High Level Balance

[Crisses]

Bluddy (& others)

I suggest having an online Dropbox account - 2GB storage free, and it synchronizes on your hard drive. Just keep the spreadsheet in the dropbox/public/ folder on your harddrive, post the "public link" to the file, and we'd be able to get the latest spreadsheet without you having to re-upload it.

http://db.tt/tojDqIX (link for a dropbox account)

I use it to sync files between my laptop, desktop, iPad, and I have a couple folders for graphics files shared with frequent-flyer clients who constantly have projects in the hopper. I was going to suggest it for the Din's Additionals plug-in too because the free file storage site he's using is a little annoying.

[Bluddy]

Thanks for the Dropbox tip -- I'll check it out!

I did some more thinking and some more number crunching.

It's indisputable that the factor causing imbalance in the game is damage. It grows very fast for the monsters and much faster than that for some player characters. At the same time, it's very hard to say if the monsters are causing too much damage, mostly because the data is just too confusing. Yes, the monsters' damage curve grows fast -- it's essential to invest in vitality or skills/items that boost vitality, especially if you're not a warrior (warriors will find armor that'll double or triple their effective HP). However, there are so many vitality boosting items obtainable by the higher levels, that even a mage should be able to get his vitality pretty high.

Still, it's possible that it's worthwhile to lower monsters' strength-to-damage multiplier a little. As I've said before, this little multiplier is one of the biggest trouble-makers in the game. Even the smallest change makes a huge difference because of the non-linearity of the damage curve. I would need a lot more sample characters though to determine if this adjustment is really needed. If it is, the min and max damage curves for the monsters need to be adjusted as well so as to keep the lower part of the curve with the same behavior as it is now.

The problem seems to be more in the DPS that player characters, and in particular select characters (ie. warriors), can inflict. It goes up so high that it's far beyond the effective HP of the monsters. The poor monsters just can't keep up -- their HP only goes up linearly.

I really have to talk about classes separately here. Full warriors get a huge unfair advantage. Not only do they get 3 trees, they also get +1.2% per strength instead of 0.6% for a plain character, or 0.8% for a partial warrior. I think this is excessive and should be reduced -- this is what allows them to reach insane DPS levels. Other characters' bonuses in this stat should be examined as well. Like I said, this is a very problematic multiplier. I'm attaching my plugin, which reduces by a little the bonus that warriors get per tree. It should probably be reduced even more. It also includes my resistance formula fix.

The problem with DPS getting so high can be seen in Baki's original complaint. His DPS long surpassed the hitpoints of monsters 10 levels higher, but really, because of the non-linear behavior of the monsters' DPS curve, playing at his own level (50) would have reduced monster average damage from 108 to 82. This is a difference of about 1/4 ie. 1/4 more life for him, buying time for him to invest in vitality, get better items etc. The problem is that playing at his own level wasn't challenging enough -- the monsters just couldn't keep up with his insane DPS. Warriors don't need the huge damage per strength boost (and 0.6% per strength point is huge). They already have enough skills to help them with that.

So this is my advice: any boost of DPS to the player, and especially damage per strength, needs to be carefully reexamined because of its potential to cause such huge imbalance late in the game. Any skills affecting damage or attack time for any class need to be examined carefully. The monster strength to damage multiplier may need slight adjustment, but I'm leaving it as is for now.

Aside from this, mages need to be boosted as we've discussed in another thread. They have virtually no non-linearity to help them out with damage.

[Castruccio]

Great work, and very clearly explained. Thanks so much for this.

[Baki]

Imo the damage of mages is fine. What they need is Crowd Control and single target root / fear / stun whatever. They should be quishy but they also need ways to to get out of harms way. If getting out of harms way is achieved by killing everything before it can reach you something is wrong. Mages have to play there spellcombitions very well. Sadly Dins Curse only offers very few good combos to make that even possible.

Every melee char with a weapon can achieve great DPS. Its not only warriors. My char you were talking about was Gladiator / Firemage, so not much str bonus there. But lets assume the warrior class does far more damage than every other class: nerfing the damage bonus from str is the wrong way because str a warrior thing, he should benefit more from it than any other class. There are other ways to nerf warrior dps: Skills, lower crit rates etc.

By adjusting the armor formula you could counter the high dmg of both players and monsters by increasing the opponents effective life in a nonlinear way.

Oc the same has to be done with the resistance formula. After that you would probably have buff mages dmg.

But the general setting is relatively easy to balance. The harder part are the skills. Companies like blizzard spend a lot of time and money there and they only have somewhat like 5 classes. We have 1xx here.

[alstein]

Suggested change: +modifiers for classes such as +0.2% str, don't stack, you just get the highest one. Adjust modifiers thusly

Defenders get +1 from Con (currently 0.8)
Shamans get +3.0% instead of +2.0% for spirit
Magicians get +3.0% instead of +2.0% for int
Reavers get +0.3 Strength (currently 0.2)

maybe a couple others.

The thing is you need to encourage mages to diversify their skillsets, Warriors don't have a problem with this- mages do.

Maybe damage should be more a function of int and mastery , and less a function of the skills?

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Baki

Imo the damage of mages is fine. What they need is Crowd Control and single target root / fear / stun whatever. They should be quishy but they also need ways to to get out of harms way. If getting out of harms way is achieved by killing everything before it can reach you something is wrong. Mages have to play there spellcombitions very well. Sadly Dins Curse only offers very few good combos to make that even possible.

This part of the discussion probably belongs better on the 'help the mages' thread. Mages need to be able to invest in offense and defense if they want. Since they currently live off skills alone, my suggestion in the other thread is to give them bonus skill points.

Every melee char with a weapon can achieve great DPS. Its not only warriors. My char you were talking about was Gladiator / Firemage, so not much str bonus there. But lets assume the warrior class does far more damage than every other class: nerfing the damage bonus from str is the wrong way because str a warrior thing, he should benefit more from it than any other class. There are other ways to nerf warrior dps: Skills, lower crit rates etc.

Interesting. Really wish I had that character to see what made it tick. BTW you said you used the creature exploit. Does that mean that at later levels, your character did better?

Anyway, what I'm pointing out is the biggest, most easily fixable imbalance, and that mostly lies in the 1 multiplier. This one change doesn't necessarily solve the runaway DPS problem, but warriors were the worst offenders. They can still have a higher damage bonus relative to other classes -- the numbers just need to be reduced.

BTW I have no problem in general with characters getting high DPS using active skills. Those should cause high DPS for the moments that they are used. The problem is if high DPS is available without using any skills, or with just passive skills are used. It's fine if you invested 30-40 levels just into a passive skill that gives you higher damage, to the exclusion of all other skills. But otherwise, default damage should not go quite as high as it does now.

By adjusting the armor formula you could counter the high dmg of both players and monsters by increasing the opponents effective life in a nonlinear way.

Adjusting the armor formula would be tough because of the type of function it is. Instead, in my first 2 posts in this thread, I suggested armor values should go up faster for monsters. There's currently no way of doing that in the game, but if armor absorption kept climbing, you'd be giving the monsters more and more effective HP without hurting the mages, who still do elemental damage. This would be another part of affirmative action for mages, and would reduce the strength of rampant DPS.

[Shadow]

Originally Posted by Bluddy

This is all fine and dandy. Where does the problem come in then? The problem is that while the monsters are given a set min and max damage values per level which are both linear (as we said above), they also get 2-4 points of strength per level (I think generic monsters get 2 and warriors get 4).

I mentioned this in a different thread also, but to make sure everyone is on the same page I'll mention it here also. Monsters don't get bonuses from strength. It kind of looks that way because they have a class, but their damage is based on MinDamage/MaxDamage and MinDamagePerLevel/MaxDamagePerLevel specified in BaseMonsters.gdb and the difficulty multiplier.

[Bluddy]

Originally Posted by Shadow

I mentioned this in a different thread also, but to make sure everyone is on the same page I'll mention it here also. Monsters don't get bonuses from strength. It kind of looks that way because they have a class, but their damage is based on MinDamage/MaxDamage and MinDamagePerLevel/MaxDamagePerLevel specified in BaseMonsters.gdb and the difficulty multiplier.

Yeah I got that part wrong initially. The only thing making their damage non-linear (aside from specific race based multipliers) is the damage increasing between difficulties (normal, champion, elite, legend). This is what makes them a challenge to fighters at level 50, but it's really not that bad unless you try 10 levels higher than your own.