Just want to say that I will not talk about the balance but about the idea of transmuters. Some of them are really fun and changing the way of playing, but some of them are straight buffs without some variety or upside+downside.
The idea is to move this straight buffs to the main part of the skill, and change this transmuters to smth different. Some examples to make it clear:
Pneuma
Fire strike
Smth like this. I think it will give more interesting options and less “must have” options.
I will admit some modifiers are weird/shit, but there’s a reason for that. In the early days of GD, base game (without expansions) the game had totally different meta. When AoM hit, many, many things changed, but there was no time nor ideas of how to change the weird ones, and some of them seemed fine (Fire Strike), so they didn’t bother.
I bet they do want to change some of them, but there’s really no force to. Pneumatic Burst was meant to be better for Nightblade’s dual wield, because back in the day there were not many builds that had much defense when you chose Nightblade, so reducing the cooldown of PB was an excellent way of buffing Nightblade’s defense.
There are plenty transmuters I think are shit, but they do have an idea behind them. Although, War Cry’s Terrify seems to be the biggest shit ever to even think of. Anyway, Crate will most likely be happy to change some of those, if we had a nice idea of rebuild for them. The difference between GD and AoM is so vast that for the base game these transmuters are super good, but they lose their values in AoM.
I kinda liked that they added flat resistance reduction to all types on it. Only 10 but hey its something. Might not be of that much importance for fully decked end-game builds but it is a nice thing to have if you are going with say a pierce based blademaster or tactician and are low on gear.
I do not think that all skills, and all items, should have a place in fully decked end-game builds, but are there to serve a purpose of leveling up and/or playing with crap gear.
I strongly disagree with this. If a skill or (legendary) item can’t be built around for endgame, it should be modified or removed.
Skills should be usable throughout the game, not only end game. I agree with malag… whatever his name is, lol.
War Cry’s Terrify is, for sure, a good leveling skill to split a huge group of enemies, but the issue is the chance for fear. If it was 33/66/100%, this skill would be way better. This is why I said it’s rather useless now. The 10 RR doesn’t do much at all unless you’re a physical build, but then you have its upgrade, Break Morale. Moreover, there are better options for bigger flat RRs.
Another thing is, a skill/transmuter CAN be useful all the time, throughout the whole game. Just look at Pneumatic Burst’s Breath of Belgothian, it’ll be useful as fuck all the time, no matter if you’re level 10 or 88.
Again, im not talking about balance\usefulness. My message is: if the transmuter gives just dirrect buff to the skill, why it is transmuter and isnt main part of this skill?
You’re overlooking the weapon requirements.
In both the cases you mention, this was done to complement a particular weapon archetype when used with the specific skill.
It’s a way of balancing different weapon configurations by making some transmuters and their bonuses exclusive to certain configurations and not available to others, for instance, this is why Searing Strike and Searing Might have different values to each other.
First I would say I do like how the transmuters are now and it works.
But I also think if another ARPG uses transmuters (made in future) I like it if they drastically change the skill. The bloody pox one does this I think in that it does more damage but buffs your enemy with this transmuter. But I like things that cause a decision say between more projectiles or critical hit damage where you choose if you want to take them. That example shows a choice between things. I really liked the Sacred 2 system of modding your combat arts. I do like GD system too but if you look at sacred 2 you are making more drastic changes to a skill. I guess it’s a bit different and can’t compare the two games because Sacred 2 the modifiers were part of the core of the game whereas GD transmuters were just kind of an extra layer. I do like how transmuters eventually lead to gear mods that change how your skills work. That was revolutionary idea!
Yea, i know, but it can be the part of the main skill, like “if you use a two-handed weapon you gain following bonuses…”, “if you use a one-handed melee weapon you gain following bonuses…”. There is no point to separate this from main skill and make it a transmuter.
Why? If there are only end-game viable items and skills, people get spoon-fed and hand holden. This is a game where you make progress and choices. And if there are no transition items and skills, what is the point? Most players do not even reach and do the end-game stuff anyway so why should the game be focused on that?
They could do that if that was how they designed weapon bonuses/restrictions to work. They didn’t :p. Not much point changing it this far into development either, maybe they’ll do it for a GD2 in the far future.
No, i know about weapon requirements, i mean why it is a transmuter and not just a few lines in the main skill that say “if you are using specific weapon you gain following bonuses…”
Because that’s not how the skill system works. :eek:
Too much stuff added in one skill. If they wanted to do that, the skill would’ve need to be more expensive. Issue is, the only thing they COULD do is increasing the cap to e.g. 16, but that doesn’t solve anything if you think about it clearly.
If a skill gives way too many bonuses, it’s becoming too strong and hard as fuck to balance. Fire Strike is already hard to balance (I think you’re also talking about this skill) due to the fact it has 4 nodes (+1 for each respective weapon it affects) and the massive bonuses it adds. If they added that to the base skill, it’d be rather impossible to balance because of how many values one skill contains. It then becomes harder to check what is causing a skill to be OP/shit.
I have modded a few games, and every time I overloaded something with numbers it was impossible for me to check wtf is causing this or that to be so OP. I’ll use an example of adding a skill to a game, I made it suck life from the target, I added magic damage, suppression for the target, additional healing, duration, additional events after the skill ends and it ended up being OP as fuck because it started to annihilate everything and overheal any damage I received, so I had to remove it and add everything separately, first the damage, then the healing, then suppression, then everything else and it ate twice or even thrice the time it should’ve taken.
Yes, it is easy to say to do something, I know from my own experience where I planned so many things to do stuff I really wanted but they ended up being messy as fuck and I’ve learned that the less you add into a skill, the better the skill is to balance. The same would apply to Grim Dawn, because it’s a game like every other.
I don’t think that 1-3 extra skill points make that much difference.
You mean this is a technical problem?
This. The skill system wasn’t designed to work that way.
Because choices that have an obviously correct answer aren’t choices at all. It’s doubly bad if which skills are bad and which are good isn’t obvious, so you get the wonderful experience of sinking 12 hours into your character only to find out on the 13th that it won’t work out in the end.
Or to put it another way; if some skills simply aren’t viable, what is the point of having them at all?
