I will, most likely, be using your mod. It sounds amazing and I agree the game can use some more polishing and balancing. My questions could have sounded a bit crude (I apologize if that was the case), but I thought them to be very pertinent in light of Crateās continuing support of their game. āSilly questionā is debatable: Some mods that fix bugs and improve the game at the core (especially when the owner wonāt do it anymore), I consider needed. YMMV, of course.
Anyway, good luck with your project. I will be following it closely.
Thanks^ and happy to respond. Iāll say straight up that neither me nor Ceno plan on being as diplomatic as Crate.
But in that particular case I was calling the question silly only because of the concept of āneedā. I understand that you feel itās needed, and actually respect that view. I was simply pointing out that what you, or I, or anyone feel is āneededā is not needed on a universal scale.
Iām a very opinionated person and very blunt, but I try to be specific with my words. I may personally believe that certain word choices are silly, but that does not mean I am belittling you as a person, or discarding your desires for the game.
I actually do apologize here if that came off as condescending though. I didnāt mean silly in that way. I say stuff people consider silly all the time, itās not a right/wrong or good/bad kind of thing. So it wasnāt that I disagreed with what you want, it was the way you expressed it I found disagreeable.
If anything Iām elated to hear that weāll potentially be providing a service you have a hunger for (extensive balance support).
Also, I admittedly did misread the tone of your question. Thatās on me. Glad to have your interest, I will do my best to keep it.
Right, I understand where youāre coming from. I donāt agree with everything you said (CT is NOT fine) but I am looking forward to this. Good luck with it.
Itās not Callidorās Tempest, itās Callidor Aether Nova at best. Lightning Nova is the exact same skill, without requiring 16 points invested in it. Add to that Inferno, which is basically āadd X more dmgā and the skill is just a bland, uninspired version of Lightning Nova. And it sure as hell isnāt a Tempest, as its name suggests.
Now, itās not a bad skill. It has great dmg, scales with weapon dmg and utterly wrecks everything but thematically itās horrible.
āCallidor perfected a technique which, by creating a sudden concentrated burst of raw aether energy, would ignite the air around him in an arcane tempestā is the description. What I imagine happens is he creates an aether version of Squallās Lightning Storm that moves with him and zaps everything below it with aether energy. Inferno could be changed to add more fire dmg to the spell and there you go, a real arcane Tempest. Again, Iām not talking about the viability of the skill in question, just pointing out that how the skill is envisioned doesnāt translate to gameplay that well.
But anyway, I imagine this is beyond the scope of a rebalance mod and I should probably learn to do it myself, it is my vision after all. Iām gonna stop derailing the thread now.
This would be cool but it sort of diverges even harsher from the skill. Itās a doom bolt not doom summon.
I like the idea though and fun trumps logic.
Compromise: It summons a player damage bonus pet that doesnāt show up on your pet list and is stationary. Like a thermite mine. It has a chance to spawn on enemy death and it looks like a mini chthonic rift that spews out chaos bolt projectiles for a while.
But yeah weāre thinking something along the lines that gives doom bolt the ability to be more single target oriented than devastation, but still have something to offer against mobs.
Yup, sorry, not exactly what weāre looking to solve. Guys, this is the thread to start giving feedback about your grievances with balance related things to the game in ANY way, shape or form. For me personally, Iām specifically looking for feedback on which skills you think are absolute shit, and detailed explanations and comparisons that show why, as well as skills you just think are under par. Anything in between really. If any of your are hoping for a specific skill to get looked at, and for that to potentially show up in our first release (whenever that is) then this is the thread to comment about it in.
I worry that Crate will be tossing huge wrenches into your plans when they them selves do re-balancing passes. Until we can get a āversion controlā aspect of the client we will not be able to balance the game as we see fit. I completely agree with you on many aspects of the game being un-playable / broken due to the required stat walls that every charicter must put up. If you need a tester of the mod iāll help when i can as time permits.
(These changes went through (potentially verbatim) and lo and behold, Mostās Callidorās Tempest build is kicking ass. But it still feels monotonous to me, albeit to a lesser extent because of the increase radius.)
As a preliminary thought, I donāt think I want to completely rework the mechanics of the base skill very much. I think it can be quite fun, actually. Inferno needs a numbers buff, though. Where I think thereās room for rework is with Wrath of Agrivix. There I think we could diverge a little from the initial design. WoA is primarily taken for the knockdown chance (Iām guilty of this), one pointing it and CT and foregoing any further investment. I havenāt seen a WoA build that is actually meant to do damage since transmuters/Arcanists (I forget which came second) were released.
Iāve made content for basically every Unreal Tournament, and have touched Doom a bit. I havenāt ever touched an ARPGās mod tools, though, which is ironic since its my most-played genre. Aside from that experience, Iām a Computer Scientist by day anyways, so now I get to be a heromodder by night.
This is definitely trueā¦but soās the opposite. We could tone down/tone up some monsters and then make skills suit their difficulty. But chances are weād still need to re-tone some monsters afterward.
Looking at it broadly, I feel like thereās a lot of monsters that are presently āOKā (albeit with maybe too high DA, but weāll get to that). Every basic Aetherial Zombie in the world doesnāt need to be mechanically different or have its very-few stats touched upon extensively. But thereās a lot of skills and items and Devotions that simply arenāt being used at all, and we can kind of see why. So we want to make them usable, then tone back the statwall (OA/DA/Resists/Health) of monsters, and then do any final tweaks to skills necessary (which will probably focus on debuffs or high-damage nukes). This seems like a lot of changes, but I feel as though its fewer changes than weād need to do if we tweaked monsters first.
Wow, there was basically nothing in that mission statement that I didnāt wholeheartedly agree with. I mean, there are some core gameplay elements that I would like to see changed (the pure RNG loot hunt is seriously nothing more than a Skinner box and Iād love to see it go), but thatās obviously outside the scope of this project and is therefore irrelevant here. I wonāt say Iām ālooking forward to itā, since this is still obviously in a very early state and the last thing I want to do is rush youā¦but I WILL say that I very much liked the sound of what I just read.
I largely agree with the goals described by adoomgod. With one addition Iād like to throw in as well: boss/hero hunting.
Iād like to weight certain epics/affixes/legendaries toward certain bosses/heroes/nemeses (although Iām probably not letting Fabius get his grubs on another Crescent Moon). But I would still like every boss/hero/nemesis to be capable of dropping anything, so its not as though I would outright remove any item from the drop pool of a boss. But Iād like to inherently give players a reason to farm X-out-of-the-way-boss moreso than Y-easily-found-boss, if they so chose.
The minutia and specifics of this are up for debate and Iām not making any guarantees that this will actually happen, because this is one instance of diverging from Crateās vision (i.e., everything is equally droppable everywhere, aside from M.I.s). But I do think it could be a step in the right direction.
Can I grieve about the imbalance of items? Like how there can be an ice+fire build, but there arenāt enough items to give the boost to the build. This is why weāve got people who have 15-20k DPS, and others who have 60k DPS. This is a huge gap. And survival is a problem: you either have to go life leech, ADCTH, or really high regeneration with pots. Iāve built so many chars and they all fail because items donāt accommodate that particular build. Devotions, too, most often than not require people to go defensive instead of offensive because items can either make or break you. Also there are a lot of cool downs. If Iām not mistaken, āARPGā should mean that a character doesnāt have to wait forever for his main spell. In other words, lower cool downs on (with lowered damage to compensate for frequency). Thatās part of the āfunā factor.
Just thoughts of what could be improved. Some items just feel out of place or useless.
An example of a failed build: olexraās flash freeze (cold) + demoās fire strike. Seems like a good combo, until you find that the only way youāre gonna have more than 10k DPS is if you sacrifice health items and end up with 5k HP on ultimate and shitty resists. And if you want to go soldier for physical damage and olexraās, expect to have low DPS and trouble killing stuff.
Absolutely! Items will be coming third-ish in our rebalancing pass, however, for reasons described in the first post. Even so, thank you for taking the time to write your grievances. Thereās a lot in there that weāre aware of.
Disregarding our CT discussion earlier, there is one skill Iād want some feedback on and havenāt found any.
OFF is, arguably, a very powerful skill against anything that can be frozen. And then you get to something that canāt be frozen and notice that ALL its dmg is completely tied into the freeze duration. As a result, anything thatās immune to freeze is completely immune to OFF as a whole. And to top it off, you canāt bind constellations to OFF either, most likely as a result of the dmg coming from the freeze the spell inflicts and not the spell itself.
Now, removing the freeze immunity from bosses will make an already very good skill completely bonkers but on the other side, why should they be immune to the dmg of one of my main spells, rendering half my build inert. As far as I know, there isnāt another ability that works the same way and even with 100% resistance to one element, you can still find ways to dmg stuff.
To be fair I only ran through CT once and concluded that it āworked.ā So when I said itās āfineā I just meant that it can function in ultimate.
But thereās certainly room for improvement. Itās not on my top list of shit I want to do, but luckily thatās why there are two of us. Me and Ceno tend to agree on how to address balance changes, but we both like to play very different aspects of the game in some casesā¦ so it works out.
Iām happy to buff inferno, or even alter what it gives. WoA definitely craves a rework. When I was talking about CT i was just talking about the base skill.
My modding experience: I tinkered around with warcraft 3 a lot. I wasnāt big on releasing my stuff, but generally Iād take popular custom games and then mod them to be even more fun for me and my friends. Thatās about it, but Iām also a compsci major. Believe it or not, I find passion goes a longer way when it comes to modders than background. Iāve seen a lot of first time modders release really great stuff because they kept at it. And again, a rebalance mod doesnāt require any great expertise in codingā¦ for most of it heh.
Iād like to elaborate on why it makes more sense to us to touch up on skills and items first and monster mechanics and stats second. Donāt get me wrong though, we arenāt doing anything 100% exclusively, so we may do a rudimentary pass on monsters early in. Specifically their DA, as Ceno mentioned, just doesnāt feel fair to a lot of builds thatād otherwise be fine.
You donāt pick your monsters, you pick your skills and items. This is an important distinction because depending on your playstyle and mindset, you may have a very different experience than other players in terms of whether monsters are unfair or OP or not. Maybe your build sucks, or maybe your skills are just not performing as well as they should relative to other skills. Or maybe your gear is not performing as well as it relatively should compared to other items. Or maybe itās presently just too hard to gear. Etc. There is more to work with and look at here.
And donāt get me wrong. Both Ceno and I are CERTAIN, 100% CERTAIN that some monsters are over tuned, and that DA scaling in GD is just annoying to a large number of players, and that itās not a player-side problem.
But itās my belief that if you tone down the monsters first, and tone up the gear and skills second, youāll just have to end up toning the monster back up in more cases than the reverse.
A really strong argument for this is that we can ONLY understand a monsterās difficulty in relation to a playerās performance against it. But with items and skills, REGARDLESS of monster strength we can often just look at the numbers and see discrepancies compared to other skills/items, gaps in strength, problems etc.
Also consider that a lot of enemies WEAR items, so if we buff the quality of loot monsters will also receive an indirect buff in some cases as well.
Think about it: It just makes sense to make tiers of items reasonably comparable to each other in power and performance, and then look at how everyoneās doing against monsters.
But the thing he said that really says it the best is this: " But thereās a lot of skills and items and Devotions that simply arenāt being used at all, and we can kind of see why. So we want to make them usableā¦" All the monsters are at the least ātolerable.ā Theyāre all there and theyāre all beatable. However, there are some items/devotions/and to some extent skills that are pretty much NEVER used by any proper theory-crafter (and a lot of 1 point wonders that offer no temptation beyond that point).
That seems much more of a priority to me. To take those poor discarded player-side aspects of the game, and make them tantalizing and interesting, before taking monsters which already function as what theyāre supposed to be and fine tune them.
I have an idea for how to fix the OFF and Blade Trap problems without touching the way the skills are designed at all. If my idea works out, youāll have full OFF and BT damage/resist reduction/da reduction against bosses, even if you donāt freeze/immobilize them.
