a few balance ideas

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Max_Damage
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a few balance ideas

Post by Max_Damage »

1) Cap dispelling chance to ~25-30% in all cases even when a 40 lvl caster dispels lvl 1 character.
Some characters like paladins and clerics suffer from dispelling a lot, it could be slightly more mild for them to get dispelled

2)Death ward and possibly freedom should not be removed via breach/mord. Imo that makes standart dispelling a bit useless: you can always just breach with 100% of success. originally on some servers people would just do a sorc monk FOD spammer with <30 sorc levels which would have no problems removing death ward via breach.

3)Maybe any polymorphed character should be undispellable? you cant recast your buffs in polymorph which has always made shifters and polymorph spells kinda useless because people just mord them.

4)two-handed AC bonus (~6 shield AC). Whenever you have a sword + shield melee, you should be able to replicate the build by making it two handed. Shield gives 3+5=8ac. two-handed weapon could be giving ~5-6 ac so that there is always a 2-3 ac diffirence which is sorta balanced. +-1AC equals ~+-10% damage taken overall usually.

Hyk
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Re: a few balance ideas

Post by Hyk »

Hello friend,

welcome to the forum.

1. IMO, being dispellable is what keeps many builds balanced (rdds, clerics, shapechangers, anything with UMD really).

2. Standard dispelling is NOT useless, because of the point above. Also, Mords/breach has no effect on may critical buffs that can only be stripped by a dispel, causing a dispeller to spend 2 rounds to strip an enemy, which is also important for balance in a caster vs chaser scenario.

3. Undispellable shapes would be a disaster. Shapechangers types are already very powerful, and this is often the case even after they have been completely dispelled (IF they can be dispelled, which is not always the case if they have enough caster levels).

4. With a two-handed weapon you gain damage, damage types, weapon size, etc. The sacrifice is that its tricky to make a two-handed character with high AC, resulting in a damage given vs damage received balance, which I think is currently OK.

Rufio
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Re: a few balance ideas

Post by Rufio »

Welcome. Also regarding death ward, freedom, etc: The server is built around the idea that you need to make your saves, not find immunities. Death ward has been nerfed to only give +4 saves vs death. Freedom still gives immunities but it isn't meant to be your primary form of protection against those effects.

What you should do is build with saves in mind and you won't have trouble with Finger of Death, etc. In fact at high levels those spells are rarely used because only builds that have really dedicated themselves to having high spell DCs even stand a chance at making anyone fail, and even then there are a lot of people running builds that have high enough saves to make every save anyways unless they are cursed and debuffed.

I'd actually like shapechange as a spell to be a little better. The only halfway decent shapechange builds are total dispel bait and the duration sucks. Druid and shifter shapes are good but those are a different matter, and I think Hyk is talking about those being good already, but those can't be dispelled anyways so that isn't relevant.
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Midterm
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Re: a few balance ideas

Post by Midterm »

Without directly impacting existing builds out there, what about giving stat bonuses based on the Spell Focus in Transmutation?

Max_Damage
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Re: a few balance ideas

Post by Max_Damage »

As long as you can debuff even just haste(-1atck) and see invis/true seeing and possibly a good amount of stat buffs (not sure how it works here), then the shifters are still also a huge dispel bait, they cant even rebuff these basic spells in a shifted form.

Dispelling always seems to be 100% thing or 0% thing depending on which side of a melee vs caster you are which is a drawback of nwn system for me.

2handed vs 1 handed. How much damage do the 2handers have? +30% tops? but then -8ac means like x2 damage taken per round.

Also another point: I think that the balanced discipline shouldnt be usually higher then ~ med/high ab +8-10 (including curse song debuff?) otherwise things like kd/ikd are sorta out of equation for the most part of it, knockdown is an opposed x+d20 vs y+d20 check.

Im not sure how useful all this is given the low nwn pop but a few things that i ve noticed during playing nwn in previous times and im not a server designer by any means and i can be wrong. All these ideas are prolly not relevant because people dont rly play so much anymore.

Bargeld
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Re: a few balance ideas

Post by Bargeld »

I would suggest looking into how dispel checks and breaches work on NS4, it's actually rather balanced (with a few exceptions by item/class).

One handed vs two handed isn't as cut and dry as '30% more damage' for 2H. 2H weapons not only provide more damage, they are also directed towards str builds only... which is probably where you are seeing the most common AC problem. 2H weapons tend to not only have more overall damage, but many also have dual damage types in order to break through armor/shield based Dr/DI.

Once you have experienced some of the min/max builds... the real extreme versions of some of the topics you bring up, you can see how your suggestions would break balance pretty badly.

As far as shifting/shapechange/polymorph, these are actually 3 distinct things in my mind. Shifting is a shifter only (and maybe RDD if you want to get picky) ability that is undispellable. Shapechange is a spell that is really only used by casters and is subject to the same dispel rules as any other spell. So a dedicated caster can have (essentially) undispellable shapechange... but the spell is rather useless except in a couple scenarios and it will also mess with the caster's stats and screws up their currently memorized spells (they lose spells based on the casting stat). Polymorph follows with shapechange as far as the application, except that there is an item with polymorph on it, allowing any character to use it. The most common usage of this item is for a fast, high lvl monk to use the item and polymorph into undead form, rendering it immune to sneak attacks and strength drains. If that was undispellable, it would break balance.

Overall, I get the sense that you need a bit more exposure to all the ranges of builds and items and high level fighting. This will help you to understand some of the intricacies of the server. The devs and playerbase (even the other guys responding here) have been around for a long time and have a good understanding of all these interactions. If change was justified, usually it was implemented, so the basic things you are pointing out have been thought out and play tested already over many years.

And btw, you can dispel haste with the slow spell, specifically. Either by casting, scrolling or item (rod of slow). It is not level dependent... slow just dispels the target's haste. This does not work vs expeditious retreat or blinding speed.

Just to put discipline in perspective... are you aware that it is possible for strength pure fighters to get 120+ base discipline? The highest possible AB's in the game are around 82. The highest AC can break 100.
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Rufio
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Re: a few balance ideas

Post by Rufio »

Those highest possible ABs and ACs are a little misleading though. Sure, they are possible, but not at the same time, and those builds sacrifice a lot to absolutely max out AB or AC (and in the case of AC you'll need to be using Improved Expertise). Typical discipline also isn't anywhere near that of a pure fighter, a lot of builds run at around 85-95 discipline,

Discipline is pretty well balanced though. It is pretty hard to KD good builds without bard cursing them, but also if it were easier to KD people, every build would just KD spam all of the time as a KD pretty much means death.
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Max_Damage
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Re: a few balance ideas

Post by Max_Damage »

The saves do not auto fail on 1?

Lokey
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Re: a few balance ideas

Post by Lokey »

No, that just make things a farce.

Guess that makes your other question moot, but the named treasure weapons (some of which have on hit slay or vorpal over my dead body lol) appear randomly. Get a handful of characters to mid-20s and you should see most of them.
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Max_Damage
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Re: a few balance ideas

Post by Max_Damage »

Yea well and it also makes 3/4 of the spellbooks and all on hit properties absolutely useless :S however i can see how a dc 26 will/ref could sometimes work on *some* for-fun 40 builds.

Celorn
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Re: a few balance ideas

Post by Celorn »

Nothing is absolute :D I have seen overly min/maxed 40s get effected by on-hit props, as well as one particular endgame boss.

This server has an amazing reworking of nearly everything possible to make it less OP and less gimmicky, like fail on a 1, and dev-crit those just HAD to go.

Pre-wipe KD was pretty powerful as many many people underestimated the importance of skills, these days KD is just hilarious when it works but can happen again due to min/maxing, ie; pure casters have some advantages but need to invest in feats and proper set of gear to avoid dying on their knees/backs.

Pre-wipe DEX-based melee was king, but no more for the most part - the thing with 2H in pvp, sure their AC is low but in many cases they can do 200-300 dmg in 1 hit, so except from ranged attackers, they aren't going to be too concerned about mosquitoes poking at them, also many invest in DR feats/classes to shrug off damage. But this does lead to severe weaknesses.

Bottom line tl;dr: The server/module has been painstakenly crafted by talented devs to (mostly) balance PvP, forcing people to find stronger 'i win buttons' and others to find the counters to those buttons. In it's maturity, ns4 has become a 3D version of a card game, especially in group vs group pvp (ie: picking builds to counter others).
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