The comment about pinpoint was mostly one of the off-handed variety. As this thread is aimed at figuring out what the problems are with tactician mode, and how to fix them. Talents and whatnot seem to be more of general class-balance discussion.
I have been thinking about it for a while and I tend to agree that my thinking about Pinpoint may have been wrong. Mostly because making it a Scoundrel 2 talent would prevent warriors from picking it up, and that'd be a shame as splashing Man-at-Arms on Rogues, and Scouldrel on Rogues, is a lot of fun and the talent has pretty much singlehandedly created an archtype that didn't exist prior to Enhanced Edition.
Something that would go a long way to make Rogues able to keep up with the rest of the party, would be to look at the Guerilla talent and the Sneaking skill and tweaking them so that they're both playable again and more beneficial to the Rogue, than to the Ranger. An idea from the top of my head would be to have Sneaking decrease the cost of Sneaking to 4AP at rank 3 and 3AP at rank 5. Add in a change to Guerilla which allows it to trigger off Invisibility AND increases the damage boost to 100% for Backstabs, rather than 50% for normal attacks.
But that's less Tactician-Mode and more general class balance nonsense.
I do still believe that grenades and arrows, or rather the overpowered ones (Frost Grenade, Love Grenade, Charming Arrow, Static Cloud Arrow) could do with having their AP costs improved. Arrows in particular as currently Archers outshine Spellcasters in just about every single aspect of the game. The fact that grenades and arrows may be semi-rare, or hard to craft, shouldn't be taken as much into consideration. Only getting 30 Frost Grenades in a playthrough still means that you have 30 goes at a very powerful source of CC (50% Frozen + icy flooring for knockdown).
But the way I see it that's of lesser concern, seeing how I believe we've stumbled upon the crux of the issue when it comes to Tactician Mode. The big three of which would be:
- There's too much XP to go around and you become overleveled too easily.
- Hard CC is too reliable.
- Bosses are a joke.
The XP thing is relatively easily fixed. Although it's going to require some serious maths.
Hard CC being too reliable could, yet again, be relatively easily fixed by creating a monster-only ability (let's call it Resillience) which increases their resistances towards Charm, Knock-Down, Frozen and Stunned. And then adding a 50% weakness to Knock-Down to the Oiled debuff (because you're slippery, see?), and possibly reducing Frost Shard and Bitter Cold to Chill-status, rather than Frozen, and then adding Wet to Slow Current to encourage setting up hard CC. Charm being a bit harder to find a flavorful fix for, although I love the idea of making it dependent on Charisma.
Another idea would be to let Leadership 6 give all under ones command immunity to Charm and then give a select number of enemies the appropriate ability level. Thereby both making Initiative more important and nerfing Charm at the same time, while also giving people a strategic choice between killing the enemy leader - or dealing with their Archers/Spellcasters. Just an idea, of course.
I very, very much agree that bosses need to be immune to hard CC, with select exceptions of course (Baron of Bone/Evelyn, etc). And that they need a considerable boost to their vitality scores. Killing a boss in 2-3 rounds is just a bit sad.
Also, a number of bosses should probally be highly resistant to Decaying Touch. As being able to remove 10% of their health instantly with First Aid is a bit broken.
EDIT: Am I, by the way, the only one who thinks that the change to the Armour-Lowered status, from a 50% decrease to a 100% one, is a bit silly?
EDITEDIT: Just remembered that Petrify is on the hard CC list too. Just noting it down for wholeness sake.
Last edited by Chumsie; 08/11/15 07:54 PM.
