57 réponses à ce sujet

[MagicalMaster]

FunkySwerve wrote...

If you want to see a fully balanced caster, you need to supply them with meaningful choices, which means making enough spells useful in your pw/mod, as well as bringing all spells into a rough power alignment by level.

How are you differentiating "fully balanced" as opposed to "balanced?"

You could make a mod where every mob was immune to every wizard/sorcerer spell except Ice Storm and IGMS  after level 20 or something (Ice Storm for AoE and IGMS for single target).  That's a whopping two spells available but it still offers more of a meaningful choice than many places and could be balanced.  You might argue that it would be rather boring to have one AoE button and one single target button, but that is not directly related to power balance.

FunkySwerve wrote...

At the same time, it also means ensuring that any one tactic, be it damage spam, death spam, summon spam, etc, is never consistently rewarded.

Define "rewarded."  To me, the idea of being able to use damage spells, death magic spells, and summons equally effectively everywhere (or as close to it as possible) sounds like the definition of balance (if it's achievable).  That regardless of which route you go and what style of spellcasting you prefer, you're not at a disadvantage OR advantage.  An evoker is roughly equivalent to a necromancer is roughly equivalent to a conjurer is roughly equivalent to a person using the full spectrum of spells.

Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but it seems to me like you seem to be saying a person who likes using Evocation spells should be rendered nigh worthless in some areas and incredibly powerful in others.

Or are you saying that if you have a baseline of 100% effectiveness, that in some areas some spells should make you 150% effective as a bonus but everything else is still 100% effective?  Even if this is the case - why?  That seems to be an argument for flavor which is coming at the expense of balance, not helping it.

Consider WoW, for a moment, where the focus of a mage is "damage spam" as you called it.  Are you suggesting that you think casters in WoW cannot be balanced because "damage spam" is consistently rewarded?

FunkySwerve wrote...

This means creating a variety of critters with things like...varied damage resistances/immunities...This requires intelligent, targeted spellcasting, even when you give players access to powerful spells.

Again...why?  Where's this "intelligent, targeted spellcasting" when you say "Okay, instead of spamming Firebrand 15 times I'm going to spam Cone of Cold 15 times?"  How does that improve *balance?*  Are you saying that every monster having identical resistances/immunities would inherently *unbalanced?*  That would seem to be an interesting arguement to make.

Modifié par MagicalMaster, 23 décembre 2012 - 07:08 .

[FunkySwerve]

[quote]MagicalMaster wrote...

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

If you want to see a fully balanced caster, you need to supply them with meaningful choices, which means making enough spells useful in your pw/mod, as well as bringing all spells into a rough power alignment by level.[/quote]
How are you differentiating "fully balanced" as opposed to "balanced?"[/quote]
Think plain english meaning, both here and below, in the context of the post. As in, balanced in multiple dimensions - as it relates to all the various monster attributes I mention, and all the spells - balanced against the opposition, and the other spell alternatives competing for the slot. You could also speak in terms of balanced for PvP purposes, but that piles on even more difficulty (and is where, frankly, HG is the weakest - we have a widget that applies some pretty severe penalties to ac, and more moderate ones to saves, for PvP purposes, but then, we were never aimed at being a PvP server). My comment stressing 'fully' balanced casters aimed to contrast previous remarks in the thread, which were extremely one-dimensional in outlook. To rephrase, I was pointing out that the problem of caster balance is much more complex than it might appear at first blush.

[quote]
You could make a mod where every mob was immune to every wizard/sorcerer spell except Ice Storm and IGMS  after level 20 or something (Ice Storm for AoE and IGMS for single target).  That's a whopping two spells available but it still offers more of a meaningful choice than many places and could be balanced.  You might argue that it would be rather boring to have one AoE button and one single target button, but that is not directly related to power balance.[/quote]
Actually, it IS directly related to balance, and this bears on a remark you make below, so I'll elaborate. One- (or two-) trick-ponies are inherent balance problems, preceisely because they are either overpowered or useless, depending on the area - even a very focused class, like our Bloodfire Mage. Neither is particularly fun for players as a group, because players of underpowered characters don't feel like they're contributing, and players of partymemebers in a party with an overpowered character feel like they're just along for the ride. Rephrased, some breadth of ability is critical to overall balance of a class setup.

This is a problem we've had to deal with extensively when setting up our quasiclasses, like the aforementioned Bloodfire Mage. Previous incarnations of the BFM quasi were extremely powerful in some areas, and useless in others - creating a severe balance issue. We fixed this by toning down the overpowered abilities and adding in some additional ones. The quasi is currently quite unpopular as a result, as many of the people who enjoyed playing it have a hard time adjusting to the new power level, despite the additions. This is also a pretty common phenomenon with nerfs - we've had players leave over similar nerfs, even ones which were plain-on-their-face-necessary, like a nerf to our Turner subclass (think redone turning mechanics). This is yet another of the aforementioned dimensions of balance - player psychology (and probably the biggest pain in the rear). Put a speed cap on your porsche and it's suddenly not so fun, even if it can still drive the same speed as the other cars in the race.

[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

At the same time, it also means ensuring that any one tactic, be it damage spam, death spam, summon spam, etc, is never consistently rewarded.[/quote]
Define "rewarded."  [/quote]
To elaborate, a player should not be able to rinse, wash, repeat the same tactic everywhere with a high degree of success. Such play is boring in the extreme, removing all semblance of tactical play, and requires little to no skill. Games should have some learning curve if you want to engage players for more than a short time - but that's diverting from balance to broader game design theory. I'm just trying to point out some of the reasons WHY balance is important.

[quote]
To me, the idea of being able to use damage spells, death magic spells, and summons equally effectively everywhere (or as close to it as possible) sounds like the definition of balance (if it's achievable).[/quote]. This is the one-dimensional approach to balance I was taking issue with. Making all classes viable and/or balanced is not the same as making them all equally successful in every area. Balanced does not imply nor require homogeneity. In fact, you can't do much in terms of class diversity with this approach, because classes of a more limited scope MUST be better at some things only some of the time. That's a bit nebulous-sounding, so let me offer a more concrete example.

If we were, per your notion of 'balance', to make death magic equally effective everywhere, we could no longer have undead - OR turners, both because you would no longer have undead (or indeed other racial distinctions, as a secondary consequence), and because you could not sustain classes of more narrow scope. Phrasing that last bit a different way, to the extent you adhere to 'balance' qua homogeniety, you narrow class diversity to almost nil. As a corrollary to that, you also might as well name all your creatures 'Pablum' (or 'Khao', with a nod to Hangover2 ) from a tactical/gameplay perspective. You make all classes equal by making them all the same. Yes, this is balance, but at the cost of all meaningful distinction - all combat would be equally effective for all, but all would be playing essentially the same class.

If that sounds extreme, it's true not just in theory, but in practice, and not just when talking about casters. Consider, by way of example, the desire to make all melee weapons equally effective against all foes. You would have to ensure that all creatures have equal amounts of resistance to B, P, and S - bye bye skeletons, oozes, plants, etc. Further, you could not use varied amounts of resistance, because this would favor either dex or str builds. You would either have to calculate the precise mix of immunity and resistance required to make dex builds and str builds have equal dps (resistance is far more hurtful to dexers, obviously, and without further tweaks or offsets, you wouldn't be able to use it all), or you'd have to toss out the str/dex distinction. It's worth noting that this way isn't easier than the more holistic approach I'm suggesting, despite the simplicity, as you have to utterly remove all distinguishing class/build characteristics, in the end.

The trick with melee weapons doesn't stop there, either. Unless you equalize all crit ranges and damage amounts, you're going to have disparate outcomes there as well. Worse still are things like dual weilding vs two-handing vs shields. If you want to allow more damage output for use of a second weapon, you must penalize defense to offset build power, but that results in more disparate outcomes, since more attacks per round will fare better againt monsters that have trouble hitting the player - otherwise, the shield is more valuable. Wanting equal outcomes there means we have to kill monster ab distinctions. And, of course, dualers would hit more often against lower-ac critters (they have a lower net ab bc of offhand bonuses), so you would etiher have to set all critters at a level-adjusted ac that yeilded roughly equivalent dps, or you would have to toss out 2-hander vs dualing vs sword-and-board, and force all characters to use the same setup.

And, before you suggest that all this talk about melee weapons is inapposite to the discussion of casters, consider that many summons are melee-oriented. All of these balance considerations are inextricably linked, often in very complex ways. Instead of aiming for equal outcomes for every type of attack in every area, you should simply aim for roughly equivalent build power overall. This approach allows for diversity in a way that yours simply does not, as I hope I've amply demonstrated above.

I'll phrase it one more way to drive the point home. So long as we want variance in ac, ab, resistance, saves, and the myriad other traits that make creatures distinctive in combat, and have since the basic boxed sets in one way or another, we must allow for certain attacks to be more or less effective against them. And, even if we try to balance the various class options across each area, there are simply far too many factors to consider to arrive at a perfect balance for all. Instead, we must allow some classes to do better in some areas. Of course, this also opens up a whole host of new build diversity. Generalist powers are by definition more powerful than specialist powers, so we can increase the power of a specialist's ability to offset. This applies to formulation of entire builds and quasiclasses, as well. If we're making a quasi that's got a wide range of abilities that apply to a broad spectrum of foes, they must of necessity be less powerful than the abilities of a class that is more limited in number or targetability of abilities. We can't go too broad or too narrow, either - there's a happy medium with a limiited range. Thus, we can have both both generalist and specialist. By contrast, to the extent that you adhere to the homogeneitous version of 'balance' you suggest above, you cannot.

  [quote]That regardless of which route you go and what style of spellcasting you prefer, you're not at a disadvantage OR advantage.  An evoker is roughly equivalent to a necromancer is roughly equivalent to a conjurer is roughly equivalent to a person using the full spectrum of spells.[/quote]
These two sentences highlight the confusion I'm seeing. 'Roughly equivalent' is more what I'm advocating, but it's a far cry from styles of spellcasting not creating dis/advantange. That is to say, I'm advocating for 'roughly equivalent' across the mod as a whole, not within each area, which is simply unworkable/undesirable for the reasons I higlight above.
[quote]
Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but it seems to me like you seem to be saying a person who likes using Evocation spells should be rendered nigh worthless in some areas and incredibly powerful in others.[/quote]
Replace 'likes using' with 'only uses' or 'can only use', and you're reading me half right. This is a more extreme case than what I'm advocating. I'll offer another example, keeping to vanilla rules: even an evoker specialist CAN use other spells, and a player that DOES make use of such spells in addition to his area of speciality, where appropriate, SHOULD fare better than one who does not. This MUST be true unless those additional abilities are meaningless/too weak to be useful (and thus negiligible in terms of class diversity). Likewise, he MUST fare worse than classes who are more specialized at dealing with those particular foes, as evocation spells are, generally speaking, of fairly broad targetability/scope. If, for example, a turner is unable to deal with undead more efficaciously than the evoker, his class/build is itself negligible in terms of diversity and class balance - it might as well not exist, since no one is going to play it when the evoker exceeds it in both scope and power (and thus overall power). This does NOT mean, as you suggest, that the evoker must be 'useless', only less useful, against those particular enemies - and that's important. Unless you accept the existance of the in-between values in addition to the binary useless/uber, you just can't have specialists and generalists, and all the diversity that accompanies.

[quote]
Or are you saying that if you have a baseline of 100% effectiveness, that in some areas some spells should make you 150% effective as a bonus but everything else is still 100% effective?  Even if this is the case - why?  That seems to be an argument for flavor which is coming at the expense of balance, not helping it.[/quote]
This is much closer to what I'm advocating, yes. But it's not coming at the expense of balance, just taking a necessarily broader view of balance - modwide, rather than area- or creature-wide.

[quote]
Consider WoW, for a moment, where the focus of a mage is "damage spam" as you called it.  Are you suggesting that you think casters in WoW cannot be balanced because "damage spam" is consistently rewarded?[/quote]
I've never played WoW, so I can't really comment on it specifically, other than to say that many of our players who have played WoW have remarked on the fairly limited set of class roles it offers. You seem to be mis-extrapolating from my remarks, however. If 'damage spam' is the only behavior that is rewarded, which I doubt, then WoW would be definitionally imbalanced. If, however, 'damage spam' is the only behavior for a GIVEN class that is rewarded, you could still have balanced play, if fairly tactically uninteresting play. Ideally, you would want that damage caster to wear a number of hats - perhaps stopping to help a knocked-down friend get up, perhaps using said damage to draw aggro away from a threatened friend - and so on. You would also want a learning curve, requiring the use of multiple spells, rather than just a single 'most damaging spell (think vanilla IGMS), and the acquisition of knowledge concerning various opponents. But that's getting somewhat far afield of your question.


[quote]
[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

This means creating a variety of critters with things like...varied damage resistances/immunities...This requires intelligent, targeted spellcasting, even when you give players access to powerful spells.[/quote]
Again...why?  Where's this "intelligent, targeted spellcasting" when you say "Okay, instead of spamming Firebrand 15 times I'm going to spam Cone of Cold 15 times?"  How does that improve *balance?*  Are you saying that every monster having identical resistances/immunities would inherently *unbalanced?*  That would seem to be an interesting arguement to make.
[/quote]
Yes, that's actually pretty close to what I'm saying, though the 15 firebrands vs 15 cone of colds misses the point. Consider instead 15 firebrands vs 3 firebrands, 2 chain lightnings, 5 ice storms, a clarity, a heal pot, an elemental shield, a dimension door, and 2 more brands. This example assumes a much greater diversity of balancing factors - not just balanced damage types, but also balanced offensive and defensive needs - assuming the character will need to do more than just offense, due to challenging spawn composition. Even that just touches a couple of bases. Have they also buffed their allies with elemental weapon buffs pre-combat? Might they not dispell a hostile confusion or fear effect with the proper spell? And so on.

What I'm saying is that there are two problems with every monster having identical resistances/immunities. First, it'd be incredibly dull (and, as I talk about above, the lack of diversity wouldn't just stop at the spawns). Second, yes, it would be inherently imbalanced. Suppose you have them all at 20 resists on all damage types. You just hosed all your dexers, and gave a heaping helping of awesome to high damage packet classes like casters, critters, and str builds. Or, conversely, suppose said creatures all had SR requiring a level-appropriate caster to pray for a 5 or 10% chance fail roll. Well, your casters are gonna hate you, but you just solved some of your high-damage packet issues (though not all). In the end, you simply cannot create a single set of stats that will treat all build types equally - which is why you would have to homogenize your build types to acheive that kind of balance. To see a very simple example of this impossibility, pick this critter's level-appropriate ac. Simply by picking it, you've determined what weilding style you're going to favor. Too low, and dualers will deal too much damage. Too high, and they'll deal too little. You could PROBABLY, absent any other considerations, work out a golden mean balancing 2H and Shield styles. The problem is, you DO have other considerations. You then, for example, have WMs to worry about, as well as an classes that have a different tier of ab (I vs II vs III - a single level-appropriate ac that's balanced for tier 1s is too high for tier 2s, killing any hope of, for example, them dualing effectively). Unless they're all weilding the same weapon, your WMs are going to be doing too much dps - the limit of a single weapon type is meaningless when all enemies have the same defensive profile. Instead of trading off weapon type disadvantages against some foes for higher ab, it no longer matters the type they use. The diversity inherent in the classes demands a matching diversity in spawn types, or the whole system is thrown out of whack (or you throw out said class diversity, at which point we're no longer really talking about the same game).

Funky

Modifié par FunkySwerve, 24 décembre 2012 - 08:15 .

[WhiZard]

Nah, give all creatures 100% concealment and full immunity to all effects and damage types (all as supernatural effects). The game will be 100% balanced. No class will be better than another (well there is still turn undead and petrification gaze but those can be scripted to remove potency).

[MagicalMaster]

Funky,

Thanks for the explanation. Bit busy now with Christmas Eve and then Christmas Day tomorrow, so won't be able to really respond until later, but I did want to mention something:

And, before you suggest that all this talk about melee weapons is inapposite to the discussion of casters, consider that many summons are melee-oriented.

Actually, I think your points about melee damage types (along with later discussion about AB/AC and shield/2H/dual-wield) are extremely relevant to casters in terms of the balance philosophy at hand and may actually be a better way to get at the heart of the matter rather than discuss spells.

Also, quick question: how many times in NWN have you been in a group of, say, 5 people and you lost a fight because one person had 1 AB less than he could have had? I'll even expand that to you losing because one of the five people should have had 2 more AB if you'd like. Honestly curious as to your answer regarding that because I suspect it'll illuminate the fundamental disconnect we have.

P.S. server is going down for a few hours if anyone was wanting to mess with that, it'll be up later.

Modifié par MagicalMaster, 25 décembre 2012 - 03:36 .

[FunkySwerve]

MagicalMaster wrote...
Actually, I think your points about melee damage types (along with later discussion about AB/AC and shield/2H/dual-wield) are extremely relevant to casters in terms of the balance philosophy at hand and may actually be a better way to get at the heart of the matter rather than discuss spells.

Glad to hear it. I regard on of HG's greatest failings that our casters NEVER melee - partly because the server was off-balance from the point I took over, but mostly because of how our legendary (and now, paragon) levels are structured. It would require some major rebalancing, but it lent me insight on why bioware did epic level ab the way they did - to limit the ab divide between tiers. We mimiced pre-epic ab in legendary levels, but reverted to a all-tiers-get-the-same approach for paragon levels, in large part because of this and related insights.

Also, quick question: how many times in NWN have you been in a group of, say, 5 people and you lost a fight because one person had 1 AB less than he could have had? I'll even expand that to you losing because one of the five people should have had 2 more AB if you'd like. Honestly curious as to your answer regarding that because I suspect it'll illuminate the fundamental disconnect we have.

I would peg it at more than you might expect, but I have a LOT more experience, and FAR more recent experience with developing than I do with playing. I can tell you the consensus of our players, however, and that's based on millions of hours of playtest. They regard a gap of 4 points to be build-killing, give or take a point. The reason for this is also structural - there's only so much granularity in a d20 roll - 5%. A standout example of this is the Abyss, one of our current endgame areas, designed for level 60s (we cover 5 major layers, plus the Plane of Portals). In one of our (near-constant) experiments with critter balancing, we dropped resists and immunities from the Hells, the other major endgame area, but upped ac and ab by an average of 4 points. Players complained that a lot of previously-viable builds were no longer melee capable.

Of course, players, like some of the earlier posters in this thread, tend to simplify their analyses, going with an all-or-nothing outlook, but the gist of their complaints, which I verified with my battle bard, was that previously marginal abs were no longer able to contribute meaningfully to melee combat. Yes, they still hit occasionally, but their dps was too low to mean much in terms of party contribution. The same was also true of builds with marginal acs. Overnight, a particular type of CoT build was the new favorite, because of a combination of high damage married to high damage resistance, which offset a lot of the monsters' increased ab.

So, how does this impact the outcomes of combats? Often, they'll turn into extended slugfests, which is not always as boring as you might expect for the party as a whole, though it often IS. We tend to have larger parties, which can cover for one or two inefficient builds pretty easily, but in smaller groups, like in the group of 5 you postulate, they are pretty quickly lethal, because the bench just isn't enough to cover sudden exigencies (of which we try to create a few each run).

So yeah, a few points can effect balance pretty critically, and this is NOT attenuated by levels, since you always have the same amount of granularity in your random rolls, and your level scaling cannot allow for either too frequent success or failure - you have to stay in a smallish sweet spot. We are slaves to the d20.

I can elaborate more, if you like - our entire system of statting is based on some pretty extensive experimentation in this area. You CAN offset problems arising from these kinds of scaling issues, but only to a limited degree. With dexers, for instance, we had to flatten the amount of ac some builds were able to attain, to bring them closer to the center of the bell curve - too much deviation in any stat will become game-breaking in one way or another. As a result, we had to increase their damage output somewhat, WITHOUT upsetting other builds, and (hopefully) without having to redo all the legendary-level monsters (around 1200 unique beasties - though we HAVE had to do mass edits in some cases, as with our bard song nerf). There, we relied on irresistable damages, which did solve the problem, but became another, if somewhat smaller balance problem in its own right, requiring further tweaking to how our weapon buffs operated (we did a lot of the irresistables that way)...and so on.

Funky

Funky

[MagicalMaster]

I'm going to try to zero in on the core issue here.  For the most part, I think we agree on the premises and we see many of the same issues.  The difference is we wildly diverge on what we think are the appropriate solutions to those issues.  To use a concrete example, you made the following statement:

both because you would no longer have undead (or indeed other racial distinctions, as a secondary consequence)

Among other things, I'm guessing one of your "racial distinctions" would include critical immunity for undead.  You're using removing critical immunity from undead (and from everything, for that matter) as a way to indicate a problem in your mind, while I'd say "Bingo, nothing should have crit immunity!"  What you view as a negative I view as a positive, and that's the issue which needs to be sorted out.

Generally speaking, I've seen two main methods of attempting to balance games.  For lack of better terms offhand, I'll dub them "Homogenization" and "Rock/Paper/Scissors."  The question becomes when to apply one method versus the other because each is appropriate in certain circumstances.  As you might guess, in a game like NWN I'm suggesting the Homogenization route is better while you're advocating the R/P/S route.  I suspect this is because you've never been in an environment where balance is essential and your second post would seem to confirm that suspicion.  This will require some explanation.

Homogenization
At the most basic level, the idea of Homogenization is that everything has the ability to do equally well in all cases (or as close to it as possible).  The simplest way to achieve this is making everything exactly the same.  If the only class in NWN was fighter and stats/feats/skills/weapon choice were pre-determined, everyone would be balanced.  Differentiating between players would depend on *how* they play their character.

This is the case in many/most FPS games.  It's also how RTS games started out (different factions were effectively mirrors of each other, potentially with different names for some units).  RTS games have generally evolved beyond this, but the reason they are *able* to do so is something I'll discuss in the R/P/S section.  Note that even RTSes have Homogenization at the meta level.  To use Starcraft (II) as an example, Zerg, Terran, and Protoss are vastly different.  But if you pick Terran, you generally have an equal chance to win whether you're facing Zerg, Protoss, or another Terran.

As seen above, Homogenization does not mean things have to be exactly the same.  Rather, it means that each option has nearly equivalent capability at everything.  It means a caster cleric and a mage can put out basically the same damage via spells, for example, but do so with different methods.

But how about some examples with actual data?  Let's turn to my primary playground, World of Warcraft.

I've never played WoW, so I can't really comment on it specifically, other than to say that many of our players who have played WoW have remarked on the fairly limited set of class roles it offers. You seem to be mis-extrapolating from my remarks, however. If 'damage spam' is the only behavior that is rewarded, which I doubt, then WoW would be definitionally imbalanced. If, however, 'damage spam' is the only behavior for a GIVEN class that is rewarded, you could still have balanced play, if fairly tactically uninteresting play.

There are three roles available.  Tanking involves getting the attention of monsters and absorbing damage (plus moving said monsters around and other things - the main gist is that tanks are generally the only ones who get hit by non-AoE or non-randomly targeted attacks), healing involves healing damage that enemies do to the group, and damage involves doing, well, damage to the enemies.  There are also other factors that are fight specific (such as moving out of a flame strike, ringing a gong to deafen a blind dragon that hunts with sound, handling debuffs the boss gives out, etc), but those roles determine nearly everything and are by far the most important factor in terms of what you'll be doing during a fight.

Each class has 3 specializations available (4 for druids) that determine role.  There are 5 tanking specializations, 6 healing specializations, and 23 damage specializations.  Every class has at least one damage specialization and there are four classes that have nothing BUT damage specializations.  For these damage specializations (which make up 60%ish of groups for the most part), assuming you execute fight mechanics correctly (fire is hot, ring the gong, use defensive abilities when appropriate, etc) your performance metric boils down to a number: DPS.  DPS means damage per second.

The following link is to a site called World of Logs:

http://worldoflogs.com/

In essence, people do a raid (group PvE content for 10+ players) and upload their combat log.  The combat log breaks down the duration people were in combat versus bosses and figures out what they did during the boss fights and provides the data in an analyzable form.  One of the main uses of the data is determining the DPS of each person. There's another website that analyzes the analysis:

http://raidbots.com/dpsbot/

The numbers to the fight of the chart are percentile comparisons of specialization performance.  I'm going to throw out the lowest six specializations for the moment (if you put your cursor over them, they are Demonology/Survival/Destruction/Unholy/Frost/Arms).  The reason for this is that each of those specializations has a better DPS specialization within the same class.  As a result, when people care about their performance, they do not use those specializations.  Those scores could be higher than they currently are but the best people don't ever bother doing it because there's a better option (in fact, currently there are two damage specializations, Subtlety and Marksmanship, that don't even appear on the chart because there's not enough people using them to get any data: but the classes which have those specializations have two OTHER damage specializations).

As an analogy, imagine a fighter with feats for both Bastard Sword and Longsword (assuming default weapons).  Given otherwise identical weapons, there is no reason to ever use a Longsword except to mess around, because it's definitely inferior, even if it's not by very much.

Looking at the current numbers at the time of this writing, the highest is 93.8 (Affliction) and lowest is 75.2 (Elemental).  To do some rough math, the average of those is 84.5.  The highest and lowest damage specializations are within roughly 11% of that average.  Or to rephrase it, 15 different damage specializations are within 11% of the average (and the outliers are all lower).  Even including all but the two not even on the chart, we get everything within 20% of the average.  Note that I'm using multiplicative percentages because that's actually accurate (if someone takes 10% of incoming damage and someone else takes 5% of incoming damage, claiming they're 5% apart is misleading, to put it kindly).

To put this in perspective for a moment, if we assume that ((AC - 20) < AB < (AC - 2)) then a single point of AB is worth between 8.3% more hits and 40% more hits for a non-dual-wielder (more if we factor in Epic Dodge).  If we average those numbers, we wind up with roughly 24%.  But let's say we think that's on the high side, so we'll divide the number in half again, which gives us 12% (an AB of AC - 11 gives a 14% bonus, as a basis of comparison).

Let's rephrase that: gaining or losing 1 AB in NWN is more of a difference than the difference in damage output for the top 15 (out of 23) damage specializations in WoW.  This is despite those 15 specializations having different abilities, playstyles, gearing needs, and more (if you don't believe me when I say that the specializations are very different, I can provide more details, but different specializations within one class in WoW are more different than entire classes in NWN).  That's pretty homogenized for damage output.

Furthermore, while some specializations are slightly better on single target versus a few targets versus heavy AoE, Blizzard's goal is to crunch these differences to be pretty small.  For example, a class that excels at attacking two targets at once might do 10-15% more damage when attacking two targets - which is the difference of 1 AB in NWN.  Yet that difference is absolutely *massive* in WoW.

Here's a recent tweet from the Lead Systems Designer of WoW indicating what I'm talking about...]https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/282207519462543360]Here's a recent tweet from the Lead Systems Designer of WoW indicating what I'm talking about...

"Yes, but during that time we've also seen the community shift from thinking a 10% dps delta is unacceptable to a 5% or 1%."

In other words, even with DPS differences generally being within 11%ish, people want it to be smaller and that gap messes things up at times.  More on this later.

I am glossing over a lot of finer details regarding the WoW stuff because they're not really important and I doubt you want a treatise on WoW mechanics.

Rock/Paper/Scissors
Rock/Paper/Scissors throws the idea of equality out the window.  It doesn't matter if you like the idea of Rock more than Paper, you'll lose to Paper if the other person chooses it.  It's not because you're worse at the game, it's because that's how it works.  Paper counters Rock.  Rock counters Scissors.  Scissors counters Paper.

A game which clearly  features this is Pokemon.  Fire does 200% damage to Grass and takes 50% damage from Grass attacks. Grass does 200% damage to Water and takes 50% damage from Water attacks.  Water does 200% damage to Fire and takes 50% damage from Fire attacks. Fire beats Grass beats Water beats Fire beats...it's a cycle.

Starcraft (II) is another game that features R/P/S at the unit level.  The Terran siege tank, for example, is a powerful artillery unit which is devastating at long range and deals AoE damage.  But it is helpless against air units.  Every unit has something that can counter it, though the game features both hard counters (unit A utterly annihilates unit and soft counters (unit A has a noticeable advantage over unit .  Air units versus siege tanks is a hard counter.  A soft counter would be that Hydralisks (ranged Zerg unit) beat Battlecruisers (heavy Terran air unit).  One Hydralisk won't defeat half a dozen Battlecruisers, but cost for cost the Hydralisk will easily win ($100 of Hydralisks will beat $200 of Battlecruisers or something).

When we look for this type of gameplay in NWN, we see it in a few ways.  The most obvious are damage immunities/resistances.  A fire elemental is resistant to fire but weak to cold.  A skeleton is resistant to piercing and slashing.  A outsider resists a flat amount of most damage types, meaning you need a large number to punch through.  There are also miscellaneous immunities.  Sneak immunity counters rogues, assassins, and blackguards.  Critical immunity counters the above mentioned (by default, at least) along with crippling Weapon Masters and anyone with a character built around criticals.  To do some rough math, a weapon master with a keen longsword deals 180% weapon damage on average (assuming every roll that threatens critical actually criticals), meaning he deals 56% of normal damage versus a crit immune foe.  If the server has modified Overwhelming Critical and/or Devastating Critical, this becomes even more pronounced.  You also have other random things like turning undead and spells that target undead specifically.

Why R/P/S Works in Pokemon and Starcraft (II)
Okay, so why I suggesting that R/P/S works in Pokemon and Starcraft (II) but fails in NWN?

In Pokemon and Starcraft (II), you control multiple units and none of them represent you.

That's what it boils down to.  Everything else winds up deriving from that statement.  In Pokemon, you control a team of up to six Pokemon and in Starcraft (II) you control an entire army.  In both of these cases, the composition of the army depends on what you choose to capture/produce.

In essence, the goal of the games is to figure out what the opponent has and use a composition to counter it.  If your enemy has 6 Water Pokemon...bring 6 Grass Pokemon.  There is zero reason to bring a Fire Pokemon to that battle.  Likewise, if your enemy decides to use nothing but air units...you build anti-air units.  The units you use can also shift mid battle for a game like Starcraft (II).  If your opponent goes heavy air and gets crushed by your anti-air, he might then swap to units that counter your heavy air.  Therefore you have to swap to units that counter his countering units.

But the units don't care.  They're pixels on a screen.  Whether you have all air units, all siege tanks, all infantry, or a mix matters to no one but yourself.  You use the most effective composition you can figure out to crush your opponent.  And you don't have to explain to the siege tanks why you aren't using them when your opponent is focusing on building air units.

The Problem of Difficulty and WoW
WoW used to be more like NWN.  Fire elementals were resistant to fire.  Undead were immune to bleeds.  Golems didn't care about poison.  As previously mentioned, the pinnacle of WoW PvE is raiding involving groups of 10+ people fighting bosses.  Specifically, each raid zone had a maximum group size (which was 10, 20, 25, or 40 at different parts of WoW's lifespan).

The initial content (such as Molten Core) wasn't tuned very well.  Molten Core could be done with 20-25 people and was meant for 40.  Blizzard has gotten far better at raid design since then and produces some tremendously difficult content.  It took over 500 attempts for the best guild in the world to defeat a boss in a zone called Firelands, for example.  Even guilds like my own, which only spend two nights a week raiding (as opposed to 6-7 nights a week in the top guilds) still took over 100 attempts.  That was with us knowing the strategy, having better gear, and being in the top 0.5%ish of the WoW population skill-wise.

To beat the bosses on the hardest difficulty, you need a full raid with very skilled players.  With a 10 man raid, for example, you're not going to win with 9 players, at least not initially.  You might be able to get away with it months after you originally beat it with much better gear, perhaps, but that's pretty much it.  The content is tuned to be on a razor's edge where every percent matters.  All of the heroic raiding guilds in WoW have stories of wiping continuously at <5% on a boss while they struggled to find those last few percent.  You didn't have room for people who couldn't pull their weight.

You can probably see where this is going.

Rogues, for example, depend on poisons for a large chunk of their damage.  What do you think happened when groups went up against bosses that were immune to poison?  They didn't take rogues.  They benched them and took someone else on their raid team.  Or even made the rogue swap to a different class.  If the rogue lost 20% of his damage from the boss being immune to poison, the group was better off with the rogue swapping to a warrior or something because even with worse gear the warrior would do like 10% more damage than the rogue.  In fact, the top guilds typically require their players to maintain several "raid ready" alternate characters that they can play if it is advantageous in a situation.

In short, the effect of the "racial distinction" of being immune to poison simply resulted in excluding people.  Boss immune to bleeds or poisons?  Tough luck if you're a warrior or rogue, hope you like cheering on your team from the sidelines or playing another character.  Boss immune to Shadow (Negative) damage?  Hope you're not a warlock or shadow priest!  Boss immune to Fire damage?  If you're a mage, you may be lucky and be able to swap to Arcane or Frost instead of Fire, but there's a decent chance you just won't be taken instead.

Let's take four players with classes A, B, C, and D respectively.  If there are four bosses, and only A can harm the first, only B can harm the second, only C can harm the third, and only D can harm the fourth, you might argue that's balance since all are "useful."  But what actually happens is that you bring four of class A to boss one, four of class B to boss two, four of class C to boss three, and four of class D to boss four.

You might think I'm joking or exaggerating.  I'm not.  There was a boss about a year ago called Spine of Deathwing.  You were literally on a colossal dragon's back trying to pry up armor plates.  However, you had a 20 second window to deal damage to the plates at a time.  Guess what happened?  Guilds brought people who were best at burst damage in a 20 second window.  If the class you played didn't excel at that, enjoy the bench!  You needed immense burst and there was little to no slack.

There were 10 classes in WoW at the time.  In a 25 man group, you'd expect 2-3 per class.  The first guild to kill the boss had something like 8 rogues and 7 mages because those classes had the best burst.  Those two classes were supposed to make up like 20% of the group and instead made up 60%.  Similar patterns (though not quite as extreme) occurred for the other top guilds.  My guild is more casual, but even we benched our two Hunters (think Arcane Archer with a pet) because they did like 10% less damage than our other players in that 20 second window solely because of their class.  And that 10% on two players was huge, the difference between successfully prying off a plate or failing with it at <5% health.

This is the effect of "racial distinctions" in a competitive environment where balance is essential.   It excludes people for no reason beyond what class they happen to play.

The Death Magic Conundrum
You seemed irked at the idea of "damage spam" being viable in every scenario.  You also suggested the idea of

Consider instead 15 firebrands vs 3 firebrands, 2 chain lightnings, 5 ice storms, a clarity, a heal pot, an elemental shield, a dimension door, and 2 more brands.

Clarity, heal potions, elemental shield, and dimension door are not primary spells you'd spam.  You use them occasionally as the situation dictates.  So that leaves us with Firebrands versus "3 firebrands, 2 chain lightnings, 5 ice storms, and 2 more brands."  Which brings up the question of why you would suddenly want to do 2 chain lightnings and 5 ice storms if Firebands are the best spell to use at the start.  Assuming you're attacking the same mob, unless he suddenly shifts his damage immunities or something there would be no reason to change spells.

In general, there seems to be three main "alternatives" for casters besides "damage spam."

1. Buffing/healing/dispelling allies
2. Debuffing/CCing/dispelling enemies
3. Death Magic

Note that I'm not including summons because I've yet to see anyone try to module where you literally summon a monster every 3 seconds.  Summons are not a "primary" spell type as a result.

Let's look at Death Magic more closely to see some issues with it.  The two primary issues are its binary nature and randomness.

Death Magic is off or on, alive or dead. The only things that matter are Death Magic Immunity and high saves.  Let's compare this to other things.

For something like a stun or paralyze, you have immunity to those effects, high saves, and your effective hit points (effective hit points is your HP coupled with damage immunities and resistances, so a character with 400 HP and 50% immunity to all damage has 800 effective HP).  In other words, even once stunned/paralyzed your enemy still has to wear down your hit points.

For damaging spells, you have high saves and your effective hit points. Having more HP/immunities/resistances increases your survivability along with better saves.

As you might notice, Death Magic is the odd one out here.  It ignores your effective hit points.  Doesn't matter if you have 100 HP and 0% immunity or 500 HP and 50% immunity.

But even that isn't so much an issue in and of itself, the problem is coupling that with its randomness.

Imagine a mage faces a pack of 10 mobs.  He has access to two spells: AoE death magic and AoE damage magic.  Using the damage spells, he will kill the group in 10 spells.  Let's even pretend we think the mage should kill the group in 10 death magic spells (the fact that mobs dying means they're not attacking means killing a few off the bat can extremely significant and thus it could be argued it should take more than 10 death magic spells).   But we don't know if he will.  He could theoretically kill all of them in one spell.  Or none could be dead after six spells.

We've effectively recreated the problem of levels 1-2!  Where a single hit can kill many characters and it's a matter of luck who wins instead of being a matter of playing well.

If you make a boss fight where it is assumed that you'll spend X time killing an monster during the fight, then if said monster is vulnerable to death magic it could die in one spell or might take 2X (or more) time to kill.  Obviously killing it in one spell means you can attack the other monsters far sooner which makes the fight much easier than intended.  Or it could make the fight far harder than intended if they keep saving successfully.

There's a reason melee characters which do an average of 50 damage per hit tend to do something like 45-55 damage or 40-60, not 1-99 (and even that 40-60 number is heavily skewed towards the middle).  Some randomness can keep things interesting, but if you make it too random you unbalance the environment.  And Death Magic as typically seen in NWN is inherently unbalanced for these reasons.

Conclusion
Now you may be thinking "Hang on, we have crit immune monsters and people still take Weapon Masters to those fights!"  That may be true.  But you have one of two options.

One, the fights are difficult enough that a person having their damage cut in half means they can't be taken.  Or even losing 10-20% damage.  This is the environment where balance actually matters. 

Two, the fights are easy enough that you can take a person who has their damage cut in half.  In this environment, balance doesn't really matter since there's loads of slack anyway.  Or alternatively, weapon masters still are powerful enough without their criticals that they're clearly not balanced regardless! 

Your point about the AB highlights this.  If we assume ((AC - 16) < AB < (AC-1)) initially, then let's look at the effect of losing 4 AB.

At AC - 16, we get 25%/5%/5%/5%/25%  = 0.65 hits per round.  At AC - 1, we get 95%/75%/50%/25%/95% = 3.4 hits per round.

Now let's subtract your 4 AB.

At AC  - 20 we get 5%/5%/5%/5%/5% = 0.25 hits per round.  At AC - 5, we get 75%/50%/5%/75% = 2.3 hits per round.

So losing 4 AB is a loss of somewhere between 60%ish damage to 33%ish damage (or reversing it, a gain of
48% damage to 160% damage).  Even going with the lower bound, that's a massive difference.

And in a balanced environment, even one or two AB would be the kiss of death you mentioned (again, see the Ghostcrawler tweet above).  This is why I asked how many groups wiped because one person had 1 less AB than needed.  That stuff happens in WoW all the time.  It happens in any environment where tuning is tight and balance is essential.  And if things aren't tightly tuned, then balance isn't all that important and you're free to tack on "racial distinctions" because they don't really matter anyway.

Modifié par MagicalMaster, 09 janvier 2013 - 04:41 .

[FunkySwerve]

For the TLDR version, skip to the bottom section titled: THE ONLY USEFUL THING IN THIS POST, AKA THE GRANULARITY PROBLEM

[quote]MagicalMaster wrote...

I'm going to try to zero in on the core issue here.  For the most part, I think we agree on the premises and we see many of the same issues.  The difference is we wildly diverge on what we think are the appropriate solutions to those issues.
[/quote]
While I'd like to be agreeable, I'm afraid our disagreement goes a bit deeper than that. You seem to have some fundamental confusion about the issues at play.
[quote]
  To use a concrete example, you made the following statement:

    both because you would no longer have undead (or indeed other racial distinctions, as a secondary consequence)



Among other things, I'm guessing one of your "racial distinctions" would include critical immunity for undead.[/quote]
No, I was talking about the races themselves, which are critical in a properly balanced PW. Sure, many of them have general characteristics, but if you look back you'll see I mentioned class abilities (like turning and defoliate) which specifically target by race. It's just one of myriad creature characteristics which an absolutely homogenous approach destroys.

[quote]
  You're using removing critical immunity from undead (and from everything, for that matter) as a way to indicate a problem in your mind, while I'd say "Bingo, nothing should have crit immunity!"  What you view as a negative I view as a positive, and that's the issue which needs to be sorted out.
[/quote]
I wouldn't say anything so airy as 'a way to indicate a problem in my mind'. It's simply a problem - an extremely hamfisted way of achieving rudimentary balance.

[quote]
Generally speaking, I've seen two main methods of attempting to balance games.  For lack of better terms offhand, I'll dub them "Homogenization" and "Rock/Paper/Scissors."  The question becomes when to apply one method versus the other because each is appropriate in certain circumstances.  As you might guess, in a game like NWN I'm suggesting the Homogenization route is better while you're advocating the R/P/S route.[/quote]
No, what I'm suggesting is far more complex than RPS. Your thinking seems locked up in a dichotomous divide between these two, when it's actually a sliding scale. No game that takes itself seriously is going to go with a completely homogenous approach - I can imagine nothing more boring. The problem is that, the further you stray from completely homogenous mobs, the more complex the task of balancing becomes. Once you reframe the issue in that manner, I think what I'm saying will become clearer.
[quote]
  I suspect this is because you've never been in an environment where balance is essential and your second post would seem to confirm that suspicion.  This will require some explanation.
[/quote]
Again, while I'd like to be polite, I can only laugh. You're advocating an extremely dumbed-down, simplistic approach to server balance, and then saying of my far more nuanced approach that I simply don't grasp or have any regard for balance - without anything to support the notion, other than a vague reference to my second post. My gut reaction to this is something along the lines of 'what a bleeping n00blet.' It's hard to overstate the arrogance of your characterization, or to square it with your apparent oblviousness to said arrogance. I would say quite a bit more on that topic and the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I'm trying to be civil. I'll leave it to others to determine how successful I've been.

[quote]
Homogenization
At the most basic level, the idea of Homogenization is that everything has the ability to do equally well in all cases (or as close to it as possible).  The simplest way to achieve this is making everything exactly the same.  If the only class in NWN was fighter and stats/feats/skills/weapon choice were pre-determined, everyone would be balanced.  Differentiating between players would depend on *how* they play their character.

This is the case in many/most FPS games.  It's also how RTS games started out (different factions were effectively mirrors of each other, potentially with different names for some units).
[/quote]
Agreed, up until the last sentence. I can think of no game, RTS or otherwise, that goes completely homogenous. Generally speaking, though, the more simplistic/low budget a game is, the more homogenous the foes - often because of things like a quality assurance/playtest department are a pipe dream. Today's flash games are a pretty good example of the floor here. I think this is sort of implicit in your next remark about how RTS has evolved beyond that point. Even if you look at an extremely simple flash game like Legend of Pandora (a Zelda knockoff), you STILL get some variety in foes - some shoot things at you, some poison you, etc etc. There's a number of reasons for this. Not only are completely homogenous foes utterly boring, they lack verisimiliatude, hampering suspension of disbelief/immersion.
[quote]
  RTS games have generally evolved beyond this, but the reason they are *able* to do so is something I'll discuss in the R/P/S section.  Note that even RTSes have Homogenization at the meta level.  To use Starcraft (II) as an example, Zerg, Terran, and Protoss are vastly different.  But if you pick Terran, you generally have an equal chance to win whether you're facing Zerg, Protoss, or another Terran.[/quote]
This characterization relying on the 'meta level' blows up the concept of homogenization as the dichotomous counter to RPS you're trying to pidgeonhole it as. As I said earlier, it's not an either/or decision, but a sliding scale of complexity.

[quote]
As seen above, Homogenization does not mean things have to be exactly the same.  Rather, it means that each option has nearly equivalent capability at everything.  It means a caster cleric and a mage can put out basically the same damage via spells, for example, but do so with different methods.[/quote]
Actually, yes, homogenization, to the extent you practice it, DOES mean things have to be exactly the same. Anything else is a step along that sliding scale towards what you are characterizating as RPS.

[quote]
But how about some examples with actual data?  Let's turn to my primary playground, World of Warcraft.
[/quote]
I'm going to skip quoting most of this in the interest of brevity. To summarize, you point out that their run logs show a pretty low deviation in dps for the varying roles - you say 11% from the average. To achieve that number, you begin by throwing out the lowest 6 DPS roles, admitting their failure in terms of balance:

[quote]
 I'm going to throw out the lowest six specializations for the moment (if you put your cursor over them, they are Demonology/Survival/Destruction/Unholy/Frost/Arms).  The reason for this is that each of those specializations has a better DPS specialization within the same class.  As a result, when people care about their performance, they do not use those specializations. 
[/quote]
An unused class (or, by contrast, an overused class) is definitionally an imbalanced class. The unused ones might as well not be in the game, for our purposes, and the overused ones will quickly be exploited until nerfed. At this point I am left to wonder why it is you're holding up WoW as an example of 'balance.' Granted, HG is far from perfect - we have our underutilised classes, but we're always striving to bring them into rough parity with the others - what you would meaninglessly term 'meta homogenous', or homogenous in average power, rather than in each specific class power.

Anyway, to continue my summary, you then assume a certain range of AB without any explanation, and even more inexplicably assign a point of AB a value of 8.5% deviation. To be clear, when I say 'inexplicably', I do not mean that I don't understand, only that you're doing so without any explained basis. You then move on to conclude that:  

[quote] gaining or losing 1 AB in NWN is more of a difference than the difference in damage output for the top 15 (out of 23) damage specializations in WoW.  This is despite those 15 specializations having different abilities, playstyles, gearing needs, and more (if you don't believe me when I say that the specializations are very different, I can provide more details, but different specializations within one class in WoW are more different than entire classes in NWN).  That's pretty homogenized for damage output.[/quote]
That just doesn't follow, as you're comparing apples and oranges. Should you actually try logging NWN, you would find similar variance in DPS for DPS-oriented classes. Here's a link to our forum for player-made logging programs, of which there are about a dozen: Click Me

Of course, that doesn't speak to the even larger problem with your thesis: the notion that DPS is the only relevant determinant in what makes a build (or, in your parlance, a role) fun/rewarding to play, or able to contribute meaningfully.  If you look at some of our run logs, you'll see quite a bit more variance, but that's for a whole host of different reasons, including divergent player skill, degree of character development and gear, and differing roles. Take, for example, this log, which shows both DPS and kills (along with a host of other factors like damage tanked, times killed, etc):
Click Here
It's quite common to see skilled, successful, veteran players on our servers scoring consistently outside that delta dps, because we've gone to great pains to create more variety in roles, like crowd control.

Furthermore, if you look at that log, you'll see that the direct link between dps and ab you're trying to forge simply doesn't hold up, because of a variety of other gameplay mechanics like concealment and concealment penetration. Further, the exceedingly high dps of the sorc is NOT matched by a high number of kills - he was doing a lot of spead damage. It's worth pointing out, however, that those areas were heavily adjusted in response to logs like that - we added more SR, and area penalties to SP to match penalties being suffered by other classes (ab, etc). So I'm not holding that log up as an ideal - far from it, it's just the first I managed to find. Rather, I'm pointing out that the issue is a lot more complex than you're trying to make it out to be.

I'm going to resume quoting you now, in part because this bit is important:

[quote]
Furthermore, while some specializations are slightly better on single target versus a few targets versus heavy AoE, Blizzard's goal is to crunch these differences to be pretty small.  For example, a class that excels at attacking two targets at once might do 10-15% more damage when attacking two targets - which is the difference of 1 AB in NWN.  Yet that difference is absolutely *massive* in WoW.

Here's a recent tweet from the Lead Systems Designer of WoW indicating what I'm talking about...]https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler/status/282207519462543360]Here's a recent tweet from the Lead Systems Designer of WoW indicating what I'm talking about...

"Yes, but during that time we've also seen the community shift from thinking a 10% dps delta is unacceptable to a 5% or 1%."

In other words, even with DPS differences generally being within 11%ish, people want it to be smaller and that gap messes things up at times.  More on this later.
[/quote]
This obsession with DPS as the sole determinant of build/role success is a frequent source of bemoaning by our more veteran players. It's a real failing of WoW's balancing. Of course, WoW is pretty far from a paragon of balance, as they pretty much throw out all their old content's challenge when they introduce their next expansion. I think you misread my remarks about not having played WoW as being unfamiliar with it. I am not, as most of our playerbase has played it at one point or another, and bemoan, among other things, the limited roles it offers. In fact, we deliberately mention it on our webpage for crosslinking purposes - we like to poach their players.

[quote]
Rock/Paper/Scissors throws the idea of equality out the window.  It doesn't matter if you like the idea of Rock more than Paper, you'll lose to Paper if the other person chooses it.  It's not because you're worse at the game, it's because that's how it works.  Paper counters Rock.  Rock counters Scissors.  Scissors counters Paper.
[/quote]
Equality of what? Your thinking is still pretty muddled by your attempt to dichotomize the concept. Again, it's just a sliding scale, though I agree that the game rock/paper/scissors is a good approximation of non-homogeneity, so far as the metaphor holds. Your Starcraft example is a solid example of simple nonhomogeneity, albeit still pretty close to the 'homogenous' goalpost on the slider.


[quote]
When we look for this type of gameplay in NWN, we see it in a few ways.  The most obvious are damage immunities/resistances.  A fire elemental is resistant to fire but weak to cold.  A skeleton is resistant to piercing and slashing.  A outsider resists a flat amount of most damage types, meaning you need a large number to punch through.  There are also miscellaneous immunities.  Sneak immunity counters rogues, assassins, and blackguards.  Critical immunity counters the above mentioned (by default, at least) along with crippling Weapon Masters and anyone with a character built around criticals.  To do some rough math, a weapon master with a keen longsword deals 180% weapon damage on average (assuming every roll that threatens critical actually criticals), meaning he deals 56% of normal damage versus a crit immune foe.  If the server has modified Overwhelming Critical and/or Devastating Critical, this becomes even more pronounced.  You also have other random things like turning undead and spells that target undead specifically.
[/quote]
NOW we're getting somewhere. This is a far more telling critique of the issue than your failed 'homogeneity-RPS' dichotomy. The problem you're trying to express is granularity. The more binary the outcome - life/death vs. amount of damage, the trickier things are to balance. The more granular, the easier. Totally with you on that one - I would redo NWN with the Rolemaster system, given the opportunity (it's d100 based, not d20, far more granular). I'll come back to this at the end, since I think we might actually get somewhere with it.

[quote]
Why R/P/S Works in Pokemon and Starcraft (II)
Okay, so why I suggesting that R/P/S works in Pokemon and Starcraft (II) but fails in NWN?

In Pokemon and Starcraft (II), you control multiple units and none of them represent you.

That's what it boils down to.  Everything else winds up deriving from that statement.  In Pokemon, you control a team of up to six Pokemon and in Starcraft (II) you control an entire army.  In both of these cases, the composition of the army depends on what you choose to capture/produce.[/quote]

No, this misses the point again. This is only a problem if you assume a single homogenous enemy type. So long as you provide players a variety of types concurrently, you can ensure than each role has something to contribute. Yes, it's far more complicated to do so, but the play is much more rewarding as a result.

[quote]
The Problem of Difficulty and WoW
WoW used to be more like NWN.  Fire elementals were resistant to fire.  Undead were immune to bleeds.  Golems didn't care about poison.  As previously mentioned, the pinnacle of WoW PvE is raiding involving groups of 10+ people fighting bosses.  Specifically, each raid zone had a maximum group size (which was 10, 20, 25, or 40 at different parts of WoW's lifespan).

The initial content (such as Molten Core) wasn't tuned very well.  Molten Core could be done with 20-25 people and was meant for 40.  Blizzard has gotten far better at raid design since then and produces some tremendously difficult content.  It took over 500 attempts for the best guild in the world to defeat a boss in a zone called Firelands, for example.  Even guilds like my own, which only spend two nights a week raiding (as opposed to 6-7 nights a week in the top guilds) still took over 100 attempts.  That was with us knowing the strategy, having better gear, and being in the top 0.5%ish of the WoW population skill-wise.[/quote]
Don't mistake difficulty for excellent design balance. I could easily design areas which are impossible to beat. Again, there's a happy medium on a sliding scale, not a fixed 'MOAR difficulty is always indicative of better balance' relation.

[quote]
To beat the bosses on the hardest difficulty, you need a full raid with very skilled players.  With a 10 man raid, for example, you're not going to win with 9 players, at least not initially.  You might be able to get away with it months after you originally beat it with much better gear, perhaps, but that's pretty much it.  The content is tuned to be on a razor's edge where every percent matters.  All of the heroic raiding guilds in WoW have stories of wiping continuously at <5% on a boss while they struggled to find those last few percent.  You didn't have room for people who couldn't pull their weight.
[/quote]
HG is the same way, whenever new areas are dropped. There's nothing about the approach we take that necessitates a different outcome.

[quote]
You can probably see where this is going.
[/quote]
Indeed, though not in the way you doubtless mean.
[quote]
Rogues, for example, depend on poisons for a large chunk of their damage.  What do you think happened when groups went up against bosses that were immune to poison?  They didn't take rogues.  They benched them and took someone else on their raid team.  Or even made the rogue swap to a different class.  If the rogue lost 20% of his damage from the boss being immune to poison, the group was better off with the rogue swapping to a warrior or something because even with worse gear the warrior would do like 10% more damage than the rogue.  In fact, the top guilds typically require their players to maintain several "raid ready" alternate characters that they can play if it is advantageous in a situation.

In short, the effect of the "racial distinction" of being immune to poison simply resulted in excluding people.  Boss immune to bleeds or poisons?  Tough luck if you're a warrior or rogue, hope you like cheering on your team from the sidelines or playing another character.  Boss immune to Shadow (Negative) damage?  Hope you're not a warlock or shadow priest!  Boss immune to Fire damage?  If you're a mage, you may be lucky and be able to swap to Arcane or Frost instead of Fire, but there's a decent chance you just won't be taken instead.
[/quote]
Again, this is a straw man problem, since you're assuming a single foe. There's no reason to limit yourself in this way, and this is one major reason our boss spawns are seldom alone. Even then, there's no reason that certain classes are totally barred from participating, because we don't balance our builds as one-trick ponies - you'll recall my mention of this earlier. Hence, that rogue, even if he were barred from effective use of poison, would have other fallback abilities. They wouldn't, necessarily, be as efficacious, but there's nothing preventing them from falling within whatever delta of efficacy you decide is appropriate - 11%, or otherwise, if you want to limit yourself to a consideration of a simple metric like DPS.

[quote]
Let's take four players with classes A, B, C, and D respectively.  If there are four bosses, and only A can harm the first, only B can harm the second, only C can harm the third, and only D can harm the fourth, you might argue that's balance since all are "useful."  But what actually happens is that you bring four of class A to boss one, four of class B to boss two, four of class C to boss three, and four of class D to boss four.[/quote]
Aww shucks, I had such hope for a second. You're still assuming a unitary foe, however, as well as some extreme one-trick ponies.

[quote]
This is the effect of "racial distinctions" in a competitive environment where balance is essential.   It excludes people for no reason beyond what class they happen to play.
[/quote]
I hope you understand now why this is incorrect - or, more specifically, why it is incorrect in practice, though it makes sense in a very limited set of circumstances (single enemy, extremely limited character traits). I agree with the principles you're describing, in rough terms, and have indeed seen some of the outcomes you are concerned with - some classes being disfavored on certain runs, for example. I'm simply telling you that in practice, there are ways around these problems that are far more interesting than resort to homogenization.

[quote]
The Death Magic Conundrum
You seemed irked at the idea of "damage spam" being viable in every scenario.
[/quote]
Irked? Not really. It's just poor design.

[quote]
 You also suggested the idea of

    Consider instead 15 firebrands vs 3 firebrands, 2 chain lightnings, 5 ice storms, a clarity, a heal pot, an elemental shield, a dimension door, and 2 more brands.

Clarity, heal potions, elemental shield, and dimension door are not primary spells you'd spam.  You use them occasionally as the situation dictates.  So that leaves us with Firebrands versus "3 firebrands, 2 chain lightnings, 5 ice storms, and 2 more brands."
[/quote]
Lolz. Cute, and typical of a WoW player. You completely missed the second point I was making about role variety - considering other things besides DPS.

[quote]
 Which brings up the question of why you would suddenly want to do 2 chain lightnings and 5 ice storms if Firebands are the best spell to use at the start.  Assuming you're attacking the same mob, unless he suddenly shifts his damage immunities or something there would be no reason to change spells.[/quote]

You just answered your own question. There's no reason to assume a unitary mob. Our runs comprise 300-500 spawns, in groups of 8-16, depending.


[quote]
In general, there seems to be three main "alternatives" for casters besides "damage spam."

1. Buffing/healing/dispelling allies
2. Debuffing/CCing/dispelling enemies
3. Death Magic

Note that I'm not including summons because I've yet to see anyone try to module where you literally summon a monster every 3 seconds.  Summons are not a "primary" spell type as a result.[/quote]
That doesn't follow. Spammability is not a requirement for a role, since, again, we're not dealing with one-trick ponies. Not critical to the overarching point, though, so I'll just leave it at that.

[quote]
Let's look at Death Magic more closely to see some issues with it.  The two primary issues are its binary nature and randomness.
[/quote]
Yay! You're back onto the granularity issue. Which, of course, is somewhat ironic, since the binary nature of your homogeneity-RPS dichotomy was its downfall. Only a Sith deals in absolutes. 0_0 More seriously, randomness isn't a problem, it's an offset to the problem of granularity, if you use it correctly. Here's where you get it wrong:
[quote]
We've effectively recreated the problem of levels 1-2!  Where a single hit can kill many characters and it's a matter of luck who wins instead of being a matter of playing well.
[/quote]
This is a meaningless problem. In any d20 system, or any system which embraces randomness as a means to attain verisimilatude, luck always determines outcomes. It's still possible to roll 10 hits in a row and kill something you shouldn't have. The problem with less granular mechnics, like death magic, is that it will increase the frequency of this happening, overwhelming other factors (including skill). The cure is to introduce additional factors to increase granularity, like (properly balanced) saving throws and spell resistance. Flat-out immunity is itself, of course, highly non-granular, creating problems of its own. Hew to that magical sliding scale, however, and you'll be fine. Of course, we still make (most) bosses flat-out immune to instant kills, because they're the cumulation of the run, and a sudden kill would be very anticlimactic. This does not, however, mean, that you can't avoid it on most of your other mobs. That's why you see such a mixed immunity profile on our mobs - we like to ensure that death magic has a role, without allowing it to become overwhelming in scope.

[quote]And Death Magic as typically seen in NWN is inherently unbalanced for these reasons.[/quote]
I hope I've explained why this is wrong. It's actually seen as inherently unbalanced because most server ops haven't playtested their servers enough to hone the saving throws, resists, etc, finely enough to balance these mechanics.


[quote]
Conclusion
Now you may be thinking "Hang on, we have crit immune monsters and people still take Weapon Masters to those fights!"  That may be true.  But you have one of two options.
[/quote]
I'm going to cut most of this section, in the interest of brevity, but you're definitely on to something with crit immunity. It is insufficiently granular to make it easily balancable. That said, this math is atrociously oversimplified, and your assumptions (including the stated assumed range) generally do not hold:

Your point about the AB highlights this.  If we assume ((AC - 16) < AB < (AC-1)) initially, then let's look at the effect of losing 4 AB.
...
So losing 4 AB is a loss of somewhere between 60%ish damage to 33%ish damage (or reversing it, a gain of
48% damage to 160% damage).  Even going with the lower bound, that's a massive difference.
[/quote]
I'll address the actual problem in a second, after I respond to your last remarks:

[quote]
And in a balanced environment, even one or two AB would be the kiss of death you mentioned (again, see the Ghostcrawler tweet above).  This is why I asked how many groups wiped because one person had 1 less AB than needed.  That stuff happens in WoW all the time.  It happens in any environment where tuning is tight and balance is essential.  And if things aren't tightly tuned, then balance isn't all that important and you're free to tack on "racial distinctions" because they don't really matter anyway.
[/quote]
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This assumes a highly simplistic set of mechanics. Even a single glance at that run log I linked you will point out the error in this thinking. Ab is not the sole determinant of a hit, or of DPS. NWN offers a wide array of mechanics to use to introduce additional granularity where necessary. The notion that a single point of Ab should be deterministic of a runs failure or success in a 'tightly balanced' server is utter nonsense - take a look back at where I point out the apples/oranges nature of your ab-to-dps comparison if you're forgetting.

THE ONLY USEFUL THING IN THIS POST, AKA THE GRANULARITY PROBLEM:

Anywho, that brings us back to an ACTUAL balancing dilemma with NWN - lack of granularity of some mechanics, like death magic and criticals. Their inherent nature makes them difficult to balance. Your perspective, however inartfully presented, that such mechanics DEMAND an edging of the slider towards homogeneity in order to maintain balance is correct...unless you can has skillz.

With death magic, it's actually comparatively simple, if you take the time to get your SP/SR and DC/save balancings correct, though that is quite an undertaking in itself, and I understand why a lot of server ops simply don't bother. With criticals, we actually had to make them more granular. Hence, acaos' engine hacks to make DC and OC into crit range and damage alterers instead of all-out killers. And, of course, our partial crit immunity mechanic, which subtracts a varying percentange of crit damage to bring things back into a more acceptable standard deviation. We also introduced concealment reduction, again as a secondary mechanic to bring things into acceptable ranges of variance. Here's a listing of some of the relevant edits we've made towards this end:

Blind Fight
- Blind Fight's implementation has changed, but the effects have not. When swinging at enemies, the conceal you see in the combat log will be the adjusted concealment after Blind Fight and other conceal reduction, rather than the base concealment.
Devastating Critical
- Now adds +1 to critical hit multiplier for the weapon chosen instead of the normal effect.
Overwhelming Critical
- Now adds +1 to critical hit threat range for the weapon chosen in addition to the normal effect.
- If you have the Weapon Master Ki Critical feat, the threat range expansion will not work for any weapon.
Power Critical
- Power Critical feats require 6 BAB and Weapon Focus in the specified weapon and add +4 to critical confirmation rolls with that weapon.
Superior Critical
- Superior Critical feats require 23 base Dexterity and Power Critical in the specified weapon and add +6 (total +10) to critical confirmation rolls with that weapon.
Listen
- Increases your chances of hitting concealed enemies. Up to a skill of 60, the enemy concealment drops to (Concealment ** (1 + (Listen skill / 60))). With a skill above 60, the enemy concealment drops to (Concealment ** (1.5 + (Listen skill / 120))).
- A Listen skill of 60 is equivalent to having the Blind-Fight feat in reducing enemy concealment, and skill and feat do not stack. '**' is the exponentiation operator.
- If the above sounds too complex, remember that effective enemy conceal will be shown in-game.
- Being deafened halves your effective listen skill - after all other calculations
Parry
- Reduces damage taken from critical hits. The total damage taken is reduced by 1% per 2 points of Parry skill above 20, to a maximum of 50% with a skill of 120.
- A skill of 100 or higher grants immunity to Assassin Mortal Strike.
Item Properties
- There are no items with Improved Evasion on Higher Ground.
- There are only two items with immunity to critical hits.
- All other item properties can be found, though some may be scarcer than others.
- Specific immunity to fear and paralysis on items do have benefits that immunity to mind spells does not cover.
Level/Ability Drain Immunity
- Level/ability drain immunity on items now grants immunity only to level drain. Immunity to ability drain must be acquired separately.
Sneak Attack Immunity
- Immunity to critical hits no longer grants immunity to sneak attacks. Immunity to sneak attacks must be acquired separately.

Pretty much every one of those edits, any many others, have been implemented (often via engine hacks) in order to address the issue of granularity as discussed above. Hopefully this was illuminating. Here's a broader perspective on the issue, which has application in many realms: Wiki entry

Summarized as simply as I can, the tension is not between homogeneity and 'Rock Paper Scissors', it's between granularity and simplicity. Granularity issues with certain mechanics present problems which you can either solve by elimination (homogenizing and thereby decreasing complexity) or by introducing offsetting mechanisms (increasing complexity).

Funky

[Squatting Monk]

This is some good stuff to think about, Funky. Any tips you can give on how a server admin can approach this balancing (especially if you don't have a wizard like acaos to assist you)?

[FunkySwerve]

Squatting Monk wrote...

This is some good stuff to think about, Funky. Any tips you can give on how a server admin can approach this balancing (especially if you don't have a wizard like acaos to assist you)?

Hmm. Well, it all depends on the amount of time and effort you're willing to invest. Even balanced DCs for death magic can take many, many hours of number-crunching, even before you get to implementation, which you can save a lot of time on with moneo and mass edits, if you have a lot of out-of-whack values.

I can't offer more specific numerical advice, since the specific numbers are highly dependant on what level range you allow, what feats you block, if any, what kind of equipment props you have on available gear, and relative ease of other means of killing mobs. The fastest way of arriving at an answer is playtest. I've been at this on HG since 2004, and I'm *STILL* tweaking our mob statting, based on player feedback, which we're fortunate enough to have plenty of. Most recently, we upped dc and ac on mobs by about 4 points, relative to where they are in our last area sets, on the end-game content we're planning, even AFTER accounting for additional level bonuses and increased gear props. This makes mobs considerably more difficult to kill, though we also tweaked other aspects, in the ever-evolving effort to balance all our class roles.

The next step up from data gathering and save/dc/immunity tweaking would be to swap your server to linux and use nwnx, which opens up an immense array of options for mechanic tweaking. Aside from all the hacks I mentioned, nearly all of which are publicly available via acaos' publicly-posted nwnx plugins, a current (and longstanding) area of focus for us is tweaking weapon balancing, using both fractional crit multipliers (like 2.5), and altered iterations (values 4, 6, and 7, in addition to the 5 standard and 3 for monk weapons). Unfotunately, that means some absurdly complicated engine edits, so that's been backburned for a bit. You can see the planned edits on this graph, if you're curious, though a lot of the numbercrunching that went into it isn't terribly transparent:
Click Me

Looking back, a lot of that advice was pretty tangential and anecdotal. The granularity problem is a knotty one, and MM is correct in pointing to it as a flaw in NWN's game mechanincs. Indeed, it's been a longstanding debate in the community on a number of fronts, most notably with Dev Crit, though it's often dumbed down as a debate over OverPoweredness. I guess I can offer some general practical advice as well, that might well have been lost in the ramblings of my last post. The discussion there, brief as it was on this subject, centered on the use of 'randomness', via the introductino of more complex mechanics, as a cure rather than an aggravator to the problem of granularity. I can see how that isn't terribly clear there, so I'll elaborate.

We basically want combat results to fall into a natural bell curve, described by a 'standard deviation' under which a given percent of outcomes fall. MM alluded to this indirectly in his post, noting that WoW designers were hewing increasingly towards a smaller and smaller standard deviation in DPS. I don't really agree with his other conclusions, for the reasons I pointed to, or the focus by WoW designers on DPS to the exclusion of other, more refined metrics (which are, by virtue of their increased complexity, more difficult to yardstick), but the fundamental concept of balance - the bell curve of outcomes - is the same.

Lack of granularity distorts the bell curve. There are a number of ways to measure it, but if you want to break it down as simply as possible, you're going to care about the time per kill in one way or another (along with the number of kills required to achieve a given amount of reward). In general terms, you can break this down to DPS even for death magic, once you know the average number of hps you're dealing with. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that you actually go out and figure that out - only that even highly non-granular mechanics can be described using the same metrics as their more granular cousins. Using DPS, since it's comparatively simple, we can calculate death magic dps by multiplying total hp by the liklihood of the death outcome (failed save). With non-death magic, it's easy to tweak both determinants of the curve, by either reducing damage packet size (less than total death, on average), or by frequency of damage occurance. The equation, in simple terms, is DxF, damage times frequency. With death magic, by contrast, you can only adjust F, the frequency of occurance, for any given mob. As a result, death magic (and dev crit) are inherently 'spikier', and consequently harder to balance. This is further aggravated by the d20 system, which limits the granularity of F to 5%, making it VERY easy to create mobs that will be disproportionately affected or unaffected by death magic - you're aiming at a pretty narrow set of target values.

So, what can you do about this? You can introduce other offsetting mechanincs - additional random rolls, where randomness can introduce greater granularity. Even vanilla NWN offers one obvious method - spell resistance. Instead of one factor of granularity, saving throw, you immediately get two, which allows FAR greater granularity of outcomes (multiplicatively). instead of 20 possible 'grains', you get 20x20, or 400. The D side of the equation is unchanged, but you can now finely tune the F side, making it conform much more closely to your desired standard deviation of outcomes. Instead of death resulting in a minimum of 1 in 20 times (fail on 1, for non-immunes), you can tweak it as low as 1 in 400, achieving a DPS much more in parity with meleer outcomes. That is, via introduction of randomness via another roll in the mechanics of the outcome, you have increased the granularity of outcomes to a point where you can hone it much more satisfactorily.

Now, a lot of that sounds very mathematical and precise - I am, after all, advocating increased complexity of mechanics as the answer to the granularity problem. In practice, however, achieving the proper mix of outcomes is both more intuitive and less labor-intensive than all that sounds. The real key is player perception - as a game, the point is of course player enjoyment of the game experience (put as simply as possible). This was also alluded to in MM's post, as the WoW dev acknowledged as much, when he discussed trends of player demands. The key is to tweak your numbers until things feel relatively balanced, bearing in mind that players will tend to advocate with a fair amount of bias in favor of their pet classes. And, as counterintuitive as it may seem, you can actually ease this process by introducing still MORE factors - more area-specific ones, like mob immunities. If you've honed DCs pretty carefully, but are still unsatisfied with the killcounts from death magic, you can do further tweaking with carefull application of Death Magic Immunity, applying it to targeted creatures, some of which will likely be pretty powerful, while leaving it as the simplest way to kill other powerful mobs - carving out specific roles for death magic users on an area-by-area basis. You don't need to get it perfect - this is the 'deviation' in standard deviation - you just need to get it close, so that players of the build in question feel satisfaction in their contribution, and players of all other builds don't feel that their contributions are unduly marginalized by that role's contribution.

That is to say, you can smooth unduly spikey bell curves by application of multiple vectors of random outcomes (save vs DC, SP vs SR), using increasingly complex mechanics to provide the granularity otherwise lacking in the system. You can also smooth results by means of selective (area-based), rather than systemic (mod-wide) variation, even when systemic mechanics like saves, dc, sp, and sr fall short on their own. More simply, increased complexity cures lack of granularity, but you don't have to get lost in the numbers. Just be aware of the various tools available to you, and use them as you see fit to achieve the balance you desire.

When it comes to things like critting (both devastating and otherwise), we felt too limited by the system's default mechanics to get the balance we wanted, so acaos improvised. I can't really offer any practical advice for other ways to go about that, as default critting mechanics offer limited 'tools' for tweaking (aka few points to introduce granularity), and WM abilities present some special challenges (as you can surmise by looking at the above-linked weapon critical charts). I CAN say, however, that that is generally the exception to the rule - in most things, NWN provides ample mechanisms to introduce granularity.

Sorry, that wound up being a bit more long-winded than intended, but these can be tricky concepts.

Funky

Modifié par FunkySwerve, 11 janvier 2013 - 04:49 .

[Lazarus Magni]

Oh goodness… I hesitate to weigh in on this but hey…

I haven’t read all the points in this thread, and many of you know I enjoy a good debate, but I am not really clear what this is about. Balance???

Balance is a relative term. It’s relative to the module environment, and the goals of the developers.

What is balanced for one PW certainly is not necessarily so for another.

For example, what is balanced for us on Av3, certainly would not be for a mod capped at level 40. E.G. Heavy armors being allowed +20 so that str builds can compete with dexers (robes are capped at +11) at higher levels.

Or let’s say allowing crit immune… We don’t allow this on items, so the only PCs that have it are PMs and Undead shifters. But they are balanced by something we call a melee factor (for melee builds) which is substantially lower for these builds, and subsequently results in less offensive potential from our post 40 system, than other builds (like say a fighter, WM) of the same level.

Same with casters… PMs sacrifice 10 CL for crit immune, and given our post 40 caster dmg bonus is 1% from the base (and all dmg spells have been uncapped for CL) they give up quite a bit of base dmg (and subsequently post 40 dmg) for the sake of defense (Crit immune). Or take a world that allows undead subraces, this can easily be balanced by including NPC mobs with dmg vs undead (eg pallys or clerics) into a number of areas.

Or let’s say dexer vs wisdom based monks on Av3 for example. Dexers benefit from higher AC due to a modification to blinding speed (not to mention reflex saves boosting imp evasion), but unarmed wisdom based monk benefit from higher DC on stunning fist/ QP (which also increased the HD in the calc post 40) and both armed (which have their weapon potential expanded to things like Katanas or bo staffs [quarter staffs] and others) and unarmed have the option for using their wisdom for their AB, so it’s a trade off.

My point is most good PW owners are concerned with balance, and strive toward this aim based off their environment. And it’s a highly relative term given the custom environments in NWN 1 (unlike some other games like *cough* WOW *cough*), A good PW developer can easily achieve balance (easy as in it’s not hard theoretically or technically (unless some complex customization), but can take a lot of work [e.g. balancing DCs vs Saves for NPC vs PC]).

If you ask me, NWN 1 has the potential to be as balanced or not as any developer would like it to be, and cares to put the time in toward that aim. Of course there are some limitations, but it is a highly flexible system that can achieve almost any balance a PW would like (or single player module for that matter.)

Modifié par Lazarus Magni, 11 janvier 2013 - 05:21 .

[leo_x]

FunkySwerve wrote...
The next step up from data gathering and save/dc/immunity tweaking would be to swap your server to linux and use nwnx, which opens up an immense array of options for mechanic tweaking. Aside from all the hacks I mentioned, nearly all of which are publicly available via acaos' publicly-posted nwnx plugins, a current (and longstanding) area of focus for us is tweaking weapon balancing, using both fractional crit multipliers (like 2.5), and altered iterations (values 4, 6, and 7, in addition to the 5 standard and 3 for monk weapons). Unfotunately, that means some absurdly complicated engine edits, so that's been backburned for a bit. You can see the planned edits on this graph, if you're curious, though a lot of the numbercrunching that went into it isn't terribly transparent:
Click Me

This is somewhat tangential to the rest of the topic, but I thought I'd ask while I had the chance. Regarding engine edits is/was there a reason for not just completely replacing functionality rather than using smaller hooks?

I've been working on a linux nwnx project for awhile that aims to do some similar things, in so far as it makes virtually all the combat/damage roll scriptable (via the scripting language Lua, not NWScript). I took the approach of just redoing everything. These are the engine hook entry points that I found necessary to takeover.

I think if someone did it in C(++) there could be some big gains in performance over the default NWN engine which caches basically no combat calculations. Even using Lua I can get an average of 4ms for resolving an attack on an ancient Pentium D server, which seems performant enough.

[Aelis Eine]

FunkySwerve wrote...

One- (or two-) trick-ponies are inherent balance problems, preceisely because they are either overpowered or useless, depending on the area...

Just a quick aside... aren't most NWN characters, especially melee characters, one or two-trick ponies? I'm pretty sure the only thing say, a Fighter/WM/Monk can do is "damage spam". What other tactics do melee characters get access to on HG to increase their skill cap?

FunkySwerve wrote...

*stuff about weapon damage*

I'd honestly rather have less weapons, but more diverse weapon specialization options. There should be more to a weapon than how hard it hits on X target, but admittedly NWN is a little too limited to implement some of the more interesting things I've seen in other MMOs, like daggers granting very mobile attacks to easily chase and outmaneuver an opponent or polearms granting powerful attacks that send mobs flying.

As you said in your later post, there should be more factors to consider than DPS, or at least, DPS by left click autoattacking.

FunkySwerve wrote...

*stuff about death magic*

The main thing I don't like about the approach of tweaking saves/SR is the collateral damage. In order to accommodate a single effect - instant death. If I raise fort saves, I have to give up the lower DC spells in the rest of the Necromancy school, i.e. the curses, the diseases and poisons, as well as other fort-based debuffs like blindness, deafness etc, and IMO there is a lot more tactical depth to be found in focusing on non-instant death effects. Conversely, if I raise SR, I close the door to melee/magic hybrids that don't have the caster levels. I believe you admitted this yourself when you say your mages don't melee - I infer that also means your melees don't mage. Additionally, that also means I just created a feat sink for pure mages, i.e. if you are a mage, the 3 SP feats are as good as taken for you, otherwise missing that +6 SP in a d20 game is going to be huge.

Of course, it could simply be an issue of raising the DCs on fort-based non-death spells (or lowering the DCs on death spells, although that approach tends to invite more complaints even though the outcome is the same), but that's a lot of work to give players the option of letting RNG play the game for them.

[FunkySwerve]

Lazarus Magni wrote...

Balance is a relative term. It’s relative to the module environment, and the goals of the developers.

What is balanced for one PW certainly is not necessarily so for another.

Balance isn't really relative, though there are certainly a number of ways of achieving it that will almost certainly very from PW to PW. There are inherent problems presented by game mechanics that are objectively imbalanced, which is what MM was driving at when he brought up death magic and crits. These are issues that are not simply relative, though they can be amerliorated by varying degrees on different servers, by different means. They are, however, subject to objective evaluation, which is of course what game theory seeks to do. It's not purely subjective.

My point is most good PW owners are concerned with balance, and strive toward this aim based off their environment. And it’s a highly relative term given the custom environments in NWN 1 (unlike some other games like *cough* WOW *cough*), A good PW developer can easily achieve balance (easy as in it’s not hard theoretically or technically (unless some complex customization), but can take a lot of work [e.g. balancing DCs vs Saves for NPC vs PC]).

I agree with this entirely.

If you ask me, NWN 1 has the potential to be as balanced or not as any developer would like it to be, and cares to put the time in toward that aim. Of course there are some limitations, but it is a highly flexible system that can achieve almost any balance a PW would like (or single player module for that matter.)

These two notions - unlimited potential and 'some limitations' - are at loggerheads. You can't have both, though I agree with the spirit which you're expressing. My main concern in this thread is to address those limitations and the means for circumventing them, to expand the potential for balance, to the extent that that's possible.

Funky

[FunkySwerve]

pope_leo wrote...

This is somewhat tangential to the rest of the topic, but I thought I'd ask while I had the chance. Regarding engine edits is/was there a reason for not just completely replacing functionality rather than using smaller hooks?

You'd have to ask acaos about that, and he's been far too busy of late to do any work on the engine.

I've been working on a linux nwnx project for awhile that aims to do some similar things, in so far as it makes virtually all the combat/damage roll scriptable (via the scripting language Lua, not NWScript). I took the approach of just redoing everything. These are the engine hook entry points that I found necessary to takeover.

I think if someone did it in C(++) there could be some big gains in performance over the default NWN engine which caches basically no combat calculations. Even using Lua I can get an average of 4ms for resolving an attack on an ancient Pentium D server, which seems performant enough.

I would be VERY interested in working with you on that, and indeed, in learning to do engine edits myself - that's pretty much the point at which my self-taught coding experience hits a wall, despite some C learning independant of nwscript to cover pointers etc. Please contact me if you don't mind doing some tutoring - I've spent some time sifting through NWN in a disassembler, but the broader process of making a plugin for nwnx is still lost on me - even something as simple as compiling with make in linux.

As to your 4ms for attack resolution, I don't want to pretend at any expertise there, but that seems VERY high, given the potential number of attacks per round. I'll consult with acaos about this, but attacks are very frequent on our servers, nearly as much so as silent shouts, and 4ms per attack...eh. It's definitely worth discussing and attempting, at any rate.

Funky

[FunkySwerve]

Aelis Eine wrote...

Just a quick aside... aren't most NWN characters, especially melee characters, one or two-trick ponies? I'm pretty sure the only thing say, a Fighter/WM/Monk can do is "damage spam". What other tactics do melee characters get access to on HG to increase their skill cap?

Yes and no. I'd agree that many tend that way, but there are of course other abilities, like skills etc, which you can bring into consideration to redress that. We try to 'stress' builds by creating need. We like to try to force use of ranged weapons, for example, though that mainly comes to my mind first because it's the least successful thing we've done in this arena, and the one I'm currently working on. We also have created a huge variety of enemy defensive profiles, so that meleers have to swap weapons in order to be most effective, and in many cases to avoid counterproductive healing of mobs (salamanders like fire). We've also created mobs that are counter-effective to just blindly swipe away at by other means - ones that simply spawn more, like Arcane Oozes, unless dealt with properly, and others that 'kick back' damage. Players are rewarded tactically for drawing spawns to them, rather than blindly rushing in, and 'tank' builds are often useful for drawing mob attention while other build types deal damage. And, of course, there's healing to consider, and we've introduced a whole host of negative effects requiring amelioration of some kind or another, which most melee builds try to introduce in some way in their builds - by scroll or rod use, if nothing else.  Carity, NEP pots, Stone to Flesh, Rez, etc. We also introduced a player 'assist' tool to pick up kd'd allies. And, of course,meleer builds get sub-specialities, to an extent. Those with better conceal penetration via blind fight,or high levels of listen, will be much more effective on foes with high concealment, while others have small amounts of unresistable damage which is valuable against highly resistant foes. There's also a variety of stat checks they face, requiring them to pay close attention to the foes they're facing, and to tailor their builds accordingly. You won't, for example, want to stand to close to a stomping Goristro, if you're not a strength build. All this combines to keep even hack n' slashers on their toes, so that they're constsantly having to adapt tactics to the situation, even when they don't have a particular non-hacking abilitiy that applies to a situation.

Then, of course, there are build-specific options we've tailored to be more useful, like our ranger's Mark, or the assassin's death blow, which are very good at taking out particular enemies, and even moreso with certain group synergies (the assassin's blow, for example, is a discipline check, and can only take out certain enemies if they've had theier disc debuffed by a bard's curse song). Going into all of those would take a book, though I can refer you to our class Edits forum:
Click Me

I'd honestly rather have less weapons, but more diverse weapon specialization options. There should be more to a weapon than how hard it hits on X target, but admittedly NWN is a little too limited to implement some of the more interesting things I've seen in other MMOs, like daggers granting very mobile attacks to easily chase and outmaneuver an opponent or polearms granting powerful attacks that send mobs flying.

As you said in your later post, there should be more factors to consider than DPS, or at least, DPS by left click autoattacking.

That's true (though my specific point there had more to do with other factors than AB going into DPS), but there already IS quite a bit there. If you look at the critter defense profiles, you'll see that each has different weaknesses, including physical resists and immunities. You're going to be a LOT less effective swinging a katana at a balor than you are a blunt weapon, for example. Of course, there are already a ton of factors besides AB - AC being the most obvious one. The value of different weapon iterations changes quite a bit based on the AB-AC differential. There's also crit range, crit multiplier, the aforementioned resists and immunes, and conceal, just to rattle off the ones that come immediately to mind. And for non-DPS options, the things I mentioned above, like tanking, assist, removing maluses, and so on.

Anyway, with the weapon edits, the goal was to make all weapons useful in some role, while at the same time trying to make them all distinctive (though we weren't completely succesful at that, if you look at the trident, for example, vis a vis spear, which is identical other than its ability to be dualed, which the trident lacks).

The main thing I don't like about the approach of tweaking saves/SR is the collateral damage. In order to accommodate a single effect - instant death. If I raise fort saves, I have to give up the lower DC spells in the rest of the Necromancy school, i.e. the curses, the diseases and poisons, as well as other fort-based debuffs like blindness, deafness etc, and IMO there is a lot more tactical depth to be found in focusing on non-instant death effects. Conversely, if I raise SR, I close the door to melee/magic hybrids that don't have the caster levels. I believe you admitted this yourself when you say your mages don't melee - I infer that also means your melees don't mage. Additionally, that also means I just created a feat sink for pure mages, i.e. if you are a mage, the 3 SP feats are as good as taken for you, otherwise missing that +6 SP in a d20 game is going to be huge.

While it's always the case that there are secondary consequences to edits, it is not the case that they are beyond control. You'll recall, for example, that I regarded our mages' inability to melee as a great failing, but it pre-existed most of our tweaks, and isn't really irreparable - it'd just take a lot of time, and we have more pressing priorities, since our mages already have very diverse roles in combat. It is, however, one reason we haven't lowered the number of spellslots we give them.

Anyway, back on point, there's nothing about tweaking of saves and SR that means you can't have melee/magic hybrids - you just don't apply that SR to everything, and you don't put SR checks on all spells, either (bioware certainly didn't, nor did A/D&D). Or, you give certain class combinations full casterlevels for certain types of spells, as we did with our quasiclasses. Again, increased complexity in the particulars, rather than the system-wide properties, can easily redress these kinds of issues, in all sorts of ways. In fact, if you find that tweaking saves to accomodate one ability throws another out of whack, it's a great sign that you need to edit one or both of those abilities instead of or in addition to modding the saves. That's why we tweaked Stunning Fist, for example - it was pretty useless as it was. Likewise, we made our PM touch AoE and regenerative...the lists goes on and on. But to get back to the core of your objection, yes, if you change something, you should expect to have to change more, and then more based on that, as even simple edits can have unforseen repercussions. It's all down to the amount of effort you're willing to invest, and in finding which tweaks work best and require the fewest zots. This issue - changes having secondary effects - will exist whether or not you decide you want to actively engage in balancing on yoru server, so if you throw up your hands and surrender to what you see as an insurmountable problem, balance will increasingly suffer just by virtue of adding new content.

That said, your point about featsinks is well taken, though it isn't the problem you see it as, so much as it's an opportunity to manufacture build diversity, by forcing build choices. We actually added a whole new layer of focuses to our caster spells for this express purpose, in paragon levels, though we reduced the DC bonus to one to bring DCs into a slightly tighter range, while limiting the number of paragon spells a caster could get (they require the focus to cast).

In the end, one could attempt to portray any given aspect of balancing as an intractable problem, but it's more akin to a balancing act. Very few things are truly intractable. In this discussion, I'm simply trying to focus on those that are tougher than most - those dealing with granularity - and offer practical solutions.

Of course, it could simply be an issue of raising the DCs on fort-based non-death spells (or lowering the DCs on death spells, although that approach tends to invite more complaints even though the outcome is the same), but that's a lot of work to give players the option of letting RNG play the game for them.

Yes, it is a lot of work, but 'letting RNG play the game for them' isn't why you're dong it. In fact, it's quite the opposite - if you fail to make various build characteristics useful and meaningful, you're not only cutting them out of the game entirely, for all practical intents and purposes, you're also limiting the character's build choices for him - removing not only tactical options, but build ones as well. Sure, the more mechanics you introduce, the more complex things get, but the more diversity of play there is. There is no magical characteristic of death magic that makes it any more or less based on the RNG than any other - just the aforementioned lack of granularity.

Funky

[Aelis Eine]

FunkySwerve wrote...

Yes and no. I'd agree that many tend that way, but there are of course other abilities, like skills etc, which you can bring into consideration to redress that. We try to 'stress' builds by creating need. We like to try to force use of ranged weapons, for example, though that mainly comes to my mind first because it's the least successful thing we've done in this arena, and the one I'm currently working on. We also have created a huge variety of enemy defensive profiles, so that meleers have to swap weapons in order to be most effective, and in many cases to avoid counterproductive healing of mobs (salamanders like fire). We've also created mobs that are counter-effective to just blindly swipe away at by other means - ones that simply spawn more, like Arcane Oozes, unless dealt with properly, and others that 'kick back' damage. Players are rewarded tactically for drawing spawns to them, rather than blindly rushing in, and 'tank' builds are often useful for drawing mob attention while other build types deal damage. And, of course, there's healing to consider, and we've introduced a whole host of negative effects requiring amelioration of some kind or another, which most melee builds try to introduce in some way in their builds - by scroll or rod use, if nothing else.  Carity, NEP pots, Stone to Flesh, Rez, etc. We also introduced a player 'assist' tool to pick up kd'd allies. And, of course,meleer builds get sub-specialities, to an extent. Those with better conceal penetration via blind fight,or high levels of listen, will be much more effective on foes with high concealment, while others have small amounts of unresistable damage which is valuable against highly resistant foes. There's also a variety of stat checks they face, requiring them to pay close attention to the foes they're facing, and to tailor their builds accordingly. You won't, for example, want to stand to close to a stomping Goristro, if you're not a strength build. All this combines to keep even hack n' slashers on their toes, so that they're constsantly having to adapt tactics to the situation, even when they don't have a particular non-hacking abilitiy that applies to a situation.

Then, of course, there are build-specific options we've tailored to be more useful, like our ranger's Mark, or the assassin's death blow, which are very good at taking out particular enemies, and even moreso with certain group synergies (the assassin's blow, for example, is a discipline check, and can only take out certain enemies if they've had theier disc debuffed by a bard's curse song). Going into all of those would take a book, though I can refer you to our class Edits forum:
Click Me

It does appear that HG has done more than the average PW to introduce tactical variety to melee classes. Other than what you've listed, I see AoE control skills like Greater melee feats and support skills like infinite use Shadow Dazes, so I can see that melee characters have more to do on HG than straight up DPS. Not quite on the same level as what I'm used to on other games, but given the engine limitations and choice to stick to D&D rules that's understandable. Conversely, that also implies the base game is sorely lacking in those areas.

That said, I don't really consider things that happen at the character building stage to be part of tactics, because tactics tend to imply short term decision making, but build choices tend to be more long term commitments. So some things you mentioned, like Blind Fight and Listen, are always on, so maybe they do create avenues for specialization, but as far as actual gameplay is concerned, they still do the same thing as another melee character, just that different numbers roll out of the combat log.

That's true (though my specific point there had more to do with other factors than AB going into DPS), but there already IS quite a bit there. If you look at the critter defense profiles, you'll see that each has different weaknesses, including physical resists and immunities. You're going to be a LOT less effective swinging a katana at a balor than you are a blunt weapon, for example. Of course, there are already a ton of factors besides AB - AC being the most obvious one. The value of different weapon iterations changes quite a bit based on the AB-AC differential. There's also crit range, crit multiplier, the aforementioned resists and immunes, and conceal, just to rattle off the ones that come immediately to mind. And for non-DPS options, the things I mentioned above, like tanking, assist, removing maluses, and so on.

What I meant specifically, is that on say, The Secret World, every weapon does DPS. However, they are differentiated not solely by DPS, but other factors as well. A sword user would usually to have an easier time applying bleeding attacks and taking advantage of bleeding opponents, while deflecting incoming attacks. A claw user on the other hand would tend to have better self-healing abilities and gain bonuses for landing consecutive hits. Of course, the DPS curve would still be relevant for DPS-oriented characters, but such a model could blur the lines enough that the highest direct DPS weapon might not necessarily be the best weapon, and this fits well with your argument for increasing complexity in the particulars.

In NWN for example, Daggers and Kukris are in direct competition with each other, with both being tiny, finessable weapons. Kukris cost an extra feat, so the extra crit is justifiable. But suppose I add a new feat line - one feat that increases poison DC on daggers  - explained in lore that puncturing weapons are better at applying poison, another feat that greatly increases poison duration. Then I expand the poison system for scaling DCs benchmarked against high level mages, and effects benchmarked against other non-stacking debuffs like Curse Song and Energy Drain. So that suddently, Assassins get a gameplay-altering choice - do they want to be pure DPS or do they want to be more support-oriented with poison debuffs that help the party?

*Disclaimer: I know Kukris aren't the best choice for Assassins in the stock game, but I haven't been playing PWs lately and I've been playing around with my custom ruleset that has crit bonuses tied to Dex so I can't really see Assassins any other way right now.

Anyway, back on point, there's nothing about tweaking of saves and SR that means you can't have melee/magic hybrids - you just don't apply that SR to everything, and you don't put SR checks on all spells, either (bioware certainly didn't, nor did A/D&D). Or, you give certain class combinations full casterlevels for certain types of spells, as we did with our quasiclasses. Again, increased complexity in the particulars, rather than the system-wide properties, can easily redress these kinds of issues, in all sorts of ways. In fact, if you find that tweaking saves to accomodate one ability throws another out of whack, it's a great sign that you need to edit one or both of those abilities instead of or in addition to modding the saves. That's why we tweaked Stunning Fist, for example - it was pretty useless as it was. Likewise, we made our PM touch AoE and regenerative...the lists goes on and on. But to get back to the core of your objection, yes, if you change something, you should expect to have to change more, and then more based on that, as even simple edits can have unforseen repercussions. It's all down to the amount of effort you're willing to invest, and in finding which tweaks work best and require the fewest zots. This issue - changes having secondary effects - will exist whether or not you decide you want to actively engage in balancing on yoru server, so if you throw up your hands and surrender to what you see as an insurmountable problem, balance will increasingly suffer just by virtue of adding new content.

That said, your point about featsinks is well taken, though it isn't the problem you see it as, so much as it's an opportunity to manufacture build diversity, by forcing build choices. We actually added a whole new layer of focuses to our caster spells for this express purpose, in paragon levels, though we reduced the DC bonus to one to bring DCs into a slightly tighter range, while limiting the number of paragon spells a caster could get (they require the focus to cast).

In the end, one could attempt to portray any given aspect of balancing as an intractable problem, but it's more akin to a balancing act. Very few things are truly intractable. In this discussion, I'm simply trying to focus on those that are tougher than most - those dealing with granularity - and offer practical solutions.

Of course, it could simply be an issue of raising the DCs on fort-based non-death spells (or lowering the DCs on death spells, although that approach tends to invite more complaints even though the outcome is the same), but that's a lot of work to give players the option of letting RNG play the game for them.

Yes, it is a lot of work, but 'letting RNG play the game for them' isn't why you're dong it. In fact, it's quite the opposite - if you fail to make various build characteristics useful and meaningful, you're not only cutting them out of the game entirely, for all practical intents and purposes, you're also limiting the character's build choices for him - removing not only tactical options, but build ones as well. Sure, the more mechanics you introduce, the more complex things get, but the more diversity of play there is. There is no magical characteristic of death magic that makes it any more or less based on the RNG than any other - just the aforementioned lack of granularity.

Funky

I believe we're moving towards the same ends here, but with different approaches. SInce I have 0 playerbase in the testing stage, I have the liberty to discard existing playstyles in favour of new ones. On the other hand, you have time to fix up death magic, but some other things like weapon DPS was put on the back burner. Not directly related I"m sure, but I imagine there is some sort of priority list in place.

Ultimately I see Necromancy as a dotty, lifestealing, curse and disease-spreading, fear-inducing class, and mages only get access to 2 fear spells, one disease spell, 2 DoTs that aren't even Necromancy and one lifesteal. So I feel that before even thinking about Death Magic, there are a lot of other playstyles I need to flesh out first.

That said, I think I've only seen one MMO that uses chance vs. instant death as a mechanic. The death spell in that game was a slow-moving ball of death that travelled in a straight line, so it actually required some skill to land, And only certain types of enemies were very vulnerable to it. But when it was useful, it was pretty darn useful, so I see where you're coming from.

Modifié par Aelis Eine, 12 janvier 2013 - 03:39 .

[FunkySwerve]

Yeah, I pretty much agree about the limits of melee classes in vanilla NWN. The animation and scale limit you pretty severely when you compare it to melee moves in something like Kingdom of Amalur. Your disablers can be somewhat one-dimension.

I didn't mean to imply that build-stage choices were tactical - they definitely aren't. Not sure where that came from, though I vaguely remember pointing that out as one of the effects of homogenizing.

In the MMO with the death mechanic, was it PvM only? HG tends to be predominantly PvM, and balancing death mechanics for PvP would be quite tricky - with or without immunity items.

Funky

[Aelis Eine]

FunkySwerve wrote...

Yeah, I pretty much agree about the limits of melee classes in vanilla NWN. The animation and scale limit you pretty severely when you compare it to melee moves in something like Kingdom of Amalur. Your disablers can be somewhat one-dimension.

I've found that some ideas in The Secret World translate fairly well to NWN, which is why I used it as an example. Like NWN, autoattacks are used a lot in The Secret World, and many of its effects can be simulated with OnHIts and ApplyEffectToTargets.

I didn't mean to imply that build-stage choices were tactical - they definitely aren't. Not sure where that came from, though I vaguely remember pointing that out as one of the effects of homogenizing.

You mentioned Blind Fight and Listen in response to my question so that might have been a misread.

In the MMO with the death mechanic, was it PvM only? HG tends to be predominantly PvM, and balancing death mechanics for PvP would be quite tricky - with or without immunity items.

It was indeed PvM-only for its second iteration. The first version had PvP, but PvP wasn't very active even then.

[MagicalMaster]

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

No, I was talking about the races themselves, which are critical in a properly balanced PW. Sure, many of them have general characteristics, but if you look back you'll see I mentioned class abilities (like turning and defoliate) which specifically target by race. It's just one of myriad creature characteristics which an absolutely homogenous approach destroys.[/quote]

Let me get this straight: you're arguing that a PW cannot be balanced unless there are different races with spells/abilities that specifically target different races?

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

The problem is that, the further you stray from completely homogenous mobs, the more complex the task of balancing becomes. Once you reframe the issue in that manner, I think what I'm saying will become clearer.[/quote]

Not particularly (on the reframing).

I'm suggesting an approach that advocates trying to make all playstyles (or as many as possible) effective in every situation.  This doesn't mean all playstyles have the exact same stats and abilities, simply that the net effect is to have them all roughly equal in every situation.

You're suggesting deliberately making some playstyles drastically more effective in some situations than others.

More on this further down.

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Again, while I'd like to be polite, I can only laugh. You're advocating an extremely dumbed-down, simplistic approach to server balance, and then saying of my far more nuanced approach that I simply don't grasp or have any regard for balance - without anything to support the notion, other than a vague reference to my second post. My gut reaction to this is something along the lines of 'what a bleeping n00blet.' It's hard to overstate the arrogance of your characterization, or to square it with your apparent oblviousness to said arrogance. I would say quite a bit more on that topic and the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I'm trying to be civil. I'll leave it to others to determine how successful I've been. [/quote]

Ouch.  My wounded ego.

For those unaware, the Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that incompetent people are too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence, thus they believe they are better than they actually are (roughly stated for the part of the effect relevant to Funky's comment).

So let's talk competence!

I can mathematically prove that the raiding guild (group PvE content) I run in WoW is in the top 2% of raiding guilds (and that's on two nights a week, versus 3-4+ nights for our competitors).  Furthermore, Blizzard has stated that something like only 10% of the playerbase even does organized raids.  That would put me roughly in the top 0.2% of the WoW population for PvE ability.  Even if we assume we're off by as much as a factor of five for whatever reason, that still puts me in the top 1%.  I have played at this level for something like five years in an extremely competitive environment and often ranked in the top 200 players of my spec (out of something probably like 250,000 players of said spec).

Does this make me a balance guru?  Of course not.  But it does mean that I can testify to the effects of different balancing methods in a competitive environment where it matters.  I have seen the effects in WoW when it was more like the ideal you describe (back in Vanilla and Burning Crusade).  I can tell you how competitive players will react to certain mechanics and situations.

And I never claimed you had no regard for balance.  I claimed you've never been in an environment where balance truly matters.  If nothing is sufficiently hard and/or there's no competition to speak of, then balance is far less important and imbalance has far fewer adverse effects (and you're free to do more "interesting" things).

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Agreed, up until the last sentence. I can think of no game, RTS or otherwise, that goes completely homogenous.[/quote]

http://tvtropes.org/...yDifferentSides

Warcraft I and II

Total Annihilation

Dark Colony

There's three (four if you count both Warcrafts) RTSes right there.

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Actually, yes, homogenization, to the extent you practice it, DOES mean things have to be exactly the same. Anything else is a step along that sliding scale towards what you are characterizating as RPS.[/quote]

Not really.  Let's say we have class A and class B.

I say "Okay, we'll give class A and class B different abilities.  Because of this, despite my best efforts class A is a few percent better in some situations and class B is a few percent better in others.  This difference is something I wish didn't exist but is an unfortunate reality of them not being identical."

You say "Okay, we'll give class A and class B different abilities.  Because of this, class A will be drastically better in some situations and class B drastically better in others.  This drastic difference is a good thing and critical for balance."

I'm only taking a step along your sliding scale to the extent that I think classes should exist.

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

I'm going to skip quoting most of this in the interest of brevity. To summarize, you point out that their run logs show a pretty low deviation in dps for the varying roles - you say 11% from the average. To achieve that number, you begin by throwing out the lowest 6 DPS roles, admitting their failure in terms of balance:[/quote]

Not quite, because you apparently ignored the whole point about longsword versus bastard sword.  Let's look at Arms versus Fury (warrior DPS specializations).  Let's say Fury is 4% above the average and Arms is 2% above the average.  No serious warrior is going to play Arms unlike there's some fight specific mechanic that favors it or unless he's just messing around.  However, Arms is still well within that 11% deviation in theory.  In practice, because the best players play Fury, Arms has lower parsed numbers and looks worse than it actually is.

Get the idea?

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

An unused class (or, by contrast, an overused class) is definitionally an imbalanced class. The unused ones might as well not be in the game, for our purposes, and the overused ones will quickly be exploited until nerfed. At this point I am left to wonder why it is you're holding up WoW as an example of 'balance.' [/quote]

None of those are unused classes.  They're "unused" damage specializations in classes that have two or more damage specializations.  Blizzard will never be able to get all damage specializations within a class perfectly identical (because the specializations are not identical), which means people will typically favor whichever specialization is the highest at the moment, even if it's by half a percent.

On a more general note, I'd somewhat agree with your statements here, the major caveats being user friendliness and enjoyment.  A class might deliver equal performance (however defined) but require more work to do so, making it less used.  This is often the case in NWN with melee versus casting classes (though casting classes are sometimes designed to be more powerful due to the extra effort required).  People may also find the mechanics of a certain class boring or unenjoyable, leading it to being played less.

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Anyway, to continue my summary, you then assume a certain range of AB without any explanation, and even more inexplicably assign a point of AB a value of 8.5% deviation. To be clear, when I say 'inexplicably', I do not mean that I don't understand, only that you're doing so without any explained basis.[/quote]

First, I assumed a range of AB where adding 1 AB would make a difference (because the AB isn't 20 or more lower than AC) and where the AB was not superior to the AC.  Do you object to either of those conditions (and if you do, I'm guessing you might wish to allow AB to be superior to AC)?

Second, I didn't assign an AB a value of 8.5%.  I said...

"a single point of AB is worth between 8.3% more hits and 40% more hits for a non-dual-wielder (more if we factor in Epic Dodge).  If we average those numbers, we wind up with roughly 24%.  But let's say we think that's on the high side, so we'll divide the number in half again, which gives us 12% (an AB of AC - 11 gives a 14% bonus, as a basis of comparison)."

I assumed you were sufficiently talented at basic math to understand how I got the 8.3% and 40% figures and you've claimed to have understood what I did.  Why, then, are you objecting to me not explaining said math?

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Of course, that doesn't speak to the even larger problem with your thesis: the notion that DPS is the only relevant determinant in what makes a build (or, in your parlance, a role) fun/rewarding to play, or able to contribute meaningfully.[/quote]

I don't think it's the only relevant determinant.  At a minimum you'll note I've mentioned the idea of tanking and healing in addition to damage.  Things such crowd control and interrupts (like failing a concentration casting check due to the opponent using an ability without actually causing damage) also exist but don't form entire roles in and of themselves - in fact, those tend to be handled by damage roles.

In other words, sometimes DPSers just deal damage (and avoid bad stuff on a fight).  Sometimes they deal damage and have to crowd control.  Sometimes they deal damage, have to crowd control, and interrupt abilities.  Sometimes they have to do all of these and handle additional fight specific mechanics.  It can be any combination of these things.

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Furthermore, if you look at that log, you'll see that the direct link between dps and ab you're trying to forge simply doesn't hold up, because of a variety of other gameplay mechanics like concealment and concealment penetration.[/quote]

Why?

Given otherwise identical builds with the difference that one has 1 more AB (and the other has 1 more Fort or something), concealment should affect both equally (assuming no Epic Dodge, which punishes the lower AB build more).

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Further, the exceedingly high dps of the sorc is NOT matched by a high number of kills - he was doing a lot of spead damage.[/quote]

What does number of kills have to do with anything?  Is that considered important on Higher Ground or something?  Do people literally compete to try to finish mobs off for some reason?

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

This obsession with DPS as the sole determinant of build/role success is a frequent source of bemoaning by our more veteran players. It's a real failing of WoW's balancing.[/quote]

It's an obsession for players who are performing the role of being the primary damage dealers.  Furthermore, the obsession is about equal opportunity - the idea that a rogue shouldn't be brought over a warrior for DPS solely because rogues are better at damage (or vice versa).

But equal opportunity of damage doesn't make it magically happen, the player still has to know how to play his class.  He also has to know how to avoid hostile mechanics, how to use defensive and movement cooldowns, and how to handle unique encounter mechanics while maintaining top notch DPS.

What I think is interesting here is how you're claiming you're familar with WoW but don't seem to realize that back in Vanilla and Burning Crusade WoW was more similar to what you're descirbing.  Shadow Priests did significantly less damage but restored magical energy, allowing more spellcasting by other players.  Other specializations/classes brought unique and powerful buffs (and again, did less damage to compensate for that fact).

There's a reason Blizzard decided to remove the unique aspect of Shadow Priests and some of the other specializations and equalize all damage specializations in potential DPS as much as possible.

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Of course, WoW is pretty far from a paragon of balance, as they pretty much throw out all their old content's challenge when they introduce their next expansion.[/quote]

What does this have to do with anything?

[quote]FunkySwerve wrote...

Totally with you on that one - I would redo NWN with the Rolemaster system, given the opportunity (it's d100 based, not d20, far more granular). I'll come back to this at the end, since I think we might actually get somewhere with it.[/quote]

Being able to use something larger than a d20 would help, but not solely because of granularity (which is an important issue).  A d20 simply can't handle a gap of 30 points between AB and AC, for example.  And higher level/higher magic worlds tend to get very large AB/AC/save gaps between different builds.

I'm exhausted right now and this forum is terrible at formatting (copy + paste causes huge problems), so I'm just posting this part now.  I'll get to the rest of the original reply by the end of the weekend.  I know there's quite a bit posted after your original reply and I'll just try to play things by ear, I guess.

Modifié par MagicalMaster, 19 janvier 2013 - 08:42 .

[WebShaman]

FunkySwerve wrote...

No, I was talking about the races themselves, which are critical in a properly balanced PW. Sure, many of them have general characteristics, but if you look back you'll see I mentioned class abilities (like turning and defoliate) which specifically target by race. It's just one of myriad creature characteristics which an absolutely homogenous approach destroys.



Let me get this straight: you're arguing that a PW cannot be balanced unless there are different races with spells/abilities that specifically target different races?

Well, this is not how I comprehend what FS posted - I believe he is simply stating that in environments with different Races (which is pretty much standard in most NWN Environments), it is critical to address them.

One thing that I see not being discussed here is the PvE (Player vs Environment) instead of just PvM (Player vs Monster).

DPS style games are inherently made for PvM stuff (and perhaps PvP, but that is a whole different can of worms).

D&D was not made primarily for PvM. Instead, it is a PvE style game. This is why one has different classes, with different roles, and why it is important to have the different roles in a party. A good party make-up always had the 4 critical roles in them :

A Warrior type, to handle Monsters.
A Priest type, to heal wounds, cure diseases, provide for substenance, etc - basically being able to provide aid against the negative effects of an environment.
A Rogue types, to help avoid the negative effects of an environment, provide scouting, and being able to overcome obstacles inherent in the environment (locked doors, chests, etc).
A Mage type, that provided basically the "catch all" for any surprises, but only for a limited amount of uses, that the environment provides. Plus basically the data bank (knowledge provider, lore, etc) of the party.

A well-made adventure in D&D is not just about x amount of monsters plus slay boss get treasure, earn XP. Instead, it is more along the lines of story line, overcome challenges of said environment, deal with the tricks, traps, etc of main villain(s), of course the obligatory slay x monster(s), get puzzle, clue, etc for next part, collect any treasure(s), gain XP, and so on, up to the culmination of defeat main villain.

One can also replace main villain here with a main topic (sort of like the Time of Troubles theme, with the PCs then striving to end the disturbance, without there actually being a "main villain" to bother them along the way).

This is why D&D has so many different types of environments - not just the normal "world" ones (like caves, forests, mountains, jungles, oceans, etc) but also the Outer Planes, and so on. Combinations of environments plus creatures, sprinkled with puzzles, conundrums, required lore, items, etc all combine to produce a more complex game.

And in the context of this complexity, one needs roles that provide the necessary skills to overcome these challenges.

This is far, far more complex an issue than mere "DPS" crud. This is why there are so many different skills, feats, Races, classes, etc - so that in a well-done D&D adventure, one has the necessary resources available to face the challenges provided.

DPS is really only applicable here for combat. Combat in a D&D game is only part of the aventure! It is mostly here that your warrior will shine - though of course in the tavern (and similar environments), your warrior may have other talents that may come in use (drinking contests, arm wrestling, etc). To get to combat, your party will probably have to make several uses of all three other roles here (Priest, Rogue, Wizard), as well as after combat (to obtain treasure, identify it, and provide necessary recuperation to survive returning to said tavern )

I always find the often heated tirades on DPS to be very tiresome - it only is important for a part of the gameplay! It is NOT necessary to make sure that every single role has to be cookie-cut into the DPS theme! On the contrary, this is what really sets D&D apart from MMO style games here - it is not a DPS bash!

Trying to turn the D&D rules into a DPS style game is IMHO really a no-go. You are cutting out most of what I consider the fun of playing. It is why most NWN PWs that are purely PG based normally have such huge balancing problems - because the roles being evaluated DPS-wise were never construed to be done so in such a manner. They were created for totally different purposes, as I have outlined.

[MagicalMaster]

Brief aside: noticed these and thought they were relevant:

https://twitter.com/...527083381940225

Q: I feel that classes have been boiled down over the years. I'd like to see more crazy incorporated into classes!
A: Me too. class diversity is typically the enemy of class balance. Both are important though!



https://twitter.com/...524967036796930

A: I'm quite torn on how to fix multiple DPS specs. We used to think that a 5% delta was okay, but players still pick the highest.

The latter demonstates the point I previously made about the multiple DPS specs, why I tossed some out, and why I didn't think it was actually an indication of terrible failure.

WebShaman wrote...

DPS style games are inherently made for PvM stuff (and perhaps PvP, but that is a whole different can of worms).

D&D
was not made primarily for PvM. Instead, it is a PvE style game. This
is why one has different classes, with different roles, and why it is
important to have the different roles in a party.

So what would you suggest for a world that is primarily PvM, with little to no use for most skills, scouting, or things like being good at winning drinking games?  As you say,  the system wasn't designed for such an environment, but what would you do to adjust to it?

FunkySwerve wrote...

No, this misses the point again. This is only a problem if you assume a single homogenous enemy type. So long as you provide players a variety of types concurrently, you can ensure than each role has something to contribute. Yes, it's far more complicated to do so, but the play is much more rewarding as a result.

In other words, you can't have a single boss mob with interesting abilities?  You always have to have mobs with X, Y, and Z weaknesses to ensure everyone has something to do?  Isn't that more limiting?  Doesn't that give you less freedom to make interesting encounters?

FunkySwerve wrote...

Don't mistake difficulty for excellent design balance. I could easily design areas which are impossible to beat. Again, there's a happy medium on a sliding scale, not a fixed 'MOAR difficulty is always indicative of better balance' relation.

Sure, designing areas which are impossible to beat is easy.

Designing areas that are almost impossible to beat is a lot harder.  Areas that push you to the limits of your playing skill and character build, that demand solid planning and precise execution.  That's what I enjoy (both playing and trying to build them).

If you're just looking for a happy medium of difficulty, then balance is kind of irrelevant.  One character being 20% better than another (for whatever reason and however you define being better in this case) doesn't matter if you only need to perform at 50% of character potential regardless.

If, on the other hand, you design assuming 95% of potential for character A, and character B is 20% worse than character A...now you have a problem for character B.

FunkySwerve wrote...

Again, this is a straw man problem, since you're assuming a single foe. There's no reason to limit yourself in this way, and this is one major reason our boss spawns are seldom alone. Even then, there's no reason that certain classes are totally barred from participating, because we don't balance our builds as one-trick ponies - you'll recall my mention of this earlier. Hence, that rogue, even if he were barred from effective use of poison, would have other fallback abilities. They wouldn't, necessarily, be as efficacious, but there's nothing preventing them from falling within whatever delta of efficacy you decide is appropriate - 11%, or otherwise, if you want to limit yourself to a consideration of a simple metric like DPS.

How in the world is this a straw man problem?  I'm not assuming anything, I am telling you what I saw.  I am describing actual events and consequences, not hypotheticals.

So you're arguing that you should provide rogues with abilities that somehow cannot be used simultaneously with poison but which act as a fallback on a poison immune foe, as an example?  And that the difference between using these fallback abilities and poison should be minimal?

P.S.  3:15 AM here, need to finish this tomorrow.  Been travelling all day and had to lead a WoW raid tonight.

Modifié par MagicalMaster, 21 janvier 2013 - 09:34 .

[WebShaman]

So what would you suggest for a world that is primarily PvM, with little to no use for most skills, scouting, or things like being good at winning drinking games? As you say, the system wasn't designed for such an environment, but what would you do to adjust to it?

Use a totally different rule system, like DA, etc, one that was made with this in mind.

Or reduce the number of classes, Skills, Feats, Spells, oh yeah...it will look more and more like 4ed...bleh.

Heck, just go with Fighter types. All you need to do is balance that with the ability to learn and use magic. Magic does DPS style stuff, so dump everything else that does not.

Not something that would even remotely interest me, however.

[MagicalMaster]

Another note on difficulty: part of the problem is that if a mechanic in the game isn't sufficiently difficult, people will tend to ignore it.  If it can be ignored, it will be ignored.  People are lazy.  Easy example: if you drop a ground effect at a player's feat, they'll happily stand in it unless it's actually potentially lethal.  If they know it won't do much damage, they'll just ignore it.

WebShaman wrote...

Use a totally different rule system, like DA, etc, one that was made with this in mind.

Or reduce the number of classes, Skills, Feats, Spells, oh yeah...it will look more and more like 4ed...bleh.

Heck,
just go with Fighter types. All you need to do is balance that with
the ability to learn and use magic. Magic does DPS style stuff, so dump
everything else that does not.

Not something that would even remotely interest me, however.

So you think Higher Ground, The Awakening, and similar servers are basically silly/stupid/pointless?  That they're trying to do something DnD (and by extension NWN) aren't built to do and thus shouldn't exist?

FunkySwerve wrote...

Aww shucks, I had such hope for a second. You're still assuming a unitary foe, however, as well as some extreme one-trick ponies.

How many tricks to harm enemies does a melee type have besides hitting it with a weapon?  Are you assuming they're UMDing scrolls and this is effective or something?

FunkySwerve wrote...

I'm simply telling you that in practice, there are ways around these problems that are far more interesting than resort to homogenization.

Like?  Let's look at the simple example of a pure fighter versus a weapon master (weapon master is more crit dependent and has far more AB).  Versus a non-crit immune enemy, you've theoretically achieved some balance in which the fighter and weapon master can contribute equally in their own way.  Now make them crit immune because they're undead.  The fighter lost far less.

You could do something like make them crit immune but jack up their AC to make it so the fighter misses far more but the weapon master isn't effective, I suppose.  However, what is the point of that?  It's something completely passive that doesn't change playstyle.  You don't react any differently to it.

FunkySwerve wrote...

Lolz. Cute, and typical of a WoW player. You completely missed the second point I was making about role variety - considering other things besides DPS.

Hardly.  There's only so many defensive spells/utility spells/summoning spells/CC spells that are needed.  Once you've done all of those that are required, you're left with four options.

1, try to physically attack something (bad idea in general)
2, stand there doing nothing
3, damage spam
4, death magic

Even if you argue that a single mage in a group will be entirely busy dispelling/CCing/summoning and won't have any free time...what if there are two mages?  If the first mage can handle all of the non-damage/death magic stuff by himself, then the second mage just has damage/death magic.  If it takes two mages to handle it, then what if you add a third caster?  To rephrase, if you need X casters to achieve the non-DPS/death magic requires, then what does the X+1th caster do?

In the end, fights boil down to making the enemy's HP hit zero before yours.  It eventually comes down to damage in the end that needs to be delivered from some source.

FunkySwerve wrote...

You just answered your own question. There's no reason to assume a unitary mob. Our runs comprise 300-500 spawns, in groups of 8-16, depending.

I'm talking about for a single encounter.  Presumably you have some fights that last more than two or three rounds, yes?  And for that encounter, there tends to be a best damage spell once you're to the point of casting damage spells?

FunkySwerve wrote...

I hope I've explained why this is wrong. It's actually seen as inherently unbalanced because most server ops haven't playtested their servers enough to hone the saving throws, resists, etc, finely enough to balance these mechanics.

You haven't.

Me: "The problem with death magic is that one attempt on an encounter can have you kill the entire spawn with a single death magic spell and another attempt you might kill nothing after ten death magic spells.  This means the two attempts are vastly different in difficulty solely due to the randomness and extremely binary nature.  This is unbalancing."

You: "It's not a problem if you set the saving throws, resists, etc correctly."

Regardless if the saving throws, resists, etc are "correct," you still can run into the situation I described.

Here's a question: let's imagine you made some mobs which were completely spell immune and could only be hurt by physical damage.  They have 1 HP and like 95% effective concealment (after blind fight/listen/etc), meaning you havea 5% chance per swing to kill them.  Do you think these mobs would be a good idea to make?

FunkySwerve wrote...

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This assumes a highly simplistic set of mechanics. Even a single glance at that run log I linked you will point out the error in this thinking. Ab is not the sole determinant of a hit, or of DPS. NWN offers a wide array of mechanics to use to introduce additional granularity where necessary. The notion that a single point of Ab should be deterministic of a runs failure or success in a 'tightly balanced' server is utter nonsense - take a look back at where I point out the apples/oranges nature of your ab-to-dps comparison if you're forgetting.

If all else is effectively equal, if a run is doable with every melee doing 15-30% less damage (they're all 1-2 AB short of what the build could be in exchange for 1-2 more saves or 40 more HP or whatever) than they should, then what does that say about how important balance is?  Is the only point of having that 1-2 additional AB each to speed the run up instead of making it doable?  At what point does it change to "the melee simply can't hit enough for the group to beat the run" or does it never reach that point?

FunkySwerve wrote...

Summarized as simply as I can, the tension is not between homogeneity and 'Rock Paper Scissors', it's between granularity and simplicity. Granularity issues with certain mechanics present problems which you can either solve by elimination (homogenizing and thereby decreasing complexity) or by introducing offsetting mechanisms (increasing complexity).

Do we agree that adding complexity without adding depth is a bad thing?  Throwing hurdles in the player's faces solely for the sake of having hurdles is bad design.  If you want to make a monster crit immune and give offsetting mechanisms, for example, the offsetting mechanisms have to be sufficiently different and force a different style of play to add depth.  If they don't, then you've just added pointless complexity.

And are you suggesting that in every situation where you've made some build weak against something you've added some offsettting mechanism to the build to make up for the weakness?  If not, then you are back to the R/P/S of having some builds be far more effective in certain situations even within the same general role.

More tomorrow!

[Squatting Monk]

MagicalMaster wrote...

WebShaman wrote...

Use a totally different rule system, like DA, etc, one that was made with this in mind.

Or reduce the number of classes, Skills, Feats, Spells, oh yeah...it will look more and more like 4ed...bleh.

Heck,
just go with Fighter types. All you need to do is balance that with
the ability to learn and use magic. Magic does DPS style stuff, so dump
everything else that does not.

Not something that would even remotely interest me, however.

So you think Higher Ground, The Awakening, and similar servers are basically silly/stupid/pointless?  That they're trying to do something DnD (and by extension NWN) aren't built to do and thus shouldn't exist?

That's totally not what he said. Besides, HG has added tons of new content, not pared the game down to bare bones.

Magical Master wrote...

Me: "The problem with death magic is that one attempt on an encounter can have you kill the entire spawn with a single death magic spell and another attempt you might kill nothing after ten death magic spells. This means the two attempts are vastly different in difficulty solely due to the randomness and extremely binary nature. This is unbalancing."

You: "It's not a problem if you set the saving throws, resists, etc correctly."

Regardless if the saving throws, resists, etc are "correct," you still can run into the situation I described.

Why is this a problem, exactly? Doesn't it mean that death magic is not a "win" button? That players will tend to gravitate towards more reliable damage sources?

Modifié par Squatting Monk, 23 janvier 2013 - 08:32 .

[WebShaman]

So you think Higher Ground, The Awakening, and similar servers are basically silly/stupid/pointless? That they're trying to do something DnD (and by extension NWN) aren't built to do and thus shouldn't exist?

As noted above, this is not what I said. I find it relatively irritating that you have a habit of posting such overblown text - a number of forum members have mentioned such directly to you, both in the present and in the past. Please refrain from doing such again in the future.

What Higher Ground has done, is a totally reworked rule system that is based on the NWN Aurora Engine. To do what it has done, one needs an unbelievable amount of changes to the vanilla NWN roots. HG uses (I believe, correct me if I am wrong here) NWNx2 functions to change lots of things that are otherwise hardcoded, I believe they incorporated parts of the PRC (or at least did, before expanding on such further - again, correct me if I am wrong here), and added to the "level limit" by adding in Legendary Levels.

Just a brief look into HG reveals that just about every part of the NWN vanilla rules have been changed - from spells, to combat, to saves, classes, races, etc!

The balancing required in order to produce a PG (PvM) style NWN (note that I mention NWN here, NOT D&D!!! ) has been so enormous, that trying to reproduce it again would probably reduce the original CCers and Devs of that PW (HG) to tears...my subjective opinion here. Seriously, the amount of work that has gone into making HG what it is is stupifying, ground-breaking, and has resulted in utilities and work-arounds that has, of course, enriched the NWN CC Community, and is beyond what anyone could reasonably expect any team to do for free.

As I have no idea what The Awakening has done along these lines, I will not mention it here, purely out of the simple reason that I know nothing about TA.

I ran a PG (PvM) type of Server way back when (The Playground). It made the Hall of Fame (It was one of the first - I maintain that it WAS the first to use the PRC). It was nowhere near where HG is now!

Basically, I ran into many of the same issues that most Staffs do when trying to make a PvM (PG) style server - major balancing issues between the classes, Races, and the Monsters (The PRC does NOT make this easier, btw - it instead makes it much harder!!!!).

There was lots of custom scripts running on most Bosses, to get around the "one trick effects" like Dev Crit, roll a 1 and fail style spells/feats, etc, and custom AI changes so that many of the new spells and feats of the PRC could be used effectively by the Monsters.

At the time, this often resulted in many errors in the running code (lots of TMI errors, tbh). This was because back then, the PRC was not as optimized as it is today, and of course, computers back then were not like they are today (I was running a bare-bones windows box as my Server from out of my home over a rather cruddy DSL connection). To that, I didn't really have any expert coders working on streamlining things (such as HG has, iirc).

Still, my PW did enjoy a rather thriving PB back then, and it was alot of fun to run (and play). Being a DM in such an environment is, for me, an incredible experience - one can really have a lot of fun with a willing group of like minded players.

But back to the battle, so to speak.

As I have mentioned before, the D&D rules were not created with PvM in mind. Now, we all know that NWN is based on the D&D ruleset, but it is NOT D&D made into a CRPG - rather, it is a somewhat of a version of the D&D ruleset created for computers. Many of the design decisions (made for whatever reasons) are altered from their D&D counterparts. Much has been left out, for whatever reasons, and over time, much has been put back in as CC by the Community.

For example, a ton of spells are missing! Many of the skills are incorrectly done, and many feats are just so incorrectly done, it is not funny! Fear, for example, is just sooo wrong in NWN!

Much has been done by the CC Community to correct these issues - the PRC incorporates a lot of these types of changes into it.

The AI - Bioware AI is...lacking, to say the least! To run any type of PW without extensive DM involvement, one needs improved AI (and again, the Community has stepped up here - Codi AI, Jassper's AI, etc) - which means having some experienced coders on your Staff.

But again, I am wandering from the battle here (when one talks about NWN, that appears to happen alot, doesn't it?).

I personally, after literally a decade or more of play, think that NWN is really not a good base for a PvM (PG) style computer game. Many of the reasons I have outlined above, and I am sure that FS could lay down textwalls of more reasons here. Put simply, the NWN Aurora Engine is not designed or optimized for such, and the ruleset is also not designed or optimized for such. The only reason that it has been used to do it, is because of the Toolset, IMHO.

NWN is perhaps one of the easiest computer games to mod due to the Toolset and the enormous amount of CC created by the Community. It is so easy, that just about every person can do it - something that seperates it from just about any other available toolset computer game out there.

I rather suspect that if DA had delivered such a toolset, we would not be having this discussion...or imagine if WoW had such a toolset...

Why is this a problem, exactly? Doesn't it mean that death magic is not a "win" button? That players will tend to gravitate towards more reliable damage sources?

Hmmm. I would say it depends on how the death magic is done. Death magic is useful if it provides a good chance of being successful (re: removing threat). Even a 50% chance is more useful (if AoE) vs reliable damage sources, because an average will slay outright at least half of the affected threat, whereas most damage will not (if it does, then of course that will be used in place of Death magic).

The thing here is to get a balance, something very difficult to do in NWN.