Mechanism change ideas/suggestions

[Mittomain]

Hey,

 

I've finally had the time to play Deadfire, and while I like it very much, there are still a few things, which could increase my enjoyment even more.

Please don't take this as a complaint post, I just wanted to share some of my ideas, on how certain things could be improved (at least in my opinion),

maybe you find something in it, that you also think might be a good idea. Maybe not, then I've just wasted my time writing this wall of text   .

Probably most of these changes are too big to be implemented at this state of the game, but who knows, maybe for the next game...

 

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1) Recovery:

In general this is my biggest problem in the game, combat just feels way too slow currently.

I know I could play the game in fast mode, but I don't like the idea of it, because it also speeds up animation speed.

 

So I'd suggest to reduce the recovery of EVERYTHING to half of its current value.

This also means dmg should be reduced by ~50% (bit less, because attack/cast speed is intact).

This way the dps remains around the same as before (less burst though).

If this is implemented resource points should be doubled as well, so in total we can deal the same damage with the available resources as before.

 

There is still one problem though, namely the healing and defensive spells, because twice as much could be cast of these in each encounter, which might drag out some fights.

Unfortunately these are much harder to be updated, because some are tied to attacks (like kind wayfarer heal), others share the resource pool with other abilities (like priest spells).

For this a possible, but indirect solution would be 2) a).

 

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2) Constitution:

Probably I'm not the only one who thinks Constitution is an unimportant stat in this game. I'd not say it's a dump stat, because no1 wants to be die in seconds, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't find many builds which are focusing on Con.

I really would like to increase its impact a bit, here are some possible solutions for that:

 

a) Re-introduce endurance from POE1 (it could regenerate after every encounter tho).

I'd prefer this one, because this way we give a limit to each character, like a total beating they can take, even if healed.

Probably not all classes could stay alive to effectively use their whole endurance pool, but that's ok, since this is mainly a tank stat anyway.

 

b) Add damage reduction to constitution like 1-2% per point.

 

c) Add increased healing received to constitution, again around 1-2% per point.

 

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3) Armor and penetration:

In general I like that you've separated penetration from damage, in POE1 armor was losing much of its efficiency by the end game.

On the other hand I don't understand why the scaling of armor vs. pen was implemented like this, currently it feels like an all or nothing mechanism.

 

I'd really prefer if it could be changed, so there are no breakpoints in the system (diminishing returns are ok tho).

One example:

Each point of armor could give 10% damage reduction relative to the previous value, which means: 

armor damage reduction % = 1 - 0,9^armor.

 

Also some suggestions on initial values:

Weapon penetration could be somewhere between 8-12.

Light armor: 14 (~34% damage reduction vs avg pen weapon)

Medium armor: 17 (~52% damage reduction vs avg pen weapon)

Heavy armor: 20 (~65% damage reduction vs avg pen weapon)

 

Additionally the system should be somehow symmetric, meaning that the maximum possible penetration increase should be around the same as the maximum possible armor increase (classes can vary, just in general).

 

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4) Ability cost:

In my opinion there is too much difference between the costs of certain abilities, e.g. some abilities cost 4x as much as others, while not giving enough benefit to justify this.

 

Possible solution:

The resource pools could be increased of certain classes.

For example, the resource pool of a multi classed rouge could be increase from 9 to 90 (or 180 in case point 1) is implemented).

Abilities that cost 1 guile now would be increased to 10 guile, which would be the basis.

The good thing in this is that it's possible to increment costs for different abilities in smaller steps, so for example a previously 2 guile ability could be 13 guile (just to justify the 10 multiplier ) in the new system.

This leaves more possibilities for balancing ability costs, also each level up could give some resource increase instead of every 2 or 3.

 

There are some classes for which this change is unnecessary, like ciphers, chanters, wizards, priests or druids, maybe monks as well, these are following different mechanisms.

 

 

I'm pretty sure that most of these were somehow discussed previously, but who cares, I don't feel like checking every topic on this forum, sry   .

At least devs will see what we (or maybe in certain cases only me) think are important things, if multiple topics were created about them.

[itshairtime]

for recovery if you just half or double everything then nothing has changed the combat speed is fine theres quite a few abilities that are practically instance with no recovery anyways and there is quite a few different ways to reduce recovery for melee and spells alike

 

your kindof contradicting yourself with the constitution saying its unimportant but not wanting to die real fast if anything i feel resolve is more of a dump stat for most classes than constitution is

 

having armor give straight damage reduction would require re-tuning of everything in the game and not really change much 

 

ive never really felt like an ability costs to much or that i dont have enough unless im trying to just bury someone really quick and multiplying everything by 10 wouldnt do anything when you could simply lower the cost of the ability you think is to costly

[Verde]

Now that Pillars has a solid combat system, I think Obs needs to focus on quests, choices, and dialogue trees. There was nothing in the base game, minus one or two gimmicky quests, that ever challenged me intellectually. And that's not a brag, I play to relax. It's just not a very challenging game outside of combat.

Edited October 30, 2018 by Verde

[Mittomain]

for recovery if you just half or double everything then nothing has changed the combat speed is fine theres quite a few abilities that are practically instance with no recovery anyways and there is quite a few different ways to reduce recovery for melee and spells alike

 

your kindof contradicting yourself with the constitution saying its unimportant but not wanting to die real fast if anything i feel resolve is more of a dump stat for most classes than constitution is

 

having armor give straight damage reduction would require re-tuning of everything in the game and not really change much 

 

ive never really felt like an ability costs to much or that i dont have enough unless im trying to just bury someone really quick and multiplying everything by 10 wouldnt do anything when you could simply lower the cost of the ability you think is to costly

Recovery: The recovery change suggestion was there to make combat a bit more fluid, I exactly put those changes there so the overall balance is more or less intact. I just want everything to be faster instead of watching everyone staring at each other. Thought that's clear from my post.

 

Constitution: I was saying it's unimportant, not that it's a dump stat, which means that most of the time you don't want to reduce it by much, but neither is there a real reason to increase it.

There are a few exceptions, like high risk high reward classes that want to stay in bloodied/near death state longer, or in case someone has really low healing in his party comp, then this stat becomes instantly super important... but I think that's rare.

I agree that some kind of fine tuning would be good for resolve as well.

 

Armor: It's too late to change that, but in case there will be a new game I'd really welcome a system like this. Currently my feeling is that armor either does nothing or it makes me super tanky. There is not much in-between, that should be changed. With a system that uses diminishing returns stacking armor is always useful but as it increases it'll be less and less important and this leads to less imbalance between armor types.

 

Ability cost: ok, I'll try with an example, so you understand what I mean.

I pick 3 abilities from the rouge tree, crippling strike (costs 1), blinding strike (costs 2) and withering strike (costs 3).

Probably obsidian set these abilities to cost this much because they thought that for example withering strike is stronger than blindig strike, etc.

On the other hand I really don't think that withering strike should cost 3 times as much as crippling strike, because it's nowhere 3 times as effective (actually I think the debilitating strike upgrade of crippling strike is better than any of the withering strike upgrades, but that's another story ).

If they'd change their system to use bigger numbers, they could change the ability costs to something like 10, 13, 15 (just an example).

TL;DR: Using a system like that gives way more flexibility in balancing the ability costs relative to each other.

Edited October 31, 2018 by Mittomain

[Elric Galad]

I pick 3 abilities from the rouge tree, crippling strike (costs 1), blinding strike (costs 2) and withering strike (costs 3).

 

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Rogues are rouge.

 

But you're probably right about abilitiy cost (but it isn't going to change on PoE2 anyway).

Edited October 31, 2018 by Elric Galad