Wall of text incomming!
- again.
@Chrest
I believe that everybody agrees that a potential difficulty mod should have an emphasis on comboing effects together. Personally I think it's by far one of, the not THE, more of aspects of the game. So you and I are of one mind there.
The way I see it it'd be far easier to "just" go down the Leadership route and making the "Leaders" immune to Charm. Seems to be far easier coding-wise and has the added benefits of nerfing Fear (another hard CC) and making Initiative scores matter more, as currently you don't really care that much about Initiative. Then again, that's just my opinion and "Leadershipping" wouldn't solve the issue of Charisma being useless. An added bonus being that Leadership 6 gives all the enemies +1 to Bodybuilding and Willpower, which makes skills like Drain Willpower and Divine Light far, far more potent.
I completely forgot about the brokenness that is Mass Disease, and I don't think it'd be difficult to force it, or other combat-setup skills, to initiate combat, in order to avoid abuse. Good call. I also believe you're very much spot-on when it comes to changing First Aid into a hard heal; rather than a percentage-based one. It allows Decaying Touch to remain an option (healing bosses to death, oh' joy!) without it being broken.
The change to Boulder Bash seems very reasonable too. Although it's a slight buff to Zombie parties, but alternate playstyles shouldn't be the main-focus of this project anyway. Besides, it's a change which makes Midnight Oil interesting and unique again. Not to mention good because of the Oiled debuff most likely being the one which gets the -50% Knock-Down resistance clause.
I suspect that one of the near-future patches is going to fix Blind and while Blind is most certainly an issue, being a borderline hard CC effect and all, I don't think it deserves quite the same treatment as the other hard CCs. But some kind of treatment it does need, indeed.
@Karvapallo
I think it'd be an idea to increase enemy vitality and Willpower/Bodybuilding in acordance to how far you are into the game. Currently all enemies recieve a blunt +20% health boost on Tactician. Which is fine in the pre-Braccus content, but it quickly becomes nill. Maybe increasing the bonus health by an additional 20% (at least!) after each major boss would be an idea? That way the later part of the game could, possibly, become less of a "Flurry and Meteor Shower all the things!"-kind of afair?
Just thinking out loud, though.
It is dissapointing though, that Tactician mode dosen't take things like character progression, Master Skills, crafting/blacksmiting and so on, into consideration and just blatantly assumes that you're planning to auto-attack everything from level 1-20.
@gGeo
That picture sums things up pretty neatly.
@Bardvaark
I think that AI-tweaking is waaay out of the scope of this project. We're a bunch of happy-amateurs who happen to be dissapointed with the current balance of the game. Not a professional game developing studio. Although it all depends on what we can and cannot do with the editor, once it comes out.
The AI is indeed a bit more sophisticated nowadays, but it's still silly. A good example being that pretty much no enemies have the Pinpoint talent, but they still insist on grenading everything around them. I remember a skeleton pirate, who was standing in a doorway and who spend his entire turn first hurling an Oil Flask directly into the doorway, and then proceeded to Firestorm Grenade himself.
Although that's easily fixed by giving them Pinpoint, but the point still stands; the AI is thick. As in really, really thick.
---
Something a bit unrelated, that I've been thinking of, is the current state of Wizards and how they do it the early game damage-wise, and how to fix it. Now, naturally changing Boulder Bash into creating Ooze, rather than oil, and making Oiled the "Knock-Down setup" is a big step in the right direction. But it still leaves Pyrokinetic as the least interesting school of magic, unless playing in a Zombie-party, in which case it's the shit. A potential and fairly elegant solution could be to simply add a talent to the game, along the lines of:
Pyromaniac: Novice and Adept Pyrokinetic skills deal 50% additional damage to Burning targets.
It'd go a long way to making Pyrokinetic more playable and it has the added benefit of being easy to code and promoting the whole comboing-thing. Just throwing it out as a quick suggestion, before I forget it.
A similar talent could, by the way, easily be added to Hydrosophist which increases healing done to Wet targets. To promote Mass Heal, just a little bit. And make you want to consider getting your own guys Wet. But that's more of a novelty thing, really.
Rogues could, likewise, become a lot more playable if the Guerilla talent was given a bit of a tweak. Causing it to give a passive +25-50% damage to backstabs aswell as the +50% for sneaking. Allow it to trigger on Invisibility and Rogues would be (gasp!) bordering on decent again.
Although this is more general balance suggestions and... yeah, I'm pretty much just writing them down here, so that I don't forget them.
Another issue, balance-wise, would be summons. But I reckon taking a page out of the Source Difficulty mods' book and giving them -2 Str, -2 Con and the Stench talent, should be a sufficient nerf to prevent people from using them as meat shields and more as support for flanking.
