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hansbricks12

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About hansbricks12

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  1. I think increasing all damage caused by a flat amount might work. Reducing health would require rebalancing healing, and increasing accuracy has problems with crit as well. It also has the side-effect of making initiative more valuable as a stat. If battles were shorter with both players and enemies being more vulnerable, then being 1-turn ahead of the enemy would also be much more powerful. Dumping dex would be much more dangerous if the enemy could K.O. your guys right from the start.
  2. What about reducing health overall? This would shorten the combat AND make initiative more valuable. In every turn-based game I have ever played initiative is perhaps the most consistently powerful stat. If battles were quicker overall, it would make it's significance much more prominent. From my point of view it should be a direct port as much as possible. Attributes, skills, spells and whatever should have the same purpose/function as in RTWP. Of course there have to be made adjustment, but the basic idea should be kept. I believe the power/stamina system Dead Inside suggested is the way to go, at least worth investigating. I don't want a direct port. I've played over 400hrs of POE 2 already and I am enjoying builds and weapons that are simply not very good in RTWP. For instance, with rounds accurate wounding shot procs its DOT damage right away, adding flat dmg to the strike. Two-handed weapons are far more viable, as you can still perform just as many actions as a dual-wielder, and can react to combat just as well. With a barb wielding Amra, you get carnage, Amra area damage on crit, and raw dmg weapon modal all adding flat damage to you strike. In RTWP, pretty much every melee dual-wields. There are some builds/weapons where 2-handed is viable, but its pretty niche. In fact, even without the 30% action speed bonus or the 15% from talents, dual-wielding still feels more powerful than two-handed in turn-based. If those talents go back, there will be no question and we will go back to the SAME builds/items being powerful. However, if we go to a non-rounds system where fast characters act more, then initiative absolutely cannot be tied to action speed, as it will make action speed the absolute best and most powerful stat in the game. Initiative would have to be tied to something else.
  3. I also think people are generally under-valuing initiative right now and we should wait until it gets balanced a little better. Currently it's value is being severely undercut by a bug which causes the player party get a free round in practically every combat, as when combat begins you start in a round with you and only a few enemies that initiated combat with you. The game also seems to be giving a free "surprise" round when you start combat from stealth. Add to this that a lot of enemies seems to have very high initiative, such that even my characters with heavy armor, modals, two-handed and 3 DEX are still going before them. I think if they buff enemy initiative a bit, fix the free round bug, and perhaps only give a 20% initiative bonus for starting from stealth people will change their tune. I have already had 1-2 encounters that punished my lack of initiative. Eating an entire room full of enemy attacks left 2 of my back-line dead before I had even self-buffed. Thankfully, I had a paladin rez handy. Limiting char's to 1 free action/turn and adding some initiative to cast times would also help bring casters in-line, as they would be vulnerable to low-initiative enemies removing concentration and interrupting the cast. I also like the idea of adding an extra attack to light weapons, as that would make one-handed builds more viable. 1 light weapon would get 2/attacks, dual wielding with 2 light would get another, so 3 attacks.
  4. They could do something to make initiative more powerful, such as getting a full "surprise" round to act. You would then be at the beginning of the first round as well, essentially getting two turns in a row. They could take the 5 lowest initiative scores in any given fight and give those a full surprise round to act, then will act again in round 1 before the other combatants.
  5. In any case, we should get a list going of areas most affected by the initiative/action point trade-off imbalance that should be addressed in a balance pass. I'll start. Armor - I think this is an obvious one, other than casters I think the value of heavy-armor outweighs the initiative cost. Reducing movement points would be a good start, as they seem much more valuable in turn based mode. Even reducing movement by 50% for the heaviest wouldn't be enough in my opinion, as this would be easily negated by stride skills, of which there are many. 60% reduction would be reasonable I think. Light Weapons - Damage on the heavier weapons is roughly 37% higher on average, so removing the -35% damage penalty for dual wielding 2 light weapons would go a long way towards bridging that gap. Light weapons could also have an accuracy bonus as a way of bridging the gap Modals - I feel conflicted here, as the Modals that have suddenly become useful are the ones that were rather unusable in RTWP due to the hefty 50% recover penalty. Modals that increase penetration & Accuracy should come with a damage reduction instead of an initiative cost. Dexterity - I'm fine with Dex becoming more important for spellcasters than melee. I think this actually helps the balance a bit, as it give melee more stats to work with than spellcasters, and spellcasters are already quite powerful in turn-based. Any others?
  6. For argument's sake, we can't forget that there needs to be balancing towards the fact that players can't react to things like the enemy switching targets or trying to sneak over to your backline. If they manage to slip through your plan and do something you don't want them to do, you have to just sit there and take it. Characters with high initiative acting more often than other characters would be more dangerous because of that alone, so it can't be a perfect 1:1 of action speed to initiative. This is a perfect example of how action speed's power gets magnified when you switch from a continuous system to a discreet unit-turn style system. Notice how much easier it is to land spell combo's, area spells and cc? With an ultra low initiative character you not only get more actions, but you can use spells, dmg and cc to deny the enemy their turns and magnify your advantage. You can kill or cc them before they have a chance to do anything to you, before they even defensively buff themselves. Turn-based systems always have the issue that acting first or acting more has a huge power-magnifying effect. Currently going first has its effect mitigated by the fact that encounters have a lot of turns and there are large advantages to ignoring initiative, such as armor, modals, etc. If we go to lower-initiative = more turns, dexterity and action speed will be even MORE dominant than in RTWP. Not only will you get to act more, but you will be able to alpha-strike very effectively. This also has the unfortunate side-effect of incentivizing the player to make combat less interesting by giving the enemy fewer chances to use abilities, to react to the player and DO things. It can make the combat much more repetitive as a result. The rounds mode already seems fairly well balanced except for a few areas where the trade-offs between initiative, damage and defense don't really work anymore, such as light weapons, heavy armor and weapon modals. Some weapons or armor that increased action speed before are now less powerful, that's fine, as there are many more weapons and armor that have become far more useful in this mode with rounds. Changing the rounds system to a dynamic initiative system would actually require another balance pass, as you would have to get the new system into player hands and do another balance pass after that.
  7. I actually enjoy the current action economy, and changing the initiative system to one where 3 initiative acts twice as much as 6 just makes it the new best stat to max for pretty much every class. I like that the changes to action speed have shaken up the meta, and would prefer to just balance the current system around rounds. All the problems people are complaining about stem mostly around how action speed was simply swapped with initiative, making previous trade-offs between the most powerful dps stat in the base game and heavy armor or weapon modals unbalanced. These could be brought back into balance with a simple balance pass without revamping the core round-based action economy. Heavy armor could affect more things than initiative, such as movement points or even defensive stats like reflex Weapon modals that increase initiative could be changed to reduce accuracy or weapon damage instead Lighter and faster weapons, when dual-wielded, could waive the -35% damage penalty or have accuracy bonuses that would offset their reduced damage This mode simply needs a balance pass, not a complete overhaul of the round system. Please do not change it into an initiative minimizing minigame.
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