I want to know, for example, what it means if my sword has a damage of "70-177" and what that means for the "attacking value" of my warrior.
I honestly don't understand what you find so confusing about this.
Your damage value is listed in the stats screen, so if your damage is listed as "70-177", that means that you will do somewhere between 70 and 177 damage with an attack, before armour and resistances of the target are taken into account.
What are the armour and resistances of the target? Put points into Loremaster to find out (once it isn't bugged, that is). Points into Loremaster will also let you know how much health the enemy has so you can decide if targeting it is a good use of your time.
Hm, then again my loremaster skill didn't work properly (and I thought perception would cause these effects...)
Maybe it's also just my game, but I recall that the damage indicators shown on screen in combat don't always match the combat log or are just lacking values. When my fire mages casted Staff of Maugs with e.g. 30-50 air damage there was just 25 damage shown on screen with no indication how much damage points were nullified by armour or resistencies...
As I've said before, maybe with some more clarification on concepts and more transparency the system would be better understandable. Not only in theory but also in each combat situation.
I agree that casting times for high-level spells could be interesting and something that D:OS could make use of, as well as giving Willpower something else to do, since so far, mental statuses seem very rare.
I don't think under such a system, once a spell is charged it should automatically cast, though. The battlefield can have changed quite a bit in the turns since. You should have the choice whether to cast it or not, heck, maybe even you can hold off on using it until later in the fight, since you did spend those turns charging it up.
Hm, I don't know if I understand what you mean or if you understood what I meant...
I'll give it a try though: so you basically agree on my suggestion but you want to give the player the decision to actually cast the spell once casted? I actually agree on that if the mage is "occupied with casting" until the spell is ready. Giving the player the option to abort the currently casted spell in each turn is actually a really good idea. Of course the system should also automatically abort the casting if the targeted enemy is already dead for example.
The main point of my suggestion was that mages shouldn't be able to move or do anything as long as they cast powerful spells. That makes them actually pretty vulnerable and their inability to move/act adds depth to the tactical system.
I don't think that being able to walk around in real-time means that you can't use spells which take multiple turns to charge. One round is 6 seconds of real time, so when casting the spell in real time, your character freezes and a little progress bar appears overhead like with crafting or identifying to show your progress until the spell is charged and ready.
Hm, I never talked about real-time. There is no sense of casting times in real-time imo since real-time means that there is no combat...
My water/air mage instead could use his lightning spell every turn.
You are mistaken. Blitzbolt has a 2 turn cooldown, so you can only use it every other turn. You can't use it every turn. It also has only a 35% chance to stun (I believe higher if the enemy is wet).
Hm, maybe my games was bugged then. I could cast lightning every turn later in the game. And usually you use rain in combination with lightning (to make enemies wet and to create puddles). That's a really overpowered combination imo.
I also don't really agree with your wish for magic. You want mages, in addition to their existing wide variety of damage, AoE, status-inflicting, heals, buffs, debuffs, summons, and control spells, to also get high-damage single-target spells, and you want them to be able to cast an important spell every single turn. A "button you press to make something awesome happen", as it were.
You essentially want D:OS to follow the unbalanced "Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards" formula, and be able to do everything with ease.
I don't think that "Linear warriors, quadratic wizards" is unbalanced by nature. I would even say that D:OS in its current state is way more unbalanced than any game I know with the formula above.
I think your main mistconception is that you think that I want mages to perform a powerful spell each turn. I want the opposite tbh. That's the reason why I actually want casting times. Casting times makes mages extremely less powerful but adds tactical depth at the same time. With casting times which leave mages defenseless you actually need your warriors to "hold the line" and occupy the enemy. And I do think that some spells are actually overpowered atm, a lot of them environmental combinations.
Of course you don't have to like the concept/formula but I do. I do quite a lot tbh. And it's only your assumption that this has to be unbalanced. That really depends on how you design the system in particular.
So, I don't have a problem with the "extreme" positions you can currently choose in decision dialogues : I care that whatever my choice is, it will affect the game in a (relatively speaking) meaningful, tangible way. I'll always prefer limited, meaningful choices, than multiple, purely cosmetic options.
If there were multiple different dialogue options, then they WOULDN'T be cosmetic, it would be easy to adjust the numbers they move the affection stat behind the scenes for each of the options, so that each option would give a different amount of positive or negative affection.
It's the actual writing of all those dialogue options that would be the hard part.
Well, I think trait rewards are a "cheap" incentive to choose an answer anyway. Answers should be chosen to match your character. But then again it seems to be a basic "philosophic" disagreement I've addressed in my previous post.
