I hope I can get this post right with respects to the Affinity mechanic, but I think it should work parallel to it. I have a big gripe with resistances in SotW right now. I feel they are the core of a pact that holds back good class design. The druid skill tree is the perfect example of this. All the spells in the second row are pretty much the same, and all the spells in the third row are pretty much the same. You don't really choose which spell to cast depending on the debuff you want, but rather based on the target's resistances. And then to motivate this diversity of nukes, enemies have arbitrary resistances so you need every nuke.



Screen space being a problem, we can't have a million different spells. If I could redo the druid class, it would be using 1-2 elements, and it would have some cool skill interaction. That's what I'm hoping to see in Loren 2. Now to bring this about, we need to get rid of all these arbitrary resistances strewn around the entire bestiary. I don't wanna see monsters having resistances because you feel they have to have them just to motivate us using different nukes. If a fire elemental has huge fire resistance that's fine, maybe Draco will suck, but we have how many characters we can use again? Still for most fights, resistances shouldn't heavily dictate which casters you want to use.



I would like to see resistances used far more sparingly, and if we can agree on that, I would then like to see more specialized skill trees for casters (and I'll get right on suggesting them). 1-2 elements each and spells with some interesting interaction. SotW does not have any of that - you just chain cast whatever does the most damage.



One part of this would be to remove the battlefield resistance effects. The fact you can pull it off is nice, and a point of progress in the game's design. But that every single encounter needs to reduce some resistance by 25% is just way out of hand. I'd like battlefield effects to be something extra and special.

I can see that, I honestly almost never worry about resistances cause I'm a fool who really doesn't care unless its a huge debuff to my attack , but for people who play on higher difficulties I imagine it's a lot bigger of a deal.

I'm not sure if you're planning on including all the debuffs in Loren 2 (Poisoned, Burning, Scared, Confused, etc.). If you aren't, then ignore this post.



I think SotW took a step forward from Loren in that resistances made debuffing more predictable. There are still some instances of "well, I didn't set anybody on fire, let me reload" but that's because skills have a % chance to apply. On the always-apply skills, I'm guaranteed to land a hit, and then resistance modifies the duration, making both my skill action and the resistance value meaningful (up to certain breakpoints).



Unfortunately, resistance still sucks as a stat on gear for a combination of reasons:



1. Finding resistances is unreliable. Resistance values are totally random and range wildly from 6 resistance to 90 resistance on a single item. (I suppose this could be fixed by having some pre-set resistance items, but...)



2. Even if you could find resistances, you can't plan for them. You normally don't know which resistance you're going to need in a fight until you're already in the fight. Yeah, you can guess that spiders might debuff Poison and Fire Elementals inflict Burning, but how do you know when to grab Paralyze, Confuse, Tired, or Weakened? You'll know in the future, but I don't think games should be tuned around the second play-through. There are also too many resistances to stack all of them (not that that is a bad thing).



3. Resistances are totally useless when fighting monsters that can't or don't use that power. So, you stacked 100% Paralyze resistance. Awesome. Now watch it go to waste as you fight 30 Empire Recruits that don't have Paralyzing abilities when you could have been stacking stats useful in all encounters: Attack, Damage, Magic, Speed. Even if you did correctly predict that the spiders have a Paralyzing bite ability, your resistance does no good if the AI never chooses to use the ability. Seems like 95+% of the time, your resistance value for a given resistance doesn't matter.



Resistances are completely a reactive stat that use up points from item budgets (I think?) and there are ten of them, so you can't realistically stack them all. Nor would you want to, because of #3 above. Thus, it's very rarely useful to buy items based on the resistance values.



Furthermore, since there are fifteen of them, all the resistance stats clutter up the shop window, the inventory screens, and the character information UI (three columns of resistance icons on the party screen in SotW and when selecting a creature in combat). They also seem to interfere with the "upgrade" calculation that turns items green, even with Jack trying out several different attempts to weight them as a stat.



Can you please rethink resistances on gear? Even if it means dropping them completely from gear.

That's a good analysis and I agree with you. That's why I'm planning to fold the ailment resistances into the elemental resistances.

And we will keep the auto success, resistances effect duration mechanic. Actually that was first done with the new framework and more or less ported back.

Not sure yet how the equipment will turn out. Depends highly on me getting my way or not.

For Loren 2 I definitely want to have less "inventory slots". When you have 13+ characters, I don't want players to waste 2h to arrange their inventory I remember a system posted by Anima a while ago, in practice you had the pieces of armors and you could then assign bonuses on them, similar to Diablo/Torchlight socket system (I'm sure he had his inspiration from some JRPG though since he plays more of those than me).

And we will keep the auto success, resistances effect duration mechanic. Actually that was first done with the new framework and more or less ported back.

That's nice to hear. I think it would work better if the base duration was 4 instead of 3 though. The breakpoint to reduce from 2 to 1 turn is in a weird spot in SotW, so many times you only get one tick of the debuff. I think 4 would make the presence or absense of resistance more noticeable.

The new framework is using a different time keeping system. So that will be different as well. Effect duration isn't in turns any more, it's in ticks instead. Same as the delay from actions.

For Loren 2 I definitely want to have less "inventory slots". When you have 13+ characters, I don't want players to waste 2h to arrange their inventory I remember a system posted by Anima a while ago, in practice you had the pieces of armors and you could then assign bonuses on them, similar to Diablo/Torchlight socket system (I'm sure he had his inspiration from some JRPG though since he plays more of those than me).

As a player, the most frustrating slots to deal with in your games are the second weapon and the second ring. At least with the current shop UI, you can't compare them without writing down the stats manually or buying and comparing from the inventory. Swapping first and second rings is also a hassle since you have to unequip one, equip it in the second slot, then equip the second ring.



I wouldn't be sad to see the rings go, or become less important for providing primary stats. They are a universal item all classes can use now, but maybe the ring can just become the Mage bracer or something. That would drop two slots. The gloves/bracers are probably the next least useful - in that the stat increases are small compared to chest/legs/etc that I rarely need to buy new gloves. But this is kind of a separate topic and I don't know what the new system will be.

My current thoughts go more in direction of reducing it to weapon and armour slots, but with customising equipment. So much much simpler then now.

This might actually be pretty close to what you are already planning for, but I've seen a really neat system in Skyborn (and Deadly Sin 2) with 7 equip slots:

1st hand

2nd hand

Headgear

Armor

Hands

Accessory 1

Accessory 2

You can add an "augment" (only one augment to every item, if you add a new one, the old one will disappear) to everything except the accs. The augments have slightly different effects if you add them on shield vs weapon vs armour, so there's a lot of variety even if the system itself for the user is fairly simple. For example "blind" augment will on shield or armour give slight resistance to blinding status but on a weapon it gives a chance to inflict blind on an enemy when you hit with basic attack.



In general, I would actually vote for a system where you have only one piece of armour, but with 2-3 augment/customising slots where the weapons/Shields would only take one. (eg, only have the equipslots bolded in the list.)

I don't mind equipping 8 chars in SotW as it is now (kinda fun to find level some 1-2 items on them still at the end of act 3, though) but I never was up to properly equipping in LtAP (exhausting), so what you are planning sounds good to me.

Yes definitely, probably 7 is even too much I think. Is possible to have just 3 (weapon,armor and accessory), but with customization options so you could get same effect as a bigger inventory + other bonuses (for example adding passive skills/conditions, unlockable skills, etc, seems fun).

Since this is already over a year old it's probably time for an update.

The biggest change is that the combination of skill specialisation and status resistance into the elemental system will not be practical. Mostly trough the boost system and the resulting lower number of base skills.

As you could already see in the last GUI preview we now have a dedicated resistance attribute for status effects.

http://i.imgur.com/13zRu5P.png" style="max-width:100%">

So we'll probably group all status effects into 3 or 4 groups and handle those as sub attributes of the resistance attribute. It's not as elegant as rolling everything into the elemental system but I think it will still help getting a handle on SotWs status resistance zoo.



As for how the resistance attribute works it's actually quite simple. The duration of every single status effect is calculated as:
[code]Effect.base_duration + (source.might - target.resistance)*Effect.duration_step[/code]
Since you're already familiar with setting things on fire let's use the Burning effect as an example. It has a base_duration of 200 ticks and a duration_step of 20 ticks. So for every point Dracos might is higher than his lunches resistance it will burn 20 ticks longer. Of course the same works in reverse as well. If Draco, as he is quite prone to, hits the Hellhound instead of the hare the targets resistance might very well be 10 points higher than Dracos might and the effect is completely resisted. Now Draco might be the guest of honour for today’s lunch.



For elemental resistances the current thinking is to simply have a weak, neutral, strong system. Of course we'll still use the affinity system with it. So Draco being strong in Fire can throw nastier fireballs. In addition to the natural affinity every character can achieve different degrees of mastery in an element trough training. The difference is that the natural affinity can be a trigger for the boost system. So the afore mentioned fireball might have the option to literally set a weak Fire target on fire.

The nice thing is that mastery and affinity can be easily displayed with a single icon.



Currently I'm toying with the idea that every character has one weak and one strong elemental affinity. Maybe in addition to an Order/Chaos affinity. The same would go for enemies of course. In addition thanks to the boost system mentioned in the beginning a caster will not be able to have an attack spell for every element. Oh and I'm planning to have the illiterates join into the elemental party fun as well. And I'm not talking about simply juggling elemental weapons, that's not much fun. More the ability to have a properly enchanted blade burst into flames with the right boost and of course a nice bonus to damage as well.