I'm very much an advocate for balance, and it's definitely an insanely hard thing to pull off. The talents were poorly balanced, but I imagine they took them into account at least somewhat in D:OS, and I'm sure much moreso in the EE. I can't imagine they just threw the talents in at the end without tweaking anything with them in mind, but who knows? I wouldn't say it's obvious that they didn't consider their effect on balance.
To make all talents seem valuable, they need to make social skills just as important as combat ones.
This wasn't necessarily the case in D:OS1, but with the importance of origin stories and 7 writers on the team, I think it's much more clear that building someone who's a social idiot with insane combat skills won't necessarily do as well as a more rounded character, especially with competitive questing. Take the Dwarf getting into the town example. A meathead will have to go around and other characters might have a headstart on other factors, but a charismatic dwarf might be able to get in right away.
I imagine tons of situations where characters with social skills or talents will be able to obtain allies, items, more ideal quest solutions, etc. compared to a meathead. In that way, +damage talents like Bully will be useful of course, but so will something like Pet Pal or Politician. A meathead might beat a more social character in a 1v1 fight, or kill monsters faster, but they could lose out on other situations. Getting an ideal quest solution is often more satisfying than being able to kill everything. And, as I said before, social skills often earn you things that aid you in combat anyway, but maybe not quite as much as direct combat skills.
Probably the best way to deal with maintaining a challenge is just to have enough difficulty levels to satisfy everyone. I'm imagining Easy: combat is trivial, Normal: combat still pretty easy but not a pushover, Hard: combat is decently hard, but most non-idiotic builds will still prevail, Hardcore: Only really smart players and min-maxers will survive.
I still don't really understand what theme you want talents to go under. Splitting social and combat talents COULD work and make balancing a little easier, but that means a lot more talents. There's only like 5 social talents right now. Keeping them in one list seems fine to me and makes for more meaningful decisions (do I sacrifice combat prowess for social skills, or vice versa?)
Last edited by Baardvark; 19/09/15 10:10 PM.
