leveling skills (idea)

[jack1974]

Yes I was including also those in heavy armors. I probably won't have time to ask the artist to draw specific items/armors for SOTW, but things like the one you mention for sure

[jack1974]

Uhm after doing some tests, I'll keep the name "Ranger". I forgot I hard coded it into several point of the game, so changing to Guardians means a lot of bugs, some immediately apparent, others hidden that could pop up maybe after 8-9h of play, and slow down the release of even more time (a week or more). I really don't want to add stuff that can cause extra bugs at this point
So my ranger class can wear heavy armors

[renke_]

Well what's the fun of a battle that ends in 2-3 turns anyway!?!?!?!? :mrgreen:

Any skirmish should be fast and deadly ;)

And yes, imho short battles are more fun - without a working tactic you're simply dead, war of attritions (after 20 rounds of slashing the side with 3 HP more wins) are boring. [not that Loren or (probably) SotW will work this way, this was meant as an in extremis example]

[yayswords]

I tried to build a party in Loren completely optimized for quickness and high-yield damage (think all mages + thieves) - great at the beginning, middle- and end-game are nearly impossible as the possible damage done in the first round is not enough to kill or critical damage all enemies.

I find that mages actually suck because magic damage is bad at causing stagger, and if you don't stagger your opponents they will stagger you, and stagger is VERY POWERFUL. If you wanna try a hit hard and fast party, check Team Fierce or maybe future Team Thrash in viewtopic.php?f=30&t=3218

Issue potions - in WoW potions used to be on a one minute cooldown, but it became more or less "automated" that you'd pot every minute because you could and it wasn't really a choice. Now you can only pop them once per combat session. Although it's sometimes kinda obvious when you want to use it it's still better than "as often as possible". Then again, WoW potions do not cost any of your time, you can pop one and immediately begin casting a spell.

[jack1974]

In SOTW many things will work differently. For example attacks targeting a single enemy will have much higher chances of a condition/event to happen. I realized that before with such lower chance, the special attack would lose a lot of importance. So we can have:
"Final Blow"
"Hits target with critical hit and has 75% chances of instant kill if target is under 30% of health, if not boss."
(in Loren, a similar attack had only 45% chances to instantly kill an enemy target under 50% health)

In practice the special attacks should play a much bigger role in this game (hopefully!).

[yayswords]

I still want a 100% chance, just saying. I am fully accountable for the way I choose to play the game and all that, but this is what will happen. Either the skill has such a high chance I assume it will always work, or it has such a low chance I would almost never use it for that effect (but maybe the bonus damage). If the high chance skill HAS to happen for me to win, I will save, use it and reload until it happens. Many might do the same. There was a skill in WoW that gave you 90% chance to resist spells for the duration (Cloak of Shadows). Since 90% is almost 100%, people assumed it would always work, and raged when it didn't, and because of a lovely human feature called selective memory, the 10% failure chance felt much higher. Now the resist chance is 100%

The skill in question here would have a much better scaling if higher levels increased the % at which you could finish someone off. Or perhaps better, the delay/mana cost.

[renke_]

A little bit more on-topic (as the thread is called leveling ;))

Did you ever thought about "unlevelling"/retraining? This was a feature well done in Avadon - the trainer NPCs allowed the player to reset every invested attribute and skill points to completely retrain the characters. At least I welcomed this very much as I had to develop a "feeling" for the right combination of traits and abilities - typically one is forced to restart or accept a broken PC in mid-game.

[yayswords]

Yeah it's pretty unmodern actually to allow players to make permanent mistakes (or permanently right choices). But I think replaying in cheat mode alleviates the problem a bit too.

[jack1974]

I still want a 100% chance, just saying. I am fully accountable for the way I choose to play the game and all that, but this is what will happen. Either the skill has such a high chance I assume it will always work, or it has such a low chance I would almost never use it for that effect (but maybe the bonus damage). If the high chance skill HAS to happen for me to win, I will save, use it and reload until it happens. Many might do the same. There was a skill in WoW that gave you 90% chance to resist spells for the duration (Cloak of Shadows). Since 90% is almost 100%, people assumed it would always work, and raged when it didn't, and because of a lovely human feature called selective memory, the 10% failure chance felt much higher. Now the resist chance is 100%

The skill in question here would have a much better scaling if higher levels increased the % at which you could finish someone off. Or perhaps better, the delay/mana cost.

Many will have 100%, but since this one gives an instant-kill, I thought would be better to give the poor target some chances. Though I could probably tweak the HP left though.
However remember that I've given up the leveling skills idea after some attempts - so there won't be higher level, each skill is unique

Did you ever thought about "unlevelling"/retraining? This was a feature well done in Avadon - the trainer NPCs allowed the player to reset every invested attribute and skill points to completely retrain the characters. At least I welcomed this very much as I had to develop a "feeling" for the right combination of traits and abilities - typically one is forced to restart or accept a broken PC in mid-game.

I have to ask Anima if is something possible (I know how to learn new skills but not sure about unlearning all at once and resetting the attributes/skills). If is something I can do without much headache yes, sure

[Becca2828]

Did you ever thought about "unlevelling"/retraining?

Do you mean like prestidgeing? If that's even the right term or spelled correctly which I know it's not but someone might know what I mean. I mean like you hit the highest (levels, if there is a level cap) you can with a character so you retrain, do it all over again I suppose or is it like someone else said and fixing a mistake you made such as you put a skill point in the wrong skill or something along those lines?

I suppose now is the time to ask if there is a level cap, and hope no one else has asked. But seriously, is there a level cap and if there is one is it moderate to hit or very hard to get up to, or well impossible?