Considerations for Better Balance and GamePlay

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And yes, I think we do need a bit of a shake-up with the monsters, and add some new ones. But that is probably a new thread - I seem to remember Shantara started one a while back.

OH GAWD NOT NEW CRITTERS!!!!!

I like the monsters we have, they're all variations on Unreal monsters and look "right" together. If any new ones get added I hope they fit in with that theme. The last thing I want to see are the same old tired monsters downloaded from the net, that other servers have. Or had till they got tired of them. Oh yeah, and obnoxious monster sounds too. There is no reason for some monsters to have sounds twice as loud as any of the regular monsters.

So to sum up, i'm happy with what we've got, but if we add anything, make it ourselves, make what it does original (not just "more damage" "more speed" "bigger" etc.) make sure it fits in, and for heaven's sake, not crazy annoying.

(P.S. Be careful what you wish for!)

Some brief thoughts:

Rod is definitely too powerful IMO.
The range should be something like 512 (1024 total) or 768 (1536 total), not 2048 (4096 total). With a range that long it's just too effective. You're literally walking around and automatically shooting everything within Redeemer-blast range. In order to use a semi-passive ability like this, players should have to actually try - In this case by navigating closely into groups of monsters.
If I were redoing this item according to my own whims I would personally remove the "drains adren on hit" aspect and make it simply activated for a one-time cost of X and run for a specified Y seconds. This would make it synergize with things like Adren Drip / Leech, but its overall effectiveness would be far less (it'd be more like a 20% total damage output boost, rather than a 100% damage output boost).

On weapon types and combining weapons:
Knockback and Force is a commonly tossed around combo. Here's the thing though - I probably always want a Force Rocket Launcher. But I rarely want a Knockback Rocket Launcher unless it's a map where I can knock monsters off an edge. Even then I might not want it since Knockback screws up chaining hits together.
I've also considered Quickfoot + Force combos (both are about speeding things up right?). I think that one makes sense. So maybe there could be a "Gusting Wind" and a "Speeding Wind" magic types instead of Quickfoot, Knockback, and Force.
The other thing I've considered is instead of doing two seperate modifiers, maybe there could be one modifier suffix: "Wind" and you could use a command (e.g. "toggleweapon") to swap between Prefixes. E.g. If you get a "Shock Rifle of Wind" you could type toggleweapon and turn it into a "Gusting Shock Rifle of Wind" or a "Speeding Shock Rifle of Wind." Or maybe this idea should require a semi-easily accessible artifact to change between different types, just so there's some minimal cost and people aren't rapidly switching all the time.

Sturdy is another modifier that's very weak and could definitely use another effect riding on top to make it better. In DWRPG "Earth" replaces Sturdy and does 25% piercing damage rather than the normal 15% piercing damage for a magic weapon. I'm not sure if that's "good" but it's at least better.

Penetrating is probably too weak conceptually to even salvage (IMO). I don't see how to keep the flavor of it while keeping it useful when most monsters don't even respect the property.

I have some more thoughts but I wanted to break things up a bit...

actually i agree make rod range less.. but leave triple, maybe at cost of more, or put a timer for that combo, i dont know if its possible but dont take it away. there are sometimes when i need it, for example a wave 12 everyone in base, and a swarm of warlords are there, u need to take them all easily. rod + triple + flak is the key.. WM got deemer, and the can use it once every wave, why not am.. (at this stage the blast cost too much, and i dont have many adren to spare.).

about wave 10, while i must addmit wave 10 is a gold mine, sometimes i feel more than wave 6 or wave 14...

so why isnted of re-re-re-re nerf the rod, make a monster that drain adren like hell in wave 10, it will be a nice counter agaisnt rod+ triple. ..

There's a lot to go through here and I can't respond to it all, but here's something I wanted to bring up and I think is probably a good step in the right direction:

One of the big problems with magic weapon types in general is that the weapons themselves vary so much. I mean, realistically, why would you ever use the Bio Rifle if you've got a Rocket Launcher and Flak. Either of these are just absolutely better weapons.

Not everything is reducible to pure Damage Per Second, but if you look at a Vorpal Shock versus a Vorpal Lightning - The Shock Rifle has a base DPS of 64.28, whereas the Lightning Gun has a base DPS of 43.75. In terms of damage, the Shock Rifle primary fire is just absolutely better by a substantial margin.

Furthermore, the Shock Rifle primary fire shoots more than twice as fast as the Lightning Gun. When you're looking at a chance rate of 5-9%, well... it makes a big difference how often that effect is occuring.

One of the things I have played around with is adjusting these values. Lets say for example we want to try and "even out" a Vorpal Shock with a Vorpal Lightning Gun. Okay - Vorpal Lightning gun gets ~15% damage bonus and the effect occurs at about 10-20% rate.

I actually don't support making the Vorpal Lightning this powerful, as I think Vorpal in general is somewhat too strong. But improving the Vorpal modifier as applied to Lightning Guns/Sniper Rifles and toning down the Shock Rifle version would fix many of the issues with Vorpal.

I think this should apply on a general level to all weapons. Bio Rifles are just inferior to Flak/Rockets, so they ought to be receiving stronger effects from the magic weapon types to compensate. Similarly, anything that applies to the Shock Rifle should get more benefits relatively when applied to the Lightning/Sniper. An effect like Rage on a Lightning Gun (ignoring RPG stats) is going to give you something like 80 DPS, whereas an unmodified Flak has a DPS of 160ish...

interesting idea... may cause the "lesser" weapons to be used more if the damage/magic ability of those are increased. however you could have issues being overpowered in other ways. lucky 7 flack spawning items every 1.5 secs, lucky 7 bio spawning every 1... makes a big difference if you make that change

Well, kind of the point of looking at each modifier on a per-weapon basis and making adjustments is you're specifically targeting everything you're doing.

In the end hopefully that means more different Weapon / Weapon Modifier combos are viable, instead of just having a couple of awesome weapon types (ie, Vorpal Shock, Energy Flak) and the rest aren't even worth using.

Ya know... I could go on and on and on (and yinz know I could)... but a couple of relatively quick (for me) points.

1) Not all weapons are created the same, but they all take skill.

Be it a flak, rocket, shock, lightning, or ripper (don't know it... I think it made it into the Chaos pack for 2K4, but it was a favorite of mine in UT99)... they all take some skill. Yes, the flak is a spammy type weapon, sending shards everywhere, etc. But it takes skill to not kill yourself with it. Same with the goo gun. And they all do damage at different rates and distances.

As has been said... the rod takes lots of skill too... doubt me... stand in the middle of a bunch of queen's, titans, or warlords, and just watch your adren plumet towards 0.

2) Not all players are created the same...

Ignore levels for a second...where do we expect even Elite's low/mid levels at? Somewhere towards the top. He is good enough that I have know lesser players called for cheating with an aim-bot or some similar trick on servers where we had pro-tour folks hanging out. There are some who just excel to the point where they should not be considered in the figuring of whether something in the RPG is balanced or not... throw them straight out...

Not all players play the same class the same way either. I am one who goes into one of two modes... I either pick a spot to snipe from (can't do that on DC), or I am very much an in-your-face player. Add in tricks that I would pull in games like DM/TDM, LMS and such (even without the RPG), and I could be a major force to be reckoned with. You never knew if I was going to be on the top of one of the towers in Face, picking off headshots without even zooming as you were around your tower, or if I would be jumping into the middle of a fray with a deemer to fire it at the ground and kill several folks as well as myself. So with my extreme AM, I am tending to be very much a chase down the big guys and try to kill as much as I can, while I have the health and adren, then pop back to a safe place for awhile.

Add into this... some people can play all day practically every day, while others are lucky for a couple of hours a week.

3) Not all levels are the same. Example, my *BEL*_o scores differently than *BEL*_e. And it gets worse when you look at say *BEL*_e vs. say Rose's characters.

Speaking to balance between Weapon Modifiers -

I have to reiterate that I don't really understand why Vorpal (one of the more powerful weapon modifier effects) also has such a high damage bonus. I guess the argument is "rarity" - But I'd rather have a balanced set of weapons than having uber things just for the sake of it.

I think most of the Weapon Modifiers should be assessed as to the usefulness of their effect and then adjust from there. A highly useful effect like Piercing, Vorpal, or Null should get less damage bonus than more situational effects like Lucky, Quickfoot, Sturdy, etc.

I also think every weapon modifier's effectiveness should scale. That means Piercing +6 should be more effective than Piercing -2, and Sturdy +1 should not be as effective as Sturdy +4.
On a similar note, the scale of some effects should be looked at. For example, a Reflection weapon at +7 has a 100% chance to reflect. Not only should we ask, "Is it appropriate to be totally immune to some creature's attacks?" we can ask, "Is it appropriate for a magic weapon type to receive no benefit except increased damage bonus for being +1ed or DMMed?" Similarly, the Vorpal weapon receives an exceptionally large benefit from being DMMed - The weapon goes from a 6% effect rate to 17% - Nearly triple the effectiveness.

Riffing off of one of Szlat's suggestions:
If you want to make items that can increase the power of a weapon beyond the normal +1 maximum. I think that can work, although honestly I think it's kind of confusing. "You can increase a weapon to its maximum value of X, except if you're an AM and use the +1, EXCEPT if you find this item that can also increase it beyond its maximum by 2, 3, 4, etc." I mean, the players still playing RPG are usually veterans, but it still seems like too many exceptions to the rule.
So perhaps this suggestion instead: If we're looking at increasing weapon damage, then an item that can increase a weapon's DamageBonus value without increasing the Magic's modifier level. So a Reflecting Flak +7 is still a Reflecting Flak +7, but deals X0% more damage per modifier level for that weapon (or maybe a static +X0% weapon damage bonus value and then add the cumulative magic modifier damage bonus).

You could also go with the flip side of the coin and have things that increase the power of the magic modifier, but decrease the damage bonus commensurately. So you could have a Protection +4 weapon that Protected like a Protection+7, but the cumulative DamageBonus was still 4%.

could always do and a seesaw scale for modified weapons... more damage with a higher + but less magic affect. so instead of a vorpal 10 having the highest chance to pop, it would be a vorpal 6 that has a highest chance to pop, with vorpal 10 having the highest damage. thing then is the double magic modifier... double mod would make it do more damage but less magic affect. so then you may have to add in a half magic modifier to make the vorpal 6 into a vorpal 3 for a better pop chance. but then you add artifacts and things DO get more confusing then

A big thing i see cropping up on the rod is the wave 10 issue. Perhaps as you said Szlat, its time for at least a change of the wave configurations and what monsters appear in each wave, frequency, effects and the like. Could add some new monsters yes or just use the ones we have and shuffle up the waves that every one has been used for the last what year or so now. Could perhaps use some of the monsters on the DC pack that currently arn't used like, Ghost Titan, Metal Behemoths, and the others. Hell I did that once on my old server where I took the standard weak pupae, put some gold plating on him (for reflective properities), boosted his health, damage, size and speed, and made the once poor defenseless pupae into a more serious threat. I mean, you got the harmless looking golden bug in your sights and its comes over and just eats your character to pieces.

And as Spacey said, everything isn't created the same. I mean a lot of people look at elite's scores and xp for example and say, damn that class is overpowered and they really need to nerf it hardcore, I'm gonna roll me one and be overpowered too. In reality that person finds out that they are dying as often as they were before and not getting anywhere near the scores that they saw and say, damn this class sucks. The player is the one that factors more into the final score then does the class. I mean, I've watched Elite's general pull some huge scores for the level hes at. When you start nerfing the classes to the point where it affects them for your average Joe Casual, you might turn Joe Casual away from the server. Of course the same could be said for if one class is seriously overpowering and it sucks the fun out for everyone else that isn't that class and espically if the player is very skilled. You can't nerf player skill. You could take off all the RPG elements and make it regular invasion and Elite for example could prob still score well into the thousands.

Since the issue about the rod is up, I'll use the AM class for an example. I've seen several 40-80 adreanline masters just not do well at all 400-800xp a map. I'm 85 on my AM and I usually pull 1000-1500ish xp and I've been getting around the 1000xp mark for several levels now I think since like 50ish. Same class but different skill levels and theres a decent swing in difference in xp value. As for Weapons, I pretty good with the flak and so terrible with the shock (I cant shock combo for the life of me). Is the shock underpowered, no cause I've seen player's do extremely well with the shock and shock combo that I basically jaw drop.

Also I think its just about time to make the sample size of the subclasses triple over what it currently is at now. I mean right now, only 72 players can remotely even access the subclasses. If the current level predictions of 80 for hybrid and 120 for extreme stands, that will rise to 135 players with all subclasses (doubled), and 234 players with hybrids (tripled) and see what some of the players that don't have all the abilities unlocked have with scoring. The 200 players are going to score well since for besides skill they basically have every single useful ability unlocked and are basically at their max strength.

To balance the classes, you almost have to compare the same player for each class and see how their average scores compare between the classes for the same player. If I were to use my scores for example, i score around 600-1000ish on my 40 MM, around 1000 on my 55 Eng, and 1200+ish on my 85 AM.

Szlat wrote:

Beam does slightly less max damage as it was killing things too fast.

how much is slightly? whats the max damage? because if it cant kill a skajaar in a single shoot then that ll be another artifact in the bunch of artifacts that i wont use. if the damage is nerfed, then why not add range?

Thè-Hättêr wrote:

Szlat wrote:

Beam does slightly less max damage as it was killing things too fast.

how much is slightly? whats the max damage? because if it cant kill a skajaar in a single shoot then that ll be another artifact in the bunch of artifacts that i wont use. if the damage is nerfed, then why not add range?

180 instead of 200.
But remember it can now be used with the double damage.

ya, but cant use triple, the dd is just 20 seconds (real seconds not ingame seconds) and picture this. 10 players what are the odds to get dd? low really low.. i know this sounds bad but thats just baaaad..

szlats.. the rod was nerfed because it was "zero" skill.. beam is waaay harder to use. must have perfect aim. that's skill....
and you are lowering the damage...

thats not rewarding having a the aim skills.. that is unfair, i wont post again a single sccreen shot. because when i proved that rod was not the source of my kills..the beam got nerfed. im so disapointment..

Rod will not run at same time as triple

Szlat, at least make rod that can be run in the same time as triple but not affected, in that way can put rod (but not affected by triple) and still use triple for a weapon