23 réponses à ce sujet

[Cydh]

 I'm getting worried here. Pretty much every RPG in the world has set this triumvirate of defensive stats in one form or another, and DAO is no exception:

_a stat that governs the frequency of incoming damage (defense)
_a stat that offsets incoming damage by a fixed amount (armor)
_a stat that reduces incoming damage by a fraction (resistance)

Each of these stats is open ended, and by itself, will never guarantee your character will be invulnerable. But the conjunction of all three just makes a character invulnerable pretty fast. That's a problem. For balance reasons, of course. The only thing that can put a dent on a well-built all-around defensive character would be a horde of enemy (reduce effectiveness of defense) that hit hard enough to get through armor or even outdamage a single heal (or regeneration, or lesser poultice) over the duration of the spell's cooldown, even after resistances are factored in.
Fact is, such fight would be insta-gib for any character that would have very high values in only two of these three stats, so these situations just don't happen. Just build a character with a set of decent armour, decent defense, decent resistance, high threat, and nothing will ever stop your party.
Everyone here has experienced the chill of being prone to twoshots from the ogre boss just because Alister (or the PC tank) has not yet reached that "sweet spot" where he can shrug off pretty much any incoming damage short of grabs. The thing is, from level 10 onwards or whatever, even Sten the proverbial glass cannon becomes nigh-invulnerable if you give him a shield.
There ought to be a trick here to make this game harder to tank at least in nightmare difficulty, such as making fatigue reduce your threat, damage and avoidance stats across the board, some armor penetration counter that destroys pieces of armor, or even cause temporary concussion injuries, or some absorb-counter on spell resistance checks...

Might sound like ranting, but I really don't like the way this game considers a valid tactic that same old simplistic "holy trinity" of dps/tank/healer that you find in pretty much every MMO out there.

[Jack-Nader]

There are plenty of ways to reduce defense, armor and resistances in this game. The real issue is that the AI is poorly scripted and does not employ said tactics efficiently or even at all.

[Mr_Raider]

Not sure where you get your numbers. On hard (PC) difficulty, equipped in full juggernaut, Alistair still takes a truck load of physical damage from the high dragon, and this is at level 16.

[stribies]

The solution is simple. Add goats to fight in this game. Nobody can defeat a goat.

[shree420]

Neither high defense nor armor can ignore magical damage, so it certainly isn't an imbalanced system. To reduce magical damage you'd either need spell protection or spell resist gear. Even spell resistance doesn't protect against elemental damage from innate abilities.



However, the game doesn't have that many magical damage dealers - at least, darkspawn/human mobs without mages/emissaries have no abilities that deal magical damage as a direct attack. That's why only your drakes/dragons/spiders pose problems for tanks, and you need to stave those off by increasing your resistances to fire/nature as the case may be.



It's a question of the enemy mix - you don't encounter any balanced enemy parties in the game for the most part. And like Jack-Nader said, the AI doesn't use its abilities that effectively, with mages killing off their own allies, never countering your buffs/debuffs. It relies on pure strength of ability.



In BG2, the first offensive spell that even a low-level Yuan-ti mage would cast would be Chaos; you'd pray that your mage resisted it, otherwise there'd be nobody to dispel. Not the case here; only high-level mages need truly be feared because of Crushing Prison. It's a surprise that no mage uses Sleep, Waking Nightmare, Mana Clash, the Glyph line; they rely on certain staples: Fireball, Misdirection Hex, Crushing Prison, etc. A mod that made mages use these CC spells instead of pure DoTs would certainly make the game more tactical.

[Cuuniyevo]

I'm not sure I understand the complaint here… You're upset that you get more powerful as you level up? That aside, my advice is to do what I try (and sometimes forget) to do: role-play with your stats instead of min-maxing. It's more fun all-around.

[stribies]

Cuuniyevo wrote...

I'm not sure I understand the complaint here… You're upset that you get more powerful as you level up? That aside, my advice is to do what I try (and sometimes forget) to do: role-play with your stats instead of min-maxing. It's more fun all-around.

If you really want to roleplay, sit in the bar all day and just stare at Morrigan's breasts.

[Haplose]

Mr_Raider wrote...

Not sure where you get your numbers. On hard (PC) difficulty, equipped in full juggernaut, Alistair still takes a truck load of physical damage from the high dragon, and this is at level 16.

This.
At level 10 Alistair still feels like glass on Nightmare. He only starts being good once I stack Heroic Defence and Glyph of Warding on him. But he can still be taken out with spells, overhelms, stuns and a number of other effects. Level 15 is not much different. Maybe around level 20 he doesn't need these buffs that desperately.

It's fine.

Modifié par Haplose, 14 janvier 2010 - 07:23 .

[Cydh]

Okay, the RP thing I can totally understand because I'm also into that sort of things. But there's a time for RP, and a time for game mechanics design.



To be perfectly honest, those who did put a dent into my Allister were gimmick fights. High Dragon is a "gimmick" fight for me - trivialized with a large fire crystallized Shale. Same goes with Revenants. Granted on my first playthrough I went for Brecilian Forest first, and got plenty of "good" difficulty because I didn't have the right set of gear for the tank (Yes, trapped room with skeleton archers, I'm looking at you ). But I pulled a full Juggernaut set out of it, which made the rest of the mundane fighting in the game (apart of those few gimmick fights) close to irrelevant, tank and spank if you prefer, and that was with Allister maxing out all his defensive talents first.



To be fair I hit a brick wall later in Redcliffe Castle, the fight with all the armor sets, that even a fully armored Allister with plenty of defensive talents couldn't tank. What worries me is that in my current playthrough, this warrior is tanking without any sword & shield talent, and I feel pretty much the same thing. Only here I managed to take down Flemeth, the Drake in the throne room and the royal palace revenant as soon as level 9, Jarvia and her cartel at level 10. I'm using a respec mod this time around and did those fights with clearly subpar tanking builds: Flemeth and Revenant as a dual-wielder, Throne room drake as an archer tank, Jarvia as a berserker accomplished warrior tank with no weapon skill whatsoever. No cheesy tactics were even needed there - as an archer for example I would just stand there in front of the drake with defensive fire on, shooting critical shot on cooldown.



In truth, I think I miss the difficulty of nightmare Ostagar Tower & Lothering questing which are still very much in place every time I create a new character. It's awesome designing new tactics for your mage when your only offensive spells are grease, and walking bomb, to dispatch a squad of darkspawns I expected the monsters to "scale up" in difficulty as well, unfortunately only a handful of fights do, which I call gimmicks.



I'm attributing this reverse difficulty scaling to defensive stats, because that's where it struck me the most, essentially turning hurlocks and their ilk into toads.

[Jack-Nader]

The problem is poorly scripted AI. This was discussed at great length in the DEVS thread. If you seriously want a challenge you are going to have to wait for Bioware or a talented modder to script out the AI correctly, like it was in baldur's gate. So far all I have seen from combat tweak mods and difficulty increase mods are player talent nerfs and hitpoint/damage increases for hostile.



It is very much a psychological issue. People like kicking butt and taking names but few like having things handed to them. There has to be some kind of middle ground. If we nerf a talent to balance it we run the risk of taking the proverbial cake off the table and offending someone. If we up the hitpoints on bosses then all we really are doing is delaying the inevitable boss death and not truly achieving anything positive. The most sensible solution to our plight lies in AI scripting.



eg.

Spells like mana clash have their place. This spell is a kick butt and take names spell. The issue is that casting it feels cheap because its a 1 shot kill. The AI should have been scripted to deploy spell shield or anti magic ward. Obviously such scripting should only be enabled on hard or nightmare modes as there are a lot of people in this world who could not cope with such difficulty increases without practice.

[dkjestrup]

The funniest AI I've seen is enemy tanks going "shield defense" > "shield wall" > "shield defense" > "shield cover". Who puts that in the tactics?



And I agree. On a tank, as soon as you can wear Blood Dragon armor, or better, you're a complete beast.



Blood Gorged Amulet + Lifegiver + Blood Dragon Armor gives you as much constitution as most con tanks. And then you can just stack dex. It gets ridiculous.



Also, for people who have trouble with tanks. A lot of people have the wrong idea. You don't go into the room and taunt everything with threaten activated, and expect to live. Run in ahead of your allies, you should end up with 60 or so percent of the enemies on you. If your mages are getting overrun, THEN taunt. You aren't invulnerable, share the load.

[StarMars]

It should be noted that the numbers listed on the char screen for defense and armor (not sure about resistances) are not the actual values used in the computation. Instead, they take a percentage of it say for EXAMPLE, 70-100% for armor. The random factor makes them less effective than what they seem to be.

Modifié par StarMars, 14 janvier 2010 - 01:41 .

[Lord Phoebus]

To large degree there is a limit to how much you can improve the AI, because there aren't enough countermeasures in the game. This isn't like D&D where you have protection from evil, mind blank, death ward, 4 dispels, 3 breaches, etc... You have physical and mental resistance, and one anti-magic line. The resistance checks are also highly level dependent, so against bosses you probably won't make those checks and not every spell/talent has a resistance check (cone of cold, dirty fighting). There aren't even any spells that grant elemental resistance and the items are too scarce to use them for every battle. You don't even have enough gold, without exploits, to buy enough equipment to make more than one of your characters immune to magic, etc.



If the AI really did act smarter, like enemy mages using spell combos, or enemies coordinating attacks, the game would easily become unwinnable particularly with some cutscene-in-an-open-position fight. E.g. consider those 12 archer fights if the archers took turns using scattershot every 2 seconds.



I'm not saying I wouldn't like a better AI, but you would have to modify some of the rules and abilities to add some more countermeaures and counter-countermeasures to give the player a chance.

[Mr_Raider]

Lord Phoebus wrote..There aren't even any spells that grant elemental resistance and the items are too scarce to use them for every battle. You don't even have enough gold, without exploits, to buy enough equipment to make more than one of your characters immune to magic, etc.

Shimmering shield and one of the spells in the haste line gives elemental resistance.

[Lord Phoebus]

Mr_Raider wrote...

Lord Phoebus wrote..There aren't even any spells that grant elemental resistance and the items are too scarce to use them for every battle. You don't even have enough gold, without exploits, to buy enough equipment to make more than one of your characters immune to magic, etc.

Shimmering shield and one of the spells in the haste line gives elemental resistance.

True but Shimmering Shield is very expensive to use and self only, and Heroic Defense only gives you 20% with a 100 spellpower.

[Ingahootz]

Haplose wrote...

Mr_Raider wrote...

Not sure where you get your numbers. On hard (PC) difficulty, equipped in full juggernaut, Alistair still takes a truck load of physical damage from the high dragon, and this is at level 16.

This.
At level 10 Alistair still feels like glass on Nightmare. He only starts being good once I stack Heroic Defence and Glyph of Warding on him. But he can still be taken out with spells, overhelms, stuns and a number of other effects. Level 15 is not much different. Maybe around level 20 he doesn't need these buffs that desperately.

It's fine.

Incorrect. Around level 12 Alistair became nearly invulnerable for me without casting any buffs on him. Get him the gear, and he becomes incredibly good. This is on Nightmare mode.

[tetracycloide]

shree420 wrote...

Neither high defense nor armor can ignore magical damage, so it certainly isn't an imbalanced system. To reduce magical damage you'd either need spell protection or spell resist gear. Even spell resistance doesn't protect against elemental damage from innate abilities.

Templar warrior with 31 strength and everything else in dextiery will have enough defense and armor to be pretty much immune to physical damage while being 100% resistant to magic from the early teens onward.  For the few, and there are very very few, elemental damage abilities there are in game there are a plethora of greater protection postions available for nearly the start of the game.  Something should give, this level of protection is far to universal to be balanced.  (I've also run into shades that use sleep in the ruins of the brecelian forest.  I do agree more should use it but just an FYI that some do).

Those pointing out how weak he is in juggernaut armor should probably start using better gear.  Juggernaut is offtank gear for a DPS warrior to use in a AoE heavy fight.  It's just not very good main tank armor most of all against physical.  Most of the 'glass Alistair' problems could be fixed by simply equiping him with dilligence armor for physical damage fights and only using juggernaut when there's actually a significant elemental damage component to an enemy.  Even then, however, you're normally better off just using a salve for the resistance you actually need and sticking with the high defense/armor/spell resistance set.

Modifié par tetracycloide, 14 janvier 2010 - 08:34 .

[WillieStyle]

Improving the AI cannot be the solution to this game because there are far too many overpowered abilities. If enemy mages used mana clash intelligently there would be a huge cry on these forums for the spell to get nerfed. Imagine a fight with a boss level enemy blood mage. After the cut scene you get blood wound, then affliction hex, virulent walking bomb, death cloud and death hex on the party member with the highest hitpoints. The game would be impossible to beat if the enemies were as smart as we are.

As for tanking, the only real problem is that there is no cap on defense and spell resistance. Put a 70-80% cap on both and tanks become less indestructible. That would also make stats like armor and hitpoints more valuable.

Modifié par WillieStyle, 14 janvier 2010 - 09:15 .

[beancounter501]

WillieStyle wrote...

Improving the AI cannot be the solution to this game because there are far too many overpowered abilities. If enemy mages used mana clash intelligently there would be a huge cry on these forums for the spell to get nerfed. Imagine a fight with a boss level enemy blood mage. After the cut scene you get blood wound, then affliction hex, virulent walking bomb, death cloud and death hex on the party member with the highest hitpoints. The game would be impossible to beat if the enemies were as smart as we are.

As for tanking, the only real problem is that there is no cap on defense and spell resistance. Put a 70-80% cap on both and tanks become less indestructible. That would also make stats like armor and hitpoints more valuable.

I agree with that.  Many abilities need a big nerf.  Mana clash, momentum & force field comes to mind right off the bat.  At the same time a lot of abilities are seriously underpowered.  So lots of balance issues.

Also, high level armor should have a cap on dexterity.  No max dexterity plus max armor.  Dexterity is an overpowered stat - Defense + To Hit + Physical Resistance.  Defense should be split or drop the to hit bonus.

Plus there is no automatic hit.  In NWN a roll of twenty was an auto hit - regardless of your defense levels.  Not so in DA:O.

[tetracycloide]

With current gear and abilites that sequence of events would be extreamly survivable by my tank, even with a 70-80% cap on spell resistance. I could be quite confidant that my tank would resist most of those spells. There's a 70% chance they resist blood wound and I could simply dispell all the others with cleanse area except death cloud which would also remove the CC from my party as well as any spell protection the mage has. Mana clash with my own mage and the encounter would be over. This might take a load or two to figure out and get right but nothing spectacularly difficult and certainly not impossible to beat.

I don't think a dexterity cap from armor would help all that much.  The best physical tank would simply wear weaker armor and switch to high armor values against the foes that actually connect and hit hard enough.  Dextertiy rogues can already off tank many of the fights, especially end game.

Modifié par tetracycloide, 14 janvier 2010 - 09:40 .

[beancounter501]

tetracycloide wrote...

With current gear and abilites that sequence of events would be extreamly survivable by my tank, even with a 70-80% cap on spell resistance. I could be quite confidant that my tank would resist most of those spells. There's a 70% chance they resist blood wound and I could simply dispell all the others with cleanse area except death cloud which would also remove the CC from my party as well as any spell protection the mage has. Mana clash with my own mage and the encounter would be over. This might take a load or two to figure out and get right but nothing spectacularly difficult and certainly not impossible to beat.

I don't think a dexterity cap from armor would help all that much.  The best physical tank would simply wear weaker armor and switch to high armor values against the foes that actually connect and hit hard enough.  Dextertiy rogues can already off tank many of the fights, especially end game.

I don't think the goal is to make it impossible!  Forcing a few reloads sounds like the game was harder- yes?  Half of the problem is still the whole "tank" concept.  Massive defense on one character is less of a issue when the monsters go after the whole party!

I disagree about the dexterity cap, I think it would make a big difference.  And the player should not be able to switch out armor in the middle of combat!

[soteria]

Massive defense on one character isn't "less of an issue," it's "pointless" when monsters go after the whole party. The tank evolved as a response to the necessity for players to be able to control who the monsters attack to some extent. The aggro system is designed to let players build characters that can do high damage without constantly getting killed. And it works, too, but tanks are just too strong in DA:O.

[tetracycloide]

A dexterity cap certianly makes more sense once the ability to swap armor in combat is removed so, in that context, it's more effective than it would be on its own. I just don't think the dexterity cap should be tied to armor, it should be universal. No amount of dexterity or defense should make any target completely immune to physical auto attacks from any other. I'd be happier with a universal 95-99% cap and a sharp increase in both physical damage and armor values. This would make tanking more fundamental to the game (although it would limit the number of possible party configurations), it would make high armor high health builds more competitive with high dexterity builds, and it would make it almost impossible for a character without a lot of health able to tank regardless of their dodge rate simply due to the risk of catastrophic failure i.e. one really big hit getting through the dodge on that 1-5% chance.

[beancounter501]

soteria wrote...

Massive defense on one character isn't "less of an issue," it's "pointless" when monsters go after the whole party. The tank evolved as a response to the necessity for players to be able to control who the monsters attack to some extent. The aggro system is designed to let players build characters that can do high damage without constantly getting killed. And it works, too, but tanks are just too strong in DA:O.

Not pointless at all, always good to have one strong defensive character in a party.  After all only one party member has to surive a tough fight.  The more I play this game the more I realize that the whole tank system is just dumb.  All of the builds are either min-maxed for either defense or attack.  There is no point in trying to build a well rounded character who is good in both attack and defense.  In Baldurs Gate a mage had to take both Offensive AND Defensive spells.  In that game a mage with no defensive spells was dead - fast.  In DA defensive spells are not worth a penny because all of the monsters are going to attack whoever the player wants.  Maybe I am just old school, but the player should NOT be able to force every monster in every encounter to attack the most defensive character in the party.

Lets give a real game example that just happened to me.  I was doing the Redcliff Castle Courtyard battle.  My party was Shale, Alistar, a 2 Hand Dwarf and Wynne.  This is my first playthrough so I did not know what to expect.  I had Wynne cast Earthquake at a group of 4 to 5 Archers and the rest of the party charged the melee guys that included a Reverant.  Wyne then cast Heroic Defense on Shale.  Shale taunted all of the melee monsters.  None of them attacked anyone but Shale.

 My 2 Hand Warrior sat there and killed people one by one while they all swung away at Shale.  All the while Wyne was just spamming heal/regeneration/Heroic Defense at Shale.  Shale was sucking health potions like crazy.  Alistar and my 2 Hand Dwarf took hardly any damage.  Nevermind the monsters could of killed either Wynne or my 2 Hand Warrior fairly quickly. 

However, Earthquake sucks and a bunch of the archers escaped and started pinging Wynne.  Before I knew it she was almost dead.  I panicked and sent Alistar over to the Archers and taunted them.  And the archers promptly ignored Wyne who had a sliver of health left and proceed to attack the full strength Alistar.

I had to laugh after the battle because that was some of the DUMBEST AI I have ever seen.  So while the tank system may give players the ability to build min-maxed Attack/Def characters it also gives some of the worst combat AI.