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FORUM: Feature Requests
This topic was started by Matrim on 09/05/2012, 05:25:33
I wanted to start off by saying thank you for making a game like this, I have been looking for a good one in this genre for a long time and it is a wonderful game to play through so far. This being a feature request forum though I wanted to express some ideas on how to make all the classes in the game more even.
Rogue - Typically I love this class in a game. Love the idea of attacking from shadows and using strategy rather than AC to reduce my incoming damage. That being said, they are rather lackluster in this game to say the least. I can see that you are trying to make them more viable with the update that makes chests super annoying without them. Here are some of my thoughts on how to make them more combat viable though. I would split up their out of combat abilities. Take away Identify and make it Bard exclusive and take away the ability to spot secrets (give that to hunters in my opinion). Let them keep lockpicking and hiding. With less out of combat usefulness it now seems more balanced to buff their in combat usefulness. Keep the hiding mechanism and make it so that if they kill something during their attack they can remain hidden (This was the mechanism used in Wizardry 6-8). That way they just need one round to vamp up their critical attack instead of effectively only getting half as many chances as a hunter (considering they even succeed at hiding).
Hunter - This class is pretty effective in game already. I would do little to it but here are some thoughts to keep them competitive throughout the game. With the addition of the monsters level being subtracted from the critical strike chance (My understanding is its Crit% - Monster Level = Crit chance) it just does not make sense to choose a hunter over a warrior at least to the point of the game I have gotten to. Warriors pretty much kill anything with their hit a billion times a round thing and bring more health and better armour to the table as well. Give hunters the ability to see secrets out of combat (makes lore sense to me as well). I would also give them an extra attack every 20 levels (might need to be tweaked, just a number that seems good to me, additionally rogues would benefit from an extra attack every 25 levels or so). What I mean by an extra attack is an additional weapon attack that occurs at the end of the round giving them another chance to crit. I would offset this advantage by giving them 1-12 health per level instead of 1-16. This would give them a different flavour than warriors which would be refreshing.
Bard - Another highly effective class. Just to make things a little more interesting I would like to see in combat songs added to them. Nothing huge but some nice utility songs would be nice. Some ideas are a song that has a % chance to make monsters not advance forward in a given round (enthrall) and a song that makes one party member unattackable for a round (sanctuary). These songs should not interrupt the out of combat song playing.
Paladin - A mediocre class in this game. I would like to see this class buffed in the middle section of the game. At the end it is my understanding that they find a Paladin specific weapon and become good again. At the very beginning they are nice because of their + hit prayer. After level 7ish however they really start to lag till you find that weapon. A nice addition might be auras, this could be another combat meta to take into account. A paladin would get an aura that reduces the effectiveness of evil creatures (Specifically evil, not the trees and spiders and whatnot) by 1 every 10 or so levels (-1 to hit, ac, hell even damage but that would not do overly much).
Monks - It took me a while to figure out that this class is just not really viable. At the beginning they are nice, str and dex focus lets them keep up and even surpass warriors effectiveness in combat. They pay for this with less health but its manageable. Manageable that is until about the swamp, I imagine and have read that it gets worse beyond that. There are just too many spells at that point, their AC is useless and I found I needed to funnel so many spell points into single heals on him just to keep him up while my warriors had triple the health and were doing great (part of the problem here is that the most cost effective heal spells are full heals rather than heals that do 70-150 health for instance). Factor in the fact that I am sure damage tiles are close and their health becomes a serious problem. To me it seems that the little damage along the way is the monks downfall. I would like to see this offset with a damage reduction ability. This would just give them a little something to take the edge off of damage tiles and the spells. Something like -5 damage every 10 levels or so. At level 30 they would see -15 damage on everything that damaged them. Not sure how the damage ranks up at that level but this seems to me to make them be able to keep up with warriors in the little damage respect while still being somewhat fragile to single monster attacks (to offset their greater damage and better hit chance).
Warriors - Fine in my opinion. An idea that would help them be more effective with large groups is a cleave. Whenever they hit a monster that is in a group of 2 or more there is a % chance (flat, does not scale with level, say 10%) that they hit a second monster in that group for the same damage. Again this is just flavouring so that not all the melee classes are the same but bring separate things to the table.
Spellcasters - Overpowered to say the least. You need at least 2 and as you increase your party gets better and better. Some of the vast utility needs to be taken away. For one thing the instant kill spell, let that be a hunter or rogue thing. Make permanent spells more expensive so that walking into dispelling zones actually hurt (triple the cost would be a good thing to see). I would also like to see the health per level of advanced caster classes reduced to 1-4 from 1-8. Casters with as much or more health as warriors and better ac due to dex are just too much. I would also like to see some monsters that can hit them more (up to the swamp at least its only been casters that can touch them but I have read about marksmen and stuff) earlier on and into end game. This has a two fold effect, one being that you actually have to watch their substantial health pool once and a while and are actually motivated to upgrade their armour and two it divides damage among the party more evenly so that your frontliners are not always getting cranked so hard.
These are just some ideas, take or leave them as you see fit. Also keep in mind that I have not played all the way through the game but being a Bard's Tale and Wizardry vet I feel I can extrapolate where things are going quite well. I have read multiple times that you made this game to be like Bard's Tale and plan to keep it that way which is commendable. I only offer these suggestions as ways to improve balance among all the classes and to avoid the obvious party of 3-4 warriors and 3-4 casters. Changes can be made to the game that were not seen in Bard's Tale because Bard's Tale was not perfect and could have been improved but the necessary technology was not as available back then as it is now. Keep up the fine work and I look forward to the sequel.
P.S I would love to see you redo Wizardry 6, 7, and 8 if you are thinking about tackling that. I know a lot of people loved 7 and I did too, it was an amazing game, but 6 was FANTASTIC too and I would hate to see that piece of nostalgia left out. I was somewhat disappointed with 8 and I believe you will have a hard time trying to adapt that game onto this platform while keeping true to it. I would not be sad to see it done in the style of 7 but with 8's storyline.
Regards
Matrim
This is a great post - particularly the suggestions for making the rogue a much more attractive class for when it comes to combat duties. That said I have to stick up for the monk class a little bit (and not just because I find the idea of a gnome equipped with little more than a woollen shawl and some leather gloves doing way more damage than their heavily armoured & weaponed colleagues just so darn cool).
I have to confess that I never really had to deal with the problems you and others have identified around managing a monk's HPs as you move onto the Swamp and harder areas - though I think that might be down to me having spent FAR too long grinding away in Savage Crossing trying to get a 2nd hunter up to speed and then discarding it in favour of a 3rd Mage who also then needed levelling up. Ok, so maybe not the recommended approach unless you're dead keen on having a monk in your group.
So apart from acting as a pack mule for the rest of the group is there anything else good to be said for the monk? Well, I think that at really high levels the AC bonus does make some difference in melee combat (especially if you've chosen one of the "small" races to be your monk). I had a go at trying to defeat the 100 mountain dwellers you find in the mountain ridge area without the aid of my mages (why the hell not?!) and whilst my other fighters ended up getting hit left, right and centre and also becoming temporarily incapacitated, my monk endured the entire fight without a scratch. Whilst this isn't really any advantage needed to win the game in its current form, it may come in handy if some of the monsters you meet in the mountain range area set the tone for the expansion (ie resistant to magic or thousands of HPs so they're still standing even after a couple of blasts of Sodar's Wrath and the hunter's critical hit ability hardly works at all so it's necessary to take the fight to your enemies up close and personal).
I too like the monk. I have completed the game once with one in my team and am using one again for my second go through.
Once past level 10 or so they always hit first and nearly always kill.
The lack of HP is a problem but not for melee combat. The monks AC means that while you are often providing medical aid to the other tanks, the monk just goes on kicking ass. The problem comes when you get traps and magic bombs flung at you, if they hit, the monk dies quickly. Lava hurts as well.
I would have thought that because monks, and paladins, are religious types they would get extra magical resistance.
Ah well, fair enough. All I can say is that I don't recall being overly worried specifically for my monk's wellbeing when it came it to magic attacks (especially if a mage was quick enough to cast Absorb Magic before any of the enemy mages could cast their offensive spells). With lava, I was also concerned for the HPs of my mages who hard roughly the same level of health when hitting the Inferno area so I was more managing HPs for the whole team rather than just one character. As for damage tiles & traps - it was rare for me to come across a trap that actually wiped out team members so most of the time it'd be a case of dealing with restoring health rather than resurrection - i.e. sitting on a tile listening to the restorative effects of the Bard strumming their harp before moving on.... So maybe it's a case of whether the preference is to play a quicker game or not - if it is then it probably makes sense to not choose a monk.
Agree that some more abilities to distinguish the monk from other classes would be nice but not a deal breaker (for me at least!).
