The Essence and Lujo Grand Item Rebalance Discussion Thread. Bergstrom!

This is the place where, as per this thread, Essence and Lujo86 are combining forces and inviting everyone in -- and r_b_b specifically because he's the man -- to talk about a Core Item Rebalance.

Mostly, at this point, we're talking armor, but I have a feeling this could get bigger.

Please go read the thread linked above, and let's start talking about:

• What flavor-based categories we can break armor up into
• How to mechanically make each of those categories interesting and distinct
• How to mechanically separate 'rogue armor' from 'wizard armor' (and possibly even 'gish armor').
• Armor crafting?
• Other issues?

Let's make armor make sense, shall we?

 

Let's get cracking! As per the original thread, I'm volunteering for data entry and have stuff to contribute and many many things I whish I knew more about.

First, questions i'd like added to the above list:

1) How do crafting tree's compare to each other?
- What is the basic stackable unit for relevant materials?
- If there is none, as is the case for wood and leather, could one be added to an existing category?
(Examples would be going ahead and adding wooden and leather INGOTS, with jokey explanations along the lines of dwarven plastic ones )

2) If we change anything, the less we add the better - the point is to give more choice, support for existing playstyles using existing blandish or otherwise "fell between the cracks" stuff related to armor. There is a lot of it. And if we add stuff, the closer we can get to the original overall design theme the better, but develop uderdevelop thematical flavor with the framework allready in place (like viking, helenistic/roman, stone age / mayan, swashbuckling, and so on and so forth, even clockwork by giving it less off an all encomapssing theme). Tying up underused but allready existing resources would also be a priority so working stuff like alchemy acids to tan awesome leather for example, or using jewels for crafting low-tech powerfull stuff is also good.

3) What ARE the general broad playstyles anyway?

Who thends to go for ? Who'd hate to see it penalized?
Same for ? What about ? Whats currently being used for focusing builds on these things?

How are we with ? (I'm personally actually rooting for a return of a based skill tree lately).

What can be buffed, and what can be penalized? What would you guys want comprehensive tables of so I can go make them?

- What do melee warriors like?
- What do throwers like?
- What would melle wizards like?
- What would pure caster wizards like?
- What would purely ranged rougues like?
- What would melle rogues like?

- What about warrior/mage hybrids?
- What about warrior/thief hybrids?
- What about thief mage?

- What about mana hungry debuff gishes?
- How about proc based guys?

4) Does anyone have an opinion on how to handle off-tree level specific stuff that ends your progression from say a crude piece of armor before you get to the uber-top one? Are there any of these dead-end items any of you are using and why?

5) Elemental resists on armor. It would be a great place to explore the rarely used ones, and it needs to move away from so much focus on either , or .

6) Procs on armor - definitely underutilized - did anyone ever make them?

I'll be more constructive tommorow, this is just setting up and bringing questions to the table.

Also qouting Sky Muffin from the other thread:

 

(Will be using this place to deposit material for making reference and agreed upon tables and important bits of wisdom.)

• Bergstrom on the Star System: The star system for items needs a revision. We need all possible info on what sawns where and how, and all possible info on where to go digging for it. Stuff drop rate scaling is terrible right now, and proper info on the floors and stuff very much needed.
  • Essence: Because it will give us an idea of where there's obvious design-space to be filled. I'm not an organizational mastermind; perhaps someone with a more detail-oriented brain who is interested can come up with a clever way to put together a system for getting this done? Who all is interested in volunteering some time and brainspace to this project? Maybe we can divvy up the work between a few people somehow.

• Bergstrom on power difference between alchemy and other trees involving RNG:Alchemy allowing for mass healing/mp potion manufacturing from a deendable and stackable reagent drop makes it orders of magnitude more powerfull than other crafting trees just on that count alone.
  • Lujo86: My wooden and leather (fibre?) ingots idea was sort of there to account for some of that. No new findable recipies would be necessary, but being able to easily store an universal stackable ingredient for everything that uses hefty sticks, wooden shields/swords, leather belts and gloves would actually allow for a reduction in the crafting system complexity and item storage, and reduce the overall need for iron ingots as well as the need for perception to offset the RNG screw for various things.
    • Lujo86: It would also help in the "crafting sensible non-metal armor" and "universal arrow recycling system" fronts by allowing wooden bolts to be the "softball" of the arrow world. The ammount of new recipies needed is probably close to 0. Further discussion needed, as I'm apprehensive about the concept, but it seems like it would open up streamlining space for currently clunky solutions rather than create a modding-spree-like inflation of content.

• Bergstrom on adding further tiers to various metal armors:Shares what is probably the universal bilief, because the lack of those and omniprevalence of clocwork as default end-game upgrades is part of what started the whole thing in the first place, and is due to the messy way in which RoTTG has been implemented.
  • Lujo86: Each category has to be put into perspective first as per Essences questions in the first post. Am working on a comprehensive map of what we are looking at, and some thematic suggestions for Viking gear allready here.

• Offensive playstyles: (Flavor / mechanics to be further analysed, as is their potential connection to armor, help us fill it out, some allready have)
  • Up close:
    • Weapons
      • Sword
      • Axe
      • Mace
      • Staff
      • Dagger
      • Polearm
      • Dual Wield
    • Magic
      • Limited Range/AoE Nukes
      • Offensive Mana Hungry Buffs
      • Defensive Mana Hungry Buffs
  • Ranged
    • Projectiles
      • Bolts
      • Thrown weapons
      • AoE Granades
    • Magic
      • Single Target
      • AoE
  • Pets

• Bergstrom on rogue vs. warrior eqipment: It's actually rather hard to make it, because enough is woth almost any tradeoff for . Any expiriences from the swashbuckling mod making and a way to check out the list of stuff you did come up with and are satisfied with would be a great boon.
  • Lujo86: Check the SkyMuffin on EDR post.

• Bergstrom on elemental resistances:The resistance penalties are deffinitely more interesting than giving bonuses, because of thee easily acquired invulnerability on the opposite case. Giving the player reason to be on their toes looking for that one monster that can really mess him up is probably a interesting thing.
  • Lujo86:I'd deffintely want to play with that mechanic, because the only real interaction the game has with it right now are the fish paladins who tax anybody because righteous resistance is the only one universaly taxed by skills. This also makes vegan rather overpowered.
    • Lujo86: To be even more constructive, different armors penalizing different types of mundane damage while buffing others, in moderate numbers, could offset both the power of , give them playstyle and thematic and RL logic identity, give design grounds for differences between rogue and warrior armors and keep everyoe on their toes. Further discussion needed.

• About Dodge, Block and Counter: Overloading these makes you invulnerable too easily. Any one of them does. To be used in moderation. Same goes for Spell Reflection and to a degree Spell Resistance, and most elemental resistances.

• SkyMuffin being a genious about : If you really want to change things up and make a significant issue for the player, move it from and onto another stat, like .
  • Lujo86: If we could talk the devs into doing this, after we see if it wouldn't have dreadfull unforseen concequences in unwanted places, this would open up so much space for this project its unbelievable. This would deffinitely help differentiate Warriors, Thieves and Mages respective armors. Discussion very much needed.

• Existant themes: (Details need filling out)
  • Nordic - Viking gear(Lujo86, current core state)
    • Helms
    • Shields
  • Greco-roman
    • Default Bronze
    • Shields
  • Medieval (Iron and steel)
  • Clockwork
  • Copper
  • Leather
  • Robes
  • Rogueish
  • Aluminum
  • Silver
  • Plastic

• Lujo86: Armors giving bonuses / penalties depending on which weapon you got equipped, armor getting proper taxa and all that, would open up a venue for justifying plusses on weapons while penalizing or boosting different playstyles. If anyone knows how to apply the weapon skill system to armor it would be HUGE Much discussion needed.

• Lujo86: Anyone with information on making pre-encrusted equipment, or equipment with pre-existing negative encrust levels would be wellcomed to share the information.

 

Rouge armor would increase nimbleness, caddishness, savvy, and the stats that rely on them, plus trap sight radius/affinity and possibly tinker. Wizard armor would increase Sagacity and Savy and the stats that rely on them, plus Mana Regeneration Bonus, Magic Reflect, alchemy, and wand crafting. Both would increase visual sight radius. Neither would give very good armor protection, health, or anything like that.

 

Also, there should be Wizard armor that gives -Nimblness and Rogue armor that gives -magic stuff.

 

With the way you guys (Essence, mostly) are gushing, how can I not help?

Spoiler

Specific items that need tweaking:

• Asgardian Stormhammer - Underpriced. If there's one in an early shop, you can afford it by selling surprisingly little junk, and then you one-shot everything for the next 5 floors or so.
• Mace of Windu - Underpriced. Ditto. There should be a minimum price for weapons, based on damage.
• BMD - Overpriced. Never worth buying, but if you find one in an archery range, you can trade it to Brax for way better things.
• Clockwork Grappling Bolt - Overpriced
• Skull Bolt - Overpriced
• Fabulous Rogue Boots - Need a stat or proc boost to make them actually better than the Black Velvet Boots.

Put in spoiler tags because most of this is already covered in that other thread.

In general, I would love to see the star ratings firmed up so that if one item A appears on a later floor than item B, it would also have better stats and a higher price tag. Some adjustment would need to be made for artifact-only items as most spawn less often than non-artifact items.

Crafting Comparison: Alchemy is just plain busted. It never looks like it from the outside staring in, but once you've actually played a run where every iron ingot became a potion of healing, it's kinda mind-blowing. Smithing can be really good early on, but doesn't compare with Tinkering in the mid- to late-game. Both smith and tink are far more susceptible to RNG-screw than Alchemy, especially in NTTG mode.

Ingot observations: If you're an alchemist, you care about iron (for rust), other than that, steel is the only medium worth worrying about. Everything else is just gimmicky, and only needed in small amounts. Where you'd like to see some sort of decision tree, instead it's just "this build has one thing it uses one other ingot for, everything else is steel". Unless you're on NTTG, where a bad RNG streak can leave you with zero steel in the first five floors... but such flukes don't improve the dynamic when they happen.

That mod I've almost done a million times: I've toyed for a long time with the idea of making a mod that takes each of the existing alternate crafting paths (the aluminum and plastic armors, the copper boots, the bronze weapons, the silvered viking stuff, etc) and adding two extra steps to the end of each path -- one hidden and one revealed recipe for each. Just never gotten it past the brainstorming stage, which I did like 8 months ago. Too many other things on my plate.

I'm very apprehensive about Wood Ingots or Leather Ingots. While they'd be flavorful and kinda funny, that's a lot of new recipes to add.

As was just discussed, it's not like anyone actually makes bronze armor unless the RNG screwed them, so I don't think adding Leather Ingots would see any more use.

If you did make the recipes good enough to justify the hassle, then you're probably pumping crafting too much. Crafting used to suck, but not these days.

Mainly it's a cross-index of "do you smack things up close or from a distance?" coupled with "do you use mana to do that?". The former has really very little impact on your equipment. The later, however, is a huge deal.

Melee builds vary between whether they just pile on the damage, or rely on maxing out a defensive stat such as . Which is often summarized as "Warrior" vs "Rogue" builds, despite sometimes not following those archetypes at all. The damage-piling builds are easier on the early floors, but tend to have trouble in the late-game, whereas the later takes a little while to get going then suddenly becomes unkillable. (So there's some design-space there for big-damage-boosting non-weapon items for the late game, provided that they really nerf either a defensive stat or a magic stat so that they aren't an auto-yes for every single build.)

Ranged builds are mostly spell-casters relying on one or two spammable spells backed up by mana sourcing support skills. Not that tinker-archers are unheard of, but I've gotten the impression they're more rare than just "eat obvious fireball and die" spellcasting. Probably because there's a dozen different skills for ranged magic, and only three for ranged non-magic.

Egyptian and Necro both combine melee support buffs with ranged AoE spam (as does, to a lesser extent, Viking Wizardry). This means that if you're sporting mana support, you can walk the line as a hybrid melee-ranged character and pretty much handle any situation.

Whether or not you hide behind pets is a play style decision for the first few floors. In theory you could add early AoE items that would be good only if you don't have a pet, but considering that pets go downhill fast mid-game that's probably not necessary.

Archaeology and Burglary both have their supporters, people who won't build a character without one or both of them. Some people LOVE crafting, others don't find it worth it or don't want to bother with it. Teleports in general have some fanciers as well. Not sure there's any way to make equip that works for or against such skills, but they definitely inform the metagame.


Rogue equipment observation: Making good late-game Rogue equipment is tricky, and the reason why is because the good late-game Warrior equipment doesn't actually do enough to make itself not-Rogue-friendly. Even a character trying to max out can usually take the -6ish from a single piece of really good armor. Trading 2 or 3 percentage points of dodge for 10 or more is totally worth it. Once you realize that, the game kinda melts down to "magic or not?" with the other variations being much less important. When Ruigi and I did the Swashbuckler's mod, we tried real hard to include more stuff that favored Rogues as opposed to Warriors, and it wasn't easy to do.

This area isn't a ripe for experimentation as it might seem at first glance.

When you actually break down the monster stats, you'll discover that the ones that do non-basic damage types often do just a couple points of non-basic damage. Three points of any one resist basically means that some monster type out there now does zero damage to you. To keep this in check, the main game mostly restricts exotic resists to a few specific armor slots so you have to choose between them, but it's not terribly consistent about it (and there's artifact bonuses at random) so most characters can already have a smattering of resists by the mid-floors.

So if you were to do something like "all Bronze armor now gives " or "all Viking gear gives ", you'd end up with weird imbalances happening as it became much easier to tweak equip in and out to shut down the most threatening monster of whatever floor you find yourself on. I'm not saying it can't be done in a way that doesn't totally hose balance, but it's definitely an area we could majorly screw up if we aren't cautious.

As a further complication, damage types are scattered unevenly through-out the dungeon, and there's only a couple floors that have a mechanical theme worth mentioning. So even if a particular item gave you 20 , it would be less useful to most characters than an item with 2 or 3 .

The inverse of that might be more interesting, actually. Big bonuses in other combat stats, reigned in by a vulnerability that's almost never going to matter but could bite you in the eyebrows if you're not paying attention when facing the one monster that cares about it.

 

Encrust abuse would be a huge problem with that. A non-caster could totally max out , and not care at all about the lost . Once you hit 100 or 100 or 100 , you're really close to unkillable. If that came on an easily replicated crust, you wouldn't really care if the downside was random teleports or whatever other nonsense the instability causes.

Ruigi and I discussed it during Swashbuckler design. I was totally into the idea of making a crust that used gems from the plunder ability to boost ... and then the forums exploded with people talking about how putting 30 iron on their sword was worth the random tenebrous rifts they'd get hit by. Nipped that in the bud real quick.

 

...and that, ladies and gentlemen, was way I wanted Bergstrom here.

OK, then! There's some hard work to be done. I want to do this:

Because it will give us an idea of where there's obvious design-space to be filled. I'm not an organizational mastermind; perhaps someone with a more detail-oriented brain who is interested can come up with a clever way to put together a system for getting this done? Who all is interested in volunteering some time and brainspace to this project? Maybe we can divvy up the work between a few people somehow.

 

With , this can be easily solved by increasing on enemies. Even +10 to late game enemies would be significant.

If you really want to change things up and make a significant issue for the player, move it from and onto another stat, like . Then people will be really confused.

As for and -- in a large portion of warrior builds this is countered by AOE spell effects and the partial damage you still take when blocking, but both of those stats could use a little nerf if their availability is increased. Another way to balance it out could be to add a few late and mid game enemies who deal spells with , as tends to be something you get when using mage equipment. also.

I also feel like alchemy is a bit overpowered at the moment. Being able to transmute gems is the big issue for me. With transmute, you can encrust a bajillion resists onto your amulet, rings, and gloves even by dungeon level 3 or 4. Since the first encrust instability rarely happens, and about half of the instabilities are negligible depending on your build, you can stack up resists very quickly and even mitigate the negative effects. Also, with a large supply of diamonds, you can get Replenish pots which heal even more than healing potions. All of this on top of some very rare ...it's a bit much.

What I would like to see is more skill trees and more items giving passive resistances, including the rogue and warrior ones. A few already do (such as how Smithing grants ), but a wider distribution could dampen the massive power that alchemy has at the moment (along with an alchemy nerf).

 

IIRC, I think the game is a little inconsistent about implementing these. I seem to remember having a spell that I could get to proc just fine on gloves, but the exact same spell and the exact same trigger would never fire-off via pants.

 

As someone who's used the same mechanism in my mod - this is very, very true. A -4 or -5 is a huge deal against something that does that damage - even moreso than a +5 resist, IMO.

 

I completely noticed this and would have posted it if I hadn't been beat to it.

There's almost no situation where a rogue doesn't want to clank around in armor that gives -8 . If the penalty was doubled on such items, then I might think twice about putting them on a rogue.

 

Ok, here's a tiny sample of hard work before I reply to anything specific, all of which was indeed really, really helpfull!

Tell me what you think of this template for fourm perusal, but bigger things are coming, this is just me getting warmed up. I actually have a bit of a orderly mind, or at least a tendency to try for it with good intentions. And my avatar, besides the hilarity of having dialectical materialism as a skill in an RPG, IS one of the all time stars of the working class heroes

VIKING STUFF:


Helmets - Hjalmrs

General notes:

Have a craftable starting point for crafting progression, scale benefits only, capstone at 4 uses silver, opt-out at 3 removes particular playstyle penalties and uses plastic.

Entries at 1 - 4 - 5* - 6 (c) Stars

Do not scale or figure into the late game (it seems) and their exact role is questionable ATM. Theme reinforced or played up in name, art and tooltip only for the most part, so one could be thought up.



Minor note: Historicaly Inaccurate one lists after . This kind of thing ought to be standardized across the board one way or another.

Considerations: Is anyone ever using any of these, and if so, when and why?

Lujo's Viking Helmet Suggestions and Ideas:
Thematic basis for flavour of potential the 5 - 6 - 7 Viking Helmets after a new general theme and role within the system is determined:

1) Combining the Historicaly Inaccurate one with the Runed One for an "powered by awesome" one.
2) A new silver using capstone as the factual magic reflecting silver helm, as a tie in for those trees (and allowing for a magic reflect setup that doesn't involve or mandate 2 silver/mirror/mirror darkly shields)
3) "Odin's third eye" helmet which has a hole on the forhead, but closes the other ones, with a sight penalty but is mana regen and/or spellpower friendly for the mana hungry buff melee gish builds (which also includes astrology and it's really good)
4) A cybercone including recipie for "Technoviking helmet" (google technoviking if not familiar, possible opt out at some point)

Actual mechanical identity of the whole tree to be determined.


VIKING SHIELDS - SKJOLDR
General notes:
Have a craftable starting point for crafting progression, scale benefits mostly with a small decreese , capstone at 4 uses silver.

Current theme - adds counter chance to shields, non-severe penalties, very vague benefits except to counterattack builds (which don't tie in on flavour grounds). Apart from that a lot of competition with more interesting shields.



Considerations: Is anyone ever using any of these, and if so, when and why?


VAGUELY VIKING THEMED ONES:



Lujo's notes and reasons for mentioning: Thecnicaly, runes are nordic, and the skjoldr tree lacks scaling. Sigils ARE more celtic than nordic, but the ensiglied shiled could be an aunholy hybrid of the roman Scutum and the "put runes on stuff" nordic theme, to tie those themes in and give the skjoldr progression (not to mention that the romans actualy used shileds simmilar to the "tribal", "hoplon" and "sjoldr" oneds for a long time before coming up with the scutum.

Considerations: If either of these is a direct reference to anything in particular, then no dice, but if not, then we have good grounds to make use of them

Info and inshight: Wootah on the skjoldr (Essentially current skjoldr design makes it the go to shield in blacksmith warrior builds in his rather accurate oppinion. His critique of the halmjr is also accurate and less flattering).

(That's it for wiking armor, as far as I can tell, I'll do something more volumionus next. This was "whatt themes there are and all that.)

 

Also digesting everything Bergstrom said, and everything else, I think we could make the choice of armor more interesting if we added benefits/penalties for having a specific weapon or tome/orb eqipped, and thus playstyle use.

It's especialy fitting along with "elemental penalties are more interesting and less unbalancing then benefits" statement which I agree with, not to mention that giving dodge, block, counter and damage reduction too much of a boost leading into unkillable territory.

 

Feel free to tell me I'm wrong, but if I'm making a crafting warrior with smithing / CWK, I feel like I have to take tinkering as well so I have the ability to make the best armours. I checked the 'pedia, and might have missed it, but it looks like the best armour a smith with max skill can make are always outclassed by throwing some gubbinz on it.

From a crafting perspective, the extra two levels of smith CWK gives you are almost completely wasted when you take smithing, and they are almost useless to a CWK/tinkerer when taken without smithing to make power armour.

Is the following too much to do?:

1. Split power armor off from non-power armor before the highest tier smithing armor (perhaps at level 2 smithing, so someone going with power armor can skip smithing)
2. Make high level smithing armor on-par with, but in different ways than power armor. Maybe have all of the power armor do something on hit and have the best smithing armor be better at protecting the player.

I know that the power armor is better because it requires both a high smithing and tinkering, but being a fantasy setting, can't we say that the highest smithing adds some magical metal veneer that would get worn off from constant gear scraping?

But I digress. I'll stop pretending I know anything about item balance and let those who do resume the conversation.

 

You're spot on, this is a huge part of what got the whole thing started, check the other thread from Essences first post for just how right you are

But because this is such an obvious and universal problem (for some in theory for others in practice) what we're trying to do is work up solutions for that and many other long time coming stuff in ways which could be applicable for everybody and not break any of the unwritten laws of the game (except ones which need breaking to do this), so it would have the same universal appeal and serve as an integral part of not just a mod but a potential patch, DLC, expansion or something universal.

But we have to chart stuff out first, so we know we're not fiddling with stuff which isn't ment to be fiddled with, or introducing out of place stuff which would clutter the game.

 

Ok, so in the third post of the thread there is a repository of answers, wisdom, states of things and all that. It's a sort of "where we are", except it needs more work and I'm both tired and required to participate in my daily life. I'll probably still do the bronze stuff overview sometimes later though

(and if anyone feels like his contributin wasn't seen, it's probably because were either at an early stage and cant go into details yet, or I didn't have the strenght to type it up there right now all is wellcome )

 

In blacksmith warrior builds, I quite often go for the skjoldr.
They are stupid cheap to build. come with increasing and a small amount of counter.

I never get the viking helms unless I am dying for a helmet... which isn't often since so many starting builds provide a helm.

Plus I think early game (the only time you use it) is a bit too early to introduce - while - is not a big deal since early monsters are balanced assuming you have almost no magic power anyway.

What it boils down to is that early game a small amount of means jack compared to and which makes the skjoldrs so much better. When you factor in losing ,, from the loss of the helms really don't make much sense to use on any build except a pure tank that has weapon skills to make up for the lost stats.

 

This is good info, summing it up there on the Viking post, which is also linked in the repository post

Keep it coming!

 

Sounds reasonable. Items meant for warrior builds should have more - and -. Warriors should be using little of either, and it would do much to prevent well armored rogues where we didn't want them.