underpowered skills. We can already avoid overpowered skills ourself.

Think the force field/taunt combo is too much? Don't use it.
Think Shimmering Shield should shut off? You know where the button is.
You say Blood Mages should still need points in Willpower? Place them as you wish.
Find it more fun to have a longer delay between casts of Cone of Cold? Wait as long as you like.

We don't need a mod to keep us from doing things we don't enjoy.

But we could use a mod to help improve the weak powers. Helpful suggestions from this Thread so far:

- increase damage for Critical Strike, which mimics Mighty Blow
- reduced cooldown for 2H Sweep
- increased effect for Holy Smite, Cleanse Area, Song of Valor, Rejuvenation, Deathblow
- increased accuracy for Arrow of Slaying

My mod changes force field so that mobs will ignore the target. That's been one of the most commonly suggested fixes and I think it's the best.

If you don't like the combination of Force Field and Taunt, why not just refrain from using it? I've been doing that, and my fights are good fun without a mod.

If players really need electronic limits to make them behave, could you at least make the effect gradual? Reasonable AI would let threat levels drop as enemies put in ineffective blows



The 2H line and Archery need significant, creative improvement, and that's where I'd be most grateful for a balance mod. A mod that simply keeps my hands off the 'I win' button is a 'nanny mod,' and that's less useful.

why focus on just one aspect and not both?
when i'm in the thick of a battle, I will lie, cheat, abuse, use, and trick my way to victory every time. To not use whatever advantage is available to you, you are a fool.

... or at least that's what I got from a book I read once (and agree with)

but anyway, I only care about balance issues when i'm not playing the game. right now I know i'll enjoy the game better if it's balanced, but when i'm adventuring through ferelden, the archdemon must die. no if's, and's, or but's.

that having been said... the thing I find to be OP that nobody has mentioned is stealth itself. you can easily win any fight with good use of stealth and arrow of slaying... or maybe punisher... or maybe anything else that helps you kill a guy, run off, and stealth, rinse and repeat.

Modifié par Alphakiller, 06 décembre 2009 - 03:26 .