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Wouldn't that make Crippling Blow into an overall escape skill for all classes, though? I'd probably get an extra point in Warfare for my rangers just to get Crippling Blow so that I can get rid of the melees hassling my back line.

I don't think that would be too much of a problem due of the AP cost that would incur.

Since Crippling Blow is a melee skill, you would have to un-equip your ranged weapon and equip a melee weapon to use it. It would cost a ranged character a total of 3AP, a memory slot, and a point into Warfare to use in combat.

Additionally it would cost you another 1AP the next turn to re-equip your ranged weapon, so you are wasting a total of 2AP to weapon swap on top of the 2 AP to use the skill itself.

Finesse characters are better off dipping into Scoundrel or Huntsman for Cloak and Dagger or Tactical Retreat, while Intelligence characters can just use Teleportation or Netherswap if they want to disengage melee opponents.

Oh, right, forgot you actually need a melee weapon for that.

Edit: posted this in the wrong thread.

I am growing increasingly wary of the direction the game is taking in terms of balance.

Smarter AI is great, but the more I play the more I hate the new armor system and the bonuses from ability points while they seem like they'd allow you to create fun synergies are so bland and boring that all they do is punish you for not pursuing the obvious ones.


There is zero elegance to character creation/stats system as a whole, which is both a step down from the simplicity of the original and years behind any similar games(anything D&D based, even the incredibly bland Pillars of Eternity).

How would you revamp the stats system and the armor system, @Naqel ? I agree that some changes need to happen, and changes *will* happen, but what are your thoughts?

+1 Exactly and totally my feeling.

How to fix it ?
Wearing down a saving trhrow value is nice idea but current system is plain without elegance.

- add a reflex saving throw based on dex.
- each saving throw need a base value driven by the atrribute (Int,Str,Dex)
- So each main stat will have saving throw.
- even naked character has some savings
- When a skill/spell is tested against the saving throw it use a % dice to know if it lands or not AND remove some small portion of saving throw value. Reduction should be small, so regular battle is not focused at tear down a saving throw, however Boss fight usually is about getting down saving throws.

That way you get a system where it is nearly impossible to get safe against all 3 saving throw and each archetype character has an advantage in certain way.

There is one issue wich current system tryied to solve.In DOS:EE First combat round everyone use the strongest spell. So since midgame combat is like chain-lightnin then mop-up the rest. Next battle repeat, then next battle repeat. Very funny rigth?
There should be some mechanics prevent using the strongest spell in the first round. This mechanic should be somehow flexible.
I was thinking about a "heat" value you need to build up to be able to call higher level skills. But cant get a formula which is not bold.

I'm not Naqel, but I would prefer something, that is less streamlined and more D&D like or for example more in the direction Titan Quest.

Sure, you can modify your character by putting in attribute points, but the character will also be modified by learning specific skills: if you learn warfare you character will get increased strength and constitution, ranger will give dexterity and wits, so that every skill tree will improve your stats and will not only give pretty unwhelming 'benefits' like they do now.

But this would afford another rework of the stats themselves, because the core principle is: There is no class, you can mix what ever you like.

But the stats say: If you go strength, you will suck as mage and vice versa.

That's why I don't like the actuell 'attribute' based seperation and I would prefer more classical approach in the direction of:
- strength increases all physical damage, beause if you are stronger even a rogue can thrust his dagger harder
- dexterity increasing the chance to hit with everything
- intelligence increasing all kind of magic/elemental damage
- Wits the as now but also to increase crit with everything, so also skills so even for a rogue it isn't that bad

You could also put in cross class stuff like: STR & DEX will increase Body building an therefore give higher chance to withstand physical effects while INT & CON will go in direction of Willpower effect for example.

Attributes and Skills need to be more symbiotic in my opinion.

Adding saving throws doesn't really fix anything, it just adds more rng. The game just gets to throw up its hands and decide you wasted a turn because you had bad luck. Part of the appeal of the magic and physical armor system is that it minimizes randomness.

Source points and magic armor/physical armor already discourage using your strongest abilities first, because source points are a limited resource, and magic/physical armor prevents the nastier effects of skills from taking place.

I think buffing/tweaking perseverance to be more useful to players, and giving this skill to certain enemies would be alot more inline with keeping the current direction of limiting rng.

I would like to see more skills have a few more uses outside of combat.

Strength: its mostly fine as is. increase 4% physical armor instead of 2% (i feel both players and the a.i are both a little bit too squishy). I'd like to see it also increase vitality by about 1%. increase base weapon durability, increase carrying capacity more than it already does, and increase the amount of weight you can steal during pickpocket (if it doesn't already, I haven't tested it yet).

Intellect: increase to 4% magic armor instead of 2 make it increase the base distance you can move objects with telekinesis, improve base bartering, and increase magic aoe size slightly for every point (if aoe sizes are to remain in their current state, though I would suggest a max aoe size cap if you take this route).

Finese: increase carrying capacity (less effective than strength), 1% increase to physical and magical armor, increase the max value cap of items you can steal during pickpocket, increase the max weight you can steal during pickpocket (less than strength). Decrease enemy vision cones slightly during sneak, and slightly increase sneak speed.

Constitution: increase magical and physical armor values by 2%, and increase the vitality it increases to 10%.

Memory: can't improve on perfection.

Wits: Mostly fine much like strength. increase the max value of items you can steal during pickpocket, increase, bartering discount, and decrease enemy vision cones slightly while in sneak.

I think civil points should stay separate from combat, but I do like the idea of primary attributes giving slight buffs to civil skills.

If there is one thing I totally despise about this game, it is source points required to cast a spell. Basically it makes spells you buy and learn the same as scrolls. A once use spell unless you find/buy another scroll.

We should need source points to permanently learn a spell, but not to cast it each time. UNLESS we automatically get source points back on enemies we killed.

My main concern is that later in the game we'll need to rely more on the powerful spells instead of the low level ones. Our complaints about "never enough AP" will be complaints about "never enough action points (AP) or source points (SP)". Instead of one complaint, we now get two .

I guess the reason why I didn't complain about this before was I didn't get any spells that required SP to cast until right before the final battle. Used them once and ACT 1 ended.

@Kalrakh:
When we do this (change what attributes do) we get a system like Pillars of Eternity. I think PoE had one of the better stat systems.

about source points and using the most powerful skills at the beginning:
Would it make sense that you need to build up some kind of "power meter" by using some skills and normal attacks and then you consume this power by using powerfull spells?
If it makes sense, should it be reset after each combat?

If I understand what you are saying I don't think it will be that bad. We are going to get access to the source point replenishing skills as permanent moves eventually, so I think that may alleviate your issue.

I haven't played PoE that much so far, so I can't argue much about it. But I think Titan Quest has a similar attribute system:


But I guess regarding attributes there would be hundreds of possible examples. But linking attributes also to class choices is more unique to Titan Quest, I believe. While in Titan Quest you are limited to two classes, D:OS could go here even further.


Anyway I like the idea of the need to get into some kind of 'manaflow' or 'battleheat'. High level spells don't need more action points but need you to be in the correct mindset. So that you can't start a fight with a meteor rain wiping half of the enemies from the start. After fight of course it would reset to 0 and CC could set you back.

It's not appeal when it actively makes the game less fun.
Risk management is what makes RPG's exciting, precisely because "It's XCOM, Baby!" can happen.

Without the spice of uncertainty, what you're left with is the bland grind of wearing down the relevant resistance until the remainder of the fight becomes a stun-lock breeze.

All that the current armor system achieves is cut away the fun of inflicting status effects, because by the time the enemy becomes vulnerable to them they can either be stunned to death, or killed outright.

It'd be better to have scarcely available hard-disables(lock them behind source points), than to gate them behind a system that invalidates every other effect at the same time.

Not to mention the myriad of improvement suggestions that were made, one of which I'm particularly proud of: http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=593592&page=1#top


Barring that, my point isn't that the player is weak, but rather that what they are allowed to do is complex but lacking in depth.

With the way attribute distribution and ability points are set up, there is basically jack shit actually fun things you can do, part of it likely due to the currently WIP nature of the skills available, but more broadly because the system that was meant to reward interesting synergies, instead punishes you for not taking the most obvious ones.

Then there's the fact that balance is all over the place and there's no real sense of progression or even a cohesive direction to the skills you can learn, etc.

I genuinely don't agree with you assessment of rng in rpgs, or that the armor system makes the game actively less fun. I can't stand playing xcom because of its randomness. Either you love how rng can lead to hilarious situations or you despise it for how much it can screw you on a bad day.

I disagree that the armor system cuts out the fun of inflicting statuses. For me, it enhances the experience because I know when I attempt to inflict a status I know whether or not it will actually work.

If a fight is a stun lock breeze that is not the armor system's fault necessarily, its more of the A.I's fault for not taking advantage of armor restoration skills or knowing when it should or shouldn't back off.

Not a fan of locking hard cc and other debuffs behind a sp wall.

In the current system you could just replace all the stats with 3. 'power' 'skill slots' and 'initiative'. Con is useless since its all about MA and PA, and str/fin/int is basically something you just raise with out thinking based on the kind of weapon you are using, there's really no other dynamic to it.

And due to MA and PA it makes mixing up parties to be more punishing. I feel better off going full physical with everyone having magic support skills, or full magic damage party. While 2 and 2 can work both of the 2s need to be damage focused (so the mages both want high aero even if they dont intend to use aero skills much, just to break the armor).

Random idea off the top of my head:

Remove MA, rename PA to just armor, armor now stops all kinds of direct damage, but statuses pass right through it.
Replace MA with a sort of status armor. This doesn't come on equipment, its inherent and based on your CON. Each point of CON gives you +1 status armor. (so everyone starts with 10).

Status armor prevents you from being affected by status effects that are on you, they do not prevent the effect from being applied to you. Damage over time status effects like bleed/poison/burning strip 1 status armor per turn if the target still has status armor up, walking through ground effects remove it as well even if you already have the effect applied. Hard CC things like knockdown and stun can remove more than 1 point. The exact amount that certain skills which are more direct CC skills remove can be a balancing factor of those skills.

The idea here is that attacks do damage, and everyone can focus a target down despite their damage type. Further, status effects always do something useful, because if the target still has status armor, or call it resilience or something, they help strip this from them. You can have an effect heavy skill setup and resilience will get stripped fast. Some enemies might be better to just try and kill outright, others might have lots of health but low resilience. Aoe status appliers might make sense to have a party that tries to aoe strip status and CC, or you might make a party that just ignores statuses and goes for burst damage. Many skills become useful in both situations because status effects and damage are both doing something for you party's strategy. You could even add interesting things like a talent that lowers your damage output but doubles the power of all status effects.

Because these effects are still on the target, just not affecting them as long as they still have resilience, you can do effect combos as well before the resilience is stripped.

Also make it very hard to restore resilience mid battle, so drawn out battles can see people getting more susceptible to CC and dots because they are getting worn down. This means you have to judge the situation and maybe change strategies based on fight. If you are fighting lots of things with a lot of health you may favor just starting to strip resilience as fast as possible because its going to be a protracted CC fight in the end, or alternatively you may identify that the enemy does a lot of dots that will strip your resilience, but only a certain enemy has hard CC, and so you focus on just bursting that enemy down fast before your party starts running low on resilience from all the stripping the status effects are causing. You can then use environmental hazards as part of fight balancing more dynamically. Certain positions or enemies behind considerable obstacles you might be able to just run through at cost of your resilience, the decision to do so must be made early else you end up stunned in the middle of a lava field mid way

I agree that each individual stat needs more uses, but i disagree that the armor system discourages more diverse parties (at least before this current patch. to save time assume all my responses are pre A.I 2.0). You definitely don't need half your party to be damage dealers to be successful. My mages only ever needed 1 point in areo to do anything, and that 1 point was mostly just because I like using teleport. You CAN put more points into it, but you don't NEED to put more in to be successful at removing MA. Hell you don't even need two damage dealer mages. I've had mages in my parties be just pure healing, and it was actually really effective. Your play style, build, and skill combinations mater more than point allocation alone, which in turn makes hybrids more viable early game then outright bad like they were in DOS1 and EE.

Your idea as an alternative to MA and PA system is interesting, but I'm unsure if it would a better system, or weather or not I would enjoy that system instead of the current one.

'need' is a bad argument, a game is a system with a goal and rules, the correct way to play the game is to try and achieve that goal the best way you are able to within the rules. You 'could' just meander around and be less effective, but nobody is going to say thats how you are supposed to play something like chess or football, yet they always bring that argument up when it comes to video games.

The current combat system could be summarizes as 'remove enemy actions while maximizing your own'. This means you try to do the most optimal combination of CC and outright killing so as to minimize the amount of stuff that can be done to your party over the course of the battle. Since to CC you need to break an armor first, CCing and killing both follow along the same strategy of simply loading damage and then either doing 'more damage' or 'apply a CC'. Both of these are done more efficiently with more options and more flexibility with a party that stacks the same damage type. A single support mage can indeed work in a 'physical' party just because you dont need 4 people worth of damage to handle most situations if you build and gear yourself apropriately, but that doesnt mean its optimal because:

Is that mage along for purely support skills? Anyone can get those support skills with a single point investment, you dont need a dedicated mage, everyone can be running armor of frost/fortify/haste on physical damage builds
Is that mage along for CC? It better be able to strip all the magic armor itself, first turn, but even then its better to be another physical character and just take warfare skills which also provide aoe cc but also help with killing. Your party also being physical means you can more reliably use your own CCs, and they can use their own, because its all synergystic
A fighter can take lore just as well as a mage can
Likewise in an all mage party you can just have one mage take thievery there is no inherent need to have a proper rogue.
Mages along for ranged CC? Makes sense at first, after all archers CC is more limited than warfare based character so maybe having a mage to cc stuff at range would be smart.. or you could just take 1 level of aero for teleport and teleport that archer next to the enemy melee and CC them all with warfare skills.. which is more optimal.

This is one of the issues actually, you dont need a smartymcsmartypants to ID stuff for you, anyone can take loremaster, you dont need mr sneakyjerk to pick locks, a mage can do that. In some systems you try to tic all the boxes in order to have the things you need in a well rounded adventuring party, and you end up with some characters doing different kinds of damage and maybe it doesnt all fit togeather, but its for a reason. But you can just optimize in this game to the point that these weaknessess can be built out of the party entierly, lowering the overal dynamic nature of the strategy involved. Everyone can support magic, do a single damage type, and do all the kinds of things you would traditionaly have had specialized 'skills' characters to do.

There is no way you can claim the different armor types do not encourage damage stacking. Im not being anti-magic here since i do think an all mage party would work as well, its just that currently its easier to stack warfare based characters.

Of course if each character can one-shot a single enemy, self contained, per turn, it doesnt matter which damage type they use. So ok, a party of 4 absolute offensive powerhouses can mix and match, but that throws the idea of a support mage out the window. But again, there is no reason to ever have a support mage, everyone can learn all the support skills they need with 10 int and a few point investments. The support mage is, itself, a sub optimal character that has no place in the current game becuase everyone can be their own support mage.

The issue I have with the armor system and status effects is that they're all or nothing. The game of "wear the enemy's armor down until you can stun them" plays out the same way over and over again and it's boring. It lacks nuance.

Some possibilities that I think would be more fun:

-Armor does not prevent status, but reduces the likelihood that they take effect. Everyone is always at risk of being stunned, but someone with lots of armor is safer than someone with no armor. Even with no armor, there is a chance to resist being stunned. Relevant attributes might also be checked.

-Armor does not prevent status, but mitigates the severity of the effect. Everyone gets stunned regardless of their armor, but someone with lots of armor loses 1 AP their next turn and someone with no armor loses their entire next two turns. Again, relevant attributes might be checked.

-Hard CC effects are replaced with effects that have more variety. I like Nagel's suggestions, linked below.



-Knowing a skill/spell (and each combat point in the relevant area) should increase your chance of dodging it. A seasoned fighter should be able to recognize when an opponent is about to Battering Ram them and have an opportunity to get out of the way (and maybe counterattack).

The feeling of each school is the same. AOE all day long.
You could start balancing when your corner stones are on place, but now they are still missing. A specification of each school is not here.

BTW : Your ideas of soft cc are good. I was thinking similar. Current skill set has too many hard cc. There should be focus for fun cc like Mute spells, Cripple char so he cant execute skills, pinned by arrow so he cant walk(but can skill/spell), push or pull enemy a meter away get them to proper floor, proper blind, ... so many fun things. Disable a character for a round is stupid.