16 réponses à ce sujet

[PsychoBlonde]

 Looking back, one of the things that kind of bugged me in DA2 was the fact that here is a game where due to the *basic design* of the game, it's very difficult to coordinate the movements of all 4 party members at once.  In fact, before release there was even some discussion about "dodging", i.e. whether you'd be able to avoid attacks by moving, and thus whether it'd be NECESSARY to avoid attacks by moving, which, given the aformentioned nature and design of the game, is a huge pain in the ass.  The devs were quick to assure us that no, there'd be no active dodging of that nature.

Except, there's a big, huge, massive, omnipresent mechanic in the game that DOES use PRECISELY that sort of mechanic: AOE damage over time.  It's even worse if you play on nightmare, I assume, because then you've got friendly-fire AOE damage.

Think about this for a second.  Does it make sense to design a game where moving people around rapidly in a coordinated manner is problematic, error-prone, and just plain annoying, and then have mechanics where you HAVE to do this?  It'd be like playing a game where they implemented a clunky half-assed jump largely so you could clear obstacles without a lot screwing around, and then halfway through the game there's a big section where you pretty much have to platform and fight at the same time.  Oh, look, Fallout 3.  (They put platforming in some of the expansions, and it sucked.)

Even on Origins the AOE DOT effects were seriously screwed up--either they were worthless (death cloud), or they were broken (Storm of the Century).  Also, why did enemies with Death Cloud do 10x as much damage as my companions when they used that spell?  I had the same problem with Curse of Mortality, too.  I use it on mobs, they take like 2 damage per tick.  They use it on me, 40 damage per tick.  WTF.

And don't get me started on the fight with Corypheus.  He wasn't the threat there, the ****ty pathfinding was.

I really think it's be better to scrap AOE DOTs altogether and focus on other mechanics that work in a different (and more fun) way.  Either that, or put in a mechanic whereby when you're moving all characters at once, they really do move all together as if you were moving just one person, and then when you go back to having one character as your focus, they resume moving independantly.

Addendum: it occurs to me that one big contributor to this problem is the friggin' stupid way they do resistances in the game.  There's an entire LITANY of problems.

1.  Diminishing returns.  The more you raise your resist, the less use you get out of that raise.  Oh, and because it's ALWAYS a percentage of damage, you'd have to raise it to absolutely STUPID levels before it has ANY useful impact on DOT.
2.  Scaling.  The higher level you get, the less you get out of whatever resist you have.
3.  Gear.  Very little gear in the game has any kind of resistance on it, and most of it has a mediocre level of resistance to ONE type of damage.  There is NO resist all gear.  Also, the resistance gear is pretty much universally crap for anything OTHER than resistance and thus isn't worth wearing.  The resist runes only go in a very small number of gear pieces and lock out runes that are much more valuable.
4.  Spells/abilities.  If they grant resistance, it's either negligible or it locks out some other important ability.
5.  Potions/temporary boosts.  Oh wait, these didn't exist.

DDO, on the other hand, has a system that works pretty well.  (I'm not recommending this system exactly, only saying that it meshes well with the way elemental damage works IN DDO.)  There are four types of elemental damage reduction:

1. Resistance, which takes a certain amount of damage right off the top.  Generally the best you can get out of this is 30, although there are some items/special abilities that can allow you to get 40 or 50 resist.  This is a high enough level that you don't take much damage from AOE DOTS, but you'll still take a lot of damage from the big targeted spells, which at higher levels and difficulties can do 400-600 damage in one shot.
2.  Saving throw, which, if you make it, halves the damage.  If you have evasion (class ability), you take no damage (if it's a reflex save, which 90% of the effects that do magical damage are).  If you have improved evasion (higher level class ability), you take half damage even if you FAIL the save.
3.  Protection.  This comes only from a spell, but it absorbs 120 points of damage.  So it'll reduce even big attacks to a manageable size.
4.  Absorption.  Takes off a percentage (usually 33 or 50%) of whatever damage makes it past resist/protection.

It works really well.  Pretty much any class can assemble a collection of gear/buffs to enable them to live through the nastiest attacks.  And if you don't bother, you go squish very rapidly.

Modifié par PsychoBlonde, 31 mai 2012 - 07:37 .

[Wulfram]

I didn't think there were all that many AOE DoT effects. Not cast by enemies, anyway. Those undead mages had one, I guess, but I can't remember any others?  Maybe I'm being dumb?

Of course, all the boss battles were about dodging their attacks, which was annoying. Particulary if you had multiple melee characters.

Modifié par Wulfram, 31 mai 2012 - 07:48 .

[MichaelStuart]

I like being able to dodge, makes me have to pay attention during combat.

[Sylvius the Mad]

I like AoE DoT effects. They tend to reward positioning and forethought, and that's something I'd like to see happen more.

But DA2's party control wasn't really conducive to this, plus the insane speed of combat overall made AoE DoT spells quite unforgiving. The lack of a tactical camera didn't help.

I'd suggest slowing the combat somewhat and granting us more complete control over the movement of our party members.

[PsychoBlonde]

Wulfram wrote...

I didn't think there were all that many AOE DoT effects. Not cast by enemies, anyway. Those undead mages had one, I guess, but I can't remember any others?  Maybe I'm being dumb?

Qunari mages had that lightning ball thing.
Pride demons throw down various cloud and circle effects, one that sucks people in while it's doing damage.
Blood mages had some sort of blood draining thing.
"Leader" type mobs could throw an ability that would damage anyone in a radius around them.
The Varterral had that sticky spit thing that also did quite a lot of damage.
There are a number of fights that contain traps which put down a poison cloud or similar.
And, of course, Corypheus.

Probably a few more I missed.

[PsychoBlonde]

Filament wrote...

That depends on what you define as active dodging.

You have to push a button to move characters out of the way.  Their avoidance is not based off numerical stats, you actually have to move them actively.  Ergo, it's an active dodge.

[PsychoBlonde]

Filament wrote...
Add that to a warrior with Elemental Aegis and Rally and your party could be immune to fire (or whatever else), before that patch that capped resistances at 90-95% for whatever reason.

That's funny, because when I threw on resistance runes and so forth, my characters would never get much above 20% resist.  So I scrapped them and threw on armor/stats instead.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Strictly speaking, PsychoBlonde is correct. Moving out of the way of a charging Ogre is an Active Dodge.

But Filament is also correct that BioWare wasn't really talking about that. They were talking about fast-paced dodging in melee combat. Think of how a blocking works in Mount & Blade, or a shield in KoA:Reckoning. There's obviously no difference in kind between DA2 and Mount & Blade in this regard, but BioWare does appear to have been talking only about immediate-reaction twitch-based gameplay.

BioWare was imprecise. PsychoBlonde is correctly describing what they said, but Filament is correctly describing what they meant.

[mesmerizedish]

"moving people around rapidly in a coordinated manner is problematic, error-prone, and just plain annoying"

You'll have to explain this. I didn't find this to be true at all. My characters always went exactly where I wanted them to with no fuss.

[AkiKishi]

PsychoBlonde wrote...

 Looking back, one of the things that kind of bugged me in DA2 was the fact that here is a game where due to the *basic design* of the game, it's very difficult to coordinate the movements of all 4 party members at once.  

It's a bit like deflection gunnrey crossed with chess. You don't move where they are, you move in relation to where they will be by the time the move is executed. You think several "moves" ahead so that the party moves as a coordinated unit.
I don't like dodging the way DA2 does it. It's just a case of not being there when the attack goes off. I prefer DAO/WKC where the attack is calculated and then it hits even if you just moved away in the time the animation goes off. The former method is far too easy to exploit.

[Wulfram]

PsychoBlonde wrote...

That's funny, because when I threw on resistance runes and so forth, my characters would never get much above 20% resist.  So I scrapped them and threw on armor/stats instead.

Resistances work weirdly.  One rune will give you pretty rubbish resistance, but two will do you quite well.  Particularly if they're on a chest piece.

[hoorayforicecream]

Wulfram wrote...

PsychoBlonde wrote...

That's funny, because when I threw on resistance runes and so forth, my characters would never get much above 20% resist.  So I scrapped them and threw on armor/stats instead.

Resistances work weirdly.  One rune will give you pretty rubbish resistance, but two will do you quite well.  Particularly if they're on a chest piece.

Different pieces of gear slots had different percentage multipliers for stat allocations for them. For items of equivalent level, gloves will always have a smaller stat budget than chest armor, and this includes most gains from rune slots. This is intentional.

[Sylvius the Mad]

ishmaeltheforsaken wrote...

"moving people around rapidly in a coordinated manner is problematic, error-prone, and just plain annoying"

You'll have to explain this. I didn't find this to be true at all. My characters always went exactly where I wanted them to with no fuss.

There were pathfinding issues (particularly in Legacy), but mostly my characters would move where I wanted them to move.  The trouble was that they wouldn''t stay there once they'd arrived.

hoorayforicecream wrote...

Different pieces of gear slots had different percentage multipliers for stat allocations for them. For items of equivalent level, gloves will always have a smaller stat budget than chest armor, and this includes most gains from rune slots. This is intentional.

Is it documented?  Whether it's intentional doesn't matter if they didn't bother to write it doewn for us somewhere.

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 01 juin 2012 - 08:34 .

[mesmerizedish]

Wulfram wrote...

Resistances work weirdly.  One rune will give you pretty rubbish resistance, but two will do you quite well.  Particularly if they're on a chest piece.

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

hoorayforicecream wrote...

Different pieces of gear slots had different percentage multipliers for stat allocations for them. For items of equivalent level, gloves will always have a smaller stat budget than chest armor, and this includes most gains from rune slots. This is intentional.

Is it documented?  Whether it's intentional doesn't matter if they didn't bother to write it doewn for us somewhere.

Each successive point of resistance grants MORE resistance than the last point until you hit some "sweet spot" that's determined by your level, at which point diminishing returns kick in and you start receiving LESS absolute resistance per point of rating.

And no, this is not documented anywhere.

[Gallimatia]

Filament wrote...

That depends on what you define as active dodging. They were likely referring to pressing a button to roll or block. In DA2 all of the dodging involves repositioning your characters outside of the range of a telegraphed AOE attack. I have no problem with that. That's a tactical thing.

There's also the dodging of every melee attack. The poor range and long time required for the enemies to land their melee attacks leaves them unable to defend themselves against even melee attackers. It's fairly simple to dodge all or nearly all melee attacks and anyone soloing melee pretty much has to. You won't beat ten or so darkspawn at level 1 if you let them hit you.