Oh for -
Sorry that I post a lot. Yes, I'm just one person, and yet my voice seems disproportionately loud here.
I'm sorry that I don't like your idea, but it is not just because it didn't come from me. I've seen tons and tons of great ideas from other people. When I disagree with an idea, I try and give reasons why not.
Why haven't I put forth a lot of ideas on the combat system? Some of the ideas I have had I've posted in general feedback or the Attributes and Skills thread. Also, a lot of the balance problems have already been gone over a ton of times, and there's likely to be a big patch after the break that does a lot of balancing. Skills clearly do not have the appropriate Ability point or Character Level requirement to use, and some do too much damage.
- The standard resource mana used to be in the game, but was removed. That probably wasn't a decision made lightly, so it's unlikely to come back. It was replaced with cooldowns. I agree that currently cooldowns are inadequate. The encounters are spaced too far apart for cooldowns to be an issue for more than a single battle.
- I like the idea of spells needing one or more turns to charge. For spells that require two+ turns to charge, there should be a way for the caster to cancel charging, though. Maybe a tutorial message saying "To continue charging the spell, hit End Turn. Any other action will cancel charging the spell."
- Currently, Fighters often need to spend their first turn just reaching the nearest enemy - even if they are in the party lead, and ranged characters (and to a lesser extent speedy ones) can attack on their first turn. I've seen lots of suggestions from other people on how to deal with that, like decreasing the movement penalty on armour, but I don't have anything of my own to contribute to addressing that.
EDIT: I think maybe a general increase in the AP cost of spells compared to Fighters skills would help increase the mobility of Fighters and decrease that of ranged characters. AP costs could also maybe be adjusted based your levels in certain Abilities, although that sounds like trouble to balance.
- Fighters can hit enemies from two move points away, but closing to 1 move point away does not increase their chances to hit - it should.
- Fighters skills seem to miss a lot more than the tooltips suggest they should. Whirlwind's range is terrible and can usually only hit one enemy - even if the tooltip shows that more than one should be hit from that range. It probably is dependent on the weapon, with 2H one having longer range.
- The animations for some Fighter skills make them look more like magic than attacks. Flurry is an odd skill, instead of being a bunch of quick strikes with your weapon, a bunch of weapons fly up from the ground behind the fighter and strike at the enemy. (Also, Flurry requires point-blank range to hit). Stun summons a big rock to flatten an enemy. I suppose that's not really a problem, it does have the benefit of giving Fighters some flashy-looking attacks to compete with the flashy attacks of mages and rangers.
- Scrolls AP cost should probably be based on the AP cost of the underlying spell, possibly with an extra AP cost over that of skills on your skillbar - especially in the case of scrolls that are a higher level than the spell you've learned. I've seen "Level 8 Blitzbolt" scrolls, for instance.
- Combat difficulty is currently too low. Most encounters don't have enough enemies to pose a tactical challenge, and the western Cyseal combat zone needs two more combat encounters (maybe more, but two sounds right). There are large empty spots.
- Most enemies have few AP. Enemy mages in particular tend to only have 5 AP, enough to move or attack, but not both, meaning they spend a lot of their turns moving and not casting spells. The Skeleton Bomber is dangerous because it has 7 AP and high initiative. It ends its first turn with you inside the splash radius, meaning that you have to spend your first turn moving out of blast range. Older games tended to balance high power of ranged characters by making them weak. I think one issue in Original Sin is that the enemies can't move far enough to threaten the mages/rangers before they are intercepted or killed at range.
- As a setpiece battle, the Lighthouse encounter should be tougher.
That boss's gimmick seems to be that it has wolf-things that it can revive after you kill them. I think it needs more minions than just the three wolves, and it needs to be tougher to kill, so that it can go ahead and keep reviving enemies through a few turns even if you send one character to focus on it.
- In the alpha, we're not going to get high level, so we have no idea how to balance for a high level.
Hi guys, I have just had an idea of how the player could be prevented from casting the "armageddon" spell in every 10HP goblin encounter. What if the number of the remaining cool-down turns would just carry over from one fight to the next? So, if you just cast the fireball and still have 3 turns of cool-down at the end of the one fight, then you have to wait three turns in the next fight before you can cast the fireball spell again. I think in that way, the spamming of powerful spells could be limited. So, what do you think?
I like this idea. The only possible issue I see is that it means your cooldowns will be stuck indefinitely if you are not in combat. I can see that possibly causing problems, like if you want to heal (or revive using your resurrect spell) but you can't because you're not in combat.
I suppose that's not that big a deal, though.
