So since I'm a very casu player and have never made it past floor 4, I have no sense of balance wirhin existant skills. So what skills are considered balanced and what is considered op, and why? So I know what to compare to
If you mean vanilla (original skills) most are balanced, except: promethean magic is op and necronomiconomics are op, but have side effects.
Polearms and Daggers, as well as Dual Wielding and Unarmed, are considered to be on the higher point of the scale (though maybe not exactly overpowered) while all other weapon proficiency skill trees are considered pretty much normal (with Archery and Thrown Weapons sometimes being considered to be crapola).
I've found it's helpful to play with permadeath off if you're running into difficulty issues. ESPECIALLY if trying to balance test something across all ten/fifteen floors. Also possibly No Time To Grind. It helps the gameplay be much more casual friendly. I'd probably start out by just copying damage/mana costs from existing skills, since it's usually safe to say that those are at least okayly balanced. (Except necro, which has atypically low mana costs since the necropain (and debuffs, but ESPECIALLY necropain) makes up a lot of the actual cost of using it.) So don't use necro as a benchmark for mana costs Also DOT effects can often have lower damage since they hit multiple times. ETA: Actually just in general, I'd figure out which skill(s) your skills are similar to and base numbers off of them.
I've been rattling this idea around in my head about a way to achieve "balance." Unfortunately it is never quite that easy, but here's the idea: An imaginary point pool system. Each tier of a skill will be assigned a maximum point pool. The community could decide exactly what that point pool is (for example, Tier 1 could be 200, Tier 2 could be 300, etc). Each passive stat added would subtract from the available point pool, with the weight of the stat deciding exactly how much to subtract. On the flip side of that, if that Tier subtracts stats, it will add points back to the point pool. If the Tier grants a spell, the same applies. Effects such as confuse or fear would subtract from the pool for each turn they potentially last. Damage types would be weighed differently as well (for example, conflagratory damage may be worth 50 points, where asphyxiative would be worth, say, 32). Any negative effects granted by said spell will, of course, return points to the point pool, with the effects weighed similarly. If a spell has the potential to cast 1 of multiple spells, calculate the point value of each and find the average. The hard part here, I think, is determining how the costs of the spell (mana, downtime, etc.) would manipulate the point pool. Yeah, I know its probably over complicated and may go against the very random nature of Dredmor, but it is an idea for a system.
Your idea isn't bad, Syphonix. The only problem is that activated abilities would have to be assigned points individually, and since activated abilities are what the whole thing revolves around, it would quickly get weird. But your idea definitely is one worth exploring, really.
Yeah, when you really look at it, there are some shady areas that would need to be defined. However, I don't feel it to be something that could not be worked around or defined better.
Unarmed seems pretty broken with it belongs in a museum. I've been gaining truckloads of levels from artifacts I don't need.
I think it's just It Belongs in a Museum that's broken. Also another thought is: Dredmor isn't a multiplayer game. 'Balance' isn't a question of "Is someone taking this skill going to win disproportionately often" because you're not concerend about people beating other people. It's more a question of "Is this skill going to make the game easy enough that everything is boring (by ie effortlessly clearing all monster zoos, which would've been the issue with Necro, Egyptian, Promethean)" and "Is this skill good enough that it's pretty unreasonable to ever NOT take it" (It Belongs in a Museum) and possibly also "Does this skill completely mitigate the drawbacks of another skill" can be a concern (The Cure when it removed all curses; Hemetic Phylactory when it decursed) There's also the other direction to consider, of course, but I'll assume that's a bit easier to pick up in testing.
Exactly, I just wanted things to compare to so I have less work to do. Not that I will ever test for balance >_>
Since it was mentioned here... I think many on these forums are deluding themselves by thinking PD makes the game harder. It only changes the way it works. It has zero effect on actual difficulty. I play GR Non-PD all the time. If I die due to a bug, or even if I want to test something I did not fully understand before I died, I just reload the save and continue. But usually when I die I delete my saves and start anew. Some say that this is not the hardest difficulty. To those, I would say the following. Edit the game yourself. Make it harder until you appreciate the difficulties and the careful balance choice many helped finalize in the game. GR is hard. I once wanted something harder. I made it too. But "Elvish Reality" was too hard. And the amount of difficulty in balancing the difficulties to the game requires more time and effort that I was willing to put into it. And until the game is fully free of bugs and impossible to crash even with crazy mods, I say PD is a bad idea in general. It really only exists so people can pat themselves on the back and pretend they did something harder than the hardest difficulty. It only exists because this is a graphical Roguelike. /Rant off.
