That's some very useful information. My commentary on critical reduction was made on the expectation that monsters had crits as often as the PC characters, which seem to fluctuate between 2-6 crit chance unless you have a critical-oriented build.Originally Posted by brbragequit Go to original post
I did notice that the Kenshi in particular seemed to crit pretty often, but I thought he was some kind of exception. Good to know.
However, my point still stands that something should be done to medium armor in order to make it stand from Heavy Armor in some way, instead of just being flatly inferior. Though I do think it is possible that the attack penalty from Heavy Armor scales up pretty considerably throughout the game (more-so than you capacity to mitigate it with skill). If that's the case, well played Limbic.
I can't speak with much experience towards Heavy Armor, since my best party was Ranger/Barbarian/Rune Priest/Freemage. The crit chance is definitely true, though, it was common to have enemies crit you back to back in the preview build.
It's always hard to speak to balance because as a player my priorities are so different than as a developer. A developer wants the most number of players to have fun with the game. A player (such as myself) wants it to have as challenging as it possibly can be but still be possible. Since "possible" varies dramatically for each player, that leads to a huge gulf between what's acceptable to a developer and what is acceptable to any given player. They tend to land on the side of "make it slightly easier than maybe it needs to be".
Armor is also kind of... a weird thing in a blobber where there isn't a front-line and a back-line. You can't make damage lethal without heavy armor, because attacks are random and can always hit squishies. Even taunts don't solve this problem, since there are monsters who use attacks that hit the whole party at once. Anyway, my verdict on Warrior difficulty as it stood in the Act II preview: game seemed mostly balanced, most skills had their place, and even ones that seemed second-rate at first later on showed they had a niche and purpose. Personally I would have dialed the difficulty up a notch on Warrior, but another fellow who was doing the preview said he found Adventurer difficulty to be plenty challenging, so there you go. Tastes differ.
I will most likely post my changes at some point. Didn't see the need during EA as things keep changing. Some things I didn't like, low mana pools, high mana costs, totally changed that, required changes in many area's to make up the new power difference you now have, but much more fun imo. Bufs/Debufs that take you a move to use and only last one turn. The minimum I made anything was to last at least two turns, these just weren't worth using imo. It's been a good while since I last played, so I don't have any example to share at this point, other than those generalities.Originally Posted by brbragequit Go to original post
To me being able to tweak the game is one of its major features and over time we'll see people with their own flavors of gameplay, to give the game some legs.
After testing a ranged party in the EA (2 scouts + 2 rangers), there seems to be more to the expert/master boni than just increased maximum range. With expert in bow, you can actually initiate combat by attacking from 5 tiles away. Furthermore, in the two cyclops dungeons, you can also initiate combat directly from the entrance (not just with bows, since the cyclops is just three tiles away), which you cannot do without expert bow (you have to move towards the cyclops for combat to begin, which immediately puts you in melee range). So in these specific dungeons you actually get two rounds worth of ranged damage simply for having at least one character with expert bow in your party.Originally Posted by SandroTheMaster Go to original post
Unfortunately the expert bonus seems to randomly disappear (i.e. you're suddenly unable to attack from 5 tiles away) in the EA, but saving and reloading seems to fix it.
If this effect is intentional for bow expert+master (and, I guess, the scout upgrade class special), then it's actually quite powerful.