19 réponses à ce sujet

[Looy]

The Problem
I'll start with a quick recap of why I (and lots of others) find mages a little too powerful when you compare them to the other two classes.

Stats
Mages only need Willpower and Magic. Warriors need Strength, Willpower and Constitution (duelies need dex too). Rogues need Dex and Cunning, and probably some Strength too.

Stamina VS Mana
I'm not sure if there is any difference in calculation of total Stamina versus Mana but it seems like the only real difference is the colour of the bar and whether or not lyrium potions work. Mages tend to have a higher mana pool, as they have lots of free stat points to spend on Willpower. They can also refill their mana much faster via potions. Physical Fighting styles rely on sustanined abilities much more and so warriors and rogues stamina pool is lowered further.

Talents/Spells
Mages have a much wider range of spells, they are much more powerful than the warriors and rogues talents and they can fire off more of them before using up all their mana. It is true that mages become worthless when they run out of mana, but this is negated by a decent supply of mana pots.

My Suggestions
Here are my suggestions to fix the above problems.

Stats
Give Warriors 5 stat points per level, and Rogues 4. These classes are more "Physical" than mages, so it makes sense that they should develop their bodies faster. It also allows them to keep their stats up to scratch as they level.

Stamina VS Mana
I don't think the way stamina is calculated needs a change, but warriors/rogues should be able to consume Mana potions to restore stamina or drink "Soup" made from Deep Mushrooms. Sustained abilities that have penalties to things other than stamina, should not cost stamina at all, but should instead have the other penalties increased. For example Powerful Swings trades attack and defence for damage but it also lowers you stamina, instead it should lower attack and defence by greater amounts but have no affect on stamina.

Talents/Spells
As Physical fighters have less talents they should have a lower cooldown on the ones they do have. Archery talents need to take much less time to fire.

[hexaligned]

I'd say I have to disagree, Wars and rogues seem fine to me, the only thing that needs to be done, is removing mana pots from the game, or at least removing the ability to craft them. That would be a quick fix that would bring mages in line with the other classes.

As a War or rogue you have the choice of pumping up your willpower a bit to use more cc/stuns and aoe abilities, or you can ignore and pump one of your other main stats  for more autoattack damage.  Mages need nothing but magic, any point in willpower is a wasted point, seeing as how mana is an infinite resource with crafting.

Modifié par relhart, 21 novembre 2009 - 12:55 .

[Forumtroll]

What? And have Arrow of Slaying doing 300 every second? Archers are ridiculously overpowered. What's wrong is you aren't building your melee right. The only thing about mages is their stats are easier to understand and therefore easier to build.

[Fudzie]

About the only idea that I really support there is the ability to turn Deep Mushrooms into "Soup" items to refill stamina on-the-go.

[Vaylor66]

Warriors and rogues can do very well for themselves. They just need to be speced out and geared properly. I do think that taking away the ability to craft lyrium pots would even things out a little though.

[WillieStyle]

No warriors and rogues don't need to be made more powerful. They just need to be made more interactive. Stacking sustained abilities and then auto-attacking is boring. Change them so that they can use their active abilities more often and those abilities are more effective but then nerf dual-wield auto-attack. Keep them roughly at the same power but require more thought and active decision making.



Mages on the other hand are a mess. Mana pots need to be nerfed certainly, but so do a host of mage spells:

-Vulnerability hex and Affliction Hex stacking and scaling with spellpower is ridiculous.

-Blizzard and Cone of Cold are far too effective as crowd control

-Mana Clash does far too much damage.

-Crushing Prison lasts too long and shouldn't render the target vulnerable to your attacks.

-Force Field: AI should be changed to ingore forcefielded targets.

-All spells should require line of sight to cast. Dropping Storm of the Century into a room from outside the aggro range of enemies essentially ends fights before they begin.

-Glyph of repulsion should have a finite number of charges. Placing it in a doorway and watching enemies helplessly try to get to your party as you burn them down is amusing for the first 5 mins. Then it just trivializes the game.

-Arcane Warriors.



I could go on. It's really quite disappointing that Bioware is so bad at balancing their games. Maybe they can have Obsidian make a sequel or something.

[marshalleck]

WillieStyle wrote...

I could go on. It's really quite disappointing that Bioware is so bad at balancing their games. Maybe they can have Obsidian make a sequel or something.

Poor balance or leaving a game half-finished. Pick your poison.

[Ashimmu]

WillieStyle wrote...

I could go on. It's really quite disappointing that Bioware is so bad at balancing their games. Maybe they can have Obsidian make a sequel or something.

Abomination!

[Gangbangjoe]

marshalleck wrote...

WillieStyle wrote...

I could go on. It's really quite disappointing that Bioware is so bad at balancing their games. Maybe they can have Obsidian make a sequel or something.

Poor balance or leaving a game half-finished. Pick your poison.

qft

[WillieStyle]

marshalleck wrote...

WillieStyle wrote...

I could go on. It's really quite disappointing that Bioware is so bad at balancing their games. Maybe they can have Obsidian make a sequel or something.

Poor balance or leaving a game half-finished. Pick your poison.

Sadly you're right.
Perhaps Bioware could outsource their playtesting to someone else.

[mian52]

Archers are *not* ridiculously overpowered. Arrow of Slaying has one of the longer cooldowns in the game, only less than the tier 4 primal spells (wich we all know aren't so hot).



That being said, disregarding how ridiculously strong mages are (doesn't matter if there's a lore reason for it, just how it is), there is nothing really wrong with rogues or warriors (aside from things like the dex bug, and poor patching IMO).



I have a rogue and she puts out a stupid amount of DPS, DW is a really strong damage spec.



Now for the reason I'm posting in this thread. You say warriors and rogues need Con? I say your wrong, constitution is the most useless stat in the game. I rarely if ever even put points into Willpower ether. Just max dex/str/cun (depending on spec). Don't waste stat points. A dual dagger rogue never needs more than 16 str, a 2h warrior never needs for than 20-25 dex (with precise striking, you should still be hitting a lot).



All that being said I can agree with some things in your post. Stamina potions would be nice, even if most of your damage is from "white" damage (backstabs) as a rogue.



Archery talents really do need to fire off faster, as it is I never use most of them. Even the stances are a waste. I use Arrow of Slaying and Scattershot when they're up, but as far as I'm concerned 8/12 points in the Archery tree are a complete waste.



I do have to disagree with you on the more stats concept though. Imagine a warrior getting 5 points per level? You could easy hit 100 str or 100 dex. That would make you do a ridiculous amount of damage, or be literally unhittable.

[hexaligned]

marshalleck wrote...

WillieStyle wrote...

I could go on. It's really quite disappointing that Bioware is so bad at balancing their games. Maybe they can have Obsidian make a sequel or something.

Poor balance or leaving a game half-finished. Pick your poison.

The game was in devolpment for 5+ years,they also aren't some brand new company with no resources.   I had more faith in Bioware to get some simple balance things right.  (runes and buffs not scaling to weapon attack speed?  How do you over look something as  obvious as that)   They should have stuck with the DnD ruleset I guess, Heres hoping they scratch DAO2, and work on a real BG3.

[Pellegrin]

Balance the abilities and balance the game. It's not as simple as mages need to be weaker across the board or rogues/warriors need to be better across the board. Bioware developed some great talents but the math doesn't work out on all of them. Once offending talents/spells are brought more in line it will make for a more enjoyable game experience.

[Lord Phoebus]

I agree with the OP to an extent, actually the meleers in my party are starting to become effective once they get their tier 4 abilities, but before that they were horrible. I think part of the problem with those characters in general is the lack of AoE abilities (which would be fine if they could really take out single targets fast), and effective stuns (mages stun for 20+ seconds, warriors and rogues for 2). That and the Arcane Warrior, it's a little sad that the mage has a twice the armor of the sword and shield tank, a 100 physical and mental resist and 75% resist to everything else.



There are quite a few design concepts I don't like in the game, e.g. the aggro abilities. I would rather have the enemies prioritize the targets based on the ratio of damage output/squishiness and give warriors the ability to control an area and knockback enemies that try to pass through that zone, (sort their own glyph of repulsion), or grab and hold enemies in place to keep them from rushing another target. It just seems like Rogues and Warriors react to the battlefield while Mages make the battlefield react to them.



It might be nice for Warriors and Rogues to have some instant kill abilities (like the shatter combo mages can pull off), give it a long cooldown and only let it work against white enemies, but something like that would really help them out at low levels.

[Endgame13]

marshalleck wrote...

WillieStyle wrote...

I could go on. It's really quite disappointing that Bioware is so bad at balancing their games. Maybe they can have Obsidian make a sequel or something.

Because kotor2 was amazing! NOT

[Kolaris8472]

Endgame13 wrote...

marshalleck wrote...

WillieStyle wrote...

I could go on. It's really quite disappointing that Bioware is so bad at balancing their games. Maybe they can have Obsidian make a sequel or something.

Because kotor2 was amazing! NOT

Well, I think you'd be surprised how many people loved it. It wasn't Kotor1 by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a good game nonetheless.

I think his point was that the gameplay was very well balanced. You had 3 classes, 6 Prestige classes, then NPC classes and everything felt viable. Gameplay was spot on.

[Loc'n'lol]

Shield warriors are pretty good at what they do, they are very resilient (though they could afford to be even better and especially less dependant on their gear).

Dual wiel rogues are pretty awesome at dealing damage, I can't imagine making them "stronger" without making them broken.

Archers are ok with the dexterity fix I guess, I use it and often find myself using the ranged wepaons on my 3 non-mages, either as an opener or to finish off enemy archers that stay out of melee range.

I still think 2handers are terrible. the only good thing about 2 handers is indomittable. Everything else you could do better with dual wield or a shield (or a mage, of course).



Now, both classes could be made to have more utility, that much is true. More crowd control and area of affect abilities. They don't need as large area of effects as mages, because they have much better survivability in close combat, but since so many encounters have you badly outnumberd, more non-mage aoe would help.

There could be a use for 'stun grenades' or similar spell-like items, too and possibly more powerful and expensive versions of the existing grenades avaible for late-game.



Other than that, yeah shimmering shield and a few spell combos are broken, I think everyone who reads this forum and has tried it in-game should have realized by now. Lyrium potions should have some drawback too, maybe suffer an injury of some sort everytime you drink one ? With similar drawbacks, stamina potions could be made without becoming gamebreaking.

[Periodiko]

I think your overall conclusion is wrong, because mages aren't over-powered because they can do what warriors and rogues do better - this has actually been true of a huge number of games, even ones that people think has really fun, great combat. The problem, I think, is that mages have access to a unique bunch of abilities that radically change combat dynamics and trivialize a lot of stuff that feels like it should be scary.

Force-field lets you take out 1 boss monster for free, basically, and kill his minions. This is a problem because not only is it overpowered, but a lot of encounters have the interesting parts designed around the premise of "minions and a boss mage/rogue/warrior", whether that boss be an Ogre, a Genlock Emissary or whatever. Crushing prison has the exact same problem.

Cone of cold lets you shut down huge swathes of monsters very cheaply, and then you add the "shatter" effect ...

Mana potions eliminate what appears to be the only balancing factor of mages: that if they cast a ton of spells early on, they burn through their mana, and also the point that you brought up, that mages don't really need willpower by a certain point in the game. If mana potions restore a static amount of mana instead of an amount based on your willpower pool than this is even worse, since it means that once you start chugging mana potions your starting willpower doesn't even come into play.

the short version

1) Enemies need better ways to prevent or protect against the abuse of crowd control spells, whether that be higher resistances, crappier crowd control spells, smarter AI, better encounter design or whatever.

2) Mana potions need to be restricted in some fashion, either with a much longer cooldown, or changing the effect to something like a slow mana regen, or even attaching some kind of penalty to drinking Lyrium (which is supported by the game background anyway).

Modifié par Periodiko, 21 novembre 2009 - 08:01 .

[Ishanda1]

"Archery talents really do need to fire off faster, as it is I never use
most of them. Even the stances are a waste. I use Arrow of Slaying and
Scattershot when they're up, but as far as I'm concerned 8/12 points in
the Archery tree are a complete waste."

I find it amazing how so many people complain about archery.  I am not picking on you personally but all you need to do with archery is think differently when it comes to tactics and voila, archers become some of the most powerful types around.  Those selfsame talents you say you mostly do not use are the ones you should be using.

Everyone goes on and on about Arrow of Slaying, which is in fact one of the LEAST useful archery talents.  Defensive Fire and Suppression Fire are the ones that makes archers totally worth it.

[Spyndel]

Rogues and Warriors dont need to be made stronger (they are quite potent). Mages need to be balanced with the removal of infinite mana, and a number of exploits and imbalanced spells corrected.

Theres far less work to fixing the specific issues with the latter, than applying wholesale changes to the former and having to re balance the entire game as a result.

Modifié par Spyndel, 21 novembre 2009 - 09:08 .