5 réponses à ce sujet

[Kesaru]

I'm working on a mod right now that will completely overhaul the Arcane Warrior specialization.
The current form of the Arcane Warrior is both unbalanced and boring; most people seem to just throw on as many maintains as possible and auto-attack their way into bad-a**ery. Not only is it too easy to abuse maintains as it is, but the lack of attack talents is both very boring and encourages such a playstyle.

So, the goal of this mod is not only to tone the spec down, but to make it a lot more interesting.
With that in mind, I would like advice on the development of this mod. How it could be more balanced, how it could be more fun, or how it could be better molded into a solid theme.

I have the outline of the mod nearly finished now (all except the final attack and the attack names), so here it is for criticism and advice. The numbers in brackets are the formulas for determining the final value, and the numbers after the brackets are the expected final values at a mid-high level (50 Magic)

Branch One
Combat Magic:
    Instead of +Attack, now adds ((Magic-10)*0.25)10 Physical Resistance and ((Magic-10)*2.5)100 Health.
    Upkeep increased to 100, Fatigue reduced to 25%.
Alacrity: (added to Combat Magic)
    +25% Attack Speed, +1 Mana Regeneration, -20% Damage dealt (Weapon Damage+Attribute
    Modifier)30-50>24-40.
Mana Sheathe: (Added to Combat Magic)
    Adds Spirit Damage to attacks (Spellpower*0.4)16. Additionally, if your attack fails to hit your Spellpower is
    added to Attack to see if the Spirit Damage still connects.
Ethereal Shroud: (Added to Combat Magic)
    Unflankable, 20% Dodge.

The second branch is the new attack skills, which use a new weapon style: a single blade with no shield.
Branch Two
(Require Combat Magic to be active, and have a very high chance to hit)
(Left Punch or Shield Bash animation): (11 Dexterity, Combat Spec 1, 20 Mana, 15 sec reset)
    Deals (5+(Magic*0.25))15 Physical damage, and (100+Spellpower*0.25)35 Spirit damage. Additionally, the
    target will be knocked back unless they pass a physical resistance check. Lieutenant+ Enemies will instead be
    knocked down.
(Kick animation): (18 Dexterity, Combat Spec 2, 15 Mana, 8 sec reset)
    Deals (5+(Magic*0.5))25 Physical damage, and (100+Spellpower*0.2)28 Spirit damage. If flanking the target,
    they will be knocked down unless they pass a physical resistance check.
AoE Attack: (25 Dexterity, Combat Spec 3, 30 Mana, 12 sec reset)
    Deals normal weapon damage to surrounding enemies (inluding Mana Sheathe).
(Shield Pummel animation?): (32 Dexterity, Combat Spec 4, 25 Mana, 10 sec reset)

So overall, the Arcane Warrior is supposed to be a mix of offense and defense with good utility, as well as the ability to effectively stand in the center of a large crowd to get the most out of spells.
Combat Magic replaces Strength, and now also partially replaces Constitution so you can spend those points elswhere while maintaining good defense. This was necessary, because I've removed the attack bonuses entirely, making Dexterity much more important.
Because I've made Dexterity necessary for all Attack/Defense bonuses to make it more valuable, and I still want them to be exceptional at hitting and evading, I've given them similar benefits independent of those stats; Mana Sheathe benefits chance to hit by making it nearly impossible to completely miss, granting partial misses instead, and Ethereal Shroud grants a percent-based chance to dodge when Defense fails (just like Evasion).
As you can see with Alacrity, the attack speed boost seems mostly pointless if it also reduces damage by a nearly equal amount, but this fixes an aesthetic issue in which single-blade attacks are normal painfully slow. Mana Sheathe is also unaffected by the damage loss, making it a greater percentage of total damage dealt.
Finally, changing Combat Magic's penalty to focus more on occupied mana than fatigue allows it to still hinder spell-casting, but now will also hinder stacking maintains which it previously did very little of. On top of that, since mana recovery makes up a greater percent compared to what you have and lose now on top of having less total mana, it benefits the use of many cheaper spells rather than fewer costlier ones, like the AW attack abilities.

With the attacks, I tried to focus more on low-cost, lower effect since Combat Magic puts a big damper on mana usage. I also tried to give them a theme of disrupting the target to make it easier to cast spells in close range.
Also, the fact that the first two attacks deal damage irrelevant of the equipped weapon not only seems fairly spell-like, but it also helps the fact that Alacrity's damage reduction would otherwise gimp the attacks until you could get Mana Sheathe.

Modifié par Kesaru, 31 janvier 2010 - 09:11 .

[Kesaru]

Somehow it didn't occur to me to ask before, but does anyone know if it really is possible to have weapon skills require a single-handed weapon with no shield?

I found this quote in reference to passive abilities on the Abilities section of the official wiki which seems to suggest otherwise, assuming attack skills are assigned to weapon types in the same way:

"Additionally, the bonuses of an ability can be made conditional on the character's current 'wield mode' (2-handed, dual, weapon & shield, or universal) through the conditional integer field on the passive_abilities worksheet. "

[Lord Thing]

You can check for whether the character has a weapon in the main-hand, but as far as I could tell you can't check whether the off-hand is empty. Also, the animations for attacking seem to be dependent on the weapons you are wielding as well, ie the shield bash animation doesn't play and a hit doesn't fire unless you have a shield equipped.

The way I got around it in a mod I made for EthrenDiak was to have two modal abilities that created a "ball of energy" in the characters off-hand, one which was based off of a dagger and one that was based off of a shield, then had the abilities require a specific ball of energy to be active.

The mod isn't currently publicly available, but if you're interested, I can open it up (after clearing it with EthrenDiak) as well as uploading the source files so that you can poke around for yourself.

EDIT: In my mod the the modal abilities are the first-tier spell in each line (the mod adds two new lines of spells) but you could easily have them added through scripts when the player learns the Arcane Warrior Specialization

Modifié par Lord Thing, 02 février 2010 - 03:32 .

[Kesaru]

Thank you, that's exactly what I needed to know.

I've decided to go with two-handed swords instead then. With that in mind, I have a couple more questions.

The first one is very important; is it possible to make a Weapon VFX (such as what's created by Flaming Weapons) appear only during the animation of an attack skill? I'm going to ditch "Mana Sheathe" entirely and make it so the character is supposed to charge their weapon with magic during the attack skills to justify the mana cost, and it'd be great if I could show that visually.

Second, is it possible to make a weapon attack skill usable from a distance, so you could make the character appear to slash at the air and have a target 20 or so feet away take damage?

[Lord Thing]

Both of those are possible.

My arcane warrior mod has a vfx appear in the hand of the caster when the modal abilities are activated and removes it when they are de-activated. You should also be able to do something like this with an activated ability.

It also has a spell called Telekinetic Strike that's basically a ranged shield-bash.

Good luck with your mod

[Kesaru]

Update!

I'm now going to have them use two-handed swords, and the attack skills will (if I can get it to work) cause a magic effect to surround your weapon during it, like with enchantments or weapon spells.

Here's what I have so far now for the first branch of spells, but it's still unfinished;



Combat Magic:

+Attack now (Spellpower*0.5), and Damage now based on (Spellpower*2) instead of Magic.

Fatigue reduced to 20%, but Upkeep is still 50. Now reduces Spellpower granted per point of Magic to 0.5.



+Health (Spellpower*5), +Physical Resistance (Spellpower*1), and +1 Mana Regeneration.

Alacrity: (added to Combat Magic)

+20% Attack Speed, and increased Flanking angle (equal to Combat Movement).

Ethereal Shroud: (Added to Combat Magic)

Unflankable, 20% Dodge.



I've found out that the devs' intention was to have characters switch in and out of Combat Magic to use spells, which is really dumb. Their original idea was to block you from being able to cast altogether while it was up, but that didn't work out apparently so they went with the hardcore Fatigue instead.

I've chosen to have spells be weakened while in Combat Magic instead of allowing you to cast much fewer (which practically forced the overpowered tactic of stacking maintains, on top of being incredibly dull). The Arcane Warrior spells scale twice as fast to compensate, making them functionally normal.

So, Combat Magic now turns you into a real demon physically with significantly weakened spells for utility. You don't hit as often as a real melee character (which fits, since you don't have the same skill), but the great flanking bonus grants a bonus to attack if someone else has your target's attention, and the attack skills utilizing the two-handed sword provide a bit of knockdown to reduce their ability to dodge if they're in your face, and you also have the option of taking hexes and such to help as well.