But the original topic is to make combat stealth *useful* again, right? So we should *not* commit to the current philosophy, right?
I've stated my idea in another topic a while ago. I can't dig it back up now, so I'll just try to come up with an idea again here. My philosophy here is to totally redo this whole thing. Also, for now I'm just going to ignore the potential work that would have to go into AI/coding to actually implement the idea. I'm just going to let my "fantasy" go wild here.
New Rogue skill: Stealth. Could be tier 1 or 2 (up for debate). Costs 1 or 2 AP (up for debate). Requires at least x points in Scoundrel. This x should probably be high in order to prevent "so my whole team just like go stealth and backstab every one on the other team all day". Always succeeds when you're not in any enemy's sight. If you're in enemy vision, either you cannot enter stealth, or, your chance of successfully enter stealth depends on Scoundrel level (or Sneaking level - considering how Sneaking is not very useful at the moment in my opinion).
Cooldown? 2 turns? 3 turns? Or available every turn? Up for debate. This is easily adjusted depending on how OP this is going to be. Duration? 2 turns? Infinite (or until getting undone)? Up for debate.
That's a start. Next, how can you be "detected"? If any enemy's vision cone hits you, there could be some sort of comparison between their Wits/Perception against your Sneaking level to decide whether they will flush you out of stealth or not. Certain enemies, like dragons, or exceptionally perceptive enemies, will always be able to undo your stealth. Any offensive action will remove stealth, of course. Defensive actions won't.
Next, damage bonus. 100%? 150%? Probably depends on weapon types - daggers receive highest bonus, then it goes down from there, with 1H swords, 2H swords. Something like that. This will be on top of the usual critical bonus from Scoundrel. Or, we could just restrict this "backstab" thing to daggers like vanilla game. Otherwise we would probably have to rework the whole damage scale of every weapon type. By restricting it to daggers we'd only have to tone down dagger damage. Or, what we can do is to tone down the critical bonus from Scoundrel to compensate for this. Doing this also discourages the "everyone puts a bunch of points into Scoundrel no matter what class they are just to get huge critical damage". This makes Scoundrel more meant to be for an actual rogue character.
Now what kind of effects will remove Stealth, depends on how strict you want it to be. I don't think Wet should remove Stealth. But Burning should. Just taking one tick of damage probably shouldn't. AOE knockdown? Maybe not. OR, again, depends on your Sneaking level. We can make all these into a "DC check" kind of thing, instead of just making it either yeah or nay. Makes the whole mechanic deeper, and Sneaking more meaningful.
Last edited by Try2Handing; 15/11/17 11:35 PM.
