I am talking to Swen about this topic. My thoughts: I think too many skills do too much. For instance, most skills deal nice damage AND set a status. This makes it so that the player never really thinks: "What am I going to do? Am I going to use this skill OR am I going to do a regular attack?" This indeed causes skill spamming. In my opinion, skills should be used in a certain context, and it should be somewhat of a hard choice for the player, and should be context-sensitive.
For instance, if a skill has a chance to knockdown, its damage output should not be as high (or higher) than the regular attack. The player will then wonder "should I hit this guy, or should I try to knock him down".
I completely agree with this. I have no idea why you guys added damage to Crushing Fist, it was fine as just a knockdown.
Here's the problem with skills:
- They ignore armour.
- They ignore resistances.
- They don't have a damage penalty.
- And they have other uses besides damage.
Skills shouldn't ignore armour and resistances, that's just silly. On top of that, some skills will also need a damage penalty, like Flurry, which does 4 hits, and so should do at most 67% of weapon damage a hit. (If I'm mistaken and it does 5 hits, make that 50%)
Crushing Fist and Rush don't need to do any damage at all, you use those to knockdown and to close the distance, that should be their primary purpose. Whirlwind and Dust Devil's use is an AoE attack, so they should probably get a penalty.
Damage-over-Time skill should get a damage penalty.
The solution to the Ranger's Arrow Spray skill wasn't to bump it up to a higher tier and leave it as is. No, the solution is to have armour and resistance affect it, and have it hit only once per target. The benefit is you can hit multiple enemies with it, that's your reason for using it.
@Stabbey
I've even put the Twins and the poison guy completely out of the equation by summoning a fire elemental. The elemental killed the poison guy in two turns while being constantly healed by the Twins who were too dumb to notice that fire actually heals a fire elemental. Of course I just skipped the turns of my fire elemental after killing the poison guy, knowing that I wouldn't damage the twins with fire. But the elemental worked quite well as a distraction...one of the shortcomings of enemy AI atm.
Yeah, I know. I made good use of the Fire Elemental in the first Fire Twins boss fight. It drew a lot of attacks which didn't hurt it at all. and I just had it skip all its turns.
And I really hope for some non-quest relevant "ultra hard" enemies. The giant spider in the Black Cove would for example be a nice candidate for such an enemy. Why not making that beast level 12 or even higher? You people surely remember Firkraag or Kangaxx from BG2? They were both ultra hard enemies for you to enjoy and offering a real challenge without blocking the main storyine (e.g. making Braccus too hard would possible block some players from progression).
A high-level optional boss would be great, although I do kinda think Braccus should probably be the highest-level enemy in Cyseal, just on principle. That Source Nightmare spider should also heal itself partially when it is drawing water from the sea.
