Know what would be awesome?

Know what would be awesome? If the head programmer, Nicholas Vining, could stop by here and throw in his two cents as to whether or not he feels the standard set by the mods in this section is generally in line with his vision of balance.

We're all one big happy modding family over here, but I always have that lingering doubt... What if ol' NickVin considers the vast majority of mods to be overpowered? I do sometimes feel like swiftstriker is making the game easier.

On the other hand, if NV thinks the mods are perfectly fine, then we can use the current norm as a standard of balance to judge future mods by.

Plus, he's a totally awesome guy, and I'd love to hear what he has to say regardless.

 

Between the mods that we've out already
Unless there is word of a creator's view
Many of them may be overpowered
Please let us know so we don't have to argue

 

Iambic pentameter! Ah, what fun!
Alas, you've set off one of my pet peeves;
For lines both 2 and 4 are one too long,
And 1 and 3 doth butcher emphasis.

 

no meter for me
look more closely at my lines
going for the bump

 

I personally feel the mods around here trend towards being overpowered - not because people necessarily are trying to break the game, but because they overenthusiastically tackle issues that they see as problems. My own gourmand mod might be giving away too much booze; it's hard to quantify and compare.

Examples:
ammo is hard to rely on for ranged characters - > GIVE INFINITE AMMO
crits make life difficult for end-game warriors -> nullify all the monsters' crit chance in a huge radius
master of arms is a bit underwhelming -> slather the player in gallons of resistances and/or armor

Generally though, mods aren't any more OP than promethean magic / golemancy / necronomiconomics + blood magic. It'd be nice to see those skills nerfed in a future patch. Modders should aim for Mathemagic or Berserker Rage as balance benchmarks, rather than, say, correcting for a weakish skill like Master of Arms by making a new defensive skill that's as powerful as Golemancy.

 

And for the record, I disagree on your choice of benchmarks.

 

Oops. Well it only lasts for 8 turns and has an incredible cooldown.

 

As opposed to Kiaido, which lasts for 3 turns and has a 3 turn cooldown.

 

I've just been testing nerfing target locked to something more reasonable in debuffs.

Also, I'm experimenting with quickstep being an "exactly two spaces away from you" teleportation spell, since its current function beats out nightly leap by a longshot.

 

I love how Meat gets all "rah" and everyone is like "oh, crap! maybe I'M OP!"

lulzy

 

Lol. I see you haven't noticed my recent thread. I've been having these concerns for quite some time, this was more the final straw. Plus, it seems EVERYONE and their grandma has something that reduces critical and/or counter.

 

Yeah, well, i was first.

Seriously, though, I think it's overreacting. More on that later when I have time to cohere a reply.

 

I'd love to hear you thoughts on the matter

 

For the moment, I don't think that major balance issues should be squashed and released. I think it's okay to bring them up, though. Without knowing exactly what has changed in 1.0.10, all of that work might be for naught. What if someone's ideas for crit/dodge/counter/block get implemented instead of the current system? Everything would have to be reevaluated again. Just my 2 zm.

 

Yeah, Fair enough. However, RHM's comment about critical/counter, while insightful, didn't strike me as the largest problem with SwiftStriker. I think most of us see it as a quick fix until the combat priorities are straightened out and we're no longer 100% at the mercy of our enemies' stats in the endgame, with little to no influence from our own stats.

I do, however, feel that something's seriously wrong when a warrior skill tree outclasses any one rogue skill tree in terms of teleportation options, which is why I'm experimenting in nerfing quickstep. Granted, two of the 3 real teleportation skills can only be used when a monster is the target, but quickstep was being used as an escape mechanism most of the time, and it was a damn good one, without me needing to hinder my warrior stats in any way.

But I digress. What I feel modders should exercise extreme caution around is defensive bonuses, and only add them if they're absolutely necessary, and never, under any circumstances, make them objectively better than any vanilla defense-oriented skill tree.

What I'm REALLY concerned with is when a skill tree is objectively all-around superior to a vanilla one in mathematical terms, such as in stat bonuses, equipment loadouts, that have superior values with no real disadvantages.

Essence, while I respect you greatly, I'm afraid I must disagree with you strongly when you say that the developers want the first half of the game to be easy. The entire game is supposed to be difficult, and if it only starts getting difficult halfway through, then dying and getting back to the difficult (and thus exciting) part is boring. If people are going to be backtracking a lot whenever they make a fatal mistake (which should be often), the tension has to be maintained at all times.

 

Not specifically, though a lot of other people's mods exist only in their heads, so with the amount of content you have created, criticism of mods is more likely to apply to your stuff - stuff which I do enjoy.

Several people have discussed creating their own ranged skillset, whether for grenades, revolvers, or otherwise. "INFINITE AMMOS!" is assumed to be a matter of course, and not even treated as a core powerful part of the mod. I'll be open for criticism on this one myself, soon. I plan to give the player infinite ammo from a skillset, though in theory I'm going to give infinite ammo the weight it deserves, and not give away as much other power in the skillset as I would put in a skillset that doesn't remove resource management from the game.

Anti-crit is increasingly common, and typically powerful. Getting to 100 crit (or even 100 dodge, which isn't as powerful as crit) takes a great deal of effort, involving several skillsets and items. If a player wants to be uncrittable, I feel they should have to take at least 2 skillsets to get there - several skills with 100% uptime and partial anti crit, or multiple skills that give 100% anti crit but have a cooldown longer than their uptime.

Any given superdefense skillset makes up for warriors' defense shortcomings, but stack several and you start kicking monster zoos in the nuts just for "the lulz" - and to keep from getting bored. It's a pipe dream, but I'd rather see warrior stats' numerical values increased on the back-end (more block/resist from , more crit from ) rather than the current state where we have to pump up skillsets to make up for things.

 

Agree 100% with this, enough so that I felt inclined to repeat it and not just hit the "like" button. I strongly feel the game needs to challenge on every floor, or else it will be boring.

 

I feel like mysterious portals solve most any issue with the earlygame being too easy. But not everyone feels as compelled to enter every single one, I imagine.

 

I never said, and don't believe, that the devs want the first half of the game to be easy. This entire discussion, in my mind, revolves around the one issue that I bring up so often that people have referred to it using my name. You can max out any skill by DL2. This creates a dichotomy in skill design: you either have to design skills that have capstones balanced around DL2 (Piracy, Fleshsmithing), or capstones that are actually decently powerful in the lower floors (Golemancy, Promethean).

(There are those skills that are useful at any level but not OP because they're not really combat-related, like Burglary and Smithing)

That fact of the way skills are designed requires the first few floors to be easy -- because if you can survive long enough to gain your first level, you can gain access to a skill that will make gaining the next 4-5 levels easy. A straight Rogue can take his first level as Fungal Arts 2 and have a pet that will solo the rest of the first floor for him. A straight Wizard can take Golemancy with the same result. A straight Warrior generally doesn't even need to gain a second level to solo the first floor without effort.

Taking out the first floor will generally give you about 5 total levels to play with. A straight Rogue can keep going up Fungal Arts and end up walking easily through floor 2 with a freaking mobile armored combat mushroom. A straight Wizard can have both a Mustache Golem and Obvious Fireball entering floor 2. A straight Warrior can walk into floor 2 dealing +12 damage and +24 crit from skills alone (and that's just one skill tree and one other first-level skill.)

So you walk through the second floor. Sure, you have some slightly more tricky enemies, but all in all, if you pick the skills that have been balanced for usefulness on lower-level floors, you will walk through the top few floors without dying to anything other than your own stupidity and possibly an Evil Chest spawn.

Each floor you go down, the ease with which you walk through decreases, but seriously, if you've logged even 40 hours in DoD, you've read the wiki, and you level up the core-game 'easy button' skills first, you aren't really put to the test until you start seeing Monstrous Masks and Magic Dragons.

The reason the game isn't boring for that first part is that you CAN still die easily if you're not paying attention, because it's always possible to fail to play to your strengths. But that doesn't mean that a skill that makes the first few levels easy is bad -- unless you want to nerf almost every core Wizard and half the core Rogue skills.

That's why, when I mod, I balance for DL7+. Because if you can easily make it to DL7 on the strengths of the skills you earned on DL1 -- and you can -- then the first few levels aren't really a "challenge" in the first place, they're an idiot filter.



Now, regarding mod skills as problem-solving for characters: I'm totally OK with it. Here's why.

Character archetypes that have certain specific problems that make them hard or impossible to play are unfun. Seeing a skill called "Throwing" and then learning through dozens of failed games that Throwing isn't a valuable skill to have isn't fun. It's the opposite of fun. Playing a straight Warrior and powering through the first six floors only to start consistently dying to RNG failure because you get crit/countercrit to death by a single out-of-depth mob isn't fun.

Slathering on dollops of resistances and armor is often overkill. Especially the armor. It doesn't actually solve a problem that characters have. Resistances you have to be careful with, but they do actually solve a different problem Warriors have in lower levels, so that's OK.

As long as those solutions to those archetypal problems aren't game-breaking in another archetype's hands (some have been), and they aren't overpowered in general (a few have been), they actually make the game MORE fun, because they allow for a wider variety of successful play. Claiming that the problems shouldn't be solved because...well, because they exist in the core game(?)...is inane.

And, by and large, the community has been pretty sensitive to complaints of overpoweredness and has responded quickly and effectively. (To date, the only thing I can think of that someone mentioned that hasn't been addressed is Ninjitsu's unlimited-ammo ability, and that's primarily because only one person has said anything significantly negative about it despite my specifically asking for other people's thoughts.) That's to be expected -- the devs have been exactly the same way when problems were brought up with the core skills (re: Berserker Rage's skill reorder, Burglary's adjustments, etc.)

So, in short, the proving ground for a mod's "poweredness" and it's "usefulness" should be determined by whether or not the mod allows a different (or brand new Runecaster) 'feel' of character to take it to Dredmor and win because of smart play (as opposed to dumb luck or OP powers). If it does, the mod should be considered successful.